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.
Interpretation
This quote discusses the distinctions between qualities and laws in shaping our understanding of reality.
In this quote, Charles Sanders Peirce emphasizes the difference between qualities, which are potential attributes that can be fully realized, and laws, which are fixed principles that govern the future. He suggests that qualities are subjective and open to interpretation, while laws represent inevitable outcomes that dictate the course of events in a linear fashion. This insight reflects a deeper philosophical inquiry into the nature of existence and how we understand the world around us.
In practice
In a philosophical debate about the nature of reality, this quote can illustrate the difference between subjective qualities and objective laws.
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.
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.
In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read β and they have been many, big, and heavy β 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.
That's a spiritual lifestyle, being willing to admit that you don't know everything and that you were wrong about some things. It's about making a list of all the people you've harmed, either emotionally or physically or financially, and going back and making amends. That's a spiritual lifestyle. It's not a fluffy ethereal concept.
Who knows their own story? It certainly makes no sense when youβre in the middle of it
The discovery of a wine is of greater moment than the discovery of a constellation. The universe is too full of stars.
There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone's arguing over where they're going to sit.
Men and women were created for something great, for infinity. Nothing else will ever be enough.
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