I never actually collect together, or call up simultaneously, all the primary thoughts which contribute to my perception or to my present conviction.
— Merleau-Ponty 1945, 71)
No particular thought reaches through to the core of our thought in general, nor is any thought conceivable without another possible thought as a witness to it.
— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 465)
In more Peircean terms, a ‘particular thought’ is an abstraction from the continuum of semiosis, whose ‘core’ is living the time. Sign, object and interpretant (Merleau-Ponty’s “thought as a witness”) are all abstracted from the process in order to symbolize and explicate semiosis.
… thought is not at all only the moving around of fixed entities, concepts that are defined, ‘pieces’ of knowledge. Thought is always very largely implicit and, as I tried to show (in ECM and in ‘Thinking Beyond Patterns,’ 1992) the implicit is not some fringe or periphery around what we centrally think. Rather, the sense we are making, the central point we are making, is had only as a carrying forward of an implicit complexity. What is implicitly functioning is the point itself, of what we are saying or thinking, just then.
— Gendlin (1998, 8a)