A typically difficult passage from Peirce, who often seems to take the tortured syntax of 19th century intellectual writing to new heights. Nevertheless, it forcefully demonstrates his brilliance and the all-encompassing wholeness of his thought.

The supreme commandment is to complete the whole system even until continuity results and the distinct individuals weld together. Thus it is, that while reasoning and the science of reasoning strenuously proclaim the subordination of reasoning to sentiment, the very surpreme commandment of sentiment is that man should generalize,…should become welded into the universal continuum, which is what true reasoning consists in. But this does not reinstate reasoning, for this generalization should come about, not merely in man’s cognitions, which are but the superficial film of his being, but objectively in the deepest emotional springs of his life. In fulfilling this command, man prepares himself for transmutation into a new form of life, the joyful Nirvana in which the discontinuities of his will shall have all but disappeared.

I feel like I could write page after page on this passage, but what most concerns me now is that phrase "the discontinuities of his will." I like this idea. We are torn in opposite directions, wanting things that we can't have and would never make us happy even if we had them. The discongruous desires for meaning, diversion, adventure, and comfort. Maybe we don't want to know the meaning of life, because what if it conflicts with our other desires? What if it's bad news? Do we still want to know? Maybe we'll settle for what gets us through the day, the week, the year.

But Peirce has a vision here in which opposite don't quite dissolve, but manage to find a balance, in which the "whole" I wrote about a few posts down becomes visible. Do we ever get to see that whole in this life? Or is it always fleeting, just out of sight, forever pursued? As I said, I like this idea because it suggests that the space between the opposites I am pulled in, the space in which I exist, forever between and torn, is the space of an accessible higher plane. If only I can be reconciled to that liminal space, if only I can reconcile those discontinuities by accepting them all together.

Is this the sense I get of a lack of "feeling" in our times? An inability to feel? A constriction of the range of emotions? Are we protecting ourselves, keeping life at arm's length? Is this what it means to grow up, historically and emotionally?

The tendency is from tacitly sense, felt, relatively immediately experienced, visceral, corporeal, concrete images toward that age-old ideal of hyperconsciously logicized, properly reasoned, cogitated, cognized, and abstracted intellection. The transformation is from sensed and experienced sign-events largely 'out there' to experienced and cognized thought-signs largely 'in here.'

--Floyd Merrell

Michel Serres:

But I want to say that there is something divine in this world, divine things. What I am saying is really beside the real, direct question: God is a noun, a name; divine is an adjective, thrown to the side. The world is divine and is full of divine things. This sea, this plain, this river, the ice floe, the tree, light and life. I know it, I see it, I feel it, I am illuminated by it, burning. The wine-dark sea and divine life. The adjective, placed to one side, at a distance from the names and notions of philosophy is enough for me as a parable. Yes, the divine is there; I touch it; these things are improbable miracles; I never stopped loving the world and seeing that it is beautiful. Yes, my philosophy is adjectival; it is awe-struck. The real is not rational; it is improbable and miraculous.

Never cease seeking to be surprised at the existence of anything at all.

Peirce's Innovation

Traditional concept of a sign: an object that refers to something else.

Peirce's concept: an object that refers to the version of itself then coming into being, and so on. Self-referential.