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Abstracts of 8 Lectures

What then does the logic of events require’? What is required, as an objectively hypothetic result, is that an arbitrary selection of them should crowd out the others. This is existence, the arbitrary, blind, reaction against all others of accidental combinations of qualities. [—]

But existence is continuous as far as the nature of the case admits. At every point of it, it reunites all qualities each in some degree. The thisness of it consists in its reacting upon the consciousness and crowding out other possibilities from so reacting.

It has often been said that the difference between the real world and a dream is that the real world coheres and is consistent. Undoubtedly this is the principal characteristic. The real events conspire as it were against the unreal ones, because there is not room for all. But observe that the logical analysis of this statement is that existence has its root in pairing. As soon as duality appears, as in contrast between the quality and the feeling of the quality, there is already an adumbration or prophetic type of real. But it is the composite of pairing in exclusion of another pair with the banding or pairing together of such exclusive pairs which produces thisness.

…although here and there in physics we may pick up a useful fact or two about habit, we really are obliged to go to the mind for the bulk of our information about it.

But even from the human mind we only collect external information about habit. Our knowledge of its inner nature must come to us from logic. For habit is generalization.

[—]

Habits are not for the most part formed by the mere slothful repetition of what has been done, but by the logical development of the potential germinal nature of the man, generally by an effort, the accident of having done this or that merely having an adjuvant effect.

[—]

A habit then is not so much a mere tendency to repeat any action you happened to perform, though there is a certain tendency of this kind as it is the adoption of something which you happened to do because it happened to afford an outlet for the logical development of your germinal nature.

…Idealism, in the sense in which Objective Logic, as I understand it, is Idealism, may be defined as the doctrine that nothing exists but phenomena and what phenomena bring along with them and force upon us, that is Experience, including the reactions that experience feels and all that logically follows from experience by Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis. And by us, we mean our neighbors, all that are embraced in the community, or society, very indefinite to our apprehension of which you and I are, as it were, histological cells.

The word individuality applied to thisness involves a one-sided conception of the matter, as if unity and segregation were its characteristic. But this is not so. Segregate unity belongs to immediate consciousness, to quality; and wherever it appears that is its real origin. The true characteristic of thisness is duality; and it is only when one member of the pair is considered exclusively that it appears as individuality.

But what is commonly in our minds when we speak of individuality is a positive repugnance to generality. Our thoughts are so impregnated with generality, that we look at everything from its standpoint. Instead of thinking of thisness as it is in itself and for itself, we think of it in its relation to generality.

To learn is to acquire a habit. What makes men learn? Not merely the sight of what they are accustomed to, but perpetual new experiences which throws them into a habit of tossing aside old ideas and forming new ones.

…it is the composite of pairing in exclusion of another pair with the banding or pairing together of such exclusive pairs which produces thisness.

The word individuality applied to thisness involves a one-sided conception of the matter, as if unity and segregation were its characteristic. But this is not so. Segregate unity belongs to immediate consciousness, to quality; and wherever it appears that is its real origin. The true characteristic of thisness is duality; and it is only when one member of the pair is considered exclusively that it appears as individuality.

But what is commonly in our minds when we speak of individuality is a positive repugnance to generality. Our thoughts are so impregnated with generality, that we look at everything from its standpoint. Instead of thinking of thisness as it is in itself and for itself, we think of it in its relation to generality. But then we so exaggerate the importance of feeling or immediate consciousness, that we are accustomed to think of generality as characterized by unity, instead of by mediation, and its positive contrary, thisness, we think of as also characterized by unity, – which is logically absurd. Positive anti-generality is not unity, but duality, – the setting of objects over against one another with a great gulf between, instead of conceiving them as cases joined by a continuous medium or perpetual thirdness.

[—]

Thisness, in short, is reaction. Whatever reacts against something else is a this; and every this so reacts. Reaction is duality. All duality is like reaction in the world in which the duality subsists.

The dimension of successive copies of feeling, so far as it applies to accidental reactions, I identify with Time.

Let me remind you that three things do not necessarily make a genuine triad or have what I call threeness, except in a modified and reduced sense. By a genuine triad I mean three things in a genuine triple relation which is not a mere mixture of dual relations.

…tychism, or the doctrine that absolute chance plays a part in the universe…