Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

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The a priori method is distinguished for its comfortable conclusions. It is the nature of the process to adopt whatever belief weare inclined to, and there are certain flatteries to the vanity of man which we all believe by nature, until we are awakened from our pleasing dream by rough facts.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Theoretically, I grant you, there is no possibility of error in necessary reasoning. But to speak thus "theoretically," is to uselanguage in a Pickwickian sense. In practice, and in fact, mathematics is not exempt from that liability to error that affects everything that man does.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the heaven, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Theology, I am persuaded, derives its initial impulse from a religious wavering; for there is quite as much, or more, that is mysterious and calculated to awaken scientific curiosity in the intercourse with God, and it [is] a problem quite analogous to that of theology.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Whenever a man acts purposively, he acts under a belief in some experimental phenomenon. Consequently, the sum of the experimental phenomena that a proposition implies makes up its entire bearing upon human conduct.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The man of action has to believe, the inquirer has to doubt; the scientific investigator is both.

Charles Sanders Peirce
There is some secret here which remains to be discovered.

Charles Sanders Peirce
There is not a single truth of science upon which we ought to bet more than about a million of millions to one.

Charles Sanders Peirce
It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecutionof science as imagination. Find me a people whose early medicine is not mixed up with magic and incantations, and I will find you a people devoid of all scientific ability.

Charles Sanders Peirce
It is certain that the only hope of retroductive reasoning ever reaching the truth is that there may be some natural tendency toward an agreement between the ideas which suggest themselves to the human mind and those which are concerned in the laws of nature.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Over against any cognition, there is an unknown but knowable reality; but over against all possible cognition, there is only the self-contradictory. In short, cognizability (in its widest sense) and being are not merely metaphysically the same, but are synonymous terms.

Charles Sanders Peirce
It may be doubtful if there is a single extensive treatise on probabilities in existence which does not contain solutions absolutely indefensible.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Fate then is that necessity by which a certain result will surely be brought to pass according to the natural course of events however we may vary the particular circumstances which precede the event.

Charles Sanders Peirce
We shall do better to abandon the whole attempt to learn the truthunless we can trust to the human mind's having such a powerof guessing right that before very many hypotheses shall have been tried, intelligent guessing may be expected to lead us to one which will support all tests, leaving the vast majority of possible hypotheses unexamined.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Still, it will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system.

Charles Sanders Peirce
All the followers of science are fully persuaded that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to each question to which they can be applied.... This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The method of authority will always govern the mass of mankind; and those who wield the various forms of organized force in the state will never be convinced that dangerous reasoning ought not to be suppressed in some way.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The universe ought to be presumed too vast to have any character.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The endless variety in the world has not been created by law. It is not the nature of uniformity to originate variation, nor of law to beget circumstance.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Metaphysics has always been the ape of mathematics.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The great difference between induction and hypothesis is that the former infers the existence of phenomena such as we have observed in cases which are similar, while hypothesis supposes something of a different kind from what we have directly observed, and frequently something which it would be impossible for us to observe directly.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Three elements go to make up an idea. The first is its intrinsic quality as a feeling. The second is the energy with which it affects other ideas, an energy which is infinite in the here-and-nowness of immediate sensation, finite and relative in the recency of the past. The third element is the tendency of an idea to bring along other ideas with it.

Charles Sanders Peirce
The percept is the reality. It is not in propositional form. But the most immediate judgment concerning it is abstract. It is therefore essentially unlike the reality, although it must be accepted as true to that reality. Its truth consists in the fact that it is impossible to correct it, and in the fact that it only professes to consider one aspect of the percept.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Some think to avoid the influence of metaphysical errors, by paying no attention to metaphysics; but experience shows that these men beyond all others are held in an iron vice of metaphysical theory, because by theories that they have never called in question.

Charles Sanders Peirce
And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.

Charles Sanders Peirce
We, one and all of us, have an instinct to pray; and this fact constitutes an invitation from God to pray.

Charles Sanders Peirce
This branch of mathematics [probability] is the only one, I believe, in which good writers frequently get results entirely erroneous.

Charles Sanders Peirce
Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth.

Charles Sanders Peirce
We should chiefly depend not upon that department of the soul which is most superficial and fallible (our reason), but upon that department that is deep and sure, which is instinct.

Charles Sanders Peirce