all inside a bigger circular boundary.)

ignoring altogether the difficult case of the space in which these words
are printed. Obviously the diagram that comes nearer experienced fact
is:--

(the word Not, followed by the letter A inside a circular boundary,
followed by the letter A)

with no outer boundary. But the logician finds it necessary for his
processes to present that outer Not-A as bounded (Vide e.g. Kayne's
"Formal Logic" re Euler's diagrams and Immediate Inferences.), and to
speak of the total area of A and Not-A as the Universe of Discourse; and
the metaphysician and the commonsense thinker alike fall far too
readily into the belief that this convention of method is an adequate
representation of fact.

Let me try and express how in my mind this matter of negative terms has
shaped itself. I think of something which I may perhaps best describe
as being off the stage or out of court, or as the Void without
Implications, or as Nothingness, or as Outer Darkness. This is a sort of
hypothetical Beyond to the visible world of human thought, and thither
I think all negative terms reach at last, and merge and become nothing.
Whatever positive class you make, whatever boundary you draw, straight
away from that boundary begins the corresponding negative class and
passes into the illimitable horizon of nothingness. You talk of pink
things, you ignore, as the arbitrary postulates of Logic direct, the
more elusive shades of pink, and draw your line. Beyond is the not-pink,
known and knowable, and still in the not-pink region one comes to the
Outer Darkness. Not blue, not happy, not iron, all the NOT classes meet
in that Outer Darkness. That same Outer Darkness and nothingness is
infinite space and infinite time and any being of infinite qualities;
and all that region I rule out of court in my philosophy altogether. I
will neither affirm nor deny if I can help it about any NOT things.
I will not deal with not things at all, except by accident and
inadvertence. If I use the word "infinite" I use it as one often
uses "countless," "the countless hosts of the enemy"--or
"immeasurable"--"immeasurable cliffs"--that is to say as the limit of
measurement, as a convenient equivalent to as many times this cloth yard
as you can, and as many again, and so on and so on until you and your
numerical system are beaten to a standstill.

Now a great number of apparently positive terms are, or have become,
practically negative terms a