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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.

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
Actual
Observation
Acceptance
Expectations
Situation
Oblivious
Common
Dwell
Upon
Requirements
Become
Continually

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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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The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which hs to be acquired with difficulty.
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All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.
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The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit.
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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.
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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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Notwithstanding all that has been discovered since Newton's time, his saying that we are little children picking up pretty pebbles on the beach while the whole ocean lies before us unexplored remains substantially as true as ever, and will do so though we shovel up the pebbles by steam shovels and carry them off in carloads.
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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.
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Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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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We cannot begin with complete doubt.
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We do not really think, we are barely conscious, until something goes wrong.
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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.
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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.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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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.
Charles Sanders Peirce