Direct perception is both the intimate beginning and the ultimate ideal of Theory. Direct perception occurs immediately, ‘before mention is made’; objective thinking or inquiry, being mediated, requires sustained attention to the dynamic object of some sign. Yet the object of the inquiry game, for Peirce, is ‘ultimately to reach a direct perception of the entelechy’; the ‘purpose of every sign is to express “fact,” and by being joined with other signs, to approach as nearly as possible to determining an interpretant which would be the perfect Truth, the absolute Truth’ (EP2:304).
In the end is the beginning. Along the way, though, we have to acknowledge the difference between real occurrences and real facts.
An Occurrence, which Thought analyzes into Things and Happenings, is necessarily Real; but it can never be known or even imagined in all its infinite detail. A Fact, on the other hand[,] is so much of the real Universe as can be represented in a Proposition, and instead of being, like an Occurrence, a slice of the Universe, it is rather to be compared to a chemical principle extracted therefrom by the power of Thought; and though it is, or may be Real, yet, in its Real existence it is inseparably combined with an infinite swarm of circumstances, which make no part of the Fact itself. It is impossible to thread our way through the Logical intricacies of being unless we keep these two things, the Occurrence and the Real Fact, sharply separate in our Thoughts.
Peirce, MS 647 (1910)
An Occurrence is necessarily real but never completely known; a Fact, being a sign, is not necessarily real, but is necessarily incomplete, since it cannot represent the ‘swarm of circumstances’ inseparable from whatever reality it has. A Fact is ‘supposed to be an element of the very universe itself’ (EP2:304), and this ‘supposing,’ though fallible, is necessary to any inquiry which hopes to arrive at even a partial truth.