Peirce: Belief Makes Things Real

"To know what we think, to be masters of our own meaning, will make a solid foundation for great and weighty thought...a few clear ideas are worth more than many confused ones" (Peirce 29). Yet, "many a man has cherished for years as his hobby some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false" (Peirce 30) and he endorses it day by day.

Peirce makes a striking picturing of how blindly many of us live our lives; in shadow.
Yet these shadows are very real to us as they are fed by the methods of fixating belief that he mentions in his first essay "The Fixation of Belief". In this essay, Peirce is careful to say that we cannot really fault people for believing what they believe, but maybe more necessarily, how they go about believing it.

But why is this important? It is important because beliefs form the habits of our existence and there is security in knowing that beliefs are simply "thought[s] at rest (Peirce 33) because in this way, we can see that fixating is not a permanent action. In believing we are allowed to shift to a new state of rest and the problem is that many people do not realize this. They see contradictions and conflicting information as enemies to the world created by their beliefs instead of momentary transitory periods of modifying their world, perhaps for the better. Or on the other hand, realizing that they have good reason to remain at rest for the time being.

However, in the grander scheme of things, in the truth of what Peirce considers the fabric of reality (universal truths), the little banter between whether or not to remain at rest does not matter because real truth, the truth that everyone believes in will be happened upon in whatever manner necessary for its happening to occur. It is not what is thought about truth that matters, but rather that the truth happens and the thoughts must be as a result of the truth, not truth the result of collective thoughts. It is almost as if Peirce is writing that predestinate opinion is written into the universe and we cannot escape it no matter what our individual opinions may be and whether or not it is lost at some point, this quality will make it rise again, planting itself within our beliefs and habits so that it can become...manifest.