SCIENCE ON THE BLOCK

From THE WISDOM OF C. S. PEIRCE A PROTEST AGAINST OBSCURANTISM
Quotes are from CP and are Peirce’s. My comments are quoteless.

CP 1.119 “The forces we know can be but a small part of all those that are operative. Our ignorance of small things and great, of distant times and of very slow operations. We are equally ignorant of very rapid performances which nevertheless we know to take place. Our science is altogether middle-sized and mediocre. Its insignificance compared with the universe cannot be exaggerated.”

Peirce included these words in a longer indictment of science as woefully limited. The irony is that his indictment still stands. Science had advanced by leaps and bounds. But it has studiously avoided things that even today remain uninvestigated to the satisfaction of the science-dependent world.

CP 118 “All the other relations of things concerning which we must suppose there is vast store of truth are for us merely the object of such false sciences as judicial astrology, palmistry, the doctrine of signatures, the doctrine of correspondences, magic, and the like.”

This could have been written yesterday, Well, it is word right now. Our binary, either-or, world is reeling in terminal chaos because we are lost in virtually every discipline there is.

But the dam is breaking, which is why Peirce is important today. He knew then that the science he venerated was sorely lacking.