Semiotics

“ Which and what principle is it whence motion and generation proceed? By what virtue does the semen act, according to Aristotle? What is it that renders the semen itself fruitful? (for the philosopher will have it that nature in all natural bodies is the innate principle of motion and of rest, and not any second accident.) Whether is that which in the egg is cause, artificer, and principle of generation and of all the vital and vegetative operations—conservation, nutrition, growth—innate or superadded? ”

“ And thus having got rid of the foolishness of the body we shall be pure and hold converse with the pure, and know of ourselves the clear light everywhere, which is no other than the light of truth.’ For the impure are not permitted to approach the pure. These are the sort of words, Simmias, which the true lovers of knowledge cannot help saying to one another, and thinking. ”

“ The law of sequence in natural phenomena seems so plausible, so obvious, that one is tempted to look for its origin, not in the realities of actual life, but in the promptings of the human mind. This law of sequence is the most mysterious of all the natural laws. Why so much order? Why not chaos and disorderliness? Really, if the hypothesis of sequence had not offered such blatant advantages to the human intelligence, man would never have thought of raising it to the rank of eternal and irrefutable truth. ”

“ We know that the fundamental mechanism of cognition may be reduced to two antagonistic processes, association and dissociation, assimilation and dissimilation; to combine, to separate; in brief, analysis and synthesis. [71] In the formation of the generic image, as we have seen, assimilation plays the principal part; the mind works only upon similarities. In proportion as we recede from this point, we have the contrary; the mind works more and more upon differences; the primitive and essential operation is a dissociation ”

“ Now, as the consecutive phases of history have been shown to be true cumulations, it follows that the rules which are revealed by our analysis, are rules relating to the very origin of cumulations also. The real element upon which the cumulation-phases, and the cumulation-rules together rest, is the human individual as the bearer of its psychology. Nobody, it seems to me, has shown more clearly than Simmel that it is the human individual, qua individual, which is concerned in every kind of history. ”

“ And the only words that I can find to have been used by any previous writers to designate the ideas concerned in that lower kind of generalization which does not depend on language, are the words above given—namely, Complex, Compound, and Mixed. Now, none of these words are so good as the word General, because none of them express the notion of genus or class; and the great distinction between the idea which an animal or an infant has, say of an individual man and of men in general, is not that the one idea is simple, and the other complex, compound, or mixed ”

“ Most educated persons are familiar with the phenomena of life, reproduction and heredity. But the real question is: whether the Creator causes these phenomena, or whether the blind, unthinking atoms and cells, of which the body is composed, produce them, spontaneously and automatically, without the aid of any extraneous psychic or creative force. The fact that these phenomena are manifested, and the cause of them, are two wholly different things. Everybody knows that a stone falls to the ground, but nobody knows why. ”

“ A Simile, or comparison, is an affirmation that one agent, object, or act, is like, or as, another,—there being a real or imaginary resemblance. Sometimes only the mere fact of a resemblance is affirmed. ”

“ The semeiotic is the science of signs, and hence the science of the form of gesture. Its object is to give the reason for the forms of gesture according to the types that characterize it, the apparatus that modifies it, and the figures that represent it.
There are three sorts of types in man: constitutional or formal, fugitive or passional, and habitual.
The constitutional type is that which we have at birth.
The passional type is that which is reproduced under the sway of passion. ”

“ One of the fundamental principles of psychology is mental synthesis. Objects that appear within the same consciousness are synthetized in a unity, if they are taken cognizance of. An object a may be presented to consciousness, and another object b may be similarly perceived. They remain two and separate as long as consciousness does not take cognizance of their duality, of their being two objects, but as soon as the two appear in consciousness together and are perceived as two, they are by this very fact synthetized into a unity. ”

“ These two views are combined when we 264remember that mechanical laws are nothing but acquired habits, like all the regularities of mind, including the tendency to take habits, itself; and that this action of habit is nothing but generalization, and generalization is nothing but the spreading of feelings. But the question is, how do general ideas appear in the molecular theory of protoplasm?
The consciousness of a habit involves a general idea. In each action of that habit certain atoms get thrown out of their orbit, and replaced by others. ”

“ Yet, with all his affectation of superiority, there is an approximation in his form and physical conformation that distinctly declares his relationship to the simia species; among which there is as great a variety in form and racial intelligence as with those of the genus to which he stands confessed. With the full development of microscopical power, future generations will learn that the wonders of Creation are beyond present conception, and that well defined organic humanity may yet be revealed on the utmost verge of atomic divisibility. ”

“ The two terms of the sequence, with which we are thus furnished by an actual experience, is an act of the mind, or a volition, on the one hand, which we call an efficient cause; and a modification or change in inert, passive matter, on the other, which we call an effect. It is easy to see how we rise from this single experience to the universal maxim in question. We are so made and constituted, by the Author of our nature, that we cannot help believing in the uniformity of nature’s laws, or sequences. ”

“ Thus Preller [144] looks on his mother, Semele, as a personification of the pregnant soil in spring. [145] The name of Semele is explained with the familiar diversity of conjecture. Whether the human intellect, at the time of the first development of myth, was capable of such abstract thought as is employed in the recognition of a deity presiding over "the revival of earth-life" or not, and whether, having attained to this abstraction, men would go on to clothe it in all manner of animal and other symbolisms, are questions which mythologists seem to take for granted. ”

“ The cumulative proof from the multitude of instances began to disappear when, in selection, a natural sequence was suggested in which all the adaptations might be reached by the motive power of life, and especially when, as in Darwin's teaching, there was full recognition of the reactions of life to the stimulus of circumstance. "The organism fits the niche," said the teleologist, "because the Creator formed it so as to fit." "The organism fits the niche," said the naturalist, "because unless it fitted it could not exist." ”

“ For what sometimes happens in art occasionally occurs in nature also; those things, namely, take place by chance or accident which otherwise are brought about by art. Of this Aristotle [301] quotes health as an illustration. And the thing is not different as respects the generation, in so far as it is from seed, of certain animals: their semina are either present by accident, or they proceed from an univocal agent of the same kind. For even in fortuitous semina there is an inherent motive principle of generation, which procreates from itself and of itself ”

“ We demonstrate, from mediums, of a following order or genus, as when we prove man to be a substance, at one one time from his being rational, at another from his being a biped; and these mediums, in part, mutually contain each other. ”

“ The genesis of new forms, moreover, is rendered well-nigh impossible by the fact that such a thing as a Semitic compound is almost totally unknown: the habit of the language, from its earliest period, has forbidden that combination of independent elements which is the first step toward their fusion into a form. Hence everything in Semitic speech wears an aspect of peculiar rigidity and persistence. ”

“ It is rather, like knowledge of external nature, dependent upon the forms that the knowing mind brings to it, and in which it takes up the data. When we are concerned with apprehension of individual by individual, these forms are individually differentiated in a very high degree. They do not arrive at the scientific generality and supersubjective conclusiveness which are attainable in our knowledge of external nature, and of the typically individual psychic processes. ”

“ The question as to the nature of that mental synthesis does not fall within the province of psychology. Like all other problems that refer to the ultimate nature of things and how they are possible, the problem of the inner nature of mental synthesis does not belong to science, but to epistemology and metaphysics. ”

“ As long as we are unable to transform inert matter into a living organism we shall remain in ignorance. But, when it is accepted with the laws of the phenomena which it produces, this unknown quantity, as Semon has shown, alone suffices to explain all the rest, and is already a great step toward the comprehension of the laws which govern life. ”

“ Our mental history, says he, is, in its view,
"a perpetual formation of new compounds: and the words 'association,' 'cohesion,' 'fusion,' 'indissoluble connection,' all express the change from plurality of data to some unity of result. An explanation of the process therefore requires two things: a true enumeration of the primary constituents, and a correct statement of their laws of combination: just as, in chemistry, we are furnished with a list of the simple elements, and the with then principles of their synthesis. ”

“ Thus the senses, although feeble and erring guides, are, after all, the gates to knowledge; and their reports, when tested by the light of reason, form the data for human speculation. The senses, resident in the limbs, are composed in certain proportions of the four elements, which also constitute the earth. Therefore, between the frame of man and the world outside him, there is a community of substance, whereby he is enabled to know. ”

“ Are the laws of psychologic sequence less rigid and certain than those laws of physical sequence which determine in material nature every phenomenon, from planet-paths in space to the gathering of dew-drops on a leaf? ”

“ Of course, the mind to which the seed is intrusted may play it false, and wilfully dwarf the growth, or force it to unnatural dimensions; but the critical observer will easily detect the fact of such treasons. Almost in the first germinal impulse the inventive mind forefeels the ultimate difference and recognizes the essential simplicity or complexity of the motive. ”

“ In the field of science to be sure, this fertility in invention will lead to a long list of important and beautiful discoveries: telescopes and the calculus, radiographs, and the spectrum. Discoveries great enough, almost, to make angels of them. But here again their simian-ness will cheat them of half of their dues, for they will neglect great discoveries of the truest importance, and honor extravagantly those of less value and splendor if only they cater especially to simian traits. ”

“ In this address we find the theory of Hering, Butler, Rignano, and Semon taking its proper place as a vera causa of that variation which Natural Selection must find before it can act, and recognised as the basis of a rational theory of the development of the individual and of the race. The organism is essentially purposive: the impossibility of devising any adequate accounts of organic form and function without taking account of the psychical side is most strenuously asserted. ”

“ It follows of necessity that any revolution in the method of observation and analysis, like that which has been going on during the last three centuries, whereby our conception of the world as a whole is altered, must supply metaphysic with new subject-matter and new methods, and force it to the reconsideration of important problems. Meanwhile, the faculty of thought itself undergoes no essential transformation; our mental and moral nature remains substantially the same. ”

“ Semon proves that Hering's idea is more than an analogy, and that there is a fundamental identity in the mechanism of organic life. In order to avoid the terminology of psychology which tends to be equivocal, Semon employs some new terms to designate his new ideas, based on the fundamental conception of irritation in its physiological sense. ”

“ The antithesis of past, present, and future, which seems to us so fundamental and necessary, the Semitic mind has ignored, setting up but two tenses, whose separate uses are to no small extent interchangeable and difficult of distinct definition, but whereof the one denotes chiefly completed action, the other incomplete ”

“ The conception, which appears strange to people who have grown up under the influence of modern thought, viz., that the male semen alone is sufficient for the creation of the gods, loses every remarkable feature in the light of the ancient and mediæval ideas concerning the physiological processes of propagation. ”