ONT Re: Inquiry Driven Systems
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Note 16
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CP 2.654. Three Logical Sentiments (cont.)
| But what, without death, would happen to every man, with death must happen
| to some man. At the same time, death makes the number of our risks, of our
| inferences, finite, and so makes their mean result uncertain. The very idea
| of probability and of reasoning rests on the assumption that this number is
| indefinitely great. We are thus landed in the same difficulty as before, and
| I can see but one solution of it. It seems to me that we are driven to this,
| that logicality inexorably requires that our interests shall 'not' be limited.
| They must not stop at our own fate, but must embrace the whole community.
| This community, again, must not be limited, but must extend to all races
| of beings with whom we can come into immediate or mediate intellectual
| relation. It must reach, however vaguely, beyond this geological epoch,
| beyond all bounds. He who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the
| whole world, is, as it seems to me, illogical in all his inferences,
| collectively. Logic is rooted in the social principle.
|
| To be logical men should not be selfish; and, in point of fact, they
| are not so selfish as they are thought. The willful prosecution of one's
| desires is a different thing from selfishness. The miser is not selfish;
| his money does him no good, and he cares for what shall become of it after
| his death. We are constantly speaking of 'our' possessions on the Pacific,
| and of 'our' destiny as a republic, where no personal interests are involved,
| in a way which shows that we have wider ones. We discuss with anxiety the
| possible exhaustion of coal in some hundreds of years, or the cooling-off
| of the sun in some millions, and show in the most popular of all religious
| tenets that we can conceive the possibility of a man's descending into hell
| for the salvation of his fellows.
|
| Now, it is not necessary for logicality that a man should himself be capable of
| the heroism of self-sacrifice. It is sufficient that he should recognize the
| possibility of it, should perceive that only that man's inferences who has it
| are really logical, and should consequently regard his own as being only so
| far valid as they would be accepted by the hero. So far as he thus refers
| his inferences to that standard, he becomes identified with such a mind.
|
| This makes logicality attainable enough. Sometimes we can personally
| attain to heroism. The soldier who runs to scale a wall knows that he
| will probably be shot, but that is not all he cares for. He also knows
| that if all the regiment, with whom in feeling he identifies himself, rush
| forward at once, the fort will be taken. In other cases we can only imitate
| the virtue. The man whom we have supposed as having to draw from the two packs,
| who if he is not a logician will draw from the red pack from mere habit, will see,
| if he is logician enough, that he cannot be logical so long as he is concerned
| only with his own fate, but that that man who should care equally for what
| was to happen in all possible cases of the sort could act logically, and
| would draw from the pack with most red cards, and thus, though incapable
| himself of such sublimity, our logician would imitate the effect of that
| man's courage in order to share his logicality.
|
| But all this requires a conceived identification of one's interests with
| those of an unlimited community. Now, there exist no reasons, and a later
| discussion will show that there can be no reasons, for thinking that the
| human race, or any intellectual race, will exist forever. On the other
| hand, there can be no reason against it; and, fortunately, as the whole
| requirement is that we should have certain sentiments, there is nothing
| in the facts to forbid our having a 'hope', or calm and cheerful wish,
| that the community may last beyond any assignable date.
|
| C.S. Peirce, 'Collected Papers', CP 2.654
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