Latest Quotes Added to the Commens Dictionary

Now we found the genuine and degenerate forms of Secondness by considering the full ideas of first and second. Then the genuine Secondness was found to be reaction, where first and second are both true seconds and the Secondness is something distinct from them, while in degenerate Secondness, or mere reference, the first is a mere first never attaining full Secondness.

Now we found the genuine and degenerate forms of Secondness by considering the full ideas of first and second. Then the genuine Secondness was found to be reaction, where first and second are both true seconds and the Secondness is something distinct from them, while in degenerate Secondness, or mere reference, the first is a mere first never attaining full Secondness.

…that Secundanity which consists in one man’s having a stature of 6 feet and another man’s having a stature of 5 feet is a degenerate Secundanity, since each would be just what he is if the other were not there, and would be Second in the same way to a merely possible but non-existent man.

Just as the first is not absolutely first if thought along with a second, so likewise to think the second in its perfection we must banish every third. But we need not, and must not, banish the idea of the first from the second; on the contrary, the second is precisely that which cannot be without the first. It meets us in such facts as another, relation, compulsion, effect, dependence, independence, negation, occurrence, reality, result. A thing cannot be other, negative, or independent,...

A genuine Secundanity affects the very mode of being of the Second. An effort cannot occur at all without a resistance. A father is not a father if his son dies, and has not that mode of being that he had when his son lived. A man who is taller than another is not really taller unless the shorter man exists. But that Secundanity which consists in one man’s having a stature of 6 feet and another man’s having a stature of 5 feet is a degenerate Secundanity, since...

…although there is but one pure Priman, there are impure and pseudo Primans, as well as Pseudo Secundans. For example, a Leibnizian monad is something which is represented to be all that it is in itself, by itself, and for itself. But this is self-contradictory. If the monad really were for itself alone one could have no more conception of it than one has of the inner life of a pebble on the beach. It would be simply nothing to us. I say, then, that the monad has...

A sign cannot function at all without producing a physical effect. All our thoughts of every description are signs. A sign is triadic because it determines an interpretant sign of the same object to which it refers itself. A sign is thus a sign of an object, for an interpretant.

[—]

A sign is something which is Secundan to an Object and determines an Interpretant to be correspondingly Secundan to the same...

That mode of being which we call existence, the reaction of everything in the universe against every other, the crowding out of a place for itself, acting most on things near, less on things far, but brutally insisting on a place is Secundan. I say “brutally”, because no law, so far as we know, makes any single object to exist. Law only determines in what way things shall behave, once they do exist.

Experience may be defined as the cognitive element which the course of life has brutally forced upon me, without reason. It implies a conservative, inert clinging to former ideas which has been conquered. This purely brute force is Secundan.

I find that there are in the phaneron,
[—]
3^rd, elements each of which is as it is to a second and for a third, that is, its very being, as phaneron, consists in its bringing that second and that third into relationship. Such an element I call a Tertian element.

You naturally expect Quartan elements, [and] so forth. But I not merely opine, but can strictly demonstrate that every quartan...