C. S. Peirce

The curvature of Space A free excerpt from Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics #InfinitelyMore #PhilMaths

To say, therefore, that a conception is one natural to man, which comes to just about the same thing as to say that it is anthropomorphic, is as high a recommendation as one could give to it in the eyes of an Exact Logician.

We thus see, however, that all the progress we have made in philosophy, that is all that has been made since the Greeks, is the result of that methodical scepticism which is the first element of human freedom.

And in these later philosophies, whether we consider their profundity or their number, our age ranges far above all others put together.

The book in which he [Kant] embodied the discussion of this question is, perhaps, the greatest work of the human intellect. All later philosophies are to be classified according to the ideas contained in it, for it is all the direct result of this production.

How many scholastics, nay how many theologians of our own day would have done otherwise than say “Behold the fruit of our opponents of system of philosophy!”

Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocination and does not extend to that of other men.

And in regard to any preference for one kind of theory over another, it is well to remember that every single truth of science is due to the affinity of the human soul to the soul of the universe, imperfect as that affinity no doubt is.

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. It is, therefore, quite analogous to a person, and indeed, a person is only a particular kind of general idea.

"Anthropomorphic« is what pretty much all conceptions are at bottom; otherwise other roots for the words in which to express them than the old Aryan roots would have to be found.

True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men.