C. S. Peirce Manuscripts

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of physics? Never: I am very sure he would condemn such piddling minuteness as inappropriate to so broad a question. He proceeds slap-dash, depicting the logical situation as in a black board diagram rather than as in a critically accurate anatomical plate. For the most part, he has but the vaguest notion of how he has come by his principles. He has gathered them casually, after the custom of amateurs. It might seem to behoove every man who has occasion to lay down principles of reasoning in a grave scientific discussion to be more than an amateur in logic. Voluminous writers, however, on logic there are who deliberately adopt vague substitutes for any definite method of establishing principles of reasoning.

When I was beginning my philosophical reading, my father, Benjamin Peirce, forced me to recognize