BEFORE A THOUGHT APPEARS (The Notion of The ‘Ground’ in Peirce’s Thought) My paper has the main objective to shape a new, fresh strategy to the study of the thought process as related to the ground. I would like to show the usage and function of the notion of the ground in Charles Peirce’s thought. Peirce presented the concept of the ground early, in his first widely appreciated essay On a New List of Categories (1867), and only barely mentioned it thereafter. Instead, he replaced it with the sign, immediate interpretant, Firstness, hypostatic abstraction. Yet, even in the earliest definition of the ground, Peirce used relation as its main characteristic. He describes it as “a pure abstraction, reference to which constitutes a quality or general attribute”. However, it stands to such pure abstraction “in certain respect” only, “in that sense in which we say that one man catches another man's idea”. This is how Peirce defines the ground - a mysterious sign, which exists “for a tenth of a second”, while the spark of understanding makes a leap from the pole of the representamen to the pole of the object. It is general but it evokes familiar ideas in the mind, it is abstract but it refers to a specific thing, it is “thing-ness”. It relates to both: Aristotle’s substance and Duns Scotus’ haecceitas hinting to a more developed view of what the moving power behind any act of cognition could be. Although Peirce renamed the term soon after he introduced it, the notion of the ground continues to influence his phaneroscopy, sign-classification and logical graphs. The characteristics of the ‘ground’ could easily be trace back to Aristotle, or they could allude to contemporary theories, say of Wittgenstein’s representational thinking. In trying to reveal these processes, we apply the “non/cognate approaches” – a group of methods, which investigate the phenomena as they originate. These approaches are cognate and non-cognate at the same time due to their common root. However, they branch in art, philosophy and literature, following the traces of relativity among them. Does the first appearance of a thought overlap with the emergence of a “shadow sign” – the ground? What is it the ground of a sign? Before a thought, there must be something out of which it appears. For Charles Peirce, that “something” is a potentiality which he calls “а mere feeling”, or “а quality of feeling”. This is the beginning of a thought process. But which beginning is this? Is it an absolute beginning? A beginning in the middle of semiosis? Is it an unidentifiable beginning? Indeed, what can be said that constitutes the beginning of a thought? Does thought even have a beginning?