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21 " Darwin’s ideas are devices for generating data. Darwin’s theory opens possibilities for inquiry; Agassiz’s closes them. "
― Louis Menand , The Metaphysical Club
22 " [Quatelet’s first claim to catch attention] was that since (as he believed he had shown) there is a ‘law’ governing the amount of crime in a society, moral responsibility for crime must lie with the society and not with the individual criminal. ‘It is society that prepares the crime and … the guilty person is only the instrument who executes it,’ is the rather dramatic way he expressed it. People who murder—like people who marry and people who commit suicide—are only fulfilling a quota that has been preset by social conditions. "
23 " [According to Peirce] ‘The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.’ … nominalism denies the social altogether … ‘the community is to be considered as an end in itself’… knowledge cannot depend on the inferences of single individuals … Logic is rooted in the social principle. "
24 " What [Peirce] meant was that since nature evolves by chance variation, then the laws of nature must evolve by chance variation as well. Variations that are compatible with survival are reproduced; variations that are incompatible are weeded out. A tiny deviation from the norm in the outcome of a physical process can, over the long run, produce a new physical law. Laws are adaptive. "
25 " [Addams] found that the people she was trying to help had better ideas about how their lives might be improved than she and her colleagues did. She came to believe that any method of philanthropy or reform premised on top-down assumptions—the assumption, for instance, that the reformer’s tastes or values are superior to the reformee’s, or, more simply, that philanthropy is a unilateral act of giving by the person who has to the person who has not—is ineffectual and inherently false. "
26 " If behaving as thought we had free will or God exists gets us results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true. "
27 " If behaving as though we had free will or God exists gets us results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true. "
28 " No belief, James thought, is justified by its correspondence with reality, because mirroring reality is not the purpose of having minds. "
29 " …Peirce’s theory of signs—there are no prerepresentational objects out there. Things are themselves signs: their being signs is a condition of their being things at all. "
30 " For Peirce, inquiry is always communal—it is the median of many observations that gives the position of the star—and the last analysis really is the last. In Peirce’s cosmology, everyone’s beliefs have to be the same in the end, because all opinion must converge. "
31 " In a time when the chance of another civil war did not seem remote, a philosophy that warned against the idolatry of ideas was possibly the only philosophy on which a progressive politics could have been successfully mounted. "
32 " In modern societies, the reproduction of custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence, and the ends of life are not thought to be given; they are thought to be discovered or created. Individuals are not expected to follow the life path of their parents, and the future of the society is not thought to be dictated entirely by its past. "
33 " [According to Holmes], ‘Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death. "
34 " We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need. "
35 " He defended them because he believed that every social interest should have its chance. "
36 " When you know that you know persecution comes easy. "
37 " When the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, on January 1, 1863, Abbott wrote from the front to his aunt to explain that “[t]he president’s proclamation is of course received with universal disgust, particularly the part which enjoins officers to see that it is carried out. You may be sure that we shan’t see to any thing of the kind, having decidedly too much reverence for the constitution. "
38 " He believed that “a day will come when the sexual relations will be regulated in every case by the private will of the parties. The public sentiment, then, or law, … will declare the entire freedom of every man or woman to follow the bent of their private affections, will justify every alliance sanctioned by these affections.”31 "
39 " I think you are hopeful because (excuse me) you are ignorant. "
40 " Mixed with this frustration was the suspicion that Northern lives were being wasted because of mismanagement and political meddling, a suspicion reinforced by Lincoln’s firing of McClellan, who, despite his poor showing in the field, was widely respected as a military professional. These are the views reflected in Holmes’s letter. They were Copperhead views, but one did not need to be a Democrat in the fall of 1862 to share them. "