List of Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

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.

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.

This Branch Of Mathematics [probability] Is The Only One, I Believe, In Which Good Writers Frequently Get Results Which Are Entirely Erroneous.

Every Work Of Science Great Enough To Be Well Remembered For A Few Generations Affords Some Exemplification Of The Defective State Of The Art Of Reasoning Of The Time When It Was Written; And Each Chief Step In Science Has Been A Lesson In Logic.

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.

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 .

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.

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.

Third, Consider The Insistency Of An Idea. The Insistency Of A Past Idea With Reference To The Present Is A Quantity Which Is Less, The Further Back That Past Idea Is, And Rises To Infinity As The Past Idea Is Brought Up Into Coincidence With The Present.

The Third Class Consists Of Men To Whom Nothing Seems Great But Reason. If Force Interests Them, It Is Not In Its Exertion, But In That It Has A Reason And A Law. For Men Of The First Class, Nature Is A Picture; For Men Of The Second Class, It Is An Opportunity; For Men Of The Third Class, It Is A Cosmos, So Admirable, That To Penetrate To Its Ways Seems To Them The Only Thing That Makes Life Worth Living. These Are The Men Whom We See Possessed By A Passion To Learn.

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.

Law Is Par Excellence The Thing That Wants A Reason. Now The Only Possible Way Of Accounting For The Laws Of Nature, And For Uniformity In General, Is To Suppose Them Results Of Evolution.