Continuing from Lowell Lecture 3.5, https://fromthepage.com/jeffdown1/c-s-peirce-manuscripts/ms-464-465-1903-low ell-lecture-iii-3rd-draught/display/13896
Those of you, ladies and gentlemen, who are interested in philosophy, as most of us are, more or less, would do well to get as clear notions of the three elements of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness as you can. [CP 1.521] Very wretched must be the notion of them that can be conveyed in one lecture. They must grow up in the mind, under the hot sun-shine of hard thought, daily, bright, well-focussed, and well aimed thought; and you must have patience, for long time is required to ripen the fruit. They are no inventions of mine. Were they so, that would be sufficient to condemn them. Confused notions of these elements appear in the first infancy of philosophy, and they have never entirely been forgotten. Their fundamental importance is noticed in the beginning of Aristotle's De Caelo, where it is said that the Pythagoreans knew of them. [522] In Kant they come out with an approach to lucidity. For Kant possessed in a high degree all seven of the mental qualifications of a philosopher, 1st, the ability to discern what is before one's consciousness; 2nd, Inventive originality; 3rd, Generalizing power; 4th, Subtlety; 5th, Critical severity and sense of fact; 6th, Systematic procedure; 7th, Energy, diligence, persistency, and exclusive devotion to philosophy. [523] But Kant had not the slightest suspicion of the inexhaustible intricacy of the fabric of conceptions, which is such that I do not flatter myself that I have ever analyzed a single idea into its constituent elements. [524] Hegel, in some respects the greatest philosopher that ever lived, had a somewhat juster notion of this complication, though an inadequate notion, too. For if he had seen what the state of the case was, he would not have attempted in one lifetime to cover the vast field that he attempted to clear. But Hegel was lamentably deficient in that 5th requisite of critical severity and sense of fact. He brought out three elements much more clearly. But the element of Secondness, of hard fact, is not accorded its due place in his system; and in a lesser degree the same is true of Firstness. After Hegel wrote, there came fifty years that were remarkably fruitful in all the means for attaining that 5th requisite. Yet Hegel's followers, instead of going to work to reform their master's system, and to render his statement of it obsolete, as every true philosopher must desire that his disciples should do, only proposed, at best, some superficial changes without replacing at all the rotten material with which the system was built up. [525] I shall not inflict upon you any account of my own labors. Suffice it to say that my results have afforded me great aid in the study of logic. http://gnusystems.ca/Lowell3.htm }{ Peirce's Lowell Lectures of 1903
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