The Intelligible Universe

Abstract

A symbol is something which has the power of reproducing itself, and that essentially, since it is constituted a symbol only by the interpretation. This interpretation involves a power of the symbol to cause a real fact; and although I desire to avoid metaphysics, yet when a false metaphysics invades the province of logic, I am forced to say that nothing can be more futile than to attempt to form a conception of the universe which shall overlook the power of representations to cause real facts. What is the purpose of trying to form a conception of the universe if it is not to render things intelligible? But if this is to be done, we necessarily defeat ourselves if we insist upon reducing everything to a norm which renders everything that happens, essentially and ipso facto unintelligible. That, however, is what we do, if we do not admit the power of representations to cause real facts. If we are to explain the universe, we must assume that there was in the beginning a state of things in which there was nothing, no reaction and no quality, no matter, no consciousness, no space and no time, but just nothing at all. Not determinately nothing. For that which is determinately not A supposes the being of A in some mode. Utter indetermination. But a symbol alone is indeterminate. Therefore, Nothing, the indeterminate of the absolute beginning, is a symbol. That is the way in which the beginning of things can alone be understood. What logically follows? We are not to content ourselves with our instinctive sense of logicality. That is logical which comes from the essential nature of a symbol. Now it is of the essential nature of a symbol that it determines an interpretant, which is itself a symbol. A symbol, therefore, produces an endless series of interpretants. Does anybody suspect all this of being sheer nonsense? Distinguo. There can, it is true, be no positive information about what antedated the entire Universe of being; because, to begin with, there was nothing to have information about. But the universe is intelligible; and therefore it is possible to give a general account of it and its origin. This general account is a symbol; and from the nature of a symbol, it must begin with the formal assertion that there was an indeterminate nothing of the nature of a symbol. This would be false if it conveyed any information. But it is the correct and logical manner of beginning an account of the universe. As a symbol it produced its infinite series of interpretants, which in the beginning were absolutely vague like itself. But the direct interpretant of any symbol must in the first stage of it be merely the tabula rasa for an interpretant. Hence the immediate interpretant of this vague Nothing was not even determinately vague, but only vaguely hovering between determinacy and vagueness; and its immediate interpretant was vaguely hovering between vaguely hovering between vagueness and determinacy and determinate vagueness or determinacy, and so on, ad infinitum. But every endless series must logically have a limit. Leaving that line of thought unfinished for the present owing to the feeling of insecurity it provokes, let us note, first, that it is of the nature of a symbol to create a tabula rasa and therefore an endless series of tabulae rasae, since such creation is merely representation, the tabulae rasae being entirely indeterminate except to be representative. Herein is a real effect; but a symbol could not be without that power of producing a real effect. The symbol represents itself to be represented; and that representedness is real owing to its utter vagueness. For all that is represented must be thoroughly borne out. For reality is compulsive. But the compulsiveness is absolutely hic et nunc. It is for an instant and it is gone. Let it be no more and it is absolutely nothing. The reality only exists as an element of the regularity. And the regularity is the symbol. Reality, therefore, can only be regarded as the limit of the endless series of symbols. A symbol is essentially a purpose, that is to say, is a representation that seeks to make itself definite, or seeks to produce an interpretant more definite than itself. For its whole signification consists in its determining an interpretant; so that it is from its interpretant that it derives the actuality of its signification. A tabula rasa having been determined as representative of the symbol that determines it, that tabula rasa tends to become determinate. The vague always tends to become determinate, simply because its vagueness does not determine it to be vague (as the limit of an endless series). In so far as the interpretant is the symbol, as it is in some measure, the determination agrees with that of the symbol. But in so far as it fails to be its better self, it is liable to depart from the meaning of the symbol. Its purpose, however, is to represent the symbol in its representation of its object; and therefore, the determination is followed by a further development, in which it becomes corrected. It is of the nature of a sign to be an individual replica and to be in that replica a living general. By virtue of this, the interpretant is animated by the original replica, or by the sign it contains, with the power of representing the true character of the object. That the object has at all a character can only consist in a representation that it has so,-a representation having power to live down all opposition. In these two steps, of determination and of correction, the interpretant aims at the object more than at the original replica and may be truer and fuller than the latter. The very entelechy of being lies in being representable. A sign cannot even be false without being a sign and so far as it is a sign it must be true. A symbol is an embryonic reality endowed with power of growth into the very truth, the very entelechy of reality. This appears mystical and mysterious simply because we insist on remaining blind to what is plain, that there can be no reality which has not the life of a symbol. How could such an idea as that of red arise? It can only have been by gradual determination from pure indeterminacy. A vagueness not determined to be vague, by its nature begins at once to determine itself. Apparently we can come no nearer than that to understanding the universe. That is not necessarily logical which strikes me today as logical; still less, as mathematics amply exemplifies, is nothing logical except what appears to me so. That is logical which it is necessary to admit in order to render the universe intelligible. And the first of all logical principles is that the indeterminate should determine itself as best it may. A chaos of reactions utterly without any approach to law is absolutely nothing; and therefore pure nothing was such a chaos. Then pure indeterminacy having developed determinate possibilities, creation consisted in mediating between the lawless reactions and the general possibilities by the influx of a symbol. This symbol was the purpose of creation. Its object was the entelechy of being which is the ultimate representation. EP2: 322-24