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| What a Thing Is, and What A Sign.
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Chapter 2.—What a Thing Is, and
What A Sign.
2. All instruction is either
about things or about signs; but things are learnt by means of
signs. I now use the word “thing” in a strict sense, to
signify that which is never employed as a sign of anything else:
for example, wood, stone, cattle, and other things of that kind.
Not, however, the wood which we read Moses cast into the bitter
waters to make them sweet,1719
nor the stone which Jacob used as
a pillow,1720
nor the
ram which Abraham offered up instead of his son;1721
for these, though they are things,
are also signs of other things. There are signs of another kind,
those which are never employed except as signs: for example,
words. No one uses words except as signs of something else; and
hence may be understood what I call signs: those things, to wit,
which are used to indicate something else. Accordingly, every
sign is also a thing; for what is not a thing is nothing at all.
Every thing, however, is not also a sign. And so, in regard to
this distinction between things and signs, I shall, when I speak of
things, speak in such a way that even if some of them may be used
as signs also, that will not interfere with the division of the
subject according to which I am to discuss things first and signs
afterwards. But we must carefully remember that what we have now
to consider about things is what they are in themselves, not what
other things they are signs of.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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