Quote

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.

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
Future
Endless
Character
Continue
May
Except
Might
Capable
Must
Habit
Something
Completely
Never
Quality
Embodied
Law
Determining

More quotes by Charles Sanders Peirce

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Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality for mere individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure nothing.
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Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling only no imagination is mere .
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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 of inert matter 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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Every new concept first comes to the mind in a judgment.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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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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All the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the power of unaided individuals.
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It is a common observation that those who dwell continually upon their expectations are apt to become oblivious to the requirements of their actual situation.
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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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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The consciousness of a general idea has a certain unity of the ego in it, which is identical when it passes from one mind to another. It is, therefore, quite analogous to a person, and indeed, a person is only a particular kind of general idea.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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The idea does not belong to the soul it is the soul that belongs to the idea.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Theoretically, I grant you, there is no possibility of error in necessary reasoning. But to speak thus theoretically, is to uselanguage in a Pickwickian sense. In practice, and in fact, mathematics is not exempt from that liability to error that affects everything that man does.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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The a priori method is distinguished for its comfortable conclusions. It is the nature of the process to adopt whatever belief weare inclined to, and there are certain flatteries to the vanity of man which we all believe by nature, until we are awakened from our pleasing dream by rough facts.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Still, 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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which hs to be acquired with difficulty.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.
Charles Sanders Peirce