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p.1 Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives of himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already.
p.3-4 Logicality in regard to practical matters... is the most useful quality an animal can possess...almost any fact may serve as a guiding principle. But it so happens that there exists a division among facts, such that in one class are all those which are absolutely essential as guiding principles, while in the others are all which have any other interest as objects of research.
p.5-6 Our beliefs guide our desires and shape our actions... The feeling of believing is more or less sure indication of there being established in our nature some habit which will determine our actions... Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief... Belief does not make us act at once, but puts us in such a condition that we shall behave in some certain way, when the occasion arises. Doubt... stimulates us to inquiry until it is destroyed.
p.6-7 The irritation of doubt is the only immediate motive for the struggle to attain belief... With the doubt, therefore, the struggle begins, and with the cessation of doubt it ends... When doubt ceases, mental action on the subject comes to an end; and, if it did go on, it would be without a purpose.
p.11 To satisfy our doubts, therefore, it is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs may be determined by nothing human, but by some external permanency - by something upon which our thinking has no effect.
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