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.
The various elements of truth stand in perpetual antithesis, sometimes requiring us to believe apparent opposites while we wait for the moment when we shall know as we are known.
I never had an occasion to question color, therefore, I only saw myself as what I was... a human being.
For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.
Among the friends of Union, there is great diversity of sentiment and of policy in regard to slavery and the African race among us.
Despots prefer the friendship of the dog, who, unjustly mistreated and debased, still loves and serves the man who wronged him.
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