Introduction the Period from the Spring of 1890 Into the Summer Of

Introduction The period from the spring of 1890 into the summer of 1892 was a time of emotional turmoil for Peirce, a time of rash ventures and dashed hopes that would culminate in a transforming experience and a new sense of purpose.1 In the decade following the death of his father in 1880, Peirce suffered a number of life-changing defeats, including the loss of his teaching appointment at Johns Hopkins University and the stripping away of his leadership in gravity determinations for the U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey. Peirce’s marriage in 1883 to his reputed mistress, the mysterious Juliette Froissy Pourtalais, and his ill- considered attempt to introduce her openly into his social circles, brought a rude end to his way of life up to that time. In April 1887, Charles and Juliette left New York for Milford, Pennsylvania, where they hoped to find acceptance in Milford’s small but thriving French community. In the spring of 1890, as the period of the present volume was about to begin, Peirce helped organize a debate in the pages of The New York Times on the soundness of Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary philosophy and he signed his contributions with the pseudonym “Outsider,” reflecting his increasing estrangement from mainstream society. At the age of fifty, Peirce had been pushed from center stage and his native sense of entitlement had been crushed. Peirce’s feeling of exclusion and disadvantage intensified during these years so that by May 1892, writing again as the Outsider, he would rail against the “politico-economical deification of selfishness” and its anti-Christian corrupting influence on society (see sel. 52). Peirce had lived most of his adult life in America’s “gilded age,” the period of reconstruction and economic expansion following the Civil War when unregulated capitalism gained the upper hand. This was the age of the so-called robber barons. It was a time of grandeur, of conspicuous, even ostentatious, wealth; yet, as the saying goes, while the rich got richer, the poor got poorer. In 1889, Andrew Carnegie, reflecting on “the contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer,” wrote confidently that this contrast “measures the change which has come with civilization” and “is not to be deplored, but welcomed as highly beneficial.”2 Carnegie invoked Darwin’s theory of evolution in support of his belief that “the law of competition” yields the most desirable results in the long run: “while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.” The gospel of wealth that Carnegie went on to expound was based on his conviction that “men of Wealth,” the fittest of specimens, should consider their surplus revenues as trust funds “which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in a manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community.” Men of wealth should not live extravagantly and they should not bequeath their fortunes to their heirs; they should “return their surplus wealth to the mass of their fellows in the forms best calculated to do them lasting good. The man who dies . rich dies disgraced.” Thus Carnegie sought 1. This is the unabridged final draft of the introduction which was abridged for publication in W8. It has been published online because it includes information additional to what could be included in the print version. It has been retrofitted to correspond as closely as possible to the print version but some inconsistencies remain. In writing this introduction, I have made heavy use of the Max H. Fisch files and data collections at the Peirce Edition Project. Footnote references are not given for items that can be easily located by keeping the following in mind: all references to manuscripts and Peirce’s letters, unless otherwise indicated, are to the Peirce papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard University or in the Open Court collection; correspondence with members of the Open Court is in the Open Court collection in the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University; letters used are also from these collections or from the Coast Survey collection in the National Archives. Readers should consult the annotations and the textual notes at the back of the volume for additional information about circumstances related to the composition of the volume’s selections. 2 “Wealth.” North American Review, 148, no. 391 (June 1889): 653–64. 1 to end the worst excesses of “the gilded age” and help solve “the problem of the Rich and the Poor,” though not by regulation or social programs but through the philanthropy of the captains of industry. Peirce had no illusions that unbridled capitalism was the path to a better world and he must have found cold comfort in Carnegie’s idea that the well-being of the poor and of society at large should be left to the super rich—although in a few years he would apply to the Carnegie Foundation for urgently needed support—but Carnegie’s “gospel” came too late for his own time. The U.S. economy was in serious trouble and in 1893 it would take the nation into one of its most severe depressions. Labor unrest was rapidly increasing; in 1892 workers would strike at one of Carnegie’s Pennsylvania steel mills and Carnegie’s unyielding response would lead to a number of violent deaths.3 In 1888, Republican Benjamin Harrison defeated incumbent Democrat Grover Cleveland to become the 23rd president of the United States. Harrison’s election was tainted by fraudulent balloting but even “buying votes” was not quite enough to deliver the election outright and Harrison was awarded the presidency by the Electoral College without having won the popular vote. Harrison and Cleveland opposed each other again in 1892 and Cleveland was returned to office for a second though non-consecutive term. Harrison’s loss is usually attributed to his support for an unpopular tariff bill and the increasing labor unrest. Cleveland’s second term would be dominated by the economic depression and also by labor unrest. The Gilded Age was in its death throes and the U.S. was in a state of turmoil—as Peirce was on a human scale. Peirce never quite fit the time he was born into and Joseph Brent has suggested that Peirce may himself have been a casualty of the Gilded Age. Brent points to Lewis Mumford’s examination of this period of American life and Mumford’s observation that being left out was a common plight of some of the greatest and most revolutionary minds of the period: “the procession of American civilization divided and walked around these men” and they were relinquished to the future. Peirce’s name was first on Mumford’s list of neglected revolutionary thinkers.4 As Peirce moved into the final decade of the 19th century, surely it was true that he felt that American civilization was passing him by without much notice and this feeling would only grow stronger. A bittersweet vestige of the prominence of the Peirce family remained to remind Peirce of what was slipping away. When The Nation announced a Phi Beta Kappa Society prize for a review of American contributions to science (6 Nov. 1890), Benjamin Peirce was mentioned as the only American who had made a notable contribution to mathematics. Six months earlier (15 May 1890), The Nation had reported on scientific work conducted on the Island of Saint Helena, where U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey Assistant E. D. Preston had swung two Peirce Pendulums (Meter No. 2 and Yard No. 3) in a station set up in Napoleon’s New House, the house built for Napoleon in his exile. Research journals and publications continued to cite the work of Peirce and his father. Many of Peirce’s students from Johns Hopkins had joined university faculties and they made frequent references in their publications to Peirce’s work in mathematics, logic, psychology, and in other disciplines. In July 1890, former student Henry Taber published a long article, “On the Theory of Matrices,” in the American Journal of Mathematics in which he 3 The Homestead Strike was a labor dispute that occurred in Homestead, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. It was one of the bitterest labor disputes in U.S. history. The strike began on 29 June 1892, when workers belonging to the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (the AA) struck the Carnegie Steel Company to protest proposed wage cuts. After some vicious battles between the striking workers and Carnegie’s three hundred Pinkerton detectives, the Pennsylvania State Militia was called in ending the strike on 20 November and leaving non-union workers on the job. The Homestead Strike weakened unionism in the U.S. steel industry for forty years. (The New Columbia Encyclopedia.) 4 Mumford, Lewis. The Brown Decades. A Study of the Arts in America, I865–1895, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. I931; see Joseph Brent’s Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, p. 2. 2 recounted many contributions of Peirce and his father, including, for example, their identification of quaternions with the algebra of dual matrices and Charles Peirce’s discovery that every dual relation can be represented by a matrix. In January 1892, another former student, Christine Ladd Franklin, published a review of the first volume of Ernst Schröder’s Algebra der Logik in Mind and reminded Mind’s readers, who it is fair to assume constituted an overwhelming majority of the philosophers and logicians of the world, that the “present state of development” of symbolic logic was due to Mr.

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