On the third hand ... | We may say that the bulk of what is actually done consists of Secondness — or better, Secondness | is the predominant character of what ''has been'' done. The immediate present, could we seize it, | would have no character but its Firstness. Not that I mean to say that immediate consciousness (a | pure fiction, by the way), would be Firstness, but that the ''quality'' of what we are immediately | conscious of, which is no fiction, is Firstness. | | But we constantly predict what is to be. Now what is to be, according to our conception of it, can | never become wholly past. In general, we may say that ''meanings'' are inexhaustible. We are too apt | to think that what one ''means'' to do and the ''meaning'' of a word are quite unrelated meanings of the | word “meaning”, or that they are only connected by both referring to some actual operation of the mind. | Professor Royce especially in his great work ''The World and the Individual'' has done much to break up | this mistake. | | In truth the only difference is that when a person ''means'' to do anything he is in some state | in consequence of which the brute reactions between things will be moulded [in] to conformity to | the form to which the man's mind is itself moulded, while the meaning of a word really lies in the | way in which it might, in a proper position in a proposition believed, tend to mould the conduct of | a person into conformity to that to which it is itself moulded. | | Not only will meaning always, more or less, in the long run, mould reactions to itself, | but it is only in doing so that its own being consists. For this reason I call this | element of the phenomenon or object of thought the element of Thirdness. It is that | which is what it is by virtue of imparting a quality to reactions in the future. | | Peirce, CP 1.343
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