Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/307

 is also thought. Thought, as we understand it here, is itself for the main part recollection of signs, and by means of signs of other things which are denoted. In what follows the name “ideas” is occasionally used to include both perceptions and recollections, but may also include feelings.

Some signs are natural signs, i.e., when the sequence to which they give rise is based upon the natural relation between sign (A) and object signified (B). Natural relations of this kind are manifold. They may be derived from an ideal case in which that sequence is self-evident; from the case of the identity of A and B, of the sign and the thing signified. This identity may (1) be present in the act of knowing of the perceiving subject; then B is in no sense another thing, and the proposition that A is the sign of B, tells us nothing else than that the perception or recollection of an object has the recollection of itself as a regular and immediate consequence. When said of the recollection it means only that it has a certain duration which may be regarded as a reproduction of itself; when said of the perception it is true in so far as perception cannot take place without recollection—a judgment of which we must here assume the correctness. But this reduces the proposition to the first alternative (that it is said of the recollection); but for a perceiving or thinking subject identity is indistinguishableness. (2) The identity is not present in the act of knowing of the perceiving subject and is yet capable of becoming known through a process of thought. Such is—according to a philosophical doctrine which again must be assumed for the purpose of this conceptual division—the identity of the living organism with its (in the ordinary view “indwelling”) soul; in other words the identity of organic “external” movements with the “internal” sensations and feelings expressed therein. For perception according to its concept, sensations and feelings (in future “sensations” will include both these) are not present as objects—they are not perceivable; on the other hand all bodily movements are perceivable, yet in reality most movements of the living organism are not perceived, only a few of those movements which are also called expressive movements, are uniformly objects of perception.

But if sensations and movements are thought of as identical, then it follows that the apprehension of these (external organic) movements is really also the apprehension of sensations, though it may be quite indefinite; and to this there corresponds the fact that there is sympathy between