In the world of Symbol – the only one that signifies – Sign and Speech in grand array, with Talk, Scribble, and a crowd of little Letters and Syllables arranged in groups, a few Colons and Commas curling and dotting gaily about, and a pompous Full Stop, sat holding a Meeting. They had called it to consult as to what fresh orders they should issue to their Slave of all work, Man. … [The meeting soon falls into disarray, the participants in meaning arguing about relative importance of their roles, then Man arrives, hears their bickering and says,] “If you treat me as a slave and abuse my powers, you will lose me and I shall leave you Meaningless. For Meaning goes with me; and well you know what that is in your life.”¹

V. Welby was a pioneer philosopher of meaning, or in more modern terms, a theorist in the discipline of semiotics, the study of meaning. In several books and numerous articles published in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, Welby makes the case that language itself is by no means the exclusive seat of meaning. Indeed, if we stop our analysis at language, as if to assume that it captures the full scope of human meaning, we would miss some of language’s inadequacies, deceptions even. “The form of expression called linguistic, our phrase and our word spoken or written, betrays us daily more disastrously, and atrophies alike action and thought.”²

So Welby creates a three-cornered semiotic, a triad of: sense ⬄ meaning ⬄ significance.

Sense. A better word, says Welby, is “sensal.” Not only in language, “realities, verities, actual facts may be set forth pictorially … Or they may be given in action, being lived or acted in outward conduct, thus impressing present spectators, hearers, touchers, with the sensuous conviction of their reality.” For “our organism is a plexus of energies, intimately related to that ‘environment’ which we call the material or physical world … [or] what is usually called experience. We are fully ‘in touch’ … with the world we live on … ‘Sense’ … becomes the fitting term for that which makes the value of ‘experience’ in this life on this planet.’” Nor is this an exclusively human ground of meaning. “The whole ‘animal kingdom’ (if not the plant order) shares the sense-world.”³ Or, in the terms we have been developing in this grammar, the ground of meaning is multimodal experience.

Meaning. This is the expression of the immediate “intention of the user,” and such “Expression [may come in the form of] action or sound, symbol or picture.” Here Welby wants to emphasize “the power of symbol not only in Word, as in legend, narrative, parable, name, and all social speech and all intellectual discussions; but also, in act, as in ritual, ceremony, performance, posture, dance.” This is to rectify an absence in hitherto existing analyses and theories of meaning. “There has been as yet no adequate, no thorough, no logical and scientific attempt on the widest basis to deal with this central interest of man’s expression and realisation of himself and the world through Symbol.”⁴

Significance. If meaning is localized, significance is broader and deeper meaning – meaning in a wider context. “For a thing is significant … in proportion as it is expressible through bare sign or pictorial symbol or representative action … It is [also] significant in proportion as it is capable of expressing itself in, or being translated into, more and more phases of thought or branches of science. The more varied and richer our employment of signs, the greater our power of … inter-translating … and coming closer to the nature of things …, for the acquisition of fresh knowledge, new truth.”⁵ As a consequence, “Significance is always manifold, and intensifies its sense as well as its meaning, by expressing … its universal or at least social range … Why do we value experience? … Because we are the Expression of the world, as it were ‘expressed from’ it by the commanding or insistent pressure of natural stimulae.”

Welby called this new science of meaning, “significs,” claiming for it “a new departure in philosophy and psychology.”⁶ Significs demands we put an end to “the old antithesis, ‘matter and mind’.”⁷

Man … must learn to signify … He must discover, observe, analyse, appraise first the sense of all that he senses through touch, hearing, sight, and to realize its interest, what it practically signifies for him … Thus at last he will see the Significance, the ultimate bearing, the central value, the vital implication – of what? of all experience, all fact, and all thought.⁸

Live in Me; learn and know Me, saith all that is Real.⁹

In the terms we have been developing in this grammar, Welby’s “sense” is more or less our reference; “meaning,” more or less our agency and structure; “significance,” more or less our context and interest; and “inter-translation,” more or less our notion of transposition.

***

C.S. Peirce to V. Welby, March 14, 1909: “I find now that my division … [into] the three kind[s] of Interpretant … nearly coincides with yours, as it ought to exactly, if both are correct. I am not in the least conscious of having been at all influenced by your book in setting my trichotomy … and I don’t believe there was any such influence … But as far as the public goes, I can only point out the agreement, and confess to having read your book.”¹⁰

Peirce is today recognized as a founder of the philosophical school of “pragmatism,” friend of philosopher William James, and teacher of John Dewey.^§1.1 But he was barely known in his lifetime. Peirce’s work had come to Welby’s attention when she read his entry, “Laws of Thought,” in Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology.

Welby’s correspondence with Peirce began in 1903 when, at Welby’s request, the publisher sent Peirce a copy of What is Meaning? Peirce wrote a review, published in The Nation in November 1903, and sent it to Welby. In fact, it was a review of two books. The other was the first volume of Russell’s Principles of Mathematics, a precursor to Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica.^§MS1a

“Two really important works of logic are these; or at any rate, they deserve to become so … [As for] Mr Russell’s book … [t]hat he should continue these most severe and scholastic labors for so long, bespeaks of grit and industry … Lady Victoria Welby’s … is a feminine book … free from the slightest shade of pedantry or pretension … The greatest service the book can render is that of bringing home the question that forms its title, a very fundamental question which has received superficial, formalistic replies.”¹¹

Lady Victoria Alexandrina Maria Louisa Welby, born into the English aristocracy. She had been named after Queen Victoria, who christened the baby Victoria just five days before she ascended the throne in 1837. After her parents died, Lady Victoria became a maid of honor in the court of the Queen. A prolific writer, and in Peirce’s view a thinker of considerable importance, she was to be a founding member of the British Sociological Society and the Royal School of Art Needlework.¹²

Welby to Peirce: “Before I say more, may I confess that in signing my book ‘V. Welby,” I hoped to get rid as far as possible of the irrelevant associations with my unlucky title? … You will understand my desire to be known as simply as possible, though I cannot altogether ignore the ‘Hon’ conferred upon me as Maid of Honour to the late Queen. But the only honor I value is that of being treated … as a serious worker.”¹³

Peirce to Welby: “My Dear Lady Victoria, I receive today your deeply interesting letter of Nov. 18, being here delivering some lectures of which I enclose a list.” Peirce was at Harvard University, delivering his Lowell Lectures. “As soon as I get back to Pike County” – Peirce had built a house in rural Pennsylvania – “I mean to hunt up the solitary copy of … my original paper on the three categories … So you shall have my last copy … As to Bertrand Russell’s book … whatever merit it may have as a digest of what others have done, it is pretentious and pedantic, attributing to the author merit that cannot be accorded to him.”¹⁴

Welby to Peirce: “My dear Dr. Peirce, I have been much hindered lately but have now been able to read … your generously appreciative Notice of my little book.” At 321 pages, Welby’s book could only be considered little beside the 534 pages of Russell’s book, and the 1,233 pages of Whitehead and Russell’s three-volume sequel.

“I … can but express my warm gratitude … I am now engaged in reading for the fourth time and analyzing from my own point of view … ‘Principles of Mathematics’ … [and] propose to write some Notes on those parts or passages which more especially concern my work and aims. This I shall hope to send to him … [on] the importance of that – may I call it practical extension – of … Logic proper, which I have called Significs … the very attribute which may be said to give human value to life, – that is (1) its ‘Sense’ and sense-power in every sense from the biological to the logical, (2) its intention, conscious and increasingly definite and rational, which we call ‘Meaning’ and … (3) its Significance, its bearing upon, its place among, its interpretation of, all other cosmical facts.”¹⁵

Peirce to Welby: “My dear Lady Welby: Not a day has passed since I received your last letter that I have not lamented the circumstances that prevented me from writing that very day.” Peirce spent the last decade of his life struggling to manage a country property, personal financial crisis, and his own and his wife’s ill-health.¹⁶

“But I wanted to write to you about signs, which in your opinion and mine are matters of so much concern … I think today I will explain the outlines of my classification of signs … to throw all ideas into three classes of Firstness, of Secondness, and of Thirdness … The typical ideas of Firstness are qualities of feeling, or mere appearances … The … idea of Secondness is the experience of effort … one thing acting upon another … I now come to Thirdness … the interpreting thought … something which brings a First into relation to a Second.”

Peirce builds a system of meaning where trichotomy layers over trichotomy. Firstness ⬄ Secondness ⬄ Thirdness; icon ⬄ index ⬄ symbol;^§1.1.3 qualisign ⬄ sinsign ⬄ legism, and others, reaching twenty-six sign triads by the time he had come to the end of his letter.¹⁷

Peirce to Welby: “My dear Lady Welby: Please excuse me for writing on this paper, as I find to my surprise that I have run out of everything else except such as is still less fit for writing to you; and it is 3½ A.M. and I am 5 or 6 miles from a stationer’s. I cannot tell you how delighted I was on Saturday last to see your hand-writing on an envelope.”¹⁸

Peirce to Welby: “[The] threefold Definition of a Sign … [might generate] six trichotomies, instead of determining 729 classes of signs, as they would if they were independent, only yield 28 classes; and if, as I strongly opine (not to say almost prove) there are four other trichotomies of the same order of importance, instead of making 59049 classes, these will only come to 66.”¹⁹

Peirce also built visualizations of his system in the form of “Existential Graphs,” which he sent to Welby, by means of which “I desire to aid you … furnishing an icon of thought which in formal respects is of the highest exactitude.”²⁰ When words were only able to represent the system with imprecision, visualization was needed.

Peirce to Welby: “My Dear Lady Victoria: No letter from you, I beg you to believe, could be too long, especially if it has in view the more forcible presentations of our recommendations … I brought along an old number of [the journal] the Monist in order to read an article of yours it contains … I don’t believe I shall ever cross the water again, & shall not have the pleasure of seeing you; but it would be a great delight if I could have a photograph of your ladyship.”²¹ In one of Peirce’s triads, a photograph would be classified as an icon.

Peirce to Welby: “I received your ladyship’s photograph last night & put it on my study mantelpiece among the very small number of those friends I love to look at, and I am sure there will be none that will do more solid good than your bright and good face. The reason I have not written is that my dear wife has been very ill & for five weeks hardly left her bedside & even now that she is up, I am continually worried about her too great energy, besides being myself in a state of nervous fatigue.”²²

The Welby–Peirce correspondence continued until 1911. Welby died in 1912, and Peirce in 1914.

• Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 22-27 [§ markers are cross-references to other sections in this book and the companion volume (MS); footnotes are in this book.]