"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. To an earlier age knowledge was power — merely that and nothing more; to us it is life and the summum bonum. Emancipation from the bonds of self, of one's own prepossessions, importunately sought at the hands of that rational power before which all must ultimately bow, — this is the characteristic that distinguishes all the great figures of nineteenth-century science from those of former periods."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United StatesMathematicians from the United StatesLinguists from the United StatesChemists from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
"The Century's Great Men in Science" in The 19th Century : A Review of Progress During the Past One Hundred Years in the Chief Departments of Human Activity (1901), published by G. P. Putnam's Sons.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce [pronounced like purse] (10 September 1839 – 19 April 1914) was an American philosopher, chemist and polymath, who is now remembered as a pioneer of the field of semiotics and, with the formulation of the pragmatic maxim, the founder of the philosophies of Pragmatism and Pragmaticism. He was the son of the mathem
119 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Charles Sanders Peirce →
Related Quotes
"The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, selected and edited with an introducton …"
"Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning …"
"The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sens…"
"It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, wil…"
"The consciousness of a general idea has a certain "unity of the ego" in it, which is identical when it passes from on…"
"You are of all my friends the one who illustrates pragmatism in its most needful forms. You are a jewel of pragmatism."
"It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All dynamic action, or action of brute force, physical or psyc…"
"I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect …"
"It has never been in my power to study anything, — mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, opt…"
"True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of …"