[Inquiry] Re: Manifolds Of Diverse Impressions

[Jon Awbrey]

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MODI.  Note 4

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| Section 2.  Substance
|
| Impression in general or as such, is itself by virtue of its generality
| not an impression but a conception.  An impression does not so much as
| conceive itself to be an impression.  It is an undifferentiated feeling
| whose vagueness is feebly shadowed forth by that sense of dyspepsia which
| tinges a man's sentiments with melancholy without being directly noticed.
| Any reflection upon an impression, since it is a step towards bringing it
| to the unity of consistency, is a conception.  To say, therefore, that
| this or that is an ultimate fact or even that it is present or is a fact,
| begins to go beyond the immediate fact itself and to be a hypothesis.
| Hence the predicate of such a statement, or 'what is present in general',
| is a hypothetic conception;  that is, it cannot be applied to a subject
| without hypothesis.  The hypothetic character of that predicate, however,
| consists merely in the impression's being viewed subjectively or reflected
| upon as being present.  Now this reflection does nothing more than enable
| us to //differentiate/discriminate// the character of the fact from the
| fact itself;  and therefore to say that "'A' is immediately present" is
| merely to say that 'A' can have attached to it a predicate, real or verbal.
| But as this predicate is left entirely indeterminate, what has been said of
| 'A' is an empty form.  It has, therefore, the form of hypothesis without its
| matter;  it is the starting-goal of all hypothetic thought.  This conception
| of the immediately present as such, since it implies merely that 'A' is the
| subject of a proposition, but not a predicate (since predicates are mediate
| cognitions), is properly indicated by the term 'substance'.
|
| C.S. Peirce, 'Chronological Edition', CE 1, 516-517
|
|["On a Method of Searching for the Categories"], MS 133 (1866), pp. 515-528 in:
|'Writings of Charles S. Peirce:  A Chronological Edition, Vol. 1, 1857-1866',
| Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.

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