"A quality is something capable of being completely embodied. A law never can be embodied in its character as a law except by determining a habit. A quality is how something may or might have been. A law is how an endless future must continue to be"
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Peirce is doing something sly here: he demotes “law” from a lofty Platonic commandment to a lived pattern that only becomes real by sinking into behavior. A “quality” can be fully present in an instant - redness, bitterness, a mood, a possibility. It’s complete because it doesn’t need time to prove itself. Law, by contrast, can’t show up all at once. It has to stretch out, repeat, and harden into a habit. That move is classic Peirce: meaning is not an essence you contemplate; it’s a tendency you can expect to see play out.
The subtext is a quiet jab at philosophies that treat laws of nature, logic, or morality as static, already-finished entities. Peirce won’t let “law” float above experience. If a law doesn’t constrain expectations over an “endless future,” it’s not functioning as law at all. It’s either a description of the past or a decorative metaphysical label. By tying law to habit, he also threads human psychology into the fabric of reality: what scientists call a “law” is inseparable from the regularities that train our predictions, our instruments, our practices.
Context matters: Peirce is writing in the late 19th-century fight over whether reality is built from fixed necessities or from evolving regularities. His pragmatism and “tychism” (the role of chance) leave room for novelty, which is why he frames qualities as “how something may or might have been” - the open field of possibility. Laws are the pressure of continuity: not what is, but what keeps insisting on being.
The subtext is a quiet jab at philosophies that treat laws of nature, logic, or morality as static, already-finished entities. Peirce won’t let “law” float above experience. If a law doesn’t constrain expectations over an “endless future,” it’s not functioning as law at all. It’s either a description of the past or a decorative metaphysical label. By tying law to habit, he also threads human psychology into the fabric of reality: what scientists call a “law” is inseparable from the regularities that train our predictions, our instruments, our practices.
Context matters: Peirce is writing in the late 19th-century fight over whether reality is built from fixed necessities or from evolving regularities. His pragmatism and “tychism” (the role of chance) leave room for novelty, which is why he frames qualities as “how something may or might have been” - the open field of possibility. Laws are the pressure of continuity: not what is, but what keeps insisting on being.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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