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Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling only no imagination is mere .

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
Imagination
Would
Trifling
Indeed
Mere

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The method of authority will always govern the mass of mankind and those who wield the various forms of organized force in the state will never be convinced that dangerous reasoning ought not to be suppressed in some way.
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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.
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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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It is not knowing, but the love of learning, that characterizes the scientific man.
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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.
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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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Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.
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All the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the power of unaided individuals.
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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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We cannot begin with complete doubt.
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Theology, I am persuaded, derives its initial impulse from a religious wavering for there is quite as much, or more, that is mysterious and calculated to awaken scientific curiosity in the intercourse with God, and it [is] a problem quite analogous to that of theology.
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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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The idea does not belong to the soul it is the soul that belongs to the idea.
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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.
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A true proposition is a proposition belief which would never lead to such disappointment so long as the proposition is not understood otherwise than it was intended.
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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.
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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.
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The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.
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Truly, that reason upon which we plume ourselves, though it may answer for little things, yet for great decisions is hardly surer than a toss up.
Charles Sanders Peirce