Continuing from Lowell Lecture 3.7, https://fromthepage.com/jeffdown1/c-s-peirce-manuscripts/ms-464-465-1903-low ell-lecture-iii-3rd-draught/display/13906 :
. while Secondness is a fact of complexity, it is not a compound of two facts. It is a single fact about two objects. Similar remarks apply to Thirdness. [CP 1.527] This remark at once leads to another. The secondness of the Second, whichever of the two objects be called the Second, is different from the Secondness of the first. That is to say it generally is so. To kill and to be killed are different. In case there is one of the two which there is good reason for calling the First, while the other remains the Second, it is that the Secondness is more accidental to the former than to the latter; that there is more or less approach to a state of things in which something, which is itself First, accidentally comes into a Secondness that does not really modify its Firstness, while its Second in this Secondness is something whose being is of the nature of Secondness and which has no Firstness separate from this. It must be extremely difficult for those who are untrained to such analyses of conceptions to make any sense of all this. For that reason, I shall inflict very little of it upon you - just enough to show those who can carry what I say in their minds that it is by no means nonsense. The extreme kind of Secondness which I have just described is the relation of a quality to the matter in which that quality inheres. The mode of being of the quality is that of Firstness. That is to say, it is a possibility. It is related to the matter accidentally; and this relation does not change the quality at all, except that it imparts existence, that is to say, this very relation of inherence, to it. But the matter, on the other hand, has no being at all except the being a subject of qualities. This relation of really having qualities constitutes its existence. But if all its qualities were to be taken away, and it were to be left quality-less matter, it not only would not exist, but it would not have any positive definite possibility - such as an unembodied quality has. It would be nothing, at all. [528] Thus we have a division of Seconds into those whose very being, or Firstness, it is to be Seconds, and those whose Secondness is only an accretion. This distinction springs out of the essential elements of Secondness. For Secondness involves Firstness. The concepts of the two kinds of Secondness are mixed concepts composed of Secondness and Firstness. One is the Second whose very Firstness is Secondness. The other is a Second whose Secondness is Second to a Firstness. The idea of mingling Firstness and Secondness in this particular way is an idea distinct from the ideas of Firstness and Secondness that it combines. It appears to be a conception of an entirely different series of categories. At the same time, it is an idea of which Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness are component parts, since the distinction depends on whether the two elements of Firstness and Secondness that are united as to be One or whether they remain Two. This distinction between two kinds of Seconds, which is almost involved in the very idea of a Second, makes a distinction between two kinds of Secondness; namely, the Secondness of Genuine Seconds, or matters, which I call genuine Secondness, and the Secondness in which one of the seconds is only a Firstness, which I call degenerate Secondness; so that this Secondness really amounts to nothing but this, that a subject, in its being a Second, has a Firstness, or quality. It is to be remarked that this distinction arose from attending to extreme cases; and consequently subdivision will be attached to it according to the more or less essential or accidental nature of the Genuine or the Degenerate Secondness. With this distinction Thirdness has nothing to do, or at any rate has so little to do that a satisfactory account of the distinction need not mention Thirdness. [529] I will just mention that among Firstnesses there is no distinction of the Genuine and the Degenerate, while among Thirdnesses we find not only a Genuine but two distinct grades of Degeneracy. http://gnusystems.ca/Lowell3.htm }{ Peirce's Lowell Lectures of 1903
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