Great Throughts Treasury

"Consider what effect, which might conceivably have practical gearing, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object."

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

"The real... is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of you and me. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception involves the notion of an unlimited community, without definite limits and capable of a definite increase of knowledge."

"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."

"Everybody knows that the long continuance of a routine of habit makes us lethargic, while a succession of surprises wonderfully brightens the ideas. Where there is a motion, where history is a-making, there is the focus of mental activity, and it has been said that the arts and sciences reside within the temple of Janus, waking when that is open, but slumbering when it is closed."

"Belief is thought at rest."

"Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic."

"Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else."

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

"It is impossible not to envy the man who can dismiss reason, although we know how it must turn out at last."

"A quality is something capable of being completely embodied. A law never can be embodied in its character as a law except by determining a habit. A quality is how something may or might have been. A law is how an endless future must continue to be."