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Home > Quote from "Lowell Lectures on Some Topics of Logic Bearing on Questions Now Vexed. Lecture III [R]"

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Digital Companion to C. S. Peirce
‘Secondness’ (pub. 09.01.13-19:49). Quote in M. Bergman & S. Paavola (Eds.), The Commens Dictionary: Peirce's Terms in His Own Words. New Edition. Retrieved from http://www.commens.org/dictionary/entry/quote-lowell-lectures-some-topics-logic-bearing-questions-now-vexed-lecture-iii-r-0.
Term: 
Secondness
Quote: 

Let us begin with considering actuality, and try to make out just what it consists in. If I ask you what the actuality of an event consists in, you will tell me that it consists in its happening then and there. The specifications then and there involve all its relations to other existents. The actuality of the event seems to lie in its relations to the universe of existents. A court may issue injunctions and judgments against me and I not care a snap of my finger for them. I may think them idle vapor. But when I feel the sheriff’s hand on my shoulder, I shall begin to have a sense of actuality. Actuality is something brute. There is no reason in it. I instance putting your shoulder against a door and trying to force it open against an unseen, silent, and unknown resistance. We have a two-sided consciousness of effort and resistance, which seems to me to come tolerably near to a pure sense of actuality. On the whole, I think we have here a mode of being of one thing which consists in how a second object is. I call that Secondness.

Source: 
Peirce, C. S. (1903). Lowell Lectures on Some Topics of Logic Bearing on Questions Now Vexed. Lecture III [R]. MS [R] 460.
References: 
CP 1.24
Date of Quote: 
1903
URL: 

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