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‘Man bites dog’ does not mean the same as ‘dog bites man’. The introduction of succession – temporal and spatial order – is an essential quality which alters the meaning of the unaltered words: bite/dog/man. The ideogram for ‘horse’,
, and the alphabetic, ‘horse’, have a historic similarity because both assume, ‘understand’, and therefore leave out a precedent phrase or phrases between ‘horse and ideogram’ and the ‘visual image’. There is similarly something between ‘visual image’ and ‘thing-in-itself’ – what I have called by the meaningless term, ‘α-element’.
A pictorial schematic formulation:
The scheme can now be considered as providing an analogue for similar schemes in which the sense of sight is replaced by taste, touch, smell, sound, etc., from infra-sensual to ultra-sensual. Psychoanalytically it means postulating a psychoanalytic domain. I would borrow for my own purposes the term invented by Teilhard de Chardin,
the ‘noösphere’, supposing it to be included in a ‘psycho-sphere’. Analogous to the supposition of a definitory hypothesis of ‘thoughts without a thinker’, the psycho-sphere would be without a noösphere [see also pp. 241-242].
To recapitulate: returning to the discussion of dreams related to visual images, I consider that dreams would need to be thought of as belonging to a far more widely extended C category [see p. vii], much more extended than one enclosing only visual or any other sensuous images, though in ‘practical’ psychoanalysis only elements within the sensuous range would, by definition, be experienced. Sooner or later, the investigation would have to be extended to infra- and ultra-sensuous areas first, then from noösphere to psycho-sphere.