Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

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Now, to say that a lot of objects is finite, is the same as to say that if we pass through the class from one to another we shall necessarily come round to one of those individuals already passed; that is, if every one of the lot is in any one-to-one relation to one of the lot, then to every one of the lot some one is in this same relation.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocination and does not extend to that of other men.
We come to the full possession of our power of drawing inferences the last of all our faculties, for it is not so much a natural gift as a long and difficult art.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and for uniformity in general is to suppose them results of evolution. This supposes them not to be absolute, not to be obeyed precisely. It makes an element of indeterminacy, spontaneity, or absolute chance in nature. Just as, when we attempt to verify any physical law, we find our observations cannot be precisely satisfied by it, and rightly attribute the discrepancy to errors of observation, so we must suppose far more minute discrepancies to exist owing to the imperfect cogency of the law itself, to a certain swerving of the facts from any definite formula.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The recognition by one person of another's personality takes place by means to some extent identical to the means by which he is conscious of his own personality. The idea of the second personality, which is as much as to say that second personality itself, enters within the direct consciousness of the first person, and is immediately perceived as his ego, though less strongly. At the same time, the opposition between the two persons is perceived, so that the externality of the second is perceived.

Charles Sanders Peirce
What distinct meaning can attach to saying that an idea in the past in any way affects an idea in the future, from which it is completely detached?

Charles Sanders Peirce
I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The old dualistic notion of mind and matter, so prominent in Cartesianism, as two radically different kinds of substance, will hardly find defenders today. Rejecting this, we are driven to some form of hylopathy, otherwise called monism.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The next simplest feature that is common to all that comes before the mind, and consequently, the second category, is the element of Struggle.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Fifth, in what measure this unification acts, seems to be regulated only by special rules; or, at least, we cannot in our present knowledge say how far it goes. But it may be said that, judging by appearances, the amount of arbitrariness in the phenomenon of human minds is neither altogether trifling nor very prominent.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Among the minor, yet striking characteristics of mathematics, may be mentioned the fleshless and skeletal build of its propositions; the peculiar difficulty, complication, and stress of its reasonings; the perfect exactitude of its results; their broad universality; their practical infallibility.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Fourth, this supreme law, which is celestial and living harmony, does not so much as demand that the special ideas shall surrender their peculiar arbitrariness and caprice entirely; for that would be self-destructive. It only requires that they influence and be influenced by one another.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Time with its continuity logically involves some other kind of continuity than its own. Time, as the universal form of change, cannot exist unless there is something to undergo change, and to undergo a change continuous in time, there must be a continuity of changeable qualities.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The tendency to regard continuity, in the sense in which I shall define it, as an idea of prime importance in philosophy conveniently may be be termed synechism. The present paper is intended chiefly to show what synechism is, and what it leads to.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The word "God," so "capitalised" (as we Americans say), is the definable proper name, signifying Ens necessarium; in my belief Really creator of all three Universes of Experience.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Do you call it doubting to write down on a piece of paper that you doubt? If so, doubt has nothing to do with any serious business. But do not make believe; if pedantry has not eaten all the reality out of you, recognize, as you must, that there is much that you do not doubt, in the least. Now that which you do not at all doubt, you must and do regard as infallible, absolute truth.

Charles Sanders Peirce
In those sciences of measurement which are the least subject to error — meteorology, geodesy, and metrical astronomy — no man of self-respect ever now states his results, without affixing to it its probable error; and if this practice is not followed in other sciences it is because in those the probable errors are too vast to be estimated.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The truth is, that common-sense, or thought as it first emerges above the level of the narrowly practical, is deeply imbued with that bad logical quality to which the epithet metaphysical is commonly applied; and nothing can clear it up but a severe course of logic.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions.

Charles Sanders Peirce
There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well.

Charles Sanders Peirce
If an opinion can eventually go to the determination of a practical belief, it, in so far, becomes itself a practical belief; and every proposition that is not pure metaphysical jargon and chatter must have some possible bearing upon practice.

Charles Sanders Peirce
There is here no need of throwing out "extreme cases." Far from that, it is precisely in the extreme cases that the power and beauty of the magic eyeglass is most apparent and most marvellous. Let me take back the word "magic," though; for the reasonableness of it is just its crowning charm.

Charles Sanders Peirce
A hypothesis is something which looks as if it might be true and were true, and which is capable of verification or refutation by comparison with facts.

Charles Sanders Peirce
One will meet, for example, the virtual assumption that what is relative to thought cannot be real. But why not, exactly? Red is relative to sight, but the fact that this or that is in that relation to vision that we call being red is not itself relative to sight; it is a real fact.

Charles Sanders Peirce
A chemical compound might be expected to be quite as much a proposition as like an algebraic invariant.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Modem mathematics is highly artistic. A simple theme is chosen, some conception pretty and charming in itself. Then it is shown that by simply holding this idea up to one's eye and looking through it, a whole forest that before seemed a thick and tangled jungle of bushes and briers is seen to be in reality an orderly garden.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The scientific spirit requires a man to be at all times ready to dump his whole cartload of beliefs, the moment experience is against them.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Time and the heavens came into being at the same instant, in order that, if they were ever to dissolve, they might be dissolved together. Such was the mind and thought of God in the creation of time.

Charles Sanders Peirce
When an image is said to be singular, it is meant that it is absolutely determinate in all respects. Every possible character, or the negative thereof, must be true of such an image.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Science, when it comes to understand itself, regards facts as merely the vehicle of eternal truth, while for Practice they remain the obstacles which it has to turn, the enemy of which it is determined to get the better.

Charles Sanders Peirce