History of science Quotes by Charles Sanders Peirce

If we are to define science, ... it does not consist so much in knowing, nor even in "organized knowledge," as it does in…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

It will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

One will meet, for example, the virtual assumption that what is relative to thought cannot be real. But why not, exactly? Red is relative…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

... and it is probably that there is some secret here which remains to be discovered.

— Charles Sanders Peirce

Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

Theoretically, I grant you, there is no possibility of error in necessary reasoning. But to speak thus "theoretically," is to uselanguage in a Pickwickian…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

Fate then is that necessity by which a certain result will surely be brought to pass according to the natural course of events however…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust,…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

Some think to avoid the influence of metaphysical errors, by paying no attention to metaphysics; but experience shows that these men beyond all others…

— Charles Sanders Peirce

The percept is the reality. It is not in propositional form. But the most immediate judgment concerning it is abstract. It is therefore essentially…

— Charles Sanders Peirce