Charles Peirce

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Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced purse), (September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American polymath. Although educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years, he is now mostly seen as a philosopher.

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• Unless man have a natural bent in accordance with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all.
  • A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God [Hibbert Journal VII:90]

• It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher.
  • Review of the Nineteenth Century (1900)

Collected Papers (1931-1958)

• Do not block the way of inquiry.
  • Vol. I, par. 135

• The idea does not belong to the soul; it is the soul that belongs to the idea.
  • Vol. I, par. 216

• Effort supposes resistance.
  • Vol. I, par. 320

• Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question.
  • Vol. V, par. 211

• Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.
  • Vol. V, par. 265

• All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.
  • Vol. VI, par. 191

• Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling; only no imagination is mere.
  • Vol. VI, par. 286

• Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way.
  • Vol. VII, par. 547

Attributed

• 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.

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