A typically difficult passage from Peirce, who often seems to take the tortured syntax of 19th century intellectual writing to new heights. Nevertheless, it forcefully demonstrates his brilliance and the all-encompassing wholeness of his thought.

The supreme commandment is to complete the whole system even until continuity results and the distinct individuals weld together. Thus it is, that while reasoning and the science of reasoning strenuously proclaim the subordination of reasoning to sentiment, the very surpreme commandment of sentiment is that man should generalize,…should become welded into the universal continuum, which is what true reasoning consists in. But this does not reinstate reasoning, for this generalization should come about, not merely in man’s cognitions, which are but the superficial film of his being, but objectively in the deepest emotional springs of his life. In fulfilling this command, man prepares himself for transmutation into a new form of life, the joyful Nirvana in which the discontinuities of his will shall have all but disappeared.

I feel like I could write page after page on this passage, but what most concerns me now is that phrase "the discontinuities of his will." I like this idea. We are torn in opposite directions, wanting things that we can't have and would never make us happy even if we had them. The discongruous desires for meaning, diversion, adventure, and comfort. Maybe we don't want to know the meaning of life, because what if it conflicts with our other desires? What if it's bad news? Do we still want to know? Maybe we'll settle for what gets us through the day, the week, the year.

But Peirce has a vision here in which opposite don't quite dissolve, but manage to find a balance, in which the "whole" I wrote about a few posts down becomes visible. Do we ever get to see that whole in this life? Or is it always fleeting, just out of sight, forever pursued? As I said, I like this idea because it suggests that the space between the opposites I am pulled in, the space in which I exist, forever between and torn, is the space of an accessible higher plane. If only I can be reconciled to that liminal space, if only I can reconcile those discontinuities by accepting them all together.