Synopsis:
Charles Peirce’s law of mind involves a synergy of continuity, dispersion, and generality. According to Peirce, ideas evolve within a continuum of interacting association – i.e. vis-à-vis other ideas, past and present. Further, generalities tend to be the products of the interaction via the law of mind’s dispersion of ideas from the continuum.
Excerpts:
“Logical analysis applied to mental phenomena shows that there is but one law of mind, namely, that ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain others which stand to them in a peculiar relations of affectibility. In this spreading they lose intensity, and especially the power of affecting others, but gain generality and become welded with other ideas.
“The two generally recognized principles of association, contiguity and similarity, the former is a connection due to a power without, the latter a connection due to a power within.
“How can a past idea be present? Not vicariously. Then, only by direct perception. In other words, to be present, it must be ipso facto present. That is, it cannot be wholly past; it can only be going, infinitesimally past, less past than any assignable past date. We are thus brought to the conclusion that the present is connected with the past by a series of real infinitesimal steps.
“In an infinitesimal interval we directly perceive the temporal sequence of its beginning, middle, and end – not, of course, in the way of recognition, for recognition is only of the past, but in the way of immediate feeling.
“Time logically supposes a continuous range of intensity in feeling. It follows, then, from the definition continuity, that when any particular kind of feeling is present, an infinitesimal continuum of all feelings differing infinitesimally from that is present.
*All excerpts have been taken from Philosophical Writings of Peirce, Dover.
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