The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that thinking leads to action, and belief is an intermediate step influenced by our thoughts.
Charles Sanders Peirce emphasizes that the ultimate goal of thinking is to take action, while belief serves as a transitional phase in our mental processes. He argues that our beliefs, shaped by previous thoughts, play a significant role in influencing our future thinking and actions.
In practice
In a motivational speech about the power of thoughts and beliefs in achieving goals.
Notwithstanding all that has been discovered since Newton's time, his saying that we are little children picking up pretty pebbles on the beach while the whole ocean lies before us unexplored remains substantially as true as ever, and will do so though we shovel up the pebbles by steam shovels and carry them off in carloads.
My language is the sum total of myself.
All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.
The third class consists of men to whom nothing seems great but reason. If force interests them, it is not in its exertion, but in that it has a reason and a law. For men of the first class, nature is a picture; for men of the second class, it is an opportunity; for men of the third class, it is a cosmos, so admirable, that to penetrate to its ways seems to them the only thing that makes life worth living. These are the men whom we see possessed by a passion to learn.
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.
In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don't remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.
On the one hand, faith is a profoundly personal contact with God, which touches me in my innermost being and places me in front of the living God in absolute immediacy in such a way that I can speak with Him, love Him, and enter into communion with Him.
The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature--: and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection.
Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
There isn't a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. All the time, we find animals doing things that, in our arrogance, we thought were just human.
In 'Self Comes to Mind' I pay a lot of attention to simple creatures without brains or minds, because those 'cartooned abstractions of who we are' operate on precisely the same principles that we do.
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