Charles Sanders Peirce quotes - page 5

When I have asked thinking men what reason they had to believe that every fact in the universe is precisely determined by law, the first answer has usually been that the proposition is a "presupposition " or postulate of scientific reasoning. Well, if that is the best that can be said for it, the belief is doomed. Suppose it be " postulated " : that does not make it true, nor so much as afford the slightest rational motive for yielding it any credence. (Charles Sanders Peirce)
It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
My original essay, having been written for a popular monthly, assumes, for no better reason than that real inquiry cannot begin until a state of real doubt arises and ends as soon as Belief is attained, that "a settlement of Belief," or, in other words, a state of satisfaction, is all that Truth, or the aim of inquiry, consists in. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
The tendency to regard continuity, in the sense in which I shall define it, as an idea of prime importance in philosophy conveniently may be be termed synechism. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
Were the ends of a person already explicit, there would be no room for development, for growth, for life; and consequently there would be no personality. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
Of this nature are all natural signs and physical symptoms. I call such a sign an index, a pointing finger being the type of the class. The index asserts nothing; it only says "There!" It takes hold of our eyes, as it were, and forcibly directs them to a particular object, and there it stops. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
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. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
If the sign were not related to its object except by the mind thinking of them separately, it would not fulfil the function of a sign at all. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
These objects are commonly called points; but to remove all notion of space relations, it may be better to name them monads. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
A system is a set of objects comprising all that stands to one another in a group of connected relations. Induction according to ordinary logic rises from the contemplation of a sample of a class to that of a whole class; but according to the logic of relatives it rises from the comtemplation of a fragment of a system to the envisagement of the complete system. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
A sign is in a conjoint relation to the thing denoted and to the mind. (Charles Sanders Peirce)
The quality of feeling is the true psychical representative of the first category of the immediate as it is in its immediacy, of the present in its direct positive presentness. Qualities of feeling show myriad-fold variety, far beyond what the psychologists admit. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
In the case of colors, there is a tridimensional spread of feelings. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
The only answer that I can at present make is that facts that stand before our face and eyes and stare us in the face are far from being, in all cases, the ones most easily discerned. That has been remarked since time immemorial. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
Consciousness must essentially cover an interval of time; for if it did not, we could gain no knowledge of time, and not merely no veracious cognition of it, but no conception whatever. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
One of the most marked features about the law of mind is that it makes time to have a definite direction of flow from past to future. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
Some minds will jump here jump to the conclusion that a past idea cannot in any sense be present. But that is hasty and illogical. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
There always remains a certain amount of arbitrary spontaneity in its action, without which it would be dead. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
Let there be, not merely an indefinite succession, but a continuous flow of inference through a finite time; and the result will be a mediate objective consciousness of the whole time in the last moment. In this last moment, the whole series will be recognized, or known as known before. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
Three conceptions are perpetually turning up at every point in every theory of logic, and in the most rounded systems they occur in connection with one another. (Charles Sanders Peirce)
The law of mind only makes a given feeling more likely to arise. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
We are accustomed to speak of ideas as reproduced, as passed from mind to mind, as similar or dissimilar to one another, and, in short, as if they were substantial things; nor can any reasonable objection be raised to such expressions. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
I think we may safely say that the studies preliminary to the construction of a great theory should be at least as deliberate and thorough as those that are preliminary to the building of a dwelling-house. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce