Charles Sanders Peirce

1839–1914 · American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

Topics: learning, science, philosophy, scientific method

• Of the fifty or hundred systems of philosophy that have been advanced at different times of the world's history, perhaps the larger number have been, not so much results of historical evolution, as happy thoughts which have accidently occurred to their authors.

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

• Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling; only no imagination is mere.

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

• Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

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

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

• Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question.

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

• Do not block the way of inquiry.

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

• Feelings, by being excited, become more easily excited, especially in the ways in which they have previously been excited. The consciousness of such a habit constitutes a general conception.

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

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

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

• When a man is about to build a house, what a power of thinking he has to do, before he can safely break ground!

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

• The one primary and fundamental law of mental action consists in a tendency to generalisation.

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

• The actual world cannot be distinguished from a world of imagination by any description. Hence the need of pronoun and indices, and the more complicated the subject the greater the need of them.

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

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

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

• Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already.

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

• It is ...easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

• To "postulate" a proposition is no more than to hope it is true.

  — 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.

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

• Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason.

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

• The only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and for uniformity in general is to suppose them results of evolution. This supposes them not to be absolute, not to be obeyed precisely.

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

• To suppose universal laws of nature capable of being apprehended by the mind and yet having no reason for their special forms, but standing inexplicable and irrational, is hardly a justifiable position. Uniformities are precisely the sort of facts that need to be accounted for.

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

• Chance is First, Law is Second, the tendency to take habits is Third. Mind is First, Matter is Second, Evolution is Third.

  — Charles Sanders Peirce