The real work of communication thus occurs largely on a non-material plane, wherever mutual partaking of intentions and thoughts opens up. Each sign is a seance in miniature, as it were, calling forth a spiritual being: “When I perceive a sign as a sign, something more comes to presence.” The sign’s own body is at best incidental. In a lovely phrase Augustine could have written, Logue and Miller write, “the sign-vehicle’s own thingness recedes into the background and sacrifices itself, as it were, for the meaning that it bears.” The motto of the venerable tradition which Logue and Miller represent might be, “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”

John D. Peters, “Sharing of Thoughts or Recognizing Otherness? “