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“The development of the human mind has practically extinguished all feelings, except a few sporadic kinds, [like] sound, colors, smells, warmth, etc., which now appear to be disconnected and separate.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“Wherever ideas come together they tend to weld into general ideas; and whenever they are generally connected, general ideas govern the connection; and these general ideas are living feelings spread out.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“The recognition by one person of another's personality takes place by means to some extent identical to the means by which he is conscious of his own personality. The idea of the second personality, which is as much as to say that second personality itself, enters within the direct consciousness of the first person, and is immediately perceived as his ego, though less strongly. At the same time, the opposition between the two persons is perceived, so that the externality of the second is perceived.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“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

The Law of Mind (1892)

“The next simplest feature that is common to all that comes before the mind, and consequently, the second category, is the element of Struggle.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

Lecture II : The Universal Categories, § 2 : Struggle, CP 5.45
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)

“Second, by this and other means we are driven to perceive, what is quite evident in itself, that instantaneous feelings flow together in a continuum of feeling, which has in a modified degree the peculiar vivacity of feeling and has gained generality. And in reference to such general ideas, or continua of feeling, the difficulties about resemblance and suggestion and reference to the external, cease to have any force.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“What distinct meaning can attach to saying that an idea in the past in any way affects an idea in the future, from which it is completely detached?”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“It has never been in my power to study anything, — mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

Letter to Victoria (23 December 1908)

“From these two immediate perceptions, we gain a mediate, or inferential perception of the relation of all four instants. This mediate perception is objectively, or as to the object being represented, spread over the four instants; but subjectively, or as itself the subject of duration, it is completely embraced in the second moment. (The reader will observe that I use the word instant to mean a point in time, and moment to mean an infinitesimal duration.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“Let me now try to gather up all these odds and ends of commentary and restate the law of mind, in a unitary way.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“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

Letter to Victoria, Lady Welby (1908) SS 80-81

“The definition of definition is at bottom just what the maxim of pragmatism expresses.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

Letter to William James (8 January 1909)

“If the sensation that precedes the present by half a second were still immediately before me, then on the same principle, the sensation preceding that would be immediately present, and so on ad infinitum. Now, since there is a time [period], say a year, at the end of which an idea is no longer ipso facto present, it follows that this is true of any finite interval, however short.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

Quoted in Essays in Zoosemiotics (1990) by Thomas A. Sebeok

“The old dualistic notion of mind and matter, so prominent in Cartesianism, as two radically different kinds of substance, will hardly find defenders to-day. Rejecting this, we are driven to some form of hylopathy, otherwise called monism.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Architecture of Theories (1891)

“The difference between a pessimistic and an optimistic mind is of such controlling importance in regard to every intellectual function, and especially for the conduct of life, that it is out of the question to admit that both are normal, and the great majority of mankind are naturally optimistic.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

Source: A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God (1908), V

“Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

Vol. V, par. 265
Collected Papers (1931-1958)

“Since space is continuous, it follows that there must be an immediate community of feeling between parts of mind infinitesimally close together. Without this, I believe it would have been impossible for any co-ordination to be established in the action of the nerve-matter of one brain.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“Second, in the presence of this continuity of feeling, nominalistic maxims appear futile. There is no doubt about one idea affecting another, when we can directly perceive the one generally modified and shaping itself into the other. Nor can there any longer be any difficulty about one idea resembling another, when we can pass along the continuous field of quality from one to the other and back again to the point which we had marked.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

“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

Lecture II : The Universal Categories, § 1 : Presentness, CP 5.44
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)