Wherefore Aught?

Post       : Wherefore Aught?
URL        : http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2013/06/01/wherefore-aught/
Posted     : June 1, 2013 at 4:00 pm
Author     : Jon Awbrey
Categories : Cosmogony, Evolution, Existence, Natural Law, Peirce, Philosophy

Re: Why Is There Something?
At: http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/why-is-there-something/

Here is another one of those eternally recurring ideas echoed inimitably by C.S. Peirce
in his sketch of a “Cosmogonic Philosophy” (http://www.jstor.org/stable/27896847).

| It would suppose that in the beginning,— infinitely remote,— there was a chaos
| of unpersonalized feeling, which being without connection or regularity would
| properly be without existence.  This feeling, sporting here and there in pure
| arbitrariness, would have started the germ of a generalizing tendency.  Its
| other sportings would be evanescent, but this would have a growing virtue.
| Thus, the tendency to habit would be started;  and from this with the other
| principles of evolution all the regularities of the universe would be evolved.
| At any time, however, an element of pure chance survives and will remain until
| the world becomes an absolutely perfect, rational, and symmetrical system, in
| which mind is at last crystallized in the infinitely distant future.  (p. 110).

Charles S. Peirce (30 August 1890), “The Architecture of Theories”, pp. 98–110 in
Peirce Edition Project (2010), Writings of Charles S. Peirce : A Chronological Edition,
Volume 8, 1890–1892, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN.  Published version,
The Monist, vol. 1, no. 2 (January 1891), pp. 161–176.

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