"It is impossible not to envy the man who can dismiss reason, although we know how it must turn out at last"
About this Quote
Envy, here, isn’t admiration; it’s a flare of irritation at how comforting irrationality can look from the outside. Peirce, the hard-nosed architect of pragmatism, nails a social fact that still stings: the person who can shrug off reason often seems freer, lighter, less burdened by doubt, evidence, or the slow grind of revising beliefs. Rationality is work. Unreason can feel like rest.
The line’s cunning move is its double vision. Peirce admits the emotional pull of abandoning reason ("impossible not to envy") while keeping the bill for that comfort firmly in view ("we know how it must turn out at last"). That last clause is doing moral and epistemic heavy lifting. He’s gesturing at consequences, not divine judgment: beliefs that ignore reality eventually collide with it. The tone is cool, almost clinical, but the subtext is impatient - a philosopher watching people choose the easy coherence of dogma over the messy discipline of inquiry.
Context matters because Peirce isn’t selling rationality as a personality trait; he’s defending a method. In his work on the fixation of belief and the logic of inquiry, he argues that superstition, authority, and "a priori" hunches can stabilize belief quickly, which is exactly why they’re seductive. The scientific attitude, by contrast, is deliberately uncomfortable: it invites error so it can be corrected.
What makes the sentence land is its refusal to romanticize reason. Peirce concedes the psychological advantage of the unreasonable while quietly predicting their defeat by reality’s delayed but reliable audit.
The line’s cunning move is its double vision. Peirce admits the emotional pull of abandoning reason ("impossible not to envy") while keeping the bill for that comfort firmly in view ("we know how it must turn out at last"). That last clause is doing moral and epistemic heavy lifting. He’s gesturing at consequences, not divine judgment: beliefs that ignore reality eventually collide with it. The tone is cool, almost clinical, but the subtext is impatient - a philosopher watching people choose the easy coherence of dogma over the messy discipline of inquiry.
Context matters because Peirce isn’t selling rationality as a personality trait; he’s defending a method. In his work on the fixation of belief and the logic of inquiry, he argues that superstition, authority, and "a priori" hunches can stabilize belief quickly, which is exactly why they’re seductive. The scientific attitude, by contrast, is deliberately uncomfortable: it invites error so it can be corrected.
What makes the sentence land is its refusal to romanticize reason. Peirce concedes the psychological advantage of the unreasonable while quietly predicting their defeat by reality’s delayed but reliable audit.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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