Friday, January 07, 2011

First Step

A close-up view of an astronaut's bootprint in the lunar soil, photographed with a 70mm lunar surface camera during the Apollo 11 extravehicular activity (EVA) on the Moon[T]he first step toward finding out is to acknowledge you do not satisfactorily know already; so that no blight can so surely arrest all intellectual growth as the blight of cocksureness; and ninety-nine out of every hundred good heads are reduced to impotence by that malady -- of whose inroads they are most strangely unaware.

-- C.S. Peirce (1839-1914), American philosopher and chemist, Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, page xi, paragraph 13

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