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We should chiefly depend not upon that department of the soul which is most superficial and fallible (our reason), but upon that department that is deep and sure, which is instinct.

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
Upon
Chiefly
Soul
Superficial
Reason
Depend
Department
Instinct
Depends
Deep
Sure
Fallible

More quotes by Charles Sanders Peirce

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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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One will meet, for example, the virtual assumption that what is relative to thought cannot be real. But why not, exactly? Red is relative to sight, but the fact that this or that is in that relation to vision that we call being red is not itself relative to sight it is a real fact.
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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The truth is, that common-sense, or thought as it first emerges above the level of the narrowly practical, is deeply imbued with that bad logical quality to which the epithet metaphysical is commonly applied and nothing can clear it up but a severe course of logic.
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.
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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When anything is present to the mind, what is the very first and simplest character to be noted in it, in every case, no matter how little elevated the object may be? Certainly, it is its presentness .
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling only no imagination is mere .
Charles Sanders Peirce
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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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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... and it is probably that there is some secret here which remains to be discovered.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way.
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 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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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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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.
Charles Sanders Peirce