It is... easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.
Interpretation
Certainty can be misleading and is often based on vague assertions rather than solid evidence.
In this quote, Charles Sanders Peirce highlights the paradox of certainty, suggesting that it is often reached not through rigorous reasoning but rather by being deliberately vague. This reflects on the nature of knowledge and belief, emphasizing that true understanding requires clarity and precision, while certainty can sometimes stem from a lack of detail or depth in thought.
In practice
In a discussion about the limits of human knowledge, this quote can illustrate how we should approach certainty with caution.
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.
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.
From a religious point of view, if God had thought homosexuality is a sin, he would not have created gay people.
One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds.
The world is not religious because religion is imposed upon us. The parents are in a hurry to impose; the church, the state, the country - everybody is in a hurry to impose a certain religion on the child. How foolish! How stupid! Religion needs maturity, great understanding, before one can choose.
If you can let go of (the Tao) with your mind and surround it with your heart, it will live inside you forever.
To be a Christian who is willing to travel with Christ on his downward road requires being willing to detach oneself constantly from any need to be relevant, and to trust ever more deeply the Word of God.
Our life and our death is with our neighbor. If we gain our brother, we have gained God, but if we scandalize our brother, we have sinned against Christ.
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