Semeiotics is the science of the organic signs by which æsthetics must study inherent fitness.
Æsthetics is the science of the sensitive and passional manifestations which are the object of art, and whose psychic form it constitutes.
If semeiotics does not tell us the passion which the sign reveals, how can æsthetics indicate to us the sign which it should apply to the passion that it studies? In a word, how shall the artist translate the passion which he is called upon to express?
Æsthetics determines the inherent forms of sentiment in view of the effects whose truth of relation it estimates.
Semeiotics studies organic forms in view of the sentiment which produces them.
It is thus that wisdom and reason proceed in inverse sense from the principle to the knowledge which is the object of both. Wisdom, in fact, studies the principle in its consequences, while reason studies the consequences in the principle, hence it comes that wisdom and reason are often at war with each other; hence also the obscurity which generally prevails as to the distinction between them. Let us say that wisdom and reason are to intelligence what æsthetics and semeiotics are to art. Let us add to this parallel that wisdom and reason are to intelligence what æsthetics and semeiotics are to ontology; that is:--
1. If, from a certain organic form, I infer a certain sentiment, that is Semeiotics.
2. If, from a certain sentiment, I deduce a certain organic form, that is Æsthetics.
3. If, after studying the arrangement of an organic form whose inherent fitness I am supposed to know, I take possession of that arrangement under the title of methods, invariably to reproduce that form by substituting my individual will for its inherent cause, that is Art.
4. If I determine the initial phenomena under the impulsion of which the inherent powers act upon the organism, that is Ontology.