Charles Sanders Peirce: Trending quotes (page 6)

“In deduction the mind is under the dominion of a habit or association by virtue of which a general idea suggests in each case a corresponding reaction. This is the way the hind legs of a frog separated from the rest of the body, reason, when you pinch them. It is the lowest form of psychical manifestation.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

Way , Idea

“In fact, this infinitesimally spread-out consciousness is a direct feeling of its contents as spread out. In an infinitesimal interval we directly perceive the temporal sequence of its beginning, middle, and end… Now upon this interval follows another, whose beginning is the middle of the former, and whose middle is the end of the former. Here we have an immediate perception of the temporal sequence of its beginning, middle and end, or say, of the second, third, and fourth instants.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

Feeling

“Here we must make one of those inductive applications of the law of continuity which have produced such great results in all of the positive sciences. We must extend the law of insistency into the future. Plainly, the insistency of a future idea with reference to the present is a quantity affected by the minus sign; for it is the present that affects the future, if there be any effect, not the future that affects the present.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

Law , Idea , Science , Future

“Third, these general ideas are not mere words, nor do they consist in this, that certain concrete facts will every time happen under certain descriptions of conditions; but they are just as much, or rather far more, living realities than the feelings themselves out of which they are concreted. And to say that mental phenomenon are governed by law does not mean merely that they are describable by a general formula; but that there is a living idea, a conscious continuum of feeling which pervades them, and to which they are docile.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

Law , Feeling , Idea , Reality

“Understand me well. My appeal is to observation — observation that each of you must make for himself.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

Lecture II : The Universal Categories, § 2 : Struggle, CP 5.53
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)

Understanding

“How can a past idea be present?… it can only be going, infinitesimally past, less past than any assignable past date. We are thus brought to the conclusion that the present is connected to the past by a series of real infinitesimal steps.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

Idea , Past

“Unless man have a natural bent in accordance with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

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

Understanding , Nature , Chance

“Do not block the way of inquiry.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

Vol. I, par. 135
Collected Papers (1931-1958)

Way

“The idea does not belong to the soul; it is the soul that belongs to the idea.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

Vol. I, par. 216
Collected Papers (1931-1958)

Soul , Idea

“The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws. But before this can be accepted it must show itself capable of explaining the tridimensionality of space, the laws of motion, and the general characteristics of the universe, with mathematical clearness and precision; for no less should be demanded of every Philosophy.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Architecture of Theories (1891)

Law , Intelligence , Mathematics , Universe

“Fifth, in what measure this unification acts, seems to be regulated only by special rules; or, at least, we cannot in our present knowledge say how far it goes. But it may be said that, judging by appearances, the amount of arbitrariness in the phenomenon of human minds is neither altogether trifling nor very prominent.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

Knowledge , Appearance

“Suppose a surface to be part red and part blue; so that every point on it is either red or blue, and of course, no part can be both red and blue. What then, is the color of the surface in the immediate neighborhood of the point. …it follows that the boundary is half red and half blue. In like manner, we find it necessary to hold that consciousness essentially occupies time… Thus, the present is half past and half time to come. …Take another case: the velocity of a particle at any instant of time is its mean velocity during an infinitesimal instant in which that time is consumed. Just so, my immediate feeling is my feeling through an infinitesimal duration containing the present instant.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Law of Mind (1892)

Color , Feeling , Time , Past

“Now, to say that a lot of objects is finite, is the same as to say that if we pass through the class from one to another we shall necessarily come round to one of those individuals already passed; that is, if every one of the lot is in any one-to-one relation to one of the lot, then to every one of the lot some one is in this same relation.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

On The Algebra of Logic (1885)

“All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

Vol. VI, par. 191
Collected Papers (1931-1958)

“Be it understood, then, that what we have to do, as students of phenomenology, is simply to open our mental eyes and look well at the phenomenon and say what are the characteristics that are never wanting in it, whether that phenomenon be something that outward experience forces upon our attention, or whether it be the wildest of dreams, or whether it be the most abstract and general of the conclusions of science.
The faculties which we must endeavor to gather for this work are three. The first and foremost is that rare faculty, the faculty of seeing what stares one in the face, just as it presents itself, unreplaced by any interpretation, unsophisticated by any allowance for this or for that supposed modifying circumstance. This is the faculty of the artist who sees for example the apparent colors of nature as they appear. When the ground is covered by snow on which the sun shines brightly except where shadows fall, if you ask any ordinary man what its color appears to be, he will tell you white, pure white, whiter in the sunlight, a little greyish in the shadow. But that is not what is before his eyes that he is describing; it is his theory of what ought to be seen. The artist will tell him that the shadows are not grey but a dull blue and that the snow in the sunshine is of a rich yellow. That artist's observational power is what is most wanted in the study of phenomenology. The second faculty we must strive to arm ourselves with is a resolute discrimination which fastens itself like a bulldog upon the particular feature that we are studying, follows it wherever it may lurk, and detects it beneath all its disguises. The third faculty we shall need is the generalizing power of the mathematician who produces the abstract formula that comprehends the very essence of the feature under examination purified from all admixture of extraneous and irrelevant accompaniments.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

Lecture II : The Universal Categories, § 1 : Presentness, CP 5.41 - 42
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)

Dreams , Color , Nature , Study

“The word "God," so "capitalised" (as we Americans say), is the definable proper name, signifying Ens necessarium; in my belief Really creator of all three Universes of Experience.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

I, Ens necessarium is a latin expression which signifies "Necessary being, necessary entity"
A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God (1908)

God , Universe

“The third argument, enclosing and defending the other two, consists in the development of those principles of logic according to which the humble argument is the first stage of a scientific inquiry into the origin of the three Universes, but of an inquiry which produces, not merely scientific belief, which is always provisional, but also a living, practical belief, logically justified in crossing the Rubicon with all the freightage of eternity.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

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

Universe

“A pair of statements may be taken conjunctively or disjunctively; for example, "It lightens and it thunders," is conjunctive, "It lightens or it thunders" is disjunctive. Each such individual act of connecting a pair of statements is a new monad for the mathematician.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

Source: Mathematical Monads (1889), p. 268

“May some future student go over this ground again, and have the leisure to give his results to the world.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

The Architecture of Theories (1891)

World , Future

“Effort supposes resistance.”

Charles Sanders Peirce

Vol. I, par. 320
Collected Papers (1931-1958)

Effort