Charles Sanders Peirce

“ The nature of things would seem to have a screw loose if the powers of a Renouvier are not to be of service to the race. When we see a man far advanced in the eighties producing, albeit with a collaborator, a great volume of metaphysics, terse, clear, and well-oriented, it is certainly not on his shoulders that we can lay the blame if his industry should teach the world nothing. The principles of Renouvier’s philosophy were published in the earlier years of the Second Empire, with the disadvantage of a too modest title. ”

“ Persuade him that this is true, and what is there for a philosopher but to hug a delusion to his heart as being, by virtue of its reasonableness, infinitely more real than the wretched abortion that the world of reality would so turn out to be? ”

“ But if we deem a man to be best represented by that one of his ideas which shows most prepotency, it is in the direction of the differential calculus that we must look for the genuine Leibniz, and in philosophy we must regard the law of continuity as most Leibnizian. ”

“ The extreme of determinism, held by Leibniz, supposes that every aspect of every fact is subject to reason, so that there is a special Providence in the fall of a sparrow. There remain two opinions less deterministic than the common one. ”

“ Nobody is unaware that most thinkers now reject any such idea. The subject of an attribute, they say, is nothing but a group of phenomena differing from a metaphysical substance in not being permanent, like that old jackknife. Even Kant declared the conception of substance has no validity beyond possible experience. It was incumbent on our authors, then, to begin by proving that there is any substance other than the universe as a whole. ”

“ It may be that reasonableness essentially requires an element of unreason, a brute force, on which and with which to accomplish itself; but in that case we hope that this unreason may turn out capable of becoming infused with reason. There must be nothing hopelessly and finally unreasonable, or in so far philosophy is to no purpose and its hope is vain. But the new monadism presents many such irrational features. What possible reason can there be for the existence of the precise finite number of monads that there are, rather than for one more? ”

“ Those schools never fully ripened their fruit, because the attention of the strongest men was turned away to the rich conceptions that the mechanical theory of heat and the Darwinian hypothesis about that time suggested. None of the Kantians had more thoroughly learned their master’s great lesson than this Frenchman-the lesson that metaphysics can be solidly founded only upon the science of logic. ”