Charles S. Peirce
Philosopher (deceased).
- We enormously exaggerate the part that law plays in the universe.
- On the other hand, to set up a philosophy which barricades the road of further advance toward the truth is the one unpardonable offence in reasoning, as it is also the one to which metaphysicians have in all ages shown themselves the most addicted.
- …it is better to be methodical in our investigations, and to consider the economics of research,yet there is no positive sin against logic in trying any theory which may come into our heads, so long as it is adopted in such a sense as to permit the investigation to go on unimpeded and undiscouraged.
- Every man of us has a metaphysics, and has to have one; and it will influence his life greatly. Far better, then, that that metaphysics should be criticized and not be allowed to run loose.
- It is like inferring that because in any country one man in so many will commit suicide, therefore every individual, once in such a period of time, will make an attempt at suicide.
- Now it is one thing to infer from the laws of little things how great things, that consist of little things, will act; but it is quite a different thing to infer from the phenomena presented by great things how single things billions of times smaller will act.
- At one time,for example, we find physicists,Kelvin,Maxwell and others,assuming that a body cannot act where it is not, meaning by "where it is not" where its lines of force do not centre. At another time,we find them assuming that the laws of mechanics(including the principles of metric geometry) /1
- hold good for the smallest corpuscles. /2x
- But all we have to do is to turn our backs upon all such truly vicious conduct, and we shall find ourselves enjoying the advantages of having an almost virgin soil to till, where a given amount of really scientific work will bring in an extraordinary harvest, /1
- and that a harvest of very fundamental truth of exceptional value from every point of view. /2x
- It is true that philosophy is in a lamentably crude condition at present; that very little is really established about it; while most philosophers set up a pretension of knowing all there is to know -- a pretension calculated to disgust anybody who is at home in any real science.
- Persons who know science chiefly by its results -- that is to say, have no acquaintance with it at all as a living inquiry -- are apt to acquire the notion that the universe is now entirely explained in all its leading features; /1
- and that it is only here and there that the fabric of scientific knowledge betrays any rents. /2x