The Truth Is, That Common-sense, Or Thought

But The Extraordinary Insight Which Some Persons Are Able To Gain Of Others From Indications So Slight That It Is Difficult To Ascertain What They Are, Is Certainly Rendered More Comprehensible By The View Here Taken.

Kepler's Discovery Would Not Have Been Possible Without The Doctrine Of Conics. Now Contemporaries Of Kepler-such Penetrating Minds As Descartes And Pascal-were Abandoning The Study Of Geometry ... Because They Said It Was So Utterly Useless. There Was The Future Of The Human Race Almost Trembling In The Balance; For Had Not The Geometry Of Conic Sections Already Been Worked Out In Large Measure, And Had Their Opinion That Only Sciences Apparently Useful Ought To Be Pursued, The Nineteenth Century Would Have Had None Of Those Characters Which Distinguish It From The Ancien Régime.

By An Object, I Mean Anything That We Can Think, I.e. Anything We Can Talk About.

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.

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.