Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

I assert that nothing ever comes to pass without a cause.

God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal - there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.

Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?

Necessity is the most powerful divinity the world knows--it is the result of physical forces set in operation by ethical forces.

God has created a logical universe of cause and effect. He who repudiates causality actually repudiates reason.

Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavoring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.

Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.

Everything necessarily is or is not, and will be or will not be; but one cannot divide and say that one or the other is necessary.I mean, for example: it is necessary for there to be or not to be a sea-battle tomorrow; but it is not necessary for a sea-battle to take place tomorrow, or for one not to take place--though it is necessary for one to take place or not to take place.

This is what writers mean when they say that the notion of cause involves the idea of necessity. If there be any meaning which confessedly belongs to the term necessity, it is unconditionalness. That which is necessary, that which must be, means that which will be, whatever supposition we may make in regard to all other things.

There are no accidents in my philosophy. Every effect must have its cause. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future. All these are links in the endless chain stretching from the finite to the infinite.

Two times two will be four even without my will. Is that what you call man's free will?

I do not believe anything comes by chance. I regard the present as the necessary child of a necessary past.

The possible ranks higher than the actual.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

Everything that is possible demands to exist.

Fate is a sempiternal and unchangeable series and chain of things, rolling and unraveling itself through eternal sequences of cause and effect, of which it is composed and compounded.

If you prove the cause, you at once prove the effect; and conversely nothing can exist without its cause.

The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died

Everything has a cause.

What always was must always be.

But to proceed in this reconciling project with regard to the question of liberty and necessity; the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science.

Fate and necessity are unconquerable.

From my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings.