EPISTEMOLOGY upon in modern states, nonetheless a kind of moral terrorism enforces uniformity of opinion ‘Let it be known that you seriously hold a tabooed belief and you may be perfectly sure of being treated with a cruelty less brutal but more refined than hunting you like a wolf.’ Second, no institution can regulate opinion on every subject, and there will always be some independent thinkers who, by comparing their own culture with others, will see that the doctrines inculcated by authority arise only from accident and custom Such thinkers may adopt a third method, attempting, by a priori meditation, to produce a universally valid metaphysics This is more intellectually respectable than the other two methods, but it has manifestly failed to produce a fixation of beliefs From earliest times to latest, the pendulum has swung between idealist and materialist metaphysics without ever coming to rest We must therefore adopt the fourth method, the method of science The first postulate of this method is the existence of a reality independent of our minds There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those realities affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really are, and any man, if he has sufficient experience and reason enough about it, will be led to the one true conclusion (EWP 133) The task of logic is to provide us with guiding principles to enable us to find out, on the basis of what we know, something we not know, and thus to approximate ever more closely to this ultimate reality Though Peirce insisted that doubt was the origin of inquiry, he rejected Descartes’s principle that true philosophy must begin from universal, methodical scepticism Genuine doubt must be doubt of a particular proposition, for a particular reason Cartesian doubt was no more than a futile pretence, and the Cartesian endeavour to regain certainty by private meditation was even more pernicious ‘We individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophy we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for the community of philosophers’ (EWP 87) Descartes was right that the first task in philosophy is to clarify our ideas; but he failed to give an adequate account of what he meant by clear and distinct ideas If an idea is to be distinct, it must sustain the test of dialectical 153