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“ Why should that absent and imagined slant-legged image displace the present and felt square image from our mind? Why, when the objective cross gives us so many shapes, as it varies its position, should we think we feel the true shape only when the cross is directly in front? And when that question is answered, how can the absent and represented feeling of a slant-legged figure so successfully intrude itself into the place of a presented square one? ”

“ Thus, by a change of form in the words employed, we have from house a plural houses; and in like manner men from man. We give also a particular form to a noun in order to mark its value as indicating the possessor of anything: thus man’s, men’s, from man and men; and, in most pronouns, we make a change of form to signify the objective relation as distinguished from that of subject: thus, me, us, him, her, them, whom, as compared with I, we, he, she, they, who. ”

“ Thus if anyone ask what is the mind's object when you say 'Columbus discovered America in 1492,' most people will reply 'Columbus,' or 'America,' or, at most, 'the discovery of America.' They will name a substantive kernel or nucleus of the consciousness, and say the thought is 'about' that,—as indeed it is,—and they will call that your thought's 'object.' Really that is usually only the grammatical object, or more likely the grammatical subject, of your sentence. ”

“ Granted that we are certain of our own sense-data, have we any reason for regarding them as signs of the existence of something else, which we can call the physical object? When we have enumerated all the sensations which we should naturally regard as connected with the table, have we said all there is to say about the table, or is there still something else—something not a sensation, something which persists when we go out of the room? Common sense unhesitatingly answers that there is. ”

“ The letters and symbols which are presented to the Interpreter are really objects of sensation: the notion of letters as signs of words, the notion of connexions among words by which they have meaning, really are among our Ideas;—Signs and Meaning are Ideas, supplied by the mind, and added to all that sensation can disclose in any collection of visible marks. The Sciences are not figuratively, but really, Interpretations of Nature. ”

“ We inherit our signs, in a way, as truly as we inherit our complexions; and if we take liberties with either it is at the peril of being too well understood. The character of our earliest signs, even down through many generations of them, may be guessed at pleasure. No one supposes that we can define them other than approximately. ”

“ We get it when we pass from a short vertical line to a long horizontal one, from a small square to a large circle, as well as when we pass between those figures whose shapes are congruous. But when the shapes are congruous our consciousness of the relation is a good deal more distinct, and it is most distinct of all when, in the exercise of our analytic attention, we notice, first, a part, and then the whole, of a single line or shape. ”

“ Had I not better become in reality what I had hitherto been merely playing at—a tinker or a gypsy? But I soon saw that I was not fitted to become either in reality. It was much more agreeable to play the gypsy or the tinker than to become either in reality. ”

“ In the common or Syllogistic Logic, a certain Formula of language is used in stating the reasoning, and is useful in enabling us more readily to apply the Criterion of Form to alleged demonstrations. This formula is the usual Syllogism; with its members, Major Premiss, Minor Premiss, and Conclusion. It may naturally be asked whether in Inductive Logic there is any such Formula? whether there is any standard form of words in which we may most properly express the inference of a general truth from particular facts? ”

“ Since we can see the relative position of things, we can see figure, which is but the relative position of the different parts of the boundary of the object. And thus the whole visible world exhibits to us a scene of various shapes, coloured and shaded according to their form and position, but each having relations of position to all the rest; and altogether, entirely filling up the whole range which the eye can command. ”

“ The perception of distance by the eye, which seems so like intuition, is thus, in reality, an inference grounded on experience; an inference, too, which we learn to make; and which we make with more and more correctness as our experience increases; though in familiar cases it takes place so rapidly as to appear exactly on a par with those perceptions of sight which are really intuitive, our perceptions of color. ”

“ Such a symbol is not an Idea in that general sense in which we propose to use the term, but is a particular modification of the general Ideas of symmetry, developement, and the like; and we shall hereafter see, according to the phraseology which we shall explain in the next chapter, how such a diagram might express the ideal conception of a plant.
The antithesis of subjective and objective is very familiar in the philosophical literature of Germany and France; nor is it uncommon in any age of our own literature. ”

“ From the existence of a thing having the properties, or from the existence of a name meaning them?
Take, for instance, any of the definitions laid down as premises in Euclid's Elements; the definition, let us say, of a circle. This, being analysed, consists of two propositions; the one an assumption with respect to a matter of fact, the other a genuine definition. "A figure may exist, having all the points in the line which bounds it equally distant from a single point within it:" "Any figure possessing this property is called a circle." ”

“ Unless I give you the noun, you do not understand. Thus every object is represented by a word which is its name and this name is a noun. To understand whether a word is a noun or not, you simple ask "Is it a thing?" "Would it answer if I spoke to it!" "Could I carry it to the teacher?" For instance, bread. Yes, bread is an object; table, [448] yes, it is an object; conductor, yes, the conductor would answer, if I were to speak to him.
Let us look through our cards now. I take several cards from different boxes and shuffle them. ”

“ I may here refer to a curious mathematical calculation by Dr. Thomas Young, to the effect, that if three words coincide in two different languages, it is ten to one they must be derived in both cases from some parent language, or introduced in some other manner. “Six words would give more,” he says, “than seventeen hundred to one, and eight near 100,000, so that in these cases the evidence would be little short of absolute certainty.” ”

“ Deductive reasoners, those who cultivate science, of whatever kind, by means of mathematical and logical processes alone, may acquire an exaggerated feeling of the amount and value of their labours. Such employments, from the clearness of the notions involved in them, the irresistible concatenation of truths which they unfold, the subtlety which they require, and their entire success in that which they attempt, possess a peculiar fascination for the intellect. ”

“ Far too as her splendors shine, system on system shooting [23] like rays, upward, downward, without center, without circumference,—in the mass and in the particle, Nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To the young mind everything is individual, stands by itself. ”

“ As an example of the kind of questions treated in numerical logic, and the mode of treatment, I give the following problem suggested by De Morgan, with my mode of representing its solution.
“For every man in the house there is a person who is aged; some of the men are not aged. It follows that some persons in the house are not men.”‍92
By enclosing a logical symbol in brackets, let us denote the number of objects belonging to the class indicated by the symbol. ”

“ In former lectures we have confined our remarks to things and a description of their characters and relations, so that every entity of which we can conceive a thought, or concerning which we can form an expression, has been defined and described in the use of nouns and adjectives. Every thing in creation, of which we think, material or immaterial, real or imaginary, and to which we give a name, to represent the idea of it, comes under the class of words called nouns. ”

“ As we arrange all our words in a dictionary under twenty-four letters, so do they arrange all their words, or characters, under two hundred and fourteen radical signs; the simplest radicals being the first, and the more complex the last.”
“Does the Chinese resemble any of the European languages in words?” said I.
“I am scarcely competent to inform you,” said the old man; “but I believe not.”
“What does that character represent?” said I, pointing to one on the vase.
“A knife,” said the old man, “that character is one of the simplest radicals or keys.” ”

“ Note that no object not probable, no object which we are not incessantly practised in reproducing, can acquire this vividness in imagination. Objective corners are ever changing their angles to the eyes, spaces their apparent size, lines their distance. But by no transmutation of position in space does an objective straight line appear bent, and only in one position out of an infinity does a broken line look straight. ”

“ So much of law and order, of symmetry and beauty in every part, implies, it may be thought, that every part has been framed with a view to some use;—that its symmetry and its beauty are the marks of some noble purpose. ”

“ The geometer, with his one definite figure before him, knows perfectly that his thoughts apply to countless other figures as well, and that although he sees lines of a certain special bigness, direction, color, etc., he means not one of these details. When I use the word man in two different sentences, I may have both times exactly the same sound upon my lips and the same picture in my mental eye, but I may mean, and at the very moment of uttering the word and imagining the picture, know that I mean, two entirely different things. ”

“ “Besotted Being! You think yourself the perfection of existence, while you are in reality the most imperfect and imbecile. You profess to see, whereas you see nothing but a Point! You plume yourself on inferring the existence of a Straight Line; but I can see Straight Lines, and infer the existence of Angles, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and even Circles. Why waste more words? Suffice it that I am the completion of your incomplete self. You are a Line, but I am a Line of Lines called in my country a Square: ”

“ But the main objection to the classification we are considering is not so much its want of absolute distinctness (a defect incident to all classification, in every department of science) as its one-sidedness: it is too much like the proverbial lover's division of the world into two parts, that where the beloved object is and that where she is not: it leaves almost all human tongues in one huge class together. ”

“ In consequence of this perversion of the word Being, philosophers looking about for something to supply its place, laid their hands upon the word Entity, a piece of barbarous Latin, invented by the schoolmen to be used as an abstract name, in which class its grammatical form would seem to place it: but being seized by logicians in distress to stop a leak in their terminology, it has ever since been used as a concrete name. ”

“ But by the fluctuations and permutations of which we have spoken, we come to form a pretty good notion of the direction in which each element differs from the rest, and so we frame the notion of it as a terminus, and continue to mean it as an individual thing. In the case of many elements, the simple sensibles, like heat, cold, the colors, smells, etc., the extremes of the directions are almost touched, and in these instances we have a comparatively exact perception of what it is we mean to abstract. ”

“ For algebra, the geometrical point. For philosophy, a soul. As a geometrical point, the basis of science; as a soul, the basis of faith. Such is the atom. Two urns, the sexes, imbibe life from the infinite; and the spilling of one into the other produces the being. This is the normal condition of all, animal as well as man. But the man more than man, whence comes he? ”

“ Propositions, therefore, in which objects are referred to a class because they possess the attributes constituting the class, are so far from asserting nothing but resemblance, that they do not, properly speaking, assert resemblance at all. ”

“ We now come to the phenomenon for which I have ventured to coin the term ‘metanalysis,’ by which I mean that words or word-groups are by a new generation analyzed differently from the analysis of a former age. Each child has to find out for himself, in hearing the connected speech of other people, where one word ends and the next one begins, or what belongs to the kernel and what to the ending of a word, etc. ”

“ Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself. In each of these parts, however, the philosophical Idea is found in a particular specificality or medium. The single circle, because it is a real totality, bursts through the limits imposed by its special medium, and gives rise to a wider circle. The whole of philosophy in this way resembles a circle of circles. The Idea [Pg 25] ”

“ So far we have established relations only to ourselves. We now compare the acts of extension one against the other, and we also measure the adjustment requisite to pass from one to another, continuing to refer them all to our own axis and centre; in everyday speech, we perceive that the various lines are similar and dissimilar in length, direction and orientation. ”