It Is Certain That The Only Hope

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.

If We Are To Define Science, ... It Does Not Consist So Much In Knowing, Nor Even In "organized Knowledge," As It Does In Diligent Inquiry Into Truth For Truth's Sake, Without Any Sort Of Axe To Grind, Nor For The Sake Of The Delight Of Contemplating It, But From An Impulse To Penetrate Into The Reason Of Things.

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.

It Is The Man Of Science, Eager To Have His Every Opinion Regenerated, His Every Idea Rationalized, By Drinking At The Fountain Of Fact, And Devoting All The Energies Of His Life To The Cult Of Truth, Not As He Understands It, But As He Does Not Yet Understand It, That Ought Properly To Be Called A Philosopher.

Upon This First, And In One Sense This Sole, Rule Of Reason, That In Order To Learn You Must Desire To Learn, And In So Desiring Not Be Satisfied With What You Already Incline To Think, There Follows One Corollary Which Itself Deserves To Be Inscribed Upon Every Wall Of The City Of Philosophy: Do Not Block The Way Of Inquiry.