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Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.

Charles Sanders Peirce

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Charles Sanders Peirce
Age: 74 †
Born: 1839
Born: September 10
Died: 1914
Died: April 19
Geodesist
Linguist
Logician
Mathematician
Philosopher
Pragmatist
Statistician
University Teacher
Phillips Place
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Charles Peirce
Charles S. Peirce
Charles Sanders Santiago Peirce
CSP
Science
Another
Cannot
Generalize
Thought
Characteristic
Thinking
Characteristics
Mathematical
Mathematics
Success

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We, one and all of us, have an instinct to pray and this fact constitutes an invitation from God to pray.
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Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling only no imagination is mere .
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All the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the power of unaided individuals.
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Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.
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We cannot begin with complete doubt.
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In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don't remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.
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If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death.
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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.
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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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We do not really think, we are barely conscious, until something goes wrong.
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Mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics.
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All the progress we have made in philosophy ... is the result of that methodical skepticism which is the element of human freedom.
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... and it is probably that there is some secret here which remains to be discovered.
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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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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.
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The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.
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It is a common observation that a science first begins to be exact when it is quantitatively treated. What are called the exact sciences are no others than the mathematical ones.
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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.
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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.
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