is, translates the unperceivable into sensuous pictures, this is also expressed by calling it the external sign of the inner, as if the soul were spatially present in the body, and both therefore parts of a perceivable whole. And so this case, which is immediately appropriate to the concept, is reduced by language (which expresses natural thought) to a more remote one derived from identity.
4. The next case which can be measured by Identity is the sensuously perceivable Similarity of one thing to another, which in its perfection is called complete likeness. Thus a portrait is a sign of the original, and is more so—i.e., has the recollection of the original more immediately and invariably as consequence—in proportion as it is more similar, or approaches more nearly to complete likeness. But even the shadow is by its similarity a natural sign of an object, and in the same way the print of the foot, etc.
5. That the part is the natural sign of the whole, can be derived from the case of Identity from another point of view. For it is the nature of recollection to pass from part to whole. This rests ultimately upon the laws of custom and habituation, which again regarded from a material point of view are special cases of “the least expenditure of energy,” but arise psychologically from the impulse to self-preservation (the will to live); the more deeply and closely a perception or recollection is connected with this impulse, the more easily, rapidly and frequently is it reproduced, and the more will it be the case that perceptions of the parts of a whole will suffice to excite the idea of the whole as present. On the other hand, this completion becomes more difficult, takes therefore more the form of an inference, in proportion as the part is more trivial or less characteristic in comparison with the whole.
6. In the same way the part is natural sign of another part, especially of one adjacent in space or in time; hence every antecedent may become the sign of a consequent, and vice versa; something external the sign of something internal, etc.,
That is a sign which acts as a sign.
Here there is as much variety as in the facts of the association of ideas in general, which are admittedly reducible to a few fundamental rules. It is rightly taught—though not yet in a definite form—that even for the process of simple cognition, especially for the spatial ordering of sensations as perceptions, one becomes “sign” for the other, that act of memory becoming possible for us through the transition—unconscious inferences—from the more known to the less
