Thus Peirce: ... the general is not capable of full actualization in the world of action and reaction but is of the nature of what is thought, but that our thinking only apprehends and does not create thought, and that that thought may and does as much govern outward things as it does our thinking. But those realists did not fall into any confusion between the real fact of having a dream and the illusory object dreamed. The conceptualist doctrine is an undisputed truism about thinking, while the question between nominalists and realists relates to thoughts, that is, to the objects which thinking enables us to know.
Peirce: CP 1.28 Cross-Ref:†† §3. THE SPIRIT OF SCHOLASTICISM †1 END QUOTE I am not sure reading the above that I agree that dreams are not real. I think everything is real. I see generals as those things within reality that are teleological in nature, they are part of whatever pattern exists that will issue in what comes into existence over time and what finally is. I choose to think of this pattern in terms of the good or the true or the beautiful but I have no demonstrable certainty of this other than the sort of "proofs" that Peirce himself appears to acknowledge in NA. What I do know is that the thought structure that has dominated culture and society needs to give way to a value based ethic and it is part of my sense of things that values good values are ontological and part of the way that Jesus saw as "easy" for those who see and harder for those who do not.
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