He is sure because in countless like cases he has seen such inadequate
and symbolic thoughts, by developing themselves, terminate in percepts
that practically modified and presumably resembled his own. By
'developing' themselves is meant obeying their tendencies, following up
the suggestions nascently present in them, working in the direction in
which they seem to point, clearing up the penumbra, making distinct the
halo, unravelling the fringe, which is part of their composition, and in
the midst of which their more substantive kernel of subjective content
seems consciously to lie. Thus I may develop my thought in the Paley
direction by procuring the brown leather volume and bringing the
passages about the animal kingdom before the critic's eyes. I may
satisfy him that the words mean for me just what they mean for him,
by showing him IN CONCRETO the very animals and their arrangements, of
which the pages treat. I may get Newton's works and portraits; or if
I follow the line of suggestion of the wig, I may smother my critic in
seventeenth-century matters pertaining to Newton's environment, to show
that the word 'Newton' has the same LOCUS and relations in both our
minds. Finally I may, by act and word, persuade him that what I mean by
God and the heavens and the analogy of the handiworks, is just what he
means also.
My demonstration in the last resort is to his SENSES. My thought makes
me act on his senses much as he might himself act on them, were he
pursuing the consequences of a perception of his own. Practically
then MY thought terminates in HIS realities. He willingly supposes it,
therefore, to be OF them, and inwardly to RESEMBLE what his own thought
would be, were it of the same symbolic sort as mine. And the pivot and
fulcrum and support of his mental persuasion, is the sensible operation
which my thought leads me, or may lead, to effect--the bringing of
Paley's book, of Newton's portrait, etc., before his very eyes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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