Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes
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It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction … in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty.
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A quality is something capable of being completely embodied. A law never can be embodied in its character as a law except by determining a habit. A quality is how something may or might have been. A law is how an endless future must continue to be.
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The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise.
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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.
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Since space is continuous, it follows that there must be an immediate community of feeling between parts of mind infinitesimally close together. Without this, I believe it would have been impossible for any co-ordination to be established in the action of the nerve-matter of one brain.
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All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.
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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.
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When anything is present to the mind, what is the very first and simplest character to be noted in it, in every case, no matter how little elevated the object may be? Certainly, it is its presentness.
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By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i.e. anything we can talk about.
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A pair of statements may be taken conjunctively or disjunctively; for example, 'It lightens and it thunders,' is conjunctive, 'It lightens or it thunders' is disjunctive. Each such individual act of connecting a pair of statements is a new monad for the mathematician.
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In deduction the mind is under the dominion of a habit or association by virtue of which a general idea suggests in each case a corresponding reaction. This is the way the hind legs of a frog separated from the rest of the body, reason, when you pinch them. It is the lowest form of psychical manifestation.
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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.
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Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way.
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Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.
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You are of all my friends the one who illustrates pragmatism in its most needful forms. You are a jewel of pragmatism.
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The idea does not belong to the soul; it is the soul that belongs to the idea.
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The definition of definition is at bottom just what the maxim of pragmatism expresses.
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It is impossible not to envy the man who can dismiss reason, although we know how it must turn out at last.
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The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.
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Feeling which has not yet emerged into immediate consciousness is already affectible and already affected. In fact, this is habit, by virtue of which an idea is brought up into the present consciousness by a bond that has already been established between it and another idea while it was still in futuro.
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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?
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Indeed, even this last moment will be recognized like the rest, at least, be just beginning to be so.
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First then, we find that when we regard ideas from a nominalistic, individualistic, sensualistic way, the simplest facts of mind become utterly meaningless. That one idea should resemble another or influence another, or that one state of mind should so much as be thought of in another is, from that standpoint, sheer nonsense.
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The final sentence here is an expression of what became known as the Pragmatic maxim, first published in 'Illustrations of the Logic of Science' in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12 (January 1878), p. 286