“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.”
Lecture II : The Universal Categories, § 1 : Presentness, CP 5.44
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)
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Charles Sanders Peirce 121
American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist 1839–1914Related quotes

System of Transcendental Philosophy (1800)

volume III, chapter I: "The Spread of Evolution", page 18 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=30&itemID=F1452.3&viewtype=image; letter to Joseph Hooker (1871)
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)

Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology
Being and Event (1988)
Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 20.

As We May Think (1945)
Context: Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

"Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism," in Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader, p. 87