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 — 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.
All the science of the Saints is included in these two things: To do, and to suffer. And whoever had done these two things best, has made himself most saintly.
A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music - these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.
The complaint that church is boring is never made by people in awe.
I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours.
I love the melodies in the Old Testament, how preachers highlight them when they read from the Scripture. But I was influenced forever by the New Testament. I love the Beatitudes, informing us that the meek shall inherit the earth.
The revolution is the war of liberty against its enemies. The constitution is the rule of liberty against its enemies. The constitution is the rule of liberty when victorious and peaceable.
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