[6.4.] Three Categories of Mental Phenomena.

 

Peirce begins his examination of ideas from psychology by noticing that mental phenomena fall into three categories. Although he doesn’t use the terms in these passages, he will by the end of this article apply terminology we have seen before to this triadic classification of phenomena: “Firstness,” “Secondness” and “Thirdness.”

 

We earlier say Peirce deriving these universal categories within his semiotics.

 

Here we have what amounts to an anticipation of a phenomenological derivation of the categories. (Peirce will canvas this ground in more detail in the early 1900s.)

 

 

Firstness: applied to the mind, Firstness amounts to feelings.

 

First, we have Feelings, comprising all that is immediately present, such as pain, blue, cheerfulness, the feeling that arises when we contemplate a consistent theory, etc. A feeling is a state of mind having its own living quality, independent of any other state of mind. Or, a feeling is an element of consciousness which might conceivably override every other state until it monopolized the mind, although such a rudimentary state cannot actually be realized, and would not properly be consciousness. Still it is conceivable, or supposable, that the quality of blue should usurp the whole mind, to the exclusion of the ideas of shape, extension, contrast, commencement and cessation, and all other ideas whatsoever. A feeling is necessarily perfectly simple, in itself, for if it had parts these would also be in the mind, whenever the whole was present, and thus the whole could not monopolize the mind. (EP 1:290-91, CP 6.18, emphasis added)

 

Secondness: applied to the mind, Secondness amounts to “sensations of Reaction”

 

... as when a person blindfold suddenly runs against a post, when we make a muscular effort, or when any feeling gives way to a new feeling. Suppose I had nothing in my mind but a feeling of blue, which were suddenly to give place to a feeling of red; then, at the instant of transition, there would be a shock, a sense of reaction, my blue life being transmuted into red life. If I were further endowed with a memory, that sense would continue for some time, and there would also be a peculiar feeling or sentiment connected with it. This last feeling might endure (conceivably I mean) after the memory of the occurrence and the feelings of blue and red had passed away. But the sensation of reaction cannot exist except in the actual presence of the two feelings blue and red to which it relates. Wherever we have two feelings and pay attention to a relation between them of whatever kind, there is the sensation of which I am speaking. (EP 1:291, CP 6.19)

 

This should call to mind the reaction or clash that Peirce mentions with regard to existence. He also associates Secondness with existence.

 

Thirdness: applied to the mind, Thirdness amounts to “general conceptions”

 

When we think, we are conscious that a connection between feelings is determined by a general rule, we are aware of being governed by a habit. Intellectual power is nothing but facility in taking habits and in following them in cases essentially analogous to, but in non-essentials widely remote from, the normal cases of connections of feelings under which those habits were formed. (EP 2:91, CP 6.20)

 

It is at this point that Peirce introduces an idea that will play an important role in his cosmology: that there is, with regard to mental phenomena, “a tendency to generalization” (EP 1:291, CP 6.21)

 

Feeling tends to spread; connections between feelings awaken feelings; neighboring feelings become assimilated; ideas are apt to reproduce themselves. These are so many formulations of the one law of the growth of mind. When a disturbance of feeling takes place, we have a consciousness of gain, the gain of experience; and a new disturbance will be apt to assimilate itself to the one that preceded it. Feelings, by being excited, become more easily excited, especially in the ways in which they have previously been excited. The consciousness of such a habit constitutes a general conception. (EP 1:291-92, CP 6.21, emphasis added)

 

We will see Peirce return to this “law of mind” later in this series of papers.

 

 

[6.5.] Objective Idealism.[1]

 

Peirce begins his explanation of the view (EP 1:292, CP 6.24) by rejecting

 

dualism (a.k.a., Cartesian dualism): mind and matter are “two radically different kinds of substance.”

 

This means that we have to accept some form of

 

monism (Peirce calls it “hylopathy”[2]): mind and matter are not two radically different kinds of substance.

 

Some modern philosophers who have rejected dualism have opted for one of the following varieties of monism:

·         neutral monism: there is only one ultimate kind of substance, and it is neither mental nor physical; mind and matter are different manifestations of the same ultimate sort of stuff (e.g., Baruch Spinoza, William James, Bertrand Russell).

·         materialism: there is only one ultimate kind of substance: matter (e.g., Thomas Hobbes).

·         idealism: there is only one ultimate kind of substance: mind (e.g., Bishop George Berkeley).

 

According to this traditional framework, the difference between these three competing forms of monism is what each theory takes to be the ultimate kind of stuff.

 

But Peirce conceives of this debate in a very different way. He stated these three forms of monism, not in terms of the ultimate kind of substance or stuff each recognized, but in terms of relations between two ultimate types of law:

 

physical laws	“psychical” or “mental” laws
These are “absolute”; they require “exact relation[s]”; events “must actually take place exactly as required by” a physical law.	These “require no exact conformity”; a given mental law only makes a given feeling “more likely to arise” (emphasis added) rather than necessitate its arising.

It is very important that Peirce casts the issue in terms of laws rather than in terms of substances. Once Peirce has adopted monism, the question becomes, not what type of substance there is in the world, but what the relationship is between different types of lawfulness. It is as if he is saying that there is only one sort of stuff and the interesting question about it is not what it is, but how it behaves, i.e., what sort of laws govern its behavior.[3]

 

For Peirce, the three forms of monism (i.e., the different ways of thinking about the relationship between the two different types of law) are:

 

A. neutralism (Peirce notes that this is sometimes called “monism”): physical and psychical laws are independent of each other; each is “primordial” (Lane’s reading: these sorts of laws evolved independently of each other.)

 

B. materialism: physical laws are “primordial,” while psychical laws are “derived and special” (my interpretation: physical laws evolved first, and psychical laws somehow evolved from them).

 

C. idealism: psychical laws are “primordial,” while physical laws are “derived and special” (my interpretation: psychical laws evolved first, and physical laws evolved from them).

 

Peirce rejects materialism: it is “as repugnant to scientific logic as to common sense; since it requires us to suppose that a certain kind of mechanism will feel, which would be a hypothesis absolutely irreducible to reason” (EP 1:292, CP 6.24).

 

And then he rejects neutralism: it violates Ockham’s razor by implying that there are “more independent elements ... than necessary. By placing the inward and outward aspects of substance on a par, it seems to render both primordial.” (EP 1:293, CP 6.24)

 

Which leaves only idealism... or as he now says, objective idealism:

 

The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws.  (EP 1:293, CP 6.25; emphasis added)

 

Later in the cosmological series, Peirce states objective idealism as follows:

 

... matter [is] mere specialized and partially deadened mind. (“The Law of Mind,” EP1:312, CP 6.102)

 

...what we call matter is not completely dead, but is merely mind hide-bound with habits. (“The Law of Mind,” EP 1:331, CP 6.158)

 

And although he does not use the phrase “objective idealism” in the following passage, he seems to have been fleshing out that doctrine when he wrote:

 

... the mind is not subject to “law” in the same rigid sense that matter is. It only experiences gentle forces which merely render it more likely to act in a given way than it otherwise would be. There always remains a certain amount of arbitrary spontaneity in its action, without which it would be dead. (“The Law of Mind,” EP 1:329, CP 6.148)

 

About ten years later, he wrote the following in a dictionary definition of “uniformity”:

 

... we must regard matter as mind whose habits have become fixed so as to lose the powers of forming them and losing them, while mind is to be regarded as a chemical genus of extreme complexity and instability. It has acquired in a remarkable degree a habit of taking and laying aside habits. (CP 6.101, 1902)

 

So his objective idealism is not an idealism like that of Bishop Berkeley. It is not the claim that everything that is, is an idea, or an instance of mind, or a mental substance, or some such.

 

Rather, it is the claim that as the universe evolved from a state of complete disorder to one of greater order and regularity, the first sorts of regularity to appear were the laws that “require no exact conformity,” viz. the laws governing the mental; and out of those regularities evolved the still more definite, determinate, and mechanical laws that govern the physical. It is a claim about the historical emergence of one sort of law from another.

 

Note that Peirce does not take his arguments against neutralism and materialism to count as decisive arguments in favor of objective idealism. He views objective idealism as an acceptable cosmological theory only if it can explain specific evident facts about the physical world:

 

But before this [i.e., objective idealism] can be accepted it must show itself capable of explaining the tridimensionality of space, the laws of motion, and the general characteristics of the universe, with mathematical clearness and precision; for no less should be demanded of every Philosophy. (EP 1:293, CP 6.25; emphasis added)

 

 

Stopping point for Friday October 5. For next time, begin reading “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” (EP 1:298-305).