PEIRCE, SEMEIOTIC, AND PRAGMATISM

Max H. Fisch

PEIRCE, SEMEIOTIC, AND PRAGMATISM Essays by MAX H. FISCH

Edited by Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel

Indiana University Press BLOOMINGTON

© 1986 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging­in ­Publication Data

Fisch, Max Harold, 1900­ Peirce, semeiotic, and pragmatism

Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 1839­1914­ Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Pragmatism­Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Semiotics­Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Ketner, Kenneth Laine. II. Kloesel, Christian J. W. III. Title. B945.P44F49 1986 85­42525 ISBN 0­253­34317­8 1 2 3 4 5 90 89 88 87 86

Page v

Contents

Preface vii

Forms of Reference xi

1 Charles Sanders Peirce (1939) 1

2 Justice Holmes, the Prediction Theory of Law, and Pragmatism (1942) 6

3 Evolution in American Philosophy (1947) 19

4 Peirce at the Johns Hopkins University (1952) 35

5 Alexander Bain and the Genealogy of Pragmatism (1954) 79

6 Some General Characteristics of American Philosophy (1960) 110

7 A Chronicle of Pragmaticism, 1865­1879 (1965) 114

8 Philosophical Clubs in Cambridge and Boston (1964­65) 137

9 Peirce's Triadic Logic (1966) 171

10 Peirce's Progress from Nominalism toward Realism (1967) 184

11 Vico and Pragmatism (1969) 201

11 Peirce's Arisbe: The Greek Influence in His Later Philosophy (1971) 227

13 Peirce and Leibniz (1972) 249

14 Hegel and Peirce (1974) 261

15 American Pragmatism Before and After 1898 (1977) 283

16 Peirce's Place in American Thought (1977) 305

17 Peirce's General Theory of Signs (1978) 321

18 Just How General Is Peirce's General Theory of Signs? (1983) 356

19 The "Proof" of Pragmatism (1981) 362

20 Peirce as Scientist, Mathematician, Historian, Logician, and Philosopher (1976) 376

21 Peirce's Place in American Life (1982) 401

22 The Range of Peirce's Relevance (1983) 422

Bibliography 449

Index 455

Page vii

Preface

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839­1914) is widely regarded as the most profound native intellect to have appeared in the United States. A scientist and mathematician of international reputation, he produced many of the advances in logic (which he equated with semeiotic, the general theory of signs) that have made possible a number of further advances, ranging from computing and literary theory to history and philosophy of science. Peirce was the inventor of pragmatism, the only native American philosophical movement, which has had, and continues to have, a worldwide impact. Peirce conceived pragmatism as an aspect of his doctrine of the nature of scientific logic and method, a topic he studied both as a practicing scientist and as a philosopher throughout his long life. To distinguish the details of his doctrine from similar efforts, in later years he preferred the substitute name, 'pragmaticism'.

In more than one sense, the field of Peirce studies is just beginning. Among its leading founders is Max Fisch. He has devoted nearly his entire life to the spirit and realization of Peirce's ideal of a scholarly community. The effects of his vast scholarship, plus his profound willingness to share its fruits, will long be felt by colleagues, friends, and scholars. Because his essays are widely consulted, yet have appeared in diverse places, we have persuaded him to allow us to prepare this collection of his principal writings on Peirce, semeiotic,* and pragmatism, so that they will be more accessible and even more widely consulted.

Max Harold Fisch was born in Elma, Washington, on 21 December 1900. He graduated from James Russell Lowell High School in San Francisco in January 1919 and entered Butler College in Indianapolis a year and a half later. There he studied philosophy under Elijah Jordan, met Ruth Bales (whom he married in 1927), was ordained a minister of the Disciples of Christ, and graduated in 1924. He received his doctorate in 1930 from Cornell University's Sage School of Philosophy, two years after he had joined the Philosophy Department at Western Reserve University in Cleveland as an assistant professor. From 1942 to 1945 he was curator of the rare book collection of the Army Medical Library, and chief of its History of Medicine Division during the first half of 1946. In the fall of that year he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois as professor of philosophy. During his long tenure at Urbana, he achieved a number of distinctions, an important one being his guidance of a whole generation of younger Peirce scholars who came to pursue doctoral studies with him. After his so­called retirement in 1969, he spent several years occupying distinguished visiting professorships: at the State University of New York at Buffalo during 1969­70, the University of Florida 1970­71, and Texas Tech University as Visiting University Professor during 1973­75, where he made important contributions to the two­year­old Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism. Ruth Fisch died

*For the spelling and pronunciation of 'semeiotic', see the opening paragraphs of "Peirce's General Theory of Signs."

Page viii July 9, 1974, and one year later, or fifty­one years after he had left Butler College, Max returned to Indiana as adjunct professor of philosophy and as general editor of the newly formed Peirce Edition Project at Indiana University at Indianapolis. He is now senior editor of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, whose plan he first drafted more than a decade ago and whose projected twenty volumes it is his dream to see realized.

Professor Fisch's chief other dream, and work that spans nearly half a century, concerns the Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico. That work began in earnest in 1939 when he visited Naples for the first time. In 1944 he published the standard translation of Vico's Autobiography with Thomas Bergin and contributed to it a monumental introduction. The same team produced a translation of Vico's New Science in 1948. He returned to Vico's city as a Fulbright scholar in 1950­51, and during that visit he presented to Croce and Santayana copies of his Classic American Philosophers. He also represented the University of Illinois in the founding conference of the International Association of Universities, serving on its administrative board until 1955. He was president of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1955­56, and in 1960­61 of the Charles S. Peirce Society. During the spring of 1958, under the auspices of the U.S. Department of State, he lectured at eleven universities in India, and immediately afterward went to Tokyo where he spent the academic year 1958­59 as a Fulbright professor of American philosophy at Keio University, which was then celebrating its centennial year. In 1976 he was made an Official Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, and in 1978­79 he served as president of the Semiotic Society of America. Since 1977 he has been president of the Charles S. Peirce Foundation.

In 1959 the Philosophy Department of Harvard University invited him to undertake a biography of America's great scientist, logician, and philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce. Since then he has spent time in Cambridge nearly every year, especially in Houghton and Widener libraries and the Harvard University Archives. Until 1974 he was always accompanied by his wife who had, he later said, "a much more dependable memory than mine" and whose contributions to rearranging and ordering both the Benjamin and Charles Peirce papers have yet to be widely appreciated. While working in the Harvard libraries, they met another eminent Peirce scholar, the historian of mathematics and science, Carolyn Eisele, then and now a close friend and valued colleague.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Ruth Alice Bales Fisch. Carolyn Eisele writes:

In remembrance of dear Ruth, the happy union of scholar, wife, mother, and friend. Her devotion to the Peircean cause was an inspiration and challenge to her co­workers, and made possible much of the collaborative efforts in the re­creation of this vital chapter in American intellectual history. Max Fisch's heroic efforts to complete the gigantic undertaking to which Ruth had also given so much of her life serve as testimony to the continuing influence of her dedicated partnership.

Page ix All of Max Fisch's writings are marked by meticulous research, and they go far beyond the boundaries of a single volume. What is contained here is but a part, yet an important one, of his published scholarship. The appended bibliography will allow interested students to pursue his complete research to date. Although from the beginning we focused upon his essays on Peirce, semeiotic, and pragmatism, there were still too many to fit within the covers of a single volume. Consequently, several important essays directly related to our topics had to be excluded. Fortunately, those are still in print and are readily available.* We decided to include the first selection because we thought it noteworthy that Professor Fisch's first serious publication on Peirce should come exactly one hundred years after the latter's birth. The significance of the other selections, which together represent the bulk of his most important writings on Peirce, semeiotic, and pragmatism, will easily be recognized and appreciated. Readers in search of an essay that, perhaps better than any other, presents Fisch's own philosophic views are advised to consult "The Critic of Institutions," preferably in the volume edited by Bontempo and Odell. Perhaps the most autobiographical of his publications is "The Philosophy of History: A Dialogue," but it leaves unaccounted the last quarter of a century.

We send our thanks to Professor C. J. M. Schuyt and Arthur F. Stewart for their help at various stages of the editorial process, and to Ursula Niklas of the Peirce Edition Project for having compiled the index. Our most profound thanks go to Max Fisch, who has helped us in preparing these essays, and with other tasks and projects.

Lubbock and Indianapolis KLK CJWK

*We have excluded his Peirce bibliographies (incorporated in the Comprehensive Bibliography, see page 449), the introduction to Philosophy in America, the masterly General Introduction to Classic American Philosophers, the introductions to the first three volumes of Writings of Charles S. Peirce, "Was there a Metaphysical Club in Cambridge?" "Salomon Bochner on Charles S. Peirce," "The New Tools of Peirce Scholarship,'' and "Peirce and the Florentine Pragmatists." We thank the original publishers and editors for their permission to reprint the essays included here. Full bibliographical citations appear in the Bibliography.

Page xi

Forms of Reference

The text of the essays contained in the present volume is generally that of the original publication. We have sought to correct all factual or printing errors and have occasionally updated the text and some references. Major revisions have been made in the notes. Their number has been considerably decreased in nearly all cases, because references to the standard Peirce editions have been incorporated directly into the text according to the following scheme of abbreviation: Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 1­6, ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, 1931­35, vols. 7­8 ed. A. Burks, 1958 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) as CP followed by volume and paragraph number; Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, ed. M. Fisch et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982—) as W followed by volume and page numbers; The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce, ed. C. Eisele (The Hague: Mouton, 1976) as NEM followed by volume and page numbers; the pages of Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence Between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, ed. C. Hardwick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977) as SS; Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to The Nation, ed. K. Ketner and J. Cook (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1975, 78, 79) as N followed by volume and page number. Peirce's lifetime publications are identified by P followed by a number that is given in A Comprehensive Bibliography and Index of the Published Works of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. K. Ketner et al. (Greenwich, CT: Johnson Associates, 1977—a revised edition published by the Philosophy Documentation Center will appear in 1986), and his manuscripts and letters by MS or L followed by a number that is given in Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce, by R. Robin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967) and "The Peirce Papers: A Supplementary Catalogue," by R. Robin (Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 1971). In a few instances we have added notes to indicate that Professor Fisch no longer adheres to the view he may have held decades ago.

Page 1

ONE—Charles Sanders Peirce

Peirce's long life was almost exclusively devoted to science and philosophy. He was America's greatest logician and one of the founders of modern mathematical or symbolic logic. His various researches in the service of the Coast and Geodetic Survey were of permanent importance. He wrote for the six­volume Century Dictionary all the definitions of the terms used in logic, metaphysics, mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, and weights and measures. Outside the circle of mathematical and scientific specialists, however, his name was scarcely known. His philosophical speculations, which were of potential interest to a much wider public, were heralded by G. Stanley Hall as likely to be "one of the most important of American contributions to philosophy."1 James and Royce repeatedly acknowledged their indebtedness to him during his lifetime, and Dewey long thereafter. But only so much of his thinking as has been assimilated, transformed and transmitted by these men has so far reached its potential audience. Peirce himself was isolated and frustrated by the lack of academic position and of avenues of publication. He was cut off from the latter by his failure to meet the prospective reader half way, and from the former by his inability to work in harness, his irregular hours and forgetfulness of appointments, and his marital difficulties.

Peirce was not only one of the most original and versatile of America's philosophers; he was its most prolific projector and drafter of systems. But for the articulation and elucidation of his final system he needed the stimulus of successive generations of able and interested students. That condition seemed in a fair way to be realized at Johns Hopkins University in the early eighties, where he was associated with G. S. Morris and G. Stanley Hall in the conduct of courses for advanced and postgraduate students, in what promised to become the country's chief center for the serious study of philosophy. The caliber of the students is sufficiently indicated by the fact that Royce received his doctor's degree there in 1878 and Dewey in 1884. The quality of the research done under Peirce's direction is evidenced by the Studies in Logic which he edited in 1883. There was a vigorous Metaphysical Club, which attracted students and

Page 2 instructors from other fields, and its roster of active contributors included the names of many who later made their mark in the intellectual life of the country. But the administration of the university decided to promote experimental psychology instead of philosophy, Morris and Peirce left, the Metaphysical Club was discontinued, and academic leadership in philosophy passed to Harvard, Michigan, Cornell, Chicago, Columbia, and California. This was the critical turn in Peirce's career, and its consequences were tragic not only for him but for American philosophy. No other university would have him, nor indeed could any other have provided an atmosphere so favorable as that of Johns Hopkins to the flourishing of his special abilities. He became a recluse, his style grew more cryptic and perverse, and he left at his death a mass of unpublished manuscripts which are only now being made accessible to students of philosophy.

Peirce's most characteristic theories—pragmatism, tychism, synechism, and agapism—may be traced to two early commitments and two early antagonisms, the combination of which in one mind is probably unique. He was committed almost from the beginning of his career to the methodology of the exact experimental sciences and to a scholastic realism derived from Duns Scotus. He was opposed to the rationalism of Descartes and to the nominalism and individualism of the British empiricists: that is, to the characteristic errors, as it seemed to him, of the two traditions from which all modern philosophy stems. He rejected the Cartesian doctrines that philosophy must begin with universal doubt, that the mind when stripped for action can intuit truth directly, and that the ultimate test of truth is to be found in the individual consciousness. We must begin, Peirce maintained, with the prejudices we actually have, and make no pretense of doubting what we have as yet no positive reason to doubt; we must depend, as the sciences do, upon the multiplicity and variety of experiments and arguments and the resultant approach to agreement in the community of minds, rather than upon the apparent conclusiveness of single arguments.

Peirce was equally opposed to the nominalism which had infected British thought from the beginning. In its extreme form in Berkeley it had asserted that only particulars exist, and that universals have no existence even as mental constructions, since what are called abstract or general ideas are only particular ideas (e.g., names), each used as a sign of an indefinite number of other particulars. Berkeley had been driven in the end to support his atomic sensations by linking them with archetypal ideas in God's mind, but this platonic pseudo­realism was as inadequate for the purpose as the later Scotch realism was for escaping Hume's dissolution of mind as well as matter into mere appearances. Nominalism, with its progeny of

Page 3 sensationalism, phenomenalism, individualism and materialism, was again ascendent in Peirce's day among scientists as well as philosophers. This was due, he thought, to persistent misunderstanding of the opposed doctrine of realism, and to misconceptions of the spirit and method of science on the part even of those expert in the practice of it.

According to Peirce the issue between realism and nominalism was not whether universals existed before or alongside of particular things and might be separate objects of intuition, but whether laws and general types were real. The real was the object of true opinion, i.e., that upon which opinion tended to settle in the long run; it was independent, not of thought in general, but of what any one man or any number of men might happen to think at a given time. But general conceptions entered into all opinions, and therefore into true opinions; so types or laws must be real. The only questions were, which ones were real and real in what way, and in what things they really were. No one seriously doubted, for instance, that such a general character as hardness really was in some things as a habit or disposition or mode of behavior of those things, and that there were in us certain habits of belief and action answering thereto. Not to doubt this was to be, so far, a realist.

One might, however, be in doubt whether this or that in particular was hard, and, if so, how hard, and how it got that way. Thought or inquiry was set going by such actual doubts, and its only function was the production and fixation of belief. There were three traditional ways in which beliefs might be locally and temporarily fixed. ( ) There was the method of tenacity, but it involved wearing mental blinkers, and man's social nature was against it. It could not hold its ground indefinitely in practice. The problem was to fix belief, not in the individual merely, but in the community. (2) For this purpose, the method of authority was more effective. But not all individuals could be kept indefinitely from discovering that beyond the reach of authority other beliefs flourished. Sooner or later, therefore, both the wilful adherence to belief and the arbitrary forcing of it upon others must be given up. (3) Under conditions of free trade in opinions, a certain standardization might ensue by the a priori method, or the test of agreeableness to reason. But opinions so standardized could be nothing more than intellectual fashions, and intellectual fashions seldom lasted more than a few centuries.

Each of these methods had its advantages, but after all everybody wished his opinions to coincide with the facts, and there was no reason why the results of these three methods should do so. That was the prerogative of a fourth method, the method of science. Only by the practice of it could we be assured that the ultimate conclusion of every man would be the same. What was that method? Its first

Page 4 requirement was that the meaning of the opinion in doubt or dispute should be clear. But there were grades of clearness. The "clear and distinct ideas" of the rationalists were not clear enough. Beyond the grades of familiarity and abstract definition, scientific thinking exhibited a third grade of clearness, though the rule for attaining it had perhaps not as yet been adequately formulated. Peirce's formulation of it in 1878 was as follows: "Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object" (W3:250; CP 5.402).

The linguistic clumsiness of the formula, with its employment five times over of derivatives of concipere, was due, he later said, to his desire to prevent such misunderstandings as that he was using meaning in any other sense than that of intellectual purport, or attempting to explain a concept by anything but concepts. In this connection it is noteworthy that his first published statement of the rule in 1871 was used in deprecation of Berkeley's denial that we have any abstract or general ideas.

A better rule for avoiding the deceits of language is this: Do things fulfil the same function practically? Then let them be signified by the same word. Do they not? Then let them be distinguished. If I have learned a formula in gibberish which in any way jogs my memory so as to enable me in each single case to act as though I had a general idea, what possible utility is there in distinguishing between such a gibberish and formula and an idea? Why use the term a general idea in such a sense as to separate things which, for all experimental purposes, are the same? (W2:483; CP 8.33)

Peirce's exposition of the principle of pragmatism in "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" laid itself open to the quite different misunderstanding of making action the ultimate end of thought. He attempted to correct this in the article "Pragmatism" in Baldwin's Dictionary. Action itself, he said, required an end, and that end must be something of a general description. Beyond the three grades of clearness already named, he now distinguished a fourth and still higher grade, which could be attained only by putting the pragmatic maxim into practice with conscientious thoroughness, but which consisted in the realization that "the only ultimate good which the practical facts to which it directs attention can subserve is to further the development of concrete reasonableness; so that the meaning of the concept does not lie in any individual reactions at all, but in the manner in which those reactions contribute to that development'' (CP 5.3).

Page 5 This development of concrete reasonableness or embodied ideas was not only the end of human action; it was also the direction of growth in nature itself. Nature acquired laws as a man acquired habits. Law was not primary, absolute and invariable, but derivative and approximate. The doctrine of necessity or determinism was neither a necessary postulate nor a probable conclusion of scientific method. "Try to verify any law of nature, and you will find that the more precise your observations, the more certain they will be to show irregular departures from the law" (CP 6.46). To this primary tendency toward diversification, this pure spontaneity or fortuitous variation, Peirce gave the name of tychism. But all variations and diversities were united logically by continuous scales of degrees, so that between any given two there was an infinite series of possible intermediates, and ontologically by the tendency toward order, by "the becoming continuous, the becoming instinct with general ideas." This principle of continuity, in both its logical and its ontological aspects, Peirce called synechism. Ontological synechism in the form of "evolutionary love," familiar examples of which might be found in the love of parents for their children and of thinkers for their ideas, he called agapism. Tychism and agapism were complementary phases of the synechistic law of mind, which was at the same time the law of nature.

Realism, pragmatism, tychism, synechism, agapism—these were but the germinal principles of a vast philosophical system, adumbrated in Peirce's early published papers and slowly filling itself out with precise detail and ingenious nomenclature, but difficult if not impossible to reconstruct at this late date from his alternative and partially conflicting drafts with their endless self­correction. It is not too much to say, however, that the assimilation and criticism of his work is likely to prove one of the most fruitful of the enterprises to which younger thinkers are now devoting themselves.

Note

1. "Philosophy in the United States," Mind 4 (1879):102.

Page 6

TWO—Justice Holmes, the Prediction Theory of Law, and Pragmatism

It would be generally agreed, even by those who are most critical of it, that pragmatism is America's most distinctive contribution to philosophy. It would also be agreed that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. had the ablest philosophical mind that has been devoted to law in this country. But it has not yet been shown how close he stood to pragmatism.

John Dewey, in the last chapter of his chief work, and as a prelude to his own most eloquent paragraphs, made effective use of two pages of quotations from Holmes, gladly borrowing, as he said, "the glowing words of one of our greatest American philosophers."1 A young Chinese friend of Holmes urged him to read Dewey's book. Holmes began it sceptically; it seemed to be so badly written. But he read it twice in the winter of 1926­1927, and wrote his impressions in five letters over a period of a year and a half. "He seems to me," Holmes said, "to have more of our cosmos in his head than any philosopher I ever read."2 Holmes reread the book in 1929, and recommended it to Sir Frederick Pollock. The only clearly intelligible sentences Pollock professed to find in it were those which Dewey quoted from Holmes; but Holmes in letters of 1930 and 1931 to Pollock said: ''His view of the universe came home to me closer than any other that I know." "So methought God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was."3

This philosophical affinity, discovered when Dewey was in his sixties and Holmes in his eighties, might easily have been discovered thirty years before. The years 1897 and 1898 are memorable for three pronouncements, each a classic of pragmatism, but not yet brought into relation. The last of the three, James's California lecture on "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," in which pragmatism was first publicly called by that name, is better known to philosophers than the two more substantial pronouncements that preceded it. Perhaps that is because philosophers have a weakness

Page 7 for what comes to focus on religion. In 1897 Dewey read at Michigan the paper on "The Significance of the Problem of Knowledge" in which we first find the program of "reconstruction in philosophy" that was carried out in the works of his maturity. It is full of the consciousness of the end of one epoch in philosophy and the dawn of another. But perhaps more epoch­making than either of these pronouncements of professional philosophers was the first of the three, Holmes's "Path of the Law,'' which has since become the gospel of "legal realism."4 Addressing the faculty and students of the Boston University School of Law at the dedication of its new hall, Holmes said:

When we study law we are not studying a mystery but a well­known profession. We are studying what we shall want in order to appear before judges, or to advise people in such a way as to keep them out of court. The reason why it is a profession, why people will pay lawyers to argue for them or to advise them, is that in societies like ours the command of the public force is intrusted to the judges in certain cases, and the whole power of the state will be put forth, if necessary, to carry out their judgments and decrees. People want to know under what circumstances and how far they will run the risk of coming against what is so much stronger than themselves, and hence it becomes a business to find out when this danger is to be feared. The object of our study, then, is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the courts.

You can see very plainly that a bad man has as much reason as a good one for wishing to avoid an encounter with the public force.... If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.

Take the fundamental question, What constitutes the law? You will find some text writers telling you that it is something different from what is decided by the courts of Massachusetts or England, that it is a system of reason, that it is a deduction from principles of ethics or admitted axioms or what not, which may or may not coincide with the decisions. But if we take the view of our friend the bad man we shall find that he does not care two straws for the axioms or deductions, but that he does want to know what the Massachusetts or English courts are likely to do in fact. I am much of his mind. The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.

The primary rights and duties with which jurisprudence busies itself again are nothing but prophecies ...... a legal duty so called is nothing but a prediction that if a man does or omits certain things he will be made to suffer in this or that way by judgment of the court; and so of a legal right. ... The duty to keep a contract at common law means

Page 8

a prediction that you must pay damages if you do not keep it—and nothing else. If you commit a tort, you are liable to pay a compensatory sum. If you commit a contract, you are liable to pay a compensatory sum unless the promised event comes to pass, and that is all the difference.... You see how the vague circumference of the notion of duty shrinks and at the same time grows more precise when we wash it with cynical acid and expel everything except the object of our study, the operations of the law. 5

Whatever may be thought of the merits of this prediction theory, it is, I believe, the only systematic application of pragmatism that has yet been made. The most striking fact about it, however, is that it clearly conceives the law not from the legislator's or judge's point of view but from that of the practising lawyer. Yet when Holmes delivered this address he was and had been for fifteen years an Associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. It is inconceivable that in his work as judge he should have thought of law as prediction except with reference to a possible appeal of cases he was considering to the United States Supreme Court. Judges are not engaged in predicting their own behavior. It is a fair inference, therefore, that Holmes's first formulation of the theory antedates his appointment to the bench. But we are not confined to inference. The theory may be traced back in his published writings, back even of his masterpiece on The Common Law (1881), so full of the spirit of pragmatism from the ringing sentences in which its theme is announced—"The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience"—on to the end, back, in fact, to the early 1870's, when Holmes was a member of "The Metaphysical Club" in which, as Peirce tells us, "the name and doctrine of pragmatism saw the light"(CP 5.12).6

In a long letter from Berlin in 1868 James had written to Holmes: "When I get home let's establish a philosophical society to have regular meetings and discuss none but the very tallest and broadest questions...."7 The society was organized in 1869.8 The most significant fact about it is that of its six most active members three were lawyers—Holmes, Nicholas St. John Green, and Joseph Warner. The other three were experimental scientists—James, Peirce, and Chauncey Wright. To the three lawyers I venture to add a fourth, John Chipman Gray, not named by Peirce, but mentioned in James's letter proposing the organization. He and Holmes often called together on James during its most active years (1869­1872), and James lists him with Peirce and Holmes among those with whom he gossiped most on generalities. 9 Wright and Green were the natural leaders of the group by right of philosophical maturity. They were both about forty; Peirce, Gray, Holmes, and James about thirty; Warner in his early twenties. 10 The one thing that all seven had in

Page 9 common, besides a Harvard degree, was an enthusiasm for the British tradition in philosophy, and a sense of the epoch­making importance of Darwin's Origin of Species, which had appeared a decade before their first meetings. Peirce alone of their number "had come upon the threshing floor of philosophy through the doorway of Kant," and even his ideas were acquiring the British accent.

According to the usual account, the name "pragmatism" was suggested by Kant, the doctrine by reflection on the methods of the experimental sciences in the light of British empiricism. Whatever assertion you make to an experimentalist, said Peirce, "he will either understand as meaning that if a given prescription for an experiment ever can be and ever is carried out in act, an experience of a given description will result, or else he will see no sense at all in what you say" (CP 5.411 ). I suggest, however, that the methods of the practising lawyer had quite as much to do with it. Peirce in fact professed to have done no more than follow the lead of one of the lawyers in the group, "a marvelously strong intelligence," Nicholas Green.

[He] was one of the most interested fellows, a skilful lawyer and a learned one, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham. His extraordinary power of disrobing warm and breathing truth of the draperies of long worn formulas, was what attracted attention to him everywhere. In particular, he often urged the importance of applying Bain's definition of belief, as "that upon which a man is prepared to act." From this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary; so that I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism. (CP 5.12) 11

The historian would like to know out of what need pragmatism grew. What were the members of the group doing that would afford material for their discussions? Wright was lecturing on psychology and working on his major essay, "The Evolution of SelfConsciousness," to which James owed so much. Peirce was lecturing on logic and philosophy of science, reviewing Fraser's edition of Berkeley, assisting in the Harvard Observatory, and working for the Coast Survey. James was nursing his health and reading Renouvier; his teaching career had not yet begun. Green, Gray, and Holmes were practising lawyers. Green was lecturing on criminal law, Gray on conflict of laws and on evidence, and Holmes on jurisprudence. Holmes had succeeded Gray as editor of the American Law Review, and was revising Kent's Commentaries on American Law, with some assistance from Warner, who was still a student at the Law School. Gray had already set himself the two tasks for whose accomplishment he is best known: a book on the Rule against Perpetuities which should be a model textbook, and a book on analytical jurisprudence. 12

Most important of all, perhaps, was the fact that Langdell's administration was just beginning at the Law School, with two innovations

Page 10 about which Holmes and Gray had doubts but to which they were in time fully converted. These were the case method of instruction, and the treatment of Torts as a separate subject. The first casebook for use in teaching was Langdell's Selection of Cases on the Law of Contracts, in the preface of which he said: "Law, considered as a science, consists of certain principles or doctrines.... Each of these doctrines has arrived at its present state by slow degrees; ... it is a growth extending in many cases through centuries. This growth is to be traced in the main through a series of cases...." Holmes in reviewing it said: "Tracing the growth of a doctrine in this way not only fixes it in the mind, but shows its meaning, extent, and limits as nothing else can." It also confirmed a remark Holmes had previously made, that "judges know how to decide a good deal sooner than they know why." But he did not share Langdell's belief in the study of cases to the exclusion of textbooks. 13

Nicholas Green was given charge of the course in Torts and made an abridgment of a standard English textbook for the use of his students. Holmes in reviewing it made the famous statement: "We are inclined to think that torts is not a proper subject for a law book." But he looked for the day when the matters grouped under that head should be treated philosophically as an integral part of the entire body of the law, and wished that Green would apply his "subtle and patient intellect" to the task. 14

In the preceding year, shortly after the Metaphysical Club began its meetings, Green reviewed at length a treatise on the law of negligence, whose publisher boasted that the authors had constructed their work on a plan "at once philosophical and practical." Green said it had a sort of practicality, but was in no sense philosophical. "It is the first requisite of a philosophical treatise that its subject should be philosophically defined.... A true definition is an analysis. Negligence is a legal term. Like other legal terms, its meaning is complex. A separate statement of each of the elements which go to make up that meaning is essential to its definition." 15

As a disciple of Bentham, Green would have found a model of such definition in the Fragment on Government, where Bentham defines legal duty in terms of legal right and right in terms of punishment. "That may be said to be my duty . .. which you ... have a right to have me made to do.... What you have a right to have me made to do ... is that which I am liable, according to law, upon a requisition made on your behalf, to be punished for not doing. I say punished: for without the notion of punishment (that is of pain annexed to an act . ..) no notion can we have of either right or duty. Now the idea belonging to the word pain is a simple one...." Bentham thought this the only way of expounding legal terms such as

Page 11 duty, right, power, title; he thought of it as a matter of resolving complex ideas to simple ones; but to the founders of pragmatism it must have seemed more important that this was the only kind of definition which made it empirically verifiable whether one had such and such a duty or not.

Now to the point for which all that precedes has been preparation. Pragmatism as a general doctrine was first announced (without the name) in a paper written by Peirce and read to the Club in November, 1872, but not published until six years later, when the Club had ceased to exist.16 The only application of the doctrine put into print during the Club's lifetime was Holmes's first formulation of the prediction theory of law. In April, 1871, Holmes was appointed University Lecturer on Jurisprudence for the following school year. For the first time he thus had need to define not merely the fundamental legal concepts but the concept of law itself. This, I suggest, was the need under pressure of which both the prediction theory and pragmatism took form. The inevitable text for such course was Austin's Lectures on Jurisprudence, and Holmes's views were shaped on that massive anvil. 17 In April, 1872, Pollock published in England an article arguing that Austin, by treating command as the essence of law, had confined it within an unduly narrow boundary. 18 In July, 1872, four months before Peirce read his paper, Holmes published, under the guise of a notice of Pollock's article, a brief summary of his own lectures. Taking a different tack from Pollock's, he pushed to its logical conclusion Austin's view that custom only became law by the tacit consent of the sovereign manifested by its adoption by the courts, and that before its adoption it was only a motive for decision. What more, Holmes asked, was the decision itself in relation to any future decision?

What more indeed is a statute; and in what other sense law, than that we believe that the motive which we think that it offers to the judges will prevail, and will induce them to decide a certain case in a certain way, and so shape our conduct on that anticipation? A precedent may not be followed; a statute may be emptied of its contents by construction, or may be repealed without a saving clause after we have acted on it; but we expect the reverse, and if our expectations come true, we say that we have been subject to law in the matter in hand. It must be remembered ... that in a civilized state it is not the will of the sovereign that makes lawyers' law, even when that is its source, but what a body of subjects, namely, the judges, by whom it is enforced, say is his will. 19 The judges have other motives for decision, outside their own arbitrary will, beside the commands of their sovereign. And whether those other motives are, or are not, equally compulsory, is immaterial, if they are sufficiently likely to prevail to afford a ground

Page 12

for prediction. The only question for the lawyer is, how will the judges act? Any motive for their action, be it constitution, statute, custom, or precedent, which can be relied upon as likely in the generality of cases to prevail, is worthy of consideration as one of the sources of law, in a treatise on jurisprudence. Singular motives ... are not a ground of prediction, and are therefore not considered. 20

By comparing this with a similar criticism of Austin by Holmes two years before, 21 in which, however, there is no trace of the prediction theory, we may reasonably assure ourselves that it was invented between 1870 and 1872, that is, during the most active years of the Metaphysical Club. Since the general doctrine which Peirce called pragmatism was worked out in the Club in these same years, we may safely infer either that the prediction theory was developed by applying that doctrine to the special case of law, or, as I think more likely, that pragmatism was a generalization of the prediction theory of law. 22

Though Holmes developed the theory at length and more consistently twenty­five years later in "The Path of the Law," he did not work out systematically there or elsewhere the distinction between law and its sources. This was definitively done in 1909 by Gray in his long­projected work on analytical jurisprudence, The Nature and Sources of the Law. The distinctive feature of Gray's book is the doctrine that all law is judge­made law and that legislative acts or statutes are merely sources of law, along with judicial precedents, opinions of experts, customs, and principles of morality, including public policy. 23

Though Gray's is the best book of its kind, and might be regarded as an elaboration of Holmes's essay of 1872, Holmes was not satisfied; and in three letters to Pollock in 1928 and 1932 he still dreamed of writing "a little book embodying my views on the ultimates of the law," "a first book of the law keeping to hard fact and using no images," "getting rid of all talk of duties and rights—beginning with the definition of law in the lawyer's sense as a statement of the circumstances in which the public force will be brought to bear upon a man through the Courts, and expounding rights as the hypostasis of a prophecy," 24

Thus, after ten years of further practise and teaching, and fifty years on the bench, Holmes still adhered to the theory he had first worked out in the circle in which pragmatism was born. So far as I can discover, though of course he had much else to say about the law, he never proposed another definition, or entertained another conception, of it. 25 Why, then, did he never call his prediction theory pragmatic, and why did neither James nor Peirce ever cite it as a model of pragmatic method? 26 Because, I suggest, they had no in­

Page 13 terest in law or in social philosophy, and because Holmes lost touch with Peirce, 27 associated pragmatism with James, thought the name pedantic, and had no sympathy with the speculations James invoked it to bless. 28

If Holmes and Dewey had met in 1897 or shortly thereafter, there might be a different story to tell. They had enough in common to learn from their differences, as Holmes and James, or Holmes and Peirce, beyond a point early reached, had not.

Notes

1. Experience and Nature (1925 ed.), pp. 417­19, quoted without references from Holmes, Collected Legal Papers (1920), pp. 305, 314­16.

2. Letters to John C. H. Wu in Harry C. Shriver (ed.), Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: His Book Notices and Uncollected Letters and Papers (1936), pp. 190­ 98.

3. Holmes­Pollock Letters (1941), 2:242, 272, 287.

4. Harvard Law Review 10 (1896­97):457­78; Collected Legal Papers, pp. 167­202. Bibliography of legal realism in Edwin N. Garlan, Legal Realism and Justice (1941), pp. 135­44; add Sabine, "The Pragmatic Approach to Politics," American Political Science Review 24 (1930):865­85. Dewey's address was published in the University of Chicago Contributions to Philosophy in 1897 and reprinted in The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (1910), pp. 271­304. James's address was published in the University of California Chronicle in 1898 and reprinted in Collected Essays and Reviews (1920), pp. 406­37.

5. Collected Legal Papers, pp. 167, 170, 171, 172­73, 168, 169, 175, 174. The last sentence is in the astringent tradition of Hobbes, Bentham, and Austin, who were Holmes's trinity. "The light of human minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definitions first snuffed and purged from ambiguity." Cf. Chauncey Wright's nihilism­"an exorcism of the vague"­and especially James's 1898 lecture on the "shrinkage" that follows application of the principle of pragmatism.

6. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1935), 1:534­36, 2:407­8.

7. Letters (1920), 1:126.

8. I think, as of 1967, that the Club was formed in 1871 rather than 1869 and that I was mistaken in including Gray as a member. For later treatments of the Club, see "Alexander Bain," "Was There a Metaphysical Club?," "Philosophical Clubs," and "American Pragmatism Before and After 1898.'' In the introduction to volume 3 of Writings of Charles S. Peirce, I argue that Peirce had a much greater and lifelong interest in law and in social philosophy than has hitherto been recognized, by myself or by anybody else.

9. Letters (1920), 1:151, 154, 168­69. All three were members of a less informal and longer­lived dining club which began about the same time (Perry, 1:360; Letters, 2:9­10). Moorfield Storey says its members "always

Page 14 thought that at the Club table we got the best conversation in Boston": M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Portrait of an Independent (1932), pp. 241­42. Storey says elsewhere that "while Gray enjoyed the meetings and listened with pleasure to what others said, he himself said little": [Roland Gray, ed.], John Chipman Gray (1917), P. 103. If he attended The Metaphysical Club, he may have been less reticent there; but is likely to have contributed most in private conversation with Holmes and James.

10. Peirce said Wright was "the strongest member," "our boxing­master whom we­I particularly­used to face to be severely pummeled." Sixty years later in a letter to Pollock expounding his own general philosophy, Holmes said: "Chauncey Wright, a nearly forgotten philosopher of real merit, taught me when young that I must not say necessary about the universe, that we don't know whether anything is necessary or not. So I describe myself as a bettabilitarian. I believe that we can bet on the behavior of the universe in its contact with us." See also Perry, ch. 31 and appendix III. On Warner see M. A. DeWolfe Howe (ed.), Later Years of the Saturday Club ( 1927), pp. 295­99.

11. Cf. Holmes, Collected Legal Papers, p. 298, on the connection between idea or belief, act, and law. On Green, see The Centennial History of the Harvard Law School, 1817­1917 (1918), pp. 214­15: "his weakness, if he had any, as an instructor was his contempt for the maxim stare decisis. He loved to attack adjudications." Brooks Adams, who was then a student at the Harvard Law School, says: "than Green, I never listened to a greater lecturer," and paints a picture of Green, Holmes, and Bigelow at work "in the old library in the old courthouse" (Boston University Law Review 1 [1921]: 168­71). Green had previously taught philosophy and economics in Harvard College: Historical Register of Harvard University (1937), P. 232. Some notion of his philosophic attainments­"his extraordinary power of disrobing warm and breathing truth of the draperies of long worn formulas"­may be got from an article on "Proximate and Remote Cause'' which he published shortly after the Metaphysical Club began meeting: American Law Review 4 (1869­70):201­16. Starting from the first of Bacon's "Maxims of the Law," "In jure non remota causa, sed proxima, spectatur," he showed that Bacon "had elsewhere taught that the neglect of the remote and the search for the proximate cause was the key to all science. Now when treating of a particular science, he reasserts it in regard to that science." He then went on to anerudite account of the various scholastic discussions of the distinction, and praised the schoolmen and especially Duns Scotus for their services in "separating and defining ideas," "making those ideas clear and distinct which had before dwelt in formless confusion in the human mind." (It may have been Green who introduced Peirce to scholasticism; except for incidental references in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2 [1868]:156, 191, 203, evidence of Peirce's serious study of it dates from his review of Fraser's edition of Berkeley in the North American Review in October 1871, nearly two years after Green's article.) For ideas about the facts with which law deals, which may have suggested the prediction theory of what law is, see especially Green's two concluding paragraphs: "We cannot add clearness to our reasoning by talking about proximate and remote causes and effects when we mean only the degree of certainty or uncertainty with which the connection between cause and effect might have been anticipated."

12. Quinquennial Catalogue of the Law School of Harvard University (1910), p. viii; Historical Register of Harvard University (1937); Centennial History of the Harvard Law School (1918), pp. 205­14.

Page 15 13. American Law Review 5 (1870­71):340­41, 539­40; 6 (1871­72):353­54. The connection with embryology and evolution comes out more clearly in Holmes's later observations: cf. Shriver, pp. 89­94.

14. American Law Review 5 (1870­71):340­41; Shriver, pp. 44­45. Ten years later Holmes taught the same course, used Ames's casebook, and was completely won over to the case method: Collected Legal Papers, p. 45. Holmes's own efforts "to discover whether there is any common ground at the bottom of all liability in tort" may be followed in "The Theory of Torts," American Law Review 7 (1873):652­63; chs. 3 and 4 of The Common Law; Collected Legal Papers, pp. 62­80, 117­37, 190­91, 222­23; and Holmes­Pollock Letters, 1:35­39, 54, 62­63. Gradually working out the doctrine of "external standard" through a series of decisions, Holmes was quite consciously shaping the law of torts on the Massachusetts bench. ''I want to get it all on the footing of the reasonably­to­be contemplated." "The general criterion of liability in tort for which I have contended ... is the tendency of an act under the circumstances known to the actor­according to common experience. If the probability of harm is very great and manifest the act is called malicious or intentional. If less but still sufficient to impose liability it is called negligent.... the difference between intent and negligence, in a legal sense, is ordinarily nothing but the difference in the probability, under the circumstances known to the actor and according to common experience, that a certain consequence, or class of consequences, will follow from a certain act." This is an eminently pragmatic way of going at the facts with which law deals, and all of a piece with the prediction theory of what law is. (For an estimate of the importance of Holmes's work in this connection, see John H. Wigmore, "Justice Holmes and Law of Torts," Harvard Law Review 29 [1915­16]:601­16. Wigmore thinks the scientific discussion and harmonization of our torts system will never be possible until the basic scheme of Holmes's "Privilege, Malice and Intent" is carried out into all details by some qualified person.)

15. American Law Review 4 (1869­70):350­53.

16. Perry, 1:332: "He read us an admirable introductory chapter to his book on logic the other day," i.e., about 20 November 1872. CP 5.13: "Our metaphysical proceedings had all been in winged words ... until at length, lest the club should be dissolved, without leaving any material souvenir behind, I drew up a little paper expressing some of the opinions that I had been urging all along under the name of pragmatism. This paper was received with such unlooked­for kindness, that I was encouraged, some half dozen years later, on the invitation of the great publisher, Mr. W. H. Appleton, to insert it, somewhat expanded, in the Popular Science Monthly for November, 1877 and January, 1878 .. ." under the titles "The Fixation of Belief" and "How to Make our Ideas Clear." By that time Wright and Green were dead; Holmes, Gray, and Warner had married, and James was about to; Peirce had left Cambridge and his first wife had left him; and the Club had long ceased to meet.

17. When the study of Roman law was urged as making for philosophic grasp, Holmes said that for that purpose Bentham's Fragment and Austin's Lectures were worth the whole corpus (American Law Review 7 [1872­73]:579; Shriver, pp. 34­35). For later estimates of Austin, see Collected Legal Papers, pp. 157, 197, 301. It is worth noting that one of Dewey's early essays was on "Austin's Theory of Sovereignty" (Political Science Quarterly 9 [1894]:31­52). 18. "Law and Command," Law Magazine and Review n.s. 1 (1872): 189­205. Pollock concluded by suggesting this quite unpragmatic definition: "Law in the widest sense is a condition or assemblage of conditions under which

Page 16 the evolution of things proceeds; law in the special sense is a condition or assemblage of conditions under which the evolution of a society proceeds, and the determination of which is part of the collective consciousness of that society."

19. Did Holmes already know Hoadly's dictum? (Cf. note 23 below, and Hughes, Addresses and Papers [1908], p. 139: "We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.")

20. American Law Review 6 (1871­72):723­25; Shriver, pp. 21­29. Peirce's nearest approaches to the principle of pragmatism prior to this date were these: (1) In 1868 he had said that the meaning or intellectual value of a thought lies "in what this thought may be connected with in representation by subsequent thoughts; so that the meaning of a thought is altogether something virtual." (2) In 1871 he had suggested this "rule for avoiding the deceits of language": "Do things fulfil the same function practically? Then let them be signified by the same word. Do they not? Then let them be distinguished'' (CP 5.289). (When Holmes met Pollock in England in 1874 he gave him a copy of this article along with others, and their sixty years correspondence starts from Pollock's half­way agreement "that the only definition of law for a lawyer's purposes is something which the Court will enforce.")

21. American Law Review 5 (1871­71):4­5; Shriver, pp. 36­38. "It is the merit of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principle afterwards." "... the rules of judge­made law are never authentically promulgated as rules, but are left to be inferred from cases."

22. The Italian philosopher Vico (1668­1744) has some brilliant pages in the Scienza nuova deriving the Socratic and post­Socratic logic, metaphysics, and moral philosophy from the disputations of the Athenian assembly and courts: first, popular government; then laws; then philosophy (ed. Nicolini, 1928, §1040­43).

23. See esp. pp. 100, 124­125 (in 2nd ed., 1921). "The shape in which a statute is imposed on the community as a guide for conduct is the statute as interpreted by the courts. To quote again from Bishop Hoadly: 'Whoever hath an absolute authority to interpret any written or spoken laws, it is he who is truly the Law­giver to all intents and purposes, and not the person who first wrote or spoke them.'" This, Gray's favorite quotation, was supplied by Holmes; cf. Harvard Law Review 6 (1892­93):33, note 1. Holmes modestly suppressed this fact in eulogy of Gray: "I think he could have given a clear account of the Bangorian controversy ..." John Chipman Gra ( 1917), p. 48; Shriver, p. 134.

24. Holmes­Pollock Letters, 2:213, 307; cf. pp. 64, 200, 212, and Collected Legal Papers, p. 313: "But for legal purposes a right is only the hypostasis of a prophecy­the imagination of a substance supporting the fact that the public force will be brought to bear upon those who do things said to contravene it­just as we talk of the force of gravitation accounting for the conduct of bodies in space. One phrase adds no more than the other to what we know without it."

25. Of course I do not mean that the prediction theory was the whole of Holmes's philosophy of law. Even in "The Path of the Law" it is only the first of three main points and needs to be interpreted in the light of the other two. The second point is that, "still with a view to prediction," the lawyer will be "interested in discovering some order, some rational explanation, and some principle of growth for the rules" upon which judges profess to rest their decisions. He must guard against "the notion that the only force at work in the development of law is logic." The real grounds of

Page 17 decision are and must be considerations of public policy, and by leaving these considerations unexpressed and often unconscious, the judge clothes with a delusive appearance of exactness what must from the nature of the facts be inexact and uncertain. The third and last point is a statement of the ideal toward which Holmes thinks the law moves, "when the part played by history in the explanation of dogma shall be very small, and instead of ingenious research we shall spend our energy on a study of the ends sought to be attained, and the reasons for desiring them." (May not the title and theme of Dewey's Quest for Certainty have been suggested by these sentences under the second point: "The language of judicial decision is mainly the language of logic. And the logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind. But certainty generally is an illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man." Dewey quoted them first in an article on "Logical Method and Law," Philosophical Review 33 [1924]:564, and again in "Justice Holmes and the Liberal Mind,'' New Republic 53 [1927­28]:21 . His Gifford Lectures were delivered in 1929.)

26. Peirce's only mention of Holmes is in his account of The Metaphysical Club: "Mr. Justice Holmes, however, will not, I believe, take it ill that we are proud to remember his membership; nor will Joseph Warner, Esq." James never refers to Holmes, unless there is an anonymous reference in The Will to Believe, where he says "a learned judge" once said to him that "few cases are worth spending much time over: the great thing is to have them decided on any acceptable principle, and got out of the way."

27. There is no record of Holmes having read anything by Peirce until the summer of 1923, when he read the papers Cohen had just collected under the title Chance, Love and Logic (Holmes­Pollock Letters, 2:122). Yet Holmes's general outlook was closer to Peirce's than to James's, and many phrases, including his formulas for truth, read like echoes of Peirce's conversation­or was it the other way around?

28. It would be hard to find in American history a man in whom, in his twenties, the ambition of philosophy was so overmastering a passion as in Holmes. It was that, of course, that drew him and James together, but it was that, in the end, that divided them. James was at heart a moralist and reformer, whose early enthusiasm for science was to work itself out in moral psychology and religious pathology. Holmes was something of an enigma to him. On the one hand, as early as 1868 he began to sense in Holmes what seemed to him a too cosmic­centered consciousness. On the other hand, he, and indeed the entire James family, was appalled by the intensity with which Holmes dug his way into the law. James began to suspect him of cold­blooded, conscious egotism and conceit, to see him as "a powerful battery, formed like a planing machine to gouge a deep and self­beneficial groove through life." In 1869 he prophesied that Holmes would not stop short of the Chief Justiceship of the United States Supreme Court. Though Holmes read James's Psychology in 1890, "every word of it," he said, "with delight and admiration," his praise thereafter was always qualified. The Will to Believe made demands on the universe which were "too nearly the Christian demands without the scheme of salvation." Parts of Pragmatism­­ "pedantic name" ­seemed to be on the way to his own humbler formula for truth, "but I am more sceptical than you are." After James's death Holmes wrote to their mutual friend Pollock that it "cuts a root for me that went far into the past, but of late, indeed for many years, we had seen little of each other and had little communication except as he occasionally sent me a book. Distance, other circumstances and latterly his demi­spiritualism and pragmatism, were sufficient cause. His reason made him sceptical and

Page 18 his wishes led him to turn down the lights so as to give miracle a chance." Santayana's Life of Reason and later his Scepticism and Animal Faith seemed closer to Holmes's own way of thinking, but "I think he improvises and obscures the foundations of his thought with too many tickling words." Finally he discovered his affinity with Dewey, but if he made any connection between Dewey and James it does not appear in his letters. (Perry, ch. 30 and 2:457­62; Holmes­Pollock Letters, 1:78, 100, 122, 129, 167, 191, 192, 260; 2:132, 133.)

Page 19

THREE—Evolution in American Philosophy

In the middle period of the century of American thought with which our symposium is concerned, there was one idea which so far overshadowed all others that we may fairly confine our attention to it. That idea was evolution. Like the ideas of earlier periods, it was imported, and imported chiefly from Britain. But the cultural lag, the interval between publication there and assimilation here, was rapidly lessening. Indeed, except for a slow start due to the Civil War, the idea of evolution spread as rapidly here as abroad. Moreover, American thinkers were from the start acknowledged though junior partners in shaping, criticizing, and confirming the idea in its biological and other applications, and they have led the way in working out the logic of evolutionary theory and the theory of evolutionary logic.

Both in preparing the Origin of Species and for defending it after its appearance, Darwin leaned heavily on his American friend Asa Gray, much as he did on Joseph Hooker in England. Other American biologists, geologists, and paleontologists, before and after 1859, discovered and adduced some of the most telling evidences of evolution. To cite but one instance, when Huxley came to America in 1876 to deliver the inaugural lecture at Johns Hopkins, he spent a week with 0. C. Marsh in New Haven studying his collection of fossil horses, which for the first time established the direct line of descent of a living animal, and his collection of fossil toothed birds, which completed the series of transitional forms between birds and reptiles. Huxley recast his New York lectures on evolution to take account of these evidences and said he knew of "no collection from any one region and series of strata comparable, for extent, or for the care with which the remains have been got together, or for their scientific importance."1 Darwin wrote to Marsh in 1880 that his work on these fossils "afforded the best support to the theory of evolution" that had come forward in the twenty years since the Origin. 2

A convenient symbol for the way in which, with respect to evolution, Britain and America formed from the start a single intellec­

Page 20 tual community may be found in the following fact. The famous Wilberforce­Huxley debate at the Oxford meeting of the British Association in 1860, just a few months after the appearance of the Origin, took place in the course of discussion of a paper by John W. Draper, the New York physiologist, "On the Intellectual Development of Europe Considered with Reference to the Views of Mr. Darwin and Others That the Progression of Organisms is Determined by Law." 3

No good cause should be without an eminent and vigorous adversary, who prevents it from being ignored. Such an adversary was Louis Agassiz. Many of the American scientists who declared for evolution in the first generation had been his pupils and were converted to it by his arguments against it. To some of them it seemed that he had laid the "whole foundation of evolution, solid and broad," and then "refused to build any scientific structure on it." 4 So it seemed to laymen also. John Fiske, for instance, says that "the immediate cause which drove me to the development theory was the mental reaction experienced in reading Agassiz's arguments against that theory in his Essay on Classification, in 1859, shortly before Darwin's book was published." 5 And Fiske became the most influential American proponent of evolution as an idea of general and even cosmic application.

The age of evolution, however, was also the great age of American enterprise, and the most distinctly American service to the cause was to provide it with an entrepreneur. The New York firm of Appleton had been cautiously edging into the hitherto unprofitable field of scientific book publishing, at the instigation of Edward L. Youmans. As a rival publisher, Henry Holt, later put it, "Youmans became the scientific adviser of the house, and brought to it so many of the important books on the great questions of that epoch, as to place the house first on those subjects, and the rest nowhere." 6 It was on Youmans' initiative that the first volume of Buckle's History of Civilization was reprinted by Appleton's in 1858, and that they got out an American edition of Darwin's Origin within two months of its publication in England. When Ticknor & Fields of Boston, who had previously published Herbert Spencer's Social Statics, declined his Education in 1860, Youmans secured it for Appleton's by writing to Spencer: "I thought ... that if our house had the management of the work I might possibly in various small ways contribute to urge it forward; for we have found on this side that the straight and narrow way that leads right up to the heaven of success is traversable by but one motor—namely, push." 7 Three years later, Youmans wrote to Spencer: "I am an ultra and thoroughgoing American. I believe there is great work to be done here for civilization. What we want

Page 21 are ideas—large, organizing ideas—and I believe there is no other man whose thoughts are so valuable for our needs as yours are." 8

John Fiske describes the pushing Youmans did as follows:

As soon as [books] were ready for the market he wrote reviews of them, and by no means in the usual perfunctory way. His reviews and notices were turned out by the score, and scattered about in the magazines and newspapers where they would do the most good. Not content with this, he made numerous pithy and representative extracts for the reading columns of various daily and weekly papers. Whenever he found another writer who could be pressed into the service, he would give him Spencer's books, kindle him with a spark from his own blazing enthusiasm, and set him to writing for the press. The effects of this work were multifarious and far—reaching, and—year in and year outit was never for a moment allowed to flag. The most indefatigable vender of wares was never more ruthlessly persistent in advertising for lucre's sake than Edward Youmans in preaching in a spirit of the purest disinterestedness the gospel of evolution. 9

When Appleton's sent Youmans to visit Spencer and other British scientists in 1862, he learned that only five hundred copies of Spencer's Psychology had been printed, and that three hundred remained unsold; that five hundred of his Education had been printed, and only two hundred were sold; that the Social Statics had been more popular, but that eleven years had not sufficed to exhaust the seven hundred and fifty copies printed.10 By the time Youmans' Spencer boom subsided, Appleton's alone had sold five hundred thousand copies of his twenty­five works.11 Of the First Principles alone, 162,000 copies were sold in less than thirty years.12

One of the best essays on the derivations of American thought, but an essay not yet as widely known as it should be, is Merle Curti's "The Great Mr. Locke: America's Philosopher 1783­1861."13 The period with which we are concerned deserves a similar essay: "Herbert Spencer: America's Philosopher 1861­1916." The difference is that whereas Locke had long been dead before his American vogue began, Spencer was adopted, subsidized, and promoted by America during his lifetime, and owed the completion and success of his Synthetic Philosophy in large part to that fact. His thus becoming American intellectual property did not, however, increase his honor in his own country. Justice Holmes could write to Sir Frederick Pollock in 1895: "H[erbert] Spencer you English never quite do justice to.... He is dull. He writes an ugly uncharming style, his ideals are those of a lower middle class British Philistine. And yet after all abatements I doubt if any writer of English except Darwin has done so much to affect our whole way of thinking about the universe."14

Page 22 As a promotional medium for the scientific books brought out under his editorship, Youmans founded the Popular Science Monthly in 1872 and continued as editor until his death in 1887. The early numbers carried installments of Spencer's Study of Sociology, written at Youmans' suggestion to prepare the public for the Descriptive Sociology which appeared in later years. Within a year and a half the Monthly reached a circulation of twelve thousand. Students of American philosophy remember with amusement but with a strange lack of curiosity that Peirce's "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" were published in it as a series of six articles. Even as unacademic a philosopher as James spoke with a certain condescension of "those hard­headed readers who subscribe to the Popular Science Monthly and Nature, and whose sole philosopher Mr. Spencer is";15 but the fact is that the Monthly was then the chief medium of periodical publication for so much of American philosophy as was in touch with science.

Not content with reprinting here the works of overseas scientists, Youmans conceived and launched in 1873 the International Scientific Series of books published simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. Within Youmans's lifetime the Series ran to fifty­seven volumes, and eventually to nearly a hundred. The first was Tyndall's Forms of Water, the second Bagehot's Physics and Politics, the classic of social Darwinism. Among other early volumes were Bain's Mind and Body, Spencer's Study of Sociology, Cooke's The New Chemistry, Stewart's Conservation of Energy, Whitney's Life and Growth of Language, Huxley's The Crayfish, Darwin's Formation of Vegetable Mould, Stallo's Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics, Romanes's Animal Intelligence, and Clifford's Common Sense of the Exact Sciences. The best seller was Draper's History of the Conflict Between Science and Religion, which ran through fifty printings and was translated into nearly every language of commercial publication.

While Youmans was enthusiastic in propagating, both through the International Scientific Series and through the Popular Science Monthly, modern views in physics, chemistry, geology, and biology generally, everything was tributary to the philosophy of evolution. As Fiske puts it: "As presenting the supreme organizing idea of modern thought, his chief effort at all times lay in directing inquirers to Mr. Spencer's works, in explaining their doctrines, defending them from misquotation and misunderstanding—in being, in short, the American apostle of evolution, fervid, instant in season and out of season, making opportunities where he did not find them."16

A symbol for the relationship between the intellectual and the industrial entrepreneur in the age of enterprise may be found in the fact that when Spencer was about to board ship for home after his visit to America in 1882, he seized the hands of Edward Youmans

Page 23 and Andrew Carnegie and cried to the reporters: "Here are my two best American friends."17

A complete sketch of the fortunes of the idea of evolution in America would include the early opposition from the side of religion, the irenic work of religious­minded biologists like Gray, the reconciliations of evolution and religion, the theologies of evolution which sought to make religious capital of it, the American forms of social Darwinism, the cosmic philosophies of Fiske and Abbot, the rise of the distinctively American science of sociology, the attempts of idealists like Howison to fix the limits of evolution and of others like Royce to digest evolution and entropy together in the Absolute, the genetic social philosophies of Baldwin, Mead, and others, and the emergence of those forms of evolutionary naturalism that are still current among us. The story of most of these matters, however, has recently been so well told by Professor Schneider18 that I shall take his chapters as read and devote the rest of my time to tracing the early steps in what I take to be the legitimate line of descent (not from Spencer but) from Darwin in American philosophy.

The crux of the theory of biological evolution was of course man, and the difficulty was not so much that of finding the links between the human organism and those of lower animals, as it was that of finding the links between animal instinct and human reason. Darwin made a beginning in those chapters of his Descent of Man devoted to comparison of the mental powers of man with those of lower animals, and to the development of the intellectual and moral faculties during primeval and civilized times. The naturalization of the human mind there begun was continued by the pragmatists. The story goes back to a time which Charles Peirce remembered, as follows, nearly half a century later:

I was away surveying in the wilds of Louisiana when Darwin's great work appeared, and though I learned by letters of the immense sensation it had created, I did not return until early in the following summer when I found [Chauncey] Wright all enthusiasm for Darwin, whose doctrines appeared to him as a sort of supplement to those of Mill. I remember well that I then made a remark to him which, although he did not assent to it, evidently impressed him enough to perplex him. The remark was that these ideas of development had more vitality by far than any of his other favorite conceptions and that though they might at that moment be in his mind like a little vine clinging to the tree of Associationalism, yet after a time that vine would inevitably kill the tree. He asked me why I said that and I replied that the reason was that Mill's doctrine was nothing but a metaphysical point of view to which Darwin's, which was nourished by positive observation, must be deadly. (CP 5.64)

Page 24 Peirce saw in the idea of evolution a welcome antidote to the prevailing nominalism and associationalism, but what Wright valued most in Mill was neither of the latter but the principle of utility, and he projected a synthesis of utilitarianism and Darwinism. Leslie Stephen in his classic work on the English Utilitarians has called attention to the paradox of their indifference to history combined with their appeal to experience. They and the British empiricists generally seemed always to be in need of, and yet always to reject by anticipation, some theory of evolution. Their difficulty was that theories of evolution appeared to them to involve something mystical and transcendental. "This," says Stephen, "may help to explain the great influence of the Darwinian theories. They marked the point at which a doctrine of evolution could be allied with an appeal to experience."19 So it seemed to Wright.

Though he was a mathematician and a computer for the Nautical Almanac, Wright had had some training in biology under Asa Gray and had published essays on the origin and uses of the arrangements of leaves in plants and on the architecture of honeycombs. Gray had sent some of these essays to Darwin in 1859, but the mathematics had been too much for him.20

Over a period of some months after his first reading of the Origin of Species, Wright composed a review essay which Gray forwarded to Darwin in 1861 and Darwin turned over to Huxley for publication in the Natural History Review; but apparently it was thought too philosophical and was never published.21

At that time Herbert Spencer's First Principles was coming out in parts. William James, who was scarcely twenty, later wrote: "I ... was carried away with enthusiasm by the intellectual perspectives which it seemed to open. When a maturer companion, Mr. Charles S. Peirce, attacked it in my presence, I felt spiritually wounded, as by the defacement of a sacred image or picture, though I could not verbally defend it against his criticisms."22

Peirce and Wright, though intellectually far apart in some respects, were agreed that there was no way of being a good Darwinian and a Spencerian at the same time, and they had no qualms about renouncing Spencer and adhering to Darwin. James soon came around to their view and used Spencer as his chief whipping boy for thirty years.23

In 1865 Wright published in the North American Review an article on "The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer," in which, in the course of criticizing Spencer, he indicated the philosophy of science in terms of which the pragmatists were to resolve Darwin's problem.

Ideas are developed by the sagacity of the expert, rather than by the systematic procedures of the philosopher. But when and however ideas

Page 25

are developed science cares nothing, for it is only by subsequent tests of sensible experience that ideas are admitted into the pandects of science.... Science asks no questions about the ontological pedigree or a priori character of a theory, but is content to judge it by its performance..... The principles of modern natural philosophy, both mathematical and physical .... are rather the eyes with which nature is seen, than the elements and constituents of the objects discovered.... Nothing justifies the development of abstract principles in science but their utility in enlarging our concrete knowledge of nature. The ideas on which mathematical Mechanics and the Calculus are founded, the morphological ideas of Natural History, and the theories of Chemistry are such working ideas,­finders, not merely summaries of truth.24

By 1870 the pragmatic case was much farther developed. In an article on the "Limits of Natural Selection," Wright gave it as his opinion that consciousness, language, and thought were so far from being beyond the province of natural selection, as Alfred Wallace supposed, that they afforded one of the most promising fields for its future investigations. In a long and revealing footnote applying the principle of natural selection to the development of the individual mind by its own experiences, he argued that "our knowledges and rational beliefs result, truly and literally, from the survival of the fittest among our original and spontaneous beliefs."25 He suggested that the chief prejudice against this conclusion would be removed if we adopted Bain's definition of belief. Now it will be remembered that the Metaphysical Club, of which Wright, Peirce, James, and Holmes were members, was meeting at this time.26 Peirce says that Nicholas Green, a lawyer among them, often urged the importance of applying Bain's definition of belief as that upon which a man is prepared to act. From this definition, Peirce adds, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary (CP 5.12).27 I shall therefore quote enough of Wright's note to show that one application of Bain's definition was to the solution of the problem our pragmatists had inherited from Darwin.

Human beliefs, like human desires, are naturally illimitable. The generalizing instinct is native to the mind. It is not the result of habitual experiences, as is commonly supposed, but acts as well on single experiences, which are capable of producing, when unchecked, the most unbounded beliefs and expectations of the future. The only checks to such unconditional natural beliefs are other and equally unconditional and natural beliefs, or the contradictions and limiting conditions of experience. Here, then, is a close analogy, at least, to those fundamental facts of the organic world on which the law of Natural Selection is based; the facts, namely, of the "rapid increase of organisms," limited only by "the conditions of existence," and by competition in that "struggle for existence" which results in the ''survival of the fittest." As the

Page 26

tendency to an unlimited increase in existing organisms is held in check only by those conditions of their existence which are chiefly comprised in the like tendencies of other organisms to unlimited increase, and is thus maintained (so long as external conditions remain unchanged) in an unvarying balance of life; and as this balance adjusts itself to slowly changing external conditions, so, in the history of the individual mind, beliefs which spring spontaneously from simple and single experiences, and from a naturally unlimited tendency to generalization, are held mutually in check, and in their harmony represent the properly balanced experiences and knowledges of the mind, and by adaptive changes are kept in accordance with changing external conditions, or with the varying total results in the memory of special experiences. This mutual limitation of belief by belief, in which consists so large a part of their proper evidence, is so prominent a feature in the beliefs of the rational mind, that philosophers had failed to discover their true nature, as elementary facts, until this was pointed out by the greatest of living psychologists, Professor Alexander Bain. The mutual tests and checks of belief have, indeed, always appeared to a great majority of philosophers as their only proper evidence; and beliefs themselves have appeared as purely intellectual phases of the mind. But Bain has defined them, in respect to their ultimate natures, as phases of the will; or as the tendencies we have to act on mere experience, or to act on our simplest, most limited experiences. They are tendencies, however, which become so involved in intellectual developments, and in their mutual limitations, that their ultimate results in rational beliefs have very naturally appeared to most philosophers as purely intellectual facts; and their real genesis in experience has been generally discredited, with the exception of what are designated specially as "empirical beliefs."28

About the same time another application of Bain's definition was being made by Holmes. He was developing a conception of law in terms of expectancies or predictions and the readiness to act upon them. In the American Law Review for July, 1872, he criticized Austin's view that command was the essence of law, that custom only became law by the tacit consent of the sovereign manifested by its adoption by the courts, and that before its adoption it was only a motive for decision. What more, Holmes asked, was the decision itself in relation to any future decision?

What more indeed is a statute; and in what other sense law, than that we believe that the motive which we think that it offers to the judges will prevail, and will induce them to decide a certain case in a certain way, and so shape our conduct on that anticipation? A precedent may not be followed; a statute may be emptied of its contents by construction, or may be repealed without a saving clause after we have acted on it; but we expect the reverse, and if our expectations come true, we say that we have been subject to law in the matter in hand.29

Page 27 Holmes does not expressly connect his prediction theory of law with evolution, but it seems likely that he had it in mind, for he published a criticism of Spencer in the following year.

It has always seemed to us a singular anomaly [he said] that believers in the theory of evolution and in the natural development of institutions by successive adaptations to the environment, should be found laying down a theory of government intended to establish its limits once for all by a logical deduction from axioms. ... Mr. Spencer is forever putting cases to show that the reaction of legislation is equal to its action. By changing the law, he argues, you do not get rid of any burden, but only change the mode of bearing it; and if the change does not make it easier to bear for society, considered as a whole, legislation is inexpedient. This tacit assumption of the solidarity of the interests of society is very common, but seems to us to be false. ... In the last resort a man rightly prefers his own interest to that of his neighbors. ... The more powerful interests must be more or less reflected in legislation; which, like every other device of man or beast, must tend in the long run to aid the survival of the fittest.30

We return now to Chauncey Wright. In July, 1871, he published an essay "in defence and illustration of the theory of Natural Selection" against the criticisms of St. George Mivart. He sent advance proof sheets of this essay to Darwin. "My special purpose," he said, "has been to contribute to the theory by placing it in its proper relations to philosophical inquiries in general."31 Darwin was so pleased with this essay that, with Wright's permission, he had it reprinted at his own expense in London, along with an appendix supplied by Wright, and distributed it to the leading naturalists of the British Isles and to some abroad.32

Mivart replied to Wright, and Wright met his new criticisms in an essay published in July, 1872, of which again he sent proof sheets to Darwin, who replied:

Nothing can be clearer than the way in which you discuss the permanence or fixity of species. ... As your mind is so clear, and as you consider so carefully the meaning of words, I wish you would take some incidental occasion to consider when a thing may properly be said to be effected by the will of man. I have been led to the wish by reading an article by your Professor Whitney.... He argues, because each step of change in language is made by the will of man, the whole language so changes: but I do not think that this is so, as man has no intention or wish to change the language. It is a parallel case with what I have called "unconscious selection," which depends on men consciously preserving the best individuals, and thus unconsciously altering the breed.33

Page 28 Shortly thereafter Wright made a trip to England and the continent. Late in August he wrote Darwin a long letter from London, indicating the line he would take, and referring to his criticism of Wallace two years before. A few days later he visited overnight with Darwin at Down, where the problem was further discussed and a plan laid which Wright reported to a friend as follows:

I am some time to write an essay on matters covering the ground of certain common interests and studies, and in review of his "Descent of Man," and other related works, for which the learned title is adopted of Psychozoölogy,—as a substitute for "Animal Psychology," "Instinct," and the like titles,—in order to give the requisite subordination (from our point of view) of consciousness in men and animals, to their development and general relations to nature.34

Wright died with the intended book unwritten, or at least unpublished, but a preliminary sketch of a part of it was written that winter and appeared in the following spring under the title "The Evolution of Self­Consciousness." In the latter part of this long essay Wright applied the principles of spontaneous variation and natural selection to the origin and development of language and worked out a solution to Darwin's problem. "So far as human intentions have had anything to do with changes in the traditions of language," he argued, "they have ... been exerted in resisting them."35 In the course of the argument Wright drew a parallel between the development of language and that of law.

The judge cannot rightfully change the laws that govern his judg­

ments; and the just judge does not consciously do so. Nevertheless, legal usages change from age to age. Laws, in their practical effects, are ameliorated by courts as well as by legislatures. No new principles are consciously introduced; but interpretations of old ones (and combinations, under more precise and qualified statements) are made, which disregard old decisions, seemingly by new and better definitions of that which in its nature is unalterable, but really, in their practical effects, by alterations, at least in the proximate grounds of decision; so that nothing is really unalterable in law, except the intention to do justice under universally applicable principles of decision, and the instinctive judgments of so­called natural law.36

This was to be one of the themes of Holmes's great lectures on "The Common Law," published seven years later. We know from an earlier essay that Wright was interested in the relations between legal and scientific thinking, and I have indicated elsewhere the importance of these relations in the beginnings of pragmatism.37

In November, 1872, shortly after Wright's return from his visit to Darwin, the Metaphysical Club met to hear Peirce read a paper

Page 29 expounding some of the views which he later said he "had been urging all along under the name of pragmatism" (CP 5.13). He began by saying that "each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic" and that "the Darwinian controversy is, in large part, a question of logic," as some of Wright's papers had shown it to be. "Mr. Darwin,'' he said, "proposed to apply the statistical method to biology.... While unable to say what the operation of variation and natural selection in every individual case will be, [he] demonstrates that in the long run they will adapt animals to their circumstances" (CP 5.363f.).38 Peirce proceeded to outline the lesson in logic of this new step in science. The now familiar argument runs as follows:

The irritation of doubt is the only immediate motive for the struggle to attain belief.... Hence, the sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion.... The problem becomes how to fix belief, not in the individual merely, but in the community.... The method must be such that the ultimate conclusion of every man shall be the same. Such is the method of science.... The essence of belief is the establishment of habit, and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise..... There is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. ... Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects..... [The way to make our ideas clear is to] consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.... [If we apply this prescription to the ideas of truth and reality, we get this result:] The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. (CP 5.375ff., 398ff.)

This paper was later published as two articles in the Popular Science Monthly and followed by four others on "The Doctrine of Chances," "The Probability of Induction," "The Order of Nature," and "Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis"; all six under the general title, "Illustrations of the Logic of Science." It will be noted that Peirce's version of Darwinian logic, like Wright's, turns on Bain's definition of belief.

As we have remarked before, Peirce had an ulterior interest in the logic of evolution as a weapon in his lifelong war against nominalism, but this was not shared by his fellow­pragmatists at the time, and I shall therefore omit any further reference to it and pass on to James.

James was trained in medicine. He had known Darwin's writings from his student days. In 1868 he had reviewed Darwin's Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication for both the Atlantic

Page 30 Monthly and the North American Review, remarking, among other things, that there was no law explaining the origin of variations. In the year 1872­1873, and during the five years from 1874 to 1880, he gave a course in Harvard College on "Comparative Anatomy and Physiology." In the first half­year he tended to use comparative anatomy as affording proofs and illustrations of evolution, and in the second half­year to use physiology as an approach to psychology.39

In 1878 James published his first original philosophical article, "Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence," or "adjustment of inner to outer relations." He argued that in the working out of his theory Spencer made mind ''pure product" and ignored the role of emotion, volition, and action.

I, for my part, cannot escape the consideration, forced upon me at every turn, that the knower is not simply a mirror floating with no foot­hold anywhere, and passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing. The knower is an actor, and co­efficient of the truth on one side, whilst on the other he registers the truth which he helps to create. Mental interests, hypotheses, postulates, so far as they are bases for human action—action which to a great extent transforms the world—help to make the truth which they declare. In other words, there belongs to mind, from its birth upward, a spontaneity, a vote. It is in the game, and not a mere looker­on ... 40

In this and later attacks on Spencer, James identified himself with Darwin. The identification is most complete in the lecture on "Great Men and Their Environment," delivered before the Harvard Natural History Society and published in 1880. He began with this sentence: "A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zoological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other."41 James's memory was at fault, for it had been often noticed by Wright. He went on to say, as Wright had, that the great merit of Darwin was to discriminate clearly between the causes which originally produced variations and the causes that preserved them after they were produced. James applied this distinction, as Wright had, to mental evolution.

... the new conceptions, emotions, and active tendencies which evolve are originally produced in the shape of random images, fancies, accidental out­births of spontaneous variation in the functional activity of the excessively instable human brain, which the outer environment simply confirms or refutes, adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys— selects, in short, just as it selects morphological and social variations due to molecular accidents of an analogous sort ... [Even the conceiving of a law] is a spontaneous variation in the strictest sense of the term. It flashes out of one brain, and no other, because the instability

Page 31

of that brain is such as to tip and upset itself in just that particular direction. But the important thing to notice is that the good flashes and the bad flashes, the triumphant hypotheses and the absurd conceits, are on an exact equality in respect of their origin.42

From this lecture it is an easy step to James's Principles of Psychology published a decade later, and particularly to the last chapter, on "Necessary Truths and the Effects of Experience," in which he applied the Darwinian notions of variation and selection to the a priori factors in human knowledge.

What was really novel in James's lecture of 1880 was the further use of Darwin's distinction to defend against Spencer the great­man theory of history.

The causes of production of great men lie in a sphere wholly inaccessible to the social philosopher. He must simply accept geniuses as data, just as Darwin accepts his spontaneous variations. For him, as for Darwin, the only problem is, these data being given, How does the environment affect them, and how do they affect the environment? Now, I affirm that the relation of the visible environment to the great man is in the main exactly what it is to the 'variation' in the Darwinian philosophy: It chiefly adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys, in short selects him. And whenever it adopts and preserves the great man, it becomes modified by his influence in an entirely original and peculiar way.43

Such a man, I imagine James would say, is John Dewey. Though born in the year the Origin of Species appeared, he came to Darwin by way of Hegel and did not reach him until nearly the end of the century.44 Since that time, however, he has worked in the legitimate line of descent from Darwin, and the whole development whose early steps I have traced may be said to have reached a kind of culmination in 1938 in his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. It rests on the principle of the continuum of inquiry and on the theory that "all logical forms (with their characteristic properties) arise within the operation of inquiry and are concerned with control of inquiry so that it may yield warranted assertions."45 Dewey reminds us that the movement away from Aristotelian logic is closely connected with "the reversed attitude of science toward change."

Completion of the cycle of scientific reversal may be conveniently dated from the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species. The very title of the book expresses a revolution in science, for the conception of biological species had been a conspicuous manifestation of the assumption of complete immutability. This conception had been banished before Darwin from every scientific subject save botany and

Page 32

zoology. But the latter had remained the bulwark of the old logic in scientific subject­matter.46

Consciously following Peirce, Dewey expounds the new logic which claims to have learned the lesson of the reversal the early pragmatists helped to complete.

Notes

1. T. H. Huxley, Science and Hebrew Tradition (New York, 1896), p. 128f.

2. Schuchert and LeVene, O. C. Marsh (New Haven, 1940), p. 246. Francis Darwin (ed.), Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (New York, 1887), 2:417.

3. Athenaeum, 14 July 1860, p. 64f. Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley (New York, 1900), 1:195.

4. Joseph LeConte, Evolution and Its Relation to Religious Thought (New York, 1889), p. 44.

5. John Fiske, Edward Livingston Youmans (New York, 1894), p. 58n. It is only fair to add that C. S. Peirce thought highly of Agassiz's Essay (CP 1.229f.), and that Peirce's and James's indebtedness to Agassiz was very great, though James's admiration of him was not without strong reservations. But that is another story.

6. Henry Holt, Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor (Boston, 1923), p. 48.

7. Fiske, Youmans, p. 113.

8. Ibid., p. 169.

9. Ibid., p. 115.

10. Ibid., p. 123.

11. Grant Overton, Portrait of a Publisher (New York, 1925), p. 50.

12. Ibid., p. 13.

13. Huntington Library Bulletin 11 (April 1937):107­5 .

14. Holmes­Pollock Letters (Cambridge, MA, 1941), 1:57f.

15. William James, Collected Essays and Reviews (New York, 1920), p. 44.

16. Fiske, Youmans, p. 148.

17. Burton J. Hendrick, Life of Andrew Carnegie (New York, 1932), 1:240.

18. H. W. Schneider, A History of American Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), esp. part 6, "Evolution and Human Progress." See also Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought 1860­1915 (Philadelphia, 1944).

19. The English Utilitarians (New York, 1900), 3:375.

20. James B. Thayer (ed.), Letters of Chauncey Wright (Cambridge, MA, 1878), p. 232. Francis Darwin (ed.), More Letters of Charles Darwin (New York, 1903), 1:124. Cf. Philip P. Wiener, "Chauncey Wright's Defense of Darwin and the Neutrality of Science," Journal of the History of Ideas 6 (1945): 31­34. Gray referred to one of Wright's essays in his "Darwin and His Reviewers," Atlantic Monthly 6 (1860):423; Darwiniana (New York, 1876), p. 171.

21. Historical Records Survey, Calendar of the Letters of Charles R. Darwin to Asa Gray (Boston, 1939), Letter 35; cf. 97, 103, 132, 133; also 56.

22. Memories and Studies (New York, 1912), p. 127f.

Page 33 23. R. B. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston, 1935), 1:482.

24. North American Review 100 (1865):427, 428, 435, 436. Chauncey Wright, Philosophical Discussions (New York, 1877), pp. 47, 55f.

25. North American Review III (1870):302n. Philosophical Discussions, p. 116n.

26. Philip P. Wiener, "Peirce's Metaphysical Club and the Genesis of Pragmatism," Journal of the History of Ideas 7 (1946):218­33. Mr. Wiener expects to publish shortly a book on "The American Founders of Pragmatism" in which the evolutionary ideas of the several members of Peirce's club are discussed at length.

27. Green's articles, reviews, and notes have been collected and reprinted under the title Essays and Notes on the Law of Tort and Crime (Menasha, WI, 1933). See also a forthcoming article by Philip P. Wiener, "The Pragmatic Legal Philosophy of N. St. John Green," Journal of the History of Ideas 9 (1948).

28. North American Review III (1870):301n. Philosophical Discussions, p. 115n.

29. American Law Review 6 (1871­72):723. Cf. "Justice Holmes," p. 11 above.

30. American Law Review 7 (1872­73): 582f.

31. Letters of Chauncey Wright, p. 230. Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 2:323.

32. Fifty Years of Darwinism (New York, 1909), pp. 32­34. St. George Mivart, Lessons from Nature (New York, 1876), p. 332f. Cf. Life and Letters of

Charles Darwin, 2:324f, 326; Letters of Chauncey Wright, pp. 230­35.

33. Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 2:343. The reference is to the articleon Schleicher and the physical theory of language by William Dwight Whitney in the Transactions of the American Philological Association for 1871, reprinted in his Oriental and Linguistic Studies, I (New York, 1873), 298­331. For Wright's discussion of "the permanence or fixity of species," see North American Review 115 (1872): 13ff., Philosophical Discussions, pp. 180ff. Note the echo of Darwin's question in North American Review 117 (1873):304, Philosophical Discussions, p. 259: "It becomes an interesting question, therefore, when in general anything can be properly said to be effected by the will of man."

34. Letters of Chauncey Wright, p. 248.

35. North American Review 116 (1873):306. Philosophical Discussions, p. 262.

36. North American Review 116 (1873):303. Philosophical Discussions, p. 258f.

37. See "Justice Holmes," pp. 6­13 above. Holmes was quite conscious of his intellectual indebtedness to Wright. As late as 1929 in a letter to Pollock expounding his own general philosophy, Holmes said: "Chauncey Wright, a nearly forgotten philosopher of real merit, taught me when young that I must not say necessary about the universe, that we don't know whether anything is necessary or not. So I describe myself as a bettabilitarian. I believe that we can bet on the behavior of the universe in its contact with us." Holmes­Pollock Letters, 2:252.

38. See Philip P. Wiener, "The Evolutionism and Pragmaticism of Peirce," Journal of the History of Ideas 7 (1946):321­54; "The Peirce­Langley Correspondence and Peirce's Manuscript on Hume and the Laws of Nature," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 91 (1947):201­28.

39. Perry, 1:469.

40. Collected Essays and Reviews, p. 67. When the pragmatists rejected the spectator theory of mind they adopted the instrumental theory, with its

Page 34 subordination of intelligence to will and action. In James's case as in Wright's, the shift to instrumentalism was connected with evolutionary biology. In an essay of 1880 James wrote: "The theory of evolution is beginning to do very good service by its reduction of all mentality to the type of reflex action. Cognition, in this view, is but a fleeting moment, a cross­section at a certain point, of what in its totality is a motor phenomenon" (The Will to Believe, p. 84). And in an essay of 1881: "The willing department of our nature ... dominates both the conceiving department and the feeling department; or, in plainer English, perception and thinking are only there for behavior's sake. I am sure I am not wrong in stating this result as one of the fundamental conclusions to which the entire drift of modern physiological investigation sweeps us" (ibid., p. 114).

41. The Will to Believe, p. 216.

42. Ibid., pp. 247, 249.

43. Ibid., p. 225f. In an essay on "Sociology and Hero­Worship" (Atlantic Monthly 47 [1881]:75­84), Fiske replied to James's critique of Spencer, and James promptly acknowledged that he had overstated his case. Cf. John S. Clard (ed.), Life and Letters of John Fiske (Boston, 1917), 2:192­99.

44. Morton G. White, The Origin of Dewey's Instrumentalism (New York, 1943). On Darwinism in Dewey's later work see W. T. Feldman, The Philosophy of John Dewey (Baltimore, 1934), ch. 4. See also David F. Bowers (ed.), Foreign Influences in American Life (Princeton, 1944), pp. 146­71: "Hegel, Darwin, and the American Tradition"; Morton G. White, "The Revolt Against Formalism in American Social Thought of the Twentieth Century," Journal of the History of Ideas 8 (1947):131­52.

45. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York, 1938), p. 3f.

46. Ibid., p. 92.

Page 35

FOUR—Peirce at the Johns Hopkins University1

THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY

At a Fourth of July gathering of Americans at Paris in 1880, it fell to one of the speakers to report how science had prospered in America since the Declaration of Independence. On the whole science had fared ill, he said, and the clerical and pedagogical bent of our colleges was largely to blame. Recently, however, there was a sign of promise.

One university in our country, the Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore, has been carried on upon principles directly contrary to those which have governed the other colleges. That is to say, it has here alone been recognized that the function of a university is the production of knowledge, and that teaching is only a necessary means to that end. In short, instructors and pupils here compose a company who are all occupied in studying together, some under leading strings and some not. From this small institution with half a dozen professors and a hundred and fifty students, I am unable to tell you how much valuable work has emanated in the four years of its existence in philology and biology. A great deal, I am sure. With its work in mathematical and physical science, I am better acquainted, and I am proud to saybecause it shows the real capability of America for such work—that in those four short years the members of this little university have published some one hundred original researches, some of them of great value—fairly equal to the sum of what all the other colleges in the land have done (except in astronomy) in the last twenty years. (MS 1330)

The speaker was Charles Sanders Peirce. In excepting astronomy he knew whereof he spoke, for he had been one of the chief observers in the Harvard Observatory during a considerable part of the twenty years, and his Photometric Researches (1878) was perhaps the most impressive volume so far published in the Annals of that Observatory.2 But during the academic year just past he had been Lecturer

Page 36 on Logic at the university to which he now paid tribute. He retained that position for the next four years. In 1891, seven years after leaving The Johns Hopkins, he defined "university" for the Century Dictionary as

An association of men for the purpose of study, which confers degrees which are acknowledged as valid throughout Christendom, is endowed, and is privileged by the state, in order that the people may receive intellectual guidance and that the theoretical problems which present themselves in the development of civilization may be resolved.

Two years later, in August 1893, John Jay Chapman spent a long evening in Peirce's company at the Century Club and put his impressions into two letters which are our most vivid record of Peirce as a conversationalist. In one of them he said:

Charles Peirce wrote the definition of University in the Century Dictionary. He called it an institution for purposes of study. They wrote to him that their notion had been that a university was an institution for instruction. He wrote back that if they had any such notion they were grievously mistaken, that a university had not and never had had anything to do with instruction and that until we got over this idea we should not have any university in this country. He commended Johns Hopkins and Gilman. 3

For the rest of a life devoted to logic Peirce looked back on his five Hopkins years with a bittersweet nostalgia. In a notebook for some 1905 "Adirondack Summer School Lectures" which were never delivered, he wrote on the first page:

If I had a class in logic to conduct for a year, I should harp still, as I used to do at Johns Hopkins, upon the maieutic character of my office which means that I should do all I could to make my hearers think for themselves, by which I earned the gratitude of men who are useful to mankind. I should insist that they must not suppose that my opinions were bound to be correct, but must work out their own ways of thinking. (MS 1334)

In a letter to William James on March 20, 1910, he said:

There is one way in which, were it open to me, my logic might find its way to people's brains. Namely, if I could meet a class of young men for an hour thrice or even twice a week for the bulk of the academical year, even for a single year, that class, ten years later, having by that time found, by comparing themselves with other men, what my lectures had done for them, would spread the truth. My Baltimore class assures me of that; for I did something for them; and yet what I knew about

Page 37

logic at that time was so vague and conjectural compared with what I know now!

PHILOSOPHER WITHOUT A CHAIR

When Peirce began lecturing at Hopkins in the fall of 1879, he had just turned forty. It was twenty years since he had taken his first degree at Harvard. During those twenty years he had been continuously in the employ of the Coast Survey, except for the year 186061. In 1859­60 he had been with a field party "surveying in the wilds of Louisiana" (CP 5.64). From 1861 to 1867 he had been a Computer at Cambridge under the direction of his father, Benjamin Peirce. Since 1867, when his father became Superintendent, he had been an Assistant. For several years he had been assigned to the Harvard Observatory, in whose Annals his Photometric Researches had appeared in 1878. In the field, he had observed two total and one annular eclipse. Since 1873 he had been engaged on pendulum experiments at various stations in Europe and America for more exact determinations of gravity and thereby of the earth's curvature. Meanwhile he had taken a degree in chemistry, studied classification with Agassiz for six months, and given two series of "university lectures" at Harvard and one series of Lowell Institute lectures. He had been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1867, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1877. He had read numerous papers before both academies and published important articles in the Proceedings and Memoirs of the former and in the American Journal of Science and Arts and the annual Reports of the Coast Survey. For a decade or more he had been a contributor to the Nation and the North American Review.

Moreover, Peirce had inaugurated the classic period of American philosophy in 1868 with a series of three articles in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy developing the pragmatic theory of mind. He had been a moving spirit in the Metaphysical Club at Cambridge in the early 1870'S. More recently (1877­78) he had published a series of six articles in the Popular Science Monthly under the general title "Illustrations of the Logic of Science." The first two embodied (without the name) the version of pragmatism which he later said he had worked out in the Metaphysical Club. The series was given the most favorable notice and the most extended account in G. Stanley Hall's review of "Philosophy in the United States" in Mind in January 1879. ''The author," he said, "is a distinguished mathematician, and this discussion, in which he long ago interested himself, promises to be one of the most important of American contributions to philosophy." 4

Page 38 Yet Peirce had never held a continuing academic position and his failure to obtain one had long been a matter of concern to his friends as well as to himself and his family. Shortly after the appearance of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy series, William James had written to Henry Bowditch:

The poor cuss sees no chance of getting a professorship anywhere, and is likely to go into the Observatory for good. It seems a great pity that as original a man as he is, who is willing and able to devote the powers of his life to logic and metaphysics, should be starved out of a career, when there are lots of professorships of the sort to be given in the country, to "safe," orthodox men.5

About that time Charles W. Eliot was confirmed President of Harvard in spite of what James called "his great personal defects, tactlessness, meddlesomeness, and disposition to cherish petty grudges"; and, as James was to say in later years, Peirce had soon "dished himself at Harvard by inspiring dislike in Eliot."6

Late in 1869, when Howison had left Washington University in St. Louis and Chauvenet had retired, Peirce got W. T. Harris to put in his name for what he took to be a professorship of "Intellectual Philosophy." When it had turned out to be one of mathematics, but with a prospect of logic being added to it, he had still thought it might enable him to write his book on logic. But nothing had come of Harris's intervention, or of other efforts in Peirce's behalf.7

As early as 1856, Peirce's father had drawn up and printed for private distribution a "Working Plan for the Foundation of a University."8 The Johns Hopkins was very like a fulfillment of the family dream. In such a university there should be a place for the country's ablest logician.

UNIVERSITY IN SLOW SEARCH OFA PHILOSOPHER

When Daniel Coit Gilman began in 1875 to recruit the Johns Hopkins faculty, Peirce's name was the first, or among the first, to be proposed for the department of philosophy. In a letter of November 25 which appears as Appendix I below, James said, "I don't think it extravagant praise to say that of late years there has been no intellect in Cambridge of such general power and originality as his," and mentioned "Wm. T. Harris of St. Louis" along with several Boston and Cambridge men as being acquainted with Peirce's capacities as a philosophic thinker.

Gilman wrote Harris on December 3:

Page 39

I often wish I could consult with you with respect to some of the names suggested to us for professorships. Within a few days, the name of Professor C. S. Peirce has been brought before us, with the intimation that you know him well in respect to his attainments in logic and metaphysics.9

On December 16 Peirce wrote to James from Paris:

I hear from my father that you have written a beautiful letter to the President of the Baltimore University proposing me for the chair of logic and I am asked if I would accept.10

And on January 7, 1876, Peirce wrote Superintendent Patterson, his father's successor in the Coast Survey:

I understand my friends are ready to urge me "enthusiastically" for a Professorship of Logic in the Johns Hopkins University. I think Logic is my best power, but I am not going to do anything which will involve my abandoning the Coast Survey after all the money which has been spent in teaching me to swing pendulums.

The University opened in the fall without a philosopher and was still without one in the spring of 1877. On April 23 James wrote Gilman that he had learned from G. Stanley Hall, who had himself been a candidate since January, that "a philosophical appointment" was to be made by the following fall. James now announced himself as a candidate and mentioned Peirce as the first of several references. Five months later, Peirce wrote Gilman a remarkable letter recommending James for the chair of "psychology."11 The appointment was not made, but James gave a series of lectures at Hopkins in February 1878 on "The Brain and the Mind" and was an off­and­on candidate for a professorship or an annual lectureship for more than three years thereafter. He had a ''cat­like dread of venturing away from Harvard,"12 but a Hopkins chair would relieve him of drudgery. In any case, he distrusted Eliot and wanted a base elsewhere from which to exert pressure at home.

Meanwhile physics at Hopkins had made an auspicious beginning with the young but exceptionally promising Henry A. Rowland as professor. Gilman invited various physicists to visit Hopkins, consult with Rowland, and make recommendations for the development of the department. Among those invited were Hilgard and Peirce of the Coast Survey. It appears that Peirce's father, assuming that Peirce was no longer in the running for the first position in philosophy, had proposed him for a chair of physics above Rowland's. After visiting Gilman and Rowland at Baltimore early in 1878, Peirce wrote Gilman from New York on January 13 a long letter outlining a pro­

Page 40 gram in physics with himself in general charge but giving a large part of his time to logic. At the end, he mentioned "by way of premonition" that he was separated from his wife and that he could not give up the direction of the pendulum experiments of the Coast Survey. 13

George Sylvester Morris was giving a course of lectures on the history of philosophy at Hopkins that month, and James's course on psychology was to follow. Gilman therefore replied cautiously:

. . . I am sure you have a great career open before you. I should personally be very glad to have you find that career among us. But I do not at the present time see my way clear to making you any semiofficial proposition. I shall continue however to reflect upon all the possibilities. One thought I have had is this: that retaining your place in the Coast Survey, you might like to be a Professor of Logic, and give to the University a certain portion of your time, what might be considered a half; or that you might like to be included among our non­resident lecturers, coming here for the next two or three years, at an appointed time, until the future reveals somewhat more of the needs and hopes of this still undeveloped foundation. If these suggestions interest you, I should like to know it,—and I will then consult the authorities and write to you again.14

After long consideration of his duties to the Coast Survey, which he thought might call him away a total of three or four weeks during an academic year, Peirce wrote on March 12 that he would gladly come to Hopkins as half­time "Professor of Logic." By that time arrangements had been made for Morris and James to return in January and February of the following year. The Hopkins trustees had also taken alarm from the decline in the dividend rate on the common stock of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The major portion of their endowment income came from their holdings of this stock, and the rate had dropped from ten per cent when the University opened to zero in the current year.15 Gilman's reply of March 20 was therefore even more cautious than before.

I shall be glad to consult the Trustees on the matter referred to,—but before doing so, it is only fair that I should say to you that at their meeting early in the present month, they concluded in view of the financial condition of the country [!] that it would be inexpedient to increase their expenditures at present, and this action was considered as closing for a while all overtures looking to the immediate enlargement of the professional staff.

Peirce replied on March 27 that he had no desire to have his name pressed upon the trustees at a moment when they had resolved that it was inexpedient to make further appointments. Communications

Page 41 were maintained, however, and in May and June Peirce supplied some questions on logic to be used in examining a "young gentleman" at Hopkins with whose course of study he was not familiar, and who therefore would probably fail most of the questions. This may have been Royce, who took his doctorate that June, and for whose examination Morris provided the questions on the history of philosophy. Or perhaps it was George Bruce Halsted, who failed to obtain his degree until the following year.

No appointment was made for that fall. In his account of "Philosophy in the United States" in the January 1879 number of Mind, Hall said: "It is ... hoped that the new University of Baltimore will soon establish a chair of physiological psychology and another of the history of philosophy."16 So Hall and James doubtless hoped, and perhaps Morris. Peirce would have put first a chair in logic and metaphysics. We have found no evidence, however, that Gilman ever contemplated more than one professorship.

Circumstances at Harvard led James to cancel the arrangements for his February lectures, but Morris gave his second course in January, this time on "Topics Historical and Practical in Ethics." While this course was in progress, James, gathering that Gilman was about to offer him a professorship, obtained assurance from Eliot that he was in line for the principal chair at Harvard, and withdrew (temporarily, as it proved) his candidacy at Hopkins. Gilman offered him what was perhaps all he had intended to offer in the first place, a lectureship "in psychology (or logic if you wish)" for three months yearly for the next three years, which James declined as incompatible with his work at Harvard. Gilman then offered Morris a similar lectureship in the history of philosophy and in ethics, which he accepted. 17

Only then, it appears, was Gilman ready to resume negotiations with Peirce. On June 6, 1879, Peirce stated his conditions for undertaking instruction in logic: "I should require in the first place to have sole charge of that branch, and in the second that there should be an intention of ultimately making a full professorship for it." Finally, on June 12, he was appointed Lecturer in Logic for the academic year 1879­80, and this appointment was renewed from year to year through 1883­84. The intention of a professorship of logic was never fulfilled.

James made a last bid for the professorship in April 1881, but on terms which Gilman was unwilling or unable to grant, though the dividend rate on the Baltimore and Ohio stock had risen again to ten per cent. Perhaps at about the same time, the professorship was offered to Robert Flint of Edinburgh, but he declined it.18 G. Stanley Hall's campaign now bore fruit in an invitation to deliver ten lectures on psychology in January 1882. On the strength of their success, he

Page 42 was then appointed Lecturer in Psychology for three years beginning in the second half of 1882­83. In his seventh annual report to the trustees, on October 2, 1882, Gilman for the first time included a section on "Logic, Ethics, and History of Philosophy."

It has been from no want of interest in philosophical studies, that we have been delayed in making permanent arrangements in regard to them; but the scheme of lectures as now arranged offers some noteworthy opportunities.

Professor George S. Morris, Ph.D.,. . . continues to lecture on the history of philosophy and on ethics...

Mr. Charles S. Peirce, who has been for a long period a close student of the processes employed in various branches of physical investigation, and who is a proficient in more than one department of science, now offers to our students instruction in logic, or the method of methods, particularly for the benefit of those who are expecting to be engaged in investigation and who need fundamental guidance in the principles which underlie the discovery of scientific truth...

Professor G. Stanley Hall, Ph.D., will hereafter direct our students in psychology...

The system of three lectureships, Morris full time in the first halfyear, Hall full time in the second, and Peirce half time in both, was continued for two years. In his ninth report, however, on November 3, 1884, Gilman wrote:

Instruction in Logic, Psychology, Ethics, and the History of Philosophy, has hitherto been given by three lecturers—no one of whom was recognized as the head of the department, and no one of whom devoted himself exclusively to his work in this University. The objections to this arrangement were apparent to all who were interested in these subjects, and when the infelicity was distinctly brought to the attention of the Trustees by one of the lecturers the decision was reached to appoint a professor in the group of philosophical subjects, and to allow the lectureships to terminate at the end of the period for which they had severally been arranged.

The next step of the Trustees was to make choice of Dr. G. Stanley Hall, late lecturer in Harvard and Williams Colleges, and also in this university, as Professor of Psychology and Pedagogics. He accepted the invitation, and will hereafter reside among us.

Sufficient reasons for the choice of Hall can readily be supplied. Though the Hospital did not open until 1889 and the Medical School not until 1893, it was decided before the University opened "that, in view of the attention which was to be given to medicine, biology should receive a large amount of attention, more than ever before in America."19 It might reasonably have been expected that there would be a corresponding emphasis on psychology among the subjects then included in departments of philosophy, and in psychology

Page 43 itself an emphasis on its physiological and medical aspects. Though at one point, while still thinking of psychology as a general field of investigation, James had mentioned Peirce and Hall together as the only workers in it besides himself,20 he had later dropped Peirce and written to Gilman: "I am acquainted with no one in America except Hall and myself who is prepared to teach psychology from the physiological side and to be a connecting link between your medical and your philosophical departments."21 Hall had come to Hopkins as a specialist in psychology fresh from intensive training in Wundt's laboratory and from intensive study of medical psychology as well. Peirce, though a self­made laboratory psychologist more original than Hall, considered logic his specialty, and Morris was not a laboratory man at all. Hall was free of other attachments, whereas Morris had a professorship at Michigan, and Peirce refused to be detached from the Coast Survey. Hall, like Morris, wore a Ph.D. after his name, and Peirce did not.

There seems to be no evidence, however, that any of these reasons, or all of them together, were decisive; and there is some evidence, like the offer to Flint, that they were not.

Hall, to be sure, thought that he and Morris had been on trial for the chair, and that "the spirit of the university" had decided for his "experimental type" instead of for the history of philosophy, without seriously considering logic or Peirce.22 It appears, however, that Hall's experimental type appealed to the spirit of the University less because of any positive contribution it might make to the medical program than because of its relative safety. When Hall launched the American Journal of Psychology in 1887, he declared its object to be that of recording "the psychological work of a scientific, as distinct from a speculative character.''23 And when he reviewed James's Psychology in the Journal, he made some remarks in that vein which shed a flood of light on Gilman's slowness to make any final commitments to James or Peirce. The kind of textbook needed in psychology, Hall said, is one

in which the main facts and conclusions in the field are conveniently presented and not scattered among the various speculative questions on which they are thought to have bearing. This method involves more labor with details and is plainer and humbler, but it is this method of self­control and subordination, carefully adhered to also by this Journal, that has commended the scientific method in psychology to the confidence of conservative administrative boards, and by which its recent remarkable academic extensions in the universities and colleges of this country have been made. It is premature speculative views that these boards justly fear.24

That the Hopkins board had special reasons to fear such views is suggested by a candid passage in Hall's autobiography.

Page 44

Rather extreme conservatism in religion focusing in Presbyterianism was characteristic of Baltimore.... Occasionally a clergyman went out of his way to attack evolution, materialism, or pantheism, with more or less of an implication that the University stood for them.... A few of us conformed by attending some church. This I did at Gilman's request.... Thus many possible sources of friction were mitigated or obviated.25

Gilman himself has related how the emphasis upon medicine, and hence upon biology, had led to the opening of the University with an address by Thomas Huxley, without benefit of prayer; and it is evident that one of Gilman's chief concerns for a decade or more was to live down the suspicions of impiety the University had thus aroused.26

We begin now to understand the offer to Flint, whose Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary had made so deep and so satisfying an impression. But Hall was even better, for, to say nothing of his own seminary training, he now brought the healing word almost from the side of biology itself.

On Commemoration Day in February 1885, feeling that "the comments which had been made upon the work of the University seemed to call for a new exposition of its principles and aims," Gilman delivered an address on "The Benefits which Society Derives from Universities."27 After speaking of these benefits in general terms, he passed in review the particular departments of instruction beginning with biology and proceeding at once to psychology, the study of "the nature of man's soul." "This science," he said, "has lately made great progress.'' After noting briefly the directions of the progress, he hastened to add that those who were devoted to this study

acknowledge the superiority of the soul to the body, and they stand in awe before ... the mysteries of man's conscious responsibility, his intimations of immortality, his relations to the Infinite.

I do not know whether philosophy is on a "return to Kant," or to common sense, but I believe that standing firm on the postulates, God, Soul and Immortality, it will in years to come disentangle many perplexities, brush away heaps of verbal accumulations, and lead the mind to purer and nobler conceptions of righteousness and duty. I go even farther and, as I believe that one truth is never in conflict with another truth, so I believe that the ethics of the New Testament will be accepted by the scientific as well as the religious faculties of man; to the former, as law; to the latter, as gospel.

In confirmation of these views, let me quote to you the language of that one among us who is best qualified to speak upon this subject.

Gilman then quoted the following from Hall's inaugural lecture at Hopkins in the preceding October:

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The new psychology, which brings simply a new method and a new standpoint to philosophy, is, I believe, Christian to its root and center; and its final mission in the world is not merely to trace petty harmonies and small adjustments between science and religion, but to flood and transfuse the new and vaster conceptions of the universe and of man's place in it—now slowly taking form, and giving to reason a new cosmos, and involving momentous and far­reaching practical and social consequences—with the old scriptural sense of unity, rationality, and love beneath and above all, with all its wide consequences. The Bible is being slowly rerevealed as man's great text­book in psychology, dealing with him as a whole, his body, mind, and will, in all the larger relations to nature and society, which has been so misappreciated simply because it is so deeply divine. That something may be done here to aid this development is my strongest hope and belief.28

The University had at last found its philosopher. He was, to be sure, not a philosopher at all. Even as a psychologist, he was vastly overrated. But he was a promoter. Five years later, before either the Hospital or the Medical School was opened, he promoted himself to the presidency of Clark University and took a considerable part of the Hopkins faculty with him.

When Hopkins chose Hall, Morris took his student Dewey to Michigan. Royce, a protégé of Gilman who would gladly have returned to Hopkins, remained at Harvard. Peirce was cut off from academic life. From 1884 to 1910, when Lovejoy came, there was no philosophy worthy of the name at Hopkins. By that time the leadership that Hopkins had seemed to be taking was divided among Harvard, Cornell, Chicago, Columbia, Michigan, and California.

What if Hopkins had chosen Peirce instead, or had continued him in a part­time capacity? There would have been at least one university in which philosophy was in living touch with science; in which it was a field of research, not of indoctrination or of "the strife of systems"; in which it was neither a conscious apologist nor a ventriloquist's dummy for the masters of business and property.

A UNIVERSITY OF METHODS

For five years Peirce taught logic to graduate students, about half of them from the mathematics department. This was the most distinguished and creative teaching any university has ever had in logic, and Peirce's students were brought to a level of original achievement which has never been rivaled. The chief monument of the quinquennium is the volume of Studies in Logic by Members of the Johns Hopkins University which appeared in 1883. This volume was intended to inaugurate a series, and others would doubtless have followed if Peirce's appointment had continued.

Page 46 Perhaps more important than the immediate achievement, however, was the general conception of logic, whose development we may trace through the course descriptions in successive years. The basic course for 1879­80 is described as follows:

A general course, treating the foundation of logic and deducing the theory of the subject from physiological facts. Subjects treated: clearness of apprehension; doctrine of limits; syllogistic (a new analysis); the doctrine of logical breadth, depth, and area; logical algebra and the logic of relatives; probabilities; theory of errors; induction and hypothesis.29

We do not have Peirce's own descriptions of his courses for 188081, but a very full account of the second semester of the advanced logic course for that year was later published by one of the students, Ellery W. Davis, professor of mathematics at the University of Nebraska. The account is too long to be reproduced here. The lectures, Davis said by way of preface, were based on Peirce's theory of induction and devoted to an examination of the logical foundations of the leading scientific theories of the time.30

There was probably not much change from the courses of 1880­81 to those of 1881­82, which were described as follows:

1. An elementary course on General Logic, deductive and inductive, including probabilities. This course will be designed to teach the main principles upon which correct and fruitful reasoning must proceed; and special attention will be paid to the discussion of the significance and validity of those logical conceptions and maxims which are current in literature and in law.

2. A course upon the Methods of Science. A sketch of deductive logic and the theory of relative terms will lead to a study of the methods of Mathematics. The theory of chances and errors will next be expounded. Lastly, after the development of the general doctrine of induction and hypothesis, the methods of reasoning in several of the physical and moral sciences will be examined in detail.

3. A series of Readings in Logic, of which the special subjects will be announced from time to time.31

In 1882­83 Peirce gave only a single course, meeting four times a week throughout the year. This was to be his most ambitious bid for a prominent place for logic in the Hopkins program, and he provided a full description and list of texts, from which it appears that he assumed a reading knowledge of Latin, German, French, and Italian.

The Psychological and Metaphysical facts upon which the possibility of Logic rests.—Text: Mr. Peirce's papers, The fixation of belief; How to make our ideas clear; Questions concerning certain faculties claimed

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for man; Further consequences of four incapacities; The validity of the. laws of logic.32 Here, as everywhere throughout the course, the doctrine of the text will receive improvements, and the subject will be further illustrated by the aid of other works.

Modern Formal Logic.—Text: De Morgan's Syllabus of Logic.

Boole's Logical Algebra.—Not merely the principles, but also the practice of this algebra will be rendered familiar, by the solution of numerous examples drawn from Boole, McColl, Miss Ladd, etc. Text: Schröder's Operationskreis des Logikcalculs.

The Logic of Relatives.—This subject will be treated in an elementary manner, so as to bring it within the capacity of the ordinary student. An entirely new general method of treating problems that involve relative terms will be developed. Text: Mr. Peirce's Logic of Relatives, Algebra of Logic, Algebra of Relatives, and a new paper. [CP 3.45­149, 154­ 251, 306­­322, 328­357]

Mathematical Reasoning.—The general nature of mathematical demonstration will be explained, the different varieties will be classified, and the particular use to which each can be put will be shown. The methods of mathematical research will be studied in the history of multiple algebra.

Theory of Probabilities.—The fundamental rules of the calculus will be discussed. Its practice will be illustrated by the solution of select problems, beginning with the simplest and proceeding to some of the most difficult. The theory of linear difference equations will be given. The method of least squares will be theoretically and practically treated. Text: Liagre's Calcul des Probabilités, Boole's Calculus of Finite Differences, Ferrero's Metodo dei Minimi Quadrati.33

Inductive Reasoning.—A large part of the course will be devoted to this subject. Inductive and hypothetic inference will be considered as inverse forms of statistical deduction. The rules of these modes of inference will be deduced from the theory and set forth with great particularity, with many illustrations drawn from the history of the physical sciences. No effort will be spared to make this part of the course practically useful to the student. Text: Mr. Peirce, On probable inference. [CP 2.694­754]

The Nature of Scientific Reasoning, illustrated by the reading of Kepler's De motibus stellae Martis.34

Inquiry into the validity of Modern Conceptions of the Constitution of Matter.—Text: Meyer's Kinetische Theorie der Gase.35

Relation of the New Theory of Logic to Philosophical questions.36

Peirce opened the course in September 1882 with a public lecture in Hopkins Hall to which the faculty as well as students were invited. The lecture was delivered without notes, but an abstract was published in the November Circular.

Mr. Peirce said that he had requested the instructors to do him the favor to listen to his observations, because he thought that a clear understanding of the purpose of the study of logic might remove some prejudices by leading to a true estimate of its nature.

Page 48 Though logic had been defined as the art of thinking, or as the science of the normative laws of thought, he said these were not true definitions, for mere thinking accomplished nothing, even in mathematics. The true and worthy idea of the science was that it was the art of devising methods of research—the method of methods.

This is the age of methods; and the university which is to be the exponent of the living condition of the human mind, must be the university of methods.

Now I grant you that to say that this is the age of the development of new methods of research is so far from saying that it is the age of the theory of methods, that it is almost to say the reverse. Unfortunately practice generally precedes theory, and it is the usual fate of mankind to get things done in some boggling way first, and find out afterwards how they could have been done much more easily and perfectly. And it must be confessed that we students of the science of modern methods are as yet but a voice crying in the wilderness, and saying prepare ye the way for this lord of the sciences which is to come.

... The theory of any act in no wise aids the doing of it, so long as what is to be done is of a narrow description, so that it can be governed by the unconscious part of our organism.... But when new paths have to be struck out, a spinal cord is not enough; a brain is needed, and that brain an organ of mind, and that mind perfected by a liberal education. And a liberal education—so far as its relation to the understanding goes—means logic. That is indispensable to it, and no other one thing is....

The scientific specialists—pendulum swingers and the like—are doing a great and useful work; each one very little, but altogether something vast. But the higher places in science in the coming years are for those who succeed in adapting the methods of one science to the investigation of another....

Now although a man needs not the theory of a method in order to apply it as it has been applied already, yet in order to adapt to his own science the method of another with which he is less familiar, and to properly modify it so as to suit it to its new use, an acquaintance with the principles upon which it depends will be of the greatest benefit. For that sort of work a man needs to be more than a mere specialist; he needs such a general training of his mind, and such knowledge as shall show him how to make his powers most effective in a new direction. That knowledge is logic.

In short, if my view is the true one, a young man wants a physical education and an aesthetic education, an education in the ways of the world and a moral education, and with all these logic has nothing in particular to do; but so far as he wants an intellectual education, it is precisely logic that he wants; and whether he be in one lecture­room or another, his ultimate purpose is to improve his logical power and his knowledge of methods. To this great end a young man's attention ought to be directed when he first comes to the university; he ought

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to keep it steadily in view during the whole period of his studies; and finally, he will do well to review his whole work in the light which an education in logic throws upon it.37

The year for which Peirce's course was thus described and thus inaugurated was also the year in which G. Stanley Hall was added to the number of lecturers in the department. At the end of the following year, Hall was awarded the professorship and Peirce's appointment was terminated. As a result, logic ceased to be a field of investigation on the part of the graduate students and became exclusively a subject of elementary instruction for undergraduates.38

The Johns Hopkins did not cease thereby to be a university of methods, but neither it nor any other university even pretended to have a specialist in the method of methods. Perhaps the Johns Hopkins was the only university which could so much as entertain the idea. But it seems strange that this should have been so in a century of which Whitehead has said that its greatest invention was the method of invention.

THE STUDY OF GREAT MEN

Of the various essays reviewing the achievements of the nineteenth century just after its close, one of the most illuminating is Peirce's "The Century's Great Men of Science," which first appeared in the New York Evening Pos: of January 12, 1901, and was twice reprinted.39 One of the preliminary drafts of this essay had a long introduction which was eliminated in the final version. It began as follows:

In the year 1883, having charge of the instruction in logic in the Johns Hopkins University, I cast about for a subject that might afford valuable training in inductive investigation, such as the members of my class might need in future life, and which they would not be likely to acquire in other studies. I wished it to be a subject susceptible of mathematical treatment, since an inductive investigation so treated may throw abundant light on the proper logical procedure where mathematics is not available, while the converse can hardly be true. Yet there were several reasons for selecting a subject concerning which no exact observations could be made. Much more logical caution is required in such a field; and it was desirable to explode the ordinary notions that mathematical treatment is of no advantage where observations are devoid of precision, and that no scientific use can be made of very inexact observations. (MS 1119)

The draft proceeds with a detailed account of the method followed, which concludes: "The above remarks have served their purpose if

Page 50 they have at all prepared us to answer the question as to the fertility of the nineteenth century in great men." One of the members of the group, Joseph Jastrow, has given us a briefer account in his essay on "Charles S. Peirce as a Teacher":

As a further illustration of his fertile suggestiveness and use of cooperative stimulus I mention his study of great men. He prepared an elaborate question­sheet regarding the ancestry, qualities of mind and body, mode of work, stages of growth, etc., of the great men of all times. He invited a small group of students to join him in reading the chief biographies of great men and extracting the data that might furnish the entries for the syllabus. We then held conferences for the discussion and tabulation of the results. The project was never completed. A number of years later, I was permitted to formulate two rather simple conclusions, the one relating to "Longevity," the other to "Precocity".40

The only official record of this study is a brief statement in the Circular for June 1884 under the head of "Work of the Past Year, 1883­84"; "Mr. C. S. Peirce ... also guided a company of students in studying the psychology of great men."41 It appears, therefore, that it was not a part of the logic course itself, but was carried on informally as a voluntary project supplementing the course and participated in by students not registered. It seems also that the project was continued through the fall of 1884, when Peirce was no longer on the faculty, since some of the surviving forms of his "Questions on Great Men" bear the date 1884 November 8 (MS 1119).

THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB

One of the members of Peirce's first class at Hopkins, Christine Ladd, in describing his classroom manner, recalls the origin of the departmental club as follows:

Peirce ... had all the air... of the typical philosopher who is engaged, at the moment, in bringing fresh truth by divination out of some inexhaustible well.... No effort was made to create a connected and not inconsistent whole out of the matter of each lecture. In fact, so devious and unpredictable was his course that he once, to the delight of his students, proposed at the end of his lecture, that we should form (for greater freedom of discussion) a Metaphysical Club, though he had begun the lecture by defining metaphysics to be "the science of unclear thinking."42

This must have been quite early in the course, for the Club had its first meeting on October 28, 1879. At this meeting six papers were read, including one by Miss Ladd herself on "Non­Euclidean Space."

Page 51 In name and in some of the themes discussed the Club echoed the Metaphysical Club of the earlier 1870's at Cambridge. At the third meeting, for example, there was a paper by E. M. Hartwell on "Reflex Action and Its Analogies in the Fixing of Belief," and another by David Stewart on "The Ethics of Belief."

The club met monthly during the academic year for six years. For the first three years, Peirce presided and logical topics predominated. In the fourth and fifth years, Morris presided in the first halfyear and Hall in the second. In the fifth and last year Hall was in full control, psychological topics predominated, and the Club died some months before the year was out.

Abstracts of many of the papers appeared in the Circulars, and some were published in full in various journals. The Club attracted graduate students from other departments, such as W. T. Sedgwick and E. B. Wilson from Biology. Professors Gildersleeve of Classics, Remsen of Chemistry, and Martin of Biology read papers by invitation. There were a few papers by visitors, including one by Royce on "Purpose in Thought" and one by Lester F. Ward on "Mind as a Social Factor." But the papers of greatest permanent value were those of Peirce and his students on logic. These are second only to the volume of Studies in Logic as a monument to his brief career as a teacher. B. I. Gilman's paper on spurious propositions, to mention but one, was made the basis of Peirce's article on that topic in Baldwin's Dictionary, and he elsewhere referred to it as constituting "a distinct step in logical research" (CP 4.364). It is safe to say that no philosophical club consisting primarily of graduate students has left so impressive a record.

A LOGICIAN'S LIBRARY

On December 18, 1880, Peirce wrote Gilman that he could not continue with the University beyond that academic year without modifying his connection with the Coast Survey, which he was unwilling to do for the sake of the subordinate position he then held at Hopkins.

Upon leaving the University I shall bid adieu to the study of Logic and Philosophy (except experimental psychology), and I have therefore determined to dispose of a collection of books upon these subjects. I send you a list of them in order that you may see whether you wish to purchase any considerable proportion for the University. I hope to get an offer for nearly the whole of them, and shall prefer such an offer. They cost me, say, $1000, and I would sell the whole for $550.

Arrangements for the purchase were initiated on December 20 and completed on the following February 7. The Johns Hopkins

Page 52 Librarian, Dr. William Hand Browne, in his annual report of June 1, 1881, recorded the transaction as follows:

Our small philosophical library has been increased by the purchase of a valuable collection of 295 volumes (210 titles) from the library of Prof. C. S. Peirce. This collection, made with much care by Prof. Peirce for his own use, follows the whole stream of philosophic thought from Aristotle to our own times, and is particularly rich in specimens of the leading metaphysical, logical, and theological works of the great Scholastic Doctors. Many of the books are of great rarity and beauty; a number are incunabula, and interesting from a bibliographical point of view; and there are among them several valuable manuscripts, one of which, a handsome MS. on vellum of the Sententiae of Petrus Lombardus, is said— for it has no colophon—to be as early as the twelfth century. It is doubtful whether a similar collection exists in any library in this country.43

A list of the collection appears in the accession books of the Library from number 9786 to number 10091, preceded by the note: "All the books that follow . . were bought from Prof. C. S. Peirce for a round sum of $550. Many of them are of great rarity and high value, a number are incunabula, and several are manuscripts."

On October 3, 1881, the Hopkins trustees voted "Special thanks ... to Mr. C. S. Peirce for a gift of several volumes on Logic supplementary to the collection purchased of him." Meanwhile, as we shall see later, they had induced him to continue as Lecturer.

Peirce himself later said the whole collection had been made with a view to writing his projected treatise on logic. "Finding great difficulty in managing so many books," he added, "and despairing of ever writing my book, I finally sold them to the Johns Hopkins University."44 In view of Peirce's lifelong inability to keep his expenditures within his income, it may fairly be suspected that financial embarrassment was a contributing motive. As he remembered it, there was an understanding to the effect that he might buy the collection back at any time for the price he had been paid.

Since Peirce had the habit of inscribing the date and place of purchase (and often the price) in his books, it is possible to trace the growth of the collection. The earliest purchase was the Rosenkrantz and Schubert edition of the works of Kant, bought in January 1865. The years of most frequent additions were 1866­71. A large part of the impressive group of works of Duns Scotus was bought in 1867. Alsted's Encyclopaedia was bought at Venice in November 1870, Egidio Colonna's commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle at London in January 1871, and Occam's commentary on the first book of Peter Lombard's Sentences at Leipzig in the same month.

Page 53 Peirce made special note of works or editions unknown to Prantl or Hamilton, and of incunabula unknown to Hain. He marked off his own holdings against the extensive bibliography in Leonhard Rabus's Logik und Metaphysik. Thomas Blundeville's The Arte of Logicke (London, 1619) is provided with an index in Peirce's hand, and the works of Boethius (Basel, 1546) with a concordance of the pages of the 1546 and 1570 editions. There are underscorings, annotations, and index corrections in the Duns Scotus volumes. Clauberg's Logica vetus et nova (Amsterdam, 1658) and Stahl's Regulae philosophicae (London, 1658) are underscored throughout. In Clifford's Lectures and Essays (London, 1879) only "The Ethics of Belief" is underlined, probably for the December meeting of the Metaphysical Club to which reference was made above. There is a sprinkling of adverse comments in the margins of C. C. Everett's Science of Thought (Boston, 1869). Ueberweg's System der Logik (Bonn, 1865), "the best logic in existence," is critically annotated.

The whole collection would repay close examination, but not all of it can now be assembled. While Peirce was still at Hopkins, a publisher "induced" him to resume his abandoned treatise on logic.45 When he left Baltimore, he obtained permission to keep some of the books for a time in order to finish the work. He spent the rest of his life writing and rewriting it, and the books were not returned. The Library made several attempts to recover them, and Peirce to redeem the entire collection. His last attempt, without success, was on November 1, 1901, in a letter to Gilman's successor, President Remsen:

I can't now pay that sum, but the question is whether I could not give some lectures as equivalent. My expectation of life is only about thirteen years and the University could then have them back greatly enhanced in value by the references I should make to them in the work I am writing.

Peirce died thirteen years later, leaving a large library which was preserved by his widow except for certain books which were acquired by the Harvard College Library. Among the latter the librarian found two which Peirce had sold to Hopkins and borrowed back: Chauvin's Lexicon (1713), which he had used constantly in his work for the Century Dictionary, and Flender's Phosphorus (1731). These were restored to the Hopkins Library.

When Peirce's widow died in 1934, the purchasers of the house beside the Milford­Port Jervis road failed to interest anybody in the books he had left, and gradually burned them in the yard. It is not unlikely that some of those he had neglected to return to the Hopkins Library were among them.

Page 54 The great bulk of the collection, however, is still at Hopkins and constitutes a third monument to Peirce's brief academic career. The thirty­four incunabula are intact and are among the Library's chief treasures.46

THE COMMUNITY OF INVESTIGATORS

It was not only the Hopkins librarian that found Peirce a difficult person. His relations with other members of the Hopkins community were strained on occasion, and there was one quarrel that found its way into the Circulars and may have been a factor in dissuading Gilman from continuing Peirce's lectureship after Hall was made professor. We proceed to review the relations on which Peirce's standing most depended, and we begin with the professor who was himself, next to Peirce, the most difficult person on the faculty.

I. James Joseph Sylvester. The most distinguished of the Hopkins professors during Peirce's time was Sylvester, head of the mathematics department from the opening of the University in 1876 through December 1883, when he left to become Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford. Peirce's father, who had known Sylvester since the early 1840's, seems to have been the first to propose his appointment. Sylvester founded the American Journal of Mathematics in 1878 with the encouragement of the father and with a contribution by the son in the opening number.

In a letter to Benjamin Peirce on March 17, 1878, Sylvester invited him to Baltimore to celebrate the birth of the Journal, and said in passing: ''I was pleased to see your son Charles on his way through Baltimore."47

About this time Sylvester's most devoted student, George Bruce Halsted, to whom Gilman had given reprints of Peirce's papers, was preparing a series of five public lectures on "Clear Thinking and Its Best Modern Methods, Biographically Treated." The five lectures were to be devoted to Augustus De Morgan, George Boole, W. S. Jevons, C. S. Peirce, and F. A. Lange in that order. On March 14 Halsted wrote Peirce of a change in his plan.

As it first stood I wished to devote a lecture to you by name, and to attempt to give the people here an account of your contributions to Modern Logic. But the opinion was expressed here to me that I had better not do it, and that you had exhibited in your writings a tendency to undervalue everybody and everything you mentioned. Besides this I was particularly discouraged by Prof. Sylvester's adding that your articles in the Popular Science Monthly were pretentious without being at all profound and that anybody could have written them.

For my part I have enjoyed your articles exceedingly and could find no fault with them except, as I have already mentioned, obscurity in

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places. So though I yielded somewhat I shall still devote the greater part of my last lecture to your work, and I think I am justified in maintaining that you have contributed more to Modern Logic than any American whatever.

On March 19 Peirce wrote to Sylvester:

I was surprised to learn from the enclosed letter that you are acting against my being invited to the Johns Hopkins University. I thought you had given me to understand that you would be friendly to me in this matter.

In regard to your opinion, in itself, I have nothing to say. I am satisfied with the reception which my writings met with in the logical world, and the opinion of outsiders does not greatly concern me....

Sylvester handed these letters48 to Gilman, who hastened on the 20th to assure Peirce that

in his conversations with me, so far from appearing unfriendly to you, he has constantly referred to you in terms of high appreciation and has left upon me the abiding impression that in his opinion you would bring to the Johns Hopkins University the sorts of intellectual power which would be most valuable in themselves, and in their influence upon other departments of university work. Whatever results from our correspondence, I trust you will believe me when I add that, so far as I know, all among us who have any knowledge of your work admire the qualities by which it is inspired.

It appears that Halsted's original plan for the lecture series was carried out, and his indiscretion was forgotten. Over a year later, on May 29, 1879, Peirce wrote Sylvester a very friendly letter speaking of several projected papers, of his readiness to accept an offer from Hopkins, of plans for a trip abroad on which he would welcome Sylvester's company, and of his intention to do what he could "in the Clifford matter."

When Peirce joined the staff in the fall of 1879, his courses and publications were listed under the head of Mathematics and Physics as well as under that of Philosophy, and about half his students came to him from the mathematics department. As late as 1935, one of them related an episode to Professor Cassius J. Keyser, who reports it as follows:

One day Sylvester summoned Mr. A, for whom he had the fondness of a friend, and said to him: "You have listened to Mr. Peirce's lectures. Tell me about them. How have they impressed you?" Mr. A explained at some length that the lectures were always substantial, often very subtle, never trite, not easy to follow, frequently so lacking in clearness that the hearers were quite unable to understand, "but," added Mr. A,

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"there can be no question that Mr. Peirce is a man of genius." Thereupon Sylvester who had been listening in silence, said quite impulsively: "Well! If he is a genius, isn't that enough? Isn't it men of genius that we want here?"49

Another of Sylvester's students, Ellery W. Davis, whose account of Peirce at Hopkins we have already cited, says that Sylvester considered him "a far greater mathematician than his father."50

In his notice in the Nation of the December 1879 number of the American Journal of Mathematics, Peirce said all three of Sylvester's papers afforded salient examples of "the importance of the part played by the faculty of observation in the discovery of pure mathematical laws." "There has been perhaps no other great mathematician in whose works this is so continually illustrated as in those of Professor Sylvester."51

On March 25, 1880, Sylvester wrote to Peirce's mother:

... It is possible that I may be Charles's companion on board the Amérique next month.... I am glad your son likes his work and seems to be well satisfied with his location here.... Our December number of the Journal still tarries in coming out but in a few days I believe will be ready to be issued. It will be a glorious number and two contributions from Charles (to be followed by another of very great interest in the number after this) will form not the least interesting part of its contents.52

In 1880 and 1881 relations were severely strained between Sylvester and William E. Story, who was his associate in mathematics and managing editor of the Journal.53 Though Story owed his position to Peirce's father and brother, Benjamin Peirce and James Mills Peirce, relations between Sylvester and Peirce were friendly enough for the latter to act as mediator. On August 7, 1880, he wrote to Gilman, who was inclined to support Story:

I have received from Sylvester an account of his difficulty with Story. I have written what I could of a mollifying kind, but it really seems to me that Sylvester's complaint is just. I don't think Story appreciates the greatness of Sylvester, and I think he has undertaken to get the Journal into his own control in an unjustifiable degree. I think that we all in Baltimore owe so much to Sylvester that he should be supported in any reasonable position with energy; I hope the matter may not go to the length of displacing Story because I think he is admirably fitted for it in other respects than those complained of. But Sylvester ought to be the judge of that. It is no pleasure to me to intermeddle in any dispute but I feel bound to say that Sylvester has done so much for the University that no one ought to dispute his authority in the management of his department.

Page 57 As we have seen, Peirce wrote Gilman on December 18, 1880, that he was unwilling to continue his present relation to the University another year. This unwillingness was reiterated on February 4 and conveyed to the trustees on February 7, whereupon they

Resolved, that President Gilman assure Mr. Peirce that this Board appreciates the enthusiasm and ability he has shown during the last two years, and that they regret to learn that his other arrangements prevent his continuance here as a lecturer.

One of the associates in mathematics, Thomas Craig, was, like Peirce, attached to the Coast Survey, and he also was apparently finding it difficult to fulfill the duties of both offices. Sylvester wanted the two men retained at Hopkins and intervened to secure the necessary adjustments. On March 28 he wrote to Gilman:

Allow me to express the great satisfaction I feel in the interest of the University at the measures adopted by the Trustees to secure the continuance of Craig and Peirce. We now form a corps of no less than eight working mathematicians—actual producers and investigators—real working men: Story, Craig, Sylvester, Franklin, Mitchell, Ladd, Rowland, Peirce; which I think all the world must admit to be a pretty strong team.

From a letter of Gilman to Peirce on April 27, it appears that, in Peirce's case, the chief measure adopted was to increase the stipend of his half­time lectureship from $1500 to $2500.

In December of that year, Professor Arthur Cayley of Cambridge University arrived in Baltimore to be visiting lecturer at Hopkins from January to June. To celebrate his visit, the Mathematical Seminary at its meeting on January 18, 1882, had a program of brilliant papers by Cayley, Peirce, and Sylvester the last of which included a tribute to Peirce's gift for feeling his way about in supersensible space.54

Sylvester himself began in January a long course of lectures on "A New Theory of Universal Multiple Algebra."55 Several members of his class were at the same time taking Peirce's advanced logic course. On January 7, when Sylvester's class had had but two meetings, Peirce wrote out a "Brief Description of the Algebra of Relatives" which he concluded as follows:

Professor Sylvester, in his "New Universal Multiple Algebra," appears to have come, by a line of approach totally different from mine, upon a system which coincides, in some of its main features, with the Algebra of Relatives, as described in my four papers upon the subject, and in my lectures on logic. I am unable to judge, from my unprofessional acquaintance with pure mathematics, how much of novelty there may

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be in my conceptions; but as the researches of the illustrious geometer who has now taken up the subject must draw increased attention to this kind of algebra, I take occasion to redescribe the outlines of my own system, and at the same time to declare my modest conviction that the logical interpretation of it, far from being in any degree special, will be found a powerful instrument for the discovery and demonstration of new algebraical theorems.

Peirce had his "Brief Description" privately printed. On January 16 he added the following Postscript on the proof sheets:

I have this day had the delight of reading for the first time Professor Cayley's Memoir on Matrices, in the Philosophical Transactions for 1858. The algebra he there describes seems to me substantially identical with my long subsequent algebra for dual relatives. Many of his results are limited to the very exceptional cases in which division is a determinative process.

My own studies in the subject have been logical not mathematical, being directed toward the essential elements of the algebra, not towards the solution of problems. (CP 3.306­ 322)

The "Brief Description" came from the printer as a brochure of six pages. On February 7 Peirce sent a copy to President Gilman with a letter in which he said:

It occurs to me that it is possible that (although I am unable to see it at all) there may be some just cause of offense in my references on the last page to Professors Sylvester and Cayley. Of course, you will see none at first glance; but will you see them and find out 1st whether they think they see anything out of the way and 2nd whether if so it is merely the systematic arrogance of these Britishers or whether it is just. I will keep back the issue until I hear from you. You understand that I do not expect them to find anything but what is flattering in the allusions; but then I want to avoid the possibility of doing wrong in the matter.

56 Gilman's reply has not been found, but Peirce says the brochure was not distributed. As he later remembered it,

When it was done and I was correcting the last proof, it suddenly occurred to me that it was after all nothing but Cayley's theory of matrices which appeared when I was a boy. However, I took a copy of it to the great algebraist Sylvester. He read it, and said very disdainfully—Why, it is nothing but my umbral notation. I felt squelched and never sent out the copies. But I was a little comforted later by finding that what Sylvester called "my umbral notation" had first been published in 1693 by another man of some talent named Godfrey William Leibniz. (MS 302:9; cf. CP 4.305)

Page 59 The American Journal of Mathematics was still running months behind schedule. Sometime in the spring of 1882, Peirce was seeing through the press his revised edition of his father's Linear Associative Algebra in numbers 2 and 3 of volume IV of the Journal, which should have appeared in April and July 1881. In one of the appendices contributed by himself he inserted a reference to the unissued brochure:

Thus, what has been proved is that any associative algebra can be put into relative form, i.e. (see my brochure entitled A Brief Description of the Algebra of Relatives) that every such algebra may be represented by a matrix. (CP 3.294)

At the April 1882 meeting of the Hopkins Scientific Association, in discussing a paper by Cayley "On the 8­Square Imaginaries,"

Mr. Sylvester mentioned... that in his recent researches in Multiple Algebra he had come upon a system of Nonions, the exact analogues of the Hamiltonian Quaternions ... Mr. Charles S. Peirce, it should be stated, had to the certain knowledge of Mr. Sylvester arrived at the same result many years ago in connexion with his theory of the logic of relatives; but whether this result had been published by Mr. Peirce, he was unable to say.57

At the May meeting of the Mathematical Society Sylvester presented an account of the system of Nonions in question. In the abstract of his paper in the August Circular there appeared near the end the sentence: "These forms can be derived from an algebra given by Mr. Charles S. Peirce (Logic of Relatives, 1870)."58 In the Circular for February 1883, however, Sylvester published an Erratum correcting this sentence to read: "Mr. C. S. Peirce informs me that these forms can be derived from his Logic of Relatives, 1870," and continuing as follows:

I know nothing whatever of the fact of my own personal knowledge. I have not read the paper referred to, and am not acquainted with its contents. The mistake originated in my having left instructions for Mr. Peirce to be invited to supply in my final copy for the press, such references as he might think called for.59

Peirce wrote a prompt and full reply, a lost draft of which was submitted to Gilman's "friendly judgment" on February 18. In the final draft a month later, Peirce began by pointing out the inconsistency between Sylvester's Erratum and the passage above quoted from his discussion of Cayley's paper, and went on to say that he had been requested not simply to supply a reference but to correct a statement relating to his work in the body of the text. He then

Page 60 related what his father and he had done in connection with nonions long before Sylvester's discovery. He concluded:

The priority of publication of the particular group referred to belongs to Professor Sylvester. But most readers will agree that he could not have desired to print it without making any allusion to my work, and that to say the group could be derived from my algebra was not too much.60

Peirce sent this to Gilman on Easter Monday, March 26, 1883, with the following note:

I have been a number of times to try to see you in order to submit to you my piece in reply to Professor Sylvester. I do not think his attack on me ought to have gone forth with the approbation of the board of trustees.61 But since it did, the University is committed to the principle and must publish my reply. If that is refused, I shall be forced to go into print on my own account. I now send you my reply, which I cannot modify in any essential particular, unless it be to add facsimiles of letters and other documents. But I prefer to reserve that for a rejoinder.

Gilman made the following annotation on Peirce's note: "I wrote acknowledging this and saying I would show the manuscript to Prof. Sylvester." After some further exchanges between Gilman, Sylvester, and Peirce which we pass over here, Peirce's "piece" was published in the April 1883 Circular, preceded by "A Note from Professor Sylvester'' saying he thought the seeming discrepancy between his two statements would disappear if the point he desired to make were duly apprehended.

I wished (as I still wish) it to be understood that it is Mr. Peirce's statement and not mine that the "forms" in question can be derived from his Logic of Relatives. I certainly know what he has told me and should attach implicit credit to any statement emanating from him, but have not the knowledge which would come from having myself found in his Logic of Relatives the forms referred to; as previously stated I have not read his Logic of Relatives and am not acquainted with its contents.62

In 1902, five years after Sylvester's death, Peirce wrote out an account of the episode which takes us behind the scenes. He says he wrote the offending sentence on the margin of the proof sheet, "without any indication to the printer that it was to be inserted."

The proof­sheet was returned by me to Mr. Sylvester, who must have drawn the crochet and line to direct the insertion of the sentence before he sent it to the printer. The following year in another frame of mind Prof. Sylvester came out with a special note exclusively devoted to

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repudiating the sentence which he said had been inserted by me, leaving it to be supposed that I had surreptitiously interfered with his printing, and to declaring "I know nothing whatever of the fact stated." I then published simply a narrative of the course of my cogitations upon the subject, without alluding either to Sylvester's previous interest in the matter or to an occasion in 1881 or early in 1882 when he and I sat at a table together with my memoir open before us and I fully expounded the whole thing. On the contrary, I stated, or I never denied or seemed to deny, that the priority of publication was his. He continued to insist apparently that my conduct had been of the blackest. I now restate the facts because I find that that opinion is still maintained and propagated in certain quarters. Lest it should be said that I make intangible insinuations, I will add that Sylvester was a man whose imagination and enthusiasm were incessantly running away with him: he was given to harboring the most ridiculous suspicions and to making rasher assertions than became so great a man. His power of distinct recollection was most phenomenally weak, almost incredibly so; while his subconscious memory was not at all wanting in retentiveness. I suppose, as he said, that he "came across" the system of novenions in the form last given above,63 and remembered or thought he remembered that I had pointed out these forms. Subsequently he got a suspicion that I was about to charge him with plagiarizing my "Description of a Notation &c" [CP 3.45­149] and was anxious to declare that he had never read it and knew nothing about it. He seems to have fancied that I had some deep­laid plot against him. (MS 431)

When Sylvester's lectures on universal algebra were finally published, he acknowledged the work of the Peirces in vague and grudging terms:

Already in Quaternions ... the example had been given of Algebra released from the yoke of the commutative principle of multiplication ... and later on the Peirces, father and son (but subsequently to 1858) had prefigured the universalisation of Hamilton's theory and had emitted an opinion to the effect that probably all systems of algebraical symbols subject to the associative law of multiplication would be eventually found to be identical with linear transformations of schemata susceptible of matricular representation.

That such must be the case it would be rash to assert; but it is very difficult to conceive how the contrary can be true, or where to seek, outside of the concept of substitution, for matter affording pabulum to the principle of free consociation of successive actions or operations.64

This method by which a matrix is robbed as it were of its areal dimensions and represented as a linear sum first came under my notice incidentally in a communication made some time in the course of the last two years to the Mathematical Society of the Johns Hopkins University by Mr. C. S. Peirce, who, I presume, had been long familiar with its use.65

Page 62 Fabian Franklin, in his eulogy of Sylvester, says that "the feeling of creation, of abounding productiveness, was to him as the breath of his nostrils"; that an unsolved problem, once it attracted his attention, "fastened itself upon his mind with a grip that seemed never to slacken its tenacity"; but that

That intermediate kind of effort which slowly and patiently builds up and improves and perfects one's own work, and which gives minute and prolonged study to the work of others, he did not command in any notable degree.66

"The seething brain of Sylvester," as Peirce phrased it (CP 4.305), was too busy making discoveries to inquire how many of them had been made before, or even to welcome such information when it came uninvited.

Gilman has recorded his hesitation about appointing Sylvester because "there were many intimations that he was 'hard to get on with.' "67 Gilman, Franklin, and others have also testified to his impatience and quick temper, but with a saving clause. "He could be irate, very much so, but his wrath was like 'the crackling of thorns beneath a pot.' For a moment it was furious, then the flame became extinct and the embers died."68 "He was capable of flying into a passion on slight provocation, but did not harbor resentment, and was always glad to forget the cause of quarrel at the earliest opportunity."69

So it was in the quarrel with Peirce. The opportunity in this case was Sylvester's withdrawal from the American scene and installation as Savilian Professor at Oxford, from which eminence he wrote Gilman on March 28, 1888:

What was the cause of C. Peirce's leaving? I am truly sorry on his account. I regret the differences which sprang up between him and me for which I was primarily to blame. I fear that he may not have acted with entire prudence in some personal matters.

2. Henry Augustus Rowland. If Peirce's offer of January 1878 to direct the physics department betrayed an underestimate of Rowland's abilities, acquaintance with him in the Hopkins Scientific Association and Mathematical Seminary soon gave Peirce a higher opinion and an occasion for expressing it. At the meeting of the Scientific Association on December 3, 1879, E. H. Hall read a paper "On a New Action of the Magnet on Electric Currents"—the action which has since been called the Hall effect—and gave a demonstration of it.70 The paper was published in the December number of

Page 63 the American Journal of Mathematics, which Peirce, with prophetic insight, noticed in the Nation for December 25 as follows:

The current number of the American Journal of Mathematics ... contains an account of a fundamentally new phenomenon in electricity, not explicable by anything hitherto known.... The discoverer is Mr. E. H. Hall, assistant in the Laboratory of Professor Rowland, to whose encouragement and assistance the discovery was in large measure due. It may justly be said that no discovery equally fundamental has been made within the last fifty years.71

During the five years of his Hopkins appointment, and for seven years thereafter, Peirce continued to work for the Coast Survey on what was ostensibly full time. He was engaged in two chief lines of research: (1) the pendulum experiments to which we have already referred; and (2) experiments toward a more exact determination of the absolute wave­length of light to supersede Ångström's, "in order to obtain a check upon the secular molecular changes of metallic bars used as standards of length."72

Now if Peirce was to continue at Hopkins without relinquishing his Survey employment, it was highly desirable if not indispensable that a Coast Survey station for his pendulum and light experiments should be established in or near Baltimore. Pendulum swinging at other stations could then be confined to university vacations. After strengthening his position at the University in the spring of 1881, Peirce immediately began making plans for the construction of a suitable building in the University yard, and on May 31 he obtained from Gilman the promise of a token contribution from the University toward its erection. There was a change of administration in the Coast Survey before any further action could be taken, and the matter was dropped. On October 3, 1883, Peirce wrote Superintendent Hilgard that in recommending a station at the Johns Hopkins his judgment had been "rather warped by considerations of convenience." But he suggested that "we might go to Mr. Hopkins' old place near Baltimore where Rowland is now determining the ohm in connection with the bureau of weights and measures."

If Peirce would have welcomed the proximity to Rowland as well as the physical conditions at Clifton, the feeling was apparently mutual. One of Rowland's early undertakings was a map of the solar spectrum. Peirce gave Rowland the results of his work on the absolute wave­length of light to serve as a standard of reference for this map. Rowland's assistant Louis Bell carried on a series of experiments as a check on Peirce's results. Peirce had used Rutherfurd's gratings; Rowland constructed a machine for ruling better

Page 64 ones. When allowance was made for errors detected in the gratings Peirce had used, his results nearly coincided with those of Bell and Rowland. Using the value obtained by giving Ångström's determination a weight of 1, Peirce's 5, and Bell's 10, Rowland constructed a table of solar spectrum wave­lengths which was the world standard for a generation.73

After retiring to Milford, Pennsylvania, Peirce continued his own investigations, but under difficulties. On April 11, 1888, he wrote to Rowland for information on publications concerning wave­lengths, with particular reference to Metre No. 49. He said he had no money for books, and the "Coast Survey Office seem to pursue a policy of cutting me off from information as far as possible."

Rowland died in 1901 at the age of fifty­two. The Hopkins Press published a collection of his Physical Papers in 1902. Peirce, in reviewing it for the Nation, placed Rowland "among those American physicists who since Rumford have influenced fundamental conceptions (if any other such there be)."74 Into this final tribute to Rowland he wove one to Gilman and, perhaps unconsciously, a negative explanation of his own failure.

Henry Augustus Rowland being a name upon which attention will inevitably be arrested in any extensive future history of the development of human knowledge, the future reader of that history may ask "How came such a tree to grow to such proportions in such a soil?" Well, it happened that the duty of tending that tree fell upon a university president of such singular discernment as not to take fright at meeting with a real live man, a man obtrusively and naively real and personal; and so the tree was supplied with the desirable fertilizer and quite indispensable vacancy, without which its growth might have been vigorous but never could have attained to largeness and symmetry.

3. Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve. Next to Sylvester in fame, and more in Gilman's counsels, was Basil L. Gildersleeve, professor of Greek, founder and editor of the American Journal of Philology. Peirce and he had much in common. Peirce was at home in the Greek text of Aristotle and in the Latin of the scholastics. He had traveled in classical and biblical lands. In later years he advertised popular lectures on "Thessalian topography: a traveler's tale" and on "The story of Pythagoras."75 One of his later papers before the National Academy of Sciences was on "The Logic of Research into Ancient History."76 For the country seat near Milford at which he spent the latter part of his life, he chose the classical name ''Arisbe."

It does not appear, however, that Peirce attended the meetings of the Philological Association, over which Gildersleeve presided, as he did those of the Mathematical Seminary and the Scientific Association. And it was not until G. Stanley Hall had become president

Page 65 of the Metaphysical Club that Gildersleeve read a paper at one of its meetings.

Gildersleeve seems to have accompanied Sylvester and Peirce to Europe in the spring of 1880.77 On July 15 he wrote Gilman from Paris that he had been seeing a good deal of Peirce, who, he said, "has been kind to me in his way, and if he were always as he can be sometimes, he would be a charming companion."78

4. George Sylvester Morris. Of Peirce's rivals for the philosophy professorship, only Morris and Hall taught formal courses at Hopkins. Morris gave a series of Hopkins Hall lectures on the history of philosophy in January 1878, and a series on "Topics Historical and Practical in Ethics" a year later. In February 1879 Morris was invited to be Lecturer on the History of Philosophy and on Ethics for the ensuing three years during three months annually, and this appointment was continued through the first half of the year 1884­85; so that Morris's official connection with Hopkins began earlier and ended later than Peirce's.

Of the three lecturers, Peirce, as being at Hopkins throughout the academic year, was in a better position to act as chairman than Morris or Hall, who were there only in alternate half­years. But Morris, as senior in tenure, seems from the first to have exercised the duties of the office without the title, even during the larger part of the year when he was not on the campus. On October 4, 1880, he wrote Gilman from Ann Arbor:

Mr. Marquand told me that two or three of the best men in the proposed class in psychology were dissatisfied with the arrangements by which they were required to go for logic into Mr. Peirce's elementary class.

It is not clear whether the complaint was against having to take logic at all, or having to take it with Peirce, or, what is most likely, having to take his elementary rather than his advanced course, which Marquand himself was attending.

Two and a half years later, on May 22, 1882, there seems to have been some uncertainty, as there had been the year before, as to whether Peirce would continue. Morris wrote Gilman that if Hall was not to give the logic, "and if Mr. Peirce is not to be at Baltimore next year, it may become necessary for me to curtail one of the courses announced, say Ethics, and give a couple of hours weekly to formal and applied logic."

At the meeting of the Metaphysical Club in October 1883 Morris read a paper on "The Philosophical Conception of Life," to which Peirce replied at the November meeting. An abstract of Morris's paper was published, but we can only guess the tenor of Peirce's criticisms of it.

Page 66 Morris and Peirce were idealists, though with important differences; they had a high opinion of Kant and Hegel, though Peirce's was not so high as Morris's; and they were severely critical of British associationism. Morris lacked Peirce's sense of the importance of science, and cannot have thought as highly of his work in logic as Hall did; but there is no evidence that this was any obstacle to their working together. In their published works, neither makes any reference to the other.

5. Granville Stanley Hall. Hall was a candidate for a philosophy position at Hopkins from at least as early as January 27, 1877. He was in close touch with James and knew that he too was a candidate from time to time, and must have known through James, if not directly from Peirce, that Peirce was also. Throughout the entire period of rivalry he nevertheless remained on terms of friendship with James and Peirce, and also with Morris, though perhaps only James had a high regard for his attainments and abilities. In his autobiography Hall writes:

Charles Peirce had been for years at the Hopkins occupying a tentative position, one of the ablest and most original philosophic minds this country has ever produced.... My old friend, George Morris, had taught several half years at the Hopkins, and William James had given lectures there. Each of the three was older and abler than I. Why the appointment, for which all of them had been considered, fell to me I was never able to understand unless it was because my standpoint was thought to be a little more accordant with the ideals which then prevailed there. To the companionship of these three men, particularly that of Peirce, who lived for years across the street from me and of whom I saw very much, I can never express my indebtedness.79

When Hall developed the psychological laboratory at Hopkins, he was not making an innovation alien to Peirce's interests, but merely concentrating upon one of them. As Joseph Jastrow puts the matter in his own case:

Though I promptly took to the laboratory of psychology when that was established by Stanley Hall, it was Peirce who gave me my first training in the handling of a psychological problem, and at the same time stimulated my self­esteem by entrusting me, then fairly innocent of any laboratory habits, with a real bit of research. He borrowed the apparatus for me, which I took to my room, installed at my window, and with which, when conditions of illumination were right, I took the observations.... The demonstration that traces of sensory effect too slight to make any registry in consciousness could none the less influence judgment, may itself have been a persistent motive that induced me years later to undertake a book on "The Subconscious."80

Page 67 For the spring of 1884 Hall organized a Saturday morning series of "educational lectures" "designed for the fellows and other graduate students looking forward to educational and scientific careers." Peirce gave the eighth and ninth lectures in this series, on the subjects "The Observational Element in Mathematics" and "The a priori Element in Physics.'' Sixty­two students were enrolled; one of them was John Dewey, who had taken two courses with Peirce in the first half­year.81

Hall's appointment as Professor of Psychology and Pedagogy was announced in April 1884. Relations between him and Peirce were apparently not strained. At the May meeting of the Metaphysical Club, of which Hall was then president, Peirce read a paper on "The Logic of Religion." He continued to reside at Baltimore in the fall of 1884, though no longer employed by the University. At the November meeting of the Metaphysical Club, he read a paper on the De magnete of Petrus Peregrinus, of which he later sought to publish a translation. This was the meeting at which "It was decided to discontinue the existing Metaphysical Club and after proceeding tentatively for a few meetings, to effect an organization which shall better satisfy the needs of those interested in this department."82 Since Peirce was himself an experimental psychologist of parts, this decision was directed against the turn which Morris, not he, had given to the Club's interests.

When the American Journal of Psychology (the fifth of the Hopkins "American Journals") was launched by Hall in November 1887, Peirce contributed a short article on "Logical Machines" to the first number. In the same number, in reviewing G. T. Ladd's Elements of Physiological Psychology, Hall remarked that the chapter "on the quantity of sensation" omitted "extremely significant views ... like that originated by Mr. C. S. Peirce."83

We have already seen that in his account of "Philosophy in the United States" in Mind for January 1879, before either of them had been invited to lecture at Hopkins, Hall had given the greatest prominence to Peirce's "Illustrations of the Logic of Science." In his review of James's Psychology in the Journal a dozen years later there is an incidental and less familiar but even more remarkable tribute to Peirce.

The ripeness, repose and perfect digestion of Lotze, who abhorred every flavor of rococo, eclecticism or extravagance of expression; or of our own Charles Peirce, who burns his own smoke, and talks with the rifle rather than with the shot gun, or water hose, are most contrasted with this author, and most desired in this confused and distracting field.84

After Hall had become president of Clark in 1889 and made it a university after the Hopkins pattern, emphasizing original research

Page 68 and the training of specialists, Peirce visited the new university on at least two occasions, as we learn from his review of the Clark Decennial Celebration volume.

The Clark University, in recognizing the pursuit of science as its first object, with teaching,—of course, an indispensable means of securing continuity of work,—as only a subordinate, or at most a secondary object, has perhaps the most elevated ideal of any university in the world; and I believe it to be so much the better for the individual students. At any rate, I can only record my personal observation in two visits, after having endeavored at many universities to learn to appreciate the atmospheres of such places, that there is a sweetness and a strength there quite exceptional.85

6. Daniel Coit Gilman. Fabian Franklin, who had been a pupil of Peirce, says in his life of Gilman:

In regard to individual men, as well as in regard to schemes of work, his eyes were open to what was outside the customary routine, and quick to seize upon anything of distinguished excellence . . the singular genius of Charles S. Peirce was made a source of remarkable intellectual stimulation in the University through the establishment of a lectureship which he filled along lines peculiarly his own.86

In view of Hall's esteem of Peirce, and Peirce's evident ability to get along with Hall, the question arises why Peirce was not continued as Lecturer after Hall became Professor. By that time Sylvester had gone. The University was as prosperous as at any time before or since. There is no evidence of quarrel between Peirce and any remaining member of the faculty.

Several answers may be suggested. Perhaps Gilman did not conceive logic as an important field of research, thought an elementary course of undergraduates sufficient, and thought Peirce likely to confuse young minds with needless subtleties. Or he may have valued Morris's instruction at least as highly as Peirce's; and, having chosen Hall for the professorship, may have wished not to make any choice between the two remaining lecturers.

It seems much more likely, however, that the limit of eccentricity and emotional instability which Gilman could indefinitely tolerate in a man of genius was marked by Sylvester; that Peirce overpassed the limit; and that, when Sylvester had removed himself, Gilman took the first politic occasion to remove Peirce. If Peirce's unorthodox economic, political, and social views found expression during his Hopkins years, they also must have weighed heavily against him.

In the absence of decisive evidence, we conclude with a few episodes which have not been touched in other connections above.

Page 69 On Christmas Day, 1879, after the strain of his first three months at Hopkins, Peirce wrote Gilman from Cambridge that his New York physician considered the state of his brain rather alarming and feared some sort of breakdown. Peirce himself was confident that he would quickly recover his balance. In any case he would not return to Baltimore until the symptoms had passed, and this might not be in time for the resumption of classes on January 5. Apparently, however, he did return then or soon thereafter, as he took part in a meeting of the Metaphysical Club on January 13.

One of the forgotten English thinkers of the nineteenth century in whom there was a flurry of interest at Hopkins was Joseph John Murphy. The second edition of his Habit and Intelligence was reviewed in the Metaphysical Club by E. B. Wilson. A presentation copy of it was forwarded to Halsted by Gilman. During Peirce's Hopkins years, Murphy published several articles on the algebra of relatives, with frequent reference to Peirce's work.87 On May 6, 1881, Peirce wrote to Gilman:

I have been having some correspondence with J. J. Murphy, the author of Habit and Intelligence. I want to have some conversation with him. He has taken up the Logic of Relatives. If I were to invite him over here I suppose the University would wish him to give some lectures, as he is a man with something useful to say. He is probably not so well up in modern psychology as Hall and James, but he is one of the philosophers of the day. His book is very good and interesting and has passed two editions. Anyway I would like to invite him to make me a visit and should like to be able to say that if he will accept I have little doubt the University will invite him to give a course of lectures. Can I do so and if so what would he get for these lectures? I shall try to have him invited to the Lowell Institute also.

Visiting lecturers from abroad were a chief attraction at Hopkins. Bryce and Freeman were being invited for the fall, and Cayley for the entire second half­year. But nothing came of Peirce's proposal.

We have noticed that in his first long letter to Gilman, Peirce had informed him that he was no longer living with his wife, Harriet Melusina Fay. "This is a fact to which you will naturally give a weight, should you seriously consider inviting me to Baltimore." Peirce instituted divorce proceedings in Baltimore on March 3, 1882, and the final decree was granted on April 24, 1883. On the same day Peirce wrote Gilman that something had gone wrong at the Coast Survey 88 and he was bringing his course to an end. Six days later, on April 30, shortly before sailing for Europe, he wrote from New York announcing his marriage to Madame Pourtalais (Juliette Froissy).

When the Peirces looked for a house in Baltimore in the fall of 1883, there was nothing suitable to lease for less than two years.

Page 70 Gilman assured Peirce that he might safely take such a lease. Late in December, however, one of the trustees imparted to the Executive Committee and Gilman "certain facts which had been brought to his knowledge quite derogatory to the standing of Mr. Peirce as a member of an academic staff."89 On January 26 the Executive Committee resolved that it was not desirable to continue the appointment of lecturers in philosophy and logic "on the present plan, after the present engagements expire," and Gilman was requested to inform the lecturers of the probability of a change in the arrangements. When Peirce was informed, he inquired what were the causes of dissatisfaction and was told that his lectures had been irregular and that, while a good investigator, he was not a successful teacher. He sensed that the real reasons were being withheld. He complained of the loss to which he would be subjected as a result of his lease, and asked for a year's extension of his appointment. This was not granted, but eventually, in October or November, he received one thousand dollars in compensation for his loss on the house.

On May 4, 1887, after Peirce had retired to Milford, Superintendent Thorn of the Coast Survey received a request from Gilman to search Peirce's books in the Survey office for those he had failed to return to the Hopkins library. Thorn wrote Peirce for permission to open his boxes, but Peirce refused on the ground that he had the books in question with him in Milford.

On October 1, 1893, Peirce's older brother James Mills Peirce, professor of mathematics at Harvard, wrote Gilman asking if he could use Peirce for a course of lectures, perhaps similar to his Lowell Institute Lectures of the preceding winter on the history of science. Gilman replied on October 4:

The theme proposed is very attractive and the lecturer has unusual, even rare qualifications for its discussion, but I see no opening for him here. There was a time when we spent a considerable sum of money in what might be called accessory courses of general interest, but of late we have given up such luxuries, except as provided by special endowments.

On January 30, 1894, Peirce sent Gilman prospectuses of two books which he expected "soon to go to press with." One of these was the treatise of Petrus Peregrinus On the Loadstone; Latin text, English version, and notes, with "an introductory history of experimental science in the middle ages." This he said was the result of work done while he was connected with the Johns Hopkins. (He had transcribed the manuscript at Paris in May 1883.) The other was an original twelve­ volume work entitled The Principles of Philosophy; or, Logic,

Page 71 Physics, and Psychics, Considered as a Unity, in the Light of the Nineteenth Century. This, Peirce wrote Gilman,

is the great work of my life; and unless I greatly deceive myself it must long be remembered. Now, although when I left Baltimore there was some irritation in my mind, yet it never did find expression, I am glad to remember, otherwise than in letters addressed to you, neither directly nor in innuendo. Therefore, I am entirely free, as I am strongly impelled, in publishing this, to express my sense of obligation to you. For of all the impressions of my life, none stands out in finer and nobler relief than that of your conception of a university. (You will find it influenced my definition of university in the Century Dictionary.) Now I really don't feel very much gratitude to Mr. Johns Hopkins. It has never transpired that he knew at all what he was doing. As for my gratitude toward you, as a mere sentiment, you may not care for it; but on the other hand perhaps if it were emphatically expressed, say in a dedication, it might in some slight measure forward the work you have at heart. If such a thing would be agreeable to you, will you not graciously signify it?

Gilman replied on February 6 that he had no hesitation in saying that it would be gratifying to have his name, as president of the Johns Hopkins, associated in this way with the comprehensive work which Peirce was about to complete and publish. As it turned out, however, the subscriptions received for these works were insufficient, and neither was published.

On April 9, 1895, Peirce wrote Gilman soliciting summer pupils and adding:

It has always been my desire to establish a summer school of philosophical studies here.... If the Johns Hopkins would aid us to make our philosophical academy, we might arrange to let the University have the place when we are done with it...

In 1899 Peirce reviewed Gilman's life of Dana for the Nation. Though writing behind the shield of anonymity which the Nation's reviewers enjoyed, he charged the faults of the book as far as possible to the publishers and excused Gilman on the ground that "the task of preparing this biography was one not sought by [him], and which he could not well have declined, remote as are his own occupations from those of the geologist."90

When Gilman retired from the presidency of Hopkins in 1901 and became president of the newly founded Carnegie Institution of Washington, one of the early applications for a grant was from Peirce, to enable him to complete the treatise on logic which he had been writing for thirty years. Of some two dozen supporting letters, half

Page 72 a dozen were from his students and associates at Hopkins: Allan Marquand, B. I. Gilman, J. McKeen Cattell, Benjamin E. Smith, William E. Story, and G. Stanley Hall. Hall said he was greatly indebted to Peirce "for facts, ideas, and stimulus." B. I. Gilman, director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, wrote: "An intellect more penetrating and powerful... it has not been my fortune to encounter nor to hear of among the living." Story, professor of mathematics at Clark, wrote: ''I can truly say that it has never been my fortune to be thrown in contact with anyone whose suggestions were more valuable to me than his in my own department of pure mathematics." From a former associate of Sylvester, this was high praise indeed.91

The application was rejected and the treatise was never finished.92 Yet in a review of Simon Newcomb's Reminiscences in 1904, the year after the failure of his Carnegie application, Peirce took occasion to say:

The brief notice of the Johns Hopkins University may also be singled out as better even than the rest; and it does justice to the singular faculty of Dr. Gilman, that university's only true begetter.93

His great respect for Gilman's achievements as an administrator seems never to have been lessened for any considerable time by a sense of unfair or undiscerning treatment in his own case.

Historians of American philosophy need bear no grudge where Peirce bore none, but will regret that Gilman did not see his way to make a permanent place for Peirce in our nearest approach to a community of investigators.94

Notes

1. The chief unpublished materials on which this paper is based are the Peirce and the James Papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard University; the Gilman Papers in the Johns Hopkins Library (hereafter cited as G); the Coast Survey records in the National Archives (CS); and the W. T. Harris Papers in the Hoose Library of the School of Philosophy of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (the Peirce­Harris correspondence has been published by Wallace Nethery in the Personalist 43 [1962]:35­45). When the date of a document is given and it is clear to which collection it belongs, no footnote reference is added. Unless otherwise indicated, letters from Gilman and from Coast Survey officials are quoted from drafts or copies in G and CS respectively, but all other letters are quoted from originals.

Page 73 The chief published materials used are the Johns Hopkins University Circulars; its Annual Reports (hereafter Reports); and Peirce's Collected Papers.

Three essays on our subject were published shortly after Peirce's death. Ellery W. Davis, "Charles Peirce at Johns Hopkins," Mid­West Quarterly 2 (1914):48­56; Christine Ladd­Franklin, "Charles Peirce at the Johns Hopkins," Journal of Philosophy 13 (1916):715­22; and Joseph Jastrow, "Charles S. Peirce as a Teacher,'' ibid., 723­26. These are of permanent value, and we have made no attempt to incorporate the substance of them in the present essay.

Other aspects of Peirce's life during his Hopkins years­such as his work for the Coast Survey, his participation in the National Academy of Sciences, and his family relations­are ignored except as they bear directly on his career at Hopkins. His influence on the later work of his students­John Dewey and Benjamin Ives Gilman for examples­and his own later references to their work are also omitted. Even so, we have been able only to glance at some of the most important matters, such as the Studies in Logic and the Metaphysical Club. (Readers who seek more light on the Club may find Appendix IV useful. See note 94.)

2. Solon I. Bailey, The History and Work of the Harvard Observatory (New York: McGraw­Hill, 1931), pp. 124f, 189f, 260.

3. M. A. DeWolfe Howe, John Jay Chapman and His Letters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), pp. 94ff, 96f.

4. Mind 4 (1879):101f.

5. R. B. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1935), 1:292.

6. Ibid., 1:296; 2:117.

7. Peirce to Harris, 29 Nov. and 8 Dec. 1869.

8. Dated 1 Sept. 1856. "The best plan for founding a university is that which concentrates the interests of the largest community and combines the greatest variety of intellect with the smallest pecuniary outlay and the least provocation of opposition." Gilman referred to this plan in his inaugural address at Hopkins in 1876, University Problems (New York: Century Co., 1898), p. 29f.

9. Gilman had earlier tried to interest Harris himself in the Baltimore superintendency of schools, "having (I will frankly admit to you) an eye to the development of the J. H. Un. in the way we recently discussed" (Gilman to Harris, 19 May 1875). James later suspected Harris of laying siege to the professorship (Perry, 1:782, 786).

10. Perry, 1:537.

11. For this letter and for full details on James's candidacy see Jackson I. Cope, "William James's Correspondence with Daniel Coit Gilman, 1877­1881 ," Journal of the History of Ideas 12 (1951):609­27.

12. James to Gilman, 18 April 1881.

13. This letter is printed in full in Appendix II (see note 94).

14. 23 Jan. 1878.

15. Alan M. Chesney, The Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; A Chronicle, vol. 1, Early Years, 1867­1893 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1943), p. 96.

16. Mind 4 (1879):98.

17. R. M. Wenley, The Life and Work of George Sylester Morris (New York:

Macmillan, 1917), p. 139f.

18. Ibid., p. 147n. We have found no other record of this offer.

19. D. C. Gilman, The Launching of a University (New York: Dodd, Mead

& Co., 1906), p. 19.

Page 74 20. James to Gilman, 18 Jan. 1879.

21. James to Gilman, 18 July 1880.

22. Wenley, George Sylvester Morris, p. 153.

23. Circulars 6:130.

24. American Journal of Psychology 3 (1891):590.

25. G. S. Hall, Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (New York: D. Appleton Co., 1923), p. 245f.

26. Gilman, The Launching, pp. 19­23.

27. Gilman, University Problems, pp. [44], 45ff. The quotations that follow are from p. 60 (Circulars 4 [March 1885 ]:48f).

28. "The New Psychology," Andover Review 3 (1885):247f. An account of Wundt's psychology written by Hall from Germany in 1878 and published in the Nation 27 (1878):283f., had borne the title "The Philosophy of the Future."

29. Circulars 1:25. "A course of lectures on Medieval Logic, designed to show the spirit and leading doctrines of the logic of the Middle Ages, was also given by Mr. Peirce." A table of Peirce's courses for the five years appears as Appendix III (see note 94).

30. Mid­West Quarterly 2 (1914):48­56.

31. Circulars 1:160.

32. CP 5.358­410, 213­357. There is a bound volume of reprints of Peirce's "Papers on Logic" in the Johns Hopkins Library containing these five papers along with others, and including also the French versions of the two first named. "The two French versions, which I prefer to the English of the same papers, derive their merit from the skill of M. Leo Séguin, who was killed in Tunis in 1881."

33. Perhaps Peirce's students read his exposition of Ferrero in American Journal of Mathematics 1 (1878):55­64, instead of the original.

34. "Finally, it is desirable to illustrate a long concatenation of scientific inferences. For this purpose we take up Kepler's great work, De Motu Stellae Martis, the greatest piece of inductive reasoning ever produced. Owing to the admirable and exceptional manner in which the work is written, it is possible to follow Kepler's whole course of investigation from beginning to end, and to show the application of all the maxims of induction already laid down." Circulars 2 (1881): 12. This enables us to date the study of Kepler referred to in CP 5.362nl on p. 225.

35. Peirce's earliest publication on the constitution of matter, "The Chemical Theory of Interpenetration," American Journal of Science 85 (1863):78­82, has escaped the notice of writers on Peirce. In reviewing later the English translation of Meyer's book (N 2:259), Peirce wrote: "We do not know what more instructive basis for a course of lectures on the logic of explanatory science could be found than the history of the theory of gases. Whoever cares to see how explanatory research proceeds cannot fail to be interested in this handsome volume. As for the mathematical division, that too affords excellent exercises in reasoning, though of a different kind of reasoning, and exercises of quite an opposite character, since this division is infested with subtle fallacies.... In the revised edition, such fallacies are not so easily found as in the first, but there remains abundance of game for the logical sportsman."

36. Circulars I:234. "Besides the lectures, Mr. Peirce will give private instruction in the different branches of logic to those who may desire to receive it." (See note 45 below for his 1883­84 course.)

37. Circulars 2 (1882):11.

38. When Morris's appointment was terminated a half­year later, this was substantially true of ethics and of the other branches of philosophy also.

Page 75 Only psychology was developed as a field of research; and, after Hall's departure in 1888, even psychology was allowed to lapse until Baldwin's appointment in 1903.

39. Smithsonian Institution Report 55 (1900):693­99; The 19th Century (New York: Putnam's, 1901), pp. 312­22. "It was my inestimable privilege to have felt as a boy the warmth of the steadily burning enthusiasm of the scientific generation of Darwin, most of the leaders of which at home I knew intimately, and some very well in almost every country of Europe" (p. 312).

40. Journal of Philosophy 13 (1916):724f.

41. Circulars 3: 119.

42. Journal of Philosophy 13 (1916):716f. For a list of the papers read before the Club, see Appendix IV (see note 94).

43. Reports 6 (1881):51.

44. Peirce to Superintendent Thorn, 8 May 1887.

45. Ibid. In June 1883 (Circulars 2:136) it was announced that Peirce's general course for the following academic year would follow the contents of his "forthcoming treatise on logic." "The distribution of topics in the chapters is as follows: Generalities (5 chapters); Deductive Logic: Non­mathematical (3 chapters), Algebraic (4 chapters), Otherwise mathematical (4 chapters), Inductive Logic: Theory (9 chapters), Illustrations (6 chapters)." Among his surviving manuscripts is a roughly corresponding "Plan for Fifty Lectures on Logic" for 1883­84, which was probably drafted during the summer (MS 745).

46. George C. Keidel, "Johns Hopkins Incunabula,"Johns Hopkins Alumni Magazine 11 (1923):130­36. (Besides the volume of his reprints mentioned in note 32 above, there are two other such volumes in the Hopkins library.)

47. Osiris 1 (1936):138­40. See ibid., 116­24 for five letters from Sylvester to Benjamin Peirce in 1842­43.

48. These letters are in G.

49. Galois Lectures (Scripta Mathematica Library No. 5, 1941), p. 94.

50. Mid­West Quarterly 2 (1914):48.

51. N 1:61. For comparable expressions see ibid., 1:63; 3:181. See also Peirce's obituary notice of Sylvester in the New York Evening Post, 16 March 1897, 7:3­ 4, and (much abridged) in The Nation N 2:142.

52. Osiris 1 (1936): 144f. The three justly praised contributions to the Journal are: "On the Ghosts in Rutherfurd's Diffraction­Spectra," 2:330­47; "A Quincuncial Projection of the Sphere," 2:394­96; and "On the Algebra of Logic," 3:15­57. (It is possible that Sylvester had something to do with Peirce's election to membership in the London Mathematical Society on 11 March 1880.)

53. Story himself had planned such a journal before coming to Hopkins, and took a quasi­proprietary interest in it. When Sylvester sailed for England in the late spring of 1880, he left Story in charge of publication. In early June Sylvester wrote Gilman wondering why he had not had an acknowledgment of a manuscript sent to Story. On 22 July this was followed byanother letter in which Sylvester complained of Story's delay in publishing and of his acting contrary to instructions, and requested his removal. Story, he said, "informs me that he has allowed Rowland to exceed the limits of the Journal by 20 pages in flat disobedience to my directions and without referring the matter to me for my opinion and in face of the fact known to him that I had risked giving offense to C. S. Peirce by requesting him (which he complied with) to abridge his most valuable memoir in order that the proper limits might not be exceeded." On 24 July Gilman wrote a note to Story suggesting that a detailed explanation of his conduct of the Journal

Page 76 should be sent to Sylvester as a peace offering. Story replied to Gilman that his difficulty had arisen from Rowland's refusal to abridge his article. One of the causes of the delay in publication appears in a note Gilman received from the printers on 27 July, stating: "We have just learned that Prof. Sylvester's article was only returned to us on Saturday last, and that it was dreadfully cut up, and that another proof of it has to go out."

54. Circulars 1:180. Sylvester, Mathematical Papers (Cambridge University Press, 1909), 3:638.

55. In answer to an inquiry about Sylvester's methods of teaching, Ellery W. Davis later wrote: "Sylvester's methods! He had none. 'Three lectures will be delivered on a New Universal Algebra,' he would say; then, 'The course must be extended to twelve.' It did last all the rest of that year. The following year the course was to be Substitutions­Théorie, by Netto. We all got the text. He lectured about three times, following the text closely and stopping sharp at the end of the hour. Then he began to think about matrices again. 'I must give one lecture a week on those,' he said. He could not confine himself to the hour, nor to the one lecture a week. Two weeks were passed, and Netto was forgotten entirely and never mentioned again" (Florian Cajori, The Teaching and History of Mathematics in the United States [Washington: Government Printing Office, 1890], p. 265f; cf. 268). The course wascontinued in the fall of 1883 and was still unfinished when Sylvester left Hopkins in December.

56. As we have seen, however, he used it as a text in his course in the following year.

57. Circulars 1:203; Sylvester, Mathematical Papers, 3:643. The following footnote was added: "Mr. C. S. Peirce gave a form of this Algebra in a paper 'On a Notation for the Logic of Relatives,' published in 1870. The class of Associative Algebras to which this belongs were termed quadrates by the late Professor Clifford. [Communicated to the Editor by Mr. Peirce.]" In a footnote just preceding this, Sylvester himself said: "As far as the present writer is aware, Professor Cayley in his memoir on Matrices, (Phil. Trans., 1858), was the first to recognize the parallelism between quaternions and matrices, but the idea and method of effecting their complete identification is due to the late Prof. Benjamin Peirce or to his son Mr. C. S. Peirce."

58. Circulars 1:242; Mathematical Papers, 3:649.

59. Circulars 2:46; Mathematical Papers, 3:649f.

60. Circulars 2:86­88; CP 3.646­48.

61. The Circulars carried under the title the statement: "Published with the approbation of the Board of Trustees."

62. Circulars 2:86.

63. Cf. CP 4.321.

64. It would not be obvious to the casual reader that, as Peirce later put it, Sylvester here "ventilates his scorn for my father's work" (CP 4.141nI), but he certainly betrays a quite inadequate appreciation of its importancein relation to his own. A fair summary statement may be found in Cajori, A History of Mathematics (New York: Macmillan, 1893), p. 323f.

65. American Journal of Mathematics 6 (1884):271f, 282; Mathematical Papers (Cambridge University Press, 1912), 4:209f, 220. See, for example, Peirce's "On a Class of Multiple Algebras," Circulars 2:3.

66. People and Problems (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1908), p. 18. On Sylvester's "weakness ... in not being able to read the work of others," see also the testimony of his and Peirce's pupil A. S. Hathaway in Cajori, The Teaching and History, p. 266f.

67. Launching of a University, p. 66.

Page 77 68. Ibid., p. 69. There is a letter of Gilman to Sylvester dated 19 February 1881, refusing "to be again exposed to such a scene as occurred in my office on Thursday, for no business can be transacted when either part is excited."

69. Franklin, People and Problems, p. 24.

70. Circulars 1:16. Peirce read a paper at the same meeting on the geographical problem of the four colors.

71. N 1:61.

72. Peirce, "Width of Mr. Rutherfurd's Rulings," Nature 24 (1881):262. Perhaps because he was engaged on these experiments, in 1879­80 Peirce listed his office hours as 10­12 "on overcast days."

73. See, e.g., Rowland, Physical Papers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1902), pp. 492, 513, 553; and Charles E. St. John and others, Revision of Rowland's Preliminary Table of Solar Spectrum Wave­Lengths (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1928), p.v.

74. N 3:113. In a preliminary draft (MS 1464) Peirce called Rowland "the only deceased American physicist since Rumford whose published work has had an important bearing upon fundamental conceptions." J. W. Gibbs died in the following month; cf. Peirce's review of his Scientific Papers in The Nation (N 3:284).

75. Printed announcement in the Peirce Papers: "The undersigned is prepared to deliver at $ 150 each the following popular lectures new this season."

76. MS 1443; N 3:53.

77. Circulars 1:68.

78. This was just what Henry James had reported of him from Paris four and a half years earlier: "He is a very good fellow­when he is not in illhumour; then he is intolerable" (Perry, 1:536).

79. Hall, Life and Confessions, p. 226.

80. Journal of Philosophy 13 (1916):724. The results were reported under their joint names to the National Academy of Science at its Newport meeting in October 1884, and published in the Academy's Memoirs 3:1­11. Abstract in Circulars 5:46. See also Peirce's fascinating account in The Hound & Horn 2 (1929):277­80. Jastrow's memory confuses two investigations; Peirce's is characteristically precise. Though Peirce could never have confined himself to psychology, he later wrote that it was "destined to be the most important experimental research of the twentieth century; fifty years hence [i.e., 1955] its wonders may be expected to occupy popular imagination as wonders of electricity do now" (CP 6.587).

81. Circulars 3:32, 69.

82. Circulars 4:28.

83. American Journal of Psychology I (1887): 16, 165­70. There was also an article by Peirce's former pupil Christine Ladd­Franklin, and Peirce was prominent in Jastrow's article in the same number on "The Psycho­Physic Law and Star Magnitudes," and again in Jastrow's article in the next number, "A Critique of Psycho­ Physic Methods."

84. Ibid. 3 (1891):589f.

85. Science 11 (9000):621f.

86. Life of Daniel Coit Gilman (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1910), p. 239.

87. Memoirs of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society 27 (1879):90­101, (1881):201­24, and other papers listed in the bibliography of C. I. Lewis, A Survey of Symbolic Logic (Berkeley, 1918), p. 399.

88. In the Coast Survey files there is a fragment of a letter from Peirce to Superintendent Hilgard, undated but with a penciled notation "About April 15 '83," listing certain "serious matters for my attention abroad." The Coast Survey Report for 1883­84 says: "In pursuance of instructions dated

Page 78 April 23, 1883, Mr. Peirce left for Europe in May in order to make for the Coast and Geodetic Survey certain observations necessary for completing the connection of the American and English pendulum work and to obtain some pendulum apparatus of special construction."

89. Draft of an undated report by Gilman in the spring of 1884, apparently intended for a subsequent meeting of the Executive Committee or of the Trustees. The "facts" are not specified. Simon Newcomb played some role in the matter, the only clue to which is his letter of 22 December 1883 to Gilman: "I felt and probably expressed some uneasiness in the course of our conversation the other evening, lest I might have been the occasion of doing injustice to persons whose only wrong had been lack of prudence. I have therefore taken occasion to inquire diligently of my informant, and am by him assured that every thing I had said was fully justified. Furthermore, he deemed it part of the obligation of friendship to make known to you the exact state of the case, and would avail himself of the first opportunity to do so." 900. N 2:222.

91. Quoted from copies in the Houghton Library.

92. The rejection is recorded in the Yearbook, II, li, 1903, under the abstract formula: "The Committee has declined to make any grants ... for preparing systematic treatises in logic and philosophy." On 19 November of that year Peirce's brother Herbert wrote him that the whole matter had been laid before Mr. Carnegie himself, and that he had said: "That is just the sort of case I desired to help. If they will manage the thing right and help just such cases I will give not ten but twenty millions" (L 75).

93. N 3:161.

94. For lack of space, the four appendixes to this article are omitted and readers are referred to the original publication for them. In Appendix III, under 1879­1880, the course in Mill's Logic was taught by Marquand, not by Peirce. The discovery in 1971 of the Minute Book of the Metaphysical Club calls for extensive revision of Appendix IV. (As indicated in the bibliography, Jackson I. Cope was co­author of the preceding essay.)

Page 79

FIVE—Alexander Bain and the Genealogy of Pragmatism

In Charles Peirce's familiar account of the genesis of pragmatism in the Metaphysical Club at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the early 1870's, there is a passage which, though often quoted, has never been adequately clarified, refuted or confirmed. It reads:

... Nicholas St. John Green was one of the most interested fellows, a skillful lawyer and a learned one, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham. His extra­ordinary power of disrobing warm and breathing truth of the draperies of long worn formulas, was what attracted attention to him everywhere. In particular, he often urged the importance of applying Bain's definition of belief, as "that upon which a man is prepared to act." From this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary; so that I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism. (CP 5.12)1

The period to which Peirce refers is approximately 1872. The time at which he writes the letter to the Editor of The Nation from which the account is taken is thirty­ five years later, in 1907.2 The part of the letter in which this passage occurs was first published in 1929.3 It attracted little notice until its definitive republication in 1934. These dates suggest several questions.

(1) Is there any statement by Peirce prior to 1907 connecting pragmatism with Bain's theory of belief and using Bain's name? There is none in his published writings. I have found none in the much greater bulk of his unpublished papers.4

(2) Is there any such earlier statement by any other member of The Metaphysical Club? No; nor, for that matter, any later statement either.5

(3) Is there any such statement by Bain himself, who lived until 1903? No.

(4) Is there any such earlier statement by other pragmatists, by critics of Bain or of pragmatism, or by anyone else? If so, was it known to Peirce, and might it have prompted him in 1907 to assert a connection which, so far as we know, he had never previously

Page 80 asserted? There was, I believe, no positive statement, but there was at least one query by a critic; it was known to Peirce, and it may well have been the occasion for Peirce's assertion.

In 1904, after Personal Idealism 6 had espoused in England views approximating James's form of pragmatism, F. H. Bradley published in Mind an essay "On Truth and Practice" attacking what he took to be the common position. In a footnote to this article, Bradley said:

It would ... be interesting to know how our new gospel conceives its relation to Dr. Bain's theory of belief. It might seem to have taken that theory, and, without considering the objectives to which it is liable,7 to have gone beyond it by simply writing "truth" for "belief."8

F. C. S. Schiller, one of the contributors to Personal Idealism, replied to Bradley in the same year with an essay "In Defence of Humanism" in the course of which he said: "I cannot really now gratify his curiosity about Prof. Bain's theory of belief (which I have always found it very hard to recognize in the account given of it in Mr. Bradley's Logic)."9 In 1907, when Schiller republished this essay in his Studies in Humanism, he added that Bradley, in his critique of Bain's theory, "so far from refuting Pragmatism by anticipation ... appears to me to have very nearly stumbled into it."10

Peirce had probably read Schiller's essay in Mind. In any case, he had been reading Studies in Humanism when, later in 1907, he composed the passage which prompts our questions. Indeed, the book lay open before him during the composition of a later passage of the same letter.11 Now Peirce was in a position, as Schiller was not, to "gratify" Bradley's "curiosity," and I suggest that the impulse to do so was one of the motives of his belated account of the genesis of pragmatism.12

(5) Was a connection, historical or logical, between Bain's theory and pragmatism asserted or suggested between 1907 and 1929, and therefore in ignorance of Peirce's assertion, or between 1929 and 1934, and therefore probably in ignorance of it? Yes, with some frequency, but never with adequate analysis or documentation. I cannot here review the relevant literature, but I give some references in a footnote.13

Returning to Peirce's own statement, I shall now state the further questions which the present essay attempts to answer.

(6) Was it Bain or Green whom Peirce meant to call the grandfather of pragmatism? And whom the father?

(7) What, more exactly, was Bain's theory of belief?

(8) Did Peirce and the other founders of pragmatism take Bain's theory from Green, or did they know it at first hand?

Page 81 (9) Was pragmatism really "scarce more than a corollary" of Bain's theory? And did it originate as such?

These last four questions will now be discussed in order. In connection with some of them, certain subsidiary questions will also be raised and answered.

THE GRANDFATHER OF PRAGMATISM14

... Nicholas St. John Green ... often urged the importance of applying Bain's definition of belief.... From this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary; so that I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism. (CP 5.12)

Professor Perry took this to mean that Bain was the grandfather and Green the father.15 Others have rightly assumed that Peirce meant to claim paternity, but they have differed as to whether he meant to acknowledge Green or Bain as "the grandfather."16

It is not like Peirce to be so ambiguous. In this case the ambiguity arose from the very habit which usually eliminated it—that of writing at intervals several independent drafts of the same piece (in this case at least eight) and then comparing them before making a fair copy of the final draft, which in this case was never done. Two earlier drafts of the manuscript from which our quotation was taken 17 show exactly how the ambiguity arose. In the former of these the passage reads:

... Nicholas St. John Green, a profound lawyer, a student of Bentham, had a penetrating mind, wonderfully strong in separating the formalistic chaff of abstract formulae from their wholesome wheat. He was the grandfather of pragmatism.

In the latter it originally read:

... Nicholas St. John Green ... was possessed of an extraordinary power of disrobing warm and breathing truth of the draperies of too long worn formulas. I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism.

The words "I am disposed to think" were then crossed out and the following substituted:

... He eloquently urged the importance of Bain's definition of belief as that upon which a man is prepared to act, from which pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary, so that I am disposed to think &c .... 18

Page 82 It is clear that referring to Bain at this point was an afterthought, and that Peirce meant to grandfather pragmatism on Green. He was thinking in the active terms of generation. Green was an agent in the genesis of pragmatism; Bain was not. As we shall see later, Bain's theory had been an inactive element in Peirce's mind for several years before Green induced him to apply it.19

BAIN'S THEORY OF BELIEF

In English­speaking countries, the standard treatises on psychology in the latter half of the nineteenth century were those of Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain. Bain's was published in two volumes: The Senses and the Intellect (1855)20 and The Emotions and the Will (1859).21 A one­volume abridgment, better suited to textbook use, appeared in 1868 under the title Mental Science.22 Of the many original features of Bain's treatise and of its abridgment, the most striking and one of the most controverted was his theory of belief.23 The chapter devoted to this topic in The Emotions and the Will and that in Mental Science had, more than any others, the character of pronunciamentos.

Two other expositions of the theory are worthy of note. The unsigned article on "Belief" in Chambers' Encyclopaedia (1861) was written by Bain and is simply a statement and defense of his own theory. It reappeared unchanged in the American editions of Chambers' (1864, 1870, 1873, 1876, 1882) and in two American encyclopedias based upon it: Alden's Library of Universal Knowledge (1880) and The International Cyclopaedia (1884, 1891, 1894, 1898). This article, thus reprinted so often in popular encyclopedias on both sides of the Atlantic, virtually made Bain's theory the household word on its subject for forty years.

In 1869 John Stuart Mill published a new edition of his father's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind "with notes illustrative and critical" by Bain and himself. The topic of belief received the greatest prominence, from being the one on which the annotators most conspicuously disagreed with each other as well as with their author. In addition to their running notes to the chapter on "Belief," Bain and Mill added terminal notes of essay length in which they developed their own theories of belief. This section thus took on the character of a debate between Bain and the two Mills, with the result of bringing into sharp relief the three chief nineteenth­ century theories on the subject: James Mill making it to consist in indissoluble association, Bain in readiness to act, and John Stuart Mill finding in it an inexplicable residuum.

Page 83 The following summary is based chiefly on the very full statement of Bain's theory in the first edition of The Emotions and the Will (1859) but it takes account also of the Chambers' Encyclopedia article (1861), the chapter in Mental Science (1868), and the long note to James Mill's Analysis (1869). It will be noted that all four expositions antedate the birth of pragmatism in The Metaphysical Club.24

Bain's position in the history of psychology is analogous to John Stuart Mill's in the history of ethics. Bain sets out to maintain and to elaborate the doctrine of the association of ideas, but he quite transforms it by introducing a physiological basis and more especially by appealing to ''the inherent activity of the system." Nowhere is the latter more evident than in his theory of belief. As a consistent associationist, James Mill had made belief to consist in "indissoluble association." According to Bain, however,

The prevailing error on this subject consists in regarding Belief as mainly a fact of the Intellect, with a certain participation of the feelings. The usual assumption is, that if a thing is conceived in a sufficiently vivid manner, or if two things are strongly associated in the mind, the state of belief is thereby induced.25

Belief does, to be sure, involve both feeling and intellect, but there is nothing in either of these to impart its essence. It is essentially a growth or development of our active nature; that is, of the will. Our tendency to action takes on under certain conditions the aspect of belief, as under others it takes on aspects of desire, intention, deliberation, and resolution. An action spontaneously begun is spontaneously continued if it sensibly alleviates pain or sustains pleasure. It is when actions indifferent in themselves are carried through in anticipation of a subsequent fruition, that the will exhibits the complication called belief.

The strength of a belief has two measures: one motor, the other emotional. It is at its maximum if (a) we pursue intermediate ends or means with the same energy as we do the final end when it is within reach, and if (b) we are as elated by achieving the means as by achieving the end. It is less in proportion as the energy and elation are less.

Belief has no meaning except in reference to our actions. But Aristotle's distinction between potentiality and actuality applies.26 In respect of matters upon which we have no present occasion to act, our belief is "an attitude or disposition of preparedness to act" when occasion offers. Under civilization and education we acquire numerous beliefs of a scientific and historical kind, upon which it is not likely we shall ever have occasion to act. But the readiness is

Page 84 there if the unexpected occasion should arise, and the readiness constitutes the belief.

The evidence of belief in those cases in which occasions for action do arise is of course the objective evidence of our then acting in the appropriate ways. Until such an occasion arises, there is only the subjective evidence of our having the same feeling that we had in those cases in which our belief has subsequently been confirmed by action. A traveler, let us say, brings us reports of Africa and of France. We later travel in France and act on that part of the information. We feel a similar confidence in the African report, though as yet we have had no occasion to act on it. "We express this attitude by saying that if we went to Africa we would do certain things in consequence of the information."27 But the belief is the readiness, not the feeling which avouches it.

Disbelief is not the opposite of belief but belief of the opposite.28 The real opposite of belief is doubt and uncertainty. There is a felt difference between the two. Belief, at least when it is "the assurance of good in the distance, is the name for a serene, satisfying, and happy tone of mind." The state of doubt, on the other hand, "is one of discomfort in most cases, and sometimes of the most aggravated human wretchedness."29

Though experience and emotion enter into the shaping and modification of belief, its grand source is our "intense primitive credulity."30

The foremost rank, among our intuitive tendencies involved in belief, is to be assigned to the natural trust that we have in the continuance of the present state of things, or the disposition to go on acting as we have once begun. This is a sort of Law of Perseverance in the human mind, like the first law of Motion in Mechanics.... 31 It is the active prompting of the mind itself that instigates, and in fact constitutes, the believing temper; unbelief is an after product,32 and not the primitive tendency.33

Experience does not so much generate belief as direct, rectify, and, above all, contract it; and it does so in the first place by surprising us and so generating doubt.34 "Sound belief" (i.e., knowledge) is the result not of "a pacific and gentle growth" but of "the battering of a series of strongholds."35

"Belief always contains an intellectual element; there being, in its least developed form, an Association of Means and End."36 The intellectual element is most obvious in the chastened beliefs that issue from doubt and inquiry. Nevertheless, even the latter are not essentially intellectual.

When we have been disciplined to consult observation and experience before making affirmations respecting things distant in place or time,

Page 85 instead of generalizing haphazard, we import very extensive intellectual operations into the settlement of our beliefs;37 but these intellectual processes do not constitute the attitude of believing. They are set agoing by motives to the will­by the failures and checks encountered in proceeding on too narrow grounds; and when we have attained the improved knowledge, we follow it out into practice by virtue of voluntary determinations, whose course has been cleared by the higher flight of intelligence; yet there is nothing in mere intellect that would make us act, or contemplate action, and therefore nothing that makes us believe.38

So much for the theory of belief in its original form, as stated in publications of the decade 1859­1869. In 1872, however, in the third edition of Mental Science, while leaving the text unchanged, Bain added to the Appendix a "Note on the chapter on Belief" beginning

In the chapter on Belief, I have given what I now regard as a mistaken view of the fundamental nature of the state of Belief, namely, to refer it to the Spontaneous Activity of the System. I consider the correct view to be, that belief is a primitive disposition to follow out any sequence that has been once experienced, and to expect the result. It is a fact or incident of our Intellectual nature, although dependent as to its energy upon our Active and Emotional tendencies.39

Three years later, in the third edition of The Emotions and the Will (1875), the chapter on belief was said in the preface to have been rewritten "with some modifications."40 In this definitive exposition of the theory, slightly greater prominence is given to the "intellectual" aspect of belief at the beginning of the chapter and in a few other places. The general effect remains the same, however, as we shall see from what James made of it and communicated to his students; and Bradley, for example, professed to be unable to distinguish the earlier and later forms of Bain's theory.41 Belief is still "essentially related to Action, that is, volition.... Preparedness to act upon what we affirm is admitted on all hands to be the sole, the genuine, the unmistakable criterion of belief." ". .. Action is the basis, and ultimate criterion of belief ...." ''The readiness to act is thus what makes belief something more than fancy."42 At the very end of the chapter, however, Bain conceded the validity of objections raised by James Sully, and offered the following compromise:

In referring belief to our Activity, I have always included in the statement a reference to what I call primitive credulity, which, however expressed, I still account the first germ and perennial substance of the state. I have here regarded belief as a primitive disposition to follow out any sequence that has been experienced, and to expect the result. It is thus an incident of our intellectual constitution; for it first shapes and forecasts the order of the world and then proceeds upon that, till

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a check occurs. With the mental conception of a sequence experienced, there is involved the assumption that what the past has been the future will be. We may if we please, call it an impotence of thought; for, without some positive interference from without, there is no other way of doing our thinking. It is not made up, in the first instance, by either activity or emotion, but is largely magnified by both. 43

This revision of 1875 was too late to influence the original formulation of pragmatism, but it is possible that the Note to the 1872 edition of Mental Science came in time to do so. For this reason it is worth observing that the outstanding feature to this Note is not the verbal recantation at the beginning but the restatement of "the agencies in Belief" which follows. Here the chief point of interest for our purposes is the more detailed account of the causes and effects of doubt, and the indications of the forms that inquiry may take with a view to reinstatement of belief. After a rephrasing of the doctrine of primitive credulity, Bain proceeds:

Suppose, next, what happens in a great number of our primitive expectations, that we encounter a failure, in other words, a breach of sequence .... This failure, or interruption, produces a mental shock, a breach of expectation, a disappointment, which unhinges and discomposes the mind. It is in point of fact destructive of the prior state of expectation; that state cannot be renewed without a roundabout process.... It becomes a serious part of our education to surmount, reconcile, and accommodate, these interrupted sequences; and we fall upon various modes of effecting the end. There are some methods of a purely rational kind; as, for example, when we set ourselves to discover the reasons of the discrepancy and find that it is only apparent. Another way is to surrender entirely certain sequences as having no validity whatever. At this stage repetition is useful as a test to discriminate the accidental from the persistent sequences. 44

And so on. This is Bain's nearest approach to Peirce's belief­doubt­inquiry­belief continuum.

STUDY OF BAIN BY THE FOUNDERS OF PRAGMATISM

Is there evidence, apart from Peirce's statement, that Green was familiar with and "often urged the importance of applying Bain's definition of belief"? None from which alone the truth of that statement could be concluded, but some which tends to support it. Green's son, Frederick Green, professor emeritus of law at the University of Illinois, has shown me his father's copies of the 1869 edition of James Mill's Analysis with notes by Bain, and of Bain's Logic in the first edition of 1870. Both contain marginal scorings and annotations by

Page 87 Green, but the pages expounding the theory of belief are not marked. Professor Green informs me that his father's copies of The Senses and the Intellect and The Emotions and the Will were also in his possession until recent years but that he cannot now find them. There is, I believe, no reference to Bain by name in Green's published writings. There are some reverberations of his theory of belief, however, 45 and also a statement of the closely related ideo­motor theory which is unmistakably based on Bain and repeats much of his phraseology. 46

It should be noticed that Peirce says, not that Green discovered or introduced or advocated Bain's theory, but that he often urged the importance of applying it. This leaves open the possibility that some or all of the other members of the Club were already familiar with Bain's psychology in general and committed to his theory of belief in particular before the Club was formed. Indeed, the context of Peirce's statement suggests that, among the members of the Club, Bain's definition was a "long worn formula" assented to but unused, until, at Green's insistence, they began applying it and thereupon discovered "the warm and breathing truth"—namely, pragmatism—of which it was but the "drapery."

We proceed, therefore, to the question: Is there evidence that members of the Club other than Green were acquainted with Bain's theory? And we confine ourselves at first to evidence from or bearing upon the years prior to 1871 and therefore prior to the earliest formulations of pragmatism.

The earliest evidence concerns John Fiske. On June 17, 1860, he wrote to his mother from Cambridge that he had been visiting libraries and bookstores and examining "the works of all the English positivists," including Bain's Senses and Intellect and Emotions and Will. "No previous instance in the history of thought can be found of so many great thinkers uniting under the same standard. I thought you might like to know who the great men are to whose school I belong." 47 In December 1861 he published an essay on "Mr. Buckle's Fallacies" in the National Quarterly Review, in which he twice referred with approval to Bain's theory of belief, but in such a way as to show that he did not understand it fully. 48 In the North American Review for January 1868 Fiske reviewed the volume of Mill's Dissertations and Discussions which contained Mill's essay on Bain's psychology, an essay in which six pages were devoted to an account of Bain's theory of belief, with extensive quotations; but Fiske disposed of the essay in one sentence: "The review of Bain's psychology is an excellent, but somewhat too scanty, summary of the case.'' 49

In the very condensed diary which 0. W. Holmes, Jr., kept during his trip to England in the summer of 1866, there appears the following entry for Monday June 11:

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Dined at the Members' [of the House of Commons] dining room with Mr. Mill with whom was Mr. Bain psychologist—and we talked—I was struck with the absence of imaginative impulse esp. in Mr. Bainexcellent for facts and criticism but not open to the infinite possibilities—eh?50

At the back of the same diary there is a list of books which Holmes read in the fall of 1866 after his return from Europe. This list includes Bain's Emotions and Will, which as we have seen contains the most extended exposition of the theory of belief. In 1870 the Holmeses borrowed from the Athenaeum Library Bain's Emotions and Will and Senses and Intellect and James Mill's Analysis,51 the last doubtless in the edition of 1869 containing Bain's long note on belief.52

Peirce and James on various occasions refer to the late 1850's and the 1860's—the period of their own first essays in philosophy—as an epoch in which Bain shared sway with Mill. The Senses and the Intellect appeared in the year in which Peirce entered Harvard College, and The Emotions and the Will in the year of his graduation. These books, he recalled in 1893, "were of the utmost service in their time in leading young men to a scientific way of thinking about psychology. Many of those men, no longer young, gratefully estimate Bain's powers by their own indebtedness to him" (MS 400). Meanwhile Peirce had come to regard Spencer's Psychology, which had appeared in the same year with Bain's first volume, as superior in originality and value, but, as he wrote in 1904, Bain's "taught us more because we were better prepared for it"53­—prepared, for instance, by the work of the Mills. In 1888 James wrote in the Nation: ''Twenty­five years ago all of us whose education had any outlook and vitality were pupils of the Mills and Bain."54 That would take us back to 1863, when James was beginning his medical studies and his interests were shifting from chemistry to biology and psychology.

Peirce and James both owned copies of the first edition of Bain's Mental and Moral Science, published in London in 1868. In James's copy, now in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the chapter on belief is scored and annotated; in Peirce's copy, now in the Johns Hopkins University Library, there are no markings in this chapter.

By that time, James was already familiar with the much longer exposition of the theory of belief in The Emotions and the Will, in either the first edition of 1859 or the second of 1865, for we find him quoting from it in his review of Liébeault's Du sommeil in the Nation for July 16, 1868:

... it seems now established as an indubitable fact that one state natural to the mind is that of inertia, a condition in which it is the passive slave of a limited group of impressions. The peculiarity of the state

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seems to consist rather in the limitation of the impressions than in the fatality with which they tow the mind after them wherever they chance to go. For the mind naturally accepts every impression as a reality. Professor Bain speaks obscurely of a mental law of inertia "analogous to the first law of motion" which gives rise to our belief in the uniformity of nature and makes us think that what has been will be.55

Shortly after finishing this review, James wrote to his friend Tom Ward from Dresden than an "optimistic faith," looking upon the world as a progressive development, seemed to him the best, "practically at any rate." "And if the philosophy of Mill, Bain, etc., ever becomes victorious, a terrestrial harmony must become our summum bonum. Perhaps a new, simple and classical era may be so inaugurated for us after the fever of the Christian and barbarous period...."56 On his way home from Germany in the fall, James bought a copy of the third edition of Bain's Senses and Intellect in Paris.57 This copy, extensively scored and annotated, is in the Houghton Library.58

In 1869 James began an essay on the conscious automaton theory which was to discuss Bain among other authors, but he soon abandoned the project.59

In November, 1869, Peirce reviewed for the Nation the new edition of James Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind which had been prepared by John Stuart Mill with the assistance of Bain and others.60 He made no reference to the chapter on Belief, or to Bain's and J. S. Mill's long notes expounding their own theories. Twenty years later, however, in his definition of Belief for the Century Dictionary, he quoted one of J. S. Mill's notes.61

In James's notebook entry of April 30, 1870, which records the crisis of the previous day, Bain is associated with Renouvier in James's decision that he would not only act with his will "but believe as well." "Today has furnished the exceptionally passionate initiative which Bain posits as needful for the acquisition of habits. I will see to the sequel."62

In November 1868 Chauncey Wright was asked to review for The Nation Bain's Mental Science and Porter's Human Intellect.63 For some reason Porter's book was eventually reviewed by Peirce instead,64 and no review of Bain's was published. In January 1870,65 however, when Wright was commissioned by President Eliot to give a course of University Lectures in Psychology the following fall and winter, he decided to use Bain's book as text.66 In preparation for his lectures, he began rereading the two volumes of Bain's original treatise, of which the Mental Science was an abridgment. In his letters67 we can in part follow the progress of his reading and later of his lectures. The latter began October 4, 1870, and continued into

Page 90 February 1871. This was apparently the earliest use of any work of Bain's as a textbook in this country.

During the summer of 1870, while continuing his preparation for the lectures, Wright also read A. R. Wallace's Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1870).68 In the latter part of August he wrote a review article upon it which appeared in the North American Review for October, under the title, "Limits of Natural Selection."69 He gave it as his opinion that consciousness, language, and thought were so far from being beyond the province of natural selection, as Wallace supposed, that they afforded one of the most promising fields for its future investigations. It was probably while working on this article, or perhaps even while correcting the proofs, that he reached Bain's chapter on belief near the end of The Emotions and the Will. This suggested a fresh application of the principle of natural selection to the development of the individual mind by its own experiences. Accordingly, he added a long footnote, almost a short essay in itself, arguing that "our knowledges and rational beliefs result, truly and literally, from the survival of the fittest among our original and spontaneous beliefs," and suggesting that the chief prejudice against this conclusion would be removed if we adopted Bain's definition of belief. Among the native faculties of the individual mind, he said, is

the power of reproducing its own past experiences in memory and belief; and this is, at least, analogous ... to the reproductive powers of physical organisms, and like these is in itself an unlimited, expansive power of repetition. Human beliefs, like human desires, are naturally illimitable. The generalizing instinct is native to the mind. It is not the result of habitual experiences, as is commonly supposed, but acts as well on single experiences, which are capable of producing, when unchecked, the most unbounded beliefs and expectations of the future. The only checks to such unconditional natural beliefs are other and equally unconditional and natural beliefs, or the contradictions and limiting conditions of experience. Here, then, is a close analogy, at least, to those fundamental facts of the organic world on which the law of Natural Selection is based; the facts, namely, of the "rapid increase of organisms," limited only by "the conditions of existence," and by competition in that "struggle for existence" which results in the "survival of the fittest." As the tendency to an unlimited increase in existing organisms is held in check only by those conditions of their existence which are chiefly comprised in the like tendencies of other organisms to unlimited increase, and is thus maintained (so long as external conditions remain unchanged) in an unvarying balance of life; and as this balance adjusts itself to slowly changing external conditions, so, in the history of the individual mind, beliefs which spring spontaneously from simple and single experiences, and from a naturally unlimited tendency to generalization, are held mutually in check, and

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in their harmony represent the properly balanced experiences and knowledges of the mind, and by adaptive changes are kept in accordance with changing external conditions, or with the varying total results in the memory of special experiences. This mutual limitation of belief by belief, in which consists so large a part of their proper evidence, is so prominent a feature in the beliefs of the rational mind, that philosophers had failed to discover their true nature, as elementary facts, until this was pointed out by the greatest of living psychologists, Professor Alexander Bain. The mutual tests and checks of belief have, indeed, always appeared to a great majority of philosophers as their only proper evidence; and beliefs themselves have appeared as purely intellectual phases of the mind. But Bain has defined them, in respect to their ultimate natures, as phases of the will; or as the tendencies we have to act on mere experience, or to act on our simplest, most limited experiences. They are tendencies, however, which become so involved in intellectual developments, and in their mutual limitations, that their ultimate results in rational beliefs have very naturally appeared to most philosophers as purely intellectual facts; and their real genesis in experience has been generally discredited, with the exception of what are designated specially as "empirical beliefs."70

This was probably read by all the members of The Metaphysical Club. At least one of its members, Joseph B. Warner, attended Wright's lectures on Bain's psychology.71 The link between Darwin's theory of evolution and Bain's theory of belief was perhaps also discussed by Wright in meetings of the Club. In any case, his fellow members thought of him as a continuer and developer on the one hand of the work of Darwin and on the other of that of Bain and Mill.72

So far we have confined ourselves to evidence of acquaintance with Bain prior to the genesis of pragmatism. We may now add a few indications for the period between its genesis in the early 70's and the appearance in the late 70's of Peirce's and James's earliest published formulations of it.

In 1872 James wrote to Charles Renouvier: "With us it is the philosophy of Mill, Bain, and Spencer which just now carries everything before it." He suggested that Renouvier's philosophy seemed "on its phenomenist side to be peculiarly qualified to appeal to minds trained in the English empirical school" and in other respects to supply certain deficiencies of that school. Renouvier replied: "You say quite truly that the teaching of Mill and Bain ... can serve as a preparation for mine .... I shall try to develop this idea."73

In May 1874 John Fiske was in London, had "tea at Huxley's with Mrs. Bain," and "dined at Spencer's, with Masson, Bain, Lewes, and Clifford." Lewes was the life of the party, but "Masson and Bain are not devoid of wit either, and their broad Scotch accent helps it."74 In the fall of 1874, Fiske's Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy appeared.

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Bain was quoted twice in the chapter on "Sociology and Free­Will." 75 A meeting, apparently of The Metaphysical Club, was appointed to discuss the work, and Fiske went to sleep under their noses.76

When the third edition of Bain's Emotions and Will appeared late in 1875, James reviewed it in connection with the second edition of Renouvier's Essais de critique générale. "The two philosophers of indubitably the widest influence in England and America since Mill's death are Messrs. Bain and Spencer... The thoroughness of the descriptive part of Bain's treatises, and the truly admirable sagacity of many of the psychological analyses and reductions they contain, has made them deservedly classical."77

In 1878­1879 James used Bain's Senses and Intellect and his Emo­ tions and Will as textbooks in his psychology course in the department of philosophy. In 1880­1881 he used Bain's Mental Science as textbook and depended on his own lectures to supply the elaboration and illustration, as Wright had done a decade before.78

James's copies of Bain's works are annotated with a view to classroom use. Key phrases are underscored and key passages are marked R in the margin, apparently for reading to his students. Questions for quizzing are written out in the margins, with pointers to the key words in the text. There are many cross­references, and also references to authors not cited by Bain.

What follows is the gist of what James expected his students to learn from the chapter on Belief in the third edition of The Emotions and the Will, in the form of a consecutive transcript of some of James's marginal queries and of the answering phrases or sentences of Bain's text to which they point.79

Q. What is "the basis, and ultimate criterion, of belief"?

A. "Action" (506).

Q. What is "the real opposite of belief"?

A. "Not disbelief, but doubt, uncertainty" (509).

Q. How is "the strength of belief" tested?

A. "In two ways. First, in the pursuit of our ends, if we work as strongly for the means, as we do for the end, we have a perfect con­ fidence in the connection of the two .... The second test of strength is the elation caused by attaining the means to a given end; or the depression caused by a prognostic of calamity" (51O).

Q. What is "the leading fact in belief"?

A. "Our Primitive Credulity" (511). "The assumption that the uncontradicted is true" (526).

Q. What about "the number of repetitions"?

A. It "counts for little in the process: we are as much convinced after ten as after fifty; we are more convinced by ten unbroken, than by fifty for and one against" (512).

Q. What is "the operation of experience in strengthening belief"?

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A. "To deal with hostile shocks, to rescue the mind from the clash of contradictions ... by purifying and correcting the sequence, and giving it a shape that no longer brings disappointment" (514f.).

Q. What is "the influence of Feelings or Emotions on Belief"? (520).

A. "When, as in all doubtful matters, there are appearances for and against a given uniformity, emotion, lending itself to one side, makes that side appear the strongest for the time, and sways belief accordingly" (522).

Q. What is "the power of the Will" over belief?

A. "The Will, as an influence on the Attention, assists in that undue selection of circumstances that creates a prepossession on one side" (525).80

The conclusion of the matter is this. Prior to the genesis of pragmatism, all the members of The Metaphysical Club—Green, Fiske, James, Peirce, Holmes, Wright and Warner—were acquainted at first hand with works of Bain in which his theory of belief was expounded; Fiske, James and Wright had referred to the theory in their published writings; and Wright had made a significant application of it. Furthermore, at or before the time of his own and Peirce's first published formulations of pragmatism (1877­1879), James made a careful re­examination of the theory in Bain's final exposition of it in the third edition (1875) of The Emotions and the Will.

It appears very likely, therefore, that whatever, as a matter of logic, pragmatism could have owed to Bain's theory of belief, it did, as a matter of face, owe to it.

PRAGMATISM A COROLLARY?

. . . Nicholas St. John Green ... often urged the importance of applying Bain's definition of belief, as "that upon which a man is prepared to act." From this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary. (CP 5.12)

By pragmatism Peirce here means the doctrine expounded in a paper which he read before The Metaphysical Club and which he later expanded into two articles for the Popular Science Monthly: "The Fixation of Belief" and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear." What he means by its being "scarce more than a collollary" of Bain's definition may appear if we review in skeleton form the argument which leads up to the formulation of the pragmatic maxim in "How to Make Our Ideas Clear."

. . . the action of thought is excited by the irritation of doubt, and ceases when belief is attained; so that the production of belief is the sole function of thought.... [Belief] has just three properties: First, it is

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something that we are aware of; second, it appeases the irritation of doubt; and, third, it involves the establishment in our nature of a rule of action, or, say for short, a habit.... The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise. If beliefs do not differ in this respect, if they appease the same doubt by producing the same rule of action, then no mere differences in the manner of consciousness of them can make them different beliefs.... The whole function of thought is to produce habits of action.... To develop its meaning, we have, therefore, simply to determine what habits it involves. Now, the identity of a habit depends on how it might lead us to act, not merely under such circumstances as are likely to arise, but under such as might possibly occur, no matter how improbable they may be. What the habit is depends on when and how it causes us to act. As for the when, every stimulus to action is derived from perception; as for the how, every purpose of action is to produce some sensible result. Thus, we come down to what is tangible and practical, as the root of every real distinction of thought, no matter how subtile it may be; and there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice.... The occasion of such action would be some sensible perception, the motive of it to produce some sensible result. Thus our action has exclusive reference to what affects the senses, our habit has the same bearing as our action, our belief the same as our habit, our conception the same as our belief.... Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves, and mistake a mere sensation accompanying the thought for a part of the thought itself.... It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (CP 5.394­402)

Peirce frequently distinguishes corollarial from theorematic reasoning. 81 Corollarial reasoning employs only the general principles of logic, whereas theorematic reasoning involves constructive imagination as well; in geometry, for instance, it involves constructing and experimenting with diagrams. Here, therefore, he means modestly to disclaim any considerable degree of the latter and higher order of reasoning in the derivation of pragmatism. Once Green had persuaded him to try Bain's definition, the rest was simple logic. If the essence of a belief is a habit or disposition to act, then different beliefs are distinguished by the different habits of action they involve, and the rule for clarifying the conceptual elements in beliefs will be to refer them to the habits of action. More generally, the rule for clarifying a proposition (whether believed or not) is to refer it to the habits of action in which the belief of it would consist.

Page 95 Two questions may still be raised. On the one hand, can we show by other evidence than Peirce's word that pragmatism was not born without benefit of Bain and only afterwards christened as a corollary of his fashionable theory? On the other hand, since an indefinite number of corollaries might be drawn from Bain's theory, how are we to account for the drawing of this particular one?

Let us assume for the time being that the answer to the first question is yes, and let us approach the second by considering more closely what Peirce was doing when he drew the corollary in question, and why the nature of his inquiry should lead to that particular corollary. About the time when Peirce wrote the account which started all our questions, he composed another unfinished and still unpublished letter entitled "Pragmatism Made Easy" and addressed "To the Editor of The Sun."82 This letter gives the following account of the matter.

Green was especially impressed with the doctrines of Bain and impressed the rest of us with them; and finally the writer of this brought forward what we called the principle of pragmatism .... The particular point that had been made by Bain and that had most struck Green and through him the rest of us, was the insistence that what a man really believes is what he would be ready to act upon and to risk much upon. The writer endeavored to weave that truth in with others which he had made out for himself, so as to make a consistent doctrine of cognition.

What were these other truths? Peirce continues: "It appeared to him to be requisite to connect Bain's doctrine on one hand with physiological phenomena and on another with logical distinctions."83 He does not here specify the physiological phenomena, but from a passage in "The Fixation of Belief" it appears that he meant those of nervous irritability (CP 5.373; cf. 6.22, 280­82). As for the "logical distinctions," Peirce first divides "logical predicates" according as they are connected with a single subject, with two, or with more than two.84 He then applies this distinction to the familiar three­fold division of "the phenomena of consciousness'' into those of feeling, volition, and cognition. He finds feeling to be a single, volition a double, and cognition a triple consciousness. Cognition, that is, is a consciousness "of the sign, of the real object cognized, and of the meaning or interpretation of the sign, which the cognition connects with that object." This, he concludes, affords "a definition of cognition, a more distinct and complete notion of what it consists in than any that had previously been proposed."

The question arises, how did Peirce connect Bain's doctrine with the physiological phenomena and with the 'logical distinctions'? The formulation of the logical distinctions which I have just quoted sug­

Page 96 gests that he did so by means of his own doctrine of the categories: firstness, secondness, and thirdness. If with this hypothesis in mind we re­examine the argument of the Popular Science Monthly articles, we observe in the first place that he restates Bain's theory in the form of an analysis of belief into three elements, and that these elements exemplify the three categories in order. Belief, he says, "has just three properties: First, it is something that we are aware of [i.e., "the feeling of believing," which is "a calm and satisfactory state" (CP 5.371, 372)]; second, it appeases the irritation of doubt; and third, it involves the establishment in our nature of a rule of action, or, say for short, a habit'' (CP 5.397).

In the second place, Peirce restates Bain's theory of the relation between doubt and belief in a way which we are now prepared to punctuate with the categories as follows: "Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state [firstness] from which we struggle to free ourselves [secondness] and pass into the state of belief [thirdness]" (CP 5.372).

And in the third place, he makes the connection with the physiological phenomena in words which we are prepared to punctuate in the same fashion: "This reminds us," he continues, "of the irritation of a nerve [firstness] and the reflex action produced thereby [secondness]; while for the analogue of belief, in the nervous system, we must look to what are called nervous associations [thirdness]for example, to that habit of the nerves in consequence of which the smell of a peach will make the mouth water" (CP 5.373).

This restatement of Bain's theory in terms of the categories had two chief consequences. It brought into sharper relief the doctrine that the essence of belief is not merely action but habits of action. And it gave greater emphasis to the struggle to escape doubt and attain belief. Peirce calls this struggle "inquiry." The only immediate motive for it, he says, is the irritation of doubt, and its sole object is the fixing of belief (CP 5.374, 375).

This, however, is not the end of the matter. "The Fixation of Belief" and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" are the first two of a connected series of six papers under the general title, "Illustrations of the Logic of Science." The four subsequent papers are: "The Doctrine of Chances," "The Probability of Induction," "The Order of Nature," and "Deduction, Induction and Hypothesis." The upshot of the series is the distinction of hypothesis and induction from each other and from deduction. One of the merits of the distinction proposed, Peirce says, is that "it is associated with an important psychological or rather physiological difference in the mode of apprehending facts." He proceeds to connect hypothesis with the sensuous element in thought, deduction with the volitional, and induction with the habitual. For example:

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Induction infers a rule. Now, the belief of a rule is a habit. That a habit is a rule active in us, is evident. That every belief is of the nature of a habit, in so far as it is of a general character, has been shown in the earlier papers of this series. Induction, therefore is the logical formula which expresses the physiological process of formation of a habit. (CP 2.643)85

The six Popular Science Monthly articles taken together thus developed a doctrine of cognition the key to which was the pragmatic maxim or principle of pragmatism, which in turn, according to Peirce, was scarce more than a corollary of Bain's definition of belief. We have shown how Peirce wove Bain's theory in with others to form this doctrine of cognition, and how, when Peirce's categories are applied to Bain's theory, and when the resulting restatement of Bain's theory is applied to the problem of cognition, pragmatism is indeed an obvious corollary.86 But we have still to face the previous question, whether this is the way in which Peirce arrived at pragmatism in the first place, or only the way he chose to gain credit for it.

Now Peirce had a theory of cognition before the period to which he assigns the genesis of pragmatism, and this earlier theory was developed in a series of three articles in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1868: "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man," "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities," and "Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic: Further Consequences of Four Incapacities" (CP 5.213­357). Let us call this the pre­Bain theory, and let us call that of the Popular Science Monthly articles a decade later the post­Bain theory.87 As we should expect, the two have a great deal in common; for example, the social theory of logic, and the definition of truth and reality in terms of the ultimate agreement of the community of investigators. What are the differences? It is evident that Peirce was already acquainted with Bain's theory of belief in 1868 (CP 5.242, 268, 318), but he neither develops nor applies it, and there is no trace of pragmatism. On the other hand, the most conspicuous doctrine of the pre­Bain theory, that all thought is in signs, is not asserted in the post­Bain theory; but it is assumed throughout, and Peirce continued to hold it until the end of his life. There is, however, a crucial difference between the two theories at this point. According to the pre­ Bain theory, every thought interprets a previous thought and is interpreted by a subsequent thought; that is, every sign translates another and is in turn translated by still another. According to the post­Bain theory, the cognitive process has context, direction and purpose. Thought arises in one set of circumstances and terminates in another. It starts from a doubt and ends in a belief, the essence of which is a habit or rule of action. In the pre­Bain theory, thought is identified with cognition; in the post­

Page 98 Bain theory, it is identified with inquiry. In place of the continuity and ubiquity of the cognitive process, we have the analysis of the cyclic belief­doubt­inquiry­belief continuum which is Peirce's restatement of Bain's doctrine of belief, and it is out of this analysis that the pragmatic maxim is drawn.

In the pre­Bain theory, Peirce touches on the distinction between belief and mere conception or imagination (CP 5.239, 242) skirts without touching that between belief and doubt (CP 5.264f, 318) and that between true and false beliefs (CP 5.311), but never comes in sight of the distinction between one belief and another, whether true or false, or the distinction between one meaning and another. That is, he never approaches Bain's theory of belief with the question which will cause the pragmatic corollary to pop out.

When did the transition from the pre­Bain to the post­Bain theory of cognition take place, and how? James in 1898 said that Peirce called the principle of pragmatism by that name "when I first heard him enunciate it at Cambridge in the early 70's."88 The only known contemporary statement which can possibly refer to this occasion is in a letter of James to his brother Henry under date of November 24, 1872: "Charles Peirce ... read us an admirable introductory chapter to his book on logic the other day."89 This may well have been the paper which Peirce later expanded into the first two Popular Science Monthly articles. That original paper has not been found. Among Peirce's surviving papers, however, are his "Notes for Lectures on Logic to be given 1st Term 1870­71" (MS 587) (which were actually given in the second term instead),90 and several drafts of his "Logic of 1873" (MSS 360­394). In the former there is still no trace of the post­Bain theory.91 In one of the drafts of the ''Logic of 1873," the opening chapters, bearing dates early in March, cover the following topics: (1) Belief and doubt; (2) Inquiry; (3) Four Methods of Settling Opinion; (4) Reality; (5) Signs; (6) Three Classes of Qualities. The post­Bain theory here appears full­blown, except that there is no explicit formulation of the three grades of clearness or of the pragmatic maxim. It is apparent at once that the Popular Science Monthly articles are a popularization arrived at by omission of (a) the doctrine of the categories and of (b) the exposition of the sign theory; but also a popularization in which the pragmatism of 1873 has been brought to sharpened focus by explicitly drawing the corollary of Bain's definition. It is quite possible, however, that this last had already been done in the paper of November 1872 or in some other draft of the "Logic of 1873" which has not survived.

What had happened between the summer of 1870 and the spring of 1873 to effect this transition? Green had doubtless been urging the importance of applying Bain's definition of belief. Holmes had

Page 99 applied it to the definition of law, and the prediction theory of law had resulted. 92 Peirce had probably examined Bain's Logic (1870), which began with a section on "The Psychological Data or Groundwork of Logic," including "The nature of Belief as applied to the controversy respecting the origin of Knowledge." Perhaps he had read the Note to the chapter on Belief in the third edition of Bain's Mental Science (1872), in which the relation between doubt and inquiry was brought into greater prominence. Above all, Wright had lectured on Bain's psychology in the first term of the same year in the second term of which Peirce had lectured on logic, and Wright had published an essay in which, whether at Green's instance or not, he had applied Bain's definition of belief to the theory of cognition. Now this is just what Peirce himself proceeded to do in his own way in the draft of an introduction to his Logic which he read to The Metaphysical Club, most probably in November 1872, and which he expanded in 1877 into the first two papers of the Popular Science Monthly series.

This brings me to my final question. Why did the derivation of pragmatism from Bain's theory escape readers of the Popular Science Monthly, who were familiar with Bain's works, just as it later escaped readers of Chance, Love and Logic and of the Collected Papers who were not? It was of course in part because Bain's name was not invoked. But it was also in part because a greater name than Bain's was invoked, that of Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species was published in the same year with Bain's Emotions and Will and made a more immediate, profounder, and longer lasting impression upon the founders of pragmatism.

Chauncey Wright's application of Bain's doctrine to the theory of cognition had been incidental to an application of Darwin's doctrine of natural selection, an application which Wright had subsequently carried further in an essay on "The Evolution of SelfConsciousness,"93 written in the winter of 1872­1873 and published about the time that Peirce was drafting his "Logic of 1873." Sometime between the "Logic of 1873" and the Popular Science Monthly series of 1877­1878 Peirce followed Wright in subordinating Bain's theory to Darwin's. As a consequence, the argument in "The Fixation of Belief" began with the assertion that ''each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic" (CP 5.363) and proceeded as if Peirce were drawing the lesson in logic taught by the Origin of Species.

The Darwinian controversy is, in large part, a question of logic. Mr. Darwin proposed to apply the statistical method to biology ... while unable to say what the operation of variation and natural selection in any individual case will be, [he] demonstrates that in the long run they

Page 100

will adapt animals to their circumstances.... Logicality in regard to practical matters is the most useful quality an animal can possess, and might, therefore, result from the action of natural selection. (CP 5.36466)

Only after the introductory sections in which these are the key sentences did Peirce restate Bain's theory of belief and derive the pragmatic maxim in the way we have already reviewed. Since he did not mention Bain's name, as he had Darwin's, and since the theme of the adaptive character of intelligence continues throughout, the connection of pragmatism with the Darwinian theory overshadowed its connection with Bain, and has done so to this day; though certainly in Peirce's mind to the end of his life the Bain connection was so much the more important that he seldom remembered the Darwinian at all.

In the course in logic which Peirce taught at the John Hopkins University in the years immediately following the publication of his Popular Science Monthly series, he began with the topic, "The Psychological and Metaphysical facts upon which the possibility of Logic rests," and the texts for this topic were the three Journal of Speculative Philosophy articles developing his pre­Bain theory of cognition, and the first two of the Popular Science Monthly articles developing his post­Bain theory.94 It would be interesting to know if Peirce drew a distinction between them.

The further question whether James's and Dewey's and still other forms of pragmatism were also directly or indirectly derived from Bain's theory of belief, would take me beyond the limits of this paper. I shall only add that Dewey's Logic: The Theory of Inquiry takes its start from the theory of inquiry which Peirce developed out of Bain's theory of belief, though Dewey, having forgotten his Bain, is obviously puzzled to account for Peirce's advance upon Hume and Mill.95

APPENDIX Pragmatism Made Easy (MS 325)

To the Editor of The Sun

Sir:— It is a well­settled rule among scientific men that every step in science, every new result, shall be credited to the name of him who first publishes it.... The rule mentioned effectually prevents the rank and file of the scientific world from at all knowing, after a generation has elapsed, what did take place .. . .

Page 101 I must count it as one of the most fortunate circumstances of a life which the study of scientific philosophy in a religious spirit has steeped in its joy, that I was able to know something of the inwardness of the early growth of several of the great ideas of the nineteenth century. By far the most interesting of these to me was the idea of pragmatism.

Philosophy is a study which needs a very protracted concentrated study before one so much as begins to be at all expert in the handling of it, if one is to be precise, systematic, and scientific. I gave ten years to it96 before I ventured to offer half a dozen brief contributions of my own.97 Three years later, when I had produced something more elaborated,98 I went abroad99 and in England, Germany, Italy, Spain, learned from their own mouths what certain students at once of science and of philosophy were turning in their minds. After my return, a knot of us, Chauncey Wright, Nicholas St. John Green, William James, and others, including occasionally Francis Ellingwood Abbot and John Fiske, used frequently to meet to discuss fundamental questions. Green was especially impressed with the doctrines of Bain, and impressed the rest of us with them; and finally the writer of this brought forward what we called the principle of pragmatism. Several years later, this was set forth in two articles printed in the Popular Science Monthly (November 1877 and January 1878) and subsequently in the Revue Philosophique.

The particular point that had been made by Bain and that had most struck Green and through him the rest of us, was the insistence that what a man really believes is what he would be ready to act upon, and to risk much upon. The writer endeavored to weave that truth in with others which he made out for himself, so as to make a consistent doctrine of cognition. It appeared to him to be requisite to connect Bain's doctrine on one hand with physiological phenomena and on another hand with logical distinctions. It had long been said that the phenomena of consciousness were of three kinds, feeling, volition and cognition. The writer proposed to amend that enumeration in one particular, so as to make it correspond with a logical division. Logical predicates are of three kinds; those of which each is connected with a single subject, those of which each is connected with two subjects, one grammatically called the subject nominative and the other the object; and those whose connections with subjects exceed two and which are analyzable into predicates at once of subjects nominative, of direct objects, and of indirect objects.

Now feelings always arise as predicates of single objects; and it is only by subsequent reflection, which is not feeling, that they may be connected with two or more subjects. In volition, on the other hand, there is always a double consciousness, the volition, being at once regarded as an effort of one subject and a resistance of another. Effort without resistance is unthinkable. Likewise in perception there is a double consciousness of an ego and a non­ego. Thus there is a double consciousness which ought to replace the narrower volition of the old

Page 102 division of consciousness. Finally cognition is a consciousness of a sign, and is a triple consciousness: of the sign, of the real object cognized, and of the meaning or interpretation of the sign, which the cognition connects with that object. This affords a definition of cognition, a more distinct and complete notion of what it consists in than any that had previously been proposed.

Notes

1. Pragmatism had of course other antecedents, some of which are elsewhere acknowledged by Peirce, but the present essay is confined to Bain.

2. The editors say "c. 1906," but later in the letter (CP 5.494) Peirce quotes Schiller's Studies in Humanism, which was published in 1907, not 1906 as the editors mistakenly say.

3. The Hound & Horn 2:282­85.

4. Even without Bain's name the only such assertion I have found is from 1903: "The argument upon which I rested the maxim in my original paper was that belief consists mainly in being deliberately prepared to adopt the formula believed in as the guide to action" (CP 5.27).

5. Indeed, there is not so much as an allusion to the Club by any other member but James, and even James does not mention its name, according to the fullest and best account of the Club, that by Philip P. Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatismt (Harvard University Press, 1949): see esp, ch. 2, and cf. my review in American Literature 22 (1950):185­89. (Since writing the present essay, I have found one further piece of evidence. When Peirce's account of the Club was discovered among his papers by the editors, only one of the men listed by Peirce as members was still living. This was Justice 0. W. Holmes, Jr. One of the editors, Charles Hartshorne, wrote to Justice Holmes for confirmation and supplementary details, and received the following reply [dated at Beverly Farms, 25 August 1927]: "I am afraid that I cannot help you much in the way of recollections of Charles Peirce. I think I remember his father saving to me, 'Charles is a genius,' and I remember the august tone in which, at one of the few meetings at which I was present, Charles prefaced his opinion with 'Other philosophers have thought.' Once in a fertilizing way he challenged some assumption that I made, but, alas, I forget what. But in those days I was studying law and I soon dropped out of the band, although I should have liked to rejoin it when it was too late. I think I learned more from Chauncey Wright and St. John Green, as I saw Peirce very little. I wish I could help you, although I have misgivings as to your prophecy" [MS L 202]. Professor Hartshorne tells me he thinks the prophecy concerned the importance that the publication of Peirce's papers would have for philosophy.)

6. Ed. Henry C. Sturt (London, 1902). That Peirce read it appears from CP 5.13n1

7. That is, the objections that had been raised by Bradley in his Principles of Logic (1883), pp. 18ff: cf. Mind 24 (1899): 164n 1 (Essays on Truth and Reality, 1914, p. 377n ). Cf. also Bosanquet in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,

Page 103 1905­1906, 264. Peirce was familiar with Bradley's criticism at least as early as 1893 when he wrote a "History of the Doctrine of Association" for his Grand Logic (MS 400).

8. Mind 13:314n.1; Essays on Truth and Reality, p. 80n1.

9. Mind 13:537.

10. Studies in Humanism (London, 1907), p. 133.

11. CP 5.494. Slight differences of phraseology between the article as originally published in Mind and as reprinted in Studies in Humanism show that Peirce was following the latter rather than the former. Peirce was at Cambridge in June 1907 lecturing before the Philosophy Club at Harvard University (R. B. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 1935, 2:436); on the 13th he received a copy of Pragmatism fresh from the press; on the 24th he was still there and expected to be there for a time longer, as we learn from a letter of James to T. S. Perry (Letters of William James, 1920, 2:294). I suggest that it was during this stay in Cambridge that Peirce wrote the letter to the Nation from which our quotation is taken.

12. In the preface to the Studies, Schiller said: "Mr. C. S. Peirce's articles in the Monist (1905) [CP 5.411­463] have shown that he has not disavowed the great Pragmatic principle which he launched into the world so unobtrusively nearly thirty years ago, and seemed to leave so long without a father's care."

13. F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford, 1914), pp. 70f, 154n.; Principles of Logic, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1922), p. 39n19. D. S. Robinson, "An Alleged New Discovery in Logic," Journal of Philosophy 14 (1917):225­37, esp. 227; John Dewey, "Concerning Novelties in Logic: A Reply to Mr. Robinson," ibid., 237­45; F C. S. Schiller, "Mr. Bradley, Bain, and Pragmatism," ibid., 449­57; Howard C. Warren, History of Association Psychology from Hartley to Lewes (Baltimore, 1921), p. 57; W. R. Sorley, History of English Philosophy (New York, 1921), p. 255; W. B. Pillsbury, History of Psychology (New York, 1929), p. 196.

14. This section is largely from my review (cf. note 5 above), p. 187.

15. Perry, Thought and Character, 2:407.

16. Wiener (Evolution, p. 68) agrees with Perry and votes for Bain, but (cf. pp. 50 and 250n9) he first raises the query: Did Peirce mean Bain or Green, and notes that Paul Weiss in his Dictionary of American Biography article on Peirce had settled on Green. Justus Buchler (Charles Peirce's Empiricism [New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1939]. p. 96) says Green, probably on Weiss's authority. Thomas A. Goudge (The Thought of C. S. Peirce [University of Toronto Press, 1950], p. 331n8) puts the query, "Does the 'him' refer to Bain or to Green?"

17. Drafts d and e in MSS 320­21.

18. Other drafts supply other details. For example, where the published version reads simply, "The type of our thought was decidedly British," draft h says that the club "used to meet ... to discuss the ideas of Locke, Berkeley,Hume, Hartley, Reid, Kant, the Mills, Bain, etc. I was the only one to whom Kant had been mother's milk; the rest were of the British schools."

19. Among Peirce's unpublished papers there is another formulation of Bain's role in the genesis of pragmatism, written at about the same time, which removes any doubt that Peirce meant to claim paternity. See the Appendix below. Cf. CP 5.13n1 and 5.414.

20. 2nd ed., 1864; 3rd, 1868; 4th, 1894.

21. 2nd ed., 1865; 3rd, 1875; 4th, 1899.

22. 2nd ed., 1868; 3rd, 1872. First part of Mental and moral science: a compendium of psychology and ethics.

Page 104 23. This was first sketched in 1849 in Bain's article, "The Human Mind," in Chambers's Information for the People, 2:335.

24. Besides these four more or less formal expositions of the psychology of belief on its own account, there were several passages in Bain's Logic (March 1870) which, taken together, contained most of the main points of the psychological doctrine. It is important to note that Peirce followed Bain in providing a psychological framework for logic. Cf. Bain, Autobiography (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904), p. 295: "While adopting Mill's manner of approaching the definition of logic, I considered it relevant to introduce the subject (1) with a statement of the psychological data or presuppositions, (2) with the nature of knowlege, (3) with the classification of the sciences."

25. Analysis, 1:394.

26. Emotions, p. 595; Chambers's Encyclopaedia, 2:7.

27. Mental Science, p. 373. Bain does not use the scholastic term "habit" in this connection, but to one as steeped in scholasticism as Peirce was, this would seem the obvious technical term for the potentiality, the readiness to act, of which Bain speaks as the essence of belief. Cf. CP 5.371: "The feeling of believing is a more or less sure indication of there being established in our nature some habit which will determine our actions." 5.373: "Belief does not make us act at once, but puts us into such a condition that we shall behave in a certain way, when the occasion arises." This distinction which Bain and Peirce apply to belief, James goes on to apply to truth in Pragmatism, p. 22 f: "The scholastics, following Aristotle, made much of the distinction between habit and act.... All such qualities sink to the status of 'habits' between their times of exercise; and similarly truth becomes a habit of certain of our ideas and beliefs in their intervals of rest from their verifying activities." On knowledge as habit, cf. CP 4.531.

28. I borrow this epigrammatic phrasing of Bain's doctrine from Robert Flint's Agnosticism (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903), p. 261.

29. Emotions, p. 573f. Cf. Nicholas St. John Green on "reasonable doubt"in 2 Criminal Law Reports (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1875), p. 437 (reprinted in Essays on Tort and Crime [Menasha, WI: George Banta Pub­ lishing Co., 1933], p. 205): "Belief considered by itself without reference to the thing believed in and as a feeling, is a feeling of satisfaction­it is an easy and pleasant feeling. Doubt is a feeling of dissatisfaction, an uneasy and unpleasant feeling. When one believes, then he is satisfied and wishes for no further proof; when he doubts, he is dissatisfied and wants more information." See text over note 45 below, and cf. CP 5.372: "Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else."

30. Emotions, p. 582.

31. Ibid., p. 580f. Quoted by James in Nation 7 (16 July 1868):51; cf. note 55 below.

32. So also is entertainment without belief, but this is a point on which Bain touches but lightly. Bradley (Essays, p. 376f) brings it into clear relief.

33. Emotions, p. 582.

34. Mental Science, p. 382: "We are all faith at the outset; we become sceptics by experience, that is, by encountering checks and exceptions. We begin with unbounded credulity, and are gradually educated into a more limited reliance. Our belief in the physical laws is our primitive spontaneity contracted to the bounds of experience." Cf. CP 5.366: "... the effect of experience is continually to contract our hopes and aspirations." Until checks

Page 105 or failures break in, however, "Experience adds the force of habit to the inborn energy, and hence the tenacity of all early beliefs" (Bain, Mental Science, p. 378). Cf. Peirce's method of tenacity, CP 5.377f. With his a priori method, CP 5.382f; cf. Bain, Emotions, p. 586n.

35. Emotions, p. 583. Cf. CP 5.406: "the truth is simply his particular stronghold."

36. Mental Science, p. 376.

37. Peirce uses synonymously "fixation of belief" and "settlement of opin­ ion" (CP 5.375, 384, 386, 408).

38. Mental Science, p. 380.

39. Mental and Moral Science (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1872), part 1, appendix, p. 100. This correction was probably prompted by an unsigned article by James Sully on "The Development of Belief" in the Westminster Review for January 1872. This was reprinted in a revised form in Sully's Sensation and Intuition in 1874. Bain reviewed Sully's book in the Fortnightly Review for 1 July 1874 (22:146­48), and said that it was in the essay on belief that Sully best showed his powers "as an acute and original analyst of the human consciousness." "Mr Sully dissents from the view that would regard the active impulses, expressed by spontaneity and volition, as the main or essential fact of volition, and reduces these to the rank of subsidiary or modifying conditions, like the feelings generally. He submits, as the primitive germ of all belief, the transition from a sensation to an idea."

40. About twenty years later, Bain wrote in his Autobiography (p. 326f) that this chapter in the third edition had been "subjected to a thorough revision, being almost entirely re­written. The position of Primitive Cre­ dulity was more thoroughly expounded; and I should not now find any important modification to introduce into the treatment of the entire subject."

41. Principles of Logic (1883), p. 22n; 2nd ed. (1922), pp. 2on and 40n23.

42. Emotions, 3rd ed., pp. 505, 506, 507.

43. Ibid., p. 536f.

44. Mental and Moral Science, 3rd ed., 1872, part 1, appendix, p. 100. On "shock," cf. CP 1.332, 334, 336; 5.45; and George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith (New York, 1923), pp. 139­49 passim.

45. E.g., the note on "reasonable doubt" quoted in note 28 above.

46. ¬ Crim. L. R. 377, reprinted in his Essays on Tort and Crime, p. 168f. Cf. Bain, Mental Science, p. 9of. Senses and Intellect, 3rd ed., pp. 341 ff. Green had taught philosophy at Harvard College in the spring term of 1870. He did not use a text by Bain, as Wiener (Evolution, p. 275) suggests, but used Bowen's abridgment of Hamilton's Lectures on Metaphysics. However, he may well have been reading Bain as part of his preparation for his lectures in the course.

47. Letters, ed. Ethel F. Fisk (New York, 1940), p. 38f.

48. Miscellaneous Writings, 8:158, 170; cf. J. S. Clark, Life and Letters of John Fiske, 1:215. In November 1863 he first met E. L. Youmans, who knew "Spencer, Lewes, Mill, Miss Evans [George Eliot], Hooker, Holland, Tyndall, Huxley, Bain, Lyell, Morell, and all the great thinkers" (Letters, p. 109).

49. North American Review 106 (1868):303. In November of the same year Fiske was flattered to learn that the first instalment of his article on "The Laws of History" (Fortnightly Review September 1868) had been recom­ mended to Bain by George Grote (Letters, p. 179).

50. Communicated to me by Professor Mark DeWolfe Howe in a letter of 19 August 1948 (along with the facts next stated), and used by his per­ mission. Cf. Holmes­Laski Letters, ed. Howe (Harvard University Press, 1953),

Page 106 1:675 (Holmes to Laski, 21 Nov. 1924): "Bain struck me as of a much coarser grain than Mill."

51. Catherine Drinker Bowen, Yankee from Olympus (Boston, 1944), p. 187; Eleanor M. Tilton, Amiable Autocrat (New York, 1947), p. 429n16.

52. The books from Justice Holmes's library which are now in the Library of Congress include Bain's Logic (2 vols., London, 1870) and Mental and Moral Science (2nd ed., London, 1868). They contain no annotations; in fact, the leaves have not been cut apart.

53. Nation 80 (26 Jan. 1905):72 [N3:199].

54. Nation 46 (22 March 1888):246.

55. Nation 7 (16 July 1868):51; cf. Bain, Emotions, p. 580f, quoted over note 31 above.

56. Perry, Thought and Character, 1:160.

57. Ibid., 2:56. Peirce's copy of the 2nd ed. (1864) is in the Harvard Uni­ versity Library. It is not annotated.

58. It is just possible that the initial impulse to James's "Sentiment of Rationality" was provided in this same year (1868) by an article of Bain's in the Fortnightly for October ("Mystery and other violations of relativity"). James's earliest notes go back to about this time (Perry, 1:494); this article of Bain's is frequently quoted in James's article, probably from notes going back to this time; and Bain's other works are several times quoted.

59. Principles of Psychology, 1:130n; cf. Perry 2:25.

60. Nation 9 (25 Nov. 1869):461f [N¬:32].

61. Century Dictionary, 2 (1889):513; cf. Analysis, 1:343n97.

62. Letters, 1:148; cf. Psychology, 2:321. What James had in mind was the chapter on "The Moral Habits'" in The Emotions and the Will, which he had apparently been rereading that winter along with the newly purchased Senses and Intellect. Twenty years later he drew heavily upon that chapter in his own chapter on Habit in the Psychology. Two great maxims, he said (1:122f), emerged from Bain's treatment. "The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.... The second maxim is: Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life." The second maxim explains what James had meant in 1870 by the sentence: "I will see to the sequel." There is no explicit reference here to Bain's theory of belief, fifty pages farther on in the Emotions and Will, but the language about belief, will, and action suggests that James had it in mind, and that it was already in process of transformation into his own later "will to believe."

63. Wiener, Evolution, p. 214. There is some evidence to indicate that Wright's acquaintance with Bain's works began as early as Fiske's. His friend E. W. Gurney later wrote that when Darwin's Origin of Species appeared and Wright adopted its conclusions, this conversion was followed by a conversion from the philosophy of Sir William Hamilton to that of Bain and Mill. "I put them [Bain and Mill] in this order, because I think it the chronological one of his intimacy with them" (Letters of Chauncey Wright, ed. J. B. Thayer [Cambridge, MA, 1878], p. 369). Gurney remembers (ibid.) "that Professor Winlock was laid up for several weeks by lameness ... and how great satisfaction Chauncey had in inducing him to read Bain and in discussing with so acute a man Bain's statements and solutions." These recollections remind us that Bain's second volume, The Emotions and the Will, appeared in the same year with the Origin of Species, and suggest that Wright read the former not long after the latter. (Peirce, however, probably puts the conversion too early when he says that, on returning to Cambridge

Page 107 in the summer of 1860 after an absence of several months, he "found Wright all enthusiasm for Darwin, whose doctrines appeared to him as a sort of supplement to those of Mill" [CP 5.64].) In 1865 and 1866 Wright wrote long and important reviews of Mill's Examination of Hamilton for the Nation, 1 (31 Aug. 1865):278­81, and the North American Review, 103 (July 1866):250­ 260, in the latter of which he mentions Mill's quotations from Bain. In 1866 he also reviewed for the Nation, 2 (26 June):804f, the American edition of James Martineau's Essays, Philosophical and Theological, which as Wright said, were "directed chiefly against the experiential philosophy, as set forth in its several aspects by Comte, Mill, Bain and Spencer." Martineau's essay on Bain's psychology was very much in Wright's mind during his University Lectures of 1870­71 (Letters, p. 204, cf. p. 178f). (It was quoted at length by James in his Psychology 1:484ff, 506f.)

64. N1:23f.

65. Annual Report of the President of Harvard College, 1869­70, p. 8. The formal letter of appointment was dated 15 March (Wiener, Evolution, p. 214).

66. Wiener, p. 269n16, mistakenly says the text used was The Emotions and the Will instead of Mental Science. Cf. Wright, Letters, p. 212.

67. Letters, pp. 174, 178f (quoting from Bain, Senses and Intellect, 3rd ed., 1868, pp. 681, 341­45), 197 (referring to chapter on aesthetic emotions in Bain's Emotions and Will), 200f, 202, 204, 208.

68. Letters, p. 191.

69. North American Review III (Oct. 1870):282­311; reprinted in Philo­ sophical Discussions (New York, 1878), pp. 97­125.

70. Ibid., 301n (Philosophical Discussions, p. 115n).

71. Wright, Letters, p. 213f.

72. Shortly before Wright's death in 1875, James, remarking how the flow and association of impressions is controlled by interests, by ends or purposes set by one's emotional constitution, wrote that "Mr. Bain, in principle, admits it, but does not work it out. The only English­writing empiricist who has come near to making use of it is Mr. Chauncey Wright, in his article on the 'Evolution of Self­Consciousness' " (North American Review 121 [July 1875]:199; cf. Perry, 1:528f). A few weeks later, in his obituary notice of Wright in the Nation (21 [23 Sept. 1875]:194; Collected Essays and Reviews, p. 22), James said:" ... a treatise on psychology written by him ... would probably have been the last and most accomplished utterance of what he liked to call the British school. He would have brought the work of Mill and Bain for the present to a conclusion." Fiske in his later essay on Wright was perhaps echoing James when he wrote (Miscellaneous Writings, 8: 100): "Could he have been induced to undertake an elaborate treatise, we should have seen the philosophy of Mill and Bain carried to its furthest development and illustrated with Darwinian suggestions by a writer not in sympathy with the general doctrine of evolution"­i.e., by a writer preferring Darwin to Spencer and Fiske. Still later James associated Bain and Wright as phe­ nomenalists (Perry, 1:580).

73. Perry, 1:662, 664.

74. Letters, p. 331.

75. 2:179, 182.

76. James, Letters, 2:233; Perry, 1:535f. James does not name the Club, but says "Chauncey Wright, Chas. Peirce, St. John Green, Warner and I appointed an evening" etc.

77. Nation 22 (8 June 1876):367­69; Collected Essays and Reviews, p. 26f.

78. Harvard University Catalogue, 1878­79, p. 80; 1880­81, p. 82. G. H. Pal­ mer had used Bain's Mental Science in 1873­74 in the psychological half of

Page 108 the required course in logic and psychology later numbered Philosophy 2. In 1885­86 James used Bain's Senses and Intellect, and in 1886­87 and 1887­ 88 James used Bain's Emotions and Will, while Royce used Bain's Senses and Intellect. See Catalogues for those years. Green's son took the course in the latter year from James. He writes me: "James was the most (I might say the only) inspiring teacher that I had in my undergraduate work.... This relates to the psychology part of the course. I think he did not like teaching logic" (letter of 24 Oct. 1949).

79. James's copy is in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. His annotations may be assumed to date from some time between November 1875 and June 1879. It will be recalled that James's form of pragmatism received its earliest published expressions in the period 1877­79 (see es­ pecially Collected Essays and Reviews, pp. 43­136, and cf. Maurice Baum, "The Development of James's Pragmatism Prior to 1879," Journal of Philos­ ophy 30 [1933]:43­51).

80. At the beginning of the chapter James has a note, "See page 568." Turning to that page in the final chapter, "Consciousness," we find the following passage marked: "When two different impressions concur in the mind, and by repetition become associated together, the one recalling the other; and when we not only have a present experience of their concurrence, but a belief of it,­­we are then said to know something. A single notion by itself does not make knowledge, in the absence of belief. Knowledge, there­ fore, is identical with affirmation and belief." Now one of the characteristic themes of pragmatism is the subsumption of knowledge under belief, in opposition to the Platonic tradition which opposes the two. It seems prob­ able that Bain was one of the sources of this subsumption.

81. E.g., CP 2.267; 4.233, 613.

82. Parts of this letter are quoted by Wiener, Evolution, p. 20f. In the Appendix below, I reproduce the entire main body of the letter, omitting only some irrelevant matter near the beginning.

83. Peirce was here following a method to which he had committed him­ self in his twenty­first year, as appears from a manuscript note quoted by Wiener, p. 73f: "July 3, 1860 The Logical and the Psychological Treatment of Metaphysics: Two methods of viewing metaphysics give rise to two methods of treating it. One starts by drawing the conceptions from logical relations and thence reasoning to their place in the mind; the other starts by drawing the conceptions from the system of psychology and reasoning to their logical meaning. The former seems to me, if less psychologically exact, to be more metaphysically true in its results, and it is the method I adopt."

84. In CP 5.469 the distinction is stated in terms of the "valency" of concepts.

85. For the distinction between induction, deduction, and hypothesis in the pre­Bain theory, see CP 5.274­77, and cf. 5.297, where induction is con­ nected with habit but without reference to belief.

86. It is of course not obvious until, by what Peirce called theorematic reasoning, these preliminary steps have been taken. As we shall see in the next and following paragraphs, all the elements were in Peirce's mind for several years before the corollary was drawn.

87. The two theories have been distinguished and compared by George Gentry without reference to Bain. See his "Peirce's Early and Later Theory of Cognition and Meaning: Some Critical Comments," Philosophical Review 55 (1946):634­50; and "Habit and the Logical Interpretant," in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce (Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 75­ 90. At the end of the first essay, Gentry remarks: "Why this shift of opinion occurred is a matter that should be gone into subsequently." The second

Page 109 essay goes into it only in the sense of showing more fully how the weaknesses of the early theory are repaired in the later theory. I suggest that Peirce's application of Bain's theory is essential if not sufficient to account for the shift.

88. Collected Essays and Reviews, p. 410.

89. Perry, Thought and Character, 1:332. Peirce himself, when revising the Popular Science Monthly articles in 1909 for publication by the Open Court Publishing Company, reunited the first two into a single essay, the main part of which, he said, ''reproduces almost verbatim a paper which I had read­it must have been in 1872­ to a group of young men who used at that time to meet once a fortnight in Cambridge under the name of 'The Metaphysical Club'" (MS 620, 6 April 1909).

90. Harvard University Catalogue, 1870­71, p. 109.

91. It should be added, however, that the notebook contains notes on only the first five right­hand pages, with brief indications for revision on the left­hand pages.

92. See "Justice Holmes," pp. 11­13 above.

93. North American Review 116 (April 1873):245­310; Wright, Philosophical Discussions, pp. 199­266; see also "Evolution in American Philosophy," pp. 19­ 34 above.

94. See "Peirce at The Johns Hopkins," pp. 46­47 above.

95. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1938), p. 12n3.

96. 1855­65. In Peirce's entry in the Harvard Class Book of 1859, we read: " 855. Graduated at Dixwell's and entered College. Read Schiller's Aesthetic Letters & began the study of Kant." In various other places Peirce refers to 1855­56 as "the first year of my own serious study of philosophy."

97. "Memoranda concerning the Aristotelean syllogism," privately printed and "distributed at the Lowell Institute, Nov. 1866" (CP 2.792­807), and five papers on logic read before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1867 and printed in its Proceedings for that year. Of these five, the first three and the last were reprinted in CP 3.1­44; 2.461­516; 1.545­59; 2.391­426. The fourth, "Upon the Logic of Mathematics," Proceedings, 402­412, has not been reprinted.

98. His three articles in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for 1868 (CP 5.213­357); his two notes in the same volume (CP 6.619­630); and above all, his "Description of a Notation for the Logic of Relatives" in the Memoirs of the American Academy for 1870 (CP 3.45­149).

99. In 1870. The purchase place and date entries which Peirce made in books later sold to the Johns Hopkins University Library show that he was in London in July, in Venice in November, in London again early in January 1871, and in Leipzig later in the same month. Among the Peirce Papers there are letters to members of his family dated Berlin, July 30, 1870; Budapest, Aug 25; Constantinople, Aug. 28 and Sept. 2; Syracuse, Sept. 22; Rome, Oct. 16. In December he was in Sicily observing a solar eclipse for the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Entries in a small notebook among the Peirce Papers show that he was in London from January 30 to February 14, 1871. His travels in Turkey (CP 2.625) and his acquaintance with E. H. Palmer (CP 4.48n1) belong to August and September 1870.

Page 110

SIX—Some General Characteristics of American Philosophy

THREE PRELIMINARY REMARKS

(1) The characteristics of which I shall speak are not exclusively American, nor are they shared by all American philosophers. By calling them general characteristics of American philosophy, I mean only that they have been more prominent and pervasive in the United States than in other countries during the same period.

(2) By philosophers I mean not merely teachers of philosophy in colleges and universities, but all persons who in their writings or public utterances give expression to sustained thinking of a philosophic kind.

(3) I shall speak first, and briefly, of characteristics of American philosophy as a whole from its beginnings in the seventeenth century until now, and second, and more at length, of characteristics of the main movement in the classic period of American philosophy, from about 1870 onward.

CHARACTERISTICS OF AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY AS A WHOLE

1. Most American philosophers have been amateurs; that is, they have been something else in the first place and philosophers in the second place. Roughly, the order in which other professions have become prominent in philosophy has been: theology in the colonial period, law in the revolutionary period, medicine in the postrevolutionary period, law again in the Civil War period, natural science in the post­Civil War period, social science in the first half of the twentieth century, fine art at present.

Page 111 2. The problems of philosophy have arisen (a) out of the political, economic, religious and social issues of the day and (b) out of the prior professions of the philosophers.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MAIN MOVEMENT IN THE CLASSIC PERIOD

Preliminary note: The classic period of American philosophy begins immediately after the Civil War and continues through the first half of the twentieth century. The more original thinkers of that period, in whose work the main movement of American thought can be traced, are: Chauncey Wright, Charles S. Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and Elijah Jordan. The central problem, posed by the Civil War and its aftermath and by the industrializing of American society, has been the nature of human community. Almost equally central has been the problem of the nature of science, its functions, its relations to technology and to other aspects of culture, and its limitations. The leading characteristics of this movement are:

1. It has substituted philosophy of science for the traditional discipline of epistemology or theory of knowledge.

2. It has rejected the static two­term subject­object analysis of knowledge and substituted various analyses involving three terms or more, understood dynamically rather than statically.

3. It has conceived science not as consisting of propositions or of sets or systems of propositions which scientists have ascertained to be true, but as consisting of the doings of scientists; not as something scientists know, but as something they know how to do; not as conclusions or results, but as method; not as knowledge but as know­how.

4. It has conceived science as consisting primarily in what researchers or investigators do, but secondarily in what technicians do; that is, as including the whole range of the so­called applications of science—the doings, for example, of engineers, skilled craftsmen, doctors, and social workers. This is not merely because science lives in its applications more than in contemplation of its own navel, but also because the applications are a necessary part of the experimental or testing phase of science, and because the technicians in the course of their applications are continually turning up fresh problems for the investigators.

5. It has thus conceived the organization of science not as that of a body or system of doctrine, but as that of a community, or, if I may so put it, a nest of communities: first, the relatively small community of investigators; second, the larger community of those

Page 112 skilled technicians who keep their practice abreast of the latest work of the community of investigators; and lastly, the still larger community of those who enjoy the fruits of investigation and application, and willingly support the investigators and technicians. The locus or residence of science, on this view, is not in the mind or consciousness of the individual scientist or student of science, but in the community at large as a going concern, so far as it is so organized as to maintain continual investigation, continual dissemination of the results of investigation, and continual modification of all other social functions by the function of investigation.

6. In this solution of the problem of the nature of science, it has found at least a partial solution of the problem of the nature of human community. If science is the best authenticated knowledge we have, and if science, which had traditionally been supposed to be an individual creation or possession, turns out to be an organization of social functions, it should be possible, from this premise, to work out a general theory of community and of the relations between the individual and the community.

7. Furthermore, it has found here, if not a solution of the more concrete and practical problems of society, at least a method for their solution. The method consists simply in giving primacy to the function of inquiry or investigation, and in diffusing the spirit and the results of inquiry through all the institutions of society, beginning with the educational institutions.

8. It has asserted that the way to begin with the educational institutions is to reduce the emphasis on lectures, textbooks, and drill, and to increase the emphasis on laboratory work, field work, library work, and group discussion. (Learning how to use the library, for example, means in the first place learning how to use the basic tools of research—the encyclopedias, manuals, bibliographies, catalogues, abstracts, and dictionaries—but above all it means learning how to take full account of the distinction between primary and secondary sources. In the case of science, the primary sources are the journal articles and treatises in which the results of investigation are reported by the primary investigators themselves. In these primary sources the conclusions are connected directly with the evidence and with the method by which they were reached, and usually also with a statement of the related problems still awaiting solution. Insofar as they lift the conclusions out of this context, all secondary sources are apt to mislead. To do one's library work in full realization of this distinction is to carry the spirit of inquiry into the library. And so far as the library system is so organized as to lead us from the secondary sources as rapidly as possible to the primary ones, the library system is itself part of that organization of social functions in which science consists.)

Page 113 9. It has put universities rather than colleges or professional schools at the apex of the educational system, and it has conceived investigation rather than teaching as the primary function of universities, and universities as the primary nuclei of the community of investigators. In this way it has made the theory of the role of the university in society an essential part of the prevailing philosophy of science.

10. It has also conceived the university community as a model for the organization of society at large. It has thus come very close to identifying social philosophy with philosophy of science.

AN EMERGING CHARACTERISTIC?

The most striking development of the last decade or two has been the increasing attention to the philosophy of art. Here again, art is conceived as what artists do, and what others do with what artists have done or made, rather than as objects immediately apprehended as having certain distinctively aesthetic characters such as that of beauty. Thus the philosophy of art revolves around the function of the arts in society. That is, our philosophers are thinking about art in the same way as that in which they have thought about science, and they are extending their social philosophy to include a philosophy of art as well as a philosophy of science.

Page 114

SEVEN—A Chronicle of Pragmaticism, 1865­1879

The history of pragmatism is still to be written. At many points throughout we lack even the prerequisite of history, a firm chronology. As a specimen, I offer a chronology for a short span of the history of Peirce's pragmaticism. I begin with 1865, when Peirce is twenty­five, a scientist in the employ of the United States Coast Survey, married, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and when he has been for perhaps nine years a student of Kant and is already well along in those "successive steps" by which, from being a "pure Kantist," he is being "forced ... into Pragmaticism" (CP 5.452). The method I follow is to base the chronology at each point on dated documentary evidence of the year, month, or day in question. I do, however, make subsidiary use, but only within square brackets, of documents of later date, or without date. My own inferences, conjectures and comments are also bracketed.

1865

January. Peirce buys Kant's Sämmtliche Werke in the edition of Rosenkrantz and Schubert, twelve volumes bound in thirteen, 18381842.1 [About this time he is working intensively at the compilation of an alphabetically arranged vocabulary of philosophy, using a large notebook which his father has begun as an index to the literature of mathematics and analytic mechanics, and which Peirce himself has continued as an index to the literature of chemistry.2 The most numerous references in the philosophic vocabulary are to this edition of the works of Kant and to the works of Hamilton, especially to Hamilton's Lectures on Logic and on Metaphysics and to the notes in his edition of Reid. On page 190 of Peirce's notebook there are numerous entries under "practical" and the following two under "pragmatic":

Pragmatic Anthropology Kant vii (b) 4

(horizon) Kant iii 206

When, thirty­seven years later, he wrote parts of the article "Pragmatic, Pragmatism" for Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psy­

Page 115 chology (CP 5.1), he began with these two entries from his old notebook.]

March 17. Peirce's course of Harvard University Lectures "On the Logic of Science" is scheduled to begin on this day. Presumably after the appointed hour, he writes to F. E. Abbot: "My lectures fell through for want of an audience." However, all subsequent official records and reports show the course as having been delivered,3 and drafts of eleven lectures survive (MSS 340­50). Lecture V contains an early statement of Peirce's threefold "natural classification of arguments": deduction, induction, and hypothesis. [Later names for "hypothesis" are "abduction'' and "retroduction," and Peirce later identified his pragmatism with "the logic of abduction" (CP 5.196).]

April 8. In London, John Stuart Mill's Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy is advertised in The Athenaeum as "just ready." On April 29 it is listed under "New Books." On May 27 it is reviewed at length. [Forty­four years later Peirce writes from memory:

When Mill's Examination of Hamilton came out in the spring of 1865, I put the volume into my portmanteau and betook myself alone to a seaside hotel, long before the season had begun to open, in order that I might study it in solitude; and it influenced me decidedly, and helped me to clear up my opinions. (MS 620)

If his memory is accurate, it was a copy of the London edition which he read, as the Boston edition was in two volumes and did not come out until the end of July.]

May 14. Peirce outlines Chapter I, "Definition," of his "Teleological Logic." "Logic is objective symbolistic. Symbolistic is the semiotic of symbols. Objective symbolistic is that branch of symbolistic which considers relations to objects. Semiotic is the science of representations" (MS 802).

July 27. The Boston edition of Mill's Examination of Hamilton is advertised in The Nation as "Now Ready." On August 3 it is listed among "Books Received." On August 31 it is reviewed by Chauncey Wright.

.... We regard Mr. Mill's definition of substances as "the permanent possibilities of sensation," and the interpretation of the facts of consciousness which he makes in accordance with it, as among the most important contributions to psychology which have been made in modern times.... Mr. Mill makes small account ... of the distinction of knowledge and belief.

Wright presents his own analysis of belief and doubt, knowledge and ignorance, in terms of motives to action. [This analysis is a

Page 116 nearer approach to that in Peirce's pragmatic essays of 1877­78 than anything so far in Peirce's own writings.]4

September 2. Peirce in a letter to Wright:

.... I have read Mill's book.... The contradictions in Hamilton are well brought out; but with a malicious intent.... These ad hominem arguments are not contributions to philosophy, but they will have a great effect on the public.5

[This was the great philosophic debate of Peirce's youth, as the Agassiz­Darwin controversy five years earlier had been the scientific one. There is no adequate account of it, and none at all of its influence on pragmatism.]

November 12. Peirce begins a Logic Notebook whose dated entries continue to 1909, and in which many of his insights and discoveries make their first appearance. On November 14 he writes in it: "There is no difference logically between hypotheticals & categoricals. The subject is a sign of the predicate, the antecedent of the consequent; and this is the only point that concerns logic." And on December 13:

It is necessary to reduce all our actions to logical processes so that to do anything is but to take another step in the chain of inference. Thus only can we effect that complete reciprocity between Thought & its Object which it was Kant's Copernican step to announce. (MS 339)6

1866

July. Chauncey Wright publishes a more carefully considered review of Mill On Hamilton in the North American Review.7

October 24—December 1. Peirce delivers twelve Lowell Institute lectures in Boston on "The Logic of Science; or, Induction and Hypothesis." These lectures are attended by William James and by O. W. Holmes, Jr. 8 In a privately printed pamphlet of Memoranda Concerning the Aristotelean Syllogism, distributed at the lectures, Peirce concludes (against Kant but without mentioning him) that

no syllogism of the second or third figure can be reduced to the first, without taking for granted an inference which can only be expressed syllogistically in that figure from which it has been reduced.... Hence .... every figure involves the principle of the first figure, but the second and third figures contain other principles, besides.

Those, namely, of hypothesis and induction (CP 2.807; cf. 2.641n1, 4.2). Every fact, he says in his lecture of November 28, "requires two kinds of explanation; the one proceeds by induction to replace its

Page 117 subject by a wider one, the other proceeds by hypothesis to replace its predicate by a deeper one" (CP 7.58 ).

1867

January 30. Peirce is elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.9

March 12. Peirce presents to the Academy a paper "On an Improvement in Boole's Calculus of Logic." The principal use of that calculus, he says, lies in its application to problems concerning probability. Peirce's improvement is designed to render the calculus more readily applicable to such problems, and he is guided in this by the frequency theory of probability first developed systematically in John Venn's The Logic of Chance, which he has been studying (CP 3.119).

April. William James sails for Europe, not to return until November 1868. [It may be that Peirce owes his early acquaintance with the new German scientific psychology of the 1860s in part to James' year and a half in Germany, though James saw Helmholtz and Wundt only briefly, and Fechner not at all.]10

June 5—6. Peirce and his father give expert testimony in the Sylvia Ann Howland Will Case, based on minute comparison of about fifty of her signatures, each with all the others, and on the theory of probabilities.11

July. Peirce reviews Venn's book in the North American Review (CP 8.1—6). [The particular idea Peirce clarified in the pragmatism papers of 1877­78 was that of probability, in a way "first developed by Mr. Venn, in his Logic of Chance" (1878 March below). Thus it is one of many valid descriptions of pragmatism to say that it was a generalization of the way in which Venn clarified the idea of probability. This agrees well enough with Peirce's description of it as "scarce more than a corollary" of Bain's definition of belief,12 as appears from Venn's chapter on "Gradations of Belief":

Whatever opinion then may be held about the essential nature of belief, it will probably be admitted that a readiness to act upon the proposition believed is an inseparable accompaniment of that state of mind. There can be no alteration in the belief without a possible alteration in the conduct, nor anything in the conduct which is not connected with something in the belief.]13

November. Peirce drafts a "Specimen of a Dictionary of the Terms of Logic and the Allied Sciences, A to ABS," noting on the title­page that "This is not supposed to be complete, but only as illustrating

Page 118 the state of my materials, Nov. 1867." [The materials are contained in the notebook described under 1865 January (MS 1174).]

1868

January 1. Peirce compiles a "Catalogue of Books on Mediaeval Logic which are available in Cambridge" (MS 1549).

April 9. Peirce writes to W. T. Harris, editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy: "You ask me to consider the rationale of the objective validity of logical laws ... I cannot say what I think in less than three articles of the Journal. I send you a first one .... "14 These articles soon appear under the titles:

Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man. Some Consequences of Four Incapacities. Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic: Further Consequences of Four Incapacities. (CP 5.213­357)

The second begins by formulating "the spirit of Cartesianism" in four points and by opposing to them four points of what Peirce later called Critical Common­sensism; and it ends with the first explicit published declaration of Peirce's Scholastic Realism. [Peirce wrote in 1905 an essay called in the published version "Issues of Pragmaticism" but in some drafts "Consequences of Pragmaticism," in which he developed two such issues or consequences, Critical Common­sensism and Scholastic Realism, and said that both were defended in this essay of 1868, "before he had formulated, even in his own mind, the principle of pragmaticism.''15] The second essay of 1868 also contains a sentence in which Peirce later16 saw a near approach to pragmaticism itself:

No present actual thought (which is a mere feeling) has any meaning, any intellectual value; for this lies, not in what is actually thought, but in what the thought may be connected with in representation by subsequent thoughts; so that the meaning of a thought is altogether something virtual. (CP 5.289)

[About 1905 Peirce said, apropos of this sentence, that the paper of 1868 "in fact expresses a kind of pragmatism not unlike that of Professor James" (CP 5.504n1).]

December 5—20. The third article is written between these dates. It contains the first reference in Peirce's writing to De Morgan's paper on the logic of relations (CP 5.322n1). A letter from De Morgan to Peirce dated April 14, 1868, makes it clear that he has not yet sent Peirce his paper but is waiting for a better address than "Cambridge, U.S." [Therefore when Peirce in 1907 wrote that it "must have been

Page 119 in 1866" that De Morgan sent him that paper, his memory served him ill (CP 1.562).] The Logic Notebook shows that by the beginning of November Peirce is already well launched on his own investigations of the logic of relations. [Peirce later wrote that these investigations had shown that "every concept" has "a strict valency," that there are three grades of valency, and that

to the three grades of valency of undecomposable concepts correspond three classes of characters or predicates . . . "firstnesses" . . . "secondnesses" ... "thirdnesses".... The little that I have contributed to pragmatism ... has been entirely the fruit of this outgrowth from formal logic.... ] (CP 5.469)

1869

April 15. Peirce observes the auroral spectrum with the large telescope of the Harvard Observatory and determines the places of seven lines. [These were the most notable scientific observations made by him on a single occasion, and his earliest single­handed scientific achievement.]17

May 2. Wilhelm Wundt grants Peirce the translation rights for his Vorlesungen über die Menschen­ und Thierseele. [Peirce did not complete his translation, and it was not until 1894 that one by Creighton and Titchener came out. Peirce's later recollection of the enthusiasm with which he and others had greeted the German original is recorded in his review in 1905 of Titchener's translation of Wundt's more systematic and technical Principles of Physiological Psychology. In a draft, Peirce goes so far as to say that "Wundt finds that the function of our thinking­organ lies in its regulation of motor reactions. Now this is neither more nor less than the substance of pragmatism in the dress of physiology."]18

May 19. Charles W. Eliot becomes President of Harvard University. Two days later he writes to George Brush: "what to build on top of the American college.... This is what we have all got to think about." His first thought is to turn the University Lectures into a postgraduate program, focusing in 1869­1870 on Philosophy and on Modern Literature. For Philosophy he enlists Bowen, Fiske, Peirce, Hedge, Cabot, Emerson, and Fisher to give successive short courses in that order, Peirce's on "British Logicians" to begin December 14.19

July. Peirce writes in a note to his father:

Here is Fechner's [Elemente der] Psychophysik. See vol I pp 72 and 93 et seq. He says he practised the experiment of saying which of two slightly differing weights is the heavier for an hour a day for several years & that his results agreed with the method of least squares. He promises to publish his experiments in another book which has never

Page 120

appeared as far as I can learn. Concerning "Schwelle" or the point where the perceptibility of a stimulus begins see pp 238—300....

[This letter is evidence that Peirce is studying Fechner along with Wundt. Experimental psychology is only a decade old, having begun with Fechner's book in 1860.]

August 7. Peirce makes spectroscopic observations of the solar eclipse at Bardstown, Kentucky, in the Coast Survey party headed by Joseph Winlock.

October 30. Peirce is appointed Assistant in the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard University, where much of his work for the Coast Survey has already been done for several years.20

November 25. Peirce reviews in The Nation James Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind and comments on the insularity and the non­scientific character of British psychology. With regard to the doctrine of the association of ideas, which the English school claim as their own discovery, but which goes back to Aristotle:

At present, the doctrine has received a transformation at the hands of Wundt of the most fundamental description. He has solved the perplexing questions concerning the principles of association by showing that every train of thought is essentially inferential in its character, and is, therefore, regulated by the principles of inference.

"This idea," Peirce adds in a footnote, "is fully explained in his very important and agreeably written Vorlesungen über die Menschenund Thierseele," which Peirce is now translating.21

December 14. Peirce gives his first lecture on "British Logicians" in the new postgraduate course in Philosophy. Nine are scheduled, but he gives fifteen. The subjects: December 14, 16, Early Realism and Nominalism; 17, 21, Duns Scotus; 23, Ockham; 24, Whewell; 28, Mill; 30, 31, January 4, De Morgan and the Logic of Relations; 6, 7, 11, Boole's Logical Algebra and its Amplification to apply to the Logic of Relations; 14, Mill on Induction and Hypothesis; 18, Bacon on Induction and Hypothesis.22 Apart from its including Peirce's first public exposition of the logic of relations, and showing the fruits of a deeper study of Duns Scotus and of Ockham, the course inaugurates Peirce's lifelong championship of Whewell against Mill in "the logic of science." Whewell was himself a scientist (indeed he coined the word); Mill is not. Whewell was also a historian of science; Mill is not. Whewell followed Kant; Mill does not. Whewell was a realist; Mill is a nominalist. Whewell emphasized the necessity of "appropriate ideas," as well as of "the colligation of facts," and he further emphasized the importance of the explication and clarification of ideas. In the history of science, as Whewell shows, it is

Page 121

true that scientific conceptions have always first become clear in debates. And this is an important truth. But what was the mental process, what was the change, and what the law of the change, in the individual's mind, by which an obscure idea became clear? This Whewell tells us nothing of....

[It is characteristic of the pragmatism toward which Peirce is moving that it focuses on the explication and clarification of ideas as a part of "the logic of science," more exactly of that part of it which Peirce calls hypothesis, abduction, or retroduction.]23

1870

January. Nicholas St. John Green has the leading article in the American Law Review, on "Proximate and Remote Cause," the first of a series much admired by Peirce; and also a review of a treatise on the law of negligence. [See April below.]24

January 4, 6, 7, 11, 14, 18. Extra lectures on "British Logicians." [Two of the students, Joseph B. Warner and Francis G. Peabody, were reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason with Peirce this winter, the arrangement being that "on any night when [he] could not see the stars at the Observatory, he would be at home to his young students."]25

January 6. Peirce is appointed University Lecturer on Logic for 187­71126 Soon thereafter he begins a notebook, "Notes for Lectures on Logic to be given 1st Term 1870­71" (MS 587). It appears from this notebook that his intention is to develop the theory of signs within the framework of the logic of relations, and then to focus on problems of meaning, truth and reality within the framework of the theory of signs.

January 26. Peirce presents to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences his memoir, "Description of a Notation for the Logic of Relatives, resulting from an Amplification of the Conceptions of Boole's Calculus of Logic."

April. Nicholas St. John Green has a second leading article in the American Law Review: "Contributory Negligence on the Part of an Infant." [Peirce's separate of it is marked: "Indictive Logic."27]

April 22. Peirce's younger brother, Benjamin Mills Peirce, a mining engineer, dies at Ishpeming, Michigan. [In an autobiographical fragment written long afterwards, Peirce recalls:

When my father and I went out to Marquette together and brought back my brother Ben's body, my father talked to me very earnestly, representing that I was sacrificing all hopes of success in life by devoting myself in logic, and that people would never think I amounted to much if I did so. I told him that I fully realized the truth of that,

Page 122

but that my bent of mind was so strong in that direction that it would be a very hard struggle to give up logic. That I intended, however, to try to do so and to take a good long time to come to any conclusion....]28

June 18. Peirce sails for Europe to choose sites and make arrangements for United States Coast Survey parties to observe the solar eclipse of December 22. He does not return until March 7, 1871. His University Lectures on Logic are at first postponed to the second term, to begin on February 13, 1871; but before that date they seem to have been canceled altogether.

July 11. Peirce calls on Augustus De Morgan in London and leaves a letter from his father Benjamin Peirce, a copy of his father's Linear Associative Algebra, and a copy of his own "Description of a Notation for the Logic of Relatives."29

October 4. Chauncey Wright begins a course of thirty­five University Lectures, "Expositions of the Principles of Psychology from the Text of Bain," ending in February 1871.30

December 22. Peirce observes the solar eclipse with a Coast Survey party near Catania, Sicily.

1871

March 7. Peirce disembarks at Boston on his return from the Sicilian expedition. [This is the terminus post quem of the Metaphysical Club in Peirce's memory when he is most careful of chronology.]31

October. Peirce reviews Fraser's edition of the Works of Berkeley in the North American Review. He gives a fuller statement and defense of his realism than that in "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities" (1868). He declares himself in print for Whewell: " ... science as it exists is certainly much less nominalistic than the nominalists think it should be. Whewell represents it quite as well as Mill." In connection with Berkeley's theory of vision, "the fundamental proposition of which ... is that the sensations which we have in seeing are signs of the relations of things whose interpretation has to be discovered inductively," he translates a passage from the third part of Helmholtz's Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (1866). [This is further evidence (after that on Wundt, 1869 May 2 and November 25, and on Fechner, 1869 July) of his study of the new experimental psychology.] And he puts forward a first approximation to the pragmatic maxim: "A better rule [than Berkeley's] for avoiding the deceits of language is this: Do things fulfil the same function practically? Then let them be signified by the same word. Do they not? Then let them be distinguished" (CP 8.12­17, 33, 36, 38). [Peirce later said that the principle of pragmatism was but a formulation of Berkeley's practice. "In 1871, in a Metaphysical Club

Page 123 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I used to preach this principle as a sort of logical gospel, representing the unformulated method followed by Berkeley, and in conversation about it I called it 'Pragmatism'" (CP 6.482).]

1872

February 4. Henry James, Jr., writes from Cambridge to Charles Eliot Norton in Europe: " ... Wendell Holmes ... my brother, & various other long­headed youths have combined to form a Metaphysical Club, where they wrangle grimly & stick to the question."32

April 11. Reviewing several logic books in The Nation (along with some scientific ones including Clerk Maxwell's Theory of Heat), Peirce criticizes Mill's "doctrine of scientific hypotheses" at some length, and expresses "our opinion of the almost utter worthlessness of deductive logic in education, except as an introduction to the logic of science."33

April 20. Peirce writes to his mother from Washington, where he is acting Assistant in Charge of the Office of the Coast Survey: "On clear nights I observe with the photometer; on cloudy nights I write my book on logic which the world has been so long & so anxiously expecting.... "

May 11—14. Peirce makes a fair copy of Chapter I of his Logic, "Of the Difference between Doubt & Belief." [This is incorporated almost verbatim in "The Fixation of Belief" in 1877.]34

June 3. Charles Darwin to Chauncey Wright: "As your mind is so clear, and as you consider so carefully the meaning of words, I wish you would take some incidental occasion to consider when a thing may properly be said to be effected by the will of man."35

July. Holmes in the American Law Review propounds the prediction theory of law as the burden of his University Lectures on Jurisprudence in the preceding term. The leading article, "Slander and Libel," is by Nicholas St. John Green.36

September 14. Charles A. Dana, editor of the New American Encyclopedia, replies to Peirce's offer to write a new article on Logic for the new edition. "When we come to Logic a year hence, I will remember your interest in the subject." [Instead, the old article was revised by its author, W. D. Wilson.]

November 24. William James writes from Cambridge to his brother Henry in Europe: "Charles Peirce ... read us an admirable introductory chapter to his book on logic the other day ..."37

November 25. T. S. Perry to Peirce from the editorial office of the North American Review in Boston: "I write to beg of you to let me have that paper you read the other night at Cambridge for the N. A. R. It ought to be published. I'll pay you bountifully & I must have

Page 124 it." [I assume that the letters of James and Perry refer to the same occasion, and that it was a meeting of the Metaphysical Club. The paper Peirce read does not survive, but its content may be inferred from May 11­14 above and from 1873 March 6 below.]

November 30. Peirce is put in charge of the pendulum experiments of the Coast Survey.38

December 2. Peirce resigns his assistantship at the Harvard College Observatory.39

1873

March 6—July 2. All dated drafts of chapters of "The Logic of 1873" fall between these dates. According to one plan, the sequence of chapters (with my asterisks marking those of which drafts survive) is:

1. Belief and Doubt.* 2. Inquiry.* 3. Four Methods of Settling Opinions.* 4. Reality.* 5. That the Significance of Thought Lies in its Reference to the Future.* 6. The Nature of Signs.* 7. Logic as a Study of Signs.* 8. Three Classes of Qualities. 9. Space as Essential in Logic. 10. The Copula and Simple Syllogism.* 11. Logical Breadth and Depth, and Distribution and Composition.* 12. The Collective Senses of Terms and of Number. 13. The Mathematical Method of Reasoning. 14. Relative Terms.* 15 Conjugative Terms. 16. Probabilities. 17. Maxims of Reasoning.

Chapters not included in the above plan: "Representation,"* "The List of Categories."* Among the drafts everything substantive may be found that was later to be incorporated in "The Fixation of Belief" and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," except the three grades of clearness and the maxim.40

April 8. Peirce orders from Westermann in New York a copy of Wundt's Untersuchungen zur Mechanik der Nerven und Nerven­centren (volume I, 1871). [In an unpublished essay of about 1905 on pragmatism Peirce wrote: "The first volume ... which I studied in '73, was a most magnificent piece of work."]41

May 8. John Stuart Mill dies at Avignon.

May 22. Obituary notice of Mill in The Nation by E. L. Godkin and Chauncey Wright.42

November 12. Chauncey Wright reads to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences his commemorative notice of Mill as a Foreign Honorary Member of the Academy.43

.... Mill's "Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy" ... was his greatest effort in polemical writing. That the reputation of Sir William Hamilton as a thinker was greatly diminished by this exam­

Page 125

ination cannot be doubted. Nor can it be doubted that the pendulum of philosophical opinion has begun, through Mill's clear expositions and vigorous defence of the Experience philosophy, to move again towards what was a century and a half ago the prevalent English philosophy....

[James in 1907 dedicated his Pragmatism "To the memory of John Stuart Mill, from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind, and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive to­day." If Peirce had written a comparable dedication, it would have been to Whewell. See 1869 December 14 above.]

1874

February 2. William Stanley Jevons in his Principles of Science adopts Peirce's rather than De Morgan's name for the new "logic of relatives," which "has been treated with such great ability by Professors Peirce, De Morgan, Ellis, and Harley." [This is the earliest acknowledgment, in a standard treatise, of the importance of Peirce's contributions to logic.]44

1875

February 11. Peirce is added to the Committee on Units of Force and Energy of the American Metrological Society, which is investigating the new unit of force (the dyne) proposed by the British Association. [He has therefore had a professional occasion for applying the pragmatic maxim to the idea of force as he does in "How to Make Our Ideas Clear."]45

April 3. Peirce sails from New York for Liverpool on the steamer "Adriatic" of the White Star Line, to remain in Europe for sixteen months on business for the Coast Survey. Among his fellow passengers is W. H. Appleton. [Later recollections: "The leisurely voyages of those days gave one time to make acquaintances, even friendships. Mr. Appleton and I used to pace the deck together, and I would talk to him about my studies of the nature of the cogency of scientific reasoning." " ... he offered me a good round price for some articles for the Popular Science Monthly." See 1877 September 13 below.]46

April 22—24. Peirce visits Cambridge University and writes a report a week later to Superintendent Patterson of the Coast and Geodetic Survey. James Clerk Maxwell, "the man whom on the whole I most desired to see," took him through his "most splendid new physical laboratory which is just finished."

Page 126

In all I ever saw in relation to the effect of the resistance of the atmosphere on pendulums it has been assumed that the resistance was proportional to the density of the air while the temperature has been left out of account altogether, but from considering the matter in the light of the mechanical theory of heat I was led to believe that the largest term of the resistance was independent of the density and also of the surface of resistance and was proportional to the absolute temperature. I was happy to find that Professor Maxwell, who is one of the greatest authorities on the viscosity of air, and the best experimenter upon it, entirely agreed with me in this view.

[The linking of Darwin with Maxwell in "The Fixation of Belief" is in part an echo of this meeting.]47

May 4. Peirce writes to his mother from London: "Today I went to the Royal Society rooms ... and I received an invitation to attend the meetings.... I afterward went to see Clifford and had a very interesting talk with him about Logic etc. & I am going to dine there Sunday. This evening I got a note from Herbert Spencer saying he had arranged to have me made free of the Athenaeum Club.... "

May 16. Peirce drafts a letter to a British logician, probably Jevons, reporting a change of view since his 1870 memoir, "Description of a Notation for the Logic of Relatives."

I think now that I somewhat cramped and warped my presentation of logic by the effort to make the notation for it as analogous as possible to that of the algebra of quantity. I first described algebraic notation without reference to its signification and then applied it to logic, but it seems to me now that it is impossible to have a more general algebra than logical algebra and that the proper way is to begin with studying logic and then to apply the results to algebra. Algebra indeed is clearly a branch of logic....

June. W. K. Clifford [who has evidently been talking with Peirce about Peirce's researches in stellar photometry] writes in the Fortnightly Review: "The method of Struve has indeed been beautifully applied by Mr. Charles S. Peirce to the richer materials now at hand with the view of determining approximately the shape of the solar galaxy and the mode of distribution of stars in it." 48

September 12. Chauncey Wright dies in Cambridge. James writes the obituary notice in The Nation. Peirce wishes he were in Cambridge "to have some talks about Wright and about his ideas and see if we couldn't get up a memorial of him. His memory deserves it for he did a great deal for every one of us .... what I am thinking of .... is to give some résumé of his ideas and of the history of his thought." [Norton collected Wright's philosophical papers; he thought of having Fiske write the introduction; James suggested Peirce; Norton eventually did it himself.]49

Page 127 September 25. Peirce reports to the Permanent Commission of the International Geodetic Association, at its meeting in Paris, on his study of the flexure of the pendulum stand and its influence on the period.

November 25. William James recommends Peirce for a chair of "Logic & Mental Science" at The Johns Hopkins University:

.... I feel confident he would do as great honor to any university which might secure him as Prof. W. S. Jevons, Esq., does to Owens College. Both Jevons and W. K. Clifford in England know him personally and would probably certify to you the high character of his work.50

1876

August 20. Peirce arrives in Boston on the steamer "Marathon" of the Cunard Line, after sixteen months abroad.51

September 8. Nicholas St. John Green dies at his home in Cambridge. [The commemorative notice in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences quotes a long letter by "one who was familiar with his modes of thought," probably Peirce:

The basis of his philosophy was, that every form of words that means any thing indicates some sensible fact on the existence of which its truth depends. You can hardly call this a doctrine: it is rather an intellectual tendency. But it was Green's mission to insist upon it and to illustrate it.]52

1876—77. William James in notes for his lectures on Physiological Psychology:

.... the logical idealists ... Hegel, Green and C. S. Peirce ... point to the fact that as a rule our sensations are merely contributory to our opinions about things.... There is an inevitable drift in thought, a logical destiny precipitated out of all experience, which takes up every sensation and makes it contributory to its ends.... This conclusion to which all sensations, all men, all opinions converge is inevitable, if time and experience enough are given, and is "the Truth."53

1877

January. W. K. Clifford in his essay, "The Ethics of Belief," in the Contemporary Review: "For belief belongs to man, and to the guidance of human affairs: no belief is real unless it guide our actions, and those very actions supply a test of its truth."54

March 24. Peirce from New York to his mother in Cambridge:

Page 128

I am writing a paper for the Popular Science Monthly but it is not complete yet. I think when I have done one, I can write others more rapidly. I received the other day a letter from Mr. Plantamour, who has been appointed to make a report on the pendulum to the International Geodetic Association, & he desires that I shall write & send to the President for publication an account of my researches on the flexure of the stand, by doing which he says I shall be rendering a ''signal service to other observers."

April 17—20. The National Academy of Sciences meets in Washington. Peirce attends by invitation of the President, is elected to membership, receives a grant of $800 for research, and is appointed to the Committee on Weights, Measures and Coinage.55

September 13. Peirce sails from New York on the steamship "Suevia" of the Hamburg Mail Line. The "Suevia" does not reach Plymouth until the evening of the 24th. There are only four first cabin passengers besides Peirce and he has the smoking room to himself throughout the eleven­day voyage. The crossing is smooth, and he is able to do "a day's work every day." "I hope to have a day in London," he writes to Superintendent Patterson before disembarking, "as it is very desirable with reference to the publication of my logic." In a letter to his mother [November 2 below]: "We had charming weather; & I wrote the best part of my second paper, 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear,' & as my own are always far from that at sea, I fear the style is somewhat giddy."

[In a letter of about October 28, 1904, to Christine Ladd­Franklin:

In the autumn of 1877 I went abroad in order to urge a certain truth upon the Geodetical Association. As I should have to speak in French and conduct a discussion in that language, by way of practise I began and finished on the voyage between Hoboken and Plymouth an article about pragmatism in French. I afterward translated into French my article of November, 1877, and these two appeared in the Revue Philosophique.

In a manuscript of 1905, Peirce remembers another motive:

The second article, the exposition of pragmaticism, will appear to the philosophical student as insufficient and frivolous. The excuse is that I was invited to write the articles by Mr. W. H. Appleton, the publisher of the magazine, on an Atlantic steamer [1875 April 3 above], without an opportunity to consult the editor, who was highly displeased with the metaphysical character of my first article. The second article was entirely written during another passage of the Atlantic ... and was written first in French ... with the idea that the temptations to be too darkly philosophical would by that means be diminished, and the editor

Page 129

be in some measure appeased. All these circumstances were unfavorable to thoroughness of treatment.]56

September 25. Peirce in London [probably on Clifford's advice] "went to see the publisher of the Nineteenth Century, who combines the business of banker & publisher. I didn't like him much, though he tried to be civil. I don't think my articles will appear there." [James Knowles had left the Contemporary Review in a crisis probably precipitated by the publication of Clifford's essay in January, and had inaugurated the Nineteenth Century in March.]57

September 27—October 2. Peirce represents the United States at the Conference of the International Geodetic Association in Stuttgart. He presents a paper in French on the flexure of pendulum supports that has been circulated in advance, addresses the Conference at four of its sessions, and becomes the world authority in this highly specialized field. [This is the high point of his scientific career, and he has reached it at the age of thirty­eight. While in Stuttgart he buys the second volume of Wundt's Mechanik der Nerven und Nervencentren, which has been published there in the preceding year. "Although not quite so conclusive as the first, it was a greater performance."]58

October. [Peirce's letter to his mother (November 2) continued:]

From Stuttgart, I went to Leipzig where I endeavored unsuccessfully to get my articles inserted in a review. The book will be translated & I must content myself with that.—From Leipzig to Berlin.... From Berlin to Paris. Here I arranged to have my articles appear in the Revue Philosophique, and the book will appear in French, also. This arrangement pleases me very much.

[Peirce had evidently hoped that the "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" might appear concurrently in English in the Popular Science Monthly at home and the Nineteenth Century in England, in French in the Revue Philosophique, and in German in a Leipzig periodical; and that the book might also appear simultaneously in English, French, and German. Of these hopes, the only fulfilment was the appearance in the Popular Science Monthly of six articles and in the Revue Philosophique of the first two of them.]

October 29. Edward L. Youmans, editor of the Popular Science Monthly, writes from London to his sister in the United States:

Charles Peirce isn't read much on this side. Clifford, however, says he is the greatest living logician, and the second man since Aristotle who has added to the subject something material, the other man being George Boole, author of The Laws of Thought.59

Page 130 November. "Illustrations of the Logic of Science, First Paper—The Fixation of Belief" appears in the Popular Science Monthly.

November 2. Peirce writes a long letter to his mother from Le Havre reporting his experiences and observations during his five weeks in Europe. [Quoted under September 13, 25, and October; cited under September 27.]

November 3. Peirce sails from Le Havre on the steamship "Herder" of the Hamburg Mail Line. He arrives in New York on November 18.60

November 20. James addresses a letter to the editors of Critique Philosophique, who publish it in the following year under the title, "Quelques considerations sur la méthode subjective." " .... toute question a un sens et se pose nettement, de laquelle résulte une claire alternative pratique, en telle sort que, selon qu'on y réponde d'une manière ou d'une autre, on doive adopter une conduite ou une autre." 61

December 29. At a meeting of the American Metrological Society in New York, "Prof. C. S. Peirce, referring to the action previously taken relative to Units of Force, stated what he considered to be the proper form and character of such units."62 [See 1875 February 11 above.]

1878

January. In "Illustrations of the Logic of Science, Second PaperHow to Make Our Ideas Clear," in the Popular Science Monthly, the pragmatic maxim appears for the first time in print: "Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object" (CP 5.402). No manuscript of earlier date containing the maxim is known to survive. [See however 1868 April 9 and 1871 October above.]

William James in the same month publishes in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy his "Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence."

The organism of thought ... is teleological through and through.... Far from being vouched for by the past, these [our several individual hypotheses, convictions, and beliefs] are verified only by the future ... The survivors constitute the right way of thinking.... The knower is an actor ... there belongs to mind ... a spontaneity, a vote. It is in the game, and not a mere looker­on.... The only objective criterion of reality is coerciveness, in the long run, over thought.... "The fate of thought" . . . is the only unimpeachable regulative Law of Mind." 63

Compare Peirce's "How to Make Our Ideas Clear":

Page 131

This activity of thought by which we are carried, not where we wish, but to a foreordained goal, is like the operation of destiny. No modification of the point of view taken, no selection of other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape the predestinate opinion. This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. (CP 5.407)

March. "Illustrations of the Logic of Science, Third Paper—The Doctrine of Chances."

The conception of probability here set forth is substantially that first developed by Mr. Venn, in his "Logic of Chance" [see 1867 July above]. Of course, a vague apprehension of the idea had always existed, but the problem was to make it perfectly clear, and to him belongs the credit of first doing this. (CP 2.651n1)

March 18. President John Le Conte writes to Benjamin Peirce:

Your much esteemed letter, inclosing your son Charles's recommendation of M. Léo Seguin for the chair of French literature at the University of California, reached me in due season.... Charles's recommendation of M. Seguin is powerful and satisfactory in relation to French.64

[In the Johns Hopkins University Library there is a volume of offprints of Peirce's octavo "Papers in Logic" including the six "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" and the French versions of the first two of them, with a note in Peirce's hand containing this sentence: "The two French versions, which I prefer to the English of the same papers, derive their merit from the skill of M. Léo Seguin, who was killed in Tunis in 1881.''65 I conjecture that Seguin was living in New York City in 1877­78 and that Peirce either took French lessons of him or, more probably, asked him to revise the original French of "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" and the French translation of "The Fixation of Belief."]

April. "Illustrations of the Logic of Science, Fourth Paper—the Probability of Induction."

June. "Illustrations of the Logic of Science, Fifth Paper—The Order of Nature."

August. "Illustrations of the Logic of Science, Sixth Paper—Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis."

Peirce's Photometric Researches comes out as Volume IX of the Annals of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College. [His major published scientific work thus appears simultaneously with the concluding essay of his "Illustrations of the Logic of Science."]

Page 132 December. "La Logique de la Science, première partie—Comment se fixe la croyance" appears in the Revue Philosophique.

1879

January. "La Logique de la Science, deuxieme partie—Comment rendre nos idées claires" is published in the Revue Philosophique. "Considérer quels sont les effets pratiques que nous pensons pouvoir être produits par l'objet de notre conception. La conception de tous ces effets est la conception complète de l'objet."66 [If, as Peirce says, this essay was originally written in French and only subsequently translated into English, this may have been the first formulation of the pragmatic maxim. See 1868 April 9, 1871 October, 1873 March 6, and 1877 September 13 above.]

In the same month, G. Stanley Hall surveys "Philosophy in the United States" in Mind and dwells at greatest length and with the most evident sympathy on Peirce's "Illustrations of the Logic of Science." "The author is a distinguished mathematician, and this discussion, in which he long ago interested himself, promises to be one of the most important of American contributions to philosophy." [Hall has been working for two years under James and Bowditch and in the preceding June has taken Harvard's first Ph.D. degree in philosophy. He probably owes his knowledge of Peirce in part to James, and the "long ago" may allude to the Metaphysical Club.] In his analysis of "How to Make Our Ideas Clear,'' and apropos of the clause, "Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects," Hall inserts in brackets a reference to Helmholtz's Physiologische Optik which shows that he [and probably James also] is aware of a source of Peirce's pragmatism which Peirce does not mention in the "Illustrations" but which is evident from his review of Berkeley [1871 October].67

February 14. Peirce's Photometric Researches [1878 August] is reviewed at length in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society as "a very valuable and elaborate investigation in this interesting but somewhat neglected branch of astronomy."68

SOME CONCLUSIONS

1. Though the "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" in their published form, in English and in French, were written entirely within the years 1877 and 1878, the substantive content of them took shape in Peirce's talk and writing over a period of more than a decade. Of the first two papers in particular, everything substantive but the grades of clearness and the maxim was in writing in some form by July 1873; and some of it was in nearly final form by May 1872.

Page 133 2. In the genesis of pragmatism there were involved not only (1) the Kantian roots of Peirce's thought (1856­1865), (2) Bain's theory of belief (1859), (3) the Darwinian and other theories of evolution (1859), (4) the legal philosophy of Green (1870­72), and (5) Holmes's prediction theory of law (1872), but also (6) Peirce's observational and theoretical work as a scientist in the period 1860­1878, and particularly in chemistry, spectroscopy, stellar photometry, metrology, and geodesy, (7) the shock of Mill's examination of Hamilton (1865), (8) Peirce's falling back on Whewell's philosophy of science (1869), and (9) the experimental psychology of Fechner, Helmholtz and Wundt (1862­1876). The first five have been explored; the sixth is currently being studied by Professor Victor F. Lenzen; the last three have still to be broached. I believe some further study of the fourth is needed, and of the personal influence of Green and Wright.

3. Although throughout the period of the genesis of pragmatism he was working away at deductive logic, and though one of his major contributions to it was his memoir of 1870 January 26, most of Peirce's important work on it is of later date (1880­1905), and during the period of the present chronicle (1865­1879) he was concerned primarily with "The Logic of Science; or, Induction and Hypothesis" (1866 October 24). His pragmatism arose from his preoccupation with what at that time he called "hypothesis" and later "abduction" or "retroduction," and it was conceived by him as an integral part of that part of ''the logic of science."

4. When Peirce in 1872 (November 25) was urged to publish separately an early form of his pragmatism paper, which he had read before the Metaphysical Club, he could not bring himself to detach it from the more comprehensive treatment of "the logic of science" on which he had been at work from the time he had drafted the University Lectures of 1865 (March 17), perhaps as early as the fall of 1864.

5. Although the first two papers of the "Illustrations" series did appear in French without being followed by the other four, this was not by design. It was Peirce's plan to have the entire series appear in French and German as well as in English, and then to appear collected in book form in each of the three languages.

6. At the time Peirce published his "Illustrations," he was known primarily as a scientist, only secondarily as a logician, and scarcely at all as a philosopher. In the "Illustrations" he was not addressing philosophers or logicians, nor on the other hand was he addressing the readers of the Popular Science Monthly, though he made some concessions, later regretted, to its editor and readers. He had not chosen that medium of communication; it had chosen him; or rather, its publisher, not its editor, had done so. Peirce was addressing himself to the community of investigators at large.

Page 134 7. There was a still more general discipline embracing not only the logic of science but also deductive logic. That was the theory of signs. Although no essay developing pragmatism as an integral part of the general theory of signs was published by Peirce, and although only one such essay has been published since his death (CP 5.464496), papers still unpublished make it evident that it was so conceived from the beginning (1873 March 6).69 Only within that general theory can the intended limitations of pragmatism be exhibited, and only as so limited did Peirce suppose it provable.

Notes

1. His set is in the Johns Hopkins University Library.

2. MS 1156. See 1867 November, below.

3. Annual Report of the President of Harvard College. 1864­65, p. 20; Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Harvard University. 1865­66/1, p. 104; Reports to Overseers, President and Fellows Series, Harvard University Archives, 2:117. (Hereafter, the first two are cited as Report and Catalogue.)

4. Nation 1 (1865):280­­81.

5. Philip P. Wiener. Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), p. 252n16.

6. Cf. CP 5.363, 420.

7. NAR 103 (1866):250­60.

8. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1935), 1:231; Mark DeWolfe Howe, Justice Holmes: The Shaping Years (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 251, 260, 274.

9. Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 7 (186568):243. (Hereafter cited as PAAAS.)

10. Perry, 1:233, 254, 274, 282; 2:3f.

11 . See Chauncey Wright in the Nation 5 (1867):238.

12. CP 5.12; see also "Alexander Bain," pp. 93­99 above.

13. John Venn, The Logic of Chance (London and Cambridge: Macmillan, 1866), p. 82, §19.

14. "C. S. Peirce to W. T. Harris," ed. Wallace Nethery, Personalist 43 (1962):39.

15. CP 5.439 (cf. 264­265), 453 (cf. 312, not 306).

16. MS 290 (a draft of CP 5.438­63).

17. American Journal of Science 98 (1869):404­5; Annals of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College 8 (1876):50, and 19 ( 1889):68. (Hereafter, the latter is cited as Annals.)

18. CP 8.196­204, 201n3. For evidence of what Peirce thought in 1869, see November 25.

19. Henry James, Charles W. Eliot (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 1:200; Catalogue, 1869­70/1, pp. 8, 102, 103.

20. Report, 1869­70, p. 5.

Page 135 21. N 1:32. See May 2 above and 1873 April 8 below.

22. MSS 584­86. Francis G. Peabody, notebook in Harvard University Archives, HUE 5.69.69, and "The Germ of the Graduate School," Harvard Gradtuates' Magazine 27 (1918): 176­81; Josiah Royce, "Present Ideals of American University Life," Scribner's 10 (1891):381. Of the lecture on Mill on 28 December, James wrote: "It was delivered without notes, and was admirable in matter, manner and clearness of statement" (Perry, 1:321).

23. MS 586; CP 5.581. Cf. C. J. Ducasse, "Whewell's Philosophy of Scientific Discovery," Philosophical Review 60 (1951):56­69, 213­34; E. W. Strong, "William Whewell and John Stuart Mill: Their Controversy about Scientific Knowledge," Journal of the History of Ideas 16 (1955):209­31.

24. American Law Review 4 (1869­70):201­16, 350­53. On the article, see "Justice Holmes," p. 9 (and note 11) above, and Wiener, pp. 156­61; on the review, p. 10 (and note 15) above, and Wiener, p. 156.

25. Harvard Graduates' Magazine 31 (1923):555.

26. Report, 1869­70, p. 8.

27. American Law Review 4 (1869­70):405­16. Peirce's copy is in Harvard College Library, Phil 5005.4.

28. Unidentified correspondence fragment in the Peirce Papers.

29. The inscribed book, with the letter inserted, is in the University of London Library, L. 2. (Peirce). (I am indebted to John B. Wolfe for this information.) Cf. Peirce to his father, July 12. For Peirce's later memory of his visit with De Morgan a few days afterward, see CP 4.4.

30. See "Alexander Bain," p.p 89­90 above.

31. Passenger list, steamship Aleppo, Boston Daily Advertiser, 8 March 1871, p. 4. (E. S. Pierce should be C. S. Peirce.) See also "Alexander Bain," pp. 100­102 above, and "Was There a Metaphysical Club in Cambridge?", part 2, item d.

32. Leon Edel, Henry James: The Conquest of London, 1870­1881 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), p. 20. See "Was There a Metaphysical Club?" for further details.

33. N 1:46.

34. MS L 248:10­12 = CP 5.370­73.

35. Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (New York, 1887), 2:343. For the sequel, see "Evolution," p. 28 above. Wiener (p. 54) is in error about the date of the letter.

36. American Law Review 6 (1872):593­613 (Green), 723­25 (Holmes). Details in "Justice Holmes," pp. 11­12 above, and in Wiener, pp. 163­65.

37. Perry, 1:332.

38. By letter of Benjamin Peirce, his father, then Superintendent.

39. Report, 1872­73, p. 3.

40. See CP 7.313­361; MSS 360­96. There is a list of chapters in MS 394.

41. MS 326. For the second volume see 1877 September 27 below; and see 1869 May 2 and November 25 above.

42. Nation 16 (1873):350­51 (first three paragraphs by Godkin, last five by Wright).

43. PAAAS 9 (1873­74):295.

44. London: Macmillan, 1874, 1:27. Jevons refers in a footnote to Peirce's memoir of 26 January 1870.

45. Proceedings of the American Metrological Society 1 (1873­78):36, 78. CP 5.404; 7.341.

46. Passenger list in New York Times, 4 April 1875; Journal of Philosophy 13 (1916):719; MS 771.

Page 136 47. Peirce to Patterson, 30 April 1875, National Archives Record Group 23, Assistants P 1, 1866­75. CP 5.364; cf. 6.297 and 7.66. See 1872 April 11 above.

48. Fortnightly Review 23 (1875):788­89.

49. Nation 21 (1875):194; Perry, 1:363, 536­37. Chauncey Wright, Philosophical Discussions, with a biographcal sketch of the author by Charles Eliot Norton (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1877).

50. Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Wiener and Young (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 363­64.

51. Passenger list in Boston Evening Transcript, 21 August 1876.

52. PAAAS 12 (1876­77):290.

53. Perry, 1:477. See 1878 January below.

54. Contemporary Review 29 (1877):298.

55. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1 (1863­94):124­26.

56. Passenger list in New York Times, 13 September 1877. Peirce to Patterson, 24 September 1877, National Archives Record Group 23, Assistants H­Q. Journal of Philosophy 13 (1916):719. MS 289 (a draft of CP 5.438­463, another draft of which is cited in note 16 above).

57. Peirce to his mother, 2 November 1877. Alan Willard Brown, The Metaphysical Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), pp. 18083.

58. Peirce to his mother, 2 November 1877. MS 326 (cited in note 41 above).

59. John Fiske, Edward Livingston Youmans (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1894), p. 340.

60. Passenger list in New York Times, 19 November 1877.

61. 6:2 (1878):410. Collected Essays and Reviews (Longmans, Green and Co., 1920), p. 76.

62. Proceedings of the American Metrological Society 1 (1873­78):78.

63. 12 (1878):13, 16, 17, 18. Collected Essays and Reviews, pp. 61, 65, 66, 67. See last entry under 1876 above.

64. In Benjamin Peirce papers, Harvard University Archives.

65. On Seguin's death in Tunis, see Le Télégraphe (Paris), I and 2 June 1881, pp. 1­2. A sketch of his life by George Renard is given on 2 June, p. 2, "Léo Seguin (1846­1881)." I owe this information to the kindness of Andrew J. Reck. 66. 7 (1879):48.

67. Mind 4 (1879):101­3.

68. 39 (1878­79):270­73.

69. See 1865 May 14 above.

Page 137

EIGHT—Philosophical Clubs in Cambridge and Boston From Peirce's Metaphysical Club to Harris's Hegel Club

Historians of philosophy have usually confined themselves to published works of major philosophers. They have seldom taken account of unpublished manuscripts and letters. Yet there exist many collections of unpublished papers which contain valuable evidence, and in some cases the only evidence, on questions of interest to the historian. An inventory of deposits of papers of American philosophers in particular would be of great service. The best known deposits are the William James and the Charles S. Peirce Papers at Harvard University. Less known are the Josiah Royce and the Francis Ellingwood Abbot Papers there and the Thomas Davidson Papers at Yale. In the Midwest there are the William Torrey Harris Papers at the Missouri Historical Society and the Elijah Jordan Papers at the University of Illinois. On the Pacific Coast there are the William Torrey Harris Papers at the University of Southern California and the George Holmes Howison Papers at the University of California at Berkeley. I am sure there are many similar collections, unknown to me, in all parts of the country. Even those that are still in private hands should be listed, if their owners are willing.

I offer here a modest example of the uses to which such collections may be put. In some places and periods the centers of philosophic activity have been not schools or departments but clubs. This was the case in St. Louis in the 1860's and 1870's, and in Cambridge in the 1870's and 1880's. In St. Louis there were the Hegel Club, the Philosophical Society, the Kant Club, and the Aristotle Club. 1 In Cambridge there was, in the first place, the Metaphysical Club in which, "in the earliest seventies," pragmatism was born. 2 One of the questions of interest to the historian is why pragmatism attracted so little notice for thirty years. If it was born in a club, perhaps a part of the answer might be found in the clubs that succeeded that

Page 138 one. I turn first to the Hegel Club of the earliest eighties. Of this I find brief published accounts, from memory, by three of its members: the first by William James in his reminiscences of Thomas Davidson (1903); the second by George Herbert Palmer in his reminiscences of James (1920); and the third by G. Stanley Hall in his autobiography (1923). For ready comparison, I place Palmer's and Hall's accounts alongside James's on the following page.3

These accounts, written from twenty to forty years after the events, supply enough leads, and the discrepancies among them raise enough questions, to prompt and guide a search for letters and documents of the period to which they refer. Relevant letters survive among the Abbot and James Papers in Cambridge, the Davidson Papers in New Haven, the Harris Papers in St. Louis and Los Angeles, and the Howison Papers in Berkeley; and Abbots' diaries contain many relevant entries. Using these and other contemporary documents, I shall try to narrate the events which James, Palmer and Hall remember so vividly but so differently and so inaccurately.

JAMES

I first heard about [Davidson] in 1873 from Mr. Elliot Cabot, who praised his learning and manliness and great success with pupils. In another year he came to Boston, ruddy and radiant.... At that time I saw most of him at a little philosophical club which used to meet (often at his rooms in Temple Street) every fortnight. Other members were W T Harris, G. H. Howison, J. E. Cabot, C. C. Everett, B. P Bowne, and sometimes G. H. Palmer. We never worked out unanimous conclusions. Davidson used to crack the whip of Aristotle over us; and I remember that whatever topic was formally appointed for the day, we almost invariably wound up with a quarrel about space perception. The club had existed before Davidson's advent. The previous year we had gone over a good part of Hegel's larger logic under the self­constituted leadership of Messrs. Emery and McClure, two young business men from Quincy Illinois, who had become enthusiastic Hegelians; and, knowing almost no German, had acttually possessed themselves of a manuscript translation of the entire three volumes, made by an extraordinary Pomeranian immigrant named Brocklmeyer. They were leaving business for the law, and studying at the Harvard Law School; but they saw the whole universe through Hegelian spectacles, and a more admirable homo unius libri than Mr. Emery, with his three big folios of Hegelian manuscript, I have never had the good fortune to know.

PALMER

Twice [James] ventured up to the idealist edge and looked on the devouring flood below. One winter Dr. W. T. Harris presided over an informal philosophical club in Boston for the reading of Hegel. Among its irregular members were C. C. Everett, Elliot Cabot, E. B. Andrews, Thomas Davidson, William James, and myself. I do not think James obtained anything

Page 139

from the strange jargon. Again a few years later he attended a seminary of mine on Hegel's Logic, and once more found it intolerable and incomprehensible. He washed his hand of the pernicious stuff in his amusing paper on "Some Hegelisms." But I thought it always held a terrifying fascination for him.

HALL

.. Harris established, one fall, a weekly conference in Boston which ... was attended ... by the venerable Professor Hedge and C. C. Everett of the Harvard Theological School; Benjamin Andrews, later president of Brown and of the University of Kansas, but then connected with the Newton Theological School; Professor Francis Bowen, William James, George Palmer, Mr. Cabot, and a few others.... Harris's method ... was to translate and expound the larger logic of Hegel... in a somewhat de haut en bas way.... Thus his hearers began to fall off James even writing his humorous "Some Hegelisms" ridiculing what was taught as almost sacred in this circle, so that the last meeting in the spring I remember only myself and a St. Louis devotee of the cult were present.

Before proceeding, however, I shall anticipate the result just enough to correct at once some of the grosser errors in the three accounts.

The chronology of James's account is incredibly confused. Davidson came, in 1875, not to Boston but to Cambridge. It was not until the summer of 1878, after a winter in Greece, that he moved to Temple Street in Boston. It was not until 1879 that Emery and McClure came from Quincy, settled in Concord, and entered the Harvard Law School. The reading of Hegel's larger Logic under their auspices did not begin until the fall of 1880. It was resumed under Harris's auspices in the late fall of 1881 and continued through the spring of 1887. James has in fact confused three clubs: (1) a club which began in January 1876 as a revival of Peirce's Metaphysical Club (1871­75), and which lasted until 1879; (2) the Hegel Club of Emery and McClure (1880­81); (3) the Hegel Club of Harris (1881­87). The controversy about space perception belongs to the first of these clubs, not to the second or third.

Palmer remembers James as attending his seminar on Hegel's logic "a few years" after the winter in which Harris presided over the club for the reading of Hegel. In fact, the seminar in question was in the year immediately before that in which Harris's Hegel Club began, and in the same year with the Hegel Club of Emery and McClure.

Hall describes "Some Hegelisms" as ridiculing what was taught in Harris's Club. In fact, it was read to Palmer's seminar in the year before Harris's Club began. Hall suggests that the last meeting in the spring of 1882 was attended only by Harris, himself, and one other member, and Palmer and Hall both suggest that the Club

Page 140 ceased after that one year. In fact, as Abbot's diary records, the meeting of June 3, 1882, was attended by Abbot, Andrews, Cabot, Hall, Harris, James, and Palmer—that is, by seven persons. There is no record of an attendance greater than ten at any time. And the Club lasted five years longer.

Now for the narrative, which I shall divide into three sections, one for each of the clubs confused by James.4

I. THE REVIVED METAPHYSICAL CLUB

In the fall of 1875 Thomas Davidson was living on Langdon Street in Cambridge as a private tutor and lecturer and was writing articles for Johnson's Encyclopaedia under the direction of its sub­editor for philosophy, William Torrey Harris, with whom he had been associated for eight years in St. Louis. On September 27 he wrote Harris that he intended to found an Aristotle Club in Cambridge like the one he had founded in St. Louis, whose continuing activities Harris had been reporting to him. But Davidson was studying with his chief patron, James Elliot Cabot, a philosopher­scholar of leisure and an Overseer of Harvard College, and Cabot called his attention to the new edition of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature which Thomas Hill Green, the English idealist, had published in the preceding year. Cabot, who had himself been in communication with Harris for ten years, wrote him on October 26 that he took "great comfort" from Green's critical introduction to the Treatise. Here, as Davidson too began to see, the issue between British empiricism and rational idealism was clearly drawn, and this, in 1875, was a better focus than Aristotle for philosophic debate.

But who were the available persons for a club based in Cambridge in which the debating should be done? Obviously, in the first place, those who had been members of Peirce's Metaphysical Club. Chauncey Wright, its coryphaeus, had just died in September, and Peirce himself was now living in Europe, but there were still William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Nicholas St. John Green, John Fiske, Francis Ellingwood Abbot, and Joseph Warner. Beyond that nucleus there was Cabot; there was Harvard's full and copious professor of philosophy, Francis Bowen; there was Charles Carroll Everett of the Divinity School, author of The Science of Thought (1869); there was Frederic H. Hedge, professor of German and scholar of Transcendentalism; there was a brilliant young graduate student of philosophy, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa; and, above all, there was George Holmes Howison, professor of the logic and philosophy of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, and, like Davidson, a veteran of the St. Louis clubs, who was giving a course of eighteen Lowell lectures that winter on Kant's Critique of Pure

Page 141 Reason. But Cabot lived in Brookline and Howison in Grantville (later renamed Wellesley Hills); they could not be expected to attend regularly; and the club should be well launched before they were brought in.

After some preliminary meetings, the club was in full swing by mid­January, 1876, and Davidson could write to Harris on the 17th:

Last night our new philosophical society, to which I have given shape and direction at least, met at Mr. James's—present Bowen, C. C. Everett, Dr. James, Messrs. Green, Warner, Holmes (Wendell jun'.), Fenollosa, and myself; absent John Fiske, whose children were ill. We are reading Hume on Human Nature, and, I doubt not, we shall have a most interesting time. Old Bowen is a perfect fossil without even a slug in his top­shell; but the other members, none of whom you know, I think, except Everett, are all very bright. We are talking of inviting Dr. Hedge; but I think the sense of the present members is rather against it. Possibly we shall invite Abbot notwithstanding his hobbies; but I think we all felt that our members ought to remain few.

At the meeting a week later, they decided to invite Abbot, Cabot, and Howison, and James immediately wrote this note to Abbot:

You are invited to join a Club for reading and discussing philosophical authors, which meets once a week at present and is composed of C. C. Everett, N. St. J. Green, O. W. Holmes jr., John Fiske, Thos. Davidson, J. B. Warner, Prof. Bowen, and one or two others. We have begun with Hume's treatise on Human nature and the next meeting is at this house, next Sunday evening at 1/2 past seven promptly. We hope that your engagements will not shut us off from the benefit of your cooperation in our scheme.

At the meeting at James's on January 30, Abbot, Cabot and Howison were all present, as Davidson reported to Harris next day; "the sparks flew," and they had "a most delightful meeting." 5 To Howison, Davidson wrote on February 2:

You did well the other night if you hadn't gone away without even once saying goodbye. I'm afraid, if we give you an opportunity of showing yourself, you will soon be beyond speaking to us at all.

Never mind; come over in good time on Sunday and call for me. I shall meanwhile find out Mr. Everett's abode. You can take tea with me, and I shall invite anybody you w'd like to see to meet you. You shan't hide your light under a bushel any longer.

In reporting the meeting of February 6 at Everett's house on Garden Street, Davidson wrote to Harris on the 9th: "We are having lively times over Hume. Cabot and Howison are both quite brilliant. Everett is not quite equal to either." On the 10th William James wrote

Page 142 to his brother Robertson James, then living at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin:

... we have reorganized a metaphysical club here. It meets on Sundays, and contains some very acute heads. The difficulty we often have in understanding each other shows how difficult these subjects are,—but in spite of everything it is a pleasure to have one's ideas give a glimmering little hitch towards greater clearness, which they invariably do on these occasions.6

And on the 11th Harris replied to Davidson: "Your philosophical society means, in my opinion, one of the greatest things that has happened since the Transcendental Club of old times. I suppose you have Green's edition of Hume? Have you read his introduction?"7

But to Howison, who was absent on February 20, Davidson wrote on the 24th:

We missed you much last Sunday, and you missed something too, viz, a good boring. Bowen came & nearly broke up the whole affair. Such an old rag store I never did know .... Don't stay away next time. We meet at Mr. James's....

P. S. Cabot says he wants very much to have you in Harvard College.8

Howison to Harris on the 26th: "T. D. seems to be prospering, and I hope, as you do, that his auspicious star may never set. The 'Club' is agreeable; I enjoy it much." Davidson to Harris on March 4: "Our philosophical society gets along quite brilliantly—except when Bowen comes. Fiske is afraid of us, being no logician and being quite unable to defend his positions." And on March 12: "Our club met today and we had a very pleasant discussion.... Bowen has not troubled us again."

Meanwhile Davidson was tutoring two of Cabot's sons, and Cabot, Davidson and Howison were associated in another enterprise. Cabot had been elected in the fall of 1873 a member of the committee of the Overseers to visit the "Academical Department" of Harvard College. He had taken the office with great seriousness and had immediately made an appointment to visit Howison's classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, so as to have a standard with which to compare the classes at Harvard. Not long afterward, he had written Harris, as Harris had much later, on June 10, 1874, reported to Howison, a letter in which he had spoken of Howison's work "in the warmest terms of commendation & expressed the idea that Harvard was far behind" Howison's "work in philosophy." In the fall of 1874, at Cabot's suggestion, Howison had been made a member of the Overseers committee. In 1875 Cabot had become chairman of the committee and had added Davidson to it. Howison

Page 143 had been assigned to the subcommittee on Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, and Davidson to the subcommittee on Classics. And now, on April 17, 1876, Davidson wrote to Harris:

I am ''roughing" Harvard College on the subject of Greek. I read a long paper to the classical part of the examining Committee last Saturday morning at the Athenaeum, and we had quite a lively and amicable discussion. My paper is to be sent as a special report to the Board of Overseers.

Cabot was present at the meeting, and Davidson's principal recommendations were incorporated in Cabot's annual report to the Overseers that fall. Davidson's complete paper was published in the Atlantic in January, 1877. The study of Greek "as pursued in Harvard College," he said, "conduces to none of the ends which it may be capable of subserving, whether those of culture or those of science." "Philosophy, religion, and polity are almost entirely neglected. Not a single Harvard graduate goes out into the world prepared to be an original investigator in these fields." 9

Though the publication of this paper helped to bring about needed changes, it also, according to James in his reminiscences of Davidson, offended enough people to nip in the bud a scheme of James's to win for Davidson a chair of Greek philosophy at Harvard. Cabot's desire to move Howison to Harvard from his professorship at the Institute was similarly frustrated by what appeared to the Overseers and officers an immoderate and misplaced zeal, on the part of Cabot as well as of Howison and Davidson, for changes in the content and methods of philosophic instruction. The changes were accepted in time, but not their advocates.

After preliminary inquiries and consultations, the revived Metaphysical Club resumed its meetings on January 19, 1877, as we learn from Abbot's diary. During this second season it met on Friday afternoons. Harris asked Davidson to report its proceedings for the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and Davidson replied on March 8:

I shall be glad to write you an account of our philosophical society, which is again in full blast, provided the other members are willing that it should receive publicity. We are still discussing Hume's problems, and arriving at a good many things of great value.

You saw, I suppose, how I set all the Harvard people in a blaze. I am having great sport out of it; but the best thing is that my suggestions are very likely to be adopted in toto. Nothing, for a long time, has caused so much turmoil in the college. I am going to attack the German next, and am assiduously visiting the recitations in that subject. Dr. Hedge stands in my way: I don't like to attack him, though his dryness deserves it.

Page 144 Two weeks later he had made sure there would be no objection to the publicity, and promised to write the account, but, if he did so, Harris never got round to printing it.

What James was making of Green on Hume that season appears from his lecture notes for his course in Physiological Psychology.

... the logical idealists ... of whom Hegel, Green and C. S. Peirce may be taken as types... point to the fact that as a rule our sensations are merely contributory to our opinions about things. The things are the matter of knowledge, the sensations are overlooked. So true is this that everyone who learns to draw has painfully to discover what his sensations actually are. He never has been accustomed to noticing or caring what they are, so much more has he been concerned with the thing they reveal.... There is an inevitable drift in thought, a logical destiny precipitated out of all experience, which takes up everv sensation and makes it contributory to its ends.... This conclusion to which all sensations, all men, all opinions converge is inevitable, if time and experience enough are given, and is "the Truth"....10

Davidson sailed on June 23 for a year in Greece and Italy. About that time Edward Caird's Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant became widely available in this country. There was a gradual shift of emphasis from Hume to Kant in the club's 1877­78 season. And, as we shall see later, there was a shift from Kant to Hegel in 1880.

On November 10, 1877, Howison began a course of ten Saturday Lowell lectures on "The Logic Underlying Grammar." He was obliged to give up the club during that period, and Cabot wrote Davidson on Thanksgiving Day, November 29, that it was "somewhat disturbed" by his absence.

I proposed to them your subject, Relation, & the next discussion, introduced by Mr. Dunbar (accent the 2d syllable) is to be upon "Correlative Terms." I shall not fail to transmit any light that may come to me on the occasion.

Mr. Bowen has published his book on Modern Philosophy from Descartes to Schopenhauer & Hartmann, & in it has shown to my thinking more distinctly than ever his unfitness for his position as teacher of Philosophy. It is indeed a marvellous book to have been written by an intelligent & conscientious man upon a matter of lifelong study. I have written a short notice of it for the "Nation," in which I have endeavoured to abstain from calling hard names, tho' my feeling of the mischief he has done made it difficult to do so.

In the review, which had just appeared, Cabot took Bowen to task for saying so little of Hobbes or Locke, Hume, Reid, or Hamilton, "because their writings are accessible to all," and for devoting a fifth of his book to Schopenhauer and Hartmann.

Page 145

What is the history of Modern Philosophy without Hume?. .. is it certain that Hume was refuted by Kant?... it seems clear that Kant did not answer Hume's doubt as Hume stated it—viz., as confined to our knowledge of matters of fact... there is a great deal more in Hume than the mere occasion for Kant's Critique. Indeed, as it seems to us, a chief cause (rather, perhaps, a chief sign) of the stagnation in English philosophy since Hume is to be found in the notion that he has been disposed of, by Kant or by somebody else, or by the mere operation of common sense, and that we can go on cheerfully with the postulates which he demolished."

It may be helpful at this point to quote from Cabot's letter of October 26, 1875, to Harris, which was cited in the first paragraph of this section.

I take great comfort in Mr. Green's Introduction to the new ed. of Hume. It seems to me that we may have good hopes of something further in this line from him. I look for the next advance in philosophy to England & America, even to France, rather than to Germany, wh. seems to have got such a surfeit of speculation.

It would appear that, though Cabot was rightly considered an Hegelian, what encouraged him in Green was not so much the Kantian and Hegelian insights as their use in so thorough a study of Britain's greatest philosopher by an Englishman.

In the fall and winter of 1877­78 Davidson wrote a series of letters from Greece which were published in the London Academy and the Boston Advertiser. Cabot, writing him again on February 26, 1878, commented on these and went on:

The Philosophical Club prospers, tho' Mr Dunbar's efforts were not very productive.—I should be glad to hear your development of the idea of Relation. It is indeed one way of stating the whole question of Philosophy. "In what relations does this fact stand?" is the first question & the last.

Howison has been taken away from it by some lectures on Grammar which he has been giving to a class of teachers in Boston. I went to several of them, as did Dr James, & we both liked them very much. I hope he will publish them. You could aid him about his deductions from the history of language.

The meetings on "Relation" doubtless included spatial relations. James says "we almost invariably wound up with a quarrel about space perception." They could scarcely have avoided a problem so crucial for Hume and Kant, Green and Caird. We have so far met no mention of it, but it was the chief topic for the rest of the club's life.

Page 146 William James's recollections of Thomas Davidson, that "knight­errant of the intellectual life," went back to a time when

I saw most of him at a little philosophical club which used to meet (often at his rooms in Temple Street) every fortnight.... Davidson used to crack the whip of Aristotle over us; and I remember that whatever topic was formally appointed for the day, we almost invariably wound up with a quarrel about space perception. 12

The "little philosophical club" was a revival of the one that had given birth to pragmatism. The founder of that Club, Charles Peirce, had ceased to reside in Cambridge, and its coryphaeus, Chauncey Wright, had died in September, 1875; but Davidson had taken up residence there about that time, and the revival of the club that winter had been on his initiative. Nicholas St. John Green, the grandfather of pragmatism, had died in the following September, a year after Wright. Leadership of the club had gradually passed to Davidson and to G. H. Howison and J. E. Cabot, none of them in any sense a pragmatist. Davidson and Howison had previously been associated with W. T. Harris in the St. Louis movement, and Cabot was an older sympathizer. For them the major philosophic events of the decade were T. H. Green's introduction to Hume's Treatise in 1874 and Edward Caird's Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant in 1877; and the leading organ was still Harris's St. Louis quarterly, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, though from 1876 onward it had a rival in the British quarterly Mind.

Evidence for the quarrels about space perception begins in the spring of 1878. Davidson, Temple Street, and the whip of Aristotle had at first nothing to do with them, for Davidson was in Italy, did not return until July, and did not reside in Temple Street until the end of the summer. The chief participants were James himself, Cabot, and G. Stanley Hall. Hall had studied in Germany, had served four years as professor of rhetoric, English literature, and mental philosophy at Antioch College, with occasional visits to "the philosophical coteries of St. Louis," 13 and had contributed to the Journal of Speculative Philosophy; but he was now in his second year of graduate study of philosophy and psychology at Harvard University, and was experimenting on problems of perception in H. P. Bowditch's physiology laboratory at the Medical School. On February 13, 1878, Bowditch presented (by title) to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences a paper by Hall "On the Theory of Color­ Perception" at the end of which Hall expressed his ''unusual obligations" to Bowditch "for suggestion, criticism, and supervision of laboratory work." 14 Later in the month Hall sent off to Harris's Journal some

Page 147 "Notes on Hegel and His Critics" in which he tried substituting space first for "Being" and then for "Nothing" in the larger Logic; cited Chauncey Wright; and said of the new physiological psychology that ''Nothing, since the phenomenology, which seems to us to contain the immortal soul of Hegelism, is so fully inspired with the true philosophic motive." Harris found room for these "Notes" in the January number of his Journal, which came out in April.15 Hall probably read one or both of these papers to the club. In any case, at a club meeting in March which Howison missed, Cabot read a paper on "Some Considerations on the Notion of Space," and Howison sent Cabot a request for it, to which Cabot replied on the 26th:

You shall see my paper & welcome, as soon as I get it back from Mr Hall, who borrowed it. I regret to say however that I spent most of the available time in reading the books wh. Mr James lent me, on the psychological side; & did not succeed in putting my thoughts into good shape. I shall rewrite it I think, but meantime I shall be glad of your criticism.

We missed you very much: the discussion did not amount to much, partly because Dr James had to go away very soon, and partly because nobody except Dr Hedge, who was present, cared to look at it from the Kantian side.

We were so "demoralized" that we dispersed without fixing upon anything for next time. What shall we do? Will you give us the Caird?

This would have been a paper Howison had promised on Caird's Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant, and perhaps it was read to the club on March 30. It appears that the club was meeting that spring in Howison's office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On April 8 Cabot wrote again to Howison, reporting a meeting that had been held there on the 6th:

Your note did not arrive until after our meeting, but it relieves me from grave anxiety wh. I felt on finding your room in the same (unusual) order as we left it last time.—Only Mr Hall, Dr James & Dr Everett were there. Mr H. read a short paper on Space, endeavoring to bridge the chasm between the intensive quality of the feeling, & extensive quantity of Space, by dint of repetition,—many visual impressions coinciding together, & perhaps also coinciding with other sensible impressions, giving the notion of Extension,­& an aggregation of atoms & their developed forces on the other hand somehow potentiating themselves into feelings.—It was a blind business, to my thinking, & in that order of argument wh. one might call the "cuttle fish":­—wh. escapes difficulties by mere complication or coincidence.—Afterwards we had a discussion wh. revealed four distinct opinions in the four of us.

Page 148

Next time Mr Everett is to bring up Mr Jevons' doctrine of the substitution of similars.16

In offering Harris his "Notes on Hegel and His Critics," Hall had written him on February 17: "The article I proposed on space is growing quite beyond the dimensions of your journal. It is possible it may become a small book." On April 29, again to Harris, Hall wrote:

I have spent the best part of this year on my space thesis which is now complete & on which I receive Ph.D here. Do you want it for the Journal? If so will forward part I immediately on hearing from you. It wvill make 15 or 20 pages printed & is confined (the first part) to the questions of muscular sense & innen,ation, & is purely psycho­ physiological.... The second part is on touch & discusses Lotze's local sign theory... together with some results of several weeks of original obsenrvation on Laura Bridgman, which I have not vet quite completed, at the Perkins Asylum. The next part is devoted to the eye.... The 4th [&] last part is devoted to the metaphysical discussion of space ... the conclusion is . . . a modified ideal­realism.

It was almost certainly part I that had been read to the club on April 6, as it was part I that was submitted in manuscript, along with tear sheets of his "Notes on Hegel and His Critics" (also, as we have seen, in part about space), as Hall's thesis for Harvard's first Ph.D. degree in philosophy.17 His oral examination took place at Professor Bowen's house and lasted three hours, with Professors Bowditch, Everett, Hedge, James, and Palmer as the other examiners—all but Bowditch members of the club.18 The degree was awarded at the June commencement; Hall left not long afterward for a second biennium of study in Germany; and the paper, not wanted, it seems, by Harris, became the leading article in the October Mind, under the title "The Muscular Perception of Space." There are motor elements in the simplest sensation, Hall said; all possible truth is practical; space is not a form of intuition imposed by the mind on non­spatial sensations but "every sensation of motion is itself spacial" and "sensitive elements of contractile tissue constitute the peculiar organ of a space­perception a priori to the experience of the special senses, and which it is theirs to elaborate externally and measure each in its own typical way."19

Meanwhile, on April 1, Cabot had offered Harris his own club paper for the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and on May 6, at Harris's request, he had sent it. It appeared as the leading article in the July number, followed by James's "Brute and Human Intellect," which was a further development of Chauncey Wright's "The Evolution of Self­Consciousness." In June, James contracted with Henry

Page 149 Holt to write his Principles of Psychology; on July l o he married Alice H. Gibbens, to whom he had been introduced by Davidson, who returned from Europe in time for the wedding. The honeymoon was at Keene Valley in the Adirondacks, where James began his Psvchology by writing "The Spatial Quale" in reply to Cabot's paper. This was the time to which James referred when, thirty years later, he wrote:

Years ago, when T. H. Green's ideas were most influential, I was much troubled by his criticisms of english sensationalism. One of his disciples in particular [Cabot] would always say to me, "Yes! terms may indeed be possibly sensational in origin; but relations, what are they but pure acts of the intellect coming upon the sensations from above, and of a higher nature?" I well remember the sudden relief it gave me to perceive one day that space­relations at any rate were homogeneous with the terms between which they mediated. The terms were spaces, and the relations were other intervening spaces. 20

Davidson, after a year's absence from the club, was catching up by reading Caird at Cabot's summer home in Beverly Farms, from which he wrote to Harris on August 12:

Have you read Caird on Kant? We all here think it is the best book that has appeared for many a day. I am delighted with it beyond measure. I should be curious to know what Caird thinks of post­Kantian German philosophy, whether he holds that it was an advance upon Kant or a return to dogmatism.

Palmer had been so delighted with the book, to which Cabot had long since called his attention, that he was spending that summer with Caird and the Ding­an­sich in Scotland. He presented himself to Caird on a Saturday.

After we had talked a couple of hours he said, "Won't you bring in on Monday afternoon a paper on Hume for discussion?" I did so, and he ordered another on Kant's "Aesthetik" [that is, on space and time] for Tuesday. Thereafter I spent two hours a day with him.... That was the first of six summers. 21

When Harris received James's "The Spatial Quale" from the Adirondacks, he replied that he could not make room for it until the following April. James protested, in a letter of September 22, 1878, against Harris's policy of publishing "so much aesthetic translation" and inquired if "original matter" should not always take precedence. I fancy you could get more original contributions, if the journal aimed at a more modern cachet. There are five or six people here who I should think would send you then at least an article a year,—Howison, Everett

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(C. C.), Cabot, Bowne, possibly Bowen, a man named Dunbar, Fenollosa, Hall, and perchance others. Many of these are non­hegelian however, and I am not sure whether you wd. consider so much infidel matter to be a gain.22

Perhaps because of the protest, James's article was moved forward to the January number. Harris wrote James that he would be glad to receive contributions from the men James named, and asked for information about Fenollosa and Dunbar. The others he already knew. All were members of the club. James replied on October 4 that he would try to stir them up.

Fenollosa is a young man, professor of Political Economy in the Universitv of Tokio, Japan. He read our club a very able paper which he said he should send to you last spring. I presume he will vet do so. Dunbar is a young philosopher looking for a professorship—more I cannot say. There is also Charles S. Peirce in New York.

To Davidson, however, Harris wrote on the 14th that he didn't know what to do with half the manuscripts he had on hand, and that he still believed "that the J. S. P. does well to publish translations of standard foreign philosophy of the speculative type." 23

Meanwhile Davidson was offering Harris another translation, this time of an Italian essay on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas which had been given to him in manuscript during his stay in Rome on his way home from Greece. He finished his translation on September 5 and wrote Harris next day that it was "the best expose of St. Thomas's fundamental doctrines" he had ever seen and that he would send it on whenever Harris was ready to print it. He too was impatient of the delays of publication in the Journal. On the 19th he confessed to Harris his growing conviction that

... medieval philosophy... was a much profounder thing than anything we have had since, Hegelianism not excepted. And our ignorance of it is so profound! Even Hegel is ridiculously innocent of any knowledge of it, and Ueberweg's account of it is as good as none. Its starting point, which was Aristotelian, was far better than the Cartesian and Kantian ones.

The philosophical club met at Howison's home in Grantville (now Wellesley Hills) on October 22, and Davidson read a paper on "Individuality." 24 Thereafter it met at Davidson's new quarters at 40 Temple Street in Boston, where on October 28 Davidson read his translation of the Italian essay on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. The Boston terminal of the horse­cars that ran from Harvard Square was in Bowdoin Square, a few steps north down the hill and around the corner from Davidson's rooms. Up the hill to the south,

Page 151 at 10 Beacon Street, were the rooms in which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and his wife had lived since 1874. The horse­cars ran every seven minutes and their running time was twenty­five minutes. 25 Davidson's rooms were thus a central meeting­place for the Cambridge members on the one hand, and on the other for Holmes, for Cabot from Brookline, and for Howison from Grantville. On November 9 Davidson wrote to Harris:

Our philosophical club meets now at my rooms once a month, and we are getting up a sort of supplementary club to read Kant and Aristotle, the latter to meet every fortnight, and to be composed of Cabot, Everett, Howison, and Mr. Dyer and myself.

I am busy on a paper intended to prove that Kant's distinction between judgments analytic and synthetic a priori is entirely without foundation, and that therefore his system, which is founded upon that distinction, falls to the ground. Howison says I must then return to empiricism, whereas I mean to show that I only return to Aristotelianism.

I am reading Thomas Aquinas with great assiduity and profit. I haven't found Green's articles yet; but I have read his Introduction to Hume, which is excellent. Spencer is getting hard knocks just now. 26

And on December 17:

My paper . . on Synthetic Judgments a priori was read ten days ago to the supplementary club consisting of Cabot, Everett, Howison, James, Holmes and myself. It was warmly— most warmly—discussed, and in the end nearly every one came over to my opinion. Everett was hard on Howison, and made him yield several points. Cabot is preparing a reply.... As soon as Cabot reads his reply to my "Synthetic Judgments," I shall rewrite it and send it to you.

Apparently the "supplementary club" was soon abandoned in favor of more frequent meetings of the larger club. On January 7, 1879, Davidson wrote to Harris:

Our philosophical club which meets now every fortnight is a great success. Last Saturday Cabot read a paper on judgments in refutation to mine, and I humbly think did not succeed, as I feared he might. I have managed to set the club by the ears, and not one member seems to know exactly where he stands. Howison seemed quite puzzled, and Cabot did not meet my points at all. Everett did not say much, and James agreed with me. Wasson 27 said he was much interested. Howison is going to try his hand at the question next....

Did James ever send you a French article of his entitled "Quelques considerations sur la méthode subjective"? 28 It is very interesting and if you haven't it, I shall send you my copy.... What do you know of Renouvier? James holds him in very great esteem....

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Howison, you will be sorry to hear, has lost his place at the Technological Inst. It is to be abolished, for want of funds, at the end of this (educational) year.... I am hoping they will give him a professorship at Harvard. 29

Meanwhile, Hall had finished in Germany an article projected and perhaps begun before he left Cambridge, on "Philosophy in the United States." He wrote Charles Eliot Norton from Berlin on October 28 that it had been accepted for January's Mind, and on November 6 that the editors had hurried him for the manuscript and that he had had no one to consult while writing it. 30 It was the tenth and last of the series begun in the first issue of Mind, on philosophy in Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, London, the Scottish universities, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, and the United States. On January 15 Davidson asked Harris, "Have you seen G. S. Hall's article on us all in 'Mind'? It is not good." Nevertheless it was a brilliant sketch of the past and present of philosophy in the country at large, and more particularly in its two major centers, St. Louis and Cambridge, which were also those that Hall knew best. Bowen, Bowne, Cabot, Davidson, Everett, Fiske, James and Palmer among members of the present club, and Wright and Peirce of its predecessor—all were there and aptly characterized; but the greatest prominence was given to Peirce's "Illustrations of the Logic of Science," which had been running in the Popular Science Monthhl; and which promised to be "one of the most important of American contributions to philosophy." Hall showed the kinship between the argument of these papers and ''the new psychology" represented by James and by himself, "a leading canon" of which was that "the active part of our nature is the essential element in cognition and all possible truth is practical." 31

About this time Harris began distributing advance sheets of his translation and paraphrase of the second volume of Hegel's larger Logic, under the title "Hegel's Doctrine of Reflection." 32 Cabot wrote Harris on January 30, 1879:

I have your card & the advance sheets of the Journal, with the paraphrase of the Logic, wh. is very interesting.... You ask me for an article for the Journal. I have something wh. I should like to send you for inspection, a paper on Kant's analytic & synthetic judgments which I read before our Club. I will rewrite my sketch & you shall see whether you want it.

This was the paper which Cabot had read on January 4, in refutation of Davidson's paper. On February 4, Davidson wrote Harris:

I am deep in my Aristotle just now, more convinced than ever of his value for thought. Next week (Saturday) I read a paper to the philo­

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sophical society on Space according to Aristotle. I wish you might be present. The Society gets on famously. There were ten present at our meeting last Saturday, and we had a most animated discussion....

I spent last Sunday at Cabot's, and we discussed my notion of knowledge's being a quo, a means for reaching reality and not reality itself. The truth, I maintained, is unutterable.

The January number of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy did not appear until the middle of February, but some members of the Club received advance sheets. In the letter just quoted, Davidson said he found his translation of "A Letter on the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas" well corrected and generally satisfactory, and "James' article pleases me, although he mixes up space and extension." And Cabot wrote Harris on February 12: "I should like to send a short reply to Dr James on the 'Spatial Quale,' not above 2 pp. or so.... Mr Davidson's translation also seemed to me important.'' 33

James, in a letter to Royce on February 16, after referring to his article on space in the Journal, and also to his forthcoming "Sentiment of Rationality," added: "I wish you belonged to our philosophic club here. It is very helpful to the uprooting of weeds from one's own mind as well as the detection of beams in one's neighbor's eyes." 34 And on the 20th Davidson wrote Harris:

Our philosophy club is doing excellent work; I wish you could be present once. Howison has read at two meetings on Kant's Aesthetik [January 18 and February 1]. Next time [March z] Everett reads. We have always full meetings. Cabot and I are going to send you a summary of our controversy on "Synthetic judgments a priori"... I have received two instalments of your "Essence".... Everything I read throws me back on Aristotle as the one great thinker....

In the fall of 1878 the Harvard Philosophical Club, primarily for undergraduates, had been formed, and in the spring of 1879, to compensate for the abandonment of the metaphysics requirement in the College, this Club announced a series of "Philosophical Lectures'," as follows: Thomas Davidson: "Idols of the Theatre" April 30. May 14. G. H. Howison: "The Scope and Value of Philosophy" 21 C. S. Peirce: "The Relations of Logic to Philosophy" 28 John Fiske: "Sleep and Dreams"

Just before that series began there was a meeting on Saturday, April 26, of the revived metaphysical club or philosophical society whose history we have been tracing. For some months Howison, perhaps made irritable by the abolishment of his professorship, and taking umbrage at Davidson's ascendancy in the club, had been too

Page 154 caustic and personal in his criticisms of him at the meetings. "Systematic snubbing," James called it. "I take no stock in what you say about Aristotle," Howison would say to Davidson, and add that Aristotle or Kant would tell him he hadn't learned the first lesson in philosophy. On April 26 Davidson's smoldering resentment was fanned into a blaze of anger. Howison wrote him a letter of apology, and sent copies to James and Cabot. Both approved, but Davidson was not content to accept the apology; he undertook to explain his anger. Howison read into Davidson's letter a hint that he withdraw from the club, and he offered to do so. Other letters passed between the four of them concerning this episode and concerning Davidson's and Howison's lectures on April 30 and May 14, but I pass over this whole correspondence for lack of room and come to a letter of Davidson to Harris on June 5, mentioning the April Journal and Howison's and Peirce's lectures.

Your last Journal, with its numerous translations, was not so good as the previous one. I am coming quite round to the view of Cabot and James that the original articles are always best. Translations have no effect. You must ask Howison to let you have the lecture he read to the students in Cambridge on "The Scope and Value of Philosophy".... Cabot and I are planning two papers on the synthetic­a­priori­judgment question, pro and con..... Peirce's paper was captious, bright and poor. After it was over, I had a long talk with Prof. Ben. Peirce, who undertook to prove to me mathematically that space has four dimensions. The Peirces are all a little crazy, I think.

I have found no definite record of meetings of the metaphysical club after that of April 26, 1879. Though the friendship of Howison and Davidson survived their quarrel, perhaps the club did not. Or it may be that each of its members had had his say out on the questions the club had considered—questions raised by Green's criticism of Hume and by Caird's Hegelian interpretation and criticism of Kant, with Davidson toward the end discovering the Thomistic interpretation of Aristotle, and with James and Hall bringing the new physiological and experimental psychology to bear upon the theory of space perception in particular. The Concord Summer School of Philosophy began its ten­year reign that summer and brought into the Boston area two new emphases—Harris's Hegelianism and Jones's Platonism.35 In another year our club was to be superseded by one devoted exclusively to Hegel, but some changes of personnel, some realignment of philosophic forces, had first to take place. To Hall, still in Germany, James wrote on September 3, 1879:

The college year ended satisfactorily. Poor Palmer has gone abroad to steep himself I suppose still more deeply in that priggish English He­

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gelism .... I am composing a chapter on space for my psychology.... But how I wish you were back,—I fairly pine for psychologic discourse. Our club is about talked out. 36

And a little over a month later, on October o: "Palmer is back from Caird in splendid condition and (I fear me) fully aulfgegangen into the great arcanum of the identity of contradictories." 37 Two and a half months later, on December 27, Hall wrote James from Leipzig: "Do write a fellow what Davidson, Palmer, Everett and all the rest are doing. How is Howison liked in the Divinity School?" 38 And James replied on January 16:

Palmer is fully enrolled in the white­winged band of seraphim illuminiati. Caird has done the business for him. ... Our Club doesn't meet this winter. Davidson is trying to make a living by lecturing on Hellas with a magic lantern. Fiske ditto on American history without. Howison has five students (private) in Hegel, and lectures on Ethics in our Divinity School. 39

On February 3, James wrote to Royce:

I will never write again for Harris's journal. He refused an article of mine a year ago "for lack of room" ["Rationality, Activity and Faith"], and has postponed the printing of two admirable original articles by T. Davidson and Elliot Cabot for the last ten months or more ["Synthetic Judgments a priori," pro and con].... Harris has resigned his school position in St. Louis and will, I am told, come East to live .... My ignorant prejudice against all Hegelians, except Hegel himself, grows wusser and wusser.... My dear friend Palmer is already one of the white­winged band, having been made captive by Caird in two summers of vacation in Scotland.... Our Philosophic Club here is given up for the year—I think we're all rather sick of each other's voices.... I enjoyed your rhapsody on space.... I despise my own article.... But I don't see why its main doctrine . . is not sound; and I think I can, if my psychology ever gets writ, set it down in decently clear and orderly form. 40

Not long after that, Davidson vacated his Temple Street rooms and left in ill health for Italy, where he discovered the philosophy of Rosmini and settled down with the learned fathers at Domodossola, on the Italian side of the Simplon Pass. Perhaps the last echoes of the old club are in two letters to Davidson, one from Holmes just before he left, the other from James in mid­summer. From Holmes on February 6, 1880:

I was very much surprised to hear that you were going off and as I heard also that you were not feeling well I was pained at what otherwise I should have congratulated you on. I write only to say good bye and

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that I hope you will soon come back to us feeling strong and well. I could not call today or I should have done so. Your Trendelenburg's Naturrecht &c I shall leave with Mrs Goddard and ask her to put with your things.

I shall miss you in the kindred spheres of philosophy and beer. 41

And from James on August I:

My wife seems to believe that you are going to pass the evening of your days as a Rosminian father in the Alps and asks me to "think" of you in that situation. If you'll set up a chapter or section or lodge, or whatever they call them, in Boston, I may join it—think of Cabot and Howison and Wendell Holmes and all of us there together! Doesn't it tempt vou? 42

II. PALMER'S HEGEL SEMINAR AND THE HEGEL CLUB OF EMERY AND MCCLURE

William James, in his reminiscences of Thomas Davidson, says that in the early years of their acquaintance they saw most of each other in "a little philosophical club."

The club [he goes on] had existed before Davidson's advent. The previous year we had gone over a good part of Hegel's larger logic under the self­constituted leadership of Messrs. Emery and McClure, two young business men from Quincy, Illinois, who had become enthusiastic Hegelians; and, knowing almost no German, had actually possessed themselves of a manuscript translation of the entire three volumes, made by an extraordinary Pomeranian immigrant named Brockmeyer. They were leaving business for the law, and studying at the Harvard Law School; but they saw the whole universe through Hegelian spectacles, and a more admirable homo unius libri than Mr. Emerv, with his three big folios of Hegelian manuscript, I have never had the good fortune to know.

From the context the reader would gather that the year was 187374, but in fact it was 1880­81. It was not the year before Davidson's advent, but some five years after it, and, as we shall see, he was a chief participant. Emery and McClure were scarcely young, and Brockmeyer was not a Pomeranian but a Prussian of Minden. 43 And James has entirely forgotten the relation between the club and a seminar in Hegel offered for the first time by George Herbert Palmer.

The man of the one book, Samuel Hopkins Emery, Jr., had been born in Taunton, Massachusetts, had gone a year to Harvard College and a year to Amherst, and had then taken a job with a stove man­

Page 157 ufacturing firm in Quincy, Illinois, and risen to partnership in the firm. In 1870 Amherst had given him an honorary Master of Arts degree. From 1871 onwards he had been the leader of a Plato Club in Quincy. In 1872 he had published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy an essay on "The Parmenides of Plato," and he had made other contributions in 1873 and 1877. In 1875, through William Torrey Harris, editor of the Journal and superintendent of schools in St. Louis, he had borrowed Brockmeyer's translation and had had a manuscript copy made for himself. In 1879, at the age of thirty­eight, he had left his business in Quincy and returned to Massachusetts to enter Harvard Law School, along with his wife's brother, Edward Woodbridge McClure. They settled first in Boston. From there, on April 21, 1879, Emery wrote to Harris:

At last the hope of many years is fulfilled and I am actually resident in Boston.... I intend now at last to give serious attention to the study of Speculative Philosophy .... As I am to study law, not thinking it advisable to be without a regular vocation, I expect to devote only two hours a day regularly to philosophy, but I hope to make some progress even with this. If you would tell me how best to begin, it would help me ...

Shortly before leaving Quincy I received a letter from Mr. Garland about your paraphrase of the 2d Vol. of the Logic with some advance sheets..... Of course I told Mr. G. to put me down as a subscriber.... Will you not give us the Ist Vol. after finishing the 2d? Hegel will now for the first time get an American audience....

And on May 6, 1879, still from Boston, Emery again wrote Harris:

I thank you for your letter of 24th April. I shall pursue the course of philosophic reading indicated by you.... I have met Mr. Davidson. Went out to Cambridge a few days ago to hear him lecture & was greatly surprised to find that he repudiated Speculative Philosophy entirely. 44. ... Shall hope for an installment of the 2d Vol. of Logic as soon as possible.

I met Prof. Howison a few days ago & from his looks should judge that he knows something of the truth. I understand that he came from St. Louis....

At least as early as January of that year, 45 Harris had begun issuing to subscribers, as a work in progress, in advance sheets of sixteen pages each, his translation and paraphrase, with commentary, of the second volume of Hegel's three­volume larger Logic. When the book appeared more than two years later, it bore a dedication "To James S. Garland, with whose kind assistance this work has been completed."

Page 158 In the summer of 1879, Emery and his wife and brother­in ­law occupied Orchard House as tenants of Bronson Alcott, with Harris as their guest, and, in its parlor and study, from July 15 to August 16, Emery presided over the first session of the Concord Summer School of Philosophy. Alcott was Dean, Emery Director, and F. B. Sanborn Secretary­Treasurer. Of the teachers, Harris the St. Louis Hegelian and Jones the Jacksonville Platonist made the deepest impression, though Alcott's "Conversations" were given the place of honor. 46

On November 18, 1879, Emery, now a resident of Concord, wrote to Harris in St. Louis:

I hear today that you will spend December East. Of course you will come to see me. I am away at Cambridge Law School every week day except Sat'. Come out some Friday & stay over till Monday—can't you? I attend three lectures by Howison each week at the Harvard Divinity School.... He lectures on Ethics and Theism. 47

Sheets of the Logic continued to come, but on January 25, 1880, Emery wrote Harris from Concord in despair:

I shall never do a thing with Hegel till you are near enough to teach me. I have not found a soul in this town 'tis worth while for me to ask to take hold of it with me and as my law studies & Howison's course take every minute of my time I am letting it all go. Howison's text book on Ethics is Kant's Theory of Ethics (Abbott's trans.) and I am in hopes of getting something out of that before the winter is over.

By March 7, however, he was able to write more cheerfully: "I have met Asst. Prof. Palmer at dinner twice & find he is a roundabout connection of mine. I attend some of Prof. James' lectures also." And on April 25: "I have gotten the start of you at Harvard, having been invited yesterday to occupy a Prof.'s chair for a few moments for a discourse on Phil. I wish you had been in my place." And finally on May 2: "Prof. James is treating me with the utmost courtesy at Harvard and I am enjoying his Renouvier class highly. 48 Prof. Palmer proposes a Hegel class next year and Prof. James & myself both expect to be there. I wish you were to be."

Harris resigned the superintendency of the St. Louis schools and moved to Concord, but did not attend Palmer's seminar. At the end of the 1880 Summer School, he left for several months in Europe, and, after his return, he prepared in the winter and gave in the spring a five­week series of lectures at Washington University, in his continuing capacity of University Professor of the Philosophy of Education; and only after that did he settle down in Concord.

Page 159 Palmer's seminar was announced in the Harvard Catalogue for 1880­81 as to be on "Hegel's Logic and History of Philosophy" and to meet twice a week; but in the Annual Report for that year it was listed as having been on "Hegel's Logic" and as having met once a week for two hours, with two graduate students, two students from the Divinity School, and two from the Law School. The two from the Law School were Emery and McClure.

To Harris in Europe, on November I , 1880, Emery wrote from Concord: "I have 16 law lectures a week & two hours of Hegel Sat'., beside all the work necessary to prepare & beside am getting the plans made for a house I hope to build in Concord." It would appear, therefore, that Palmer's seminar had its weekly meeting on Saturday.

On Tuesday evening, November 19, Emery read a paper on Hegel to the Harvard Philosophical Club. 49

On Monday morning, December 6, the Chestnut Street Club held its first meeting of the season and the Boston Daily Advertiser reported it at length next day.

An unusually numerous attendance was noticeable and among the company were the Hegel club of Cambridge..... Mr. Thomas Davidson read the essay of the forenoon which was a learned and interesting review of the life and philosophy of Antonio Rosmini­Serbati, an Italian philosopher.

This is the only contemporary mention of the Hegel Club that I have found in print. Presumably it had been invited at Davidson's wish, because he was a member, and because his essay was intended to establish Rosmini in Hegel's stead as the great synthesizer of the antitheses of Western philosophy. There were two great schools, he said, the Platonic and the Aristotelian. The founder of each had two great successors. The successors of Plato were Augustine and Bonaventure; those of Aristotle were Thomas and Rosmini. "Hegel was well acquainted with ancient and modern philosophy, but his knowledge of medieval thought was pitiable. Rosmini alone of all thinkers grasped the organic unity of occidental thought and stated it in terms intelligible to modern men." After a very full account of Davidson's paper, the report concludes: "Dr. Bartol, Dr. Hedge, the Rev. Mr. Mayo and Mr. S. H. Emery, Jr., spoke, defending the received philosophy and criticizing that of Rosmini."

Howison, who had gone to Germany for a second two­year stay and was living in Dresden, received a copy of the Advertiser there and wrote to Davidson on January 6, 1881:

Won't you have a gay old time this winter and the few following seasons, banging those Boston idealists, and laying out on the heads of the

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members of that "Harvard Hegel Club"? Lucky for me that I am not there.... Do you go to Palmer's class in Hegel's Logic?" 50

Howison, it seems, understood the Hegel Club to be something other than Palmer's seminar; but James's surviving letters of that year do not distinguish the two. On December 25, 1880, for example, he wrote to Royce: "Hegelism in the person of Professor Palmer and one Emery, Secretary of the Concord School, a retired merchant of forty­five who has entered our law school, is making a very able and active propaganda here; and part of my fun this winter is trying to scotch it." 51

Davidson went to Italy in April and ran into Howison in Rome, as the latter reported to James on May 12.

He told me a good deal about the Palmer class in Hegel.... According to his account, you and he had rare fun in making mincemeat of Hegel for the amusement of the boys at Harvard, and I don't much envy, Palmer the times he must occasionally have had in his class, judging by an incident or two that Davidson reports. I hear that Palmer bore the war with commendable grace and fortitude but that our friend Emery was moved to a pitch of wrath.

To which James replied on September 30, 1881:

Davidson's viva voce utterances about Hegel, on top of my written ones... must have given you the impression that the truth's path in America was not unsprinkled with obstructions.... My quarrel with him is entirely apropos of the principle of identity.... But you will see better what I mean when the paper I read in Palmer's class appears in print.... The latter, I must say, treated both me and Davidson very handsomely; and Emery, too, was extremely good­natured. 52

James had just revised his paper "On Some Hegelisms" and sent it to the International Review. It was declined, and he sent it next to Mind, in which it appeared in the following April. James sent an offprint to Harris on April 16, 1882: "It was read aloud to Palmer's Hegel class last year and intended to leave as disrespectful an impression on the minds of the students as possible, Palmer having all the rest of the year to himself to wipe it out." 53

The astounding fact that, in his reminiscences of Davidson, James recalls the Hegel Club of Emery and McClure but forgets Palmer's seminar, and the further fact that Howison assumed that they were two things and not one, do not quite suffice to exclude the possibility that Palmer permitted his "roundabout connection" Emery, with Brockmeyer's translation in hand, to share the leadership of the seminar, and that, in the resulting informality, the seminar itself

Page 161 became in effect a Hegel club,—"that 'Harvard Hegel Club'," "the Hegel club of Cambridge."

III. THE HEGEL CLUB OF W.T. HARRIS

Harris resided in Concord from 1880 to 1889, when he became United States Commissioner of Education and moved to Washington. On May 1, 1881, he dated the preface "To the Reader" of his Hegel's Doctrine of Reflection, his translation and paraphrase, with commentary, of the second volume of Hegel's larger Logic. "The work was begun and continued under the auspices of the 'Kant Club' of St. Louis, Missouri, and has been used as a hand­book by that club." In the 1880s, he began a similar rendition of the third volume, and planned one of the first; but in 1883 he turned to writing for Griggs's Philosophical Classics the volume which finally appeared in 1890 under the title: Hegel's Logic: A Book on the Genesis of the Categories of the Mind: A Critical Exposition. This book­in ­the­making was in effect the hand­book of the Hegel Club of Boston. The first steps toward the formation of that Club were taken by Charles H. Ames, and he became its chief chronicler.

Ames had graduated from Amherst in 1870. Since 1875 he had been general agent for the educational division of Prang & Company. Travelin widely to promote its drawing materials and textbooks, he had made long visits to St. Louis, whose public schools were among the Company's best customers; he had become a disciple of Harris, had joined the Kant Club, and was a faithful reader of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, to which he had made a brief contribution in 1877. He and his close friend Edwin D. Mead had read Hegel's shorter Logic together in Wallace's translation. Ames's sister Lucia, who later married Mead, was also a student of philosophy.

On October 26, 1881, Ames wrote Harris: "May I beg you to think favorably of a Hegel class in Boston this winter? No single thing or dozen things I can think of would be such a boon to my sister Lucia & to me." And on November 11: "I am overjoyed that you feel so about a Hegel class in Boston this winter & I can't begin to tell you how delighted Lucia is." But instead of a mixed class, what developed was a men's club.

On November 23 James wrote Harris, "I should be very happy to join the Club you propose," and from a letter of Ames to Harris on December 7 it appears that the first meeting had been held. He hoped the Club would decide to meet on Saturdays, since otherwise he could seldom come.

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But of course the meeting at some rate or other is the all important thing & to have the work done & these notes & translations made, as in the case of Essence.... [C]ould you sometime bring in with you my 2nd part of the Essence? 54 Dr. G. Stanley Hall wants a full copy too, if he can get it. He called on Monday or Tues. & was delighted with our first meeting. Says he wants to borrow my copy of your MSS.55& go at it with interest. I feel perfectly sure that the coming meetings will be grand & that all will be interested & catch fire & hope. That will be of itself a great thing for this region.

On December 13 Ames wrote Harris: "I send the sheets (from your paraphrase) to Hall today." His sister Lucia had read the smaller Logic through and had begun work with him on the sheets of the larger Logic, and Ames was still hoping that there would be some sort of class which she could attend. He hoped also that the Club would meet every week, even if some members could attend only every other meeting. By January 9, 1882, James could write to Davidson, who was then in Scotland:

Harris has founded a weekly Saturday afternoon Hegel Club where he expounds the third volume of the Logik to ten of us, Palmer, Cabot, Hall, Everett, Emery and some others. I am much won by his innocence and apostolic disposition, but not a word has he said that has any magic for me. 56

On January 17, James sent an invitation to Francis Ellingwood Abbot:

I have been deputed by a Club just formed to read Hegel under the auspices of W. T. Harris, to ask you to join. Elliot Cabot, Carroll Everett, Palmer, G. S. Hall, and others belong. We meet every Saturday at 3.15 in Room 29, Tremont Temple. Take elevator to go up. We are beginning the 3d. vol. of the Logik. 57

And on Saturday, January 2 , Abbot writes in his diary:

In acceptance of an invitation from Dr. James, attended a Hegel Club at Room 29, Tremont Temple, at 3'/4 P.M. Mr. J. Elliot Cabot, Prof. Andrews (of Newton), Dr. Harris, Dr. James, Mr. S. H. Emery, a Mr. Williams, & another not known to me, were present. They are reading Hegel's larger Logik, in English (MS.)58 and German. Was much amused! Shall go when I can. Dr. James & I had a discussion on Idealism in the horse car, returning.

On April 16, 1882, James wrote to Davidson, now at Domodossola in Italy: "Our Saturday Hegel Club proves very dull,—Harris rather tedious. He revolves like a squirrel in a cage in one circle of ideas; all openings presently lead into that circle, and then the monotonous whirring begins." 59 And on the 25th Cabot wrote to Davidson:

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The Hegel Club goes on.... I do not think he [Harris] makes as yet much progress towards the much needed rewriting of Hegel—being content very much to repeat him .... Dr James still comes—why, I know not. He has lately published in ''Mind" a piece about Hegelianism wh. I regret is likely to hurt him in the opinion of those who do not know him—by an attempt to sneer at something of wh. he understands nothing—& a failure at that.

Abbot's diary says of the meeting of May 6, 1882: "Rather tiresome thrashing of straw." Of that of June 3: "I went to the Hegel Club, being desirous to hear Harris's paper on Hegel's 'Four Paradoxes' ."60 Cabot, who was present at that meeting, must have dropped out soon afterward, for he wrote Harris on July 10:

I quitted the Hegel class somewhat suddenly and without warning—having been called off by other matters which very much occupied me just then. I wish to thank you for my share of the pleasure & instruction of your exposition. I think perhaps it would have been a still better plan to have confined ourselves to discussion, without taking time in translation—and to have confined the class to persons who think that Hegel is worth while.

What the other matters were appears from James's letter to Davidson on the 16th: "I saw Cabot day before yesterday. He is very busy sifting the enormously bulky correspondence of Emerson." (Emerson had died in April, and Cabot was his biographer.) Of those who did not think Hegel worth while, James was doubtless the chief.

That summer Howison returned from Germany, took up his residence again in Wellesley Hills, and supported himself by private teaching, which for some months made it inconvenient for him to come into Boston on Saturdays. Hall went to Baltimore to become Lecturer in Psychology at the Johns Hopkins. James went to Europe on leave, and Royce came from California to take his place on a visiting appointment, but did not join the Hegel Club. The Club resumed its Saturday meetings in September, but in the morning rather than the afternoon, and at the law office of Emery and McClure, 65 Sears Building. Abbot's diary records that he met there with Harris, Emery, McClure and Ames on September 16, and that they "read in Hegel's larger Logic (in German), & discussed it, till 11 A.M." On the 23d and 30th, Abbot read an "Outline Sketch of Scientific Philosophy" which he had written at Nonquitt Beach during the summer. 61 On the 23d:

Read nearly the whole of my paper. They began to take notes (for discussion) till Emery said that he saw it would be necessary to note the whole & proposed that I read it a second time, so as to discuss it then. I assented. I saw Dr. Harris was impressed. He at once took in

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the vast significance of my doctrine of the "Exient End" 62—said "that will give us a theology." "Yes," said I, "that is the 'God of science'." Dr. H. also saw the force of my universalization both of object & subject 63 This thing is too strong to be a failure.

And on the 30th:

Finished reading.... Much discussion. They (particularly Emery) seemed unable to digest it with the Hegelian stomach, but evidently felt the power of my presentation. I was amused at the criticisms of Emery: Dr. Harris showed a better appreciation of my points.

On October 7 they "discussed my paper at large—saw they could not escape its central principle, tho' they tried hard to do so. Dr. Harris has a larger mind than Emery, & showed far deeper insight into the subject." On the 21st Abbot "went to the Hegel Club at It, & read the Logik with Dr. Harris and the rest." And on the 28th: "Went to Hegel Club at 10. Mr. Emery reminded me of his letter in vol. 2 of the Index (to which I had replied), as the beginning of his interest & study of Speculative Philosophy." 64

The October Mind had arrived on the 9th, containing Abbot's essay on "Scientific Philosophy: a Theory of Human Knowledge." 65 On November 4 he wrote in his diary: "The Hegel Club discussed my Mind article today—after a fashion. No one had mastered it: I felt it to be a farce." Abbot did not often attend after that, but the Club went on, and Howison now began coming in for it. The meetings of January 6 and 13 and February 10, 1883, are reported at length in Ames's manuscript "Harrisiana." Excerpts follow:

January 6. Hegel Club: Harris, Howison, Emery, McClure, Ames. Harris read first instalment of his book on Hegel's Logic. Howison often speaking.... Difference of opinion between Harris and Howison as to the true meaning of the power which makes movement and advance in the dialectic. It was the old difficulty with Snider at the [Kant] Club in St. Louis. Harris (Emery agreeing) thinks, in opposition to many Hegelians, that the only advance in the dialectic is made by a conception, more or less clearly, of the end from the beginning, of the "Idee." Howison thinks that robs the dialectic of its essential, internal principle of growth and movement.... January 13. Hegel Club: Harris, Prof. Everett, Emery, McClure, Ames. Discussion on subject of last meeting, i.e. "being and nothing," are they identical or antithetical? Dr. Harris sustains the doctrine that they are the same.... Being and nothing are two names for one concept. This Howison last week denies. Prof. Everett inclines to Howison's idea. Thinks them formally the same, but not actually.... Pure, or logical, thinking ... sees the inadequacy of all the attempts to realize its def­

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initions and here gets its motive power for the progressive movement of the dialectic....

February 10. Hegel Club: Dr. Harris, Howison, Emery, McClure, Mr. Henderson, Ames. Dr. H. on some questions concerning the passage from quality to quantity. Intuition—what is it? and what is dialectic proof of anything? ... Each category has its intuition. Each is a Weltanschauung.... Howison's view and estimate of Harris on the Personality of God. 66 The greatest statement of the fundamental truths of philosophy. Thinks a second edition of it could be made clearer to others....

In March, 1883, Harris was in St. Louis giving his annual lecture series at Washington University, and on the ioth Ames wrote him from Boston: "Club met today, Mr. Emery, Prof. Everett, Prof. Howison & myself present. Prof. Everett read paper on The Comic, taking up the theory of it, very bright and interesting. We shall discuss it next Sat." And on the 17th:

We met at Emery's today, Prof. Everett, Prof. Howison, Mr. Emery & I (Mr. McClure still in Dakota). Discussed Prof. E's paper on "The Comic."67 Prof. Howison & Prof. Everett got a little at odds, in a perfectly pleasant way of course. Prof. H & I lunched together & had a good talk. He is to read a paper on Lange's system next Sat. & Prof. Everett will bring in Prof. Ladd of Yale Coll. if he can. I like Prof. Howison more & more.

On April 9, Everett wrote Howison: "Shall you (or will you) read your paper next Saturday [April 14]? James (who has returned) would like to hear it as well as myself." He also gave Howison an elaborate restatement of his theory of the comic, which was still under discussion. Finally, Howison's paper on the "Self—Refutation of Agnosticism" as shown by the dialectic inherent in Lange's philosophy, was read on the 21st; and on May 2, 1883, James, back from his year in Europe, wrote to Davidson, still there:

The Hegel Club still exists. I heard an excellent paper on Lange read there ten days ago by Howison. He is much improved by his trip abroad, and seems to me a broader man than formerly. Harris is to me simply preposterous, albeit a holy man. Cabot I haven't seen, as he sticks tight to his trunks—full of Emerson letters. 68

In 1883­84 Howison taught at the University of Michigan, and in 1884­85 he began his career at the University of California. On December 13, 1 884, Cabot wrote from Brookline to Howison in Berkeley:

Dr Harris & Mr Emery continue their Hegel readings this winter. I should like to attend them, tho' I have long since despaired of getting

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from Harris that re­writing of Hegel that is needed to give him efficiencv outside of a very small circle. 69

Everett still attended, and there was much interest in his book on Fichte's Science of Knowledge, just out in the series for which Harris was writing Hegel's Logic. Abbot and others dropped in occasionally, but the "constants," as Ames called them, were Harris, Emery, McClure, and Ames. After Harris left in January 1885 for his annual series of lectures in St. Louis, Ames wrote him on the 27th that the Club was "suspended till Hegel comes back!" There were similar suspensions in Harris's absences in subsequent years, but the Club continued through 1885­86 and 1886­87. Besides the Saturday morning meetings in Boston, there were less formal Sunday supper meetings in Concord, alternating between Harris's house and Emery's, and sometimes Saturday evening meetings there as well.

Emery and McClure returned to Illinois in 1887. In September 1889 Ames left the Prang Educational Company for D. C. Heath & Company, and in the same month Harris entered upon his duties as U.S. Commissioner of Education in Washington. On November 15, 1889, Ames responded to a letter from Howison introducing Sidney Mezes:

I am sorry to say that the Hegel Club was obliged to suspend meetings a good while ago because of the scattering of the members. Emery & McClure have gone back to Ills. and are deep in commercial matters, trying to gain again an income which will enable them to devote leisure to phil. studies. At least so I suppose.

Professor Palmer has been abroad for a year or two, tho' just returned. Stanley Hall is at Worcester, Prest. of the new Clark University. Professor Andrews is Prest. of Brown University, and Dr. Harris is as you know at Washington in the right place I think, but his going was a great personal grief to me....

So you see that I am actually about the only member of the old Club still on the ground. I am deep in the myriad cares of my new business....

After Harris's death on November 5, 1909, the editors of the Journal of Philosophy at the suggestion of Nicholas Murray Butler, asked Ames to write a memorial essay, which appeared in the issue of December 23. As a member both of the Kant Club of St. Louis and of the Hegel Club of Boston, it was with an almost proprietary pride that Ames paid tribute to the birth of their time, "that greatest of all American books, [Harris's] critical exposition of Hegel's 'Logic' ."70

EPILOGUE

The Question with which I began was why pragmatism attracted so little notice for thirty years. It was born in a Metaphysical Club in

Page 167 Cambridge "in the earliest seventies." On the hypothesis that a chronicle of the clubs that succeeded that one might shed some light on the question, I have traced them through the eighties.

Pragmatism began to move when, in 1898, before Howison's Philosophical Union in Berkeley, James delivered his lecture on "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," beginning with a restatement of Peirce's principle but ending on the note that the "true line of philosophic progress" lay "not so much through Kant as round him to the point where now we stand."71 "Philosophy can perfectly well outflank him," James concluded; but I conclude from my chronicle that neither British nor American philosophy had been able to do that. Peirce himself was later to say that it was through Kant that he had come to pragmatism; and I venture to add that it was through Hegel that he had come to the point where, in 1898, he stood. In any case, it was through Hegel that American philosophy did so.

Notes

1. Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America. Philosophical and Literary Influences, 1600­1900 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), pp. 25790.

2. See my "Was There a Metaphysical Club in Cambridge?".

3. William Knight, ed., Memorials of Thomas Davidson (Boston & London, 1907), pp. 110­11; George Herbert Palmer, "William James," Han,ard Graduates' Magazine 29 (1920­21):34; G. Stanley Hall, Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (New York and London, 1923), pp. 200­01.

4. Unless otherwise indicated in footnote references, all letters to Abbot are among the Abbot Papers in Harvard University Archives, where his diaries are also; all letters to Davidson are among the Davidson Papers at Yale; all to Howison are among the Howison Papers at the University of California at Berkeley; all of Davidson's and Emerv's letters to Harris are among the Harris Papers at St. Louis; and all other letters to Harris are among the Harris Papers in the Hoose Library of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. For letters of William James the relevant parts of which have already been published in Ralph Barton Perry's The Thought and Character of William James (Boston, 1935), the volume and page of that work are given. For letters of James to Harris that have been published by Wallace Nethery in the first issue of Coranto, the page of that issue is given. Some of Davidson's letters to Harris were discarded by Harris's daughter, Edith Davidson Harris, but only after she had made summaries of them, with short excerpts; for these the reference EDH is to her summaries. (Miss Harris has permitted me to examine and to quote from [i] the letters of Charles H. Ames to her father, William Torrey Harris, and [2] her typewritten copies of Ames's manuscript, "Harrisiana." The letters

Page 168 and one copy of "Harrisiana" are now in The Houghton Library at Harvard University; another copy of "Harrisiana" is in the Hoose Library.) Some of Howison's letters to Davidson are quoted from typewritten transcripts among the Howison Papers at Berkeley; for these the reference is GHH. Some of Harris's letters to Davidson are with the Harris Papers in St. Louis rather than with the Davidson Papers at Yale; for these the reference is WTH.

5. EDH.

6. Perry, 1:713.

7. WTH.

8. Cf. John W. Buckham and George M. Stratton, George Holmes Howison (University of California Press, 1934), p. 93.

9. Atlantic Monthly 39 (1877):125; cf. 386­88.

10. Perry, 1:477.

11. Nation 25 (1877):335.

12. See p. 138 above.

13. Mind 4 (1879):100.

14. Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 13 (187778):413; cf. 431 for date.

15. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 12 (1878):95, 100, 102.

16. W. Stanley Jevons, The Substitution of Similars, the True Principle of Reasoning (London, 1869).

17. Harvard University Archives, HU 90.220. On p. 44 of the manuscript, at the end of part I, there is a table of contents for parts II and III, as follows:

Part II to contain: A. A discussion of local signs B. Touch superseding muscular sense as sight does touch C. Confirmatory original observations on Laura Bridgman D. Light & the Berkeleian theory

Part III: A. Metaphysical: Kant & Hegel (see printed "Notes") B. Mathematical: Riemann & Helmholtz

The printed "Notes on Hegel and His Critics" are bound in between pages 43 and 44. Part IIC was published in Mind 4 (1879):149­72. So far as I know, it was not written in time to be part of the thesis, and IIA, B, and D, and IIIB were not written.

18. Louis N. Wilson, G. Stanley Hall: A Sketch (New York, 1914), p. 64.

19. Mind 3 (1878):446, 450.

20. The Meaning of Truth (New York, 1909), p. 138f.

21. George Herbert Palmer, The Autobiography of a Philosopher (Boston, 1930), p. 67.

22. Coranto I (Fall 1963):8. The man named Dunbar cannot have been Charles F. Dunbar, who had been Professor of Political Economy since 1871 and who was at this time Dean of the College Faculty.

23. WTH.

24. He had read it the day before to the Radical Club in Boston (Sketches and Reminiscences of the Radical Club, ed. John T. Sargent [Boston, 1880], PP. 334­ 38).

25. Foster M. Palmer, "Horse Car, Trolley, and Subway," Cambridge Historical Society Publications 39 (1964):82, 84, 87.

26. Louis Dyer, at this time a tutor, became Assistant Professor of Greek and Latin in 1881. The first three of Thomas Hill Green's articles on "Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. G. H. Lewes: Their Application of the Doctrine of Evolution to Thought" had appeared in the Contemnporar, Review for December 1877, and March and July 1878. The first two were on Spencer.

Page 169 27. David A. Wasson was prominent in the Radical Club (note 24 above) and had contributed to the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. There is no record of his attending any other meeting of our philosophical club. A selection from his writings has been edited by Charles H. Foster under the title Beyond Concord (Indiana University Press, 1965).

28. Critique philosophique 6:2 (1878):407­13; reprinted in William James, Collected Essays and Reviews (New York, 1920), pp. 69­82.

29. Howison was appointed lecturer on ethics in the Divinity School of Harvard University for the year 1879­80. See text over notes 38 and 39 below.

30. I owe this information to Mrs. Dorothy Ross, who is writing a biography of Hall (G. Stanley Hall [Chicago, 1972]).

31. Mind 4 (1879):101­03, 105.

32. Hegel's Doctrine of Reflection, Being a Paraphrase and a Commentary, Interpolated into the Text of the Second Vollume of Hegel's Larger Logic, Treating of "Essence" (New York, 1881).

33. Harris assured Cabot that his reply to James would be welcome; Cabot wrote a longer one than he had intended; he sent it on 25 February; and it was published in the April number, which, for a change, came out in April. "The Spatial Quale­An Answer," Journal of Speculative Philosophy_ 13 (1879): 199­204.

34. Perry, 1:783; Letters of William James, ed. Henrv James (New York, 1920), 1:203; cf. 201f, where the editor, William James's son, says that the philosophical club here alluded to "was presided over by Dr. W. T. Harris and held informal meetings in Boston during this one winter. Its purpose was to read and discuss Hegel." There was never a club of which this entire statement was true. The club of which William James writes did meet in Boston this winter (at Davidson's rooms), but it had met there the winter before (in Howison's office); a club presided over by Harris for reading and discussing Hegel began three years later (1881­82) and met in Boston, but for at least four winters, not one.

35. Paul R. Anderson, Platonism in the Midwest (Columbia University Press, 1963), sheds new light on the Concord School.

36. Perry, 2:15­16.

37. Perry, 2:16.

38. William James Papers, Houghton Library, bMS 1092.

39. Perry, 2:20; Howison to Davidson, 2 June 1880, GHH.

40. Perry, 1:786­87.

41. Holmes had borrowed and read the Trendelenburg in March 1879. See Eleanor N. Little, "The Early Reading of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes," Harvard Library Bulletin 8 (1953­54):200. Much of Holmes's philosophical reading during these years was connected with the discussions going on in the club.

42. Perry, 1:734.

43. Brockmeyer had been a student at Brown University when F. H. Hedge was a Unitarian minister in Providence, and it was from the extracts in Hedge's Prose Writers of Germnany that he had drawn his first knowledge of Hegel.

44. Davidson had lectured under the auspices of the Harvard Philosophical Club on "Idols of the Theatre" on 30 April. He wrote Harris on 25 August that his lecture contained "a great truth, viz. that we know thro' thought, and that knowledge is not thought"­that is, what we know is not to be confused with the thought through which we know it.

45. See p. 152 and note 32 above.

Page 170 46. The Journals of Bronson Alcott, ed. Odell Shepard (Boston, 1938), pp. 496­510; Recollections of Seventy Years, by F. B. Sanborn (Boston, 1909), 2:485­ 513. Though the ten summers of the Concord School are a proper part of my story, I have no room for them.

47. From this it appears that Emery was not a member of Howison's private class in Hegel (see p. 155 and note 39 above).

48. Perry, 1:670f.

49. Harvard Advocate 30:61; Crimson 16:59.

50. GHH.

51. Perry, 1:789; cf. 674, 728. As we have seen, Emery was the Director, not the Secretary, of the Concord School. He was forty, not forty­five.

52. Perry, 1:764, 765.

53. Coranto I (Fall 1963):I1.

54. Sheets 8­14 (pp. 113­214) of Hegel's Doctrine of Reflection.

55. The beginning of Harris's English rendition of the third volume of the larger Logic? Or possibly Brockmeyer's translation of it? See text over note 58 below.

56. Perry, 1:738. It appears that Hall was to read a paper later in the month, as Ames (on the road for Prang & Co.) writes Harris from Detroit on the 18th: "Has Hall given his paper yet? And how far have you read in the Logic?"

57. Abbot had not been available in the precious year for the Hegel Club of Emerv and McClure, as he was then conducting a private school for boys in New York City.

58. See text over note 55 above.

59. Perry, 1:742. On the same day James sent Harris a copy of his "On Some Hegelisms," which had appeared that month in Mind; see text over note 53 above.

60. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 16 (1882):113­22.

61. Later revised and incorporated in Abbot's Scientific Theisim (Boston, 1885), as part I.

62. Cf. Scientific Theism, pp. 192­204.

63. Scientific Theism, p. 211.

64. Emery's letter had appeared, with Abbot's answer, in the issue of 29 April 1871. There were, Abbot had said, two schools of Free Religion, the intuitive and the scientific. Emery took Abbot to include Speculative Philosophy in the intuitive school, and gave reasons for including it instead in the scientific; but Abbot replied that in his opinion "Speculative Philosophy is to be as thoroughly revolutionized by science as is religion."

65. A draft of this had served as part of Abbot's thesis for Harvard's second Ph.D. degree in philosophy, in June 1881; the first having been given to Hall in 1878.

66. North American Review 131 (188o):241­55.

67. Later revised and published as part II of Everett's Poetry; Coinedy; and Dtutv (Boston, 1888).

68. Perry, 1:753.

69. In the same letter Cabot discussed James's "The Dilemma of Determinism" in the Unitarian Review for September, which had confirmed his feeling "that he, like his father, should avoid philosophy & stick to literature."

70. Journal of Philosophy 6:702.

71. Collected Essays and Reviews, pp. 410f, 437.

Page 171

NINE—Peirce's Triadic Logic

Charles S. Peirce is generally recognized as an originator of what is often called the matrix method for constructing the usual two­valued sentential calculus, 1 but credit for extending this method to the case of three­valued calculi is usually given to Jan Lukasiewicz and Emil Post. In discussing the origin of triadic logic, Alfred Tarski asserts the following:

Lukasiewicz was also the first to define by means of a matrix a system of sentential calculus different from the usual one, namely his threevalued system. This he did in the year 1920. Many­valued systems, defined by matrices, were also known to Post.

What is called the three­valued system of the sentential calculus was constructed by Lukasiewicz in the year 1920 and described in a lecture given to the Polish Philosophical Society in Lw6w. A report by the author, giving the content of that lecture fairly thoroughly was published in the journal Ruch Filozoficzny, vol. 5 (1920), p. 170 (in Polish).2

Alonzo Church expresses essentially the same points in the following way:

Using three truth­values instead of two, and truth­tables in these three truth­values, Lukasiewicz first introduced a three­valued propositional calculus in 1920. He was led to this by ideas about modality, according to which a third truth­value—­possibility, or better, contingency—has to be considered in addition to truth and falsehood; but the abstract importance of the new calculus transcends that of any particular associated ideas of this kind. Generalization to a many­valued propositional calculus, with v + 1 truth­values of which + 1 are designated (I<µ

Church points out further that 1921 denotes the date of the published version of Post's dissertation of 1920.4

Some hitherto unpublished Peircean fragments now give what appears to be conclusive evidence that by February 23, 1909, Peirce had already succeeded in extending to the case of triadic logic the matrix method which he originated for the ordinary two­valued logic and for which he is now given full credit. If our evidence is as

Page 172 conclusive as it seems, this means that Peirce not only originated a matrix method for two­valued logic, but he also originated a matrix method for three­valued logic. In this latter regard, therefore, Peirce anticipated similar work by Lukasiewicz and Post by at least ten years. This does not detract from the value of Lukasiewvicz's and Post's contributions to triadic and many­valued logic. They both worked without knowledge of Peirce's earlier results and their findings constitute important additions to Peirce's preliminary investigations. Peirce, however, should be given proper credit for his role in the history of triadic logic which these newly found unpublished fragments from his writings bring to light.

These fragments are unnumbered pages from Peirce's Logic Notebook (MS 339). They are reproduced here, in the order in which they seem to have been written, as Plates I, 2 and 3. Peirce's remark that "all this is mighty close to nonsense" suggests that he was not happy with the results as shown in Plate i. There is, however, no indication that he was not satisfied with the results as shown in Plate 2. Since Peirce concludes at the end of Plate 3 that "Triadic Logic is universally true," it seems safe to assume that he was completely satisfied with the results as shown in Plate 3. Perhaps Plate i reveals Peirce's first recorded experiments with triadic logic which he did not consider successful. Plate 2 may give results of experiments with triadic logic which Peirce considered successful. Plate 3 may indicate Peirce's conclusions about triadic logic reached after what he considered to be successful experiments with the new kind of logic. In any event, a close examination of Plates X and 2 indicates that Peirce was developing triadic logic by means of a matrix method. It is equally clear from Plate 3 that Peirce was willing to conclude that dyadic logic is limited (though "not absolutely false") in a way in which the "universally true" triadic logic is not.

It is interesting to notice that some of Peirce's matrices which appear in Plates X and 2 have later been made famous by other logicians working in the area of many­ valued logics. Consider the one­place matrices given in Plate 1 under the following correspondences:

V 1 1 t1«T

½ t N L 2 2«

F 3 0 t3«F

8 Peirce's correspond respectively to Post's negations ~3x and ~32 X . Applying the same set of correspondences to the two­place matrices which appear in Plate 2, 9 Peirce's operators , Z, Y, and are readily associated with well­known matrices used by later logicians. corresponds to Post's alternation" V3 which represents a

Page 173

Plate 1. Peirce's Logic Notebook, page 340v.

Page 174

Plate 2. Peirce's Logic Notebook, page 341v.

Page 175

Plate 3. Peirce's Logic Notebook, page 344r.

Page 176 minimum function and plays a useful role in most systems of logic. Z corresponds to the dual of under Peirce's bar negation (Lukasiewicz's N) 10 and represents a maximum function which is as useful as a minimum. corresponds to Bocvar's 11 which is the same as Kleene's weak conjunction. 12 Finally, is the dual of under Peirce's bar negation and is the same as Kleene's weak alternation. 13

Aside from satisfying commutative and associative laws, just what motivated Peirce to introduce the operators and is not entirely clear. appears to be a slight variation of and appears to be a similar variation of Z. It is clear that under Peirce's bar negation, and constitute a dual pair of operators. Regardless of the motivation, however, it was not necessary for Peirce to introduce and . Without them, he already had sufficient machinery to develop an entirely adequate triadic logic. In fact, from such later results as Post's, 14 it follows that Peirce could have defined all of his operators in terms of and '. The set { , '} defines what is now called a functionally complete logical system. 15 In the present case, this means, among other things, that all possible operators which are definable by matrices of triadic logic can be defined in terms of and ' alone. Hence, on purely formal logical grounds, Peirce had every reason for being completely satisfied with the results obtained from what we take to be his successful experiment with triadic logic. This experiment followed Peirce's decision to ''try the triadic System of Values again" as indicated at the top of Plate 2. We assume, however, that Peirce's unsuccessful experiment, as shown in Plate I, was not a total loss since it did yield a fruitful set of one—place operators. Plates I and 2 are not sufficiently clear to justify the conclusion that Peirce was fully aware of the adequacy of his triadic logic. The various expansions which appear in the plates suggest that Peirce may have been thinking along lines of functional completeness. If this was not the case, however, it is still a tribute to Peirce's logical intuition that he actually discovered a thoroughly adequate triadic logical system whether he was fully aware of this fact or not.

Plate 3 adds very little to Peirce's formal development of triadic logic, but it does give insight into Peirce's possible motivation for developing such logics and the manner in which he thought of interpreting them. It is clearly indicated that the motivation arises from problems associated with the kind of proposition which "has a lower mode of being such that it can neither be determinately P, nor determinately not­P"—assuming that the proposition in question is of the form S is P. This alone is sufficient to suggest that Church's account of Lukasiewicz's discovery of a three­valued calculus might also be applied to Peirce's discovery of triadic logic, namely: "He was led to this by ideas about modality, according to

Page 177 which a third truth­value... has to be considered in addition to truth and falsehood."

The suggestion becomes even more plausible in the light of the fact that just prior to the period when Peirce was developing his triadic logic, he was giving serious consideration to problems of trichotomic or triadic modality. For example, under the date of January Ig98, The Prescott Book (MS 277) deals with modality in terms of the triad "potentiality," "actuality," and "necessitation." Peirce characterizes these as follows:

Potentiality is the absence of Determination (in the usual broad sense) not of a mere negative kind but a positive capacity to be Yea and to be Nav; not ignorance but a state of being... Actuality is the Act which determines the merely possible... Necessitation is the support of Actuality by reason...

On August 28, 1908, Peirce records in his Logic Notebook an account of the co­reality of the three universes: " 1) of Ideas, 2) of Occurrences ..., and 3) of Powers." He then argues that the "mode of being" of an Idea is that of "Real Possibility," that of an Occurrence is "Actuality," and that of a Power is ''Real Necessity." Then, in the same Logic Notebook on December 27, 1908, Peirce lets "1" denote Idea, "2 " denote Occurrence, and "3" denote Habit, which is presumably a kind of Power. This same date, December 27, 1908, appears on the recto of the leaf whose verso is reproduced in Plate I; however, a line has been drawn through the date and just below it there is recorded January 7, 1909. Peirce could have written Plate i on December 27, 1908, but in any event, what has been called Peirce's first recorded experiment with triadic logic followed shortly upon his assignment of numerals to modal triads.

That Peirce was still giving serious attention in a similar fashion to problems of triadic modality late in 1908 is apparent from his treatment of the subject in The Art of Reasonin g Elucidated (MS 678). The following quotation from this work (pp. 34­35) is a good summary of Peirce's views:

Now, in this respect, a simply assertory proposition differs just half as much from the assertion of a Possibility, or that of a Necessity, as these two differ from each other. For, as we have seen above, that which characterizes and defines an assertion of Possibility is its emancipation from the Principle of Contradiction, while it remains subject to the Principle of Excluded Third; while that which characterizes and defines an assertion of Necessity is that it remains subject to the Principle of Contradiction, but throws off the yoke of the Principle of Excluded Third; and what characterizes and defines an assertion of Actuality, or

Page 178

simple Existence, is that it acknowledges allegiance to both formulae, and is thus just midway between the two rational "Modals," as the modified forms are called by all the old logicians.

If Peirce's discovery of triadic logic was actually motivated by his consideration of triadic modality, as the evidence suggests, then it is not too difficult to understand the statements regarding interpretations of triadic logic which appear in Plate 3. Essentially, Peirce seems to be saying that triadic logic may be interpreted as a modal logic which is designed to deal with the indeterminacies resulting from that mode of being which Peirce has called "Potentiality" and "Real Possibility." Under such an interpretation, dyadic logic becomes a limiting case of triadic modal logic resulting from removing indeterminacy and being determined entirely by "Actuality."

In this connection, it will be helpful to recall Peirce's analysis of indeterminacy in his "Issues of Prgamaticism." In particular, consider the following quotations:

A sign (under which designation I place every kind of thought, and not alone external signs), that is in any respect objectively indeterminate (i.e., whose object is undetermined by the sign itself) is objectively general in so far as it extends to the interpreter the privilege of carry ing its determination further. (5­447)

Every utterance naturally leaves the right of further exposition in the utterer; and therefore, in so far as a sign is indeterminate, it is vague, unless it is expressly or by a well­ understood convention rendered general. (5­447)

Perhaps a more scientific pair of definitions would be that anything is general in so far as the principle of excluded middle does not apply to it and is vague in so far as the principle of contradiction does not apply to it. Thus, although it is true that "Any proposition you please, once you have determined its identity, is either true or false"; yet so long as it remains indeterminate and so without identity; it need neither be true that any proposition you please is true, nor that any proposition you please is false. So likewise, while it is false that "A proposition whose identity I have determined is both true and false," vet until it is determinate, it may be true that a proposition is true and that a proposition is false. (5.448)

Such a treatment of indeterminacy appears to leave open the question as to whether it is always possible in principle to remove an indeterminacy. To borrow Peirce's own language, is it always possible to remove an indeterminacy by making use of "the privilege of carrying its determination further"? The answer clearly depends on whether or not a limit exists for "carrying its determination fur­

Page 179 ther." Bertrand Russell's criticism 16 of Hugh MacColl's variables, 17 which are similar in several respects to Peirce's assertions of possibility, is typical of the view that in principle an indeterminacy can always be removed. The trick, according to Russell, is not to overlook "two relevant and connected distinctions ..., namely (I) that between a verbal or symbolic expression and what it means, (2) that between a proposition and a propositional function." 18 Hans Reichenbach's analysis of "indeterminate statements" in quantum mechanics will serve to illustrate a view contrary to Russell's. For Reichenbach, indeterminacy is "inherent in the nature of the physical world" and no amount of "interpolation'' can remove all indeterminate statements. 19 Another interesting example might be provided by the now famous Gödel undecidable sentences. 20

In interpreting his triadic logic, did Peirce intend to take a stand on this kind of issue? The black blot illustration of indeterminacy given in Plate 3 is not very helpful in providing an answer. This is especially true when comparisons are made with similar illustrations in the Grand Logic (4. 127) and "Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic" (5.336). However, judging from Peirce's remarks on "Real Possibility" and "Potentiality," it would seem clear that his intention was to side with those who would deny that indeterminacy can always be removed. In particular, "Potentiality" is "a positive capacity to be Yea and to be Nay; not ignorance but a state of being." This suggests that Peirce would have agreed with the later view of Werner Heisenberg to the effect that there is "necessary uncertainty." 21 It is interesting to note that such necessary uncertainties led Heisenberg to reinstate Aristotle's "potentia." 22 A letter to William James 23 gives further evidence that Peirce firmly believed in unavoidable indeterminacy at the time he was writing his remarks on triadic logic as given in Plate 3. The letter is dated March 9, 1909, and thus was written just a short time after Peirce wrote Triadic Logic. In the letter, Peirce writes to James that "I hold to my 'tychism' more than ever." Perhaps this unavoidable indeterminacy was one of the principal factors which led Peirce to conclude at the bottom of Plate 3: "Triadic Logic is universally true."

In the March 9, 1909, letter to James, Peirce mentions an earlier draft of "forty sheets" just before indicating that he believed in tychism more than ever. This forty­ sheet draft (more exactly, it runs to forty­two numbered pages) has recently been re­assembled. Dated February 26, 1909, just three days after Plate 3, it contains some additional evidence that in Peirce's mind there was an important connection between his version of tychism and triadic logic. For example, in explaining his tychism to James in the forty­sheet draft, Peirce writes the following (pp. 21­22):

Page 180

I have long felt that it is a serious defect in existing logic that it takes no heed of the limit between two realms. I do not say that the Principle of Excluded Middle is downright false; but I do say that in every field of thought whatsoever there is an intermediate ground between positive assertion and positive negation which is just as Real as they. Mathematicians always recognize this, and seek for that limit as the presumable lair of powerful concepts; while metaphysicians and oldfashioned logicians,—the sheep & goat separators,—never recognize this. The recognition does not involve any denial of existing logic, but it involves a great addition to it.

Another very important factor back of Peirce's belief in triadic logic, no doubt, was his cenopythagoreanism (1.351, 8.328, and 1.568). In a letter to Lady Welby dated " 1904 Oct. 12," Peirce writes as follows:

I now come to Thirdness. To me, who have for forty years considered the matter from every point of view that I could discover, the inadequacy of Secondness to cover all that is in our minds is so evident that I scarce know how to begin to persuade any person of it who is not already convinced of it. Yet I see a great many thinkers who are trying to construct a system without putting any thirdness into it. Among them are some of my best friends who acknowledge themselves indebted to me for ideas but have never learned the principal lesson. Verv well. It is highly proper that Secondness should be searched to its very bottom. Thus only can the indispensableness and irreducibility of thirdness be made out, although for him who has the mind to grasp it, it is sufficient to say that no branching of a line can result from putting one line on the end of another. (8.331)

Peirce seems to have already reached essentially the same conclusion by 1885 in his "One, Two, Three, Fundamental Categories of Thought and of Nature" (1.369 with an error of transcription corrected). There he writes:

Kant, the King of modern thought, it wvas who first remarked the frequency in logical analytics of trichototies or threefold distinctions. It really is so; I have tried hard and long to persuade myself that it is only fanciful, but the facts will not countenance that way of disposing of the phenomenon.

If Peirce was as convinced of his cenopythagoreanism in 1885 as he was in 1904 when he wrote Lady Welby, why didn't he develop his triadic logic sooner than he did? In particular, why was it not incorporated within his closely related investigations of"trichotomic mathematics" in the Minute Logic of 1902 (4.307­323)? In fact, the work on trichotomic mathematics in the Minute Logic suggests so strongly the possibility of triadic logic, it seems surprising that Peirce

Page 181 did not incorporate his work on triadic logic with that on trichotomic mathematics in the Minute Logic. The reason appears to be that Peirce had not solved the problem of triadic logic at the time he was working on trichotomic mathematics in the Minute Logic. This assumes, as was suggested earlier, that Plate 2 represents Peirce's first successful recorded experiments with triadic logic and that he had not solved the problem of triadic logic to his satisfaction before February 1909. It seems likely, however, that Peirce may have conducted unrecorded thought experiments with triadic logic at least as early as his work on trichotomic mathematics in the Minute Logic. He may even have recorded some of these experiments in notebooks referred to in MS 339 which have not yet been found. Hence, there are still many unknowns associated with Peirce's development of triadic logic.

It would be interesting to know exactly what circumstances stimulated Peirce's successful solution of the problem of triadic logic. For example, could it have been that Peirce had been following the controversy in Mind between Bertrand Russell and Hugh MacColl, prompted by Russell's review of MacColl's book 24 and MacColl's reply? 25 If so, late in 1908 or early in 1909, Peirce might have seen MacColl's note entitled "'If' and 'Imply' "26 which had appeared in January 1908. In this note, MacColl considers the difference between his and Russell's treatment of implication. He indicates that for "nearly thirty years" he has been "vainly trying to convince" logicians of the errors involved in equating "implication" with what is now called ''Russell's material implication." MacColl then asks the following question:

Is it too much to hope that this test case will at last open the eyes of logicians to the necessity of accepting my three­fold division of statements (e, ?, ?) with all its consequences?

This three­fold division of statements was introduced quite explicitly in "Def. 2" of MacColl's fifth paper (1896­1897) in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. In the "Postscript" of the same paper, MacColl speaks of the great utility of "this logic of three dimensions (e, ?,?)," and points out the fallacy resulting from confounding "truth with certainty, and falsehood with impossibility." 27 Considering MacColl's rejection of Russell's material implication, it is interesting to notice also that MacColl's "Def. 13"28 gives what is now called "C. I. Lewis's strict implication."

It is beyond the scope of the present paper to investigate in detail all the possible relationships between Peirce's construction of his triadic logic and MacColl's three­ dimensional logic. However, it is

Page 182 known that Peirce and MacColl were interested in one another's work for a considerable period of time. In a letter to Peirce dated May 16, 1883, MacColl wrote the following:

It will be a great pleasure indeed to me if you can stay a little while in Boulogne on your way to England. It is not often that I have the opportunity of making the personal acquaintance of my correspondents in logic and mathematics. (MS L 261)

Much later, in a draft of a letter dated November 16, 1906, Peirce writes the following to MacColl:

Although my studies in symbolic logic have differed from yours in that my aim has not been to apply the system to the working out of problems, as yours has, but to aid in the study of logic itself, nevertheless I have always thought that you alone, so far as I know, except myself, have understood how the matter ought to be treated by making the elements propositions or predicates and not common nouns. (MS L 261 )

As far as it is now known, however, there is not sufficient concrete evidence available to make possible an accurate account of the exact relationship between MacColl's work in three­dimensional logic and Peirce's investigations of triadic logic. The solution to this problem will have to await future historical research.29

Notes

1. For example, see Alfred Tarski, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers from 1923 to 1938, trans. J. H. Woodger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 40n2. Also see Alonzo Church, Introduction to Mathematical Logic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956), p. 162.

2. Tarski, pp. 40n2 and 47n2.

3. Church, p. 162.

4. Ibid., p. 162n277. Emil L. Post, "Introduction to a general theory of elementary propositions," American Journal of Mathematics 43 (192 I): I6385.

5. Atwell R. Turquette, "Peirce's icons for deductive logic," Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1964), pp. 95­96.

6. Tarski, pp. 47­48. Also see C. I. Lewis and C. H. Langford, Symbolic Logic (New York: Dover Publications, 1959), pp. 213­14.

7. Jerzy Stupecki, "Der volle dreiwertige Aussagenkalkuil," Comptes rendus des seances de la Socidtd des Sciences et des Lettres de Varsovie, classe 3, vol. 29 (I936), pp. 9­11. Also see J. B. Rosser and A. R. Turquette, Many­

Page 183 valued Logics (Amsterdam: North­Holland Publishing Company, 1952), ch. 2.

8. Post, 1800.

9. Ibid.

10. Rosser and Turquette, pp. 15­16.

11. D. A. Bo:var. "Ob odnom trehznadnom isCisl6nii i dgo prim6n6nii k analizu paradoksov klassiC6skogo rasSirdnnogo funkcional nogo is:isldnii," Matematiceskij sbornik 4 (1939):287­308. Also see Alonzo Church's reviews of Bocvar in the Journal of Symbolic Logic 4 ( 1939):98­99 and 5 (1940):1 19.

12. Stephen C. Kleene, Introduction to Metamathematics (New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1952), pp. 327­36.

13. Ibid.

14. Post, 180­81

15. J. B. Rosser and A. R. Turquette, "Axiom schemes for M­valued propositional calculi," Journal of Symbolic Logic o1 (1945):61 n5.

16. Mind 15 (1906):255­­60.

17. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Societ­y 28 (1897):157.

18. Mind 15 (19o6):256.

19. Hans Reichenbach, Philosophic Foundations of Quantumi Mechanics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1944), parts 1 and 3.

20. For example, see Andrzej Mostowski, Sentences Undecidable in Formralized Arithmetic: An Exposition of the Theorn, of Kurt GOdel (Amsterdam: North­Holland Publishing Company, 1952), pp. 1­13.

21. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution ill Modern Science (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), p. 46. Also see Atwell R. Turquette, "Modality, Minimality, and Many­Valuedness," Acta Philosophica Fennica, fasc. 16 (1963):261­76.

22. Heisenberg, pp. 180­86.

23. See Ralph Barton Perry. The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1935), 2:437­38.

24. Hugh MacColl. Symbolic Logic and Its Applications (London, 1906).

25. Mind 16 (1907):470­72.

26. Mind 17 (1908):151­52.

27. See MacColl, pp. 157, 182­83.

28. Ibid., p. 159.

29. For further treatment of Peirce's triadic logic, see the following articles by Turquette: "Peirce's Phi and Psi Operators for Triadic Logic," Transactions 3 (1967):66­73; "Peirce's Complete Systems of Triadic Logic,' ibid. 5 ( 1969): 199­210; "Dualism and Trimorphism in Peirce's Triadic Logic," ibid. 8 (1972): 131140; ''Minimal axioms for Peirce's triadic logic," Zeitschrift ftir Mathematische Logik u nd Gru ndlagen der Mathematik 22 (1976): 169­176; "Alternative axioms for Peirce's triadic logic," ibid. 24 (1978):443­444; "Quantification for Peirce's Preferred System of Triadic Logic," Studia Logica 40 (1981/4):373­382; "Defining Peirce's Verum " and "Peirce's Triadic Logic and Lukasiewicz's Shortest Axiom" are forthcoming. (As indicated in the bibliography, Atwell R. Turquette was co­ author of the preceding essay.)

Page 184

TEN—Peirce's Progress from Nominalism toward Realism

A collection of papers on "British and American Realism 1900­1930" may properly include "the first American realist," l for though the earliest published formulations of his realism date from 1868 and 1871, the later ones extend from 1891 to 1908, and fresh formulations in unpublished manuscripts and private correspondence continue through 1913. And his inclusion in such a collection in The Monist is doubly appropriate, for it was here that most of his later published formulations appeared, and that many of his unpublished ones were intended to appear.

He often said in later years that the proper order of philosophizing was to begin with nominalism and give it a fair trial before going on to realism (CP 8.251) "Everybody ought to be a nominalist at first, and to continue in that opinion until he is driven out of it by the force majeure of irreconcilable facts" (4. I). "What distinguishes the nominalist is that he does not admit certain elements. The realist, if he is a sound thinker, must once have occupied the same position." 2 Quantify that and you get this: If nominalism won't do, try next a realism just distinguishable from nominalism, and so on, until by such minimal steps you reach a realism that will do, and just do.

Was he a nominalist at first? Yes, by avowal and repute, and, I think, in fact. When did he take his first intended step toward realism? In 1868, in his three papers on cognition in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy (5.213­357). His second? In 1871, in his article on Fraser's edition of Berkeley in the North American Review (8.738). Was it by gradual further steps that he reached what he called the extreme realism of his later years? He thought so, and so do I; and, on the scale my space permits, I plot the course. 3

I. HIS INITIAL NOMINALISM (1867­1868)

Peirce's first professional publications in logic and philosophy (apart from a privately printed brochure) were five papers presented to

Page 185 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1867 and a review of John Venn's Logic of Chance in the same year. That he was an avowed nominalist at that time is evident from the review. "Mr. Venn remarks, with great ingenuity and penetration," says Peirce, that "the philosophy of chances ... has had its realistic, conceptualistic, and nominalistic stages.... This last is the position of Mr. Venn and of the most advanced writers on the subject" (8.12). This last position, the nominalistic one, was the frequency theory of probability, which Peirce was to hold for more than thirty years, 4 and which he had already maintained in his Lowell Institute Lectures of 1866, before he had seen Venn's book. 5 When he doubts in 1893 that he learned anything from the book, he is so far right; but when he adds ''except a classification of the philosophies of probability" (6.590), he misleads us. For Venn nowhere speaks of three stages or philosophies. He does note vestiges of realism in some theories still current, but the only distinction he draws between general types of theory is a twofold one, between the Conceptualistic view represented chiefly by De Morgan and the "Material or Phenomenalist" view represented chiefly by Mill and adopted by himself. 6 Nowhere does he call the latter view nominalistic. The terms 'nominalism', 'nominalistic' nowhere occur in any edition of The Logic of Chance. So the one thing Peirce learned from it was not in it.

Why then does Peirce, in the very act of declaring his adherence to the frequency theory, hoist the flag of nominalism over it, without license from the book he is reviewing? Because he is a nominalist, because he has adopted the frequency theory as being nominalistic, and because it does not occur to him that Venn can mean anything else by "Material or Phenomenalist."

How shall we account for the nominalism at twenty­seven of "the first American realist"? By the influence of Chauncey Wright, an avowed nominalist, a close student of Mill's Logic and Political Economy, who has published two influential reviews of Mill's Examination of Hamilton, and who looks to Mill as "the modern champion at once of nominalism in logic and of individualism in sociology." 7 As Peirce said late in life, "all of us, students of philosophy, were stirred to our depths by Mill's Examination ... as no metaphysical eloquence ever did stir us before or has since stirred us" (MS 675).s

What, more exactly, was the variety of nominalistic metaphysics that Peirce then held? In another late recollection (MS 655) he calls it

"cognitionism," a point of view which it is probable that both James and I were led to take by the influence of our common friend,—not to call him our teacher,—Chauncey Wright, who unquestionably derived

Page 186 that way of thinking from John Stuart Mill, whose enthusiastic follower he was. Cognitionism was the doctrine that what there is is cognitions; that "cognizability (in its widest sense) and being are not merely metaphysically the same, but are synonymous terms" (5.257); that "whatever is meant by any term as 'the real' is cognizable in some degree, and so is of the nature of a cognition, in the objective sense of that term" (5.310); that cognitions are all in signs and none intuitive (5.253); that "cognition arises by a process of beginning" in which there is no first (5.263), that is, nothing is sign­object only and not sign­vehicle or sign­interpretant; that every cognition is continued in another, so that none is interpretant only (5.253); and that nothing is absolutely singular or absolutely determinate, so that "being at all is being in general" (5.349).9 Clearly this variety of nominalism is also a variety of idealism; more exactly, a semiotic idealism.

But were there any philosophers outside Cambridge who knew that Peirce was a nominalist? Yes, William Torrey Harris of St. Louis for example. When Peirce in January 1868 raised questions about the Hegelian identification of Being and Nothing, Harris published them in his Journal of Speculative Philosophy, along with editorial replies, under the title "Nominalism versus Realism"—that is, the nominalism of Peirce versus the realism of Harris. 10

Harris invited Peirce to show how, on his nominalistic principles, the validity of the laws of logic could be other than inexplicable (5.318), and Peirce set out to do so in a series of three articles in the Journal. The first, "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man," was sent to Harris under the title "Questions concerning Reality," and it was at Harris's suggestion that the title was changed. 11 In a draft of "Questions concerning Reality" (MS 931), Peirce writes:

[I]f a proposition is logically inferable ... from the sum of all possible information ... then it is absolutely true.... [T]he real is the object of an absolutely true proposition. Thus, we obtain a theory of reality which, while it is nominalistic, inasmuch as it bases universals upon signs, is yet quite opposed to that individualism which is often supposed to be coextensive with nominalism. For there is nothing to prevent universal propositions from being absolutely true, and therefore universals may be as real as singulars. 12... Now the nominalistic element of my theory is certainly an admission that nothing out of cognition and signification generally, has any generality.... But is the blackness of this, identical with the blackness of that? I cannot see how it can help being; the determinations which accompany it are different but the blackness itself is the same, by supposition. If this

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seems a monstrous doctrine, remember that my nominalism saves me from all absurdity.... Our principle, indeed, is simply that realities, all realities, are nominal, significative, cognitive. This is simply the pure doctrine of idealism. (W 2:175, 180, 181)

2. HIS FIRST STEP TOWARD REALISM (1868)

By the time the cognition series appears in print, Peirce has lowered his colors. Not only does he no longer call himself a nominalist, but in the second article he declares unobtrusively for realism (5.312). The measure of this first step may be taken in ten observations. (1) The realism he declares for is "the realism of Scotus." 13 (2) It is confined to one paragraph. (3) It is not opposed to his nominalism but added to it. (4) The nominalism to which his realism is opposed is that of the incognizable thing­in ­itself. (5) The rejection of that nominalism is nothing new, for his previous nominalism had already excluded it. (6) The realism is a by­product of a slight modification of the theory of reality, in the preceding paragraph (5.311). The distinction between true and untrue cognitions, "or cognitions whose objects are real and those whose objects are unreal," is now made to rest on that

between an ens relative to private inward determinations, to the negations belonging to idiosyncrasy, and an ens such as would stand in the long run. The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you.

The operative phrase is "in the long run." To meet Harris's challenge, Peirce has to justify probable inference (induction and hypothesis), and the gambit he has been driven to is that of first applying his theory of probability to his theory of reality. (7) What is needed for the job in hand, and is therefore emphasized, is not the realism but its premise, the modified theory of reality. (8) Since realism is ipso facto anti­individualistic, and since it is an incidental consequence of the theory of reality as now modified, Peirce need no longer protest that the latter is anti­individualistic in spite of being nominalistic. (9) He does not, however, call it realistic instead; but, since it is as cognitionistic and therefore idealistic as before, he calls it simply idealistic. 14(10) The declaration for realism is thus so unobtrusive as to be almost an aside to the editor, acknowledging that the principles by which Peirce is validating the laws of logic are not exactly those by which he had undertaken to do so.

Page 188

3. HIS SECOND STEP TOWARD REALISM (1871)

The years 1868 and 1869 were those of Peirce's most intensive study of the schoolmen. 15 When in 1871 in his Berkeley review he declares a second time for "the realism of Scotus" (8.19), he is able to do so more knowledgeably and confidently. In 1871, as in 1868, the great virtue of Scotus's realism is that it is "separated from nominalism only by the division of a hair" (8.11). But these eight things (and many more) are new. (I) The question is now the burden of the whole article, not of a single paragraph. (2) Peirce starts from a neutral definition: "The real is that which is not whatever we happen to think it, but is unaffected by what we may think of it" (8.12). (3) He then states the question. (4) He next distinguishes "two widely separated points of view, from which reality, as just defined, may be regarded." (5) He calls these views not idealistic and unidealistic as in the cognition series but (naming them for their fruits) realistic and nominalistic. (6) He sharply contrasts the two views in terms of their temporal orientation, the realistic toward the future, the nominalistic toward the past. (7) He traces the medieval disagreement about universals to the opposite orientations of these two views of reality. (8) Without excluding the possibility of an eventual logical solution, he makes the issue for the present a practical and moral one, an affair of engagement (8.38).

By declaring for the prospective or realist view of reality, against the retrospective or nominalist view, Peirce puts himself in position for his third step, which, in his Metaphysical Club paper of 1872, will be pragmatism. But at this point I must give up trying to number, time, and measure his steps, and content myself with a rough sketch of his further progress, dividing it into two periods which for a reason that will appear later, I call pre­Monist and Monist.

4. THE PRE­MONIST PERIOD (1872—1890)

This is the period of his major contributions to astronomy, geodesy, psychology, metrology, mathematics, and mathematical logic. All the while he is slowly maturing a philosophy (8.317; 7.566) that will find its first extensive published expression in the Monist series of 1891—1893, and that will undergo continual revision from then on. But it is astonishing how little explicit anticipation of that philosophy there is. And as for the realism­nominalism issue, there is no discussion of it, no announcement of a change of position, scarcely even a glance at it for nearly two decades. Only a reader with his later realism very much in mind will see him as now advancing toward it, now hesitating, now retreating.

Page 189 The chief developments in the pre­Monist period whose effects on Peirce's realism will appear in the Monist period are his pragmatism; his work on the logic of relations and on truth­tables, indices, and quantification; the resulting reformulation of his categories; his work and that of Cantor and Dedekind on transfinite numbers; the appearance in 1885 of provocative books by Royce and Abbot; and, at the end of the period, a fresh review of the history of philosophy for purposes of defining philosophical terms for the Century Dictionary.

The pragmatism of the Metaphysical Club paper of 1872 and of "The Logic of 1873"'16 receives definitive statement in the "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" in 1877­1878. Only the scientific way of fixing belief involves the conception of reality (5.384). The neutral definition as "that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be" now exemplifies a second grade of clarity (5.405). A third, here reached by applying the maxim later called pragmatic, is summed up in the sentence: "The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real" (5.407). This is "the idealistic theory of reality'' of the cognition series (5.353) and the "realistic" theory of the Berkeley review (8.12 ­13), but both names are avoided here, and the realistic consequence is nowhere drawn. There is, to be sure, an approach to his later realism in the conception of beliefs as habits of action. But though he approaches his later conception of a habit as a would­be or would do (5.400), he is far from reaching it. And on the whole we must count the pragmatism of the 1870s as nominalistic for three further reasons. (1) The maxim is a recipe for sign­interpretation; more exactly, for translating certain kinds of categorical propositions (or propositional functions) into certain kinds of conditional propositions (or functions). But how shall the conditionals be interpreted? That question is not directly answered, but from the application of the maxim to "x is harder than y" (5.403; last sentence of 5.409; 2.646), we see that the answer is: Interpret them as Philonian or material implications. Of all the tenets of nominalism, there was none to which he would cling longer. (2) The burden of the series is the clarification of the conception of probability, and the result is the same frequency theory that in his review of Venn he had called nominalistic (2.651n1), but which he now follows Venn in calling materialistic (2.673). (3) He still holds the nominalistic view of possibility, and will not reach the realistic view until 1897.17

His papers on the logic of relations in the 1870s and 1880s are technical and do not broach his later doctrines that, where ordinary logic talks of classes, the logic of relations talks of systems; that it is continuity that, in the logic of relations, corresponds to generality

Page 190 in the syllogism or in the logic of monadic predicates; that continuity is a higher type of generality; and that the question of realism and nominalism therefore becomes, are any continua real?

His study of the logic of relations led him into the theory of multitudes. His first paper was published in 1881 (3.252­288). By the mid­1880s he had become acquainted with some of Georg Cantor's papers, which confirmed him in the conviction to which his own work had brought him, that it is possible to think about infinity without contradiction. This was important for the synechism and the new realism toward which he was moving, because he thought we had to go through infinity to get to continuity, so that, if we could not reason about infinity, a fortiori we could not reason about continuity. A decade later he would say that "the nominalist school of philosophy" which had "dictated the accepted logic of mathematics" for about a century was "rapidly going out of vogue," and he would ascribe this to Cantor's influence (MS 210). Both "the doctrine of limits'' and the view that we cannot reason mathematically about infinity he would then call nominalistic. But in the 1880s he does not yet separate "the method of limits" from "the doctrine of limits"; he does not vet call the doctrine nominalistic; and he does not yet disavow it.

Though he gave his pupil Mitchell full credit for introducing indices into the algebra of logic (3.363), it was his own work on the logic of relations that had made the need of them evident. Indices called for a reformulation in 1885 of his theory of signs (3.360­363) and, about the same time, of his general theory of categories (1.369372). By this route, he arrived at the doctrine that three kinds of signs—icons and indices as well as general terms—are indispensable in all reasoning. This means that even the necessary reasoning of mathematics involves observation and therefore attention and therefore arbitrary choice. And this gives him a basis for criticizing the idealism of Royce's Religious Aspect of Philosophy as suffering from "the capital error of Hegel," that of ignoring the "Outward Clash," the "direct consciousness of hitting and of getting hit [which] enters into all cognition and serves to make it mean something real" (8.41). We can see that Peirce is on his way to a three­category realism in which ultimate reality is ascribed to seconds rather than to thirds or firsts; but there is no evidence that he sees it.

The argument from the possibility of error to the existence of God is defended by Royce against a counter­argument which he puts into the mouth of a modern Thrasymachus. "No barely possible judge," Royce retorts, "who would see the error, if he were there, will do for us" (8.41). Peirce recognizes himself in the guise of Thrasymachus, and he undertakes to make the counter­argument good. In doing

Page 191 so, he turns some of the will­bes of his Popular Science Monthly series into would­bes, and thereby takes a short step from his earlier nominalistic pragmatism toward his later realistic pragmaticism. Again, we can see this; it is not apparent that he does.

Francis Ellingwood Abbot had been a Harvard classmate of Peirce's. His Scientific Theism appeared late in 1885. It was the only book read and reviewed by Peirce that made the realism­nominalism issue central and did battle for realism, yet Peirce contrived to review it at length without using either term and without addressing himself to that issue. 18 In his review of Berkeley, Peirce had said the realism he espoused "involves a phenomenalism. But it is the phenomenalism of Kant, and not that of Hume. Indeed, what Kant called his Copernican step was precisely the passage from the nominalistic to the realistic view of reality" (8.15). From the opening paragraph of his book, Abbot took the opposed view that Kant's phenomenalism was simply nominalism—the nominalism common, like idealism, to both the schools of modern philosophy—worked up into a great philosophical system. Abbot rejected phenomenalism and idealism of all forms in behalf of the "relationism"—the doctrine of the objectivity of relations—on which modern science rested and which he therefore called "scientific realism." Peirce replied in his review that "As yet, science does not decide either for or against any of the current systems of philosophy"—much as Wright had replied to Peirce's review of Berkeley. 19 In a letter to Abbot, Peirce said: "I am myself not only phenomenalist, but also idealist.... Being an idealist, of course, I cannot yet accept the objectivity of relations in the sense in which you mean it.'' And he appended some passages on relations from Ockham's Logic, as if to say that, if Abbot's view of relations be realist and Ockham's nominalist, then he himself is not only phenomenalist and idealist but also still nominalist. 20

At the time, then, Peirce conceded nothing to Abbot. But three or four years later he went over the whole ground again to define for the Century Dictionary such terms as Aristotelianism, class, continuity, general, haecceity, individual, Kantianism, nominalism, Occamism, Platonism, realism, relation, scholasticism, universal. The article on nominalism listed the chief varieties and ended with that of Kant. Under relation and universal, Kant is again a nominalist. Under realism, there is a string of extracts from Abbot's book distinguishing the several forms of realism and nominalism, and concluding with Abbot's own relationism or scientific realism. Peirce now follows Abbot in characterizing science as "prevailingly realistic." At the time of the Abbot­Royce controversy in 1891, Peirce will write Abbot that though there is much he cannot accept in the book, "I have sufficiently approved of your statement of the question con­

Page 192 cerning universals to make a long quotation from it under realism in the Century Dictionary." 21 His agreement with Abbot will later go much further.

How shall we account for Peirce's nearly complete silence concerning the realism­nominalism issue in the pre­Monist period, except at the end in the Century Dictionary where it was unavoidable? It will not quite suffice to say that this was the period of his scientific productivity and eminence, and that he was too busy being a scientist; for it was also the period in which he lectured on logic for five years at The Johns Hopkins University. The likeliest explanation is his own, on a page of extremely rough notes, without date but from the beginning of the Monist period:

In the case of the principle of continuity the initial questions of logic have proved most refractory.

The very first of these is, what do we mean by continuity....

The essence of continuity, by G. Cantor's aid & by Mr. Peirce's own studies, having been determined, it remains to ask what reason we have, or, for that matter, ever can have, for believing that things really are continuous. This is the deepest of all questions of logic....

For a long time doubt as to evidence of the existence of continuity interfered with the development of my speculations. But those doubts have at length been overcome. (MS 949)

But, alas, he would later say that his Century Dictionary article, based on Cantor, defined only the nominalistic "pseudo­continuity" of the calculus and theory of functions, not the real continuity of his own topical geometry. 22

5. THE MONIST PERIOD (1891­1914)

The newly founded Monist now became his chief medium of publication; he published four series of articles in it; and much of his unpublished work was intended for it.

In the first of the four series, that of 1891­1893, at the end of the third article, he says:

I have thus developed as well as I could in a little space the synechistic philosophy, as applied to mind. I think that I have succeeded in making it clear that it carries along with it ... first, a logical realism of the most pronounced type; second, objective idealism; third, tychism, with its consequent thorough­going evolutionism. (CP 6. 163)

The logical realism, as applied to mind, comes to this:

Page 193

And to say that mental phenomena are governed by law does not mean merely that they are describable by a general formula; but that there is a living idea, a conscious continuum of feeling, which pervades them, and to which they are docile. (CP 6. 152)

The objective idealism: "matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws" (6.25). The tychism: "I make use of chance chiefly to make room for a principle of generalization, or tendency to form habits, which I hold has produced all regularities" (6.63). By ''loosening the bond of necessity, it gives room for the influence of another kind of causation" (6.60), i.e. final causes, agapasm, evolution by creative love (6.302).

The editor, Paul Carus, maintained that by his "onslaught on the doctrine of necessity" Peirce had shown himself a "Hume redivivus" and "an extreme nominalist." 23 Peirce replied: "All that Hume attacked I defend, namely, law as a reality" (6.605). Real chance, so far from being incompatible with real law, is its presupposition, for the reason that a real law, a law by which things are governed, must have grown up, must be an acquired habit, and must be still imperfect. So, if there are real laws, there is real chance, as distinguished from the nominal chance that is relative to our ignorance. Real chance leaves room for the growth of law, and real law leaves room for real chance.

There is a radical difference between his objective idealism and his earlier phenomenalistic idealism, and between his new and his earlier realism. Whereas the earlier realism was a rider on an idealism that he already held while he was still an avowed nominalist, the new realism is contained in the new idealism; both are doctrines about real laws; neither is separable from the other or from the synechism that contains both.

Nevertheless, the idealism still overshadows the realism, and this first Monist series nowhere focuses on the realism­nominalism issue. It is in the "Grand Logic," about 1893, that we find his first discussion of the issue since 1871, his first discussion anywhere in which he does battle without benefit or handicap of a presupposed idealism, his first use of the phrase "extreme realism" to describe his own view, and his first use of the argument that his extreme realism is strong in the way that nominalism is strong as over against the weakness of moderate realism (MS 410). It is also in the Grand Logic that, since the continuous is what the general becomes for the logic of relatives, realism becomes "the doctrine of the reality of continuity" (CP 8, p. 279).

The second Monist series was in the form of review articles on Schróder's Algebra und Logik der Relative. In the first article, in

Page 194 October 1896, he still held to the nominalistic (6.367) definition of possibility (3.442). In the second, in January 1897, he renounced it:

I formerly defined the possible as that which in a given state of information (real or feigned) we do not know not to be true. But this definition today seems to me only a twisted phrase which, by means of two negatives, conceals an anacoluthon. (CP 3.527)

In a letter to William James on March 18, 1897, he added:

The possible is a positive universe, and the two negations happen to fit it, but that is all.... I reached this truth by studying the question of possible grades of multitude, where I found myself arrested until I could form a whole logic of possibility....(CP 8.308)

He later regarded this as his most decisive single step toward realism. 24 It called at once for another revision of his categories, which first appears in "The Logic of Mathematics." The "categories of elements of phenomena" (1.418­420)—the "metaphysical categories" (1.452)—are now, first, quality or possibility; second, fact; third, law. The "logical categories" (1.542) are monad, dyad, triad. And now, answering to these, Peirce for the first time distinguishes three ''modes of being" (1.432, 434, 451, 452, 456, 457, 458, 515).25 The realism­nominalism issue has so far been a question concerning thirds; now it becomes a question also concerning firsts, and "the great error of all the nominalist schools"—the error from which he has just extricated himself—"lies in holding that the potential, or possible, is nothing but what the actual makes it to be" (1.422). But he must now distinguish the generality of firsts from that of thirds, and his first attempt is this:

Generality is either of that negative sort which belongs to the merely potential, as such, and this is peculiar to the category of quality; or it is of that positive kind which belongs to conditional necessity, and this is peculiar to the category of law. (CP 1.427)

In the middle and late 1890s his realism was further modified by three developments I cannot reduce to the scale of this paper: his existential graphs and topical geometry, and an approach to Hegel that culminated in his Cambridge Conferences of 1898.26

Writing to Georg Cantor on December 23, 1900, to explain how he is led to "ideas which seem opposed to yours about continuity," he begins by stating three criteria of truth and distinguishing positive, ideal, and ultimate reality or truth by the applicability to them of these criteria. 27 All three criteria apply to positive, only the first two to ideal, and only the first to ultimate reality or truth.

Page 195

By an ultimate reality or truth, I mean one to which the first criterion can be in some measure applied, but which can never be overthrown or rendered clearer by any reasoning, and upon which alone no predictions can be based. Thus, if you are kicked by a horse, the fact of the pain is beyond all discussion, and far less can it be shaken or established by any experimentation. (MS L 73)

It is therefore with the reality of firsts and thirds firmly grounded in that of seconds that he enters the period to which the present number of The Monist is devoted. As he puts the same point in his Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism in 1903, "Whatever reacts is ipso facto real" (5.96). The central lecture distinguishes "The Seven Systems of Metaphysics" by "what ones of the three categories" they "have fully admitted as real constituents of nature.'' Since it was by adopting Scotus's haecceities about 1890 and Aristotle's real possibilities about 1897 that Peirce had become a three­category realist, he now calls himself "an Aristotelian of the scholastic wing, approaching Scotism, but going much further in the direction of scholastic realism" (5.77ni). After the introductory sections, this lecture has three parts, on the reality respectively of thirdness, firstness, and secondness. 28 The novel doctrine of these lectures, so far as concerns realism, is the theory of perceptual judgment. 29 It is in this connection that he first makes it quite clear that his realism is now opposed to idealism as well as to nominalism. "Every philosopher who denies the doctrine of Immediate Perception—including idealists of every stripe—by that denial cuts off all possibility of ever cognizing a relation" (5.56). So also in his Lowell Lectures later in the year: "Nothing can be more completely false than that we can experience only our own ideas..... all experience and all knowledge is knowledge of that which is, independently of being represented" (6.95). After eighteen years, his agreement with Abbot is now nearly complete: "all modern philosophy of every sect has been nominalistic" (1.19), but "science has always been at heart realistic, and always must be so" (1.20). (Abbot has just taken his own life and does not hear.)

In the third Monist series, beginning in 1905, pragmaticism is pragmatism purged of the nominalistic dross of its original exposition; it is a semiotic doctrine, not just a maxim; it is provable (5.415); it entails realism (as well as critical common­sensism), so that its proof becomes a proof of realism; and the realism embraces not only "the modes of determination of existent singulars" but also "real vagues, and especially real possibilities.... Indeed, it is the reality of some possibilities that pragmaticism is most concerned to insist upon" (5.453). The logic of possibility is part of the logic of vagueness (5.446­450, 505­507).30 More generally, the realism is a

Page 196 doctrine of objective or "real Modality, including real Necessity and real Possibility" (5.457) as well as Actuality.

Since the proof of pragmaticism, and thereby of realism, can be most cogently stated in existential graphs, the series proceeds to a fresh exposition of the graphs (4.530—572). But the Monist printer's ink is scarcely dry on that when Peirce hits upon an improvement to enable them to represent different kinds of possibilities; and, confronted by this improvement, his other self, his nominalist self, surrenders his last stronghold, that of Philonian or material implication (4.580, 546).31

In what was intended to be only an interlude in the third Monist series, he began the fourth, the "amazing mazes" series of 1908­1909. He used the graphs to define a cyclic system (4.620­623) and thus to illustrate their superiority over either of his algebras of logic as an instrument of logical analysis. He also worked out new definitions of a perfect continuum (4.642) and of an imperfect or pseudocontinuum. The next article in the pragmaticism series was to use the graphs to define real definition, and one or two more would derive pragmaticism from the definition of definition and draw the further consequences.

Meanwhile the publishers of The Monist were ready to make a book of his original pragmatism papers and he was revising them for that purpose and writing new matter to correct their "errors and other faults" (8.214). That series had consisted of two principal parts: the general theory of inquiry in the first two papers, and the application to probability in the last four. The "principal positive error" of the first part was the nominalism of the general theory (8.216), and that error he had gone far toward correcting in the Harvard Lectures of 1903 and in the third Monist series. The principal positive error of the second part was the nominalism of the frequency theory of probability, and that had still to be corrected. From 1907 to 1913, in drafts of articles and in private letters, Peirce tried definition after definition of real probability, all sharing the realistic dispositional frequency character, but differing significantly in other respects, and none of them altogether satisfactory.

While revising his theory of real modality to accommodate the mixed mode of real probability, he experimented also with modal logic, and early in 1909 he worked out a truth­table formulation of three­valued or "triadic" logic. 32

During the last six years of his life he was also engaged on a System of Logic "considered as semeiotic," for which the pragmatism book was to prepare the way, and which should stand for realism in the twentieth century as Mill's System of Logic had stood for nominalism in the nineteenth. But each of the four Monist series was broken off incomplete; neither book was finished; and his half­century progress

Page 197 from nominalism and idealism toward realism, though nearing its goal of definitive statement and published proof, was broken off short of it.

APPENDIX

Extract from Peirce's Draft Letter to Georg Cantor, December 23, 1900 (MS L 73)

By a true proposition (if there be any such thing) I mean a proposition which at some time, past or future, emerges into thought, and has the following three characters:

1st, no direct effort of yours, mine, or anybody's, can reverse it permanently, or even permanently prevent its asserting itself;

2nd, no reasoning or discussion can permanently prevent its asserting itself;

3rd, any prediction based on the proposition, as to what ought to present itself in experience under certain conditions, will be fulfilled when those conditions are satisfied.

By a reality, I mean anything represented in a true proposition.

By a positive reality or truth, I mean one to which all three of the above criteria can be applied,—of course imperfectly, since we can never carry them out to the end.

By an ideal reality or truth, I mean one to which the first two criteria can be applied imperfectly, but the third not at all, since the proposition does not imply that any particular state of things will ever appear in experience. Such is a truth of pure mathematics.

By an ultimate reality or truth, etc. [as in text over note 27 above].

[Peirce goes on to define individual, primitive individual, derivative individual, subjects of the same category, subjects more or less independent, collection, and multitude.]

Notes

1. H. W. Schneider, A History of American Philosophy; 2nd ed. (Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 517.

2. In a draft of a letter to Ernst Schr6der, 7 April 1897 (L 392).

3. My aim is to open, not close, a line of inquiry. I cannot here sort out the meanings of terms, or measure their shifts, or weigh objections; but briefs of a few objections and answers are offered as earnest in notes 3, 8, 9, 12, 31. Objection: Does not Peirce say (1) at 6.605 (1893) that "never, during the thirty years [1863­ 93] in which I have been writing on philosophical questions, have I failed in my allegiance to realistic opinions and to certain

Page 198 Scotistic ideas," and (2) at 1.20 (1903) that since he declared for realism in 1871 he has "never been able to think differently on that question of nominalism and realism"?—Answer: (X) Yes, but the "thirty years" go back five too many, and in the same series he says at 6.103 (1892) that in 1868 "I was a little blinded bv nominalistic prepossessions'' and at 6.270 (1892) that "my views were, then, too nominalistic to enable me to see," etc. (2) At 1.20 he goes on to mention an aspect of that question on which he has been able to think differently. (3) So I take both statements to mean that he has never retreated from the minimal realism he declared for in 1868 and 1871, not that he has never advanced from it.

4. Arthur W. Burks, "Peirce's Two Theories of Probability," Studies ill the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, Second Series, ed. Edward C. Moore and Richard S. Robin (University of Massachusetts Press, 1964), pp. 141­50.

5. Lecture 3, delivered 31 October (MS 354). Venn's book was published earlier that month in England, but was not available in this country until later.

6. Tihe Logic of Chance (1866), pp. 36, 43, 55; and xi­xiii, 171, 343.

7. Letters of' Chauncey Wright (Cambridge, MA, 1878), p. 163.

8. Objection: This takes us back to 1865, but Peirce was writing philosophy in great quantity for at least six years before that, and at least once, 25 July 1859, he called himself a realist (MS 921, quoted by Philip P. Wiener, Evolution and the Founders o/'Pragtatisnl [Harvard University Press, 1949], p. 73); so he was not a nominalist at first.—Answer: My 'at first' means 'as of the time of his "first professional publications in logic and philosophy" '; his unpublished juvenilia are matter for another study.

9. Objection: This 'nominalism' begins to look like realism.—Answer: The appearance is deceptive. That "being at all is being in general" is not to the point of the question about universals.

10. Journal of Speculative Philosophly 2 (1868):57­6I. Peirce in his reply (ibid. 1990­91 = 6.625­30) does not disavow the nominalism.

11 "C. S. Peirce to W. T. Harris," ed. Wallace Nethery, The Personalist 43 (1962):39.

12. Objection: So his 'nominalism' is realism!—Answcr: No, but this is the opening through which a minim of realism will enter in the final draft.

13. See John F. Boler, Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism: A Study of Peirce's Relation to John Dunls Scotlus (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963). The declaration wvas composed in October 1868 and published in January 1869.

14. CP 5.353 is sometimes misunderstood. The sense is: Let us now suppose, in this one short paragraph, that that idealistic theory is false which has been defended in the first two papers and assumed true in the third.

15. See "A Chronicle" under 1868 January I and 1869 December 14 (pp. 118 and 120­21 above). See also Peirce's review of Porter's Human Intellect, The Nation 8 (I8 March 1869):211­13 (NI:23 or W2:273­81).

16. See "A Chronicle" under 1872 February 4, May 11­14, November 24 and 25, and 1873 March 6 (pp. 123­24 above).

17. On reason (1) see text over note 31 below; on (3) see note 24.

18. N1:71. See "Peirce's Debt to F. E. Abbot" by Daniel D. O'Connor, Journal of the Historv of Ideas 25 (1964):543­64.

19. N1:43 (W2:487­89).

20. Abbot Papers, Harvard University Archives, HUG 1101.10, "Scientific Theism" folder, letter of 11 January 1886.

21. Ibid., "Comments on Royce Matter" folder, letter of about 30 October 1891.

Page 199 22. 6. 164­68, 176; 7.652, 656; MS 95: 11 1 2; MS 137:100­1 3; MS 288:125 (1903­1906). (The term defined in 6.164 is continltity; the "not" in line 22 belongs before "belonging" in line 21. 167 should precede 165. In 6.166 the reference should be to 165, not 164. Only 168 is dated "1903 Sep 18.")

23. The Monist 2 (1892):561; 3 (I893):573.

24. MS 288:129­30 (draft of 5.527, c. 1905): (At CP 3.527ff) "he repudiates the nominalistic view of possibility, and explicitly returns to the Aristotelian doctrine of a real possibility. This was the great step that was needed to render pragmaticism an intelligible doctrine." MS 845:29­30 (1905), in a long passage omitted at the end of 6.501: "It is plain that pragmaticism involves scholastic realism, since it makes all intellectual purport, and therefore, the meaning of reality itself, to consist in what would be, under conceivable conditions most of which can never be actualized. It thus involves making real being to include more than existence. Now that is precisely the point in dispute between Realists and Nominalists. 'A real possibility,' says the nominalist, 'is nonsense. For that is possible which we do not know is not true.' The realist says that there is, besides, a real possibility and real necessity (not mere compulsion, but rational necessity, as in the laws of nature)." If that is the point of the dispute, Peirce had not crossed over to the realist side of it until 1897, and his original pragmatism was nominalistic. See text over note 17 above.

25. Manley Thompson, The Pragmatic Philosophy of C. S. Peirce (University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 182 and elsewhere (see his index under "modes of being"), finds only two until 1902.

26. On the topical geometry see Murray Murphey, The Development of Peirce's Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1961). On the graphs see J. Jay Zeman, The Graphical Logic of C. S. Peirce (Diss. Chicago 1964) and Don D. Roberts, The Existential Graphs of Charles S. Peirce (The Hague: Mouton, 1973). Murphey has told the Peirce­Kant story but keeps Hegel offstage, and the Peirce­Hegel story awaits a teller (see "Hegel and Peirce, " pp. 261­80 below).

27. See the Appendix.

28. The part entitled by Peirce "The Reality of Firstness" includes 5.108­18, 1.314­16, 5. I19.

29 . That it is both novel and important for Peirce is shown by his coining for it the terms percipuum, antecept, antecipuumtz, ponecept, ponecipuzum (CP 7.629, 648). See Richard J. Bernstein, "Peirce's Theory of Perception," Studies, Second Series (note 4 above), pp. 165­89.

30. See Jarrett E. Brock, Charles Sanders Peirce's Logic of Vagueness (Diss. Illinois 1969).

31. Objection: After the first step or two, is not your evidence of Peirce's progress toward realism that he abandoned position after position and, after abandoning each, called it nominalistic? And does that prove anything more than that, though a pusher for the ethics of terminology, he has a way with words that lets him change labels at will? The alleged first step or two consisted in changing them in the nominalism­realism direction, and each alleged further step has consisted in changing them in the realismnominalism direction.­Answer: (1) Change of labels might be evidence of change of position, for, if there is a spectrum of theories running from extreme nominalism at the left to extreme realism at the right, and if a thinker has started at the left and is moving to the right, any position will seem relatively realistic until he reaches it, and relatively nominalistic after he has passed it; so that, if he changes labels in the realism­nominalism direction, that may be because he has changed positions in the nominalism­

Page 200 realism direction. (2) Peirce does first call some positions nominalistic in the act of or after abandoning them. (3) Change of labels is, however, almost no part of my evidence; for in no case except possibly that of Kant's phenomenalism does Peirce call a position realistic before or while holding it which he calls nominalistic after abandoning it.

32. See "Peirce's Triadic Logic," pp. 171­82 above.

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ELEVEN—Vico and Pragmatism

There have been many revolts against Descartes. It is a mark of his greatness that they still continue. Vico's was not the first, and the pragmatists' has not been the last, but they have been as radical as any. Vico's began two hundred and sixty years ago with his inaugural oration of 1708, On the Study Methods of Our Time, and was made explicit and decisive in 1710 by his Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. The pragmatic revolt began just a century ago with Charles Peirce's three papers on cognition in the Journal of Speculative Philosophi for 1868, and was made firm a decade later by his "Illustrations of the Logic of Science," which appeared in six issues of Popular Science Monthly during 1877 and 1878. Neither revolt attracted much notice at the time, and it is only in retrospect that their depth and scope have become apparent. Peirce nowhere mentions Vico, nor does any other American pragmatist. Direct influence is out of the question, and indirect influence would be hard to trace. But a kinship has been discerned, 1 and detailed comparative studies may be expected to shed fresh light both on Vico and on pragmatism. One such study has already appeared, carefully comparing Vico with Dewey, but in a particular respect, dialectically rather than historically, and in relation not to Descartes but to Hobbes. 2 What follows here is the outline of a tentative approach to a more comprehensive and more historical comparison which goes back to the origins of pragmatism and therefore compares Vico primarily with Peirce, and in relation to Descartes, on questions deriving chiefly from Aristotle's Organon and Metaphysics .3

ORGANON

In the Organon, and particularly in the Topics and Posterior Analytics, Aristotle distinguished demonstrative from dialectical reasoning. The former was scientific; it started from first truths known by intuition, and its conclusions were necessarily true. The latter started from opinable or probable premises and drew opinable or probable conclusions. The former represented an ideal unapproached in antiquity except by Euclid's Elements and a few other

Page 202 mathematical works. The latter included the reasoning of the law court, the deliberative assembly, the philosophical dialogue, and, later, the interpretation of legal, classical, and biblical texts and the disputed question of medieval philosophy. The latter was problem centered and social; the former was not. The latter called for an art of finding arguments (or middle terms), called topic, from the topoi or places in which to seek them, or, in Latin, inventio, for the skill of finding. Aristotle dealt with the topoi in his Rhetoric also, and topic or invention led an amphibious life thereafter, partly in logic, partly in rhetoric. Over against topic, the formal logic of Aristotle and of the Stoics and the medieval logicians came to be viewed as an art for judging arguments and to be called critic or, in Latin, itudiciutm. 4 Thus the division of logic into topic and critic, invention and judgment, overshadowed, if it did not displace, the earlier division of reasoning into probable and demonstrative. Bacon, while reserving the name of topic for the invention of arguments, and conceiving particular topics as "a kind of mixtures of logic with the proper matter of each science," extended the scope of the logic of invention to include the discovery of new arts and sciences by the aid of his Novtlun organult.

Descartes consigns the traditional logic—topic and critic alike—to rhetoric, and puts in its place the method of his Ridules and Discourse; but he revives Aristotle's distinction in a Neo­Platonic and Augustinian form. There are, he says, but two "operations of our intellect by which we are able, without fear of deception, to arrive at knowledge of things," namely, intuition and deduction. Intuition requires clear and distinct ideas, like those of arithmetic and geometry. Deduction starts from intuition, involves intuition at every step, and is taken up into more complex intuitions. "Enumeration or induction" is not a distinct form of inference but a device for giving to long chains of deductions the certainty of intuition. No reasoning is demonstrative in Aristotle's sense, or deductive in Descartes's sense, which is not connected by a chain of uninterrupted and irreducible steps with intuited first truths, or which contains any premises not known to be true. All science is evident knowledge. There is no middle ground between knowledge and ignorance, and probability falls on the side of ignorance. In the absence of knowledge we may have to act on probability, but it has no place in science. Experiments become necessary in advanced stages of a science, and Descartes performs many, but only to give direction to further deductions. A perfect science would be the work of a single scientist (adult from birth if that were possible) who should not rely on the experiments of others but perform his own. The aim of the method is to form the judgment of the single individual to separate truth from falsehood and to attain all the knowledge of which he is capable.

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METAPHYSICS

From Aristotle's Metaphysics came the medieval conception of metaphysics or first philosophy as having two chief concerns: common or universal being and natural theology. Under the former the chief doctrine was that of the "transcendentals"—being, one, true, good as standing above the distinction of categories, as applicable in every category (analogically or proportionally, at least), and as "convertible." That is, to be is to be true, and vice versa; and likewise with other pairs. Verumn, true, as a transcendental, refers to the truth of things, not of propositions, and means intelligible. According to some Scholastics, including Duns Scotus, a thing may be said to be true by reason of its conformity to its maker as well as by reason of its conformity to an intellect that knows it. In Scotus, being is the first of the transcendentals; then follow one, true, and good, which are coextensive or convertible with being, and finally the disjunctive attributes (infinite­finite, substance­accident, necessary­ contingent, actual­potential, etc.), each pair of which, taken in disjunction, is coextensive with being. Bacon separates first philosophy, metaphysics, and natural theology; makes metaphysics a part of natural philosophy, investigating formal and final causes; and puts under first philosophy a theory of disjunctive transcendentals, "handled as they have efficacy in nature, and not logically." 5

There was no formal doctrine of transcendentals in which facturn, made or done, was added to ens, unum, verutm, bonumn, and thus made convertible with verum, true; but there were hints from which such a doctrine might have been developed. In the Vulgate, God says "Let x be made" (fiat), and x is made so (factum est ita), and God sees that x is good (bonum). The Maker intends, He makes true, and He inspects and passes what He has made. Similarly, in Greek philosophy, craftsmanship is a standing paradigm both of creation and of knowledge. Socrates's mission takes him to the politicians, the poets, and the craftsmen, and it is only among the last, and only within their crafts, that he finds knowledge. His talk, says Alcibiades, is of pack asses and blacksmiths, shoemakers and tanners. Socrates in the Phaedo says that in his youth he devoted himself to those questions concerning the nature of things which the Ionian philosophers had pursued for a century and a half. It turned out, however, that to every such question there were as many answers as philosophers and that there was no decision procedure. Then one day he heard someone reading from a book of Anaxagoras that everything was arranged and caused by mind. That seemed to promise a decision procedure, because mind does everything for the best and there cannot be more than one best. Reading on for himself, however, Socrates found Anaxagoras making no use of his mind except

Page 204 to start the vortex. After that curtain­raiser, material and mechanical causes stole the show as usual; and the many answers to each question were not reduced to one, but increased by one. Finding the promise of Anaxagoras unfulfilled, and himself unable to fulfill it, Socrates worked up another way of inquiring into the causes of things, which involved hypotheses and "forms." That is in the strictest sense true or intelligible, and therefore the proper object of science, which in the strictest sense is: namely, a form, which cannot seem other than it is or hide any part of itself. Socrates in the Republic adumbrates a system of such forms, in which it is to the supreme form of The Good that the others owe both their being and their truth, and that the knower owes his power of knowing them. There is no such science of the physical world itself, but only probable accounts; and none more probable, the Timaeus suggests, than that it is as if made by a good craftsman, a demiurge, after a perfect model given in the system of forms, but working on a given chaos in a given receptacle or space. For Aristotle, physics is a science, not just a probable account; but, as both the Republic and the Timaetis had done, he not only admits final causes but subordinates material, efficient, and formal ones to them. A science, then, of what kind? Contemplating, doing, and making have each its mode of reasoning, and there are three corresponding kinds of truth or intelligibility, and of science: theoretical, practical, and "poetic"—that is, productive or creative. In the Metaphysics Aristotle makes physics, along with metaphysics and mathematics, a theoretical science, but in the Parts of Animals, thinking of nature as craftsman, he makes physics productive rather than theoretical. Natural things, that is, have the same kind of truth that works of craftsmanship have—which, an impetuous reader might think, is as much as to say that for physics, as for the crafts, the true is the made. Later periods yield other hints, on down to Bacon's ringing equation of knowledge and power: "what in working is most useful, that in knowing is most true." 6

Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy has no doctrine of transcendentals (as he has none of categories in his method), but he does have a natural theology. Universal doubt, the cogito, the proofs of God's existence and veracity, bring him to a dualism of mind and body, of thinking and extended substance, and to the exclusion of final causes from physics. Leibniz reinstates the Aristotelian and Scholastic transcendentals, but still without factum. 7

PORT­ROYAL LOGIC (1662)

The Port­Royal Logic of Arnauld and Nicole reduced to elementary textbook form not only the Cartesian method but the Cartesian meta­

Page 205 physics, along with as much of the older logic as could be assimilated to it; more critic, therefore, than topic. There are two short chapters on topic: "Places; or, the Method of Finding Arguments,—That This Method is of Little Use," and "Division of Places into Those of Grammar, of Logic, and of Metaphysics." The latter ends: "It is nevertheless true, that we cannot attain, in that way, any very valuable knowledge." What is developed at greatest length is the Cartesian doctrines of clear and distinct ideas and of demonstration. The most original doctrine is that of the comprehension and extension of ideas. Because the aim throughout is to form the judgment and render it as exact as possible in discriminating truth from error, the new logic comes to be called the new critic. Cartesianism in this textbook form takes possession of higher education in the student's first year. It is already well established in Vico's time, and it remains so into Peirce's, when it is still a standard textbook. Peirce can say as late as 1903 that it is "a shameful exhibit of what the two and a half centuries of man's greatest achievements could consider as a good account of how to think" (CP 5.84).

VICO: STUDY METHODS (1709)

At the University of Naples the academic year 1708­9 opens as usual with a convocation addressed by the Professor of Eloquence, speaking not for his discipline but for the University. He considers the advantages and disadvantages of the methods of study of the Ancients and of the Moderns, and the possibility of such a conciliation as would unite the advantages of both and avoid their disadvantages. With a fine sense for the proprieties of the occasion, he nowhere names Descartes. Even the term "Cartesian" he uses only once, to remark that a student nowadays is likely to get his physics from an Epicurean, his metaphysics from a Cartesian (119; 77).8 Arnauld he does name four times in one short passage, but with respect and reserve (83­84; 17ff). We gather quickly, however, that the Moderns are chiefly the exponents of the new critic (that is, Descartes, Arnauld, and their followers, including the Jansenists) and that the Ancients are chiefly the exponents of the old topic (that is, the Academics, Cicero, and their followers, including the Jesuits). The criticists of antiquity were the Stoics, who disdained topic, eschewed probability, and (like their modern follower Descartes) forged chains of deduction, and whose sage did not opine (83, 85, 118; 16ff., 23­24, 76). The fact that Latin ingenium, Italian ingegno, Spanish ingenio, are translated esprit in French—that is, that the faculty of invention is translated as the faculty of judging, what belongs to topic as belonging to critic—argues that only the French could have excogitated the new critic and analytic geometry (95; 40). It may

Page 206 nonetheless be that modern mechanics owes more to ingenium and to Euclidian geometry than to Cartesian analysis (87­88; 26ff).

Vico begins with Bacon, and Bacon is the last author he names at the end. He associates his own criticism of the moderns for relying on chain arguments with Bacon's criticism of the Galenists for relying on syllogisms to the neglect of observation and induction (90; 32­33).

The great fault of modern methods is that college study begins with a logic that belittles topic and is dominated by the new critic, and it ends with a rhetoric in which, for the first time, topic is taken seriously. This inverts the natural order, in which invention comes before judgment, topic before critic. As a result, young minds are blighted at the start and rendered unfit for their subsequent studies; not only for languages, literature, art, history, ethics, politics, and for medicine, theology, and law, but for physics or natural science itself. Let formal logic, like formal rhetoric, be put at the end of college study. In the earlier years, let the place of critic be taken by geometry, taught not analytically but synthetically, in Euclidian fashion, to cultivate spatial imagination along with reason; and let the place of topic be taken by those studies in which memory and imagination generally, ingenuity and inventiveness, common sense, probability and induction, are cultivated (84; 19). Coming at the end rather than at the beginning, the new critic will be put to good uses—even in poetry, if the poetry is there first (96; 42).

But why does premature exposure to the new critic render the young unfit for natural science? Because, by applying the geometric method to physics, it causes to pass as true (verum) what is only truelike (verisimile) or probable. What physics gets from geometry with Descartes's aid is expository method only, not demonstration. "We demonstrate geometricals because we make them. If we could demonstrate physicals, we should be making them." But the true forms of physical things, to which their nature is conformed, are in God, not in us (85; 23). And the geometric dress of Cartesian physics has not kept Leibniz from finding two of its laws of motion inexact (85; 21­22).

This is Vico's first approach to the verum =factum principle that he will develop in the Ancient Wisdom and the New Science. He does not connect it directly with the transcendentals, of which we hear only in another context: "The good [or appetible] is congruent with the true [or intelligible] and has the same force, the same properties" (91; 35).

VICO: ANCIENT WISDOM (1710)

Vico now set himself to expound and defend his system of philosophy in the form of a three­volume work On the Oldest Wisdom of

Page 207 the Italians Recoverable from the Origins of the Latin Language. Of the three intended volumes—Metaphysics, with an appendix on Logic; Physics; and Ethics— only the first was published, and that without the appendix.

The chief traditional themes of metaphysics, to repeat, were the transcendentals and natural theology. Vico's main innovation in the former was his verum =factum principle; in the latter, his metaphysical points. Both were directed against Descartes.

The first sentence of the first chapter pours the new wine of Vico's theory of knowledge into the old wineskin of the transcendentals. "In Latin verum and factum reciprocate, or, as the Schoolmen commonly put it, convert" (131). (As if to say: "Yes, to be is to be one, true, good—ens = unum = verum = bonum; but, since all but God that in any way is, is made—since ens =factum—it follows that the true is also the made, verum =factum; and, as I shall now argue, it is only as factum that it is verum, only as made that it is true or intelligible—and intelligible only to its maker.")

We must, of course, distinguish our making from God's. As Christians, we must further distinguish His outward making of the world in time from His inward begetting of the Word from eternity (132, 137, 208). We must correspondingly distinguish our verum from His, our scientia from His; and we must measure our trues by His true, and our sciences by His science (141, 191). And finally, among our sciences, we must observe a fundamental difference between mathematics and physics of which Descartes failed to take account.

(In the preceding paragraph and in some that follow, I depart from English usage in the direction of Vico's Latin. English permits us to speak, somewhat stiltedly, of the good, the true, and the beautiful, but not of the trues and the beautifuls, and only in a debased sense of the goods. But Vico's verum means the true, not the truth, and its plural vera means not the truths but the trues or intelligibles; that is, the things, other than sentences or propositions, that are true in the transcendental sense of intelligible.)

Descartes confused two quite different things: (1) verum, the true, which is the object of scientia, scientific knowledge, and (2) certum, the certain, which is the object of conscientia, simple consciousness, awareness, or acquaintance. In the light of this difference, we see that cogito ergo sum cannot be the criterion of the true, because there are no trues in it. To be sure, even for the sceptic there is no doubt that he doubts, and no doubt that he exists, but what is not dubious is not therefore true but only certain; and the sceptic's certitude that he thinks and that he exists is that of simple consciousness, not of science (139, 147). Both the cogito and the sum (more exactly, exsisto [221]) are certain, but neither is true. And, as for the ergo, science is knowledge by causes, and my thinking is not the cause of my being mind but only a certain sign of it (140). So

Page 208 Descartes has erected a nest of mere certainties into a criterion of the true.

But if cogito ergo sum cannot be the criterion of the true, neither can clear and distinct ideas be its rule. (Not one of the three ideas—cogito, ergo, stum—is clear or distinct in the first place, but let that pass.) Arithmetic and geometry are models of clear and distinct ideas, but it is not for that reason that they are sciences of the true. ''The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it" (136). In mathematics we make the elements by nominal definition, not out of any underlying thing but, as it were, out of nothing, as God makes the elements of the physical world; and we perform the operations and constructions not in or on or out of any physical thing but in that "world of forms and numbers" which man has built for himself (135) "and of which he is in a measure God" (156). The method of Descartes, the geometrical method, the method of intuition and deduction, is a method of exposition, not of discovery, and it cannot give demonstrative character to what would otherwise lack that character. What has the force of demonstration is not the formal proof of textbook expositions but operations and constructions. The reason why mathematics is science of the true is not that its ideas are clear and distinct but that, instead of being a theoretical science as Aristotle and Descartes held, it is wholly productive or constructive, "in its theorems as well as in its problems" (135). "Demonstration is the same as operation, true the same as made" (150).

It is generally acknowledged that arithmetic and geometry are more certain than mechanics, mechanics more than the rest of physics, and physics more than "morals" (psychology, ethics, politics, history, etc.) (136). Now, if clear and distinct ideas were the rule of the true, all the sciences might aspire to the condition of mathematics and eventually reach it by adopting the Cartesian method and persisting in it. But there is an ineradicable difference between mathematics and the other sciences, namely, that we make its elements and God makes theirs. A leveling of sciences is therefore not possible.

Nevertheless, whereas Vico in the Study Methods had said against Descartes that we cannot demonstrate physicals as we do mathematicals, in the Ancient Wisdom he finds something in physics that answers to demonstration in mathematics, namely, experiment. What is wanted in physics, he says, is not the deductive geometric method of Descartes but demonstration itself, which is inductive and which consists in "explaining particular effects in nature by particular experiments which are particular works of geometry" (184). (Vico's word is "peculiar," the opposite of common or general [147]; and I take him to mean that, to explain variations in natural phenomena, we vary our hypotheses and the experiments that are guided by them until we succeed in producing variations similar to those we are

Page 209 trying to explain.) Just as that which has the force of demonstration in mathematics is operation and construction, so, that which has the force of demonstration in physics is experiment, and what mathematics contributes to experiment, by way of mechanics, is definiteness of hypothesis and of experimental design and contrivance. This is the way to advance physics, and those who in modern times have thus advanced it have been Galileo and his followers in Italy (who explained numberless great natural phenomena before Descartes introduced the geometrical method into physics) and, more recently, the physicists of England (184­85).

But physics remains irreducibly different from mathematics in that, though we make the hypotheses and experiments, we do not make the elements of the physical things on which our experimental operations are performed, and our experimental effects are only like the natural effects we seek to explain and are not those effects themselves. In mathematics the causes are entirely within ourselves; we demonstrate by causes, we make the trues we know, and making is all one with knowing. In physics the elements of natural things are outside us; we cannot demonstrate by causes, what we make is not what we seek to know but only something like it, and making is not all one with knowing, nor the true all one with the made, but "we hold for true only that whose like we produce by experiments" (149­50, 191). That is, such quasi­truth or intelligibility as nature in part has for us, in spite of its being none of our making, lies in the control it exerts over our conjectures about it, as we assimilate our makings to it in successive approximations, and the tools of this assimilation are mathematics and experiment.

To sum up: Mathematics is wholly demonstrative in the sense of proving by causes; physics is partly demonstrative in a secondary and derivative sense; no science is demonstrative in Aristotle's or Descartes's sense. But there is progress in physics; agreement and consensus are reached; and this is brought about by experimental demonstration, not by the geometrical method. The logic of deduction is not the logic of science; experiment is central to the logic of physics, not just an adjunct; it is heuristic and inductive; it belongs to topic, not critic; and that is why the new critic of the Cartesians, who neglect topic as the Stoics did, cannot be the logic of science (180­85).

All of this is implicit, and much of it explicit, in the first two sections of chapter I. To round out his preliminary statement of it there, Vico sets it firmly in the framework of the transcendentals by a concluding paragraph on the convertibility of verum and bonum in God's making and ours (137).

We turn now from the transcendentals to the other chief theme of metaphysics: namely, natural theology, the relations between God and the world, and between mind and body. Here Vico is attacking

Page 210 Cartesian dualism, and his chief innovation is the doctrine of metaphysical points.

Descartes has clear and distinct ideas of thinking, extension, matter as identical with extension, and motion as a mode of extension. So, in effect, he takes extension and motion as given. But this is to substitute physics for metaphysics (158, 261) and to make all relation and transition between thinking and extension unintelligible. Without falling into Aristotle's opposite error of turning metaphysics directly into physics, we must start with God's making. On the hypothesis that our making in mathematics is as near as we can come to God's making, but that what we make are fictions and what God makes are realities, we reach the hypothesis that the elements made by God, out of which He makes the world of extension and motion, are metaphysical points. As in geometry we construct the extended line, plane, surface, and figure from the unextended geometrical point by postulation or hypothesis, and, as in rational mechanics we construct motion in the same way, so, in metaphysics, our hypothesis must be, first, that God produces extended bodies from points that are unextended and indivisible but endowed with infinite power of extension, and, second, that the conatus or power of motion ascribed by physicists to bodies must be ascribed instead to these metaphysical points. Thus, "as the metaphysical point is an infinite power of extension which equally underlies unequal extensions, so [its] conatus is an infinite power of moving which equally explains unequal motions" (157). By this hypothesis we can descend from metaphysics to physics, that is, from God and from the true Forms of things as they are in God, to the physical world (163, 259, 261); we escape dualism by taking the substance of bodies to be incorporeal, the causes of motion to be motionless; and thus, instead of taking the physical world as brute fact, we explain its existence. But of course our metaphysical hypothesis does not of itself explain particular bodies or particular motions. For that we must pursue particular experiments, and we can stretch our explanations only as far as we can carry our experiments.

The two main anti­Cartesian doctrines of Vico's metaphysics, verum =factum and metaphysical points, are related in this way. In mathematics, since the entire causes of the effects we produce are within ourselves, we demonstrate by causes; in physics, since the elements of natural things are outside us, we cannot demonstrate by causes. But in metaphysics we must propose a hypothesis as to what those elements are, and, guided by the verum =factum criterion, which only our mathematics can nearly satisfy, we are led to the metaphysical point as something we can "contemplate from the hypothesis of the geometrical point" (191).

Page 211 In conclusion, Vico commends his metaphysics for the kind of physics we descend to from it. "By requiring us to hold for true in nature only that the like of which we can make by experiments, it serves the experimental physics which is now being cultivated to the great benefit of mankind" ( 19 '). Not the deductive physics, which turns to experiment when in doubt as to what to intuit or deduce next, but the inductive physics, which keeps its focus on experiments and whose demonstrations are the experiments themselves.

VICO: NEW SCIENCE (1744)

For lack of space, I pass over the Universal Law (1720­22), the first two editions of the New Science ( 1725, 1730), and the Autobiography (1729), and consider only the third and last edition of the New Science (1744). Here there is but one mention of Descartes by name (706), and it is incidental and unpolemic. I remark only that, as usual, Vico links him with the Stoics.

Some scholars see a positive influence of Descartes in the section entitled "Elements" (119­329), with its axioms, definitions (137­38, 142, 320­26), and postulates (192, 195, 248, 295, 306)—as if Vico were applying the geometrical method to history. But this is to forget that he has also a section on "Method" (338­60), as remote from the Rules and the Discourse as it could well be, and that he says he is applying to history the method Bacon in his Cogitata et visa proposed to apply to nature (163, 359).

Nearly all the nameless criticisms of Descartes and Cartesianism in the Study Methods were repeated in the Ancient Wisdom with the names; nearly all those in the Ancient Wisdom are repeated in the Newt' Science without the names. What is both anti­Cartesian and new is the new science itself. It is anti­Vichian too, if we measure Vico by the Study Methods and Ancient Wisdom. In the latter, we have seen, there was a scale of diminishing certainty running from mathematics through mechanics and physics to morals. Only God's science fully satisfied the verum =factuln criterion. Of man's sciences, mathematics came nearest to doing so; mechanics next; physics next, but only in small part and very imperfectly; morals, man's knowledge of himself, not at all. Now, man's new science of himself heads the list. It meets the verum =factum? criterion better than mathematics (349).

No longer bound to the transcendentals, Vico has made the certain coordinate with the true and has elaborated the distinction between them. The true is still the intelligible; the certain is now the ascertainable. The intelligible is that which may be understood by reason, in terms of causes, universals, laws. The ascertainable is that which

Page 212 may be witnessed, or suffered, or known by the testimony of witnesses or from competent authority. Science is knowledge of the true; conscience, the witnessing consciousness, is knowledge of the certain. Philosophy aims at science; philology aims at conscience.

The philologians include "all the grammarians, historians, critics, who have occupied themselves with the study of the languages and deeds of peoples: both at home, as in their customs and laws, and abroad, as in their wars, peaces, alliances, travels, and commerce" (139)—more generally, "of all the institutions that depend on human choice" (7). The philosophers include all the—scientists, Vico might have said if the word had existed, but Whewell did not coin it until a century later, in time for Peirce.

In these broad senses of the two terms, "philosophy has had almost a horror of treating philology, because of the deplored obscurity of the causes and almost infinite variety of the effects" (7). Because of the estrangement of the two cultures in the Cartesian age, each has failed by half in its own aims (140). The philologians, finding some help in the topic of the logicians, but none in their critic, have developed a philological or erudite critic of their own. More recently this has been influenced by the new critic of the Cartesians, but with results almost wholly negative.

To "reduce to certainty human choice, which by its nature is most uncertain" and thereby "to reduce philology to the form of science" (7, 141, 390), a new critic was needed—new relative to the new critic of the Cartesians as well as to the merely erudite critic of the philologians (7, 143)—a critic which Vico now supplies and which he also calls metaphysical (348, 493, 662, 839) or philosophical (392).

Since Vico's new critic requires a complex interplay of philosophy and philology, science and conscience, moving back and forth between the true and the certain, it must have a criterion for the certain as well as one for the true. Neither criterion bears any resemblance to "I think, therefore I am," or to the rule of clear and distinct ideas. The criterion of the certain is "the common sense of mankind" (145) "with respect to human needs or utilities" (141), "determined by the necessary harmony of human institutions" (348), "on which the consciences of all nations repose'' (350). The criterion of the true is the same as before, verum =factum, the true is the made. If the new science is to satisfy that criterion, its "first undoubted principle" must then be that "the civil world has certainly been made by men. Therefore its principles can, because they must, be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel how all the philosophers studied seriously to attain the science of the natural world, of which, since God made it, He alone has the science; and neglected to meditate on the world

Page 213 of nations, or civil world, of which, since men had made it, men could attain the science" (331).

The new science is like mathematics in being constructive, but the way it satisfies the verum =factum criterion is different. Men have made the world of nations; it exists; it is real, as the world of nature is and that of mathematics is not. Moreover, in making it they have in a sense made themselves (367, 520, 692), which they can scarcely be said to do in the course of making the world of mathematics. But the science of the world of nations has not come ipso facto and pari passu with the making, as it does in the world of mathematics. The new science comes rather with a remaking, a reconstructing, which could not even begin until Vico had made a certain discovery, the master key of the new science (34), which had cost him the research of a good twenty years (338). Yet, after all, the new science takes place in the world of sciences, which is part of the world of nations, and so the remaking not only represents but continues and is part of the first making, and partakes of its reality. "When geometry is constructing the world of magnitudes from its very elements, or is contemplating it, it is at the same time making that world for itself. Exactly so does this science proceed, but with a reality greater by just so much as the institutions that order human affairs are more real than points, lines, surfaces, and figures are" (349).

That is, whereas Vico had been a nominalist in his constructive theory of mathematics, the new science of history, though also constructive, has made a realist of him, and has even modified the nominalism of his theory of mathematics. In the Ancient Wisdom, God made realities, and man in his most Godlike making made only fictions. In the New Science, man in his most Godlike making makes realities.

But science itself is true or intelligible only as made along with the making of the world of nations, and the history of science is therefore the science of it. This holds for the logic of science also, and the history of logic is a proper part of the new science. The priority of topic over critic is now justified by the new science of history. But the logic of the philosophers, topic and critic alike, was a late development, preceded by what Vico calls "sensory topic" (495), by autopsy or evidence of the senses (499), by Aesopian example, and, more importantly, by a vast development of a more strictly poetic logic (400­500), the terms of which were "poetic characters" (34, 412­27). After his long account of this poetic logic, Vico sketches the history of the logic of the philosophers, and once more contrasts the fruitful inductive method of the Pythagoreans and Hippocratics, of Socrates and Plato, with the barren deductive

Page 214 method of Aristotle with his syllogisms and the Stoics with their sorites, "to which corresponds the method of the modern philosophers" (that is, the Cartesians), and he concludes: "Hence with great reason Bacon .. proposes, commends, and illustrates the inductive method in his [Novuim] Organutn, and is still followed by the English with great success in experimental philosophy" (499).

Two movements may be discerned in Vico's anti­Cartesianism. In the first he has put forward a new criterion of the true, opposed to Descartes's, as affording a better reason than Descartes's for the preeminence of mathematics among the sciences, a pre­eminence Vico does not yet challenge; and he has used the new criterion, along with his theory of metaphysical points, to sanction and serve a physics more inductive and experimental than Descartes's. In the second, out of the historical and philological studies that the Cartesians disdained, using anti­Cartesian criteria of both the true and the certain, and passing now from nominalism to realism, he has created a new science of history which supersedes mathematics as the exemplary science of the humanly true or intelligible. The stone the builders rejected has become the head of the corner.

PEIRCE: THE COGNITION SERIES (1868)9

For the early Peirce, the chief business of logic was classifying arguments and determining their strength or validity by classes. There were three irreducible classes: deduction, induction, and hypothesis. The strength of an argument, as he put it in a paper of 1867, "is only the frequency with which such an argument will yield a true conclusion when its premises are true" (CP 3. 19). Realism, nominalism, and conceptualism were then understood as theories not only of universal terms but also of the import of propositions and of the validity of arguments, and this was the nominalistic theory of the validity of arguments. Hamilton, in his lecture on nominalism and conceptualism, had said: "In this discussion I avoid all mention of the ancient doctrine of Realism. This is curious only in an historical point of view; and is wholly irrelevant to the question at issue among modern philosophers." Mill in his Examination of Hamilton had agreed: "Realism being no longer extant, nor likely to be revived, the contest at present is between Nominalism and Conceptualism."10 Peirce had declared for nominalism in a review of Venn's Logic of Chance. "The logic of the Middle Ages,'' he had said, "is almost coextensive with demonstrative logic; but our age of science opened with a discussion of probable argument (in the Novum Organum), and this part of the subject has given the chief interest to modern studies of logic." Conceptualism was plausible so long as we focused on

Page 215 deduction, but now that the advance of science has pushed our focus to induction and hypothesis, the two classes of probable argument, we find that only nominalism will do as a general theory of validity. "[W]hat constitutes the validity of a genus of argument? The necessity of thinking the conclusion, say the conceptualists. But a madman may be under a necessity of thinking fallaciously, and (as Bacon suggests) all mankind may be mad after one uniform fashion. Hence the nominalist answers the question thus: A genus of argument is valid when from true premises it will yield a true conclusion—invariably if demonstrative, generally if probable" (8.1­2).

The editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy challenged Peirce to show how upon this nominalistic theory "the validity of the laws of logic can be other than inexplicable" (5.318). Peirce took up the challenge in a series of three articles on cognition (5.213357). In the first, in the form of a medieval disputed question, attacking the intuitionism assumed by the conceptualistic theory, he argued that we have no power of intuition, but that every cognition is determined logically by previous cognitions and ultimately by probable inferences, that is, by inductions and hypotheses. This was as much as to say that there are no such first truths as Aristotle and Descartes supposed, and that neither science nor mathematics can have, or should desire, any such foundations.

Descartes is not named in the first paper, but Peirce begins the second with a four­point statement of "the spirit of Cartesianism" as opposed to scholasticism, continues with a four­point statement of the "spirit of opposition to Cartesianism" to which "modern science and modern logic" lead, and adds that the first paper has been written in this latter anti­Cartesian spirit. In all four respects "modern science and modern logic" are closer to scholasticism than to Descartes. (1) We cannot begin with universal doubt; if we could there is no absolute certainty which we could reach by it; if there were, it would be such a certainty as could not help, and might hinder, science. The doubts by which science is furthered are piecemeal doubts, for particular, not for general, reasons, in retail, not in wholesale, lots. (2) The test of certainty is to be found not in the individual consciousness, where the cogito sought it, but in the eventual agreement of competent investigators. ''We individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for the community of philosophers." (3) The successful sciences trust rather to multitude and variety of arguments, like the "multiform argumentation of the middle ages," than to single chain arguments like Descartes's, which often depend on inconspicuous premises. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, but a scientific conclusion supported by many reasons may be stronger than any one of them, and may even be made certain by

Page 216 them, though none of them is itself certain. (4) It is never admissible to suppose a fact to be absolutely inexplicable. "But there are many facts which Cartesianism not only does not explain but renders absolutely inexplicable, unless to say that 'God makes them so' is to be regarded as an explanation." All connection between mind and body, in perceiving, suffering, acting, and the laws of nature themselves, are thus rendered inexplicable by Descartes's dualism.

If, from this anti­Cartesian passage­at­arms in the opening pages of the second paper, we return to the first, we see that the quaestio form was not an antiquarian whimsy. It was intended to exemplify, as well as commend, "the multiform argumentation of the middle ages" and thereby to show that, though medieval logicians attended chiefly to deduction, the method practiced by medieval philosophers was inductive and hypothetical and thus closer than Descartes's to that of modern science. In the remainder of the second paper and in the third, Peirce takes the anti­Cartesian conclusions of the first as hypotheses and draws out their consequences, not so much to prove the consequences as to test the hypotheses further. It now transpires that the whole argument of the three papers is directed not only against Cartesian intuitionism but also against the incognizable thing­in ­itself to which Descartes's dualism commits him, and that, in both directions, the argument turns on the medieval doctrine of the transcendentals, and more particularly on the convertibility of ens and verumn. That doctrine was there in the first paper, but we had missed it, partly because, since the transcendental sense of true was no longer current in English, Peirce has substituted cognizable. In arguing that we have no conception of the absolutely incognizable, he had said: "In short, cognizability (in its widest sense) and being are not merely metaphysically the same, but are synonymous terms" (5.257).

Out of this transcendental equation, with the help of the other conclusions of the first paper, Peirce develops a sign theory of cognition, a semiotic idealism, a social theory of logic, and a minim of logical realism.11 The principle of human individuation is ignorance and error. All thought is in signs. All our cognitions "have been logically derived by induction and hypothesis from previous cognitions." Along with the intuitions of Descartes we must reject the sense­data of British empiricism, which in this respect is only a species of Cartesianism (5.291­309). Cognitions "are of two kinds, the true [in the non­transcendental sense] and the untrue, or cognitions whose objects are real [ = true in the transcendental sense] and those whose objects are unreal." The distinction between real and unreal, in turn, comes to that "between an ens relative to private inward determinations, to the negations belonging to idiosyncrasy, and an ens such as would stand in the long run." ''The real, then, is

Page 217 that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of an indefinite increase of knowledge" (5.311).

From this theory of the real, with the help of the further premise that "no cognition of ours is wholly determinate," Peirce now infers that some generals or universals are real (5.312). Thus equipped, he proceeds in the third article to explain the validity of the laws of logic. His general theory of validity remains the same as that which he had called nominalistic in his opposition to conceptualism, but he no longer calls it nominalistic; and, though still adequate for deduction, it requires amendment for probable inference. We cannot say that inductions and hypotheses generally hold, or hold with any determinable frequency, but only that in an indefinitely long run of them "our errors balance one another" (5.350) and we approach those conclusions on which, if it reached them, the community of investigators would agree.

PEIRCE: THE PRAGMATISM SERIES (1877­78)

The publisher, W. H. Appleton, informed of Peirce's views on the logic of science by shipboard conversations with him, invites him to write for the Popular Science Monthly, and Peirce contributes a series of six "Illustrations of the Logic of Science."'12

The appeal to history, so slight in the cognition series as to have escaped our notice (5.215), is now emphatic. The logic of science is not spun out of the inner consciousness of a logical genius, once and for always, but is gradually learned from the practice of the successful sciences, "each chief step" of which "has been a lesson in logic" (5.363). As of the 1870'S, the chief recent step has been the extension of statistical methods from economics to physics and biology. In the lesson taught by evolutionary biology, knowing becomes a species of believing; the opposite of believing is doubting; belief is primary; its essence is the habits of action by which alone one belief is distinguished from another; genuine doubt is breakdown of belief by surprise or frustration; inquiry is started by doubt and ended by the resettling of belief; and the scientific method is an emergent way of resettling belief, supervening upon such other ways as tenacity, authority, and the a priori. It is to the last that most philosophers, and Descartes above all others (5.391, 406), are committed. But it is only the scientific method that involves the

Page 218 conception of reality and that is such that the ultimate conclusion of every man shall be the same (5.384).

"The very first lesson that we have a right to demand that logic shall teach us is, how to make our ideas clear" (5.393). But the logic of science is a logic of discovery, and since "nothing new can ever be learned by analyzing definitions," Cartesian clarity and distinctness, even as amended by Leibniz, are insufficient. Heuristic science requires a "higher perspicuity" (5.392), the rule for which is, for each idea, to specify "sensible effects'' and "habits of action" adjusted to them. Thus, in mineralogy, to make the idea of hardness clear, for the propositional function "x is harder than y" we may begin by specifying the sensible effect "x will scratch v and not be scratched by it" and the habits of using x when we want to scratch y (as when v is a sheet of glass to be divided) and of keeping x away from v when we do not want v scratched. (Peirce here for the first time in print explicitly connects meaning, and thereby truth and knowledge, with doing­and­making, and thus approaches the substance though not the language of Vico's verumn =[factuln. This maxim or rule of logic he had for some years called "pragmatism," but he did not use that name in print until 1901. In a letter of 1912, he said he had derived the name "from p???µa,. 'behavior'—in order that it should be understood that the doctrine is that the only real significance of a general term lies in the general behavior which it implies."13 I shall return to this point in the Epilogue.)

The third degree of clarity is the decisive step that separates the method of science from those of tenacity, authority, and apriority. For them the first two degrees suffice, and if science were an affair of intuition and deduction, as Aristotle and Descartes had thought, the first two degrees would suffice for science also. But the logic of science is not that of proof or demonstration but that of hypothesis and induction; that is, of discovery. (This is the counterpart in Peirce of Vico's insistence that topic is prior to critic. The place of topic has been taken by the logic of science, the new organ of "invention" or discovery; and Peirce's identification and analysis of the third grade of clarity is the first American contribution to that organ.) It is "the prerogative of the method of science" to cause our opinions "to coincide with the fact" (5.387); its "fundamental hypothesis" is that of reality (5.384), and it submits particular hypotheses to that fundamental one by putting them through this third degree, so as to make them fully responsive to observation, experiment, and induction.

Between Vico and Peirce the doctrine of chances, or calculus of probabilities, had had a great development. The calculus itself is deductive, and belongs to mathematics rather than science, but the idea on which it rests has permeated science throughout, and changed

Page 219 the very conception of it. The probable, excluded from science by Aristotle and Descartes, is now seen to be of its essence. The data of science are probable, as being subject to probable errors of observation and measurement, if not also in a profounder sense; and the forms of inference proper to science, namely, hypothesis and induction, are probable only, not demonstrative. The idea which therefore, above every other, calls for the third degree of clarity, is that of probability—if indeed it is not rather a cluster of ideas all bearing the same name. This clarification is the principal task of the last four papers of the pragmatism series. We are brought to views similar to those of the cognition series, including the social theory of logic (2.652­55). What is new is the historical, the evolutionary, the pragmatic conception of science itself, in terms of which these views are now set forth and more fully developed.

PEIRCE: THE EVOLUTION SERIES (1891­93)

The fullest consecutive published statement of Peirce's mature metaphysics was made in a series of five articles in The Monist.14 Like Vico's metaphysics, it is anti­ Cartesian, idealistic, and commended as subserving experimental physics. "The old dualistic notion of mind and matter, so prominent in Cartesianism, as two radically different kinds of substance, will hardly find defenders today" (6.24). But, although we no longer have two substances, we still have two kinds of law, physical and psychical, and a problem as to the relation between them. Consider first the physical laws that were discovered first and are best understood, those of dynamics. "A modern physicist on examining Galileo's works is surprised to find how little experiment had to do with the establishment of the foundations of mechanics." That is not, as Vico says, because we make theoretical mechanics almost as we do mathematics, or because dynamics is the closest of all branches of physics to pure mathematics, but because, ''our minds having been formed under the influence of phenomena governed by the laws of mechanics, certain conceptions entering into those laws become implanted in our minds, so that we readily guess at what the laws are." (Not verum =factum, we are tempted to say, but verum =faciens: it is not what our minds have made up, but what has made them up, that is intelligible to them.) "The further physical studies depart from phenomena which have directly influenced the growth of the mind, the less we can expect to find the laws which govern them 'simple'" (6. 10); and "When we come to atoms, the presumption in favor of a simple law seems very slender" (6. 11). "To find out much more about molecules and atoms we must search out a natural history of laws of nature which may

Page 220 fulfill that function which the presumption in favor of simple laws fulfilled in the early days of dynamics, by showing us what kind of laws we have to expect" (6.12). What Peirce proposes, then, is a cosmogonic or second­order hypothesis of the evolution of the laws of nature, by which we may be guided in forming first­order hypotheses for experimental testing in the several branches of physics. The hypothesis is that the laws of nature are acquired habits, beginning in absolute chance, spreading, becoming continuous, and growing toward, but never reaching, absolute necessity; that is, the hypothesis that physical laws derive from the one psychical law, the law of association or habit­taking. "The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws" (6.24). So that, after all, there is a sense in which, for Peirce, as for Vico, verum =factum. "That which did all this was mind."

This, rather than Vico's metaphysical points, is Peirce's anti­Cartesian hypothesis for descending from metaphysics to physics; but in the detail of his argument he concludes that neither molecules nor atoms can be absolutely impenetrable and that "we are logically bound to adopt the Boscovichian idea that an atom is simply a distribution of component potential energy throughout space" (6.242)—an idea as close to Vico's as was possible for a working physicist in Peirce's time.15

PEIRCE: OTHER WRITINGS (1890­1908)

What I promised at the beginning was not a comparison but the outline of an approach to a comparison—an outline which should bring into relief some of the features likely to lend themselves to fruitful comparison. For lack of space, I have omitted what is not deliberately anti­Cartesian; I have omitted pragmatists other than Peirce;16 I have come only halfway with Peirce; and even within those limits I have omitted many relevant considerations. I conclude now with a few anti­Cartesian themes from Peirce's later writings which have not appeared, or have not been prominent, in the three series of papers so far considered.

Mind as non­substantial, non­resident, and mostly non­conscious. In his Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism in 1903 Peirce said that the normative sciences—logic, ethics, aesthetics—are in the truest sense "sciences of mind." "Only, modern philosophy has never been able quite to shake off the Cartesian idea of the mind, as something that 'resides'—such is the term—in the pineal gland. Everybody laughs at this nowadays, and yet everybody continues to think of mind in this same general way, as something within this person or that,

Page 221 belonging to him and correlative to the real world. A whole course of lectures would be required to expose this error" (5.128).

As an experimental psychologist and one familiar with the literature, Peirce had written as early as 1890: "The doctrine of Descartes, that the mind consists solely of that which directly asserts itself in unitary consciousness, modern scientific psychologists altogether reject. Swarming facts positively leave no doubt that vivid consciousness, subject to attention and control, embraces at any one moment a mere scrap of our psychical activity." In part on the basis of his own experiments, he bluntly laid it down that: "(1) The obscure part of the mind is the principal part. (2) It acts with far more unerring accuracy than the rest. (3) It is almost infinitely more delicate in its sensibilities" (6.569).

Mathematics as constructive. Benjamin Peirce, the leading American mathematician of his day, defined mathematics as "the science which draws necessary conclusions." That made it coextensive with deduction. His two eldest sons, James and Charles, were also mathematicians. A four­volume edition of Charles's mathematical writings is in preparation. Charles's work on the logic of relations also influenced his conception of deduction as nonintuitive, regulated by choice and deliberate plan, yet reaching its conclusions, many of them surprising, by observation, and differing from induction mainly in that the objects it observes are of our own creation, whereas we have relatively little control over those of inductive science. No mathematical proofs are demonstrative in Aristotle's sense or deductive in Descartes's. "Mathematical reasoning ... does not relate to any matter of fact, but merely to whether one supposition excludes another. Since we ourselves create these suppositions, we are competent to answer them.... Mathematical reasoning holds. Why should it not? It relates only to the creations of the mind, concerning which there is no obstacle to our learning whatever is true of them" (2.191 f). Mathematical knowledge "is to be classed along with knowledge of our own purposes" (5.166).

Science as a mode of life, social and historical. Descartes said that all science is certain and evident knowledge. The dictionaries called it systematized knowledge. But that, said Peirce, was shelved science (1.234), "the corpse of science." "Science itself, the living process, is busied mainly with conjectures, which are either getting framed or getting tested" (1.234). "As a living thing, animating men, it need not be free from error,—nor can it be;—and it cannot be thoroughly systematized so long as it is in rapid growth" (MS 965). "A'' science is or implies "a social group of devotees" (8.378). Science "as a living historic entity" (0.44) "is a mode of life ... and that which distinguishes the life of science ... is not the attainment of knowledge,

Page 222 but a single­minded absorption in the search for it for its own sake" (MS 1269:I).17

History as Science. The Greek name for science as knowledge was episteme which Peirce anglicized as epistemy (1.232, 279). The Greek name for science as inquiry was historia, which was already anglicized as history. Though Peirce was less sure than Vico was of history's being science in the former sense, he was perfectly sure of its being science in the latter sense. He was himself a historian, more particularly of science, and several of the quotations in the preceding paragraph are from drafts of his unfinished "History of Science." He had given a course of twelve Lowell Institute lectures in Boston in 1892­93 on "The History of Science from Copernicus to Newton." One of the problems that concerned him was the logic of Kepler's search for the orbit of Mars. Another was the shift from the moral to the physical sense of "law of nature''—from its meaning something that can but ought not to be broken, to its meaning something that cannot be broken. He found the chief source of this scientific superstition in Descartes: "Moreover, from this same immutability of God, certain rules, or laws of nature, can be known, which are secondary and particular causes of the different movements which we observe in bodies" (MS 870:42).18 Peirce was even more critical of German historical criticism, higher and lower, than Vico was of the historical criticism more immediately influenced by Descartes. Peirce, like Vico, gave much thought to the roles of hypothesis and induction in historical inquiry as compared with their roles in natural science. It was no accident that the last major revision of Peirce's general logic of science was to take better account of history, and was presented to the National Academy of Sciences in 1901 in a monograph "On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents especially from Testimonies" (7.162­255).19 So there were two principal movements in Peirce's anti­Cartesianism as there were in Vico's, the first in a broad sense metaphysical, the second historical. And, as it was by way of history that Vico moved from nominalism to realism, so it was by way of evolution and history that Peirce did so.

EPILOGUE

If we imagine that an approach like the one outlined above has been taken, and that the comparison has then been worked out in detail, and if we try to predict its conclusions, we may imagine them beginning somewhat as follows.

Vico and the pragmatists are among those philosophers who, for various reasons, have rejected the spectator theory of knowledge. Plato's "contemplation of all time and all existence" is a misconcep­

Page 223 tion of philosophy and science, of knowledge divine or human. The world is not given as an object for contemplation, a world we have not made, waiting to be known. If it may be said to be given at all, it is given as known and misknown from of old, with our past knowings and misknowings inextricably, unidentifiably ingrown, a world already construed and more or less misconstrued, a world in part constructed out of our doings and makings—our languages and other institutions, our domestications, our tools, machines, instruments, our experiments of all kinds—and the rest construed by imagined extensions of our doings and makings and by anticipations of their results. Our misconstruings are detected, explained, and rejected, for the most part one by one, with great difficulty, even painfully, in ways on which historians of science have begun to shed light; and the place of error is often taken by more ingenious error. The world is not cognitively innocent, any more than we are who desire its better acquaintance. A cognitively innocent world would be a world of incognizable things­in ­themselves, such as Peirce discerned in Descartes. The mind is no more given for introspection than the world is for extrospection. Nor does it shine out through human faces, least of all from our own in the glass. It is known by hypothesis and induction from human doings and makings, in large part the same as those from which the world is known. The doings and makings by which world and mind are known enter into the making of both mind and world. If the human mind could be given at all, it would be in nothing short of the history of human institutions; but that history, like the history of the natural world, is a laborious, secular, incompletable construction.

The fact that Vico and the pragmatists should have held views approximating these is interesting enough. Much more interesting will be the conclusions precisely detailing the agreements and disagreements in these and other respects. For those conclusions we must await the actual comparison. I hope some reader may be moved to undertake it, and also, for good measure, to determine at what points, if at all, Vico and the pragmatists mistook Descartes, and how far he may be defended against their criticisms.20

A last suggestion. What if Peirce, toward the end of his life, had heard of Vico's verum =facturnm? He would have said: "The way to take that is to turn it first into Greek, the native language of philosophy, and then from Greek into English. The Greek for it is t??????? = t? p???µa. The English unpacking is that the true in the transcendental sense—the unconcealed, that which hides nothing, that which is intelligible without remainder—is the deed, action, behavior, practice, affair, pursuit, occupation, business, going concern. The Greek formula has several advantages over the Latin. The Latin facturn emphasizes the completed actuality, the pastness, of

Page 224 the deed; the Greek p???µa covers also an action still in course or not yet begun, and even a line of conduct that would be adopted under circumstances that may never arise. The Latin is retrospective; the Greek is, or may be, prospective. The Latin is, on the face of it, individual, and it took Vico's genius and years of struggle to make it social in the New Science. The Greek would have offered no such resistance. The Greek leaves room for possibility and for generality, and so for Scholastic realism; the Latin, while perhaps not excluding realism, favors nominalism. Further, the transcendental sense of 'true' is more obvious in the Greek ?????? than in the Latin verum. Now the doctrine of transcendentals, though metaphysical, includes a theory of knowledge, and the theory of knowledge includes, at least by implication, a theory of meaning. The Greek formula lends itself better than the Latin to the disengaging of the theory of knowledge from the metaphysics, and of the theory of meaning from the theory of knowledge. Vico disengaged the theory of knowledge but not that of meaning. He saw that the question of truth in the transcendental sense is logically prior to that of truth in the non­transcendental sense; he did not see that the question of meaning is also prior to that of truth in the non­transcendental sense. If he had thought in Greek instead of Latin, he might have taken that final step of disengaging the theory of meaning. If he had taken it, the result would have been pragmatism. ????µa prompts us, as factuln does not? to find the meaning of probability (for example) in (for example) the insurance business. And the meaning it prompts us to find is not so much how that business has been, has come to be, or is conducted, as how it would be conducted in a rational society."

Notes

1. See, for examples, James K. Feibleman, "Toward the Recovery of Giambattista Vico," Social Science 14 (1939):31­40, esp. 36­37, and An Introduction to Peirce's Philosophy (New York, 1956), pp. 69­70; Bertrand Russell, Wisdom of the West, ed. Paul Foulkes (London, 1959), pp. 207, 277, 296.

2. Arthur Child, "Making and Knowing in Hobbes, Vico, and Dewey," University of California Publications in Philosophy 16 (1953):271­310; Descartes appears only on p. 301.

3. Questions in large part, it might now be said, of the theory of knowledge; but this was not a separate discipline in Vico's time, and was not recognized as such by the pragmatists.

Page 225 4. Cicero, in his Topics, in a passage Vico liked to cite (1.2.6), said that the Stoics gave the name of "dialectic" to their logic that was only half a logic, all critic and no topic.

5. De augmentis III.iv; Robert McRae, The Problem of the Unity of the Sciences: Bacon to Kant (Toronto, 1961), pp. 27­28, 114­15; James F. Anderson, An Introduction to the Metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas (Chicago, 1953); Allan B. Wolter, The Transcendentals and Their Function in the Philosophy of Duns Scotus (St. Bonaventure, NY, 1946).

6. Novumn organum I.iii, II.iv. For a few other hints, see Rodolfo Mondolfo, "'Verum ipsum factum' dall' antichitA a Galileo e Vico," Il Ponte 22 (1966):492­506.

7. Gottfried Martin, Leibniz: Logic and Metaphysics, trans. K. J. Northcott and P. G. Lucas (Manchester, 1964).

8. References to Vico's Study Methods and Ancient Wisdom are to the pages of volume I of Nicolini's edition of the Opere (Bari, 1914); and in the former case, after the semicolon, to the pages of the translation by Elio Gianturco (Indianapolis, Ind., 1965). References to Vico's New Science are to the numbered paragraphs of volume IV of Nicolini's edition of the Opere (Bari, 1928) and of the English translation by Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch, new ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968).

9. For the thesis of the three articles of this series, see "Hegel and Peirce," pp. 278­79 below.

10. Sir William Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics, lecture 35; John Stuart Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (London, 1865), chs. 17­ 19.

11. See "Peirce's Progress," pp. 184­97 above.

12. A book under the same title was announced as in preparation for the International Scientific Series but never appeared. There is no accurate reprint of these papers. The only accurate account of them is in a master's thesis by Donald R. Koehn, "Charles S. Peirce's 'Illustrations of the Logic of Science' " (University of Illinois, Urbana, 1966); see also his doctor's thesis on the same subject, "Peirce's Explanation of the Validity of Synthetic Inference in the 'Illustrations of the Logic of Science'" (Illinois, 1969). His criticisms of a draft of the present essay have led to extensive revisions. See also "A Chronicle,'' pp. 114­34 above.

13. Draft of letter to Howes Norris, Jr., 28 May 1912 (L 321).

14. CP 6.7­65, 102­63, 238­71, 287­317; see 5.436 for an intended sixth article that never appeared.

15. Peirce concerned himself with atomic theory until late in life. His first published professional paper, of 1863, was on "The Chemical Theory of Interpenetration." This aspect of his scientific work has not been studied.

16. James, Dewey, Mead, and Lewis, for examples. Whitehead in his Science and the Modern World (New York, 1925) took James's "Does Consciousness Exist?" (1904) as marking the end of the Cartesian age in philosophy. For Dewey, see note 2 above. Chapters I and 12 of C. I. Lewis's Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La Salle, Ill., 1946) read like a pragmatic version of the transcendentals with Vico's factum firmly placed in the center: verum = factum = bonum.

17. Selected Writings, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), pp. 227­28.

18. Ibid., p. 298.

19. The fullest and best account of this is Willard Marshall Miller's master's thesis, "History as Science in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce"

Page 226 (University of Illinois, Urbana, 1968); see also his doctor's thesis on the same subject, "C. S. Peirce on the Philosophy of History" (Illinois, 1970).

20. For an interpretation that finds in him some part of what his critics have failed to find, see Gerd Buchdahl, "The Relevance of Descartes's Philosophy for Modern Philosophy of Science," British Journal for the Historv of Science 1 (1963):227­49.

Page 227

TWELVE—Peirce's Arisbe: The Greek Influence in His Later Philosophy

We are meeting not far from the west bank of the Delaware River. If we were to follow that bank upstream, through and beyond the Water Gap, we should come at last to Pike County, in the northeast corner of Pennsylvania, and to Milford, its county seat, where Peirce and his second wife, Juliette, settled in 1887. Two and a half miles beyond Milford, and four below the bridge to Port Jervis, New York, we should be on land which Peirce bought a year later, in 1888, in Juliette's name. There was a farmhouse on it which they soon set about enlarging and remodeling. That was their residence for the last twenty­six years of his life, and it was hers for the twenty further years that she survived him. They called it "Arisbe."

Peirce's philosophic activity may be divided into three periods.1 (1) His Cambridge period, say from his reading of Whately's Logic in 1851 to his memoir on the logic of relatives in 1870. (2) His cosmopolitan period, from 1870 to 1887, in which he traveled extensively, resided in Paris, New York City, Washington, and Baltimore, was stationed more briefly in many other cities at home, in England, and on the continent, and did his most important scientific work. (3) His Arisbe period, from 1887 until his death in 1914, the longest of the three, and the most productive philosophically.

I shall offer an explanation of the name "Arisbe." My approach to the explanation will be by way of reasons for describing Peirce's cosmopolitan period as that in which he came to take the Greeks seriously, and his Arisbe period as that in which he revised and tried to complete his philosophy with their help. But I begin with evidence tending to show that Peirce himself divided his philosophic life into three periods nearly coinciding with those I have marked off.

Late in life he exchanged several letters with an Atlanta actuary named Samuel Barnett.2 Barnett had taught mathematics and physics, was a student of probability, and a great admirer of Hobbes. Peirce protested:

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In my opinion your admiration of Hobbes is a great mistake. I thought as you did3 until my years of study of scholasticism brought me first half way to the truth. But it was not until about 20 years from my complete devotion to Logic, i.e. not until near 1889, that I was able to see its4 total falsity. That is, I utterly deny that the only Reals are definite individual objects. Under the name of "generals," two totally different things are confounded. One of these classes is that of Universal Facts, or Would­bes, such as Laws of Nature ... The other class ... ought to be called indefinites, or can­bes. For instance, it is a Real fact, I suppose, that the centre of mass of a body is capable of being moved along a straight line, even though, as a matter of Actuality, it never is so moved.

What Peirce is saying may be paraphrased in terms of his categories: In respect of nominalism, my philosophic life falls into three parts. (1) From the time I read Whately in 1851, I was, like him, a Hobbesian nominalist, holding only Seconds to be real, until study of the scholastics, and particularly of the British logicians Duns Scotus and William Ockham, enabled me (2) in 1868 to see the half of the falsity of nominalism that consists in its denial of the reality of Thirds. But it took me another twenty years of devotion to logic to see (3) toward 1889 the other half of its falsity, which consists in its denial of the reality of Firsts.5

Now Hobbes, "who carried the nominalistic spirit into everything" (CP 8.22), was a necessitarian, denied the freedom of the will,6 was an egoist, worked up the theory of motives (5.339ni, 7.329, 1.380), denied the validity of induction (6. ioo), held that chance and probability were names for our ignorance (6.94), and, by reviving the doctrine of the association of ideas, started "that most widely spread of philosophical blunders, the notion that associationalism belongs intrinsically to the materialistic family of doctrines" (6.36).

Peirce in his Arisbe period attacked the doctrine of necessity (6.3565), advertised "a mathematical demonstration of free will" and a "refutation of the theory of motives" (CP 8, p. 285), espoused a doctrine of objective or real probability as well as of absolute chance, and opposed the other views of Hobbes above mentioned. Had Peirce's views in his Cambridge period—at least in the earlier part of it—been those of Hobbes in these respects also, and had they passed through intermediate stages in his cosmopolitan period? Yes, in most of these respects, perhaps in all.

After his reading of Whately's nominalistic Logic in 1851, Peirce says, "Next, some old treatise on rhetoric set me thinking for myself on psychology; and I remember I wrote a small treatise called 'The Mechanics of Volition.' I was a young necessitarian of the most odious type" (MS 958).7 When he later spoke of egoism as "the theory of Hobbes, La Rochefoucauld, and other thinkers in the boyhood of modem philosophy" (7.602n5), he was glancing back at his own

Page 229 boyhood too. By the end of his Cambridge period, he was questioning Hobbes's egoism and theory of motives (5.339nl; cf. 7.329). He had also committed himself to an objective theory of probability and of the validity of induction, which he at first called nominalistic (8.2). But he did not yet assert real chance, nor did he assert the freedom of the will. Until well past the middle of his cosmopolitan period, he remained a necessitarian, though no longer of the most odious type. His earliest published statement of his case against the doctrine of necessity was in 1887, at the beginning of his Arisbe period (6.553ff); and even that contained no hint of tychism, though he had already reached it.

In his passage from necessitarianism to tychism, there were two decisive episodes I have not yet mentioned: his arrival at his categories toward the end of his Cambridge period, and his "one bold saltus" (1.364), past the middle of his cosmopolitan period. Of the first of these he says in 1908, "my work became self­ controlled early in the year 1867, when I already had in my mind the substance of my central achievement, the paper of May 14 of that year, 'On a New List Of Categories'." And he explains that by "self­controlled" he means "controlled by a 'self,' or person who deliberates, and makes resolves which make or denote 'determinations' or real dispositions causing conduct to agree with the resolves."8 Once he had found his categories, the now self­controlled development of his philosophy, in the last years of his Cambridge period and on through his cosmopolitan period, was a matter of following them out, as he says in his Guess at the Riddle, "in a sort of game of 'follow my leader' from one field of thought into another''—logic, psychology, the physiology of the nervous system, the theory of protoplasm in general.

I had no difficulty in following the lead into the domain of natural selection; and once arrived at that point, I was irresistibly carried on to speculations concerning physics. One bold saltus landed me in a garden of fruitful and beautiful suggestions, the exploration of which long prevented my looking further. (CP 1.364)

Prevented his proceeding, that is, from evolutionary biology and physics into sociology and theology (1.364; cf. 354). That was the way the book had grown in his mind during his cosmopolitan period, and it was also the order in which he had written it, early in his Arisbe period. The striking thing about the order is that a physicist should have taken so long to get to physics, which proved to be "the germinal chapter" of his Guess (1.354).

What was the "garden of fruitful and beautiful suggestions," and what was the "one bold saltus" that landed him in it? The Garden

Page 230 of Epicurus, I suggest; and the Epicurean swerve from the second to the third of Peirce's three theories of chance.9 Having long since given up Hobbes's view of chance as a name for our ignorance, and having more recently held that chance is "that diversity in the universe which laws leave room for, instead of a violation of law, or lawlessness" (6.602), he now took the leap to absolute chance. Why had he not taken it sooner, and how did he come to take it when he did—and when was that? "About 1880," he says in another place (MS 674). I follow that clue.

After being first considered for its chair of physics, Peirce was Lecturer in Logic at The Johns Hopkins University from 1879 to 1884, while retaining his position in the Coast and Geodetic Survey. For the first time, he became responsible for the history, of logic. 10 Since it was the logic of science that most concerned him, he assumed responsibility for the history of science also. In his first year, he directed his only Ph.D. thesis, that of Allan Marquand. Marquand was well trained in Greek and Latin, and had studied philosophy at Princeton under McCosh, at Berlin under Harms, Paulsen, Pfleiderer and Zeller, and at The Johns Hopkins under George Sylvester Morris. At Princeton he had written a sympathetic and able paper on "The Ethics of the Epicureans."11 In an appendix on prolepses or prenotions, he had argued for their empirical character against McCosh who took them to be innate. In the body of the paper he had twice referred to Philodemus, the author of various Epicurean works found among the papyri of Herculaneum. Theodor Gomperz in 1865 had edited one of these under the title Peri sêmeiôn kai sêmeiôseôn, on signs and on inferences from signs. Marquand undertook for his thesis to translate the Greek text and to elucidate it in an introductory essay on "The Logic of the Epicureans." Peirce worked through Philodemus along with Marquand. In the spring of 1880, while writing the essay, Marquand was also teaching an advanced course on Mill's Logic. He and Peirce concluded that Philodemus's treatise contained a well­developed theory of induction, and that it was about on a level with that of Mill. 12 Until then, Peirce had supposed, on good authority, that the Greeks had no theory of induction, just as they had no theory of probability; that these were modern inventions. If Prantl and the other historians of logic and of philosophy could be so far wrong, the only thing for it was to be one's own philologist and historian of Greek philosophy, as Peirce already was of medieval logic. He was not unprepared; his teachers of Greek, as of Latin—Sophocles, Felton, Goodwin, Chase, Lane—had been of the best.

As Marquand had re­examined the ethics of the Epicureans, and he and Peirce together had re­examined their logic, it was natural

Page 231 that Peirce the physicist should re­examine their physics also. And what would strike him most would be its differences from that of Democritus. Chief of these was the swerve (6.36). Philodemus used it to illustrate one of the canons of inference from signs. When the inference is from phenomena taken as signs to an explanatory hypothesis about the unobservable atoms, not only must it explain the phenomena in question but it must remain uncontradicted by other phenomena. When from the phenomena of chance and free­will we infer the swerve of the atoms, this canon is satisfied.13

Peirce the mathematical physicist must have sought to give the hypothesis a precision lacking in the sources. Here is a way he may have tried. The hypothesis is that any atom can at any time swerve without cause from its rectilinear course into another. Now the necessitarian physics of Democritus and of the Stoics was fairly represented by Diodorus's definition of the possible as that which either is or will be. If we supply a time variable and take "possible" to mean "possible at time t," it will follow that there are no unactualized possibilities. But an Epicurean atom leaves a trail of unactualized possibilities behind it. Not only so, but its direction of motion at any point­instant actualizes only one of infinite possibilities. For even if we suppose that all swerves are instantaneous and rectilinear, and further that the new rectilinear path is always at the same angle to the old one, it will be but one of an infinite number of such paths, all lying in a continuous cone with its origin at the point of the swerve, and all equally possible at the point­instant of the swerve. And so long as an atom neither swerves nor collides, its path is the axis of a continuous series of such cones of possibility. So, when an atom swerves, the path into which it swerves, and when it does not swerve, the path it continues, alike actualize but one of infinite possibilities, each no less possible than the one it actualizes.14

Not that Peirce believed in Epicurus's atoms, any more than in those of Democritus. In atomic theory, he was a Boscovichian (6.242). What mattered was that here at last was a physical model of an absolute chance, beside which the chance of the calculus of probabilities, of the statistical theory of gases, or of Darwin's fortuitous variations, was but quasi­chance (6.613; cf. 602, 611). Add that in Epicurus's physics the order of a kosmos derives from the chance of the swerve,15 add further that Epicurus connects the freedom of the will with mind­atom swerves; and the swerve becomes a physical paradigm of Peirce's category of Firstness, such as he has hitherto lacked (6.201). Substitute atoms of feeling for atoms of matter, and continua of feeling­possibilities for continua of motion­possibilities, and you have hints enough toward such a Cosmogonic Philosophy (6.33) as he will soon begin elaborating. The Garden of Epicurus

Page 232 has proved indeed a "garden of beautiful and fruitful suggestions" (I.364), and physics, not biology, has become "the germinal chapter" of Peirce's Guess at the Riddle (1.354).

At The Johns Hopkins in Peirce's third year (1881­1882) there was a graduate assistant named Benjamin Eli Smith, who had been trained in philosophy by J. H. Seelye at Amherst, had taught mathematics there, and had then, like Marquand, studied in Germany. Before the year was out, Smith joined the staff of the Century Dictionary, and he soon became its managing editor and Peirce a principal contributor, responsible for logic and philosophy, mathematics, mechanics and astronomy, weights and measures, and all words relating to universities. As a preparatory step, in his last year at The Johns Hopkins (1883­1884), Peirce added a course in Philosophical Terminology, in which his chief resource, and that of his students Dewey and Jastrow, was the Berlin Academy edition of Aristotle, with its Greek texts, Latin translations, and Bonitz's monumental index.16 From Epicurus's chance, for example, Peirce moved to the chance and spontaneity of Aristotle, and in general to Aristotle's logical and physical modalities in relation to his own categories.

Of Aristotle until then Peirce had read only the Organon and Metaphysics, "no doubt too early thoroughly to profit by the reading" (MS 606:25). (Until his study of scholasticism in 1867­1869 he had not taken seriously any other philosopher before Machiavelli and Bacon.) He had of course been struck by "the sea­fight tomorrow" in On Interpretation chapter 9: It is a logical truth that there will either be a sea­fight tomorrow or not be one, but, if it has not yet been determined whether there is to be one, it is neither true that there will be nor true that there won't be. As he later said, Peirce had shared the general nominalistic (6.368) opinion of Aristotle's ''childish naivete" in this and other passages on "the great difference in the logical status of the future and the past"—"until the further progress of my own studies forced me to the very substance of what Aristotle says" (6.96). Now he was reading the Physics and had got to the chapters in Book II on chance and spontaneity in relation to the four causes; and by January 17, 1884, he was ready to ask: "may it not be that chance, in the Aristotelian sense, mere absence of cause, has to be admitted as having some slight place in the universe?" (MS 875). And shortly afterwards, in defining "absolute chance" for the Century Dictionary (p. 918), he wrote: "According to Aristotle, events may come about in three ways: first, by necessity or an external compulsion; second, by nature, or the development of an inward germinal tendency; and third, by chance, without any determining cause or principle whatever, by lawless, sporadic originality." To which he would later add: "and this doctrine is of the inmost essence of Aristotelianism" (6.36).

Page 233 Obliged for the first time to define "continuity," Peirce jotted down on April i, 1884, a note of despair. "Continuity has never yet been defined. Kant's definition, to which I am ashamed to say I have hitherto given my adhesion, is ridiculous when you come to think of it. And without a definition of course all the reasoning about it is fallacious."17 Apparently he had not yet come to Aristotle's definition of it in the Physics, or had not yet understood it; and he had not yet made the acquaintance of Cantor. He very soon got to both; but it was only after his article was in print that he saw how to put Aristotle and Kant together (6.120­124). Even that synthesis he still later referred to as "my blundering treatment of continuity" (6. 174). But it was Aristotle who opened the way toward his maturer views.18

Since Smith had made him responsible for the history of ethics and aesthetics as well as of logic and metaphysics, Peirce in 1883 began the study of ethics (5.1 I , 129) and began with the Greeks. He read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Politics for the first time, a good deal of Plato, who had hitherto bored him,19 and of the other post­Aristotelian schools besides the Epicureans. He was still not sure that ethics was or could be a science, normative or otherwise, and he had graver doubts about aesthetics; but, whatever ethics and aesthetics were, it was evident that here the Greeks were supreme; and it was their characteristic tendency to rest their ethics on aesthetics, as Peirce himself, in his Arisbe period, would eventually do.

Nearly all the Greek philosophers were cosmologists, and most of them, as far back as the Milesians, were evolutionary cosmologists of one sort or another. And it was by way of the Greeks, and especially by way of Empedocles, Aristotle, and Epicurus, but in reverse order, that Peirce arrived at his own evolutionary cosmology. Every cosmology involves a theory of the absolute; of these there are three kinds; and the only one of the three that Peirce ever names after a representative of it is the Epicurean (1.362; 6.27). (This is not the kind he calls evolutionary, because for Epicurus and for Empedocles there is evolution not through their infinite worlds but only within single worlds.)

Nothing in Peirce's philosophic development is so astonishing as the fact that, although the Origin of Species appeared in the year he graduated from Harvard; although Cambridge was a chief center of the ensuing debates during the last decade of his Cambridge period and on into his cosmopolitan period; and although the pragmatism of his "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" (1877­1878) may be read as the lesson in logic taught by those debates (5.363f); nevertheless, for a quarter of a century, he did not commit himself to the Darwinian theory of evolution or to any other, or even to evolution as a fact awaiting its theory.

Page 234 But there were three good reasons for this abstention. In the first place, he was not a biologist, and had therefore no occasion to commit himself. In the second place, as a connoisseur of the reasonings of biologists, as of other scientists, he thought that, within the confines of biology itself, the reasoning of Agassiz was much more cogent than that of any of the evolutionists (MS 957).20 In the third place, as a philosopher he sought to generalize the conception of evolution, and to generalize each of the competing theories. That meant extending it and them to the physical universe on the one hand and to the history of civilization on the other, but in such fashion as to find all three of his categories everywhere exemplified. For long years he saw no way to do this. "Now philosophy requires thorough­going evolutionism or none" (6.14). The result, until 1884, was—none.

By January 17, 1884, in the twenty­fifth year from the Origin, and in his own forty­fifth year, Peirce had finally found his way. That evening he read to the Metaphysical Club an anniversary address on "Design and Chance" (MS 875), beginning: "The epoch of intellectual history at which the world is now arrived finds thought still strongly under the influence imparted to it in 1859 by Darwin's great work." Evolution is now the postulate of logic itself. The postulate extends to laws as well as to states of things. We want a theory of the evolution of physical law. Absolute chance—not the ordinary chance which is merely relative to the causes that are taken into account—is "the one essential agency upon which the whole process depends." But the operation of relative chance in instances of Bernoulli's law or laws of large numbers shows how the agency of absolute chance is to be understood in a philosophic evolutionism in which the antithesis of design and chance—Agassiz and Darwin is aufgehoben.

As the editors of the Collected Papers observe, the last two chapters of A Guess at the Riddle, on sociology (or pneumatology) and theology, seem not to have been written. The Plan of the Work gives helpful indications for the former, but is enigmatic on the latter: "Chapter 9. The triad in theology. Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching" (1.354). The clue is in the address on "Design and Chance," where he chides even Epicurus for flinching, by exempting his gods from the absolute chance that gives rise to his infinite worlds. For he places his gods in the spaces between the worlds and rests their divinity on the fineness of the atoms that compose them. "Thus, divineness comes from a special cause & does not originate by chance from elements not containing it. Darwin's view is nearer to mine. Indeed my opinion is only Darwinism analyzed, generalized, and brought into the realm of Ontology."

Page 235 Brought in, we take him to mean, by making the absolute chance of Epicurus and Aristotle prior to the relative chance of Darwin's fortuitous variations. But there are gaps in the manuscript of the address both before and after this point, and we must look elsewhere for further light. We find it next year in his review of Royce's Religious Aspect of Philosophy. There he says that he holds a theory different from Royce's, which he intends to take an early opportunity of putting into print (8.44). That is, the Guess is already projected; and Peirce goes on to indicate how the sociology and the theology are to be connected. (We are reminded of his earlier sympathy with Vacherot's conception of God as the being whose essence implies non­existence [6.396].)

I think that the existence of God, as well as we can conceive it, consists in this, that a tendency toward ends is so necessary a constituent of the universe that the mere action of chance upon innumerable atoms has an inevitable teleological result. One of the ends so brought about is the development of intelligence and of knowledge; and therefore I should say that God's omniscience, humanly conceived, consists in the fact that knowledge in its development leaves no question unanswered.

Still to be accounted for is the last of the "fruitful and beautiful suggestions" that came to Peirce from the Garden in which his "one bold saltus" had landed him (I.364); namely, the role of habit­taking in the evolution of the laws of nature, which is just where the Guess comes in ( .409f). The suggestion could not have come directly from Epicurus or from any of his ancient followers. And in spite of the prominence of "habit" in the philosophy of Aristotle and of his scholastic followers, it could scarcely have come directly from him or from them. Exactly how it came cannot be made out from manuscripts prior to Peirce's Arisbe period. So far as I know, it first becomes evident in a manuscript of 1901 on "The Laws of Nature."21 Three preliminary observations will help us find it there.

I. Nothing is more characteristic of Peirce's interpretations of Greek philosophy, as reflected first in his work for the Century Dictionary, than his assimilation of Epicurus and Aristotle. For example, as we have seen, he assimilates Aristotle to Epicurus when he ascribes to Aristotle the doctrine of absolute chance (p. 918). He assimilates Epicurus to Aristotle when, in the article "Epicurean" (pp. 1966f), he speaks of the swerve as "the very life" of the atomic theory; or, as he later puts it, the "life and entelechy" (6.35). Soul or life is habit or first entelechy of organic body (p. 1946); energy or activity of soul is second entelechy. Swerve­ability, then, would be soul or first entelechy of atomic body, and actual swerve would be

Page 236 second entelechy. And he later associates Epicurus and Aristotle as upholders of the freedom of the will, against Democritus and the Stoa (6.36). As between the two, however, it is Epicurus who bears the palm: "His views were thus more like those of a modern scientist than were those of any other philosopher of antiquity" (p. 1967).

2. In the absence of such great compilations as Usener's Epicurea (1887), Arnim's Stoicorum veterum fragmenta ( 1905­1924), and Diels's Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903), Peirce's foremost guide to Greek philosophy in general was Cudworth, who regularly quoted the sources both in Greek or Latin and in his own vivid translations.22 In college, when he had been intent on Kant and had read all of Hobbes, Peirce had also read "the most readable part of Cudworth,"23 Hobbes's ablest philosophic opponent and Kant's ablest forerunner. Peirce liked later to say of Kant that there was "perhaps no very valuable philosophical conception in his works that might not have been suggested to him by some one of half a dozen English writers, Hobbes, Cudworth, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Reid" (MS 1454); and that "Even where he appears least English, he is following Cudworth." 24 Cudworth was the source, still unconsidered, of much of Peirce's early idealism. And he was a favorite source for illustrative quotations in Peirce's contributions to the Centulry Dictionarv.25

3. But for Epicurus in particular Peirce relied heavily on the collections, interpretations, and elaborate defenses of Gassendi, the seventeenth­century Epicurus Redivivus, whom Cudworth criticized almost as severely as he did Hobbes. So closely does Peirce associate Epicurus with Gassendi that it is as if he had found them together in the Garden. He assimilates Gassendi as well as Epicurus to Aristotle, and he describes his own cosmology as in important respects reviving that of Gassendi, when we expect him to say Epicurus.

With these three observations in mind, we are prepared to entertain the possibility that it may have been Cudworth's mocking caricature of Epicurus's physics, as revived by Gassendi and given currency in England by Charlton,26 that inspired Peirce's Guess.

So far as concerns the laws of nature, Peirce writes, whatever in the philosophies of our day is not nominalism is evolutionism of one kind or another; and every evolutionism must in its evolution eventually restore "that rejected idea of law as a reasonableness energizing in the world ... which belonged to the essentially evolutionary metaphysics of Aristotle, as well as to the scholastic modifications of it by Aquinas and Scotus."

To this wing of philosophy belongs, too, that theory of Gassendi which the present writer endeavored, a few years ago,27 to reawaken (in a perfected form), and of which, for the sake of the evolutionary con­

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ception of law which it illustrates, may here be inserted a description by an opponent of it, which was published in 1678:

"But because men may yet be puzzled with the universality and constancy of this regularity, and its long continuance through so many ages that there are no records at all of the contrary anywhere to be found, the atomic atheist further adds that the senseless atoms, playingand toying up and down, without any care or thought, and from eternity trying all manner of tricks, conclusions and experiments, were at length (they know not how) taught, and by the necessity of things themselves, as it were, driven, to a certain kind of trade of artificialness and methodicalness: so that, though their motions were at first all casual and fortuitous, yet in length of time they became orderly and artificial, and governed by a certain law, they contracting as it were upon themselves, by long practice and experience, a kind of habit of moving regularly." Cudworth's True Intellectual System of the Universe.28

The "one bold saltus" into the "garden of fruitful and beautiful suggestions" took place, I conclude, not earlier than 1879­1880, when Peirce was working with Marquand on Philodemus; the "exploration" of these suggestions occupied the remaining years of his cosmopolitan period (1880­1887); it was accelerated by his work on the Century Dictionary (1883­1887); but by 1884 he had taken Cudworth's hint and fixed the main outlines of his theory of the evolution of the laws of nature out of absolute chance by habit­taking; and was already, in his Darwin anniversary paper on "Design and Chance" (1884) and in his Royce review (1885), "looking further'' (1.364); that is, into "sociology or, shall I say [with Cudworth], pneumatology" and into "theology" ( 1.354); and by the beginning of his Arisbe period in 1887 he was ready to start composing his Guess at the Riddle.

By that time, the Coast and Geodetic Survey had entered a period of enforced retrenchment, and could no longer sustain the wide ranging and expensive field work of Peirce's gravity researches, or even afford the improved instruments he required. His duties were now confined to "reducing" the results of his previous experiments, and preparing reports for publication. This he could do at home. It was time, thought he and his wife, to find a permanent residence, both for her health and for his leisure for study and writing. They quickly narrowed the search to "the wildest county of the Northern States, south of the Adirondacks and east of the Alleghenies" (MS 842),29 yet within reach of the Erie Railroad station in Port Jervis, from which a ride of two and a half hours would take them to Jersey City and the Manhattan ferry. During the months of inquiry and looking, Peirce's mother and his father's sister died in Cambridge, and the slow settlement of their estates would bring him modest inheritances; so that it did not seem imprudent to buy the farm and enlarge the house that became Arisbe.

Page 238 Making the architect's drawings and supervising construction to body forth Juliette's dream­house went to Peirce's head a bit, so that in drafting his Guess at the Riddle he began thinking of it as the ground­plan of "a philosophic edifice that shall outlast the vicissitudes of time," of "a philosophy like that of Aristotle ... so comprehensive that, for a long time to come, the entire work of human reason ... shall appear as the filling up of its details" (1.l). Before the Guess was finished, he was invited in 1890 to contribute to The Monist, and he began with an article on "The Architecture of Theories'' (6.7­34). Since the Darwin anniversary paper, the Royce review, and the Guess remained unpublished, it was in this Monist series of 1891­1893 that his evolutionary cosmology was broached in print. The second and fifth papers took off from the Greeks whose company Peirce had joined (6.36, 287). When that series was broken off incomplete, he invited subscriptions for a twelve­volume Principles of Philosophy (CP 8, pp. 282­86). "This philosophy," he said, "is of the nature of a Working Hypothesis for use in all branches of experiential inquiry" (CP 8, p. 282); its "entelechy and soul" is "the principle of continuity," which "leads directly to Evolutionism" (p. 283). He has begun to think better of Plato, however, and in a gesture of homage Volume IV is to be entitled Plato's World: An Elucidation of the Ideas of Modem Mathematics (p. 284). But the subscriptions proved insufficient, and Peirce set about turning volumes II and III into a separate Logic.30

Further alterations and additions to the house kept the architectural metaphor alive for a few years, with some help from "that celebrated and splendid chapter of Kant upon the architectonical method" (6.604). But even at the beginning of 1894 Peirce could say that "systematic completeness ... is about the idlest decoration that can be attached to a philosophy"; the "great desideratum" is that "it must lead to unmistakable consequences comparable in great detail with observation" (N 2:20).

He had lost his Coast Survey position at the end of 1891; nearly all his income­producing efforts failed; the 1890s became a decade of adversities from which he never recovered; and his system­building ambitions were reduced to more modest proportions. He was above all a logician. He was now a recluse for logic's sake, a "bucolic logician" (MS 296:I I). His lifelong concern was with the validity of synthetic inference, the logic of science, the logic of hypothesis and induction. For the sake of the logic of science he had become a historian of science. He gave a series of Lowell Lectures on the History of Science in 1892­1893 (MSS 1274­1287), and he began a book on the history of science for Putnam's in 1898 (MSS 1269, 1273, 1290­91). His great lifelong ambition was to establish hypothesis and induction firmly and permanently along with deduction, each

Page 239 clearly distinguished from and yet positively related to the other two, in the very conception of logic and in the continuing researches of logicians. It was this ambition that had made the discovery of Philodemus's theory of inductive inference loom so large for him. Difficult as the problem of induction was, however, and long as Peirce wrestled with it, "the bottom question of logical Critic" (6.475) was for him that of hypothesis, abduction, or retroduction. It was hard to persuade logicians or scientists that this was inference at all. He hoped that a proper history of science would help to show that it was.

He had from the beginning appealed to history against a narrow positivism. Not only the history of logic and of science, but all history whatever, including paleontology, geology, and the history of the physical universe, "is entirely hypothetical, and is absolutely incapable of verification by direct observation" (2.51 n I, cf. 642). The logic of historical investigation, perhaps even better than atomic theory, should bring the nature of hypothetical inference into clear relief. Ancient history would do better than modern because the documents and monuments were relatively few and fragmentary. He was particularly impressed by the way in which the archaeologists, and above all Schliemann at Troy (5.597), had proved the higher critics wrong. But his own competence was in philosophy, and since he was now fully at home with the Greeks, and the Greeks were fully at home in Arisbe, he renewed and intensified his study of them from this fresh point of view. He worked out a new interpretation of the life of Thales, the first of the Milesians (MS 1604). He tackled the hardest case in the history of Greek philosophy, the life of Pythagoras, "the sublimest of all human biographies,"31 and worked up a lecture on him as a specimen of his new logic of history (MSS 1277, 1582).

When Lutoslawski's book on the logic of Plato came out in 1897, Peirce took up the problem of the chronology of the dialogues, applied mathematical methods to the working up of Lutoslawski's stylistic data, modified his conclusions in certain respects, copied the Greek texts of certain dialogues into notebooks with generous spacing between the lines and made his own interlinear English translations, realized that he had previously quite failed to appreciate the logical importance of the dialogues,32 came to regard the Theaetetus and Parmenides as the greatest of Plato's productions,33 tried his own hand at composing dialogues in Plato's later manner (6.349352), and decided that Aristotelianism was a variant form of Platonism, and that his own philosophy was a variant form of Aristotelianism (5.77ni). Having come to conceive logic as a normative science subordinate to ethics, and ethics as subordinate to aesthetics, Peirce in his Minute Logic about 1902 wrote three partial drafts

Page 240 of a chapter on ethics (MSS 432­434), the third of which contains his longest consecutive discussion of Greek philosophy. After briefly reviewing earlier theories of the good, he devotes two hundred pages to Plato, critically reexamining the dialogues in chronological order from this point of view.34 It is not by accident, then, that it is in this work that "the summum bonum" first appears as a technical term in Peirce's own philosophy (2.1 16).

By 1894 he had "read and thought more about Aristotle than about any other man" (MS 1604), but his really intensive study was still to come. It struck him toward Igoo that his new logic of history might be tried on Strabo's story that Aristotle's manuscripts lay hid for a century and a half in a damp cellar at Scepsis in the Troad. Not only were many of the known facts explained by the story, and none of them contradicted, but further testable consequences could be drawn from it. For example, calculating that Aristotle had written the equivalent of about 70 lines of the Berlin edition to a sheet of papyrus, and assuming that the sheets had not been pasted together but rolled one after another onto a stick, we should expect damage from dampness and insects to the first and last sheets of a roll, and to the tops and bottoms of intervening sheets. The incompetent and unscrupulous first editor, Apellicon, would hence have found short passages missing or unreadable at intervals of about 70 lines, and longer ones at longer intervals. He would have filled them out by guessing what Aristotle had written, and would have guessed wrongly more often than rightly. A modern student of Aristotle could improve on Apellicon's guesses, and those of subsequent editors, particularly in passages coming within his special competence. Peirce was such a student of the Organon, and he detected what he thought were "two blunders" (7.248) in Book II of the Prior Analytics. When these blunders are corrected, Aristotle's theory of induction (epagôgê) in Chapter XXIII, of analogy (paradeigima) in XXIV, and of abduction (apag6ge) in XXV, becomes a coherent and intelligible body of doctrine, and the otherwise immense superiority of the Epicurean logic in respect of synthetic inference is somewhat reduced.35

Late in 1901 he completed a long paper "On the Logic of drawing History from Ancient Documents, especially from Testimonies" (MS 690), in the latter part of which he treated at great length three of the examples mentioned above: the Strabo story, the chronology of Plato's dialogues, and the life of Pythagoras. He presented an abstract of the paper to the National Academy of Sciences at its meeting here in Philadelphia in November of that year (7.162f). The paper itself contained the last extensive revision brought to completion by Peirce of his general theory of logic; its purpose was to strengthen his theory of hypothesis or abduction; and it was by long mediation

Page 241 upon the Greeks, and by detailed study of the surviving texts, that he achieved it.

I cannot here even enumerate the further steps taken by Peirce at Arisbe toward the revision and the completion of his philosophy. Still less can I connect them, step by step, with the Greeks. But the most important single large­scale effort toward completion was the elaboration of his semiotic or general theory of signs, looking toward a "system of logic considered as semiotic" (8.302,377); and the three most important revisions were those of his categories, his pragmatism, and his metaphysics, to bring them into harmony with his semiotic.

The revised categories appear under the head of "high philosophy" at first (7.526); later under that of phenomenology, phaneroscopy, or phenoscopy. In homage to Pythagoras and on account of their connection with numbers, he calls them Kainopythagorean (7.528) or Cenopythagorean (1.351; 2.87, 16; 8.328f), in spite of finding no approach to them among the Pythagoreans; and he sometimes calls the discipline Cenopythagorean Phenomenology to distinguish it from Hegel's.36 And his revised pragmatism he at least once calls "Cenopythagorean Pragmaticism" (5.555*).

It is a puzzling fact that, although he had argued for a sign­theory of cognition in his Cambridge period, in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy series of 1868­ 1869, there is no mention of it in the pragmatism series in the Popular Science Monthly in 1877­1878 in his cosmopolitan period,37 nor even in the metaphysical series in The Monist in 1891­1893, early in his Arisbe period. Not only so, but in the latter he seems even to substitute for it the psychological doctrine of the association of ideas. That was a strange aberration from the point of view of the ordering of the sciences in his mature philosophy (1.180ff). Since it is a process­ rather than a substance­philosophy, its key distinction, after the revision of the categories, must be that between two kinds of process, dyadic or dynamical, and triadic or semiotical; or, as he usually phrases it, between dynamical action and sign­action (5.469,472f). And the very conception of sign­action, as well as the technical term for it, semiosis or semeiosy (5.473,484), is adapted from Philodemus. The Greek term semeiôsis scarcely occurs before Philodemus, but is frequent and technical in his On Methods of Inference.38 To that extent, then, the revision and completion of Peirce's philosophy depended upon the study of Epicurean logic in which he had been assisted by his student Allan Marquand.

The connections between Peirce's mature philosophy and that of Aristotle await a monograph. Lacking time for any part of that, or for his less sympathetic study of the Stoics, or for the influence, largely indirect, of Plotinus and other Neoplatonists on his later

Page 242 metaphysics, or even for the evidences of his continuing high esteem of Epicurus himself, I break off the narrative at this point and state the conclusion toward which I have been moving: that the revisions of his philosophy during his Arisbe period, and his approaches toward completing it, were prompted and aided by study of Aristotle, Epicurus and Philodemus, Plato, and the earlier cosmologists, in that order of importance, and in ways of which little or no account has so far been taken.

I return now to the question with which I began: Why did the Peirces give the name "Arisbe" to the estate on the west bank of the Delaware, in Pike County, Pennsylvania, in which he lived with the Greeks for the last third of his life?

In search of an answer, I go back a century to the year 1870. In April of that year, Schliemann made a preliminary excavation at Hissarlik. At about the same time, the Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods, by Peirce's teacher, friend and mentor, Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, was published in Boston. In reviewing it on July 21, The Nation said: "Here is a scholar whose view comprehends the entire Greek language, in its unbroken course, from Homer to the newspapers of modern Athens."

There was to be a total eclipse of the sun on December 22, and the path of totality was to run through Thessaly, Sicily, northernmost Africa, and southernmost Spain. At the end of its session, in mid July, the United States Congress passed an appropriation bill for sending observation parties under the direction of the Superintendent of the Coast Survey. Peirce, an Assistant in the Survey, was already in Europe to visit possible sites and make recommendations. In London, he had called on Augustus De Morgan and presented a copy of his paper on the logic of relatives, the culminating achievement of his Cambridge period. From London, after the Vatican Council had declared the conditions of papal infallibility, and as the Franco­Prussian War began, he journeyed eastward by way of Rotterdam, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, Pest, the Danube and the Black Sea, to Constantinople. After a week there in the exciting company of Edward H. Palmer (4.48n 1) and Charles Drake, he began moving westward along the expected path of totality in search of eligible sites for the observation parties.

On Sunday morning, September 4, 1870, Peirce passed through the Hellespont in the steamer Naptun. It stopped at Gallipoli on the European side and at Dardanelles on the Asiatic side. Between the two, shortly before reaching the Narrows, it passed on its left the mouth of the river Selleis. Not far inland had stood Homer's Arisbe. Centuries later, Alexander's army encamped at Arisbe after making the crossing, and was rejoined there by Alexander after his visit to Troy. Fifteen miles by road to the northeast of Arisbe was Lamp­

Page 243 sachus, where Epicurus had lived and taught for the last several years before his return to Athens, and where he had won his ablest disciples. Some thirty crowflight miles to the south of Arisbe was Scepsis, where, according to Strabo, the manuscripts of Aristotle from which our corpus derives had lain hid in a damp cellar for a century and a half.

The Naptun continued, past Schliemann's digs, to Lagos, Kavalla, Saloniki, and Volo. At Gallipoli Peirce had heard of the surrender of McMahon and the capture of the Emperor. At Kavalla he heard that the Republic had been proclaimed. On the way up to Saloniki, he wrote:

When I got up this morning it had been raining & was rather moist & misty & cloudy & there was to be seen Mount Olympus looking very grand and well as if it might be the home of the gods. Its base was hidden in mist. Its top hardly distinguished itself in colour from the light cloud that floated about it & it seemed almost doubtful whether it belonged to earth or to heaven.

At Volo he took leave of the Naptun (2.625), spent his thirty­first birthday, and presented letters of introduction from Sophocles, who had been born near Volo and had made a return visit not long since. With new young Greek friends Peirce drove "in a braganza over a road in Phthiotis in the night" (6.182) on which Zeno's Achilles might have raced the tortoise. He explored Larissa as a possible site for an eclipse party. Then he continued by another steamer to Messina and visited sites near the eastern coast of Sicily. The eventual decision was in favor of sites in Sicily and in southern Spain. But the Troad and Thessaly had seized Peirce's imagination as no other locality had ever done, or would ever do.39

Thirteen years earlier, as a junior at Harvard, Peirce had read the Iliad with Sophocles and Felton, using Felton's edition. Before that, as a lifelong elocutionist, he had competed for a Boylston Prize by reciting Byron's "Isles of Greece," and the memory still lingered of his high­school recitation of Halleck's vigorous poem on the Greek patriot Marco Bozzaris. From college on, he was a geyser of Homeric Greek and Horatian Latin. Felton had urged carrying the Iliad to the Troad and reading it on the spot. If Peirce did not do this in fact, he surely did so in imagination. Passing near Arisbe, he would recall the great lines, admired by Felton, on the slaying of Axylos by Diomedes—"Axylos, son of Teuthras, from well­built Arisbe, a man of substance and loved by all men, for his home was on the high­road there, and he welcomed all who came by." Felton had a note on Axylos as the genius of hospitality. And Peirce would remember also the grander passages on Asios of Arisbe, the leader of

Page 244 the Trojan allies from Perkote and Praktios, Sestos and Abydos, as well as from Arisbe. It was Asios with whom William Everett, his Harvard classmate, associated Peirce's Arisbe when writing to him in 1893 (MS L 136): "I admire so much the name of your home. Asios of Arisbe, the fierce driver of horses, was always a great favorite of mine in the Iliad."

Arisbe the town had been named for Arisbe the woman, and about her there were conflicting legends. Peirce's Arisbe was bought in the name of his wife, and about her also there were growing up conflicting legends, because she and he guarded well the secret of her identity and her European origins.

But more important than any of these considerations, I think, was the fact that Arisbe was a colony of Miletus, the home of the first philosophers of Greece—Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximeneswho first had sought the Arche, the Principle, the First of things (MS 905:22­26). Of Peirce's three categories, it was Firstness that had given him the greatest difficulties, and it was only when Epicurus had helped him to a partial solution of them that he was ready to join the Greek cosmologists, and that his Arisbe too became a colony of Miletus.

The high­road through Peirce's Arisbe ran from Port Jervis to Milford and on past the Water Gap to Philadelphia, where we sit. The high­road through Homer's Arisbe ran from Lampsachus where Epicurus taught, on past the Narrows to Troy where Schliemann had just been digging, and farther on, up the Scamander, to Scepsis where Aristotle's manuscripts lay hid. And that was roughly the order of some of Peirce's chief dealings with the Greeks: (1) Philodemus and Epicurus; (2) the earlier cosmologists; (3) Schliemann's Trojan digs as a symbol of the logic of hypothesis; and (4) Strabo's story about the manuscripts of Aristotle, as an hypothesis as momentous as any in the history of philosophy, the testing of which would illustrate the logic of hypothesis in full detail, and bring Peirce to still closer grips with the man of whom he had read and thought more than of any other.40

APPENDIX

In reviewing his life's devotion to logic, Peirce nearly always ascribes decisive importance to his reading of Whately and retirement to Arisbe. My three periods are therefore open to question only as dating the second period from 1870. My warrant is an episode recalled in a letter draft of June 1909 (MS L 482). In April of 1870, Peirce's younger brother, Benjamin Mills Peirce, a mining engineer, died in northern Michigan.

Page 245

When my father and I went out to Marquette together and brought back my brother Ben's body, my father talked to me very earnestly, representing that I was sacrificing all hopes of success in life by devoting myself in logic, and that people would never think I amounted to much if I did so. I told him that I fully realized the truth of that, but that my bent of mind was so strong in that direction that it would be a very hard struggle to give up logic. That I intended, however, to try to do so and to take a good long time to come to any conclusion.

He reached his conclusion within the year. Robert Harley's very favorable discussion of his memoir on the logic of relatives at the Liverpool meeting of the British Association in September was encouraging. Meeting De Morgan and making the friendship of W. K. Clifford helped. Papal infallibility may have given him a push toward the logic of fallibilism. Soon after his return from the eclipse, the Metaphysical Club began, in which pragmatism was born.

Notes

1. Other divisions have other merits. For Peirce's biography the most important is into two periods, divided by the death of his father in 1880: (1) Father and Son, 1839­1880; (2) Son Alone, 1880­1914. On the three periods of the present essay, see further the Appendix.

2. Peirce's letters to Barnett are in the Emory University Library. I quote from a letter dated 20 December 1909. See notes 23 and 32 below.

3. A slip of the pen for "do"?

4. Hobbes's nominalisms.

5. The argument of "Peirce's Progress" (pp. 184­97 above) has been examined by Don D. Roberts (Transactions 6 [1970]:67­83). His searching, trenchant, and helpful criticisms call for direct and separate reply. The present essay is not that reply, but anticipates it at this point.

6. Centurv Dictionary, p. 3873, s.v. Motive, II.n. I.

7. In another manuscript, the reference to which I have lost, Peirce remembers the title of his boyhood treatise as "The Dynamics of Persuasion."

8. From a long letter of 10 July 1908 to Francis C. Russell (MS L 387), in the part that was not sent.

9. Peter Turley, "Peirce on Chance," Transactions 5 (1969):243­54.

10. In the first half of his first year, he gave a course in medieval logic, for which he was well prepared by previous study and by a series of University Lectures on "British Logicians" he had given at Harvard in 1869­70. See "Peirce at The Johns Hopkins," Appendix III (not included here).

11. Marquand's papers, including this one, and including his detailed and intelligent notes on Peirce's Hopkins courses, are in the Princeton University Library.

12. The thesis has been lost. There is a draft of the translation among the Marquand papers, entitled "Philodemus on Inductive signs and infer­

Page 246 ences." The essay, no doubt abridged, was published in Studies in Logic by Members of The Johns Hopkins University (1883), pp. 1­11. So far as I know, this was the earliest recognition in English of the importance of Philodemus's work, and the earliest competent recognition anywhere of the merits of the Epicurean logic. The translation had been presented to the Metaphysical Club, of which Peirce was president and Marquand secretary, in January 1880, and the essay in April; see "Peirce at The Johns Hopkins," Appendix IV (not included here). Peirce speaks of Philodemus in CP 7.60 (1882), 2.741 (1883), 2.38 and 6.98 (1902), 8.379 (1908), and 2.761 (c. 1908), and in unpublished manuscripts and letters. In MS 1604 he says he devoted months to the study of this small treatise and gave a good deal of time to editions of other Epicurean papyri from Herculaneum. "This philosophy is my particular pet, or one of my pets."

13. Col. 36, lines 7­17. See Philodenmus: On Methods of Inference, A Study in Ancient Empiricism, ed. Phillip Howard De Lacy and Estelle Allen De Lacy (Philadelphia, 1941), pp. 106­7.

14. Even the changes of direction of motion resulting from collisions are not absolutely determined, since either atom may swerve at the instant of impact from the rectilinear path into which the collision would otherxvise redirect it. The laws of atomic motion can therefore only be statistical in nature. An atom­tracking computer that should predict future positions of single atoms is not only practically but theoretically impossible (even if some atoms are hidebound by habits both of swerve­ frequency and of swerveorientation).

15. Besides the "laws," that govern the motions of single atoms, which may be supposed to hold in all worlds (as well as outside them), we may call "laws," those more or less regular ways in which gross phenomena such as eclipses are caused. Since "laws2" vary from world to world, we may perhaps conceive them, if not also ''laws,," as acquired habits. But this is getting ahead of our story.

16. "Peirce at The Johns Hopkins," Appendix III (not included here); and correspondence of October and November 1883 in the Peirce file in the Gilman Papers at The Johns Hopkins University.

17. On a sheet in MS 278 with two rubber stamp marks: C. S. Peirce/r884 FEB 7, and C. S. Peirce/1884 APR I. (It may be added that in MS 238 Peirce writes as if his Centurv Dictionary article on the Method or doctrine of limits [p. 3458] had been written in 1883.)

18. In 1905 Peirce distinguished "five grades of original work in logic" (MS 816). "The first and highest consists in showing for the first time that some element, however vaguely characterized, is an element that must be recognized as distinct from others. It is in such achievements that Aristotle is peerless. Examples from his works could be given by scores. I will mention only his definitions; his definition of continuity would be enough were it alone." The order of development of Peirce's own theory of continuity has been confused by editorial notes in 6.164­68. The term defined is "continuity," not "continuous." 165­168 are not a marginal note, but four separate notes on the facing interleaf page, only the last of which, 168, is dated "1903 Sep 18." The order of the earlier notes should be 167, 165, 166. The reference in 166 should be to 165, not 164. 168 should contain a reference indicating that the wrong definition is that in 166.

19. Even as late as 1894 (in MS 1604) Peirce wrote: "Have read Plato only in translation; only a dialogue or two in Greek. Never was intensely interested in Plato.... My description of Platonism [Centurt, Dictionar, p. 4540, Platonic] was written at Niagara Falls [in November 1885] without a single

Page 247 book to refer to. It was subsequently revised but not much changed." His intensive study of Plato was still to come.

20. Peirce had studied botany with Gray in college and was intimately associated with Chauncey Wright, and he had studied zoology with Agassiz privately. These were the chief Cambridge protagonists.

21. Published in Values in a Universe of Chance: Selected Writings of Charles S. Peirce, ed. Philip P. Wiener (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958), pp. 289­321.

22. In MS 1604 Peirce puts him at the head of his list of Pre­Socratics.

23. SS 114. Peirce to Samuel Barnett, 20 December 1909 (see note 2 above): "In College ... I was also made to study Hobbes and Jouffroy, and for myself read in Cudworth."

24. In a review of Berkeley's works (N3:37), preceded by the sentence: "Indeed, in Kant's thought, generally, there is hardly anything but his architectonic method that is not more in the line of English tradition and development than it is in the German line."

25. See for example the quotations under nature (pp. 3943f) from Cudworth himself and from Cudworth's rendering of Proclus, and see the reference forward from entelechy (p. 1946). In drafts of his review of Paulsen's Kant (MS 1454), he quotes passages in Cudworth "from which Kant and a more recent philosopher [i.e. Peirce himself] may have profited."

26. Walter Charlton, Physiologia Epiciuro­Gasseindo­Clharltoiniala: or a Fabrick of Science Natural, upon the Hvypothesis of Atonms (London, 1654). Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1966.

27. In the Monist series of 1891­93.

28. 1678 ed., pp. 674f; 1845 ed. (used by Peirce), 2:599. Wiener's Values, p. 300f. I have brought the Cudworth passage slightly closer to the 1678 edition.

29. MS 843: "in order to escape distractions from my study of logic, I retired to the wildest county that I could easily reach."

30. The order of development was: Search for a Method, Principles, Grand Logic. The last was composed in the years 1894­95.

31. Open Court 6 (1892):3375.

32. Letter of 20 December Igog to Samuel Barnett (notes 2 and 23 above).

33. Marginal note in his copy of Lutoslawski in the Harvard University Library, at p. 415.

34. In 1905 he reread the Theaetetus in Greek and drafted a long letter to Lady Welby about it (MS L 463, 16 July 1905).

35. In 1906 he resumed this investigation, concentrating on the seventy or so scattered passages in which Aristotle either distinguishes the senses of "prior" and "posterior" or makes important use of the distinction in some unspecified sense. It had long seemed to him that there were incoherences and confusions within and among these passages, and that some of them might be chargeable to Apellicon. This time, he assumed that Aristotle wrote 64 Berlin lines to a sheet. See MS 992 and the draft letter of 30 July 1906 to Edward S. Holden in MS L 200.

36. Earlier he had seemed to find an approach. In his "Pythagorics" (Open Court 6 [1892]:3376) he had written: "The Pythagoreans attached significance to numbers.... One was the origin; two, stalwart resistance; three, mediation and beauty." But they had not stopped at three, and that made all the difference. (In 1898 Peirce said, in MS 438, that the connection of his categories with the numbers 1, 2, 3 was one of their least important features, and he even guessed that the Pythagorean doctrine of the significance of numbers was exoteric only.) For Peirce's definitions of Cenopythagorean

Page 248 Phenomenology and of phenoscopy see the Century Dictionary supplement of 1909, 2:978, 981.

37. See however CP 7.355ff.

38. See the index of Greek philosophical terms in the De Lacy edition (note 13 above) at p. 192.

39. The nearest approach was an interior scene later on the same trip, in Pisa Cathedral (6:578). Peirce at Arisbe later worked up his adventures in Thessaly into his major work of fiction, "A Tale of Thessaly" (MSS 1561, 1582, where "Topology" should be "Topography").

40. The last eight paragraphs have been pieced together from sources too numerous to cite­letters home, Coast Survey reports, Harvard catalogues, newspaper and journal articles, Walter Leaf's Trov and Strabo on the Troad, Schliemann's Troja, and scores of other works of reference. My explanation of the name of Peirce's Arisbe remains, however, pure hypothesis. It might at any time be shaken by the discoverv of a letter in which he says, for example: "We call it Arisbe because Juliette is so fond of the butterfly of that name. Do you remember that lovely enameled butterfly brooch she wore when you were here? It's an Arisbe." I expect no such shock, but, if it comes, it may not affect the rest of my essay, and may not be fatal to the hypothesis.

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THIRTEEN—Peirce and Leibniz

The best account of Peirce's life is still that of 1934 by Paul Weiss in the Dictionary of American Biography. In it he says that "Peirce placed himself somewhere near the rank of Leibniz."1 Part I of the present essay documents and qualifies that statement. Part II suggests a relationship more intimate than that of sharing a rank.

I

Weiss's authority, I believe, was a letter Peirce drafted, but apparently did not send, to his Chicago friend and admirer, Francis C. Russell, on November 15, 1904 (MS L 387). Nearly six weeks earlier, Peirce had received the September 29 issue of the Journal of Philosophy, which contained the first instalment of James's "A World of Pure Experience." Peirce had been struck by the sentence: "In Taine's brilliant book on 'Intelligence,' substitution was for the first time named as a cardinal logical function, though of course the facts had always been familiar enough."2 Taine's De l'intelligence had appeared in 1870. Peirce remembered having sent Taine in 1867 a copy of his Three Papers on Logic, in one of which he had held that substitution was not only a but the cardinal logical function. In any case, his priority was clear. It was not a question of originality, for earlier nominalists—Ockham, Hobbes, Leibniz—had held much the same view. Nor had he said that substitution was an elementary operation. More recently, he had analyzed it into two, insertion and omission. How could he bring all this to the attention of students of logic, without offending James or dispraising Taine? He could write a letter to the editor and ask him to have it fathered by somebody else. He was not free to write such a letter to Woodbridge, the editor of the Journal, so he had written it instead to Paul Carus, the editor of The Monist. Carus had had no difficulty in persuading Russell to let it appear over his name.3 Russell had written Peirce to this effect in a letter Peirce had just received, but which has not been preserved.

As to what you say about me [Peirce wrote in reply], partly seriously, strictly sub rosa I hold that a man of 65 well read in philosophy & a

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thinker himself must be a precious fool or be able to place himself better than anybody else can do, and I place myself somewhere about the real rank of Leibniz. Of course, Leibniz had the advantage of coming to a field into which no reapers had come.

Observe that: (I) This is a draft, not a letter actually mailed. (2) What Peirce says is "strictly sub rosa." (3) He ranks himself near Leibniz only in logic; perhaps more precisely, only in symbolic logic; not in mathematics or in metaphysics, not in philosophy or in science generally. (4) Even this he does only "partly seriously." If I seem to you to be suffering from a delusion of grandeur, he says in effect, that may be because you have taken us at our apparent ranks, and because in symbolic logic I followed hard upon Boole and De Morgan, but before Leibniz there was nobody, so that his apparent rank is much higher, and mine much lower, than our real ranks, which are not far apart.4

Besides this partly serious ranking of himself in relation to Leibniz, there is, however, a later and wholly serious ranking of himself in relation to Aristotle, Duns Scotus, and Leibniz. It also is in a letter draft—a draft sequence of sixteen pages, without beginning or ending, whose only date is that of a resumption on "June 19" after an interruption. My guess is that the person addressed was Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and the date June 18, 1909, a few months after Lowell had succeeded Eliot as president of Harvard University.5 Peirce says that it has been a [and here the sequence begins]

matter of so much concern to me to know just what my comparative powers in logic are that I have taken the utmost pains to estimate them correctly, and neither too high nor too low. Now I am well acquainted & deeply read in the whole literature of the subject in the widest sense & have so carefully studied the question that personally concerns me, that I feel sure I can have made no great mistake about it; and the only writers known to me who are in the same rank as I are Aristotle, Duns Scotus, and Leibniz, the three greatest logicians in my estimation, although some of the most important points escaped each. Aristotle was a marvellous man in many other directions; a great writer, a great zoologist, a great psychologist, a profound sociologist, and a very able practical politician. I only compare myself to him in respect to logical powers. Leibniz, too, was a sublime mathematician, as well as very able in all that concerns politics and jurisprudence. But I consider him only as a logician. (MS L 482)

Observe that: (1) This also is only a draft. No such letter has been found among the Lowell papers or elsewhere. (2) Again the ranking is only in logic, though clearly without any limitation to symbolic logic. (3) It is with a view to a question that concerns him personally that he has taken "the utmost pains" to estimate his comparative

Page 251 powers in logic "neither too high nor too low." The question, as appears from later pages of the draft sequence, is whether he has a continuing duty to devote himself so wholly to logic, with so little encouragement, and whether he is justified in asking for needed financial help, when scarcely anybody thinks him or his work worth helping along. More particularly, is he now justified in asking for a thousand dollars for the books he needs to complete his System of Logic, considered as Semiotic?

So far as the known evidence goes, it is only in these two passages in letter drafts, late in life, in respect to logic, and as bearing on a practical question, that Peirce places himself in or near the real rank of Leibniz.

Nearly a decade before he first placed himself there, however, he had been so placed by another logician, Ernst Schröder. The third volume of Schröder's lectures on the algebra of logic, that on the algebra and logic of relatives, had appeared early in 1895. Paul Carus wanted it adequately reviewed in The Monist. He could not ask Peirce to review it, because he was under instructions from Edward C. Hegeler, the publisher, to accept nothing further by Peirce. In September he asked Francis Russell to try it. Russell corresponded with Peirce about it, but even with Peirce's help it was too much for him. At the end of January 1896, Carus appealed to Schr6der himself, whom he knew personally. Schröder wrote Peirce on February 16:

In a six­pages letter I exhausted my eloquence trying to dissuade him from undertaking such a criticism himself, and to reconcile him (if possible) with you. I most seriously assured him, that however ungrateful your countrymen and contemporaneans might prove, your fame would shine like that of Leibniz or Aristoteles into all the thousands of years to come, and that he could do no better than openly to join your banner (however: difference of opinion as to necessitarianism allowed). (MS L 392)6

Observe that: (1) Schröder too was facing a practical problem: how to get his book competently reviewed in The Monist, given that by far the most competent reviewer was persona non grata to that quarterly's publisher and editor. (2) He therefore gave his ranking the form of an anticipation of the verdict of history. (3) But he too was careful to limit the ranking to logic. The question, as he put it in his letter to Carus, is Peirce's merits in the fields of his real work—aufseinen eigentlichen Arbeitsgebieten—and you mustn't be blinded to those merits by your quarrel with him off his beat, over the doctrine of necessity, as to which I am on your side.7

So much by way of evidence for Weiss's statement and by way of contexts and circumstances restricting its interpretation. The result leaves much to be desired. On the one hand, if we limit ourselves

Page 252 to logic, and if we remember that Schröder had reviewed the Begriffsschrift and had sent Peirce a copy of his review,8 we wonder at their taking no account of Frege. On the other hand, if we remember that Peirce and Leibniz have often been compared without limitation to logic or regard to rank,9 we wonder if Peirce himself felt the affinity or kinship; if he acknowledged any debt to Leibniz; if he had any sense of Leibniz as a continuing presence in his own philosophical development. A leading Leibniz scholar says that Peirce "knew Leibniz better than any other American of his time"10­—but how well was that? How much of Leibniz's work was accessible to him, early or late? What were his opportunities and occasions for study of it? How accurate was his understanding of it? With which of Leibniz's views did he express agreement or sympathy, which did he reject—and did he change his mind about any of them? Did he take up any of Leibniz's unfinished projects and carry them forward?

These are questions for a monograph, not for a short essay. Part II ignores the Frege question, and concerning the others it offers only such brief indications, in an approximately chronological order, as may encourage somebody competent in logic and mathematics to undertake the monograph.

II

The name of Leibniz was familiar in the Peirce household and in the Cambridge of his youth. His father and older brother were mathematicians before him. His father was a leading member of the Cambridge Scientific Club, which had several meetings on Leibniz. His teacher, Francis Bowen, another member, liked to find in Leibniz a priori anticipations of nineteenth­century experimental discoveries."11 Leibniz's vis viva was a topic of conversation in Cambridge and Boston intellectual circles.12 The first two hundred pages of his father's great treatise on Analytic Mechanics appeared in 1855, just before he entered Harvard College, and the complete volume in 1857, in the middle of his college career. It contained an appendix arguing for a return to Leibniz's position on the force of moving bodies. At the end of his junior year, in June 1858, the Atlantic Monthly had a masterly review article on Leibniz by Frederic H. Hedge.13 Leibniz's principle of continuity was brought into the debates over evolution that began soon after his graduation.14

In his sophomore, junior, and senior years, to the neglect of some of his courses, Peirce concentrated his studies on Kant's first critique and on the literature in the light of which it was to be understood; especially on Leibniz and Wolff on the one hand, and on Hobbes, Cudworth, Newton, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume on the other.15

Page 253 In the mid­1860's Peirce began compiling references for a Philosophical Vocabulary. He used a large "Universal Index" blankbook which his father had used for terms and references in mathematics, astronomy, and mechanics, and which Charles in the earlier 1860's had used for chemistry (MS 1 156). For Leibnizian terms his primary source was Erdmann's edition of 1840, and his secondary sources were Hamilton's Lectures on Logic and on Metaphysics and Hamilton's edition of the works of Thomas Reid. Among the terms for which he referred directly to the pages of Erdmann's edition were: clear and obscure; distinct and indistinct or confused; adequate and inadequate; intuitive and symbolic or blind or suppositive; primitive; nominal and real definition; true and false; necessary and contingent truth; the principle of logical continuity; the principle of individuation; haecceity; reality; infinite virtue; practical discipline.16 Besides his lifelong private use of this Vocabulary, Peirce drew upon it for his contributions to the Century Dictionary (1889­91) and its supplementary volumes (1909) and to Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1901­02).

As Peirce remembered it late in life, "my work became self­controlled early in the year 1867, when I already had in my mind the substance of my central achievement, the paper of May 14 of that year, 'On a New List of Categories'."17 His three categories provided the rationale for the division of signs into icons (at first called likenesses), indices, and symbols; of symbols into terms, propositions, and arguments; and of arguments into hypotheses, inductions, and deductions (CP 1.558­59). In a draft of the "New List" he explained his choice of the name "symbol" for the third kind of sign by quoting Leibniz's "celebrated passage'' on the chiliogon or polygon of a thousand equal sides as an example of the use of signs in the kind of thinking Leibniz calls "blind or symbolic" (MS 720).18

In his 1867 paper "Upon Logical Comprehension and Extension" Peirce described the "allied ... distinction of clear and distinct" as "very much more clear with Leibniz than with Descartes" and said the nearest earlier approach had been made by Duns Scotus. "A philosophical distinction emerges gradually into consciousness; there is no moment in history before which it is altogether unrecognized, and after which it is perfectly luminous" (CP 2.392). That may be read as Peirce's first application of Leibniz's principle of continuity; his three papers of 1868 on the validity of the laws of logic as his second; and his six of 1891­93 on the evolution of the laws of nature as his third.

When in 1871 in his review of Fraser's edition of Berkeley Peirce called Hobbes "the plusquam nominalis" (W2:475; CP 8.22) he was echoing Leibniz's preface to Nizolius (1670).19 Peirce had been a nominalist for seventeen years (1851­68),20 and though he was now

Page 254 declaring for realism, it was the realism of Scotus, the great virtue of which was that it was "separated from nominalism only by the division of a hair" (W2:467; CP 8.11). Leibniz had been a declared nominalist for seven years (1663­70), and was still a nominalist, but was now receding from Hobbes's extreme of making truth arbitrary and dependent on the human will, and was also receding from his earlier rejection of Scotus's principle of individuation. Peirce repeats Leibniz's point about Hobbes. Perhaps Leibniz assisted Peirce's first steps from nominalism toward realism.21

In 1876 appeared one of the last contributions to mathematics by Peirce's father Benjamin, "A New System of Binary Arithmetic," compared step by step with Leibniz's system.22 Darwin's,/Origin of Species, following upon the mechanical theory of heat, had inaugurated "the greatest mental awakening since Newton and Leibniz."23 Peirce's pragmatism, born in 1871 of that awakening, was presented in 1877­78 as the lesson in logic taught by these recent advances in science (CP 5.363f). But it was essentially a maxim or precept for attaining a third and higher grade of clarity of ideas, above and beyond Descartes's two grades as amended by Leibniz (CP 5.388­402).24 In that respect, it was a matter of going on from where Leibniz had left off.

In 1879, at the beginning of his quinquennium as lecturer in logic at The Johns Hopkins University, Peirce founded a Metaphysical Club. At its second meeting his pupil B. I. Gilman presented a translation of Leibniz's Meditationes de cognitione, veritate et ideis, the chief source for the pre­pragmatic grades of clarity, and Peirce resumed the attack on intuitive cognition begun in his papers of 1868. At the first meeting Gilman had read a paper on the doctrine of limits and there had been other papers on the differences between Leibniz's calculus and Newton's, on Zeno's paradoxes, and on the non­Euclidean conception of space.25

In January 1882 Peirce had a Brief Description of the Algebra of Relatives privately printed (CP 3.306­22); then discovered that his point pairs had been anticipated by Cayley in 1858; but "took a copy of it to the great algebraist Sylvester. He read it and said very disdainfully—Why it is nothing but my tumbral notation." In 1890 The Nation sent Muir's Theory of Determinants to Peirce for review,26 and

I was a little comforted ... by finding that what Sylvester called "my umbral notation" had first been published in 1693 by another man of some talent, named Godfrey William Leibniz. He himself speaks of it as "une ouverture assez extraordinaire".... The mathematics which results from following out this idea of Leibniz which I rediscovered for myself and applied to dichotomic mathematics is, in mathematics taken generally, now most usually called the theory of matrices. (MS 302)27

Page 255 In 1884 Peirce presented to the National Academy of Sciences a memoir (in collaboration with his student Joseph Jastrow) reporting experiments which he later described as showing

that there is no Differenz­Schwelle in sensation, or that if there be it is almost incredibly small. The philosophical interest of this consists in part in its bearing upon svnechism, or the principle of universal continuity, which does not mean that there is no discontinuity, which is involved in all existence. It was also shown by these experiments that a perception might be so slight (petite, Leibniz) that the greatest effort of attention under the most exceptionally favorable circumstances would fail to make the subject aware of it, so that he could answer the question which of two alternative characters it had, and yet if the subject was required to answer at random, in 60 per cent of the cases his answer agreed with the objective fact. (MS L 107)28

So Peirce's chief contribution to experimental psychology, as well as his mathematics, logic, and metaphysics, had Leibnizian affiliations.

From about 1890 onwards Peirce was engaged in a long series of interrelated projects with similar affiliations: elaborating and testing his synechistic metaphysics; writing a history of science; detailing and illustrating the logic of historical inquiry; studying non­Euclidean and especially hyperbolic geometry; reforming mathematical education; reconstructing geometry so as to move from the constitution of real space through topical and projective into metrical geometry; constructing a topical geometry (or general topics or topology or, as he preferred to call it, synectics) that should be adequate to true continuity as distinguished from the pseudocontinuity represented by Cantorian set theory; developing graphical logics, entitative and existential, as alternatives to the algebras of logic in which he had previously pioneered; defending infinitesimals against the doctrine of limits, as his father had before him; devising, like his father before him, a new system of binary or, as he preferred to call it, secundal arithmetic; revising his pragmatism to extirpate its "principal positive error," its nominalism (CP 8.216); proving it in its revised form by the aid of his existential graphs; backing it up with a phenomenology and a theory of the normative sciences, and rounding it out with a critical common­sensism (carrying his evolutionary version of innate ideas), a complete logic of vagueness, and a logic of religious belief consonant with the logic of science; sketching a triadic logic; and— his last ambition—writing a system of logic considered as semiotic.29

It is not surprising, then, that beginning in the 1890s there are characterizations of Leibniz that read like projections, and accounts of Leibniz's philosophy that make his own seem its legitimate issue.

Page 256

In 1899 he reviewed for The Nation the translation and exposition of the Monadology by Latta and La nouvelle monadologie by Renouvier and Prat.30 In the first review he lists the collected editions of Leibniz then available, and gives prominence to Gerhardt's seven volumes of the mathematical works, "which furnish the only key to Leibniz's thought." Of Latta's commentaries he complains that "it is a pity that the logic of so eminent and original a logician—life and soul, as it is, of his whole philosophy—should not have been more completely illustrated." Before examining "weaknesses of the logic of Leibniz'' unnoticed by Latta, he says "the reasoning of Leibniz was nearly, if not quite, of the highest order, being far more accurate than that of Kant or almost any metaphysician that can be named, and abounding in luminous, simplifying, and fecund methods." Since Leibniz was "a writer of papers and not of books," we meet his philosophy always in process, even in its most systematic formulations.

The Columbus of the subconscious mind, the discoverer of mechanical energy, the joint inventor of the differential calculus, and, more than all these, the great promulgator of the law of continuity (understood by himself to include historical continuity, and, as he was dimly aware, supposing an evolution of all things and all laws from a primal chaos), is a figure to excite the curiosity of thinking men of the present day.

In the second review, concerning the claim of Renouvier's "new monadology" to be regarded as "the natural perfecting of the philosophy of Leibniz," Peirce concludes:

Leibniz had more sides than one. If we consider him as above all else an extreme nominalist, and expunge from his celebrated paper all that tends in the opposite direction, the development of what would remain might not be very different from the nouivelle monadologie minus its free­will doctrine. But if we deem a man to be best represented by that one of his ideas which shows most prepotency, it is in the direction of the differential calculus that we must look for the genuine Leibniz, and in philosophy we must regard the law of continuity as most Leibnizian. This principle would at once do away with the isolated monads, and render the extravagant and unverifiable hypothesis of preestablished harmony superfluous by directly solving the riddle of the transitivity of causation, while it would form the basis of a philosophy in deepest unison with the ideas of the last half of the nineteenth century.

In drafting an exposition of his topology for the Popular Science Monthly in 1904, Peirce introduced his binary arithmetic, and remarked with humorous filial affection:

This system of secundals, like one or two other of the gimcracks of Leibniz, such as the differential calculus, determinants, the umbral

Page 257

notation, the principle of continuity, the principle of indiscernibles, the principle of sufficient reason, and so on, is of no little utility in reasoning, and I shall define it more precisely below. (MS 137:17)

The revision of his pragmatism involved, among other things, recognizing a fourth grade of clarity (CP 5.3), above and beyond the two of Descartes and Leibniz and the pragmatic third (which he now sometimes called "pragmatistic adequacy" [MS 649:3]); removing the false suggestion that each grade of clarity left its predecessors behind; withdrawing the criticism of Leibniz in "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" for attaching so much importance to formal definitions; and showing, as he had not previously done, how he had originally derived his pragmatism ''from a logical and non­psychological study of the essential nature of signs" (MS 137:20).

In a draft of what was to have been the third article of his 1905 series on pragmaticism,31before entering upon his most extended and careful criticism of Leibniz's Meditationes and locating the point at which its nominalism comes in, Peirce describes it as "that writing which earliest marked the glorious logical strength of Leibniz, when he was only 381/3 years old, an age at which no strong logician can have attained maturity" (MS 284:14). The sensitive reader does a bit of arithmetic here. Peirce, he finds, was 38 when "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" came out in the Popular Science Monthly in January 1878. It is the doctrine of that paper which Peirce is now revisinga doctrine of which "the principal positive error is its nominalism" (CP 8.216). So Peirce conceives that paper as occupying the same place in his own philosophical development that the Meditationes occupied in Leibniz's.

One more indication. Late in September of 1908, drafting a small Logic while waiting for copies of the October Hibbert Journal containing "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," Peirce again contrasted Leibniz with Kant, whose first critique was

the very chimaera of the history of philosophy, according to the tongues of fame ... but in reality nothing more portentous than a sickly little nanny­goat masquerading as a world­shatterer. Kant had been constituted by nature a great logician,—not, indeed, to be compared with Leibniz, who in his later years, in his infinitesimal calculus, in his law of continuity, even in his Théodicee, and still lesser flights, soared high above his earlier nominalism,—yet nevertheless a great logician .... [who by maladies here diagnosed] was prevented from ever thoroughly outgrowing his nominalism. (MS 609:10)

The sensitive reader readily substitutes: not, indeed, to be compared with Peirce, who in his later years, in his tychism and synechism, his synectics or topology of true continuity, his pragmaticism, his

Page 258 critical common­sensism, even in his "Neglected Argument," and still lesser flights, soared high above his earlier nominalism.

In assembling the foregoing indications, I have omitted nearly everything that can readily be found by consulting the indexes of the Collected Papers.32 I have also omitted nearly all the details of Peirce's analyses, reconstructions, criticisms, and arguments. I have said nothing about Boscovich and his followers as intermediaries between Leibniz and Peirce, and nothing directly about panpsychism. And I have completely passed over many matters of such recurrent concern and importance for Peirce as Leibniz's theory of space.

Conclusions would therefore not be in order. They must await the monograph. But I hope its author will try out the hypothesis these indications suggest: that, while accepting without change scarcely any of his positive doctrines, Peirce identified himself more closely with Leibniz than with any other thinker; that among the many grounds for the identification was that Leibniz alone of the great philosophers was mathematician, logician, historian, and physical scientist as well as metaphysician; and that not the least ground was that Peirce saw prefigured in Leibniz, as in no other philosopher, his own progress from nominalism toward realism.33

Notes

1. 14:403.

2. 1:541.

3. 15 (April 1905):294­95.

4. The humor becomes more obvious when he goes on to say that he is "by nature most inaccurate," that he is "quite exceptional for almost complete deficiency of imaginative power," and that whatever he amounts to is due to two things, first, "a perseverance like that of a wasp in a bottle,'' and second, "the happy accident" that he "early lit upon a METHOD of thinking, which any intelligent person could master." (The reference, I think, is to his discovery of his categories early in 1867. It was only then, as he later wrote Russell, that his work "became self­controlled" [io July 1908, MS L 387]. See note 17 below.) In a postscript he adds a third thing, that he has "always unceasingly exercized" his "power of learning new tricks"to keep himself "in possession of the childish trait as long as possible. That is an immense thing."

5. See "Peirce's Place in American Thought," p. 318 below (where I date the letter "about 1907" and conjecture that it was addressed to George A. Plimpton).

6. The English is Schr6der's.

7. Schroder's letter to Carus, dated 12 February 1896, is in the Archives of The Open Court Publishing Company at Southern Illinois University. The

Page 259 relevant passage reads in part: "Sie konnen sich daraulf verlassen, dass wie undankbar auch die Zeitgenossen und Landsleute desselben sein m6gen, der Ruhm von Charles S. Peirce gleich dem eines Leibniz oder Aristoteles in alle kunftigen Jahrtausende strahlen wird. Und Sie können sich kein besseres Denkmal setzen, als wenn Sic möglichst bald und mit vollen Segeln oder fliegenden Fahnen zu ihm iibergehen. [Ich meine hierbei nicht die Frage des Determinismus oder Peirce's Anti­ necessitarianism, in der ich auch zu seiner Opposition gehöre.]" For the sake of completeness, it should perhaps be added that, two decades earlier, in 1877, when most of his work in logic was still before him, Peirce had been ranked by W. K. Clifford nearly as high as he was by Schröder, and that Peirce associated the two judgments. On 29 October 1877, Edward L. Youmans, editor of the Popular Science Monthly, in which the first of Peirce's "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" was about to appear, wrote from London to his sister in the United States: "Charles Peirce isn't read much on this side. Clifford, however, says he is the greatest living logician, and the second man since Aristotle who has added to the subject something material, the other man being George Boole, author of The Latws of Thought." (This was two years before the Begriffsschrift.) The letter was published by John Fiske in his life of Youmans in 1894 (on pp. 338­40). Writing to his cousin Francis Blake in December 1896, Peirce mentioned Carus's search for a reviewer of Schröder, the appeal to Schr6der himself, and Schröder's reply "that nobody but Peirce ought to be thought of for the criticism, and that, let his countrymen think what they would, history would rank him as a logician by the side of Aristotle, as a mind of the first order. Clifford told Youmans substantially the same thing. Be that an overestimate or not'' (MS L 421). Peirce was appealing to his cousin for help in a financial crisis, so there was a practical occasion for linking the two judgments. Observe again the limitation to logic.

8. Peirce's copy of the review is in a bound volume of reprints from his library in the Harvard University Library, call number Phil 5005.4. It is marked in his hand: Formal Logic. Christine Ladd, one of his pupils, listed the Begriffsschrift and this review in the bibliography appended to her essay "On the Algebra of Logic" in Studies in Logic by members of the Johns Hopkins University (Boston, 1883), edited by Peirce, 70­71, item 17.

9. For example, by Philip Wiener in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 91 ( 1947):202.

10. Leroy E. Loemker in the second edition of his translation of Leibniz's Philosophical Papers and Letters (Dordrecht, 1969), p. 57.

11. The records of the Club are in the Harvard University Archives.

12. Philip Wiener, Evolution and the Foiunders of Pragimpatispm (Cambridge, MA, 1949), pp. 173f.

13. 2:14­32.

14. A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray (Cambridge, MA, 1959), p. 285.

15. The perspective in which he viewed Leibniz for the next five or six years appears from the three references to him in Peirce's oration of 1863. Philip Wiener, ed., Values in a Universe of Chance: Selected Writings of Charles S. Peirce (Garden City, 1958), p. 7; WI:105­6.

16. The particular works referred to, in the order in which they appear in Erdmann's edition: I. Disputatio metaphysica de principio individui (1663), 1­5; II. Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (1666) and the appendix thereto, 6­44; IX. Meditationes de cognitione, veritate et ideis (1684), 79­81; XI. De scientia universali seu calculo philosophico (n.d.), 82­85; LIX. Nouveaux essais (1703), 194­418; LXIII. De modo distinguendi phaenomena realia ab imaginariis (n.d.), 443­45.

Page 260 17. From a long letter of 10 July 1908 to Francis C. Russell (MS L 387), in the part not sent. See note 4 above.

18. Murray Murphey, The Developiment of Peirce's Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 1961), pp. 41 1­14, published the earlier part of MS 720 as draft 2. If he had found the continuation, the name of Leibniz would have appeared once in the best book on Peirce. The chiliogon passage is on p. 285 of Philip Wiener's Leibniz Selections (New York, 1951).

19. Erdmann edition, 69; Loemker translation, 128 (see note io above).

20. See "Peirce's Arisbe," p. 228 above.

21. See "Peirce's Progress," pp. 184­97 above. The criticisms of Don D. Roberts, in Transactions 6 (1970):67­83, are still to be answered; see "Peirce's Arisbe," note 5.

22. U.S. Coast Survey Report for 1876, Appendix No. 6, 81­82.

23. MS 620, published on pp. 24­29 of "Was there a Metaphysical Club in Cambridge?" where the quoted phrase is on 24.

24. H. S. Thayer, Meaning and Action (Indianapolis, 1968), p. 85, sees an application of Leibniz's identity of indiscernibles in the pragmatic criterion according to which beliefs differ if and only if some of their practical consequences differ.

25. See "Peirce at The Johns Hopkins," Appendix IV (not included here). Gilman's translation of the Meditationes was not published. There is a translation in Wiener's Liebniz Selections, pp. 283­90.

26. N 1:90.

27. See the whole context, and for an account of Peirce's contributions thereto, see Henry Taber, "On the Theory of Matrices," American Journal of Mathematics 12 (1890):338, 340n, 346n, 349n, 352­54, 386n.

28. For the memoir itself see CP 7.21­35.

29. The literature on these projects is too extensive to be cited here. Further progress will be possible now that Carolyn Eisele's edition of Peirce's mathematical writings has appeared (NEM).

30. N 2:186, 206.

31. The one promised at CP 5.440.

32. Trackers of Leibniz in the Collected Papers may like to know that John Dewey, not Peirce, wrote CP 6.364­366.

33. See note 21 above.

Page 261

FOURTEEN—Hegel and Peirce1

An essay on Hegel and Peirce might compare their philosophies without raising the question of influence; or it might inquire what influence, if any, Hegel exerted on Peirce, without carrying comparison beyond the points of discernible influence; or it might assess Peirce's accuracy, fairness and penetration as an interpreter and critic of Hegel; or it might simply assemble some of the biographical information that one would wish to have in hand before attempting any of those more philosophical tasks. That is, it might report what Peirce had to say of Hegel from time to time in the course of his own philosophical development—what Hegelian enterprises he thought of himself as resuming and continuing, what elements or features of Hegel's philosophy he esteemed or disesteemed as he understood them, and what elements or features of his own philosophy he viewed as roughly equivalent to or corrective of them. It is an essay of this last and most modest kind that I offer here, because that is as far as I have got.

Since in a short essay only a small part of the evidence can be presented, a plan of selection is needed. My plan is to focus (A) on the two principal occasions on which Peirce developed his philosophy at length in relation to Hegel's and (B) on what he took to be his own two principal contributions to philosophy, considered here in relation to Hegel. The two occasions were: (A1) his five contributions to the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1868­9, and (A2), thirty years later, his eight Cambridge Conferences of 1898. The two contributions were: (B1) his "New List of Categories" in 1867, and (B2), forty years later, the proof of pragmaticism that he was working out from 1903 to 1911. The four parts of my essay will come to these focuses in the order A2, B1, B2, A1. This plan will involve touching incidentally on his relations to the two men who, in his eyes, were the leading American Hegelians of his time: Josiah Royce in Parts I and III and W. T. Harris in Parts III and IV.

I

In Peirce's Cambridge Conferences of 1898 there was a notification implicit in his title, "On Reasoning and the Logic of Things," and

Page 262 explicit in his advance correspondence, that he was inviting comparison with Hegel. To William James, who had made the arrangements for the series, he wrote at first: "I think I will call the course On the Logic of Events. Thus it will be my tychism & synechism, but regarded from the point of view of Objective Logic."2 Here, from his next letter to James, are brief descriptions of lectures 4, 6, 7 and 8 as he first conceived them.

4. The Categories: Quality, Reaction, Representation or Mediation. This is the main thing I have been harping on from the beginning and shows wherein my objective logic differs from that of Hegel. 6. Objective Deduction. Shows how deduction works in the world, both in its simplest and more intricate forms. 7. Objective Induction and Hypothesis. Same for these modes of inference. 8. Creation. Shows how I would conceive the earliest steps of evo­ lution, beginning with the Germinal Nothing and continuing to the point where the special sciences attack the problem, took place. I am writing this last lecture first.3

In his notes for the Conferences, Peirce wrote: "It is not my intention at all to attempt a criticism of Hegel. I have not studied him deeply enough to do so. But certain remarks about him strike me, from time to time; and those I insert" (MS 943).

That was in Peirce's fifty­ninth year, and there is no evidence that in the remaining sixteen years of his life he made any deeper study.

With that disclaimer before us, our expectation will be that what Peirce says about Hegel will tell us at least on first consideration, rather more about Peirce than it does about Hegel.

One reason for the disclaimer, however, was that Peirce's audience was to include a philosopher who had studied Hegel deeply. That was Josiah Royce. Royce wrote James more than three years later: "As for thoughts, of late, I seem to myself to be on the track of a great number of interesting topics in Logic. Those lectures of poor C. S. Peirce that you devised will always remain quite epoch marking for me. They started me on such new tracks."4 Nearly a year after that, late in May of 1902, Peirce wrote Royce that if he would come to Arisbe, Peirce's country place on the Delaware, and spend the summer there, "you and I could pitch into the logical problems and I am sure I could make it well spent time for you, while with all you should teach me of Hegel etc. I am equally sure it would tremendously benefit my own work."5 But Royce replied that, attractive as the proposal was, he had engaged to teach that summer at Berkeley.6 So the one occasion when Peirce might have made a deeper study of Hegel did not come off.

Page 263 We shall briefly return to the Cambridge Conferences in Part II, paragraph (19). And we shall find reason in Parts II­IV to think that Peirce's study of Hegel had not been altogether lacking in depth, and that when the Cambridge Conferences are eventually published and examined in the light of all the drafts and notes, they will afford a basis for a detailed and fruitful comparison.

II

In 1905, in his sixty­sixth year, Peirce said that the one contribution he had made to philosophy was the "New List of Categories" he had published in 1867, in his twenty­eighth year (CP 8.213); and that the one contribution he had still to make was a proof of his pragmaticism, since that "would essentially involve the establishment of the truth of synechism" (5.415). That second contribution never reached print, and its reconstruction from the numerous surviving manuscripts is perhaps the chief remaining task of Peirce scholarship. But though for his first attempts at a definition of continuity he turned to Aristotle and Kant (6.120­126), Peirce the synechist thought of Leibniz and Hegel as his leading forerunners among philosophers, because it was they who, in their different ways, and Hegel more than Leibniz, had made continuity a central principle of philosophy (1.40­42).7 I shall return to that point in Part III. Meanwhile I trace the Hegelian bearings of the one contribution to philosophy that Peirce had already made.

Peirce in his twenties was an avid system­builder. A system of philosophy began, of course, with a system of logic, and the prime business of logic was establishing a table of categories.

Though Peirce in his published 1867 paper "On a New List of Categories" (1 .545­559) made no reference to older lists, we know from drafts of it that he had those of Aristotle, Kant and Hegel chiefly in mind.8 With the further assistance of later accounts we gather that the order of development was about as follows:

(1) He at first accepted Kant's list, as if from Sinai (4.2). (2) He began finding among the categories in Kant's list relations other than those that Kant himself pointed out. (3) About the same time, he detected a fallacy in Kant's logic that emancipated him from his previous idolatry (4.2). (4) It appeared to him that these other relations, if they belonged to a system of conceptions at all, belonged to a larger one than that of Kant's list (1.563; 4.2). (5) He devoted two years—"the two most passionately laborious years" of his life (1.288)—to the endeavor to make out what that larger system might be. Before trying various constructions of his

Page 264 own, he examined other systems. Preeminent among these was Hegel's. (6) In order not to overlook any conception that might belong to that larger system, he began compiling a philosophical vocabulary, using a large bound Universal Index notebook, which his father had previously used for mathematical terms, and which he himself had previously used for chemical terms (MS 1156). (7) In conjunction with the notebook, he worked up a card file, with at least one card for each conception, definition, problem, controversial issue, and position, and for each author and work, giving the abbreviation under which it was referred to on other cards. For Hegel his primary sources were his own copy of the second edition of the Encvclopddie and his own set of the posthumous edition of Hegel's Werke, in eighteen volumes (MS 1156a). (8) He also began a Logic Notebook to record the day­to­day explorations that should issue in the system of logic that should be built upon his own deduction of the categories. On an early page of the Notebook he wrote in 1865:

Hegel makes a great boast of the fact that his Logic developes its own method. Mine pursues a rational method of which the logic itself is but the deduction & proof. Moreover I am not forced to make my book unintelligible in order to follow mine, but on the contrary it is the very proceedure which perspicuity demands. Another thing; Hegel never deduces the necessity of considering what he considers before considering it; but I never introduce a distinction without having deduced the necessity for it.9

(9) After two years of intense pursuit of a larger system like Hegel's, he found himself with no satisfactory result. (10) It occurred to him that there might be two sets of categories. Besides the long list, as long or longer than Hegel's, there might be a short list, shorter than Kant's twelve or Aristotle's ten. And the short list might be the shortest, if not the only, way to the long one. (11) By a method which seemed to him to combine the opposite strengths of Kant's and Hegel's, and to avoid their opposite weaknesses, Peirce came out in 1867 with a list of three categories. He called them Quality, Relation, and Representation (1.555). (12) The deduction of the three categories in the "New List" of 1867 was backed up (if not superseded) in 1870 by a much simpler deduction in his "Logic of Relatives" (3.63, 144). (13) Years later, it dawned upon him that, though his three categories were quite disparate from those that Hegel called by that name, they did correspond nearly to Hegel's three stages of thought (8.267­268, 329).

Page 265 (14) He then began calling his three categories Quality, Reaction and Mediation (after Hegel's Vermittlung); or Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness (6.32; 4.3; 1.530). (15) To distinguish the categories of the short list from those of the long list, he called the former universal or formal, quantitative or valential, and the latter particular, qualitative or material (1.284; 8.213; MS 1338:40). He could then say: "In Hegel his long list which gives the divisions of his Encyclopaedia are his Particular Categories. His three stages of thought, although he does not apply the word Category to them, are what I should call Hegel's Universal Categories" (5.43). "In regard to these, it appears to me that Hegel is so nearly right that my own doctrine might very well be taken for a variety of Hegelianism ...." (5.38). (16) In sum, "My three categories ... resulted from two years incessant study in the direction of trying to do what Hegel tried to do. It became apparent that there were such categories as his. But bad as his are, I could substitute nothing radically better."10 That is, his short list resulted from the attempt to improve on Hegel's long list. And "I should not have attempted [that] had I thought Hegel's system satisfactory as a whole" (MS 1338:40). (17) Though his two­year quest of a larger system to take the place of Hegel's had failed, he never gave it up. He continued work on his Philosophical Vocabulary. He ransacked the sciences. He studied the scholastics and labored over Bonitz's monumental index to Aristotle. He wrote definitions for the Century Dictionary. He examined languages as remote as possible from the Indo­European, because it seemed to him that Hegel's Logic was in a sense a treatise on the German language.11 (18) On one occasion, Peirce ventured to commit himself to producing a longer list comparable with Hegel's Encyclopedia. At the end of 1893 he projected a twelve­volume work, The Principles of Philosophy; or, Logic, Physics, and Psychics, considered as a unity; in the Light of the Nineteenth Century. In the prospectus inviting subscriptions he said:

The principles supported by Mr. Peirce bear a close affinity with those of Hegel; perhaps are what Hegel's might have been had he been educated in a physical laboratory instead of in a theological seminary. Thus, Mr. Peirce acknowledges an objective logic (though its movement differs from the Hegelian dialectic), and like Hegel endeavors to assimilate truth got from many a looted system.

And he described the eleventh volume as follows:

Vol. XI. A Philosophical Encyclopaedia. The philosophy of continuity leads to an objective logic, similar to that of Hegel, and to triadic

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categories. But the movement seems not to accord with Hegel's dialectic, and consequently the form of the scheme of categories is essentially different. Systematic perfection seems to be for the present neither requisite nor attainable; but something like Hegel's Encyclopaedia is proposed. (CP 8, pp. 283 and 285)

There were not enough subscribers, the project was abandoned, and Peirce was not obliged to deliver on that commitment. The next occasion was that of the Cambridge Conferences of 1898, with which we began, and to which we now return.

(19) Ideally, Peirce thought, the categories of the longer list should stand in some determinable relation to those of the shorter list. He tried various ways of generating the longer out of the shorter. Here is a passage from his notes for the Cambridge Conferences:

Were I to take the categories of First, Second, and Third, and to classify in their order all the forms of secondness, and then all those of thirdness, connecting each with the preceding by a process of tran­ sition,—a work which, by the way I have performed,—I should be developing my doctrine as it seems to me very much in the spirit and method in which Hegel developes his Encyclopfidie. But having gone through with that work and studied its result as thoroughly as I have been able to do, I am convinced that whatever utility it may have,—it does not proceed according to the true logic. The second does not spring out of the first directly; but firstness looked at from a second point of view gives birth to a thirdness and the secondness comes out of the thirdness. This is the true logic of events. (MS 943)

(20) In the end, Peirce concluded that the longer list was incompletable. It was not derivable from the shorter in any a priori fashion. One had to wait on experience and on the progress of the sciences. Advance derivations, like that of his sixty­six classes of signs, were only heuristic devices, to guide the search. The best we could hope for was that as new categories were added to the long list, or took the place of old ones, they would yield to analysis in terms of the short list.12

(21) Nevertheless, in presenting successive reformulations of his short list, Peirce served notice from time to time that he did not hold it to be "the sole true set of logico­metaphysical categories." For example, in 1906 he wrote of himself in the third person: "It is merely the only set the study of which he has sufficiently matured for publication. He has had another list under active advisement for more than forty vears" (MS 283:196); that is, from 1865 or earlier until 1906.

With respect, then, to the "one contribution to philosophy" that Peirce had made early in life (8.213), I conclude that he associated

Page 267 with Hegel the original two­year quest of the longer list that had led to the short one, the short list itself, the more than forty years of further searching for the longer list, and the successive reformulations of the short one to which he was thereby led.

III

Turning now to "the one contribution of value" that in 1905 he had still to make, the proof of pragmaticism, I repeat that the value of the proof was to lie in its essentially involving the establishment of the truth of synechism (5.415) and that Leibniz and Hegel were the chief precursors of the synechism. Leibniz had had a mathematical grasp of the principle of continuity which Hegel had lacked, but Hegel had done more to make it a central principle of philosophy; and Peirce hoped to take up and unite the two roles, that of Leibniz and that of Hegel, at a later stage.

In a draft of his review of Royce's The World and the Individual Peirce wrote that Hegel's "presentations of half a dozen of most fundamental conceptions of philosophy ... were of the utmost service to thought."

The first of these was the conception of mediation, culminating in that of continuity, which had, it is true, been far more distinctly apprehended by the mathematicians since Leibniz and Newton than he ever apprehended it, but which had been totally ignored by philosophers generally.13

One of Leibniz's successors was Boole, and Boole's algebra of logic was the point at which Peirce had come in (3.1­19). He saw relations between it and Hegel that were not obvious to others. Reviewing in 1894 the translation of Spinoza's Ethic by White and Stirling, he wrote:

Mathematical reasoning consists in thinking how things already remarked may be conceived as making a part of a hitherto unremarked system, especially by means of the introduction of the hypothesis of continuity where no continuity had hitherto been thought of.... Boole discovered that if he simply assumed I to signify what is, and o what is not... he could without any further assumption express the premises of a syllogism as two equations from which, by ordinary algebraical rules, the conclusion could be deduced. This was a genuine, living thought, and as such is quite beyond the appreciation of seminary logicians. Its value consisted in its bringing the conceptions of being and nothing into relation with the system of numbers, and especially exhibiting them as the mere punctual terminations of the continuous quantity between them. This last part of the idea coincides with that of Hegel's Becoming, though this latter, besides its inconvenient lug­

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ging in of Time, is less useful as being less diagrammatic. However, Hegel's reasoning and Boole's were essentially the same, and this was nothing but an example of the ordinary mathematical proceeding.14

A book will sometime be written on Peirce's synechism in relation to Hegel's, after the much needed book on Peirce's synechism itself. But what about the pragmaticism, and what about the proof of it, both in relation to Hegel?

The first thing to say about the pragmaticism is that James saw its Hegelian affinity from the beginning. In lecture notes for his 1876­77 course in physiological psychology, he wrote:

... the logical idealists ... Hegel, Green and C. S. Peirce ... point to the fact that as a rule our sensations are merely contributors to our opinions about things ... There is an inevitable drift in thought, a logical destiny precipitated out of all experience, which takes up every sensation and makes it contributory to its ends.... This conclusion to which all sensations, all men, all opinions converge is inevitable, if time and experience enough are given, and is "the Truth."15

The second thing to say is that the pragmaticism to be proved had undergone extensive revisions. It had been purged of its "principal positive error ... its nominalism" (8.216). The requisite antecedent step had been taken in 1897, when Peirce (at 3.527 ff.) repudiated "the nominalistic view of possibility" which he had held until 1896 and "explicitly" returned to "the Aristotelian doctrine of a real possibility. This was the great step that was needed to render pragmaticism an intelligible doctrine."16 Having admitted the reality of can be's and would be's, he had been led to put restrictions upon the principles of contradiction and of excluded middle (8.216)restrictions that he associated with Hegel's.17 The third grade of clarity was no longer the highest (5.3). And in numerous other respects his pragmatism had become so different from James's, Schiller's, or Dewey's, that he could say that it was ''closely allied to the Hegelian absolute idealism" (5.436) and that "Royce's conception in The World and the Individual ... comes nearer to the genuine upshot of pragmaticism than any exposition that a pragmatist has given,that any other pragmatist has given" (MS 284:5). So that it was not without Peirce's encouragement that Royce—"the greatest of living metaphysicians" (MS 284:92) though still in Peirce's eyes an Hegelian—began about 1906 to call himself an "absolute pragmatist."18

The third thing to say—and this will bring us to the proof—is that Peirce did not finish revising his pragmaticism and then proceed to prove it. His every attempt to construct the proof led him into further revisions of the pragmaticism. It was no longer—if it had ever been a simple take­it­or­leave­it maxim for attaining the grade of clearness

Page 269 of ideas that characterizes the scientific method. It was a doctrine, connected with other doctrines in a system, and therefore susceptible of proof (8. 91). And the proof was not a simple demonstration. The doctrine was not true by arbitrary definition; it was not tautologically or trivially true. To prove it was to bring it to the test of indubitable experience19 and only the system to which it belonged could do that, just as only the system could locate and explicate the doctrine in the first place.

So the question of the Hegelian bearings of what Peirce variously called his proof (5.415; 8.209) or defence (4.534) of, his apology (4.530) or argument (5.470, 474; 8.209, 210, 21 I) for, pragmaticism, becomes the question of the Hegelian bearings of the revisions of the system during the period (1900­1913) in which it was being focused on the construction of the proof. That is a question for a book. Only a few brief indications can be offered here. And since major revisions of the system are reflected in revisions of Peirce's classification of the sciences, I first present in tabular form his two principal classifications.

Imagine being asked, with these tables as reminders, to single out the most conspicuous constant feature of Peirce's philosophy over the sixty years that he devoted to it, and then to put beside that the most conspicuous change. One could scarcely make better reply than this. The constant was his conception of philosophy as research science, intermediate between mathematics and the special sciences, in an "ontological line"21 in which each science borrows principles from the sciences above it and data from those below it. And the change was that, whereas until the turn of the century he recognized only logic and metaphysics as having the research character, and did not conceive logic as normative, from around the turn of the century onward logic was for him a normative science, with two others, ethics and esthetics, above it, and above all three of them a new science which for a time he called phenomenology. Until then, ethics had been down among the practical sciences (or more recently in part under the special science of sociology), and esthetics had been nowhere.

Just how logic became for Peirce a normative science is a story still to be told. But once that change had taken place, the theory of the categories could no longer be the work of logic itself, but must be presupposed by it, and indeed by the prior normative sciences of esthetics and ethics also. But why assign it to a new science which should have that for its sole business, and why call that science phenomenology?

A decade before the change, Peirce had assigned to mathematics the proposition that first, second and third—something, other, and medium or middle—are irreducible categories, and that there is no

PEIRCE'S TWO PRINCIPAL CLASSIFICATIONS OF THE SCIENCES

(Ignoring nearly all the variants of each, and omitting the subdivisions of mathematics, metaphysics, psychics, physics, science of review, and practical science) 20

Page 271 fourth. "In this mathematical proposition (for such it is shown to be,) you have all logic and all metaphysics in a nut­shell." He gave Sylvester credit for importing into mathematics from chemistry "the method of graphs" that made its truth more evident, but for the proposition itself, and the argument for it, he rightly claimed priority. "Of course, Hegel preceded us both; but he was not exact enough" (MS 915; cf. CP 3.63, 144, 469 f.).

The need remained, however, for a science that should observe the phenomena found in every experience and draw the simplest generalizations from them (7.538). Just before the change Peirce was calling this new science "High Philosophy" (7.526); just after it, in 1902, Phenomenology (1.280; 2.197).22 "This is the science which Hegel made his starting­point," said Peirce in the first of his Harvard Lectures of 1903 (5.37), and it was from this science that the proof of pragmaticism, to which those eight lectures were devoted, took its start. In Peirce's system, as in Hegel's, phenomenology did not depend upon any other positive science; but in Peirce's, though not in Hegel's, it did depend, to its great advantage, upon the conditional or hypothetical science of pure mathematics (5.40).

Thirty­five years earlier, in 1868­9, in the same three numbers of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in which Peirce's own system was first presented, there was an analysis of Hegel's Phenomenology by the editor, W. T. Harris, and a partial translation, in three instalments, by Harris and Brockmeyer. Though Peirce thanked Harris at the time,23 until the 1890s he almost never referred to any work of Hegel's but the Encyclopedia, the larger Logic, and the Propaedeutic.

In 1890, however, Harris published his major work, Hegel's Logic: A Book on the Genesis of the Categories of the Mind, in which he devoted four chapters to the Phenomenology, under the title of "Hegel's 'Voyage of Discovery'."24 After that, Peirce began associating the Phenomenology with the Logic as "rich mines of philosophic thought."25 By 1900, he is ready to call the Phenomenology Hegel's "greater masterpiece" (8.112)—greater, that is, than the Logic. And by 1903 it is ''a work ... perhaps the most profound ever written" (MS 478:28), and Hegel is "in some respects the greatest philosopher that ever lived" ( .524). It pleased Peirce that his new science should bear the name of a work that had risen so high in his esteem.

For several years Peirce had been half playfully calling his three categories Kaino­ or Ceno­Pythagorean (7.528; 2.87). In the same vein he sometimes called his new science Cenopythagorean Phenomenology.26 And at least once he called his revised pragmatism Cenopythagorean Pragmaticism (5.555*). It begins to appear, therefore, that the contribution he had still to make, the proof of pragmaticism, was a further development of the one he had already made in his "New List of Categories." And the Hegelian bearings of the

Page 272 first contribution are a chief part of the Hegelian bearings of the second.

In drafting a syllabus to accompany his Lowell Lectures in the fall of 1903, Peirce went so far as to insert another Hegelian science between Phenomenology and the Normative Sciences.

Phenomenology studies the Categories in their forms of Firstness. It ought to be followed by a science which should study them in a general way as they present themselves throughout common experience. This seems to be approximately, though not exactly, what Hegel intended in his Encyclopddie. This study may be termed, in advance of any serious undertaking of it, Encvclopedeutics. Then, and only then, should succeed the Normative Sciences (MS 478:41).

In drafting his lecture on the normative sciences as a further part of his argument for pragmaticism in the Harvard Lectures in the spring of 1903, Peirce had begun by remarking that the three categories of his previous lectures on phenomenology were of course no discovery of his.

If they were, that circumstance would be an almost conclusive proof of the falsity of the list .... No, all that I have done is to give an exposition of them which, I hope, puts them in a clearer light than that of Hegel.

The first year of my own serious study of philosophy, in 1856, fortyseven years ago, was devoted to esthetics. My good angel must have prompted me to take up first that branch of philosophy which ought immediately to follow the study of the categories, and to study it in a German book which though it was too old to be sensibly influenced by Hegel27 was nevertheless one of those books in which the three categories, in an almost unrecognizable disguise, plaved a great part. It was Schiller's asthetische Briefe,—a very good book for an infant philosopher. (MS 310:4­5)

In another draft, he had said that Schiller's book had been his introduction to phenomenology as well as to esthetics (MS S80).

Passing over ethics, for which Peirce does not look to Hegel (MS 893), and coming again to logic, I remark first that, besides conceiving it now as a normative science, dependent on ethics, as ethics is on esthetics, he explicitly identifies it with semiotic, the general theory of signs, and therefore as including two disciplines from which he had usually, though not always, distinguished it. In an essay of about 1896 called "The Logic of Mathematics: An Attempt to develop my categories from within," he had written (1.444):

The term "logic" is unscientifically by me emploved in two distinct senses. In its narrower sense, it is the science of the necessary con­

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ditions of the attainment of truth. In its broader sense, it is the science of the necessary laws of thought, or, still better (thought always taking place by means of signs), it is general semeiotic, treating not merely of truth, but also of the general conditions of signs being signs (which Duns Scotus called grammatica speculativa), also of the laws of the evolution of thought, which since it coincides with the study of the necessary conditions of the transmission of meaning by signs from mind to mind, and from one state of mind to another, ought, for the sake of taking advantage of an old association of terms, be called rhetorica speculativa, but which I content myself with inaccurately calling objective logic, because that conveys the correct idea that it is like Hegel's logic.

But when logic became a normative science, logic in the broader sense became normative semiotic, consisting of normative speculative grammar, normative critic, and normative speculative rhetoric or methodeutic. Not only, therefore, was it necessary to move category­theory up into a higher discipline, but, since objective logic, whether Hegel's or Peirce's, is not normative, it was necessary to move it down into a lower one—either into metaphysics or into a new discipline placed tentatively between logic and metaphysics, as encyclopedeutics was between phenomenology and normative science. Here is how Peirce approached the problem is his Minute Logic of 1902 (2.111):

With Speculative Rhetoric, Logic, in the sense of Normative Semeotic, is brought to a close. But now we have to examine whether there be a doctrine of signs corresponding to Hegel's objective logic; that is to say, whether there be a life in Signs, so that—the requisite vehicle being present—they will go through a certain order of development, and if so, whether this development be merely of such a nature that the same round of changes of form is described over and over again whatever be the matter of the thought or whether, in addition to such a repetitive order, there be also a greater life­history that every symbol furnished with a vehicle of life goes through, and what is the nature of it.

"... a doctrine of signs corresponding to Hegel's objective logic ... a life in signs...." That there is such a doctrine and such a life, Peirce doubts not; and much of his own life is devoted to giving an account of them. But the pragmaticism itself, in the strict sense, is not that doctrine but a prior doctrine of normative semiotic which it presupposes and of which it is a further development. To say what that prior doctrine is, even roughly, we should have to pass in review the phenomenology, the normative sciences with their sttuinmtul bonum, and then the semiotic in detail, with attention first to the triadic structure of sign­action, of signs in actu, of semiosis, as

Page 274 distinguished from dyadic or dynamical action (5.472, 484). Then more particularly to symbols, and within symbols to arguments, and within arguments to abductions, since "the question of Pragmatism is the question of Abduction" (5.197). So much under Speculative Grammar. Then, under Critic, to "the bottom question of logical Critic" (6.475; cf. 5.196)—that of the validity of abduction. Then, under Methodeutic, to the strategy of abduction, deduction, and induction as successive stages in a repeating but advancing cyclestages corresponding very roughly to Hegel's three. Along the way, we should have to come to grips with the semiotic of modalities, and especially with that of the several degrees of possibility, since the acknowledgment of real or objective possibility "was the great step that was needed to render pragmaticism an intelligible doctrine."28 In that connection, we should have to make out just how the proof of pragmaticism "would essentially involve the establishment of synechism" (5.415). All this for a rough account of what pragmaticism is. For a more precise account, in which alone the full cogency of the proof would emerge, we should have to follow Peirce's system of existential graphs—"my chefd'wauvre ''29—in its first discovery and gradual development, and more particularly those parts of it that he designed to deal with the modalities.

This would take a volume or two.30 We must content ourselves here with the most essential point, the triadic (object­sign­interpretant) structure of thought as sign­ interpretation, sign­action or semiosis. "A Sign is anything which is related to a Second thing, its Object, in respect to a Quality, in such a way as to bring a Third thing, its Interpretant, into relation to the same Object, and that in such a way as to bring a Fourth into relation to that Object in the same form, ad infinitulm" (2.92; cf. 2.203). It was with reference primarily to this triadicity of thought—the open sesame to all that followed, including the synechism—that Peirce began about 1890 to say that he was working on a doctrine, a formula, a method, a system more general than Hegel's, of which Hegel's dialectic was a special case; and that the general doctrine led more securely and clearly than the special one to the true conception of continuity.31 But alas! the general doctrine was never finished, because

I am, as far as I know, a pioneer, or rather a backwoodsman, in the work of clearing and opening up what I call seimiotic, that is, the doctrine of the essential nature and fundamental varieties of possible semiosis; and I find the field too vast, the labor too great, for a first comer (5.488).

Nevertheless, with his intent and aim in mind, we may put a more charitable construction on his many overemphatic criticisms of He­

Page 275 gel, which might otherwise strike us as hostile and arrogant. They are all in the family, and full of the affectionate and humorous hyperbole of free expression of family differences. And they assume no infallibility on the critic's part. "Hegel, of course, blunders monstrously, as we shall all be seen to do" (8.268).

We are prepared also for the discovery that Peirce was best understood, in this crucial respect, not by other pragmatists at home or abroad, but by Josiah Royce, the philosopher of his acquaintance who, after W. T. Harris, had studied Hegel most deeply. In 1913, in a series of four lectures in the second volume of The Problem of Christianity, Royce developed Peirce's "doctrine of signs" at length, applied it to metaphysics, and stated its relation to Hegel in the most important paragraph so far written on "Hegel and Peirce." It is noteworthy, however, that he drew his understanding of the doctrine not from Peirce's later writings on the subject, most of them unpublished, nor from the pragmatism papers of 1877­78, which made almost nothing of it, but from the "New List'' of 1867 and the three articles of 1868­9 on the sign­theory of cognition in Harris's Journal of Speculative Philosophy (5.213­357)—four papers whose significance Royce had not until recently appreciated.32 In the latter half of the paragraph just mentioned he says that

Peirce's concept of interpretation defines an extremely general process, of which the Hegelian dialectical triadic process is a very special case. Hegel's elementary illustrations of his own processes are ethical and historical. Peirce's theory of comparison is quite as well illustrated by purely mathematical as by explicitly social instances. There is no essential inconsistency between the logical and psychological motives which lie at the basis of Peirce's theory of the triad of interpretation, and the Hegelian interest in the play of thesis, antithesis, and higher synthesis. But Peirce's theory, with its explicitly empirical origin and its very exact logical working out, promises new light upon matters which Hegel left profoundly problematic.

Royce sent Peirce a copy of The Problem of Christianity, and Peirce replied in a letter which Royce received in time to read it to his seminar on October 28, 1913, and in which, as he later wrote, what few interpreters of Peirce were ever able to write, "my interpretation of him gained on the whole, his approval."33

IV

At this point a reader may well ask, if Royce found it profitable to go back to those early papers, would it not be still better to go back to the very beginning and pick up in chronological order all the evidences of Peirce's awareness of Hegel? I assure such a reader that

Page 276 I could not have written the present essay without first attempting just that. And further, that I have used but a small fraction of the evidence collected—less than a tenth of it—and that many of the most important and revealing things about "Hegel and Peirce" remain to be said. They can best be said in a book­length monograph on chronological lines.34 To convey some idea of what the bare bones of such a chronological monograph would look like, I conclude with a few of the entries for a six­year period near the beginning. This will take us through the year of his contributions to the Journal of Speculative Philosophy and the two of his correspondence with its editor, W. T. Harris.

1863

Nov. 12. Peirce presents to a reunion of the Cambridge High School Association "The Place of Our Age in the History of Civilization." Extensive extracts are published in the Cambridge Chronicle for Nov. 21. There is a key sentence on Hegel.35 [Thirty years later, Peirce writes: "On lines laid down by [Kant], I began to think for myself, setting out, as he did, from Formal Logic. That path inevitably led to an objective logic; and the first thing I printed was a Hegel­like paper on the philosophy of history, with predictions as to the subsequent course of events. I did not recognize the affinity of my thought to Hegel's, because in all details it was entirely different, and because his weak logic and pretentiousness repelled me then more than now."36]

1865

Spring. In his Harvard University Lectures "On the Logic of Science" Peirce seems to have planned one on Hegel's logic (MS 340:6) but not to have given it. In Lecture III he illustrates boundary problems by a sheet of paper of which part is red and part green. "It seems to me ... that the boundary is both red and green;—the distinction between them vanishing at this point. And this is the answer which was made by Hegel and which mathematicians give to similar questions" (MS 342:[33]). In Lecture VIII he objects to the contamination of logic with anthropology and psychology. "Kant's definition, which is the best yet given, is nearly freed from all such admixture. And perhaps the strongest point of Hegelianism is the purely impersonal character which it attributes to the unity of apperception. In this respect I follow Hegel; but I do so without budging from the critical standpoint" (MS 346:2).37

Dec. 11. Peirce writes to Charles Eliot Norton, editor of the North American Review, to ask if a reviewer has been engaged for Stirling's The Secret of Hegel. "If not, I would like to write about two pages of fine print on the subject if you will admit it."38 But Norton has already

Page 277 engaged Henry James the elder, and James's review appears in the January 1866 issue. [Three years later, James publishes The Secret of Swedenborg, and Norton has Peirce review that.]

Dec. 14. Peirce writes in his Logic Notebook the paragraph quoted above in Part II, paragraph (8).

1866

Nov. 21. In his Lowell Institute Lectures on "The Logic of Science; or, Induction and Hypothesis," Lecture IX contains what may be regarded as a draft of the "New List of Categories." In this draft Peirce argues that "Hegel is wrong in making Negation enter so early as he does into Logic" (MS 357:12).

Not long before or after this, Peirce writes the draft numbered 2 by Murray Murphey. This contains a crucial paragraph on Hegel.39

1866­1867?

In still another draft of the "New List," intended as Chapter I of a treatise on The Logic of Science (MS 769), Peirce begins by arguing for a return to the earlier and more general conception of Vorstellung or representation as against the restricted senses in which these terms have been used by Kant, the Hegelians, and Hamilton. [This is the most important single clue to the derivations of (1) the third of the three categories of the "New List," (2) the conception of logic as semiotic, and (3) the conception of semiosis as a more general process of which Hegel's dialectic is a special case.]

1867

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the first philosophical journal in English, begins publication in St. Louis. Peirce subscribes. The first volume includes translations from Leibniz, Fichte, Schelling, and Schopenhauer; an essay on Hegel's aesthetics; the first four instalments of an Hegelian "Introduction to Philosophy" by the editor, W. T. Harris; and an article by Harris on "Paul Janet and Hegel."

March 29. Peirce acquires a copy of the second edition of Hegel's Encyclopddie and inscribes on the flyleaf the Greek of Parmenides's saying about those who are persuaded that to­be and not­to­be are the same, yet not the same.40

November. Peirce draws up a "Specimen of a Dictionary of the Terms of Logic and the Allied Sciences, A—ABS" based on the notebook and card file described above in Part II, paragraphs (6) and (7). He quotes Hegel on abstract freedom, and suspects him of confusing abstraction and generalization with denial "when he says that being and nothing are the same because they are equally the absence of all determination" (MS 1174:24, 29­30).

Page 278 Dec. Io. In acknowledging receipt of Peirce's Three Papers on Logic, the third of which is "On a New List of Categories," Harris calls attention to passages on the categories in his own "Introduction to Philosophy" (L 183).

1868

Jan. I. Peirce replies to Harris that he has read the "Introduction" as far as published (i.e. the first three instalments) and thinks it very good yet totally disagrees, since he acts wholly in the interest of the "understanding" and does not believe in the "reason" of the Hegelian school. ''I admit there is music in the logic of Hegel, but that is all I discover there." He has written Harris "a long letter relative to Hegel" but decided not to trouble him with it.41

Jan. 24. Peirce writes Harris criticizing a paragraph in his article on "Paul Janet and Hegel."42 Harris publishes the criticisms and his replies under the title "Nominalism versus Realism"—the nominalism of Peirce versus the realism of Hegel as interpreted by Harris (6.619­624).

April. The North American Review has a long article on Hegel by J. E. Cabot, concluding that "all philosophy at present must take this road, and the first question to be put to any new attempt is, whether it has got as far as this or not so far." [Peirce says later that among his elders it was Cabot from whom he had got most encouragement.43]

April 9. Having been invited by Harris to consider how on his nominalistic principles the validity of the laws of logic could be other than inexplicable (5.318), Peirce sends the first of three articles, which appear in the second, third and fourth issues of the second volume of the Journal. In the third issue there is also a continuation of the controversy with Harris in which Peirce defends his definition of Pure Being as seeming to be "in accord with the explanations of almost all, if not all, the commentators and expositors of Hegel" (6.628).

The same three issues of the Journal contain an analysis of Hegel's Phenomenology by Harris in two instalments and a partial translation by Harris and Brockmeyer in three instalments.

Though in his three principal articles Hegel is named only three times (5.310, 330, 332), Peirce's letters to Harris show that Hegel is on his mind throughout. The thesis of the articles is that all thought is dialogic, or in signs, or representational, and therefore triadic; that none of it is dyadic in the way that a non­representational intuition, sensation, perception, conception—Anschatluung, Empfindung, Wahrnehmung, Begriff—might be supposed to be. There are no first or last cognitions—no "first impressions of sense," no intuited first principles, no final comprehensions. Every thought interprets

Page 279 another, and is interpreted by still another. We are in thought, not thoughts in us. Moreover, sign­interpretation is irreducibly triadic; it is no synthesis, say, of a dyadic perception and a dyadic conception; nor can it be analyzed into dyadic relations of any kind. [It is this irreducible sociality, triadicity and continuity of the process of interpretation that Royce later seizes as the key to Peirce's early papers and thereby to the whole of his philosophy.44 And as we have seen (1865 Spring), Peirce associates it, and the non­psychological logic that results, with "the strongest point of Hegelianism."]

May 13. Peirce objects to Harris's assumption that his argument is anti­Hegelian. If thinkers had to be divided between Hegelians and non­Hegelians, "I should come on the same side as Hegel, because I am idealistic."45

June 11 Peirce to Harris: "I am most pleased at your giving us the Phanomenologie."46

Nov. 30. Peirce to Harris: In proof­sheets of the second article, "I struck out the paragraph referring to Hegelians. I intended no slur on them, or any appeal to the ignorant against them. What I meant was to protest respectfully but energetically to them against a certain tendency in their philosophy" (8.246).

1869

Dec. 8. Peirce ends his last letter to Harris: "I should like to write a systematic series of essays on logic—objective & subjective—and take say just two sheets [32 pages] in every number of the Journal, and enter into an arrangement with a publisher here to purchase a certain number of copies of each one on such terms as would at once be advantageous to the Journal & yet render it easy for me to find a publisher. The whole to be bound as a book when it was finished. But this is only a passing dream."47

[In respect of publication in Harris's Journal it was a passing dream; but in other respects it remained with him throughout his life, and he never ceased working toward its fulfilment.]

EPILOGUE

In postponing all questions of influence, of critical comparison, and of accuracy of interpretation, and confining myself to the Hegelian "bearings" of two focal occasions and two focal contributions, I have taken my metaphor from the first year of Peirce's professional life— the year 1859­1860, just after his graduation from Harvard College. He spent that year with two field parties of the Coast Survey, the first on the Maine coast near Machias, the second on the Gulf coast around the delta of the Mississippi; the first on land, the second in large part at sea. With that experience of triangulation behind him,

Page 280 it was natural for him to locate his own changing positions in relation to the nearest eminent landmarks. And the most eminent of the nearest was Hegel.

Notes

1 Though I shall not refer to them, three previous essays deserve mention. H. G. Townsend, "The Pragmatism of Peirce and Hegel," Philosophical Review 37 (1928):297­303; Matthew J. Fairbanks, "A Note Concerning Peirce's Debt to Hegel," New Scholasticism 36 (1962):219­24; Antonio Santucci, "Peirce, Hegel e la dottrina delle categorie,'' in Incidenza di Hegel, ed. Fulvio Tessitori (Naples: Morano, 1970), pp. 965­84.

2. Peirce to William James, 13 December 1897, James Papers, The Houghton Library, Harvard University.

3. Peirce to James, about 19 or 20 December 1897, James Papers. (The first two pages are missing.) For further details, see Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1935), 2:418­21. See also CP 1.622. For the "prime difference" between Peirce's objective logic and Hegel's in the Conferences as delivered, see 6.218.

4. The Letters of Josiah Royce, ed. John Clendenning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), P. 422.

5. Peirce to Royce, 28 May 1902, in Royce on the Human Self; by James Harry Cotton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), P. 301.

6. Royce to Peirce, 20 June 1902, ibid., p. 302.

7. See "Peirce and Leibniz," p. 256 above.

8. Murray Murphey, The Development of Peirce's Philosophey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 412. See also Donald E. Buzzelli, "The Argument of Peirce's 'New List of Categories'," Transactions 8 (1972):63­89.

9. MS 339 (14 December 1865). In the spring of that year, in his Harvard University Lectures on "The Logic of Science," Peirce intended to include a lecture on Hegel, which seems not to have been written or delivered. But there were important brief passages on Hegel in the third and eighth lectures. See Part IV below, under 1865 Spring.

10. July 1905 draft letter to Lady Welby (MS L 463).

11. N3:103 (Peirce's review of Baillie's Origin and Significance of Hegel's Logic).

12. Carnegie Application, "Statement," pp. 2­6 of a longer draft with that heading (MS L 75).

13. MS 1461, which continues: "Then his conception of thought as something independent of the individual man who apprehends it was almost as good as reinstating the Aristotelian final cause." See again Part IV below, under 1865 Spring.

14. N 2:83.

15. Perry 1:477; cf 541f. See also "A Chronicle," pp. 127, 130­31 above.

16. MS 288:129­30 (draft of CP 5.527, c. 1905). See also "Peirce's Progress," PP. 193­94 above.

Page 281 17. E.g., in MS 137:79 (1904), and SS 82.

18. Royce's Logical Essays, ed. D. S. Robinson (Dubuque, Iowa, 1951), pp. 96, 350­351, 364, 369; Lectures on Modern Idealism (Yale University Press, 1919), p. 258; The Problem of Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 2:123. In a draft letter to Lady Welby late in 1904, Peirce had written: "my pragmatism is very different from Schiller's & I believe reconciles the truth in Hegel with the truth in scientific ideas" (MS L 463).

19. Draft letter to J. S. Engle, 14 February 1905 (MS L 133). Cf. CP 3.432 (1896).

20. For classification I, see CP 3.427 (1896); for details, MS 15:15­18 (1896). For II, 1.180­202 (1903); in tabular form, Thomas A. Goudge, The Thought of C. S. Peirce (University of Toronto Press, 1950), facing p. 48. With the subdivisions of logic in II, compare the trivium of 1.559 (1867); see also 3.430 (1896).

21. Manley Thompson, The Pragmatic Philosophy of C. S. Peirce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 168­72, 178, 193.

22. Yet as late as 22 July 1902, while struggling in his Logic Notebook with the theory of collections in relation to that doctrine of real or objective or substantial possibility that was required to make pragmatism an intelligible doctrine, Peirce entertained the idea of calling his new science Categoric and putting it above mathematics (MS 339:222r)! But that was a momentary aberration.

23. Wallace Nethery, "C. S. Peirce to W. T. Harris," The Personalist 43 (1962):40. Quoted in Part IV below, under i i June 1868.

24. See William Elton, "Peirce's Marginalia in W. T. Harris' Hegel's Logic," Journal of the History of Philosophy 2 (1964):82­84.

25. N I:199.

26. See his definitions of "cenopythagorean" (p. 217) and of "cenopythagorean phenomenology" (p. 981) in The Centurv Dictionary Supplement (1909). For the playfulness see MS 298:17.

27. If there was any influence, it was of course the other way around. H. S. Harris, Hegel's Development: Toward the Sunlight, 1770­180 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 253, 41 In.

28. See note 16 above.

29. Draft letter to P. E. B. Jourdain, 5 December 1908 (MS L 230a), quoted by the editors of the Collected Papers, vol. 4, p. 291. For the context see Don D. Roberts, The Existential Graphs of Charles S. Peirce (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), P. 110

30. The nearest approach so far to an adequate statement of the proof is a book by John J. Fitzgerald, Peirce's Theory of Signs as Foundation for Pragmatism (The Hague: Mouton, 1966). It falls short in three respects. It makes no use of the unpublished papers in which Peirce's latest efforts are recorded. It omits the existential graphs. And it does not show how the proof involves the establishment of synechism. But its author plans to make good these deficiencies in a second edition.

31. CP 1.368 (c. 1890); 6.31 (1891); 6.305 (1893); MSS 397­98 (c. 1893); Peirce to Francis C. Russell, 8 September 1894 (MS L 387); 1.453, 491 (c. 1896); 2.32­35 (1902); 5.37 (1903).

32. The Problem of Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1913), vol. 2, Lectures XI­XIV, "Perception, Conception, and Interpretation," "The Will to Interpret," "The World of Interpretation:' and ''The Doctrine of Signs." Peirce's early papers are listed in the note on p. 114. The only later item listed is his brief article "Sign" in Baldwin's Dictionarv. The paragraph from which I quote is on pp. 184­86. See also Vol. I, p. xi.

Page 282 33. J. H. Cotton, p. 218 (see note 5 above). Josiah Royce's Seminar, 19131914, ed. Grover Smith (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963), PP. 37­ 39, 41­42.

34. Since writing this paper I have seen the abstract, dated December 1972, of a Pennsylvania State University thesis answering to this description: Peirce on Hegel, (Diss. 1972), by Joseph A. Petrick. He informs me that he is revising it for publication.

35. Values in a Universe of Chance: Selected Writings of Charles S. Peirce, ed. Philip P. Wiener (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958), p. 8. See also W: :104.

36. MS 958, in a draft of 6.605.

37. See note 13 above; also note 9.

38. Norton Papers (bMS Am 1088) 5425, The Houghton Library, Hanrard University. Quoted by permission.

39. Murphey, p. 412.

40. Widener Library, Harvard University, call number Phil 3425.44.

41. Netherv, p. 37. This and subsequent passages from Peirce's letters to Harris are quoted bv permission of Harris's daughter, Edith Davidson Harris.

42. Ibid., p. 37f.

43. John Jay Chapman and His Letters, ed. M. A. DeWolfe Howe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), p. 97.

44. The Problem of Christianity, Lecture XI.

45. Nethery, p. 40.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid., p. 44f.

Page 283

FIFTEEN—American Pragmatism Before and After 1898

I. PROLOGUE

In this country, at least, it was in 1898 that the word "pragmatism" was first used in a public address and then in print as the name of a philosophic doctrine and method. The history of American pragmatism was thereby divided into two quite different periods: a period without the name pragmatism or any other public name, from about 1865 to 1898, and a period with that name and several others, from 1898 onward. Among the other names are practicalism, pragmaticism, absolute pragmatism, humanism, voluntarism, functionalism, contextualism, instrumentalism, experimentalism, operationalism.

The differences between the two periods are very great. In the second period pragmatism became a movement, the liveliest movement so far in American philosophy. That was due in large part, no doubt, to its having evangelists like James and schools like Dewey's at the University of Chicago. But it was due in no small part to its having a name, which served both as a flag for its followers and as a target for its critics.

The epoch­marking address was by William James. It was the annual address before the Philosophical Union at the University of California in Berkeley on August 26, 1898. It was published in September. The title was "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results."1 The members of the Union were, as usual, prepared by having devoted the preceding academic year to critical study of the speaker's philosophy, as represented in this case by James's The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, fresh from the press in 1897, dedicated to his "old friend" Charles Sanders Peirce. At the last meeting of the year, in May, the president of the Union, George H. Howison, had presented his own criticisms of the title essay.

Let us imagine ourselves as members of the Philosophical Union, thus prepared, attending James's address, reading it soon afterwards, being moved by it, working backward through the first period to its origins, and living forward into the second period.

Page 284

II. JAMES'S ADDRESS

The lecture hall is Harmon Gymnasium. There are over a thousand persons present. James is introduced by President Howison. After some opening remarks on philosophers as pathfinders and trail blazers, James is saying to us:

I will seek to define with you merely what seems to be the most likely direction in which to start upon the trail of truth. Years ago this direction was given to me by an American philosopher whose home is in the East, and whose published works, few as they are and scattered in periodicals, are no fit expression of his powers. I refer to Mr. Charles S. Peirce, with whose very existence as a philosopher I dare say many of you are unacquainted. He is one of the most original of contemporary thinkers; and the principle of practicalism­— or pragmatism, as he called it, when I first heard him enunciate it at Cambridge in the early '70's is the clue or compass by following which I find myself more and more confirmed in believing we may keep our feet upon the proper trail.

James then presents "Peirce's principle" as he says Peirce himself introduced it in the Popular Science Monthly for January 1878. James then says: "This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. I think myself that it should be expressed more broadly than Mr. Peirce expresses it." For Peirce, it seems the meaning of a thought is the conduct it is fitted to produce. For James the meaning "can always be brought down to some particular consequence, in our future practical experience, whether active or passive; the point lying rather in the fact that the experience must be particular, than in the fact that it must be active."

After these preliminaries James devotes his address to showing how this broader expression works by applying it to the dispute between theists and materialists. At the end, however, as his last bit of trail blazing, James says that what Peirce "expressed in the form of an explicit maxim" was the "great English way of investigating a conception." The English­speaking philosophers had all been led by their sense for reality to follow this method instinctively. Over against the English philosophers James sets "the circuitous and ponderous artificialities of Kant."

The true line of philosophic progress lies ... not so much through Kant as round him ... Philosophy can perfectly well outflank him.... May I hope, as I now conclude . . . that on this wonderful Pacific Coast ... the principle of practicalism ... and with it the whole English tradition in philosophy, will come to its rights, and in your hands help the rest of us in our struggle towards the light.

Page 285 As we leave the lecture hall, a lawyer friend, also a member of the Philosophical Union, tells us of another trailblazing address a year and a half ago, across the continent, at the opening of the new hall of the Boston University School of Law—an address by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., called "The Path of the Law." It was promptly published in the Harvard Law Review. Holmes did not give his prediction theory of law a name, our friend says, but he might well have called it "legal pragmatism." It was much closer to Peirce's pragmatism than to James's practicalism.2

Four days later, on August 30, there is a special meeting at which Howison summarizes his own address of last May, and James then replies in detail to the criticisms that have been made of his philosophy during the past year by readers of papers before the Union. A lively but inconclusive discussion follows.

James's address appears as the leading article in the University Chronicle for September 1898, and then as a separate pamphlet for the Philosophical Union. The pamphlet is widely circulated by the Union and, as we soon hear, by James himself. We receive our copies and read the address we have heard. One thing that strikes us even more in the reading than it did in the hearing is James's alternation between "pragmatism" as Peirce's name for the method, and James's own much preferred "practicalism." It is "practicalism" that gets the last word, as it got the first. We gather that James uses "pragmatism'' with reluctance and only out of loyalty to Peirce.

III. WORKING BACK

In the published address as in its oral presentation, the only reference James gives for Peirce's principle is "the Popular Science Monthly for January 1878." We go to the library and look it up.3 What we find there is entitled:

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE LOGIC OF SCIENCE. By C. S. Peirce, ASSISTANT IN THE UNITED STATES COAST SURVEY. SECOND PAPER.—HOW TO MAKE OUR IDEAS CLEAR.

We have no difficulty finding the passages that James has so freely but on the whole faithfully reported.4 Out of context, however, they had seemed to have nothing to do with science, and we had wondered at their appearance in a scientific journal, even a popular one. In context we see that Peirce's pragmatism, unlike James's practicalism, is presented as an integral part of the logic of science.

Page 286 We turn back to the first paper in the series, the leading article in the volume's first issue, that of November 1877. "Illustrations of the Logic of Science..... First Paper.—The Fixation of Belief." (CP 5.35887). There we find the scientific method presented as one of several ways of fixing beliefs, contrasted with such other ways as those of tenacity, authority, and apriority. But we also find the logic of science viewed as a second­order field of research, progress in which depends on progress in the first­order sciences. Each chief step in science, Peirce says, is a lesson in logic. The most recent chief step was that taken by Darwin when he applied to the origin of biological species the statistical conceptions and methods first developed in political economy, for example by Malthus, and then applied to thermodynamics by Clausius and Maxwell (CP 5.364).

What was the lesson in logic taught by this most recent step in science? Our first guess is that what Clausius and Maxwell had first done, and what Darwin had next done, were illustrations of a general principle of the logic of science: that of trying out on the still unsolved problems of a given science the concepts and methods that have already proven successful in one or more other sciences. But Peirce makes no point of this beyond the single paragraph, as if in that respect these were but fresh illustrations of a lesson long since learned. It dawns on us then that pragmatism itself is the lesson now to be drawn—or at least a principal part of it.

Returning to the second paper, "How To Make Our Ideas Clear," we find Peirce's pragmatism, without the name, presented as a rule for attaining a third grade of clearness of apprehension, beyond the clearness and distinctness of Descartes and Leibniz. The rule is: "Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object" (CP 5.402).

The rule seems utterly opaque at first but gradually takes on meaning from the preceding paragraphs and from the applications that follow. From what precedes we gather that the effects are sensible effects; that sensible effects are not effects on our senses but perceivable public effects of one thing on another; that practical bearings are bearings on practice, that is, on habits of action; and that these depend on desires or purposes as well as on expected sensible effects. We gather also, though Peirce does not say so, that the only way to the third grade of clearness is through the first and second.

Peirce applies the rule to such familiar concepts as hardness in mineralogy, weight and force in physics, reality and truth in logic. The point to the last two applications is that he has said in the first paper that the "fundamental hypothesis" of the scientific method is that "there are real things, whose characters are entirely indepen­

Page 287 dent of our opinions about them," but that "we can ascertain by reasoning how things really are, and any man, if he have sufficient experience and reason enough about it, will be led to the one true conclusion. The new conception here involved is that of reality" (CP 5.384). This conception is not involved in the methods of tenacity, authority, or apriority.

We move on now to the four later papers in the series: "Third Paper.—The Doctrine of Chances"; "Fourth Paper.—The Probability of Induction"; ''Fifth Paper.—The Order of Nature"; "Sixth Paper.Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis"5 (CP 2.645 —60, 669—93; 6.395427; 2.619­44). It soon appears that the relatively easy applications of the pragmatic rule in the second paper were preliminary to the extremely difficult application of it to the concept of probability, which Clausius, Maxwell, and Darwin have so recently moved to the very center of modern science, and which Peirce is moving to the center of the logic of science.

In view of James's advice to bypass Kant, we are struck by a passage in Peirce's fourth paper, "The Probability of Induction."

Late in the last century, Immanuel Kant asked the question, "How are synthetical judgments a priori possible?"... Not so much by his answer to this question as by the mere asking of it, the current philosophy of that time was shattered and destroyed, and a new epoch in its history was begun. But before asking that question he ought to have asked the more general one, "How are any synthetical judgments at all possible?" (CP 2.690)

In the "Illustrations" Peirce's concern is not with judgments or propositions but with reasonings. He starts from a familiar distinction. "All our reasonings," he says, "are of two kinds: (I) explicative, analytic, or deductive; (2) amplifiative, synthetic, or (loosely speaking) inductive" (CP 2.680). The former are said to be necessary, the latter only probable. The logic of science, as distinguished from that of mathematics, is therefore the logic of probable reasonings. So the logic of science must not only clarify the concept or concepts of probability that are employed in the first­order sciences, but must determine in what sense (or senses) of probability the reasonings of those sciences are called probable in the logic of science.

But Peirce goes on to subdivide those reasonings into two kinds, which he calls induction (strictly speaking) and hypothesis (CP 2.623). (We observe a certain discomfort about "hypothesis" and guess that sooner or later he will find a suitable noun ending in "­duction.") He says this division "was first made in a course of lectures by the author before the Lowell Institute, Boston, in 1866, and was printed in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, for

Page 288 April 9, 1867" (CP 2.641n). We look that up and find a paper entitled "On the Natural Classification of Arguments" (CP 2.461­516). By dint of further searching, we find a privately printed brochure distributed at the Lowell Lectures themselves in November 1866 entitled Memoranda Concerning the Aristotelean Syllogism (CP 2.792­807). In this Peirce concludes against Kant, but without mentioning him, that

no syllogism of the second or third figure can be reduced to the first, without taking for granted an inference which can only be expressed syllogistically in that figure from which it has been reduced.... Hence ... every figure involves the principle of the first figure, but the second and third figures contain other principles, besides. (W1:514; CP 2.807)

By dint of still further searching, we learn that the title of the Lowell Lectures was "The Logic of Science; or, Induction and Hypothesis."6 It appears, then, that this division was Peirce's first contribution to the logic of science, that pragmatism was his second, and that the second depended on the first. And since Peirce arrived at the first by defending the Aristotelian syllogistic against Kant's essay on The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, we gather that Peirce reached pragmatism by going through Kant, not round him; and we wonder if his pragmatism may not owe something directly as well as indirectly to Kant.

Meanwhile we have noticed that the most frequently recurring technical term in the "Illustrations" is "rule." There are rules for the calculation of chances and rules for the conduct of inductive and hypothetical inference. The pragmatic principle itself is called a rule.

It finally dawns on us that what we are reading is an anti­Cartesian Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Searching for the Truth in the Sciences.7 We are even tempted at first to say that Peirce's Discourse consists of six papers because Descartes's Discourse had six parts. But we note references forward in the "Illustrations" to matters not discussed in subsequent papers. About the same time we notice that the publishers of the Popular Science Monthly are also the publishers of the International Scientific Series, and in volumes of that series published in 1878 and 1879 we find Peirce's Illustrations of the Logic of Science announced as one of the volumes in preparation.8 It never appeared, and that suggests the hypothesis that he planned additional "Illustrations" for the book, if not also for the Monthlh. The book would have come out in French and German as well as English—perhaps also in Italian and Russian.9 The first two papers did appear in French in the Revue Philosophique. 10

To learn what notice was taken of the "Illustrations" in England, we examine the library's bound volumes of the journal Mind. In the

Page 289 first four volumes (1876­79) we find a series of ten articles on philosophy in Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, London, the Scottish universities, France, Germany, the Dutch universities, Italy, and finally the United States. This last is by G. Stanley Hall. He writes at greatest length and with greatest sympathy about Peirce, gives a summary of the six "Illustrations" so far published, and says the series is "still progressing." Its author, he says, "is a distinguished mathematician, and this discussion, in which he long ago interested himself, promises to be one of the most important of American contributions to philosophy."11

Wondering what the further "Illustrations" might have been, and doing some further searching among Peirce's publications, we turn up papers "On the Theory of Errors of Observation" and "The Theory of the Economy of Research" in the Coast Survey Reports for 1870 and 1876 (CP 8, pp. 263, 267; 7.139). These topics seem eminently suitable. A paper on the classification of the sciences would also have been in order. We note that in the six "Illustrations'' that did appear Peirce gets no further than to distinguish hypothesis and induction as forms of probable inference. We gather from the second paper that the pragmatic rule is a rule governing the admissibility of hypotheses in the first place, prior to the question which hypotheses are to be tested and in what order. A further "Illustration," therefore, might well have shown just how the rule functions, just why it is a rule of hypothetical rather than of deductive or of inductive reasoning, and just how this lesson in logic was taught by Darwin's Origin of Species.

Why did Peirce not finish his Discourse on Method and get it out in book form? Probably, we conclude, because in 1879 he became Lecturer in Logic at The Johns Hopkins University and had occasion there to rethink the whole undertaking in the company of the brightest, the most advanced, and the most serious students of logic anywhere in the country, perhaps in the world.12

We now remind ourselves that, though James made no mention of any paper but that of January 1878, he said he first heard Peirce enunciate his pragmatism "at Cambridge in the early '70's," and we wonder in what circumstances. Professor Howison tells us of a philosophical club there at that time, of which he himself and Hall became members when it was revived in 1875­76. The members "in the early '70's" included James, Peirce, Holmes, and two older men, Chauncey Wright, a scientist, and Nicholas St. John Green, a lawyer. Howison had it from James in conversation that the enunciation took the form of a paper read to that club.13

Though that paper was not published except as reworked later in the "Illustrations," we wonder if there were adumbrations of pragmatism in papers that Peirce did publish in the early 1870's or earlier.

Page 290 We succeed in locating his review article on Fraser's edition of Berkeley in the North American Review for October 1871. A passage catches our eyes in which Peirce says that a better rule than Berkeley's "for avoiding the deceits of language is this: Do things fulfil the same function practically? Then let them be signified by the same word. Do they not? Then let them be distinguished" (W2:483; CP 8.33).

Howison tells us that Peirce was an early contributor to the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. In the volume for 1868 we find three articles by Peirce that are even more explicitly anti­Cartesian than the "Illustrations" of a decade later. In this series we are struck by the doctrine that all thought is in signs, and by the sentence:

Finally, no present actual thought (which is a mere feeling) has any meaning, any intellectual value; for this lies not in what is actually thought, but in what this thought may be connected with in representation by subsequent thoughts; so that the meaning of a thought is altogether something virtual. (W2:227; CP 5.289)

Shortly after that sentence, Peirce distinguishes three elements in thought and refers in a footnote to another of his 1867 American Academy papers, which turns out to be "On a New List of Categories." We find no discussion there of earlier lists, but we guess that he has chiefly Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel in mind; and his three categories remind us most of the triads in Kant's table of categories and the triadic structure of the Hegelian dialectic. We note further that both his classification of signs and his classification of inferences are explicitly grounded in his categories (CP 1.545­59, at 555, 557, 558).

Returning once more to the "Illustrations," we make two further observations. The first is that there is no mention anywhere either of signs or of categories. The second is that, nevertheless, the analyses of belief and doubt in "The Fixation of Belief" and of the three grades of clearness of apprehension in "How To Make Our Ideas Clear" are obviously based on the categories, and that the pragmatic rule becomes fully intelligible only when we place it and the whole of the ''Illustrations" within the framework of the general theory of signs.

We conclude, therefore, that although Peirce's pragmatism did not reach print until 1878, the whole structure in which it has so precise a place was in print by 1868, a decade earlier; that adumbrations of the pragmatism itself had reached print in 1868 and 1871; and that a near approach to his full­blown pragmatism may therefore well have been expounded in James's presence "in the early '70's," as James seemed in his address to be saying.

It is now December 1898. We have not found the name "pragmatism" in any of Peirce's published writings to date. But we do not

Page 291 doubt that James was right in remembering that Peirce was already calling his principle by that name when James first heard him enunciate it "in the early '70's." James's own obvious preference for "practicalism" is enough to assure us on this point. So we now ask ourselves why Peirce preferred "pragmatism,'' and what connotations it carried for him.

A teacher of ancient Greek among us says the verb prattein meant to do regularly, to practice; the noun pragma the "thing" that is regularly done; the noun praxis the regular doing of it; the classical adjective praktikos and the postclassical adjective pragimatikos, concerned with, engaged in, skilled in, devoted to, some practice or other—for example, that of law. When Socrates is asked what his pragma, his "thing," is, he understands that he is being asked what his profession or business is.

So Peirce must have meant by the pragmatic rule the rule that finds the third grade of clearness not in sensible effects as such, nor even in particular actions, but in habits of action; and not solely the habits of action of single individuals, but those also of businesses, professions, and communities. We note, for example, that in applying the rule to the conception of probability involved in that of probable inference, Peirce moves first to the gambler, then to the insurance business, and finally to the unlimited community of investigators (CP 2.653­55). And we note further that he was already making such moves in print a decade earlier, in 1868, when he had not yet formulated the rule that governs them (CP 5.348­57).

We now turn to James himself. Howison has told us that James also contributed to the Journal of Speculative Philosophy: In its issue for January 1878, the month of Peirce's "How To Make Our Ideas Clear," we find an article by James called "Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence." Some of the characteristic themes of James's 1898 address are already there.

The organism of thought ... is teleological through and through.... Far from being vouched for by the past, these [our several individual hypotheses, convictions, and beliefs] are verified only by the future. ... The survivors constitute the right way of thinking..... The knower is an actor.... there belongs to mind ... a spontaneity, a vote. It is in the game, and not a mere looker­on. ... The only objective criterion of reality is coerciveness, in the long run, over thought.... "The fate of thought" ... is the only unimpeachable regulative Law of Mind.14

Though James does not present this as a "lesson in logic" taught by Darwin's Origin of Species, it is evident that he too has the Origin very much in mind.

We find a few adumbrations in James's still earlier papers, but none as early as Peirce's, and none as close as this.15 Between 1878 and 1898, however, we find James referring once (in 1881) to "the

Page 292 admirably original 'Illustrations of the Logic of Science,' by C. S. Peirce, especially the second paper," and once (in 1885) quoting the rule itself, along with the most telling preceding clause, that "there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice."16

We examine once more the dedication of the book we have been studying for a year, James's Will to Believe. It reads:

To My Old Friend, CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE To whose philosophic comradeship in old times and to whose writings in more recent years I owe more incitement and help than I can express or repay.

A footnote toward the middle of the volume (145n) now leads us to the "writings in more recent years" here meant—Peirce's Monist series of 1891­93, beginning with "The Architecture of Theories" and "The Doctrine of Necessity Examined." In this series we find Peirce restating (CP 6.297), revising, and supplementing the lesson in logic taught by Darwin's Origin of Species. He does this by developing theories of chance, continuity, and love called tychism (CP 6.102), synechism (CP 6.103), and agapism (CP 6.302). We gather, then, that James owes his pragmatism more to Peirce's ''philosophic comradeship in old times" than to the published "Illustrations," but that whatever of tychism and synechism has come to him from Peirce, has come chiefly from these more recent published writings.

At last we return to Holmes. With some help from our lawyer friends, we learn that in the early 1870's he was co­editor of the American Law Review that in the spring of 1872 he was University Lecturer on Jurisprudence at Harvard, and that in the July number of the Review, under the guise of a review of an article by Frederick Pollock, he reviewed his own lectures.l7 Already there are all the essentials of the prediction theory of law which he will state more fully a quarter of a century later (in 1897) in "The Path of the Law." In 1872 he criticizes Austin's view that command is the essence of law, that custom only becomes law by the tacit consent of the sovereign manifested by its adoption by the courts, and that before its adoption it is only a motive for decision. What more, Holmes asks, is the decision itself in relation to any future decision?

What more indeed is a statute; and in what other sense law, than that we believe that the motive which we think that it offers to the judges will prevail, and will induce them to decide a certain case in a certain way, and so shape our conduct on that anticipation? A precedent may

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not be followed; a statute may be emptied of its contents by construction, or may be repealed without a saving clause after we have acted on it; but we expect the reverse, and if our expectations come true, we say that we have been subject to law in the matter in hand. It must be remembered ... that in a civilized state it is not the will of the sovereign that makes lawyers' law, even when that is its source, but what a body of subjects, namely, the judges, by whom it is enforced, say is his will. The judges have other motives for decision, outside their own arbitrary will, beside the commands of their sovereign. And whether those other motives are, or are not, equally compulsory, is immaterial, if they are sufficiently likely to prevail to afford a ground for prediction. The only question for the lawyer is, how will the judge act? Any motive for their action, be it constitution, statute, custom, or precedent, is worthy of consideration as one of the sources of law, in a treatise on jurisprudence. Singular motives ... are not a ground of prediction, and are therefore not considered.

Holmes goes on in the same vein to a more extended elucidation of the concept of legal duty. He does not say that he is applying to the concepts of law and of legal duty a rule of more general applicability. He says nothing about the logic of science, but he is clearly a legal pragmatist at least, and we are tempted to say that it is as if either he was anticipating Peirce's "How To Make Our Ideas Clear" by six years, or he had heard the substance of it from Peirce's lips in club meetings. But whether in fact he learned from Peirce, or Peirce from him, or both, or neither, we cannot say.

IV. LIVING FORWARD

The researches that have taken us back to the origins of the first period of American pragmatism have occupied the leisure of several months. It is now 1899, and we are well into the second period. Dickinson Miller has a discussion of James's address in the Philosophical Review for March. Friends returning from the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association at Yale University at the end of the year tell us that William Caldwell read a paper there entitled "Pragmatism." This appears in Mind for October 1900. Peirce himself begins using the name "pragmatism" in print in 1900.18 In the spring 1901 go issue of the Italian Rivista filosofica there is an article, "Il movimento prammatstico,'' the pragmatic movement. In 1902 James has an account of Peirce's pragmatism in his Varieties of Religious Experience, echoing that in his Philosophical Union address.

Also in 1902 there appears the first article on pragmatism in a philosophical dictionary. It is in the second volume of Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (II, 321­23; CP 5.1­4). It is in five parts, two by Peirce and one each by Seth, James, and

Page 294 Baldwin. We are shocked to find Peirce defining pragmatism as "The opinion that metaphysics is to be largely cleared up by the application" of the now familiar rule. We take some satisfaction, however, in having guessed what Peirce now emphatically asserts, as if against James, that he "was led to the maxim by reflection upon Kant's Critic of the Pure Reason." He says that James's Will to Believe and Philosophical Union address have ''pushed this method to such extremes as must tend to give us pause." Peirce now subsumes pragmatism under the synechism which he had broached in 1868 and developed more fully in the 1890's. He even finds a fourth grade of clearness of thought in acknowledging as "ultimate good" "the development of concrete reasonableness" and in so applying the maxim as to serve that end.

Peirce has nearly a hundred and eighty other articles on terms of logic in the Dictionary. We are curious to learn what he has done about the term "hypothesis." Sure enough, we find him proposing the term "abduction" (II, 426; CP 2.774). That sounds not quite legitimate, and we guess that before long he will try another "­duction" word. Meanwhile we are prepared to find him saying that pragmatism is the logic of abduction, but he nowhere does so.

In the spring of 1903, however, we learn that Peirce is giving a course of lectures at Harvard University on "Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking,"19 and we are relieved to hear from friends there that they led up to a final lecture on pragmatism as the logic of abduction (CP 5.180­212). We inquire whether he presented pragmatism also as an opinion about metaphysics and are assured that references to metaphysics were only incidental, and no direct connection between pragmatism and metaphysics was worked out. So we conclude that pragmatism remains for Peirce, at least in the first place, a rule of the method for rightly conducting the reason and searching for the truth in the sciences. We hear, however, that there was a supplementary lecture under the auspices of the department of mathematics on "Multitude and Continuity" (MS 316a). So perhaps there is a passage from pragmatism to metaphysics that only a mathematician can follow.

In the fall of the same year come reports of a course of Lowell Lectures by Peirce under the curious title, "Some Topics of Logic Bearing on Questions Now Vexed" (CP 8, p. 295). The topics are Peirce's three universal categories, his new system of diagrams called "existential graphs" for studying logical relations, and his doctrines of multitude, infinity, continuity, and chance. The first lecture is entitled "What Makes a Reasoning Sound?" and the last "How To Theorize." We gather that the questions now vexed concern the nature and merits of pragmatism, and that one of the merits of Peirce's

Page 295 pragmatism is that it leads, by way of tychism, to synechism. We read Peirce's article on synechism in Baldwin's Dictionary. He says it "is not an ultimate and absolute metaphysical doctrine; it is a regulative principle of logic, prescribing what sort of hypotheses are fit to be entertained and examined" (CP 6.173). That puts it in the company of pragmatism. The article on tychism in Baldwin is by John Dewey. It is based entirely on Peirce but does not say how tychism is related to pragmatism and synechism. But if tychism, like pragmatism, is subordinate to synechism, as it seems to be, then tychism too must, at least in the first place, be a regulative principle of logic.

In this same year (1903) two provocative books come out: Studies in Logical Theory by Dewey and others at Chicago, and Humanism by F. C. S. Schiller in London. Both provoke hostile reviews. James begins to see that there are forms of pragmatism as much broader than his as his was broader than Peirce's. In an article, "Humanism and Truth," in Mind for October 1904 James says:

since my pragmatism and this wider pragmatism are so different, and both are important enough to have different names, I think that Mr. Schiller's proposal to call the wider pragmatism by the name of 'humanism' is excellent and ought to be adopted. The narrower pragmatism may still be spoken of as the 'pragmatic method.'

At the end of November 1904 appears the first volume of the University of California Publications in Philosophy, with a dedication to Howison. It contains a paper by Charles H. Rieber, "Pragmatism and the a priori." He sees in Dewey and the Chicago school an "improved pragmatism" which looks backward as well as forward for the meaning of an idea, whereas the pragmatism of Peirce and James looks only forward.

In December 1904 James reprints his 1898 address in the Journal of Philosophy, with some abridgment.

In 1905 Peirce begins a series of articles in the Monist explaining his own limited form of pragmatism and proposing the name "pragmaticism" for it. "Some of his friends," he says, ''wished him to call it practicism or practicalism. ... But for one who had learned philosophy out of Kant ... praktisch and pragmatisch were as far apart as the two poles" (CP 5.412). He seems to be moving by way of his existential graphs toward a proof of pragmaticism that would also be a proof of synechism, but in print he gets no further than prolegomena (CP 4.530­72).

In Italy by this time there is what calls itself The Florence Pragmatist Club. It publishes a pragmatist journal called Leonardo, with articles, discussions, reviews, and bibliographies. Papini, the editor,

Page 296 is a James enthusiast, but Vailati and Calderoni are Peirceans. Papini calls pragmatism a corridor theory. Vailati reviews Peirce's first Molnist article at length and with full sympathy.20

In March 1907 Schiller's Studies in Humanism appears. He offers seven definitions of pragmatism, says humanism includes pragmatism but does not confine itself to epistemology, and remarks, without showing he has read them, that

Mr. C. S. Peirce's articles in the Moinist (1905) have shown that he has not disavowed the great Pragmatic principle which he launched into the world so unobtrusively nearly thirty years ago, and seemed to leave so long without a father's care.21

In March and April 1907 James has a two­installment "Defense of Pragmatism" in the Popular Science Monthly. In June it reappears as the first two chapters of his book Praginatismi, dedicated

To the memory of John Stuart Mill from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive to­day

James's pragmatism is now a theory of truth as well as of meaning. He approves Papini's corridor metaphor. He takes no account of Peirce's Monist articles and does not mention pragmaticism.

At the beginning of 1908 Arthur O. Lovejoy, once a student of Howison's here, has a two­installment article in the Journal of Philosophy on "The Thirteen Pragmatisms." He does some much needed sorting out, but he gives no sign of having read anything by Peirce.22 And in general, in the bewildering crescendo of articles and books attacking and defending pragmatism in this first decade of the twentieth century, of the few that so much as mention Peirce, nearly all do so at second hand, taking their cues from James.23

In October 1908 Peirce has an article in The Hibbert Journal, "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God." Reality, we note, not existence. Two further things strike us. The first is that the place of "hypothesis" and "abduction" is now taken by "retroduction," and retroduction, deduction, and induction are presented as the three stages of inquiry. So pragmatism is now the logic of retroduction, and ''the bottom question of logical Critic" is that of the validity of retroduction (CP 6.475). (Which reminds us that forty years ago, in 1868, Peirce said that the question how synthetical reasoning is possible is "the lock upon the door of philosophy" [CP 5.348]).

Page 297 The second thing that strikes us is that toward the end Peirce gives an account of his pragmaticism and says: "In 1871, in a Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Mass., I used to preach this principle as a sort of logical gospel, representing the unformulated method followed by Berkeley, and in conversation about it I called it 'Pragmatism'" (CP 6.482). We are glad at last to have James's testimony confirmed by Peirce, and to have the name of the club.

About that time we hear that pragmatism was the talk of the Third International Congress of Philosophy at Heidelberg in September. The proceedings are published in 1909 and we read a paper by Josiah Royce, "The Problem of Truth in the Light of Recent Discussion," in which he calls his own philosophy Absolute Pragmatism.24

Royce was California's first philosopher, as well as one of her first historians and novelists.25 Though he moved to Harvard in 1882, and the Philosophical Union was founded by Howison in 1889, Royce is a corresponding member. We all remember his own address to the Union in 1895, "The Conception of God." Some old­ timers even remember that back in 1880, when Peirce's Metaphysical Club at The Johns Hopkins asked Royce for a paper, he sent them one called "On Purpose in Thought." They tell us that was the first statement of what he now calls Absolute Pragmatism. So his pragmatism, like Peirce's, James's, and Holmes's, goes back to the 1870's.26

Browsing further in the proceedings of the Heidelberg Congress, we find Paul Carus, editor of the Monist, taking part in the discussion that followed papers on pragmatism by Schiller and Armstrong. Pragmatism, says Carus, is a disease. What is true in it is not new, and what is new is false. Peirce is the only pragmatist who can think scientifically and with logical precision. The others write like novelists rather than philosophers. So Peirce has dissociated himself from them and has begun calling himself a pragmaticist.

The prefatory note to the two supplementary volumes of the Centutrv Dictionary in 1909 acknowledges Dewey's assistance "in the defining of pragmatism and related terms." Under "pragmatic," Kant's distinction between pragmatic and practical is now clearly drawn. There is a separate article on Peirce's pragmaticism. And under ''pragmatism," five meanings of the term are arranged "in the order of descending generality," with illustrative quotations from Peirce, James, Schiller, and Dewey himself.

The Popular Science Monthly for July 1909 prints Dewey's fiftieth­anniversary lecture on Darwin's Origin of Species. It is full of Dewey's pragmatism, described as "the Darwinian genetic and experimental logic." It strikes us that the aptest comparison of the pragmatisms of Peirce and Dewey would take the form of comparing the lessons in logic they draw from the Origin. "The influence of Darwin upon philosophy," says Dewey, "resides in his having conquered the phe­

Page 298 nomena of life for the principle of transition, and thereby freed the new logic for application to mind and morals and life."27

James's The Meaning of Truth and A Pluralistic Universe come out in 1909. He dies in 1910. Some Problems of Philosophy appears posthumously in 1911 and Essays in Radical Empiricism in 1912. In The Meaning of Truth we are shocked by a footnote explaining the phrase "practical consequences": "'Practical' in the sense of particular, of course, not in the sense that the consequences may not be mental as well as physical."28 In Some Problems James makes several applications of what he now calls ''the pragmatic rule." But what surprises us is that, whereas his pragmatism has previously seemed to favor nominalism, he now declares for "logical realism." In an appendix to A Pluralistic Universe there are several pages on Peirce's tychism, synechism, and agapism, in relation to Bergson's creative evolution.

Royce's The Problem of Christianity comes out in two volumes in May 1913. We read with particular attention the chapters on interpretation in the second volume, based on Peirce's early papers on the general theory of signs. Here for the first time, it seems to us, is a major philosopher deliberately building on Peirce's work, and building on that part of it which was the framework within which his pragmatism was later so precisely placed. In the last chapter we note the great emphasis laid upon Peirce's distinction between inductive inference (in the strict sense) as practiced in the insurance business and hypothetical inference as illustrated by Darwin's Origin of Species.

Peirce dies in April 1914. In the latter half of July, Royce comes to Berkeley to give six summer school lectures on the process of interpretation and on communities of interpretation. These lectures are preparatory to the address he will give to the Philosophical Union on August 27 to mark its twenty­fifth anniversary. We attend the first of these introductory lectures. Royce dwells at length on the transition from his Philosophy of Loyalty in 1908, in which there is no mention of Peirce, to his Problem of Christianity in 1913, the second volume of which was worked up out of Peirce's sign theory of cognition. He says he had long known Peirce personally and been interested in his theories, but there were aspects of his theory of knowledge which he had never understood. While examining the problem of the essence of Christianity in the light of his own philosophy of loyalty, however, he was led to reread some of Peirce's early logic papers and to reconsider the way in which Peirce's earlier theories had worked themselves out in the form which some of his later writings indicated. Royce says he came then to see that Peirce's whole career as a student of logic and of scientific method was devoted to a few fairly simple and obvious ideas. He tried to

Page 299 restate these central ideas and found that they provided a theory of knowledge that was congenial to his own philosophy of loyalty and that provided just the key he was seeking to the essence of Christianity.29

Royce's able student, C. I. Lewis, is now secretary of the Union. He joined the philosophy department here in 1911 . He has already addressed the Union twice himself. He introduces us to Royce after the lecture. Royce tells us that he has been taking steps toward obtaining Peirce's manuscripts from his widow for deposit in the Harvard Library, with a view to an edition of his writings.

After Royce's last preliminary lecture and the close of the summer session comes the assassination at Sarajevo and the outbreak of war in Europe. When Royce appears before the Philosophical Union on August 27, about eight hundred persons are present. The announced topic is "The Spirit of the Community." But Royce substitutes an address on war and insurance for the more general one he had originally intended. This timely address, with an added introduction and notes, is published by Macmillan in October. Royce says he wrote it after the war began and "with a longing to see how the theory of 'interpretation' which I owe to the logical studies of the late Mr. Charles Peirce, would bear the test of an application to the new problems which the war brings to our minds." In a note to the address, Royce says:

The idea, although not the name of the "Community of Interpretation," is derived by me from certain essays of the late logician, Mr. Charles Peirce. The philosophical bearing of this idea, and its relations to very deep and far­reaching philosophical issues, have been discussed in ... my recent work entitled the "Problem of Christianity"... The present application of Peirce's theory of interpretation to the philosophy of war and peace is, so far as I know, new.30

It does indeed appear that the application of international insurance to the prevention of war went beyond anything explicitly formulated by Peirce, but it was in the line of his moves from the gambler to the insurance company to the unlimited community.

In the following winter, Lewis hears from time to time of the acquisition and handling of the Peirce manuscripts. Our young friend Victor Lenzen, a student of Lewis's and more recently of Royce's, is sent by the Harvard department to the Peirce house near Milford, Pennsylvania. Between Christmas and the New Year, under Mrs. Peirce's supervision, he packs the manuscripts and about 1250 books in 24 large cases and ships them to Harvard.31 Royce examines the manuscripts. At a department gathering late in March, Royce speaks

Page 300 of Peirce and gives some account of the manuscripts. Lenzen makes a preliminary catalogue of them. An assistant of Royce's, Fergus Kernan, is to make a selection of manuscripts to be published under Royce's direction. A former student of Royce's now at Columbia, Wendell T. Bush, coeditor of the Journal of Philosophy, is planning an issue of the Journal devoted to Peirce.32

That issue finally appears nearly two years later, in December, 1916, three months after Royce's own death. It begins with an article by Royce and Kernan on Peirce's leading ideas—his evolutionism, his insurance theory of induction, his tychism, his objective idealism—and on his unpublished manuscripts. It ends with a bibliography of his published writings by Morris R. Cohen. In between there is an article by Dewey, "The Pragmatism of Peirce"—much the best account so far—and articles by two of Peirce's Johns Hopkins students Jastrow and Christine Ladd­Franklin.

As a pupil of Royce, Cohen testifies to "the frequency and generosity with which Professor Royce has, in his lectures and seminars, referred to the doctrines of Peirce." He says that James was no less indebted to Peirce for his radical empiricism than for his pragmatism. And he shows how Peirce's philosophy was grounded in his work in physics and mathematics.

For the first time we have the help of informative private letters by Peirce. Ladd­Franklin gives us three to herself and one to her husband. From one of these, late in October 1904, we glean the following: (I) further details about the Metaphysical Club in Cambridge in which "the name and doctrine of pragmatism saw the light"; (2) the way in which the "Illustrations" came to be written for the Popular Science Monthly; (3) the fact that "How To Make Our Ideas Clear" was written in French, though the English translation was published a year before the French original. (4) The point of Peirce's pragmatism, as distinguished from James's, ''is that the meaning of a concept ... lies in the manner in which it could conceivably modify purposive action, and in this alone." (5) Royce comes closer than James to Peirce's pragmatism. "His insistence on the element of purpose in intellectual concepts is essentially the pragmatistic position." (6) "Pragmatism is one of the results of my study of the formal laws of signs, a study guided by mathematics and by the familiar facts of everyday experience and by no other science whatever. It is a maxim of logic from which issues a metaphysics very easily."33

We conclude that, if pragmatism survives the war and the present confusion of tongues and leaves a lasting legacy to philosophy, it will be when the general theory of signs has been more intensively developed, and it will be because the pragmatic rule is found to be a necessary part of that general theory.

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V. EPILOGUE

Let us relax now from our effort of imagination and quickly review the most relevant later developments. We entered the war. Kernan entered the army and never left it. Lenzen returned to California as a physicist and returned to Peirce only after retiring.34 Lewis's Survey of Symbolic Logic with twenty­eight pages on Peirce came out in 1918 while Lewis was still in the army. In 1920 he was brought back from California to the Harvard department in the hope that he would edit the Peirce papers. He "lived with them for two years"35 and drafted a plan but gave it up. Cohen brought out in 1923 an edition of Peirce's "Illustrations" and his Monist series of 1891­93, with Dewey's "The Pragmatism of Peirce" reappearing as an appendix, and with the most anti­Cartesian pages from Peirce's 1868 papers as proem. Cohen wanted to call the volume Tychismn, Agapismn and Synechism, but his wife persuaded him to make it Chance, Love and Logic. In an appendix to The Meaning of Meaning in the same year Ogden and Richards published extracts from Peirce's letters to Lady Welby which established Peirce as a founder of the general theory of signs. Six volumes of Peirce's Collected Papers were edited by Hartshorne and Weiss from 1931 to 1935 and two more by Burks in 1958. Cohen, out of loyalty to his teacher Royce, did more than any other single person to make that edition financially possible by raising the funds for it.

Lewis's most Peircean work, Mind and the World­Order, came out in 1929. He called its doctrine "conceptualistic pragmatism." It was somewhere between Peirce's pragmatism and Royce's absolute pragmatism.

Dewey's most Peircean work, Logic: The Theon, of Inquiry, appeared in 1938 after he had published reviews of the first six volumes of Peirce's Collected Papers. But one of the most vigorous essays he ever wrote was published eight years later, in his eighty­seventh year, on "Peirce's Theory of Linguistic Signs, Thought, and Meaning."36

Dewey had addressed the Philosophical Union on "Philosophy and Democracy" in 1918 and on "Context and Thought" in 1931; C. I. Lewis on "The Pragmatic Element in Knowledge" in 1926; and G. H. Mead on "A Pragmatic Theory of Truth'' in 1929. Mead died in 1931. The four volumes that bear his name were all published posthumously. Dewey died in 1952, Lewis in 1964.

There are biographies of James and Dewey and editions of the letters of James and Royce. Biographies of Royce and Peirce are in preparation. A critical history of pragmatism was published by H. S. Thayer in 1968. New editions of the writings of Dewey and James are in progress. A microfiche edition of Peirce's published writings is nearly ready, and four volumes of his mathematical writings are

Page 302 in press. Work has begun on a new and much more comprehensive edition of his writings, in chronological order, including a large proportion of still unpublished work.

An international Peirce congress was held at Amsterdam in June 1976.

Professor Quine has been called "the last pragmatist,"37 but if he is willing to be called one, we may be sure there are others coming on who will be no less willing.

The general theory of signs is now one of the most intensively cultivated interdisciplinary fields, and Peirce is being studied as the most original and fundamental contributor to it. But there is still no adequate account of his pragmatism within the framework he provided for it, and no adequate account of the proof he constructed for it within that framework.

Notes

1. Universitv Chronicle I (1898):287­310. Reprinted, with omissions, in Journal of Philosophy I (1904):673­87; reprinted in William James, Collected Essays and Reviews (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1920), pp. 40637, and in Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 25770. In what follows I make use of the Minute Book and other records of the Philosophical Union in the University of California Archives at the Bancroft Library on the Berkeley campus, by permission of the University Archivist.

2. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., "The Path of the Law," Hanrvard Latw Review 10 (25 March 1897):457­78. Reprinted in his Collected Legal Papers (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), pp. 167­202.

3. Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878): 286­302; see CP 5.388­4 10.

4. The "open the door" illustration was contributed by James.

5. The running head in all six papers is the series title, never that of the single paper. See note lo below.

6. As announced repeatedly in the Boston Daily Advertiser, for example on Friday, 19 October, p. 2, col. 4.

7. Cf. Paula Rothenberg Struhl, "Peirce's Defense of the Scientific Method," Journal of the Historyt of Philosophy 13 (1975):481­90.

8. For example, see Alexander Bain, Education as a Science (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1879), on the eighth of ten pages of announcements following p. 453.

9. Popular Science Monthh, 3 (September 1873), 648. John Fiske, Edward Livingston Youtmans (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1894), chapter thirteen, "The International Scientific Series," pp. 466­94 (see also 577­78).

10. Vol. 6 (December 1878), 553­69; vol. 7 (January 1879), 39­57. The running head is Peirce—La Logigue de la Science, as in PSM it was Illustrations

Page 303 of the Logic of Science. In neither journal was the title of the particular paper used as running head.

11. G. Stanley Hall, "Philosophy in the United States," Mind 4 (1879): 1013. (In connection with "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," Hall refers to Helmholtz's treatise on physiological optics as a possible source.)

12. See "Peirce at The Johns Hopkins," pp. 35­72 above.

13. See "Was There a Metaphysical Club?" and "Philosophical Clubs" (pp. 137­67 above).

14. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 12 (1878):13, 16, 17, 18; reprinted in his Collected Essays and Reviews, pp. 61, 65, 67, 68.

15. Maurice Baum, "The Development of James's Pragmatism prior to 1879," Journal of Philosophy 30 (1933):43­51.

16. "Reflex Action and Theism," Unitarian Review 16 (188 ):400; The Will to Believe (1897), 124n; "The Function of Cognition," Mind 10 (1885):43n; The Meaning of Truth (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 190gog9), p. 40n.

17. American Law Review 6 (July 1872), 723­25.

18. For example, in his review of the Clark University decennial volume in Science n.s. 11 (20 April 1900):520­22. Reviewing John Fiske's Through Nature to God in The Nation (N 2:210) on 10 August 1899, Peirce had already spoken of James and himself as Fiske's "Pragmatist friends."

19. This is the title given in announcements in the Harvard Bulletin and Harvard Crimson in March, April, and May of 1903. Cf. CP 5.14­212.

20. Leonardo, anno III, seconda serie (Aprile 1905) 47; (Giugno­Agosto 1905), 139­40.

21. F. C. S. Schiller, Studies in Humanism (London: Macmillan, 1907), pp. ix­x.

22. Journal of Philosophy 5 (1908):5­12, 29­39; reprinted in Lovejoy's The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essavs (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), pp. 1­29.

23. Andre Lalande, "Pragmatisme et pragmaticisme," Revue philosophique 61 (1906):121­46 is a conspicuous exception.

24. Bericht fiber den III. Internationalen Kongress fiir Philosophie zu Heidelberg I. bis 5. September 1908, hrsg. v. Th. Elsenhans (Heidelberg, 1909), pp. 62­ 90. Reprinted in Royce's William James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life (New York: Macmillan, 1911), pp. 187­254, and in Royce's Logical Essays, ed. Daniel S. Robinson (Dubuque, IA: Wm. C. Brown Co., 1951), pp. 63­97.

25. California from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco: A Study of American Character (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886). The Feud of Oakfield Creek: A Novel of California (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887), reprint edition with an introduction by John Clendenning (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970).

26. See "Peirce at The Johns Hopkins," Appendix IV; Royce, Fugitive Essays, ed. by Loewenberg (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920), pp. 219­60 (cf. 18­20, 29, 36); correspondence between Royce and Allan Marquand in the Marquand Papers in the Princeton University Library; Minute Book of the Johns Hopkins University Metaphysical Club.

27. John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1910), pp. 8­9.

28. James, The Meaning of Truth, 52n.

29. Royce's "First Berkeley Lecture, 1914," Harvard University Archives, Royce Papers, vol. 84, no. 3, 5­14, quoted in Frank M. Oppenheim, "Josiah Royce's Intellectual Development: An Hypothesis," Idealistic Studies 6 (1976):85­86.

Page 304 30. Warand Izsuratnce (New York: Macmillan, 1914), iv­v, 50n. Here again I have used the Minute Book of the Philosophical Union.

31. Victor F. Lenzen, "Reminiscences of a Mission to Milford, Pennsylvania," Transactions I (1965):3­ I.

32. See Royce's letters to Bush in The Letters of Josiah Royce, ed. John Clendenning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 621­22 (13 January 1915) and 642­43 (7 February 1916).

33. Journal of Philosophy 13 ( 1916):718­20.

34. See "Victor F. Lenzen," 225­26.

35. Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of C. I. Lewis (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1968), p. 16 (in Lewis' autobiography).

36. See "Dewey's Critical and Historical Studies," p. 331.

37. Ernest Gellner, "The Last Pragmatist," London Times Literarn, Supplement, 25 July 1975, 848­53.

Page 305

SIXTEEN—Peirce's Place in American Thought

Charles S. Peirce has come to be widely recognized as one of the founders of modern semiotic; often as the founder, or at least as the American founder. It is not inappropriate, therefore, that the first number of a new "International Journal of American Semiotic" should contain a paper which tries first to place him in American thought in general, and then to view his semiotic in that perspective.

The main body of this paper is a public lecture given first in 1964 and frequently thereafter, but not published until now. Preceding that is a prologue relating the lecture to studies of Peirce on which I have been engaged systematically and intensively for nearly two decades, and episodically through the three decades before those. Following the lecture is an epilogue in which I address myself to semioticians in particular, acknowledge the inadequacy of the lecture from the point of view I share with them, indicate ways of supplying what it lacks, and refer to a forthcoming publication in which this is more adequately done, with documentation that is here omitted.

PROLOGUE

In September 1928, when I had just finished my postgraduate study of philosophy at Cornell University and was entering upon my teaching career at Western Reserve University, there appeared an article in the Philosophical Review called "Peirce's Place in American Philosophy," by J. H. Muirhead. I was an assistant on the staff of the Review until the end of my stay at Cornell, and among my last duties had been preparing that article for the printer and then reading the proofs. It was based entirely on Peirce's published writings, without benefit of the Collected Papers, and without knowledge of their being in preparation. The answer that Muirhead gave to the question posed by his title was that Peirce was essentially an idealist in the Platonic tradition and that his philosophical affinities were with Royce rather than with James and Dewey.

Page 306 In 1931 Muirhead's article reappeared as a chapter in his book on The Platonic Tradition in Anglo­Saxon Philosophy.

In 1959 I was asked to undertake a biography of Peirce. By that time, I no longer had Muirhead's article or book consciously in mind. For several years in the early 1960's, I was chiefly engaged on the one hand in accumulating and organizing the materials for a much more detailed biography than I had an expectation of writing, and on the other hand in forming and from time to time revising a general characterization of him as scientist, mathematician, logician, historian, and philosopher.

In December 1964 the Charles S. Peirce Society held a meeting in Boston commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Peirce's death. I was asked to speak on "Peirce's Place in American Thought." I am sure the program committee did not have Muirhead's article in mind, nor did I in preparing the paper I presented. The other speakers were Paul Weiss and Murray Murphey. Weiss's paper was entitled, "Charles S. Peirce, Philosopher," and Murphey's "On Peirce's Metaphysics.'' Both were published in the following year. Mine now reaches print for the first time.

Over the next twelve years, with occasional revisions, I presented that paper as a public lecture at colleges and universities from Massachusetts to Colorado. Frequently, for a reason which will appear near the end of it, I used the title "The Wasp in the Bottle: Charles Peirce and the Logic of Science."

Eventually I looked again into Muirhead's article and book, and thereafter I opened the lecture with the first paragraph of this Prologue, adding the sentence: "Without contradicting Muirhead's answer, I wish to propose another."

One of the problems of a biographer of Peirce is that of explaining the early termination of his career in the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the discontinuance of his Lectureship in Logic at The Johns Hopkins University, and his failure to obtain any other continuing academic appointment. It is a plausible hypothesis that personality factors were somehow involved, and that the personality factors are in part susceptible of a medical explanation. To try this hypothesis, David E. Pfeifer compiled a medical history of Peirce from materials in my extensive files, and Dr. Norbert 0. Hanson, a diagnostician at the Mayo Clinic, then collaborated with me in a two­part paper entitled "The Medical History of Charles S. Peirce—and a Diagnosis," which we presented to the American Association for the History of Medicine when it met at the Mayo Clinic in 1966. This remains unpublished, and needs revision.

Another attempt at a general account of Peirce was the article I wrote for the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Because of editorial changes which I found unacceptable, I asked to have my

Page 307 name withdrawn, but there is one paragraph that remains nearly as I submitted it, and with which I remain nearly content.

Logic in its widest sense he identified with semiotic, the general theory of signs. He laboured over the distinction between two kinds of action: sign­action or semiosis, and dynamic or mechanical action. In 1907 he said, "I am, as far as I know, a pioneer, or rather a backwoodsman, in the work of clearing and opening up what I call semiotic, that is, the doctrine of the essential nature and fundamental varieties of possible semiosis (CP 5.488)." His major work, unfinished, was to have been entitled A System of Logic, Considered as Semiotic.

Readers of the lecture that follows are urged to bear that paragraph in mind.

My most recent attempt at a general account was an address to the C. S. Peirce Bicentennial International Congress held at Amsterdam in June 1976. That address was entitled "Peirce as Scientist, Mathematician, Logician, and Philosopher." It has appeared in the Proceedings of the Congress, published by the Texas Tech Press.

But the lecture that follows, given first in December 1964 and last in February 1976, has not, in my judgment, been superseded by any subsequent attempt, and I welcome this occasion for publishing it, unsuited to the occasion as it would be without the epilogue that follows it.

THE LECTURE

Ninety­five years ago, a frequent passenger on the B & O between Baltimore and Washington was a man of middle stature, in his early forties, with quick movements, piercing eyes, and high­pitched voice, slightly curly black hair parted in the middle and combed back, and a black beard with streaks of dark gray. His permanent employment was in Washington, as an Assistant in the Coast and Geodetic Survey. He was one of the slowly growing corps of scientists in the service of the federal government. In the administrative hierarchy at the Survey, the rank of Assistant was next under that of Superintendent. The principal duty of this Assistant was that of directing the pendulum­swinging researches of the Survey. The intention of most of these researches was geodetic. That is, it was sought, by swinging pendulums in suitable locations, to make more precise determinations of gravity, and thereby to determine more precisely the ellipticity of the earth. But the intention of others was metrological. That is, it was sought, by swinging yard and meter pendulums that had been compared with the standard yards of Britain and the United States and with the standard meters of France and Germany, and

Page 308 further by using a wave­length of light as a unit of measure, to determine more exactly the relations among these standard measures.

In these researches, our passenger was an international authority. He represented the United States at conferences of the International Geodetic Association, and he was a familiar figure at the British Standards Office in London, at the German Imperial Standards Office in Berlin, and at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris. He was a member of the American Metrological Society, and of the Committee on Weights, Measures and Coinage of the National Academy of Sciences. He was a member of the Philosophical Society of Washington, a society in whose name Philosophical meant Scientific, and whose members were for the most part scientists in the service of the federal government.

But during the years of which I speak, from 1879 to 1884, our passenger's residence was not in Washington but in Baltimore, where he held a part­time appointment as Lecturer in Logic at The Johns Hopkins University, which was still in its first decade. There, besides regular elementary and advanced courses in logic, he gave occasional courses in medieval logic, in probabilities, in the logic of relations, and in philosophical terminology. Among his pupils was a young Vermonter named John Dewey. To the opening lecture of the general course in the fall of 1882, President Gilman and the faculty as well as the students were invited. The view of logic that the lecturer commended to his distinguished audience was that it was the art of devising methods of research—the method of methods.

This is the age of methods [he said]; and the university which is to be the exponent of the living condition of the human mind, must be the university of methods.

Now I grant you that to say that this is the age of the development of new methods of research is so far from saving that it is the age of the theory of methods, that it is almost to say the reverse.... And it must be confessed that we students of the science of modern methods are as yet but a voice crying in the wilderness, and saying prepare ye the way for this lord of the sciences which is to come.

... when new paths have to be struck out, a spinal cord is not enough; a brain is needed, and that brain an organ of mind, and that mind perfected by a liberal education. And a liberal education—so far as its relation to the understanding goes—means logic. That is indispensable to it, and no other one thing is.

.. a young man wants a physical education and an aesthetic edu­ cation, an education in the ways of the world and a moral education, and with all these logic has nothing in particular to do; but so far as he wants an intellectual education, it is precisely logic that he wants; and whether he be in one lecture­room or another, his ultimate purpose is to improve his logical power and his knowledge of methods. To this great end a young man's attention ought to be directed when he first comes to the university; he ought to keep it steadily in view during the

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whole period of his studies; and finally, he will do well to review his whole work in the light which an education in logic throws upon it. (CP 7.62f)

The lecturer was Charles Sanders Peirce, and his quinquennium as Lecturer in Logic at The Johns Hopkins was the strongest bid that has ever been made for the centrality of logic in the economy of research and in the strategy of liberal education. He taught logic itself as a field of research, and he and his students published a volume entitled Studies in Logic, by Members of The Johns Hopkins University. This was to have been but the first of a series of such volumes. But the bid failed. Pioneer as it was in graduate education and in many fields of research, The Johns Hopkins University decided that logic was not to be one of those fields. After five years, the President and the Board of Trustees abolished the Lectureship in Logic, and The Johns Hopkins has never since recovered the leadership in that field which it then enjoyed.

But if there was no permanent place for Peirce at The Johns Hopkins University, there was not even a temporary one at any other. For this was the man of whom anybody who knows anything knows two things: first, that he was the most original philosopher our country has so far produced, and second, that no university in the country would have him as a professor of philosophy. Causes of his academic failure have been sought in his irregular habits, in his divorce of his first wife, and in the unwillingness of his European second wife to let her origins and connections be known. Doubtless these were contributory causes and doubtless there were others enough. But I suggest that the chief cause was just that he was the most original philosopher our country has so far produced, and that his originality took just the form that it did. The systematic arrangement which the editors have imposed upon his Collected Papers has misled nearly all of us into thinking of him as a metaphysician, a system builder in the grand manner; and even the most penetrating book about him portrays him as building system after system with a "passion for architectonics" that "outran even Kant's." If that were a fair portrait of him, he might perhaps have had a professorship in spite of his irregularities.

I suggest instead that he was a sort of philosopher who was in the first place a scientist, and that he was the sort of scientist who was in the first place a logician of science; and that no university or college in his time knew what to make of such a philosopher, or of such a scientist. Peirce's most creative students came to him from mathematics and the sciences. Students bent on what then passed for philosophy found little of it in his courses. John Dewey, shortly after entering as a graduate student, wrote home to his old philosophy teacher: "I am not taking the course in Logic. The course is

Page 310 very mathematical, and by Logic, Mr. Peirce means only an account of the methods of physical sciences, put in mathematical form as far as possible. It's more of a scientific, than philosophical course. In fact, I think Mr. Peirce don't think there is any philosophy outside the generalization of physical science." Dewey took two courses with Peirce in his second year, but more to fill out a program than to learn what Peirce could teach him. Toward the end of the term he wrote to William Torrey Harris: "Mr. Peirce lectures on Logic, but the lectures appeal more strongly to the mathematical students than to the philosophical." Twenty years later Dewey began to see the value of Peirce's work, but it was only after another twenty years, when Morris Cohen republished some of Peirce's papers (Chance, Love, and Logic), that Dewey learned what Peirce had tried to teach him.

So much by way of introduction. Now I propose to sketch in greater detail the portrait of Peirce that I should like to put in place of the now usual portrait of him as architectonic philosopher. You will see as I go along, I believe, that the portrait I am sketching is, in essentials, Peirce's own self­portrait.

To begin with the most obvious fact, his career was that of a scientist. For over thirty years he served on the Coast and Geodetic Survey. During a part of that time he was also an Assistant in the Harvard College Observatory. (In the Observatory, as in the Survey, "Assistant" was the rank next under the Director.) He was considered for the chair of physics at The Johns Hopkins University, to which Henry Augustus Rowland was appointed. He accepted a lectureship in logic there, but that, as we have seen, was a part­time appointment, and his full­time appointment on the Survey was not interrupted by it.

His professional papers were presented to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston, to the Philosophical Society of Washington (in whose name, as we have remarked, "Philosophical" meant "Scientific"), to the International Geodetic Association, the American Metrological Society, the American Mathematical Society, and, above all, to the National Academy of Sciences. He presented his first paper to the National Academy in 1878, at the age of 39, and his last in 1911, thirty­three years later, at the age of 72.

The sciences to which he chiefly contributed were mathematics, physics, astronomy, chemistry, geodesy, metrology, and psychology. But he was a serious student of other sciences to which he did not contribute. For example, he did no original work in biology, but he made an intensive study of taxonomy by dissecting fishes under Agassiz's private direction; and he did no original work in geology, but he was chosen to referee a dispute between two of the leading

Page 311 geologists of his day: that between Van Hise and Becker concerning slaty cleavage.

At no time of his life did Peirce confine himself to the natural sciences. Among the cultural sciences, he devoted himself particularly to linguistics, philology, and history. At the age of eighteen he began a "Scientific Book of Synonyms in the English Language, classified according to their meanings on a definite and stated philosophy." At about the same time, he invented an artificial language "in which every letter of every word made a definite contribution to its signification," and he drew up a set of rules for editing Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream—rules, that is, for choosing among the variant readings in the folios and quartos. If his first professional publication was in chemistry, his second was in philology—on ''Shakespearian Pronunciation."

In later life, he drafted part of an Arabic grammar; he devised a mnemonic rule for the use of a and de with French infinitives following personal verbs; he was a contributing editor for the six volumes of the first edition of The Century Dictionary in 1889­1891, and for the two supplementary volumes of 1909; he was a contributing editor for Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology; he planned an editor's manual, completed Chapter I on spelling, and drafted chapters on punctuation and other topics; he wrote an essay on the pronunciation of ancient Greek; and he made studies of the chronological order of Plato's Dialogues along Lutoslawski's lines.

In the field of historical method, he was a critic of German criticism, higher and lower. As Descartes's Discourse on Method was accompanied by three sciences to show how the method worked, so Peirce wrote a long essay on "The Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents, especially from Testimonies," accompanied by three specimens of his own historical inquiries.

For all that, Peirce was not a renaissance man washed up in the nineteenth century. As a creative artist, he had little in common with Leonardo but his flowing beard, his left­handedness, and the habit of filling out with drawings of grotesques the manuscript pages on which higher inspiration flagged. He did, however, cultivate the friendship of painters, and he made some study of architecture. (His Harvard classmate Richardson was the leading architect of the day.) Peirce made the architect's drawings and specifications for the successive remodelings and enlargements which his wife conceived for their Milford home, in the shingle style then fashionable.

His wife studied acting under Steele Mackaye in New York, and he himself gave readings of The Tragedy of King Lear, preceded by a short lecture on the diction and action of the play. He tried his hand at the long short story. He wrote in 1892 "A Tale of Thessaly"

Page 312 inspired by memories of his experiences there in 1870; and he gave readings of it at the Century Club and elsewhere. The readings had some success, and he offered it to Richard Watson Gilder for publication. If it had been accepted, there were other stories he wanted to write, but Gilder did not take it. Peirce began a play at the end of 1905, and his wife joined him in working at it early in 1906.

... the setting ... is to show rooms in two flats one over the other, both being shown at the same time. The upper one to be occupied by a woman thief who has a trap door to go down into the other flat which is occupied by some kind of a parson or ecclesiastic. What she steals she hides chez le bon cure who thinks his saint is showering riches on his head.

Peirce practiced "Art Chirography." For example, there survives an attempt he made to express the tonality of Poe's "The Raven" by the script and flourishes in which he wrote it.

If Peirce was not an artist, he was a serious student of aesthetic sensibility of all kinds and at all levels. He became a connoisseur of the red wines of Medoc under the tutelage of the wine­steward at Voisin's in Paris. He made elaborate studies of poetic diction. For one example, he investigated the frequency of lines ending in k in Browning's The Ring and the Book. For another, he compiled a list of words "affected by phrase," as, for example, "wrought," though meaning simply "worked," was affected by Emerson's phrase on the architect of St. Peter's, that he "wrought in a sad sincerity." He gave lessons to Episcopalian rectors in the reading of the order of worship, with detailed instructions as to pitch, tempo and emphasis in the address to the congregation at morning and evening prayer.

"Human greatness," Peirce wrote in 1900, "has been a favorite study of mine for seventeen years." At The Johns Hopkins he had devised methods for so organizing the relevant information about the men and women of history as to reduce the judgment of relative greatness as nearly as possible to a purely aesthetic judgment, and then to make the judgments themselves a subject of scientific inquiry, and examine the logic of such inquiry.

Peirce did not, like Whitehead, have first a career in science and then a career in philosophy. He had no career in philosophy at all. When he resigned from the Coast and Geodetic Survey at the end of 1891, at the age of 52, he set up in private practice as a chemical engineer. He invented an improvement in a method of bleaching, made inventions looking toward acetylene lighting, surveyed sites for waterpower development on the St. Lawrence, and worked up the mathematical theory for George Morison's projected North River Suspension Bridge. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the office

Page 313 of inspector of weights and measures, which shortly grew into the National Bureau of Standards. He catalogued the mathematical collection of George A. Plimpton and laid the foundations on which David Eugene Smith's history of mathematics was later built.

It was not till the turn of the century, when he was sixty, that Peirce gave up earning his living by science, pure or applied, and became the first American to list his profession as that of logician. Even then he did not cease to be a scientist. He continued to attend the meetings of the National Academy of Sciences, and to present papers at them; and he now also reported them for the New York Evening Post and The Nation. He wrote scientific and philosophical definitions for the supplementary volumes of The Century Dictionarv. More important, he continued to do original work in science and mathematics to within a few days of his death in 1914 in his seventyfifth year. Among the topics to which he specially devoted himself late in life were secundal arithmetic, three­valued logic, map projections, and the earth's ellipticity. He no longer had access to a laboratory or to a research library, and he could not buy the books he needed, or keep up communications with specialists in the fields of his study, but only death could stop him.

What I have so far said has of course been with a view to my going on now to say that all the time that Peirce was a scientist he was also a philosopher. When he began to philosophize, the chief approach to philosophy was still that of the theological seminary. He undertook to represent an alternative approach that had as yet few representatives, that from the sciences. The contrast between these two approaches is a recurring theme throughout his philosophical writings. He did not count as a third approach that from the arts and crafts, in which the first question is what the effects are that are sought and in a measure achieved, and how they are achieved. That was all one with the scientific approach. It scarcely occurred to him that there might be generations of philosophers to come who would philosophize without benefit either of theology or of science or art.

There is scarcely any field of philosophic speculation which is not touched in Peirce's still unpublished early essays in philosophy. But before his earliest professional publications in philosophy, in 1867, at the age of 28, he had settled on logic as the field he would specially cultivate, and more particularly on the logic of science; that is, on the logic of hypothesis and induction, as distinguished from deduction.

Peirce himself dated his commitment to logic to a much earlier age. The boyhood episode he most often recalled late in life was on a sunshiny day of September 1851, when he had just turned twelve. Walking into the room of his older brother, James Mills Peirce, who

Page 314 was called Jem and who was then a junior in college, he noticed a new book on the table, picked it up, and found it to be Whately's Logic. He asked Jem what logic was, and, on getting some simple answer, he spread the book and himself on the carpet, and in a few days got all the good he could out of it. "From that time," he says, "I looked upon myself (and always have) as studying nothing but logic and exercises in reasoning." "I have, ever since, had a strong passion for logic, although my training was particularly in the direction of mathematics, physics, and chemistry." From that day, he often said, it had never been in his power to study anything— mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science—except as a study of logic.

From that moment to this [he wrote nearly sixty years later], the theory of reasoning,—just why a given kind of reasoning will lead to the truth, as often and under the same conditions as it is trusted to do,—has been my sole study. For whatever else I have studied, I studied solely for the sake of better comprehending that.

Since Peirce's time the phrase "logic of science" has fallen into disuse, and the term "logic" has come to mean deductive or mathematical logic, in algebraic form. Peirce made contributions to the algebra of logic of such importance that students of the history of logic think of him as the author of the papers in which these contributions were published. With these papers in mind, their only doubt is which of the two, Frege or Peirce, was the greatest logician of the nineteenth century, and which the second greatest.

Peirce himself, though a mathematician, did not put so high a value on his work in the algebra of logic. He was content to leave its systematic completion to Schröder and others. Even within deductive logic, he counted his system of existential graphs a greater achievement. Logicians have so far ignored the graphs, but three Ph.D. theses have been written on them, and two of these have been published. Peirce claimed that the graphs were superior to the algebra of logic as an instrument of conceptual analysis. Perhaps the chief unexplored question concerning Peirce's philosophy is whether this claim is justified.

But it was neither mathematical logic nor existential graphs that was Peirce's dominant concern in logic. In 1892 he gave in Boston a pathbreaking series of Lowell Institute lectures on the history of science. In the introductory lecture of that series, he had said: "I am above all things a student of logic; and have especially devoted myself to the historical study of the logic of science." It was just twenty­six years before that, in December of 1866, that Peirce had

Page 315 completed his first course of Lowell Institute Lectures, under the title, "The Logic of Science; or, Induction and Hypothesis." By April of 1870, less than three and a half years later, he had published nine original papers in logic, plus a privately printed brochure on Aristotle's syllogistic, a review of Venn's Logic of Chance, reviews of Noah Porter's The Human Intellect and of John Stuart Mills' edition of his father's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, and several minor pieces, including a review of Henry James's Secret of Swedenborg; and he had given a course of Harvard University Lectures on the British Logicians. During those three and a half years, as before and afterwards, he had earned his living by science, computing for the Coast Survey by day and observing at the Harvard Observatory by night. He had published no major scientific paper, but he had made and reported observations of decisive importance on the spectrum of the aurora borealis.

Those three and a half years, from Peirce's twenty­eighth to his thirty­first year, were the highwater mark of American philosophic genius. If there were a man or woman of thirty with a comparable record today, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, and points west would be bidding for his or her services, and some of them would be offering distinguished professorships without teaching duties. Peirce received no offers; not even a cautious inquiry. The day of logic had not come.

In April of 1870, Peirce's younger brother, Benjamin Mills Peirce, a mining engineer, died in northern Michigan. Long afterwards Peirce jotted down the following recollection:

When my father and I went out to Marquette together and brought back my brother Ben's body, my father talked to me very earnestly, representing that I was sacrificing all hopes of success in life by devoting myself in logic, and that people would never think I amounted to much if I did so. I told him that I fully realized the truth of that, but that my bent of mind was so strong in that direction that it would be a very hard struggle to give up logic. That I intended, however, to try to do so and to take a good long time to come to any conclusion. (MS L 482)

The solution Peirce came to was to make devotion to science itself his way of devoting himself to logic. After all, his interest in logic was an interest primarily in the logic of science. To understand the logic of science was in the first place to understand the methods by which, in the several sciences, results are obtained in each that contribute to its advancement, even if these results be later superseded. And a necessary if not a sufficient condition of understanding the methods is to try them and by using them to make such contributions to the sciences oneself. The methods differ sig­

Page 316 nificantly from science to science, and from age to age within any one science, and what is common to all the sciences can be made out, if at all, only by a student who knows the differences, and knows them by practicing the various current methods, and by discovering and reliving those of the past. So it turned out for Peirce that the way to philosophy was through logic, and more particularly through the logic of science, and that the way to that was twofold: one through the practice of diverse sciences, the other through the history of science.

The place to begin was with such opportunities as were offered by his employment in the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Until 1870 he had been doing apprentice work, but within another three years he was well launched on two lines of independent research in which he rapidly became the master workman of the day. One was the photometric researches that issued in his major scientific publication; the other, his pendulum experiments for determinations of gravity. The former involved an intensive study of the history of astronomy, and particularly of the major star catalogs of the past, and its aim was a more exact determination of the shape of the galaxy. The latter involved intensive study of the history of physics, and particularly of mechanics, and its aim was a more exact determination of the earth's ellipticity. Peirce's work in these two fields was aimed not at generating radically novel hypotheses but at attaining a higher level of precision in theories already established. This led him into a pioneering paper in the Coast Survey Report for 1876 on the economy of research, cast in the language of mathematical economics.

How from these researches in astronomy and geodesy he moved into other sciences, and how his study of the history of science led him into more professional work in linguistics and philology, into the logic of the weighing of testimony, and into the editing and translating of medieval and renaissance manuscripts, is a story for another occasion.

Peirce was fully aware that the deliberate diversification of his work in the sciences prevented his attaining the eminence he might have attained by concentrating his researches in some one of them, or in a few closely related ones. He was first nominated for membership in the National Academy of Sciences in April 1872. He was renominated in April 1873, 1874, and 1876, and in October 1876, and finally elected in April 1877. Shortly before the last meeting, he wrote to his father, Benjamin Peirce:

I have received an invitation to go on to the Academy & read a paper. Hilgard also wanted me to send a list of my printed papers. I sent only the names of four logical papers & said that I wished to stand or fall as a scientific man by those. That in my opinion the

Page 317

members of the Academy would feel that the subject was one they knew little of & could not judge of the merits of the papers, that if this were so of course they could not put me in & that if I was presented on the ground of these papers only that I should so interpret a rejection & I should not mind it at all. That I have real pretensions in logic & I have none outside of that, & that it would not be consistent with the former, to urge me on minor grounds, & I desired it should not be done.

Peirce supposed himself to have been elected on these terms, and when he wrote Hilgard acknowledging the honor, he expressed great satisfaction in the implied recognition of logic as a science.

The answer I have given to the question of "Peirce's Place in American Thought" is that he was our foremost scientific philosopher or philosophic scientist. By that I mean, in the first place, a philosopher whose approach to philosophy is not by reading up on science, or taking courses in it, or even by taking an advanced degree in some science, but by being a scientist and by being one for life. In the second place, a philosopher who carries the spirit of scientific inquiry into philosophy, who assumes that the philosophic disciplines are in their way also sciences, or may become sciences, and who proposes to apply there, with such modifications as may be required, the methods of observation, hypothesis and experiment that are practised in the sciences. That is, the philosophic scientist, or scientific philosopher, is, not only as scientist but also as philosopher, a member of the same community of inquirers with all scientists, and cannot imagine himself as a rival, or as called upon to put science in its place, or to spend any part of his time building fences around philosophic preserves.

If time permitted, and if I were ready, I should like now to consider how far Chauncey Wright was a predecessor of Peirce as philosophic scientist, and what successors he has had. My conclusion would be that in certain decisive respects Peirce remains unique.

I should like also to offer a judgment of the value of the unique place that Peirce filled. But such a judgment would be premature. It must wait on work that is still in progress or still to come. Five volumes of his mathematical writings, edited by Carolyn Eisele, have recently appeared. Still to come is her edition of his writings on the history of science. And still to come is a comprehensive study of the logic of science as Peirce conceived it, of his researches upon it, and of the results he achieved: a comprehensive study for which, in recent years, many fine analyses and penetrating criticisms of particular aspects of his work, by persons too numerous to mention here, have prepared the way.

We do not expect, nor would he expect, the conclusion of such a study to be that being a scientist kept Peirce from making mistakes

Page 318 in philosophy or in the logic of science. He knew of himself what he said of Hegel: "He blundered monstrously, as we shall all be seen to do"; for he had caught himself in blunders as monstrous as any he found in Hegel, and he would expect us to find others as monstrous that had escaped him. But we may fairly expect that it will be concluded that his having been a scientist makes some of his blunders more interesting and instructive than they would otherwise have been; perhaps than ours will be.

What, finally, it may be asked, was Peirce's own notion of his place in American thought? I am not sure that he had any such notion. He was not accustomed to think in terms of any intellectual community that did not include Europe. I do not recall any general estimate of himself as a philosopher, or even as a scientist. But I shall conclude by quoting two estimates of himself as a logician. The later of the two is from a fragment of a draft letter of about 1907, to someone who was neither logician nor philosopher nor scientist; probably to George A. Plimpton. [In "Peirce and Leibniz," I make a more likely conjecture: that the intended addressee was Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and the date 18 June 1909, a few months after Lowell succeeded Eliot as President of Harvard University.]

The problem of rating one's own intellectual powers [Peirce wrote] is, quite apart from self­tenderness, one that is full of pitfalls. But [it has been] a matter of so much concern to me to know just what my comparative powers in logic are that I have taken the utmost pains to estimate them correctly, and neither too high nor too low. Now I am well­acquainted and deeply read in the whole literature of the subject in the widest sense and have so carefully studied the question that personally concerns me, that I feel sure I can have made no great mistake about it; and the only writers known to me who are in the same rank as I are Aristotle, Duns Scotus, and Leibniz, the three greatest logicians in my estimation, although some of the most important points escaped each. Aristotle was a marvellous man in many other directions; a great writer, a great zoologist, a great psychologist, a profound sociologist, and a very able practical politician. I only compare myself to him in respect to logical powers. Leibniz, too, was a sublime mathematician, as well as very able in all that concerns politics and jurisprudence. But I consider him only as a logician. (MS L482)

In a draft letter to his Chicago friend and admirer Judge Russell, on November 15, 1904, there is what seems at first to be a more general self­estimate:

As to what you say about me, partly seriously, strictly sub rosa I hold that a man of 65 well read in philosophy & a thinker himself must be a precious fool or be able to place himself better than anybody else can do, and I place myself somewhere about the real rank of Leibniz.

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Of course, Leibniz had the advantage of coming to a field into which no reapers had come.

[The apparent rank of Leibniz is much greater than his real rank, for the reason indicated, and Peirce's self­estimate is therefore less presumptuous than it would otherwise be. He goes on:]

But what I want to say which is more practical, is that I am by nature most inaccurate, that I am quite exceptional for almost complete deficiency of imaginative power, & whatever I amount to is due to two things, first a perseverance like that of a wasp in a bottle & 2nd to the happy accident that I early lit upon a METHOD of thinking, which any intelligent person could master, and which I am so far from having exhausted that I leave it about where I found it,—a great reservoir from which ideas of a certain kind might be drawn for many generations....

P.S. Add to the elements of whatever success I have had that I have always unceasingly exercized my power of learning new tricks—to keep myself in possession of the childish trait as long as possible. That is an immense thing. (MS L387b:272f)

EPILOGUE

The most striking deficiency of the preceding lecture is its failure to mention that Peirce from the beginning conceived of logic as coming in its entirety within the scope of the general theory of signs; that all his work in logic had been done within that framework; that for a time in his fifties he distinguished a narrow and a broad sense of logic, in the latter of which it was coextensive with the general theory of signs; that eventually he abandoned the narrow sense; and that the comprehensive treatise on which he was working in the last decade of his life was to be entitled A System of Logic, considered as Semeiotic.

This is such a radical deficiency that I could not now publish the lecture without acknowledging it and taking corrective measures of some kind. Really to make good the deficiency would involve extensive rewriting. It seems preferable, however, to let the lecture stand as an object lesson, showing that it is possible, after years of absorption in the work of a great thinker, to emerge with an intellectual portrait of him which, though accurate as far as it goes, yet misses altogether his single most characteristic trait.

To make amends, and by way of penance, I have written an essay on "Peirce's General Theory of Signs" (pp. 321­52 below). To that essay the reader is referred for details and for documentation omitted here. In the present epilogue I offer only brief indications of a few of the revisions the preceding lecture needs.

Page 320 1. To begin with, I should have remarked that, of the many versions of the story of his early reading of Whately's Logic, one was addressed to Lady Welby, author of What is Meaning? In that version, Peirce says that, since reading Whately at twelve, "it has never been in my power to study anything ... except as a study of semeiotic." Why did Peirce call it semeiotic in that one version and logic in all the others that have so far been found? Probably because, as he put it in an unmailed postscript to the same letter, "since 1863" he had been "entirely absorbed in the very same subject" to which her life was devoted, "without meeting, before I made your acquaintance, a single mind to whom it did not seem very like bosh." Calling it logic conveyed a meaning to everybody else; calling it semeiotic conveyed a meaning to Lady Welby alone.

2. Having taken off from Muirhead's article, I should in fairness have returned to it and acknowledged that, in associating Peirce with Royce rather than with Dewey or James, he was on the right track, for Royce deliberately built on Peirce's earliest publications on the general theory of signs, as neither James nor Dewey ever did. But even Muirhead did not do justice to the chapters on interpretation in Royce's The Problem of Christianity: In "Peirce's General Theory of Signs" I call these chapters "the first non­Peircean erection" on the semiotic foundation laid by Peirce in 1865­69.

3. In the same paper I show that Peirce's work in deductive logic—"the logic of mathematics"­—was done throughout within the framework of the general theory of signs. I am sure that this was true also of his more extensive work on the logic of the positive sciences, but that is less evident, and showing it accurately will be a difficult task.

4. Peirce from the beginning distinguished three kinds of signs—icons, indexes, and symbols. At first he thought of logic as concerned with and using only symbols. He came in time, however, to recognize on the one hand that signs do not fall into mutually exclusive kinds, but that a given sign may have elements or aspects of all three kinds, and on the other hand that neither mathematics nor logic nor the other positive sciences can do business with pure symbols, but all require indexical and iconic signs as well. In this respect first, and later in other respects also, it became evident to him that logic cannot be confined within any single subdivision of semeiotic.

5. But what may turn out to be the most important observation concerning the lecture is this. It is obvious that the central position in higher education which Peirce envisaged for logic has not been attained by logic as now taught in departments of philosophy or of mathematics. It is nearly as obvious that logic as now taught does not merit that position. But "logic considered as semeiotic" may come to merit it, and may in time attain it. It is not too soon to begin planning semiotic curricula, association sessions, and journal issues with that end in view.

Page 321

SEVENTEEN—Peirce's General Theory of Signs

Both the general theory of signs and certain specialized branches of it, such as symptomatology and grammar, may be traced back to the ancient Greeks. But when today's semioticians speak of the founders of their science, they seldom mention anyone earlier than Charles Sanders Peirce (1839­1914), and they mention him oftener than any later founder.

If Peirce was one of the founders, perhaps even the founder, of modern semiotic, when and how did the founding take place? What are his relevant published writings? What did he take the business of the science to be? What importance did he attach to it? How did he conceive its relation to other sciences? To logic, say; or psychology, or linguistics? And by what steps did he come to be recognized as such a founder? Has all his relevant published work been either assimilated or superseded, or are there things still to be learned from it? Is any important part of his relevant work still unpublished? In what follows I suggest approaches toward answering such questions as these.

I. A PRELIMINARY NOTE ON SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION

Most of the vocabulary of Peirce's doctrine of signs—for examples, representation, sign, object, and interpretant—is derived from Latin, and poses no difficulty of spelling or pronunciation. But for the science itself and for what it studies, he uses English forms of two Greek terms that are more troublesome in both these respects. Now Peirce was, among other things, linguist, philologist, lexicographer, and exponent of the ethics of terminology. So if we count him a founder of our science, we shall wish to know what these terms were, and how he spelled and pronounced their English forms.

For —sign—action, the operation or functioning of a sign, sign­interpretation, or the act of inferring from signs—he uses two English forms, semiosis and semeiosy. The former he tells us to

Page 322 pronounce with the e and the first i long and with the accent on the o (CP 5.484).1 He does not tell us where to place the accent in semeiosy (5.473), but I think he put it on the second syllable, pronouncing it ''my."2 For the plural of semiosis, he uses semioses (5.489).3

For —the art or science or doctrine or general theory of semioses—he uses semeiotic; much less often, semeiotics or seimiotic; very rarely, semeotic; never semiotics. To tell us how to pronounce his preferred form, he marks it semeio'tic (MS 318:52).4

His rationale for that spelling and pronunciation was probably two­fold. (I) There is no more reason for semeiotics or semiotics than for logics or rhetorics. (2) Both the spelling and the pronunciation should (in this case, at least) be signs of etymology; that is, should make it evident that the derivation is from Greek s?µe???, sign, not from Latin semi­ ("half­"). There is nothing halfway about semeiotic; it is all about signs, and it is about all signs. And the o in semeiotic should be long because it has behind it a Greek omega, not an omicron.

In the remainder of this paper, I shall use in quotations whatever spellings Peirce there uses, but outside of quotations I shall use only semeiosis and semeiotic, and I invite the reader to pronounce them with me "See my o, sis" and "See my o tick." I cannot believe that Peirce ever pronounced the latter "semmy­AHT­ick."

2. THE FIRST FOUNDING (1865­1869)

Peirce's training was in chemistry. His career was in the service of the United States Coast Survey, 1859­1860, 1861­1891. His work for the Survey was primarily astronomical and geodetic, but it involved metrology, spectroscopy, optics, color theory, map projections, the four­color problem, and the history of astronomy and of science in general. His contributions to the annual reports of the Survey included one on the theory of errors of observations in the Report for 1873 and one on the economy of research in that for 1876. He deliberately diversified his researches beyond the requirements of his work for the Survey, not from ambition to contribute to as many sciences as possible, but with a view to advancing the logic of science; that is, of hypothesis and induction. His first professional publication was on the chemical theory of interpenetration; his second on the pronunciation of Shakespearian English. He was a mathematician also, but with a view to advancing the logic of mathematics, that is, of deduction.

In the spring of 1877, when he was being considered for election to the National Academy of Sciences, he submitted a list of four of his published papers in logic and asked that his eligibility be judged by these rather than by his contributions to the special sciences.5

Page 323 He was elected, and in his letter of acceptance he expressed his "gratification at the recognition by the Academy of Logic as entitled to a place among the real sciences."6 Many of the papers he later presented to the Academy were in logic, and at least one in semeiotic.

For five years, 1879­1884, he was part­time Lecturer in Logic at the Johns Hopkins University, while continuing his work for the Coast Survey.7

From time to time he gave single courses of lectures at Harvard University, at the Lowell Institute in Boston, and elsewhere. These were usually in logic, in the history of logic, or in the history of science considered from the viewpoint of the logic of science.

His first such course was given at Harvard University in the spring of 1865, under the title "The Logic of Science." In the first half of the first lecture he reviewed various definitions and conceptions of logic, psychological and nonpsychological. In the second half he approached his own nonpsychological definition by way of Locke's identification of logic with semeiotic, "the doctrine of signs," in the last chapter of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). The resulting definition of logic, Peirce said, would serve as a first approximation; but it was too broad, since, of the three kinds of representations, logic treats only of symbols. (Locke had used "representation" as a synonym of "sign," and Peirce at this time was using "representations'' as his technical term for signs in general.8)

A second approximation to a definition of it then will be, the science of symbols in general and as such. But this definition is still too broad; this might, indeed, form the definition of a certain science, which would be a branch of Semiotic or the general science of representations, which might be called Symbolistic, and of this logic would be a species. But logic only considers symbols from a particular point of view....

A symbol in general and as such has three relations.... I define logic therefore as the science of the conditions which enable symbols in general to refer to objects.

At the same time symbolistic in general gives a trivium consisting of Universal Grammar, Logic, and Universal Rhetoric, using this last term to signify the science of the formal conditions of intelligibility of symbols. (W 1:174)

On May 14, 1865, Peirce began a book called Teleological Logic with a chapter of definitions, in which, like Locke, he makes semeiotic one of the three most general kinds of science. With no further help from Locke, he then makes symbolistic one of the three divisions of semeiotic, as he had done in his lecture; and he makes General Grammar, General Rhetoric, and General Logic the three divisions of Symbolistic (W 1:303­4).

Page 324 In Boston in the fall of 1866 he gave a course of twelve Lowell Lectures on "The Logic of Science; or, Induction and Hypothesis," in which the doctrine of signs was carried into somewhat greater detail (W 1:357­504, esp. 471 ff and 490 ff).

The first published sketch of his semeiotic was in a paper "On a New List of Categories," which he presented to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on May 14, 1867. Forty years later he described this paper as the outcome of "the hardest two years' mental work that I have ever done in my life" (1.561). He first establishes, in place of Aristotle's ten categories and Kant's twelve, a new list of three: Quality, Relation, Representation. He then uses these categories to distinguish: (I) three kinds of representations—likenesses (which he will later call icons), indices, and symbols; (2) a trivium of conceivable sciences—formal grammar, logic, and formal rhetoric; (3) a general division of symbols, common to all three of these sciences—terms, propositions, and arguments; and (4) three kinds of argument, distinguished by their three relations between premisses and conclusion—deduction (symbol), hypothesis (likeness), induction (index) (W 2:49­59; CP 1.545­59).9

It is evident that Peirce is still using representation in the general sense in which he will later use sign. In effect, therefore, he is making of sign an ultimate and irreducible category. It would seem to follow, though he does not press the point, that we need an autonomous science or doctrine of signs. Other sciences—perhaps any other science—may supply indispensable data, but no synthesis of these will suffice to constitute the science.

Nevertheless, it might plausibly be objected, Peirce is a logician, and he concerns himself with semeiotic only so far as is necessary to place logic within the larger framework of that one of the three most general kinds of science that Locke, following the ancient Greeks, had distinguished. To that objection, however, it may fairly be replied that at no time of his life did Peirce set any limit to the intensity of cultivation of the larger field of semeiotic that would be advantageous for purposes of logic, even if the cultivating had to be done by logicians themselves because, for the time being, they were the only semeioticians.

In any case, it was not enough in Peirce's eyes for semeiotic to provide a pigeonhole for logic in the classification of the sciences. This became fully apparent in 1868­ 69 in a series of three articles in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy: "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man," "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities," and ''Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic: Further Consequences of Four Incapacities" (W 2:193­272; CP 5.213­357).

The first two papers are there for the sake of the third. The upshot of the series is a theory of the validity of the laws of logic, including

Page 325 those of the logic of science (that is, of hypothesis and induction) as well as those of the logic of mathematics (that is, of deduction). Yet the first paper is in the form of a medieval quaestio, a disputed question, and the second begins with a four­point statement of "the spirit of Cartesianism," followed by an opposed four­point statement of the spirit of the scholasticism that it displaced. In respect of these four antitheses, "modern science and modern logic" are closer to the spirit of scholasticism. The first paper was ''written in this spirit of opposition to Cartesianism." It was meant to illustrate as well as to commend the "multiform argumentation of the Middle Ages." It resulted in four denials.

1. We have no power of Introspection, but all knowledge of the internal world is derived by hypothetical reasoning from our knowledge of external facts. 2. We have no power of Intuition, but every cognition is determined logically by previous cognitions. 3. We have no power of thinking without signs. 4. We have no conception of the absolutely incognizable. (CP 5.265)

These propositions cannot be regarded as certain, Peirce says; and the second paper puts them to the further test of tracing out some of their consequences. The third paper then constructs a theory of the validity of the laws of logic in the form of "further consequences" of these "four incapacities."

The central positive doctrine of the whole series is that "all thought is in signs" (5.253). Every thought continues another and is continued by still another. There are no uninferred premisses and no inference­terminating conclusions. Inferring is the sole act of cognitive mind. No cognition is adequately or accurately described as a two­ term or dyadic relation between a knowing mind and an object known, whether that be an intuited first principle or a sense­datum, a "first impression of sense" (5.291). Cognition is a minimally three­termed or triadic relation (5.283). The sign­theory of cognition thus entails rejection not only of Cartesian rationalism but also of British empiricism.

The sign­theory of cognition leads into a semeiotic theory of the human self, "the man­sign" (5.313), and thence into a social theory of logic. "When we think, then, we ourselves, as we are at that moment, appear as a sign" (5.383); "the word or sign which man uses is the man himself" (5.314). "Finally, no present actual thought (which is a mere feeling) has any meaning, any intellectual value; for this lies not in what is actually thought, but in what this thought may be connected with in representation by subsequent thoughts; so that the meaning of a thought is altogether something virtual"

Page 326 (5.289). "Accordingly, just as we say that a body is in motion, and not that motion is in a body, we ought to say that we are in thought and not that thoughts are in us" (5.289n1). "The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of an indefinite increase of knowledge" (5.311).10 ''So the social principle is rooted intrinsically in logic" (5.354).

Along the way, with the help of his three categories, Peirce's doctrine of signs is worked out in greater detail in these three papers, and especially in the second of them.

As a first approximation, then, we may say that, if Peirce was a founder—perhaps the founder—of modern semeiotic, the first founding took place in the years 1865­ 1869. The most relevant publications were "On a New List of Categories" (1867) and the three papers developing the sign­theory of cognition (1868­1869). The chief occasions for the founding were that Peirce was invited to give lecture courses in "the logic of science" at Harvard in 1865 and at the Lowell Institute in 1866; that he presented five papers on logic to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1867; and that the editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy challenged him in 1868 to show how, on his principles, the validity of the laws of logic could be "other than inexplicable" (5.318).

The semeiotic thus founded was semeiotic as viewed from the standpoint of logic and studied for the purposes of logic, and more particularly for those of the logic of science rather than for those of the logic of mathematics. But it was a semeiotic that included logic.

3. THE FIRST NON­PEIRCEAN ERECTION ON THIS FIRST FOUNDATION (1913)

So far as I am aware, nobody but Peirce himself deliberately built on this first foundation until forty­five years later. Then, in 1913, Josiah Royce, though acquainted with much of Peirce's later work, discovered in the doctrine of signs contained in these four early published papers just the foundation he needed for solving "the problem of Christianity." In a two­volume work under that title he moves toward the solution in the following four chapters:

XI Perception, Conception, and Interpretation XII The Will to Interpret XIII The World of Interpretation XIV The Doctrine of Signs

Page 327 The very first step toward the solution was to abandon the dyadic models of perception and conception and to adopt in their stead Peirce's triadic semeiotic model of interpretation.11

4. PRAGMATISM A SECOND FOUNDING? (1877­1879)

As we shall see, when modern semeioticians began in the 1920s and 1930s to recognize Peirce as a founder of their science, the Peirce they had in mind was the founder of pragmatism. Pragmatism was, at least in the first place, a theory of meaning, and therefore a contribution to the doctrine of signs. Peirce's first published exposition of pragmatism was in a series of six "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" in the Popular Science Monthly in 1877­78. A book under the same title was announced as in preparation for the International Scientific Series but never appeared. The "Illustrations" bore the following titles:

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE LOGIC OF SCIENCE First Paper.—The Fixation of Belief. Second Paper.—How to Make Our Ideas Clear. Third Paper.—The Doctrine of Chances. Fourth Paper.—The Probability of Induction. Fifth Paper.—The Order of Nature. Sixth Paper.—Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis.12

A reader coming to these papers directly from that "On a New List of Categories" and those on the sign­theory of cognition and the validity of the laws of logic would soon make the following observations. (a) Peirce is having another go at the validity of the laws of logic, and more particularly those of the logic of science; that is, of hypothesis and induction. (b) The upshot is not radically different; we reach the social theory of logic at the same stage (2.654); but the pragmatism that is only implicit in the earlier papers, if present there at all, is now unfolded as the lesson in logic taught by Darwin's Origin of Species (5.364).13 (c) Though there is no mention of the categories or of the doctrine of signs, they are omnipresent, and the "Illustrations" become fully intelligible only in the light of the four papers of a decade earlier. (d) The categories are the key to the analysis of belief, doubt, and inquiry in the first paper, and to the distinction of the three grades of clarity in the second paper. (e) The sign­object­interpretant triad is the key to the maxim for attaining the third grade of clarity: "Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is

Page 328 the whole of our conception of the object." (f) The whole series is thought out within the framework of the doctrine of signs. (g) Peirce has presumably suppressed the terminology and the technicalities of semeiotic so as not to put too great a strain on the readers of the Popular Science Monthlv. (h) Perhaps the book never appeared because he decided that this suppression had been a mistake, but he did not find time for the rewriting that would have been needed to save the book from the same mistake. (i) Even so, the "Illustrations," just as they appeared in the Monthly, constitute an anti­Cartesian Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Searching for the Truth in the Sciences.

Take observation (e). In the second paper Peirce applies the maxim to the scientific conceptions of hardness, weight, and force, and to the logical and metaphysical conceptions of truth and reality; and in the third and following papers he applies it to the most difficult conception of the logic of science, that of probability. Take hardness, for example. The object is the physical property designated by the sign hard as used both by laymen and by mineralogists. The three grades of clarity are exemplified by three kinds of interpretants of this sign. The second presupposes the first, and the third presupposes the first and the second. The first is that of familiar feel, ready use, and easy recognition; the second is that of abstract genus­and­differentia or synonym­and­antonym definition. At the very least, what is hard is not soft, and what is harder than x is less soft than x. Suppose that the second kind of interpretant, and thereby the second grade of clarity, that of distinctness, is already attained; then the rule for reaching the third involves two further steps. In the first further step we specify, in this case, the sensible effects of one thing's being harder than another; say, of a diamond's being harder than glass. Sensible effects are not effects upon our senses, but perceivable public effects. For example, diamond will scratch glass but glass will not scratch diamond. In the second further step we specify practical bearings of these effects. Practical bearings are bearings on practice or conduct; that is, on habits of action. A sensible effect has a practical bearing if it is such that to conceive ourselves as being in a certain situation and having a certain desire is to be ready to act in a certain way if such a situation should ever arise. For example, we can conceive ourselves as desiring to divide a sheet of glass, and as having no regular glass­cutting tool available, but only a diamond ring. So to conceive is already to have formed the habit of using the diamond to cut the glass in such situations. On the other hand, we can conceive ourselves as having a sheet of glass we do not want scratched; say, a mirror. The habit of action determined by the belief that diamond is harder than glass will in that case be the habit of keeping the diamond ring away from the mirror. In each

Page 329 of these cases, the third and final interpretant, which marks the third level of clarity, consists of conceived sensible effect, conceived desire, and habit of action together. At that level of clarity, interpretants such as these constitute the whole of our conception of the object represented by the sign hard. The mineralogists' scale of hardness is arrived at by interpreting hard in this way, and the scale itself is so interpreted.

Much of this, however, would have escaped a reader unacquainted with Peirce's earlier papers. If the pragmatism of 1877­79 was indeed a second founding of semeiotic, this would have been evident at the time only to a reader who had the first founding very much in mind. In both foundings, the semeiotic is one that includes logic and that serves logic.

5. PHILODEMUS AND SEMEIOSIS (1879­1883)

In 1865, the first year of the first founding, Theodor Gomperz published an edition of the Herculaneum papyrus remains of a Greek treatise on inductive logic by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus. The papyrus lacked the title, but the one most often given it is the Latin De signis ("On Signs").

Peirce seems not to have made the acquaintance of this work immediately, but at the Johns Hopkins University he had a student named Allan Marquand, with whom he made an intensive study of it in 1879­80. To meet the thesis requirement for his Ph.D. degree, Marquand translated the treatise under the title "On Inductive Signs and Inferences" and wrote an introduction to it. The introduction, or an abridgment of it, was published under the title "The Logic of the Epicureans" as the first essay in a volume of Studies in Logic edited by Peirce in 1883.14

One of the most striking features of the treatise is the frequency of the term semeiosis. The Greek suffix ­sis means the act, action, activity, or process of. Peirce was prepared to understand semeiosis in either of two ways: (1) from the side of the sign, as sign­action, the functioning of a sign, or (2) from the side of the interpretant, as sign­interpreting or inferring from signs. Philodemus used it primarily in the latter sense, and even more narrowly as drawing inductive inferences from inductive signs. But for Peirce sign­action and sign­interpretation were not two different kinds of semeiosis but one and the same semeiosis considered from two points of view. To act as a sign is to determine an interpretant.

Furthermore, a sign is not a kind of thing. The world does not consist of two mutually exclusive kinds of things, signs and nonsigns, each with its subdivisions, yet with no subdivision of the one

Page 330 overlapping any subdivision of the other. There is nothing that may not be a sign; perhaps, in a sufficiently generalized sense, everything is a sign: "all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs" (5.448nl). The fundamental distinction is not between things that are signs and things that are not, but between triadic or sign­action and dyadic or dynamical action (5.473). So the fundamental conception of semeiotic is not that of sign but that of semeiosis; and semeiotic should be defined in terms of semeiosis rather than of sign, unless sign has antecedently been defined in terms of semeiosis. A quarter of a century later, in 1907, Peirce could still describe himself as "a pioneer, or rather a backwoodsman, in the work of clearing and opening up what I call semeiotic, that is, the doctrine of the essential nature and fundamental varieties of possible semiosis" (5.488).

6. SEMEIOTIC AND THE LOGIC OF MATHEMATICS (1866­1911)

Peirce wrote in 1903: "It has taken two generations to work out the explanation of mathematical reasoning" (NEM 3:1119; cf. 1256). What were the essential steps that he himself took or observed others taking? A list of some of them follows.

But first a prefatory note. It all started in 1854 with The Laws of Thought by George Boole, the Copernicus of modern logic (MS 475).15 After an introductory chapter on the nature and design of the work, Boole began the work itself with a chapter entitled "Of Signs in General, and of the Signs Appropriate to the Science of Logic in Particular; also of the Laws to which that Class of Signs are Subject." Of Peirce's five papers on logic in 1867, the first was "On an Improvement in Boole's Calculus of Logic," the fourth took off from Boole, and Peirce later showed how study of Boole led him to the "natural classification of arguments" in the second (MS 475). Now for the steps:

(1) In a privately printed paper of 1866 (at CP 2.801­804) and in his second and third papers of 1867 (at 2.470, 474 and 1.559) Peirce showed, as he later put it, that "all logical thought" is "an operation upon symbols consisting in substitution" but did not claim or assume that such substitution is "an indecomposable operation."16

(2) In 1870 Peirce published his "Description of a Notation for the Logic of Relatives" (3.45­149), with sections on the various signs (for examples, of inclusion, equality, addition, multiplication, involution). The logic of relatives became the key to the inexhaustible riches of mathematical reasoning, its ability to draw indefinitely numerous necessary conclusions from a single hypothesis, a single premiss or conjunction of premisses (NEM 4:58­59).

Page 331 (3) In the same year his father, Benjamin Peirce, began his Linear Associative Algebra with the sentence: "Mathematics is the science which draws necessary conclusions." He went on to discuss "the language of algebra"—its letters and signs and rules of composition. The first principle he states is that of "the substitution of letters," which "is radically important, and is a leading element of originality in the present investigation.''

(4) During the period in which son and father were working on (2) and (3), they had frequent conversations. The son later remembered two things: (a) The father at one point seemed inclined toward the view, later embraced by Dedekind, that mathematics is a branch of logic; but the son "argued strenuously against it," and thus the father "came to take the middle ground of his definition" (NEM 3:526). (b) The father as mathematician and the son as logician were both struck by the contrary nature of their interests in the same propositions and in the systems of notation in which they were represented. Take the algebra of logic for example.

The mathematician asks what value this algebra has as a calculus.... The logician ... demands that the algebra shall analyze a reasoning into its last elementary steps. Thus, that which is a merit in a logical algebra for one of these students is a demerit in the eyes of the other. The one studies the science of drawing conclusions, the other the science which draws necessary conclusions. (CP 4.239)

(5) In the 1870s, the British mathematicians Cayley, Sylvester, and Clifford made two­way connections between mathematics and chemistry. Cayley applied his mathematical theory of "trees" to a problem in chemistry. Sylvester and Clifford shortened to graph the "graphic formula" of the chemists, and, starting with the theory of invariants, they began adapting such graphs to mathematical uses.

(6) Sylvester became professor of mathematics at the Johns Hopkins University in 1876, founded the American Journal of Mathematics there in 1878, introduced the new term graph in the first issue, and said that Clifford had found "the universal pass key to the quantification of graphs."17

(7) Peirce joined the Hopkins faculty in 1879. As chemist, mathematician, friend of Clifford (who had died in the spring), and now younger colleague of Sylvester, he welcomed the adapting of chemical graphs to mathematical uses. To the Journal's first seven volumes (1878­1885) he contributed a review and five articles, as well as a new edition of his father's Linear Associative Algebra, with many notes and two addenda by himself.18

(8) Cayley was visiting lecturer at Hopkins from January to June 1882. Peirce, as usual, was attending meetings of the Mathematical

Page 332 Society, presenting papers to it, and taking part in discussion of papers presented by others. At its January meeting, for example, papers were presented by Cayley, Sylvester, and Peirce.19 In the spring Peirce gave a short course of three lectures on the logic of relatives for students of mathematics.

(9) In 1883 George Chrystal gave an account of mathematics in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which Peirce took to be defining it as the science of making pure hypotheses, though Chrystal used the term conception rather than hypothesis (3.558). Chrystal, he said, "puts emphasis upon the definiteness of mathematical hypotheses.... I incline to suspect that Prof. Chrystal has confounded definiteness with iconicity, or the capability of being represented in a diagram" (NEM 2:595).

(10) In 1885 Peirce published the second of his two papers "On the Algebra of Logic," with the subtitle "A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation" (3.359­403). It begins with a section on "Three Kinds of Signs"—icons, indices, and tokens—whose thesis is that "in a perfect system of logical notation signs of these several kinds must all be employed." He gives his student O. H. Mitchell credit for introducing indices, and thereby quantification, into the algebra of logic. He goes on to say that by means of tokens and indices alone ''any proposition can be expressed; but it cannot be reasoned upon, for reasoning consists in the observation that where certain relations subsist certain others are found, and it accordingly requires the exhibition of the relations reasoned with in an icon." The theory of signs and the logic of relatives thus lead to the further conclusion that all deductive reasoning, including that of mathematics, involves experiment and observation (3.363). In the main body of the paper, Peirce presents in the form of twelve "icons" the algebraic foundations of a system of material implication, including truth­table analysis and quantification. One of these "icons," the fifth (3.384), has come to be called Peirce's Law.

Every one of the icons consists of symbols (here called tokens) and is a symbol. Some of the elementary symbols are indices. But what Peirce wants to emphasize is the iconicity of each formula as a whole. The logic of relatives has opened the way for him to extend the notion of iconicity from quasi­geometrical graphs, whose iconicity was already obvious, to algebraic formulations of the laws of logic, whose iconicity is rendered obvious by the logic of relatives.

It follows that, just as the world does not consist of two mutually exclusive kinds of things, signs and non­signs, so there are not three mutually exclusive kinds of signs: icons, indices, and symbols. These are rather elements or aspects of semeioses that vary greatly in relative prominence or importance from semeiosis to semeiosis. We may therefore call a sign, for short, by the name of that element or

Page 333 aspect which is most prominent in it, or to which we wish to direct attention, without thereby implying that it has no element or aspect of the other two kinds.

(11) In 1886 A. B. Kempe published in the Philosophical Transactions "A Memoir on the Theory of Mathematical Form" and sent an inscribed copy to Peirce, who annotated and indexed it. Kempe made an extensive use of graphs, and it was in part by critical study of this memoir that Peirce later arrived at his own two systems of graphs. As late as 1905, he called Kempe's "great memoir" ''the most solid piece of work upon any branch of the stecheology of relations that has ever been done" (5.505).

(12) In 1889 Peirce contributed to The Century Dictionary the first dictionary definition of the new term graph:

A diagrammatic representation of a system of connections by means of a number of spots, which may be all distinguished from one another, some pairs of these spots being connected by lines all of which are of one kind. In this way any system of relationship may be represented. Graphs are commonly used in chemistry, and have been applied in algebra and in logic.

(13) In 1894­95 Peirce drafted two textbooks: Elements of Mathematics (NEM 2:1­232) and New Elements of Geometry Based on Benjamin Peirce's Work & Teachings (NEM 2:233­473). In the former he describes mathematics as "the exact study of ideal states of things" and says his father's definition "comes to much the same thing" (NEM 2: 10). "Two kinds of icons are chiefly used by mathematicians, namely, first, geometrical figures, drawn with lines, and, second, arrays of points or letters ... upon which experiments and observations can be made" (NEM 2:24; cf. 2:12).

(14) In 1896, in a paper "On Quantity, with special reference to Collectional and Mathematical Infinity," Peirce finally concedes that his father's definition of mathematics is defective in that it omits the framing by the mathematician of the hypotheses from which he proceeds to draw necessary conclusions (NEM 4:271); and he offers a definition of his own that makes good that defect (NEM 3:40­41).

Mathematics may be defined as the study of the substance of exact hypotheses. It comprehends 1ST, the framing of hypotheses, and 2ND, the deduction of their consequences. ... [T]he definition I here propose differs from that of my father only in making mathematics to comprehend the framing of the hypotheses as well as the deduction from them. (MSS 16:2, 18:4; cf. NEM 2:595)20

(15) In The Monist for January 1897, with references to Clifford and Kempe by name (3.468, 479n1) and to Sylvester by implication

Page 334 (3.470*), Peirce presented the system of what he later called entitative graphs. While reading the proofs, he conceived another system, which he called existential graphs. Partial expositions of this second and more iconic system reached print in 1903 (4.394­417) and 1906 (4.53072).21

(16) In the Educational Review for 1898 Peirce published "The Logic of Mathematics in Relation to Education" (3.553­62).

Thus, the mathematician does two very different things: namely, he first frames a pure hypothesis stripped of all features which do not concern the drawing of consequences from it, and this he does without inquiring or caring whether it agrees with the actual facts or not; and, secondly, he proceeds to draw necessary consequences from that hypothesis. (CP 3.559)

Peirce describes the "stripping" as "skeletonization or diagrammatization"; that is, iconization.

(17) In 1901, in a draft of "On the Logic of drawing History from Ancient Documents, especially from Testimonies," Peirce divided deductions into two kinds, corollarial and theorematic, and gave a detailed example of each, both drawn from the doctrine of multitude (NEM 4:1­12). He took this to be the most important division of deductions, and his own most important discovery in the logic of mathematics (NEM 4:38, 56). He had already "opened up the subject of abstraction" (NEM 4:I), distinguished its two kinds, prescission and subjectifaction, and called the latter "the very nerve of mathematical thinking" (2.428). He now proceeded to divide theorematic reasoning into abstractional and non­abstractional (NEM 4:49). Here again the theory of signs came into play. "Every subject partakes of the nature of an index. .... The expressed subject of an ordinary proposition approaches most nearly to the nature of an index when it is a proper name. ... Among, or along with, proper names we may put abstractions...." (2.357). But this is matter for a separate long article or short book.

(18) In 1902, in the chapter of his Minute Logic on "The Simplest Mathematics," Peirce briefly restates the distinction between corollarial and theorematic deduction; speaks of the latter as "mathematical reasoning proper"; describes it as "reasoning with specially constructed schemata"; and says it "invariably depends upon experimentation with individual schemata:' that is, with icons, whereas corollarial reasoning is largely "reasoning with words," that is, with symbols (4.233). In the same chapter, in an eleven­page passage omitted by the editors of the Collected Papers (at 4.261), he introduces two notations for the sixteen binary connectives of the two­valued

Page 335 propositional calculus. One of these may be called his box­X, the other his cursive notation. He says it was his Hopkins student Christine Ladd­Franklin "who first proposed to put the same character into four positions in order to represent the relationship between logical copulas, and ... it was a part of her proposal that when the relation signified was symmetrical, the sign should have a right and left symmetry." Peirce's own notations simply carry out that proposal in a particular way (NEM 3:272­75n at 272).22

(19) In his article on Symbolic Logic in Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology in 1902 Peirce said the symbols should include graphical as well as algebraic ones, and that a system of symbols devised for the investigation of logic, as opposed to one intended as a calculus, "should be as analytical as possible, breaking up inferences into the greatest possible number of steps, and exhibiting them under the most general categories possible." "There must be operations of transformation. ... In order that these operations should be as analytically represented as possible, each elementary operation should be either an insertion or an omission" (4.372­74).23

(20) In 1903, in his Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic, there appeared the first published account of Peirce's existential graphs (4.394417), including rules of transformation and code of permissions, from which it appears that in this system each elementary operation is an insertion or an omission. This is preceded by a section called "The Ethics of Terminology"—an ethics that applies to notations and other symbols as well as terms (2.219­26). And that is preceded by "An Outline Classification of the Sciences" (1.180­202). Logic is now a normative science, depending on ethics, as that does on esthetics. Above the normative sciences are mathematics and phenomenology.

All thought being performed by means of signs, logic may be regarded as the science of the general laws of signs. It has three branches: i, Speculative Grammar, or the general theory of the nature and meanings of signs, whether they be icons, indices, or symbols; 2, Critic ...; 3, Methodeutic.... Each division depends on that which precedes it. (CP 1.191)

(21) About 1904, in his ("New Elements"), Peirce presents the best restatement so far of his general theory of signs (NEM 4:238­63). Symbols are now genuine signs; indices are signs degenerate in the first degree; icons are signs degenerate in the second degree. A symbol sufficiently complete always involves an index; an index sufficiently complete always involves an icon (NEM

Page 336 4:256). But "the icon is very perfect in respect to signification, bringing its interpreter face to face with the very character signified. For this reason, it is the mathematical sign par excellence" (NEM 4:242).

(22) About 1905 Peirce begins "The Rules of Existential Graphs" (MS 1589) with a preface and an introductory section on "The Nomenclature," in which he confesses a violation of the ethics of terminology in his previous expositions. The preface reads:

The system of existential graphs is intended to afford a method for the analysis of all necessary reasonings into their ultimate elements. No transformations are permitted except insertions and omissions, and the formal signs are the fewest with which it is possible to represent all the operations of necessary reasonings.

(23) In 1906, in his "Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism," Peirce presents the fullest and most mature accounts both of his semeiotic (4.530­51) and of his existential graphs (4.552­72) that he succeeded in publishing. A sample sentence:

Now since a diagram, though it will ordinarily have Symbolide Features, as well as features approaching the nature of Indices, is nevertheless in the main an Icon of the forms of relations in the constitution of its Object, the appropriateness of it for the representation of necessarv inference is easily seen. (CP 4.53 I)

(24) Up to this point, Peirce has concerned himself primarily with the classification of arguments. From the beginning he recognizes three kinds, which he calls at first deduction, induction, and hypothesis. The last he later calls abduction, and finally retroduction. He has set the logic of mathematics (that is, of analytic, deductive, or necessary arguments) over against the logic of science (that is, of ampliative or probable arguments, either retroductive or inductive). In 1908, however, in "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," he presents retroduction, deduction, and induction as successive stages of inquiry (8.468­73). To that extent, he absorbs the logic of mathematics into that of science. Deduction, he says, has two parts.

For its first step must be by logical analysis to Explicate the hypothesis, i.e. to render it as perfectly distinct as possible .... Explication is followed by Demonstration. .... It invariably requires something of the nature of a diagram; that is, an "Icon," or Sign that represents its Object in resembling it. It usually, too, needs "Indices," or Signs that represent their Objects by being actually connected with them. But it is mainly composed of "Symbols," or Signs that represent their Objects essentially because they will be so interpreted. Demonstration should be

Page 337

Corollarial when it can ... Theorematic Demonstration resorts to a more complicated process of thought.

(25) The nearest thing to a retrospective summing up is in a long letter to J. H. Kehler in 19 I (NEM 3: 159­21), from which I quote two short passages.

I invented several different systems of signs to deal with relations. One of them is called the general algebra of relations, and another the algebra of dyadic relations. I was finally led to prefer what I call a diagranmmnatic syntax. (162)

He gives an exposition of the syntax of his existential graphs, in the course of which he remarks that

this syntax is truly diagrammatic, that is to say that its parts are really related to one another in forms of relations analogous to those of the assertions they represent, and that consequently in studying this syntax we may be assured that we are studying the real relations of the parts of the assertions and reasonings; which is by no means the case with the syntax of speech. (164f.)

In concluding this section, I trust that its twenty­five selected steps in the working out of the explanation of mathematical reasoning have made it sufficiently evident that Peirce's lifelong study of the logic of mathematics was conducted throughout within the framework of the general theory of signs.

7. THE REBIRTH OF PRAGMATISM (1898­1911)—A THIRD FOUNDING?

In the United States, at least, it was in 1898 that the word pragmatism was first used in a public address and then in print as the name of a philosophic doctrine and method. The speaker was William James, addressing the Philosophical Union at the University of California at Berkeley on "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results." His address appeared as the leading article in the University Chronicle for September. It was widely circulated, and pragmatism soon became a movement, the liveliest so far in American philosophy.24

Though James gave him full credit, Peirce soon felt the need of restating his own pragmatism, both to distinguish it from James's and Schiller's and to correct certain errors and omissions in his original statement of 1877­78; above all to make fully explicit the semeiotic framework within which it had been worked out. Peirce held that his own strictly limited form of pragmatism was provable, and it was only within the semeiotic framework that the proof could

Page 338 be made evident.25 With this in view, he gave two series of lectures in 1903, one at Harvard University in the spring, the other at the Lowell Institute in the fall.

In 1905 he began a series of articles on pragmatism in The Monist. In the first, "What Pragmatism Is," his own form of it was renamed pragmaticism (5.411­37 at 414). In the second, "Issues of Pragmaticism," two doctrines that he had defended before he first formulated his pragmatism back in the 1870s—namely, critical common­sensism and scholastic realism—were now treated as consequences of it. The chief novelty in this article is the semeiotic of vagueness, one of the characters of critical common­sensism (5.438­63 at 446­50).

These two articles were meant only to prepare the way for the proof of pragmaticism in a third article. But after the second had appeared, Peirce decided that the best way to present the proof was by means of his existential graphs. So he devoted the third article to further "Prolegomena" to the proof. These, as we saw in step (23) of section 6, were a restatement of his general theory of signs—the last he succeeded in getting into print—and a much fuller exposition of his system of existential graphs.

But, alas! Though there are drafts of a fourth article and promises of a fifth and sixth, the third was the last to reach print. One of the unfinished tasks of Peirce scholarship is to construct the proof, largely from manuscripts not yet published, and to show how the graphs would have functioned in the exposition of it.

In sheer volume, his writings on the theory of signs in the nine years from 1903 through 1911­—many of them still unpublished exceed those of the preceding forty years. The most striking features of these later writings are the high frequency of focus on pragmaticism and the development of a semeiotic realism out of the typetoken distinction.

In any case, the semeioticians who were soon to begin thinking of Peirce as founder of modern semeiotic had in mind chiefly his published writings of this last period, rather than those of what I have called the first and second foundings.

Meanwhile a relevant change had taken place in Peirce's views of the relation between logic and semeiotic. I report that change in the following section.

8. BACK TO LOCKE: FROM LOGIC­WITHIN­SEMEIOTIC TO LOGIC­AS­SEMEIOTIC (1865­1911)

We have seen in section 2 that Peirce at first refused to follow Locke in identifying logic with semeiotic, and defined it rather as one of the three parts of a symbolistic which in turn was one of the three

Page 339 parts of semeiotic. By the mid­1880s, however, as we saw in step (10) of section 6, he had come to realize that logic requires indices and icons; that it cannot do business with symbols that are neither indexical nor iconic. About 1894, in the chapter on signs in his only finished treatise on logic (the so­called Grand Logic), he argued that in all reasoning we must use a "mixture" of icons, indices, and symbols. "We cannot dispense with any of them" (MS 404). So the symbolistic trivium became the semeiotic trivium, with logic as its mid­science, and Peirce was halfway back to Locke.

But we have also seen in step (20) of section 6 that by 1903 he had gone the rest of the way. Logic was now semeiotic, as Locke held, and what Peirce had previously called logic he now called Critic. When and how did his conversion come about?

It was a gradual transition rather than a conversion. Even on the second half of the way back there was an intermediate stage, beginning about 1896, in which Peirce was saying such things as: "The term 'logic' is unscientifically by me employed in two different senses" (1.444). "The word logic is ambiguous. It is at once the name of a more general science and a specific branch of that science" (MS 751 ). During this two­sense transitional stage, logic in its narrow sense was the mid­science of the semeiotic trivium; in its broad sense it was general semeiotic, embracing all three sub­sciences. But even the narrow sense was by no means as narrow as that which Peirce had given to logic in what I have called the first founding.

The journey back to Locke was completed when in 1902 he gave up the narrow sense altogether, identified logic unreservedly with semeiotic, and adopted Locke's term Critic for what he had most recently been calling "logic in the narrow sense" (NEM 4.20f.). Since Critic in this sense is the critic of arguments (4.9), and since this may need to be distinguished from the critic of morals or of works of art or of craftsmanship, Peirce sometimes calls it Critical Logic (2.93); more often, Logical Critic (6.475). To one occurrence of the latter phrase, however, he adds "or let us say 'critic' simply, as long as we have to do with no other than the logical kind" (MS 852:3).

It is important to note, however, that though logic is now wholly semeiotic, it is still not the whole of semeiotic. It is semeiotic variously qualified as cenoscopic 26 (MS 499), formal (NEM 4:20f.), general (1.444), normative (2.111), speculative (MS 693). It is "General Semeiotic, the a priori theory of signs" (MS 634); "the quasi­ necessary, or formal doctrine of signs" (2.227); "the pure theory of signs, in general" (MS L 107). In addition to cenoscopic semeiotic, there are, or may be, idioscopic studies of signs as various as the idioscopic sciences themselves—physical, chemical, biological, geological, anthropological, psychological, medical, musical, economic, political, and so on. None of these is any part of logic, though the reasonings

Page 340 they employ may be made matter for logical study. Take psychology for example.

Of course, psychologists ought to make, as in point of fact they are making, their own invaluable studies of the sign­making and sign­using functions,—invaluable, I call them, in spite of the fact that they cannot possibly come to their final conclusions, until other more elementary studies have come to their first harvest. (MS 675)

Those, namely, of cenoscopic semeiotic.

The explanation Peirce most often gives of his move from logic within­semeiotic to logic­as­semeiotic is in terms of the classification of the sciences.27 This was always a concern with him, but increasingly so after 1890, from dissatisfaction both with the definitions of science and with the classification of the sciences that he had contributed to the Centurv Dictionary. He came to think of science no longer as knowledge already possessed or acquired and systematized, but as ongoing investigation, as what research scientists do; and therefore to identify a given science not with a particular body of knowledge but with a social group, a subcommunity of the larger community of investigators. As he wrote Lady Welby in 1908, "the only natural lines of demarcation between nearly related sciences are the divisions between the social groups of devotees of those sciences" (8.342). But of course, in attempting to place a given science, the classifier would consider not only what the subcommunities are severally doing at present, but what changes are in progress, and how far they are likely to go in the near future.

"A great desideratum" he wrote in 1909, "is a general theory of all possible kinds of signs, their modes of signification, of denotation, and of information; and their whole behaviour and properties, so far as these are not accidental" (MS 634). The task of supplying this need must be undertaken by some group of investigators. Nearly all that had hitherto been accomplished in that direction had been the work of logicians. No other group was so well prepared to take on the task, or could do so with less diversion from its previous concerns.

For examples, though "a piece of concerted music is a sign, and so is a word or signal of command," and "logic has no positive concern with either of these kinds of signs," it must nevertheless "concern itself with them negatively in defining the kind of signs it does deal with; and it is not likely that in our time there will be anybody to study the general physiology of the non­logical signs except the logician," who is in any case "obliged to do so, in some measure" (MS 499).

So it came about that the last of Peirce's major unfinished works, which he hoped would in the twentieth century have some measure

Page 341 of the success that Mill's System of Logic had had in the nineteenth, was A System of Logic, considered as Semeiotic (MS 640; NEM 3:875); considered, that is, not as the whole of semeiotic, but as the whole of cenoscopic semeiotic.

9. THE LOGIC OF MATHEMATICS AGAIN (1903)

At this point we return briefly to section 6, step (14). How could Peirce defend his father's definition so long and then so abruptly change it? Because of the change in his conception of science that we have just been tracing. As he put it in 1903,

if we conceive a science, not as a body of ascertained truth, but, as the living business which a group of investigators are engaged upon, which I think is the only sense which gives a natural classification of sciences, then we must include under mathematics everything that is an indispensable part of the mathematician's business; and therefore we must include the formulation of his hypotheses as well as the tracing out of their consequences. (NEM 3:343)

10. VICTORIA LADY WELBY AND SIGNIFICS (1903­ 1911)

In May 1903 Victoria Lady Welby published What is Meaning?, had a copy sent to Peirce, and wrote him asking for criticism. He replied, and he reviewed the book in The Nation along with Russell's Principles of Mathematics. The correspondence thus begun lasted eight years, until her final illness.28

Along with the rebirth of pragmatism, his having at last a responsive correspondent was almost certainly a factor in Peirce's concentration on semeiotic in the last decade of his life, from his Harvard and Lowell lectures of 1903 onward. It may also have been a factor in the directions this concentration took, and in its characteristic emphases. Some of his best expositions are in letters to Lady Welby, and among his last creative efforts were drafts of a paper for a Festschrift in her honor.

After first trying sensifics, Lady Welby had adopted significs as the name for the field to which she was devoting the latter part of her life. She had contributed a brief article under that title to Baldwin's Dictionary in 1902. She later contributed a much longer one to the Britannica, in which she distinguished "three main levels or classes" of "expression­value"—"those of Sense, Meaning, and Significance." Peirce wrote her that these nearly coincided with his own division

Page 342 of interpretants (SS 111). And in a letter to James about the same time, he referred to her distinction in an illuminating passage on the sign­object and sign­interpretant relations, and on the relations between the two relations (NEM 31:844).

Lady Welby wrote on December 4,1908: "You have always been kindly interested in the work to which my life is devoted" (SS 65). Peirce replied on the 23rd:

But I smiled at vour speaking of my having been "kindly interested" in your work, as if it were a divergence—I should say a deviation, from my ordinary line of attention. Know that from the day when at the age of 12 or 13 I took up, in my elder brother's room a copy of Whately's "Logic," and asked him what Logic was, and getting some simple answer, flung myself on the floor and buried myself in it, it has never been in my power to study anvthing,—mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economic, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic. (SS 85­86)

Or, as he put it in a postscript not mailed, "when I have myself been entirely absorbed in the very same subject since 1863, without meeting, before I made your acquaintance, a single mind to whom it did not seem very like bosh" (8.376).

11. THE SOP TO CERBERUS (1908)

Responding to questions about his work in logic, Peirce wrote to Philip E. B. Jourdain on December 5, 1908:

My idea of a sign has been so generalized that I have at length despaired of making anybody comprehend it, so that for the sake of being understood, I now limit it, so as to define a sign as anything which is on the one hand so determined (or specialized) by an object and on the other hand so determines the mind of an interpreter of it that the latter is thereby determined mediately, or indirectly, by that real object that determines the sign. Even this may well be thought an excessively generalized definition. The determination of the Interpreter's mind I term the Interpretant of the sign. (NEM 3:886)

Less than three weeks later, in his letter of December 23 to Lady Welby, Peirce wrote:

I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former. My insertion of "upon a person" is a sop to

Page 343

Cerberus, because I despair of making my own broader conception understood. (SS 80­81)

What was that broader, that more generalized, conception? Negatively, it is apparent that it did not involve ''the mind of an interpreter" or "an effect upon a person." Did it also not involve an utterer, a sign­giver? In the last account of his theory of signs which Peirce had published, as a framework within which to introduce his existential graphs, the place of the sign­utterer or sign­giver had been taken by the Graphist.

Moreover, signs require at least two Quasi­minds; a Quasi­uttterer and a Quasi­interpreter; and although these two are at one (i.e. are one mind) in the sign itself, they must nevertheless be distinct. In the Sign they are, so to say, welded. Accordingly, it is not merely a fact of human Psychology, but a necessity of Logic, that every logical evolution of thought should be dialogic. (4.551)

What, then, was the sop to Cerberus? If we recall that the original motive of subsuming logic under semeiotic in 1865 was to avoid basing it on psychology, we can give a tentative and at least partial answer. The sop to Cerberus was lapsing from sign­talk into psychtalk—from semeiotic into psychology. Since Peirce was himself an experimental psychologist, perhaps the first on the American continent, and once thought of giving up logic for psychology,29 no disparagement of psychology is implied. Certainly it was no disparagement of psychology to place it lower than semeiotic in the classification of the sciences, just as it was no disparagement of semeiotic to place that below mathematics.

If we were attempting to give a more positive and complete answer, we might well begin with Peirce's 1902 application to the Carnegie Institution for a grant to enable him to write a series of thirtysix memoirs on logic; and more particularly with his brief descriptions of Memoirs No. 11, "On the Logical Conception of Mind," and No. 12, "On the Definition of Logic."

If the logician is to talk of the operations of the mind at all ... he must mean by "mind" something quite different from the object of study of the psychologist. .... Logic will here be defined as formal semiotic. A definition of a sign will be given which no more refers to human thought than does the definition of a line as the place which a particle occupies, part by part, during a lapse of time. (NEM 4:20)

A few sentences from one of the drafts of the application offer further hints.

Page 344

We must begin by getting diagrammatic notions of signs from which we strip away, at first, all reference to the mind; and after we have made those ideas just as distinct as our notion of a prime number or of an oval line, we may then consider, if need be, what are the peculiar characteristics of a mental sign, and in fact may give a mathematical definition of a mind, in the same sense in which we can give a mathematical definition of a straight line..... But there is nothing to compel the object of such a formal definition to have the peculiar feeling of consciousness. That peculiar feeling has nothing to do with the logicality of reasoning, however; and it is far better to leave it out of account. (NEM 4:54)

If that does not answer our question, it sets us off on the right track. But we return from it to pursue the question how Peirce came to be recognized as a founder of semeiotic.

12. OGDEN AND RICHARDS: THE MEANING OF MEANING (1923)

Almost from the beginning of their correspondence in 1903, Lady Welby gave her visitors accounts of Peirce's letters, and frequently enclosed copies of extensive extracts from them in her letters to other correspondents. On May 2, 1911, she wrote Peirce that she thought she had found a disciple for him in C. K. Ogden, then still a student at Cambridge University (SS 138­39).

In Peirce's letters to Lady Welby, one of the most striking passages is that concerning his early reading of Whately's Elements of Logic. Ogden was so impressed by it that in The Meaning of Meaning in 1923 he and Richards made Whately and Peirce the culminating figures in the movement "Towards a Science of Symbolism"— the nominalistic movement from Ockham through Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Condillac, Horne Tooke, and Taine. (In order to pass directly from Whately to Peirce, they depart from chronology by taking up Taine before Whately.) They quote a passage from Whately's introduction in which he professes to know nothing of any universals but signs. Signs, he says, are the instrument of thought, not merely the vehicle of expression and communication. In any case, the only logic he understands "is entirely conversant about language" and other signs. It knows nothing of ''abstract ideas" or of nonsemeiotic mental processes. Ogden and Richards then say:

It was doubtless this insistence on Signs, in which few subsequent logicians have followed him, that appealed to C. S. Peirce, the most notable of all the thinkers who have approached the question of Symbolism from the logical side.

Page 345 After misquoting the Whately passage from Peirce's letter to Lady Welby, they continue:

There cannot be thought without signs, he insists; and when William James drew attention to the work of Taine as the first writer to emphasize the importance of symbol­ substitution in 'thought,' the objection was put forward that already in 1867 Peirce had treated "all logical thought as an operation upon symbols consisting in substitution."30

They do not call Peirce a nominalist, but they suggest that his "scholastic realism" and his exclusion of psychological considerations may account for a lack of clarity at certain points in a semeiotic that was otherwise the final upshot of the nominalistic tradition they have been sketching. In an appendix they offer a thirteen­page digest of his theory of signs in the form of extracts from his published papers (chiefly from the "Prolegomena" of 1906) and from three of his longer letters to Lady Welby, one of which contains the Whately and the "sop to Cerberus" passages.

The Meaning of Meaning was the first book in any language from which it was possible to get a grasp of Peirce's semeiotic at first hand, in his own terms. F. P. Ramsey, reviewing the book in Mind, rightly said that its "excellent appendix on C. S. Peirce deserves especial mention."31 (Ludwig Wittgenstein may have known something of Peirce through Ramsey.)

The authors misquote three passages from Royce's The World and The Individual. Had they also looked into The Problem of Christianity, its chapters on interpretation would surely have led them to Peirce's cognition series of 1868­69, in which the doctrine that all thought is in signs was most fully argued and developed.32 This is much more fundamental than anything they do quote. Had they known of it, they would surely have asked themselves where Peirce got that doctrine, and would have given what is almost certainly the right answer: He got it from Whately at the age of twelve. But at least they were on the right track in approaching Peirce from Whately and from Whately's nominalistic predecessors. It is unfortunate that no other writer on Peirce's theory of signs has taken the same approach.

13. CHARLES MORRIS: FOUNDATIONS OF THE THEORY OF SIGNS (1938)

The movement variously called logical positivism, logical empiricism, scientific empiricism, and the unity of science movement, began in German­speaking middle Europe in the 1920S, started a westward migration in the 1930s, and for a time found its main resting place, at least in English­speaking countries, at Chicago. Its

Page 346 chief single monument is the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, edited by Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and Charles Morris, and published by the University of Chicago Press. After an introductory monograph called "Encyclopedia and Unified Science" (by six authors—Neurath, Bohr, Dewey, Russell, Carnap, and Morris), its first systematic monograph was Foundations of the Theory of Signs by Morris in 1938.33

The position of Morris's monograph in the Encyclopedia was no accident. It was the outstanding feature of the very design of the Encyclopedia. The foundations of the theory of signs were the foundations for the unification of the sciences.

Morris had studied under George Herbert Mead and had written his dissertation on Symbolism and Reality in 1925. He had been "helped to identify the contours of a general theory of signs by The Meaning of Meaning."34

The first six volumes of Peirce's Collected Papers, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, had come out in the earlier 1930s; the first in 1931, the sixth in 1935. (Hartshorne was a colleague of Morris's at Chicago.) Morris acquired each of the six volumes as it appeared, and annotated it extensively.35 There were semeiotic materials in all six volumes, but especially in the second and fifth. By the time Morris wrote the Foundations, therefore, he had examined a much more nearly adequate body of evidence for Peirce's theory of signs than had been accessible to Ogden and Richards. But the same evidence was now in the hands of many other students, and interpretations or criticisms of Peirce no longer passed unchallenged.

Morris had a student named Estelle Allen De Lacy, who wrote her dissertation in 1935 on Meaning and Methodology in Hellenistic Philosopht; giving prominence to Philodemus. She assisted Morris for several years in collecting materials for a history of semeiotic. This was never written, but she and her husband, Phillip De Lacy, edited and translated Philodemus's De signis.36

Morris's later work, Signs, Language and Behavior (1946), has an appendix with a section on Peirce, which begins: "Peirce was the heir of the whole historical analysis of signs and has himself had a major influence upon contemporary discussion." In this book, as in the Foundations, Morris rightly took off from semeiosis, but about the same time Dewey challenged his earlier account of "the pragmatic dimension" of semeiosis as "the relation of signs to interpreters." Morris replied to Dewey and other critics in 1948 in "Signs About Signs About Signs,'' which brought Peirce to the center of semeiotic controversy,37 as Morris's two books had brought Peirce to the center of fresh construction.

Another student of Morris's, Thomas A. Sebeok, has become the most productive and influential semeiotician of the present day. A

Page 347 special field of his, which he will forgive me for spelling zoösemeiotic, is one that farmer Peirce entered now and then with his horses and dogs, but found no time to cultivate systematically.

14. THE GESTATION PERIOD (1851­1865)

Whately's Elements of Logic was studied in the spring semester of the junior year in Harvard College. In September 1851, when about to enter upon his junior year, Peirce's older brother Jem (James Mills Peirce) bought his textbooks for the year, including Whately. Charles, who was turning twelve that month, came into Jem's room, glanced at the new textbooks, and asked what logic was. Jem's answer led Charles to stretch himself upon the carpet there in Jem's room, with Whately open before him. As Charles wrote F. A. Woods in 1913, in a few days he got all the good he could out of it, "so that 6 years later when I was, with the rest of my class, required to answer at recitations on the book, I needed no more than slight rereading of the lessons" (MS L 477).

There was no other episode of his boyhood that Peirce so often recounted. In other accounts he speaks of himself as having "in a few days mastered that illuminating work" (MS 905), as having been "intent" upon reading it "on several days" (MS 842[s]), as having "buried" himself in it (SS 85), as having been ''delighted" with it (MS 1606), as "poring over" it (NEM 4:vi); and in at least four other accounts as "devouring" it.38

The logicians of Peirce's youth, however critical they were of particular points in Whately, ascribed to him the revival of logic at Oxford and elsewhere after a century or more of stagnation. As early as 1833, Sir William Hamilton wrote that by the publication of Whately's Elements in 1826 "a new life was suddenly communicated to the expiring study," and that the decade in which it appeared had "done more in Oxford for the cause of this science than the whole hundred and thirty years preceding."39 In 1854 George Boole, in the preface to his Lauws of Thought, said that for "a knowledge of the most important terms of the science, as usually treated, and of its general object .... there is no better guide than Archbishop Whately's Elements of Logic," to which "the present revival of attention to this class of studies seems in a great measure due." Augustus De Morgan in his article on logic in the English Cyclopaedia in 1860 wrote that Whately possessed "the talent of rendering a dry subject attractive in a sound form by style, illustration, and clearness combined. And to him is due the title of the restorer of logical study in England." Peirce's Harvard teacher, Francis Bowen, had written in the North American Review for October 1856:

Page 348

The revival was not confined to England, but extended to the colleges in this country. The study of Whately's Elements here almost immediately superseded that of Hedge's Logic, a little compend which did not profess to give more than a few definitions of the most frequently recurring technicalities of the science.40

Besides the passages in his introduction from which Ogden and Richards quoted, Whately had a chapter criticizing realism, and treating conceptualism as a variant of it.41 He made the same distinction between fact and arrangement to which Peirce appealed in two of the most nominalistic passages of his Popular Science Monthly series: the application of the pragmatic maxim to the conception "hard" and the comment on Gray's "Elegy" (5.403 and 409 at end; cf. 7.340). In later stages of his long progress from nominalism into realism, Peirce corrected or rejected these (5.453, 457, 545; 1.27nl, 615; 8.216).

To keep from sliding into realism unawares, Whately prescribed the prophylactic measure of using "description" when tempted to say "kind" or "nature.'' 42 Peirce never quite lost the habit so formed, in spite of having gradually become more and more of a realist (1.27n, 204, 549n; 5.127, 483, 486; 8.251).

When Peirce recited on Whately's Logic in the spring of 1858, it had been the Harvard logic text, and nominalism had been "the Cambridge Metaphysics," 43 for a quarter of a century. But the Logic was not the only book of Whately's on which Peirce had to recite. In the first term of his freshman year, he recited twice a week on Whately's Lessons on Morals and Christian Evidences. In both terms of his junior year and perhaps also in his senior year he recited on Whately's Elements of Rhetoric, which had a passage advocating nominalism more vigorously even than the one that Ogden and Richards quoted from the Logic. Here is the latter half of it:

The full importance, consequently, of Language, and of precise technical Language,—of having accurate and well­defined "names for one's tools,"—can never by duly appreciated by those who still cling to the theory of "Ideas"; those imaginary objects of thought in the mind, of which "Common­terms" are merely the names, and by means of which we are supposed to be able to do what I am convinced is impossible; to carry on a train of Reasoning without the use of Language, or of any General­Signs whatever.

But each, in proportion as he the more fully embraces the doctrine of Nominalismn, and consequently understands the real character of Language, will become the better qualified to estimate the importance of an accurate system of nomenclature.44

The rhetoric text in Peirce's sophomore year, George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric, inculcated similar views.

Page 349 While still in college, Peirce had in his private library at least two other books of Whately's. One was A Selection of English Synonyms, by Whately's daughter Elizabeth Jane Whately, revised throughout by Whately himself, who said in his preface that it was "very much the best" work that had appeared on the subject, but that

the importance of that subject itself ... and of all that relates to language, will be much less highly estimated by those who had adopted the metaphysical theory of ideas, and who consider the use of language to be merely the conveying our meaning to others, than by those who adhere to the opposite—the nominalist—view ... and who accordingly regard words­—or some kind of signs equivalent to words—as an indispensable instrument of thought, in all cases, where a process of reasoning takes place.45

It was doubtless this book that prompted Peirce in October 1857, early in his junior year, to begin writing "A Scientific Book of Synonyms in the English Language" (MSS 1 140­42).

Also in Peirce's private library was Whately's Historical Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte, a parody of Hume's scepticism concerning miracles. This was almost certainly the germ from which Peirce's theory of historical method developed (2.625, 634, 642, 714; 5.589; 8.194f., 380, 382; MSS 1319­20).

Peirce also read the nominalists that Ogden and Richard later reviewed on their way to Whately and Peirce. Take Horne Tooke, for example. On January 1, 1861, Peirce's "Aunt Lizzie" (Charlotte Elizabeth Peirce) gave him a copy of the 1860 edition of The Diversions of Purlev.46 Though Horne Tooke was a follower of Locke, his thesis was that everything Locke had said in terms of ideas should rather have been said in terms of words. Though Peirce did not jettison that language of ideas, even in the article in which his pragmatism was first put forward—"How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878)—he could write as late as 1896: ''What do we mean by an idea being clear? It is not needful to inquire first what an idea is. We can dispense with the word idea, and can ask what we mean by attaching a clear signification to a word" (MS 953:9).

Peirce frequently said in later years that it was the extreme nominalists such as Ockham, Hobbes, Leibniz, and Berkeley who had especially urged the doctrine that "every thought is a sign" (5.470), that "thoughts are signs" (4.582), that "Any concept is a sign" (8.332), but that there is nothing inherently or peculiarly nominalistic about the doctrine, and that "the realists are, for the most part, content to let the proposition stand unchallenged, even when they have not decidedly affirmed its truth" (4.582).

Of Peirce himself it may be concluded that he committed himself in youth to a theory of cognition which he knew to be prima facie nominalistic, and that he at first conceived himself to be a nominalist

Page 350 in so doing; but that, step by step over a period of forty years or more, beginning in 1868, he transformed that nominalist doctrine into a more and more realistic one.

In any case, he remained a nominalist throughout what I have called the gestation period of his semeiotic.47

15. A FOURTH FOUNDING? (1976—)

Peirce's Letters to Lady Welby came out in 1953. Volumes 7­8 were added to the Collected Papers in 1958, both containing further materials on the general theory of signs, including a long draft of a letter not sent to Lady Welby and therefore not included in the 1953 edition (8.342­79). A microfilm edition of the Peirce manuscripts at Harvard University became available in 1964, and a Catalogue of them came out in 1967. The first of four volumes of his Nation reviews appeared in December 1975. Carolyn Eisele's The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce (1976) consists almost entirely of papers not previously published, and much more of this new material is relevant to semeiotic than would be guessed from the title, from the indexes, or from a casual glance through the four­volumes­in ­ five. A microfiche edition of the papers Peirce himself published appeared in 1977. An edition of the Peirce/Welby correspondence by Charles S. Hardwick, containing Lady Welby's letters to Peirce as well as his to her, appeared later in 1977. Several anthologies of Peirce's writings on semeiotic, both in English and in translation, are being prepared.

It remains the case, however, that Peirce's still unpublished writings on the theory of signs exceed in quantity those that have so far been published. A new and more comprehensive edition of his writings is now in preparation, to be arranged chronologically in twenty or more volumes to appear over a period of ten or more years, plus a two­volume biography and a volume of bibliographies and indexes. The semeiotic materials appearing for the first time in this new edition will exceed in quantity those which first appeared in the eight volumes of Collected Papers.

There is already an extensive body of secondary literature, some of it purely expository, some of it critical; some of it continuing where Peirce left off; some of it inspired in part by Peirce but making no attempt to distinguish Peircean from non­Peircean elements in the new constructions in progress.

The continuing confusion of tongues in the semeiotic tower of Babel is such that, for some time to come, it will be worthwhile for semeioticians and Peirce scholars to study the new materials as they become available, and to attempt some of the unfinished tasks of

Page 351 Peircean semeiotic scholarship. Eight of these occur to me as worth mentioning here.

(1) Most needed, and perhaps even a prerequisite to the rest, is an annotated bibliography of Peirce's own relevant writings, published and unpublished, followed by a bibliography of the secondary literature and by a lexicon that quotes Peirce's best definitions or explanations of the terms he uses and that gives references to other relevant passages in his writings and in the secondary literature.

(2) The present paper has briefly shown how Peirce's lifelong study of the logic of mathematics was conducted throughout within the framework of semeiotic. This is worth showing in greater detail. But Peirce's work in the logic of mathematics was for the sake of his more extensive work in the logic of the positive sciences, and it remains to be shown how that also was conducted throughout within the same framework.

(3) Peirce said that the proof of pragmaticism on which he embarked in his Monist series of 1905 was "the one contribution of value" that he had still to make to philosophy, "For it would essentially involve the establishment of the truth of synechism" (5.415). What, in full, was the unfinished proof? How did the theory of signs and the system of existential graphs function in it? And how would it establish the truth of synechism?48

(4) What, more exactly, was the "sop to Cerberus"? And what, more exactly, was that broader, that more generalized conception of sign that Peirce despaired of making understandable and understood?

(5) Suppose that Peirce had succeeded in writing A System of Logic, considered as Semeiotic, or rather suppose that he were writing it today, in full knowledge of developments in logic and in semeiotic since his time. What would be its distinguishing features? Imagine the System already published, and a competent critic writing a careful review article on it. How would the article go?

(6) As an approach to (5), consider that nearly everything that has so far been written about Peirce's general theory of signs belongs to the first of the three parts of the semeiotic trivium, leaving the second and third empty. But Peirce said his hardest and best work had been done on the third (NEM 3:207).49 Interpreters and critics of his pragmatism and of his theory of the economy of research, for examples, have either detached them from semeiotic altogether or have failed to assign them properly, as he did, to its third part, Methodeutic, as presupposing the second, Critic. To what extent has our understanding of them been thereby vitiated? What were his other contributions to Methodeutic? And how about Critic?

(7) What were the steps by which Peirce passed from a nominalistic to a more and more realistic general theory of signs?

Page 352 "Everybody ought to be a nominalist at first, and to continue in that opinion until he is driven out of it by the force majeure of irreconciable facts" (4.1). What was the force majeure at each step of the way?50

(8) Among the recurring topics in Peirce's writing, early and late, are "first impressions of sense" and "immediate perception." It is perhaps obvious enough that the sign theory of cognition entails rejection of the former. It is less obvious that it entails acceptance of the latter. But as late as 1905 Peirce not only claimed to have adhered from the beginning to the doctrine of immediate perception, as held by Aristotle, by Reid and Hamilton, and by Kant in his refutation of Berkeley (8.261), but said that in his own case it was viewing logic as semeiotic that led "at once" to this doctrine.51 These matters are worth arguing out in detail, and our understanding of Peirce will remain imperfect until that has been done.

If the new materials becoming available are as illuminating as the old, and if oncoming semeioticians and Peirce scholars carry out such tasks as these, and others not less fundamental, may we not look for a fourth founding before the end of the century?

It is my belief that such a fourth founding has already begun.

Notes

1. Imagine a small boy for whom shaping his letters is still fun. One day he draws a big O that pleases him, and he proudly calls to his older sister, "See my O, sis!"

2. "See my O, see!"

3. The boy puts a pair of eyes in his big O and says, "See, my O sees!"

4. The boy draws another big O with a quivering or zigzag line and says, "See my O tick! Hear the clock tick, but see my O tick!" See further Thomas A. Sebeok, " 'Semiotics' and Its Congeners," in his Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press, 1976), PP. 47­ 58; and Luigi Romeo, "The Derivation of 'Semiotics' through the History of the Discipline," Semtiosis 6 (1977):37­50.

5. Peirce in a letter to his father without date but about 15 April 1877 (MS L 333).

6. Letter to J. E. Hilgard, Secretary of the Academy, 6 August 1877, in the C. S. S. Peirce folder in the Archives of the National Academy of Sciences.

7. See "Peirce at The Johns Hopkins," pp. 35­72 above.

8. He uses the singular representamnen once, in CP 1.557 (1867). The plurals representamina and representamzens do not yet occur. He uses both later. By 1904 he has dropped this term, but he picks it up again at least twice, in 1906 (5.554) and in 1911 (MS 675). He continues to use represent and representation, but seldom technically.

Page 353 9. In CP 1.555 Peirce places these three categories between Being and Substance, making five in all; but he makes no use of the first and fifth as categories. By the time he wrote his 1870 paper on the logic of relatives, it was evident to him that, in any sense in which the central three are categories, the first and fifth are not; and they never reappear as such after 1867. They are hardly ever even mentioned in connection with the categories. In at least one account, however, Peirce explicitly says that "Being and Substance are of a different nature" (MS L 75, Carnegie Application, "Statement," p. 4 of longer draft with that heading). The best account of this matter is still that by Manley Thompson, The Pragmatic Philosophy of C. S. Peirce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 29­36. (Other questions concerning Peirce's theory of categories are dealt with in "Hegel and Peirce," pp. 263­67 above).

10. The last clause is here corrected from an errata list not found by the editors of the Collected Papers.

11. Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 2:107­325. See especially i:xi and 2:114. See also the last paragraph of section 12 below.

12. The first two papers appeared also in French in the Revue Philosophique 6 (1878):553­69, 7 (1879):39­57, under the titles La Logique de la Science, Premiere partie: Comment se fixe la crovance; Deuxieme partie: Comment rendre nos iddes claires.

13. To be sure, there are differences, but they might not strike a reader unacquainted with Bain's theory of belief. See "Alexander Bain:' pp. 97­98 above.

14. See "Peirce's Arisbe," pp. 230 and 241 above.

15. Next in importance was Augustus De Morgan's fourth memoir on the syllogism, in 1860, which opened up the logic of relations (NEM 4: 125) and elaborated the syllogism of transposed quantity (4. 103). A distant third was Sir William Hamilton's quantification of the predicate (1.29) and the controversy to which it gave rise (2.532­35).

16. "Substitution in Logic," The Monist 15 (1905):294­95, signed by Francis C. Russell but written by Peirce. See further steps (3), (19), (20), and (22) below. See also note 30 below.

17. American Journal of Mathematics 1 (1878):126n.

18. Ibid. 4 (1881):97­229; for errata see p. iv.

19. Johns Hopkins University Circulars 1:178­80.

20. For an explanation of this step, see section 9 below.

21. See Don D. Roberts, The Existential Graphs of Charles S. Peirce (The Hague: Mouton, 1973).

22. Cf. MS 530, "A Proposed Logical Notation." (An American psychologist and logician, Shea Zellweger, is about to publish a new notation for the same connectives, which he calls "the logic alphabet." He accepts four of Peirce's criteria for a good notation, and follows Peirce in calling two of them iconicity and cursiveness. The other two, in substance contained in Peirce's box­X, he calls frame consistency and etlsyl?metrv. Although his logic alphabet differs from Peirce's notations, he conceives his own notation as directly continuing Peirce's work.)

23. See step (1) above and steps (20) and (22) below. Peirce submitted a long article on "Mathematical Logic" for the same Dictionary, but Baldwin printed only the first five words of it and the appended bibliographical note. The article included a five­step analysis of the mathematician's procedure. The account of the peculiarities of mathematical reasoning ended: "Of still greater importance is the practice of making operations and relations of all kinds objects to be operated upon" (NEM 3:749f).

Page 354 24. See "American Pragmatism," pp. 283­302 above.

25. See "The Proof," pp. 362­74 below.

26. For Peirce's use of Bentham's cenoscopic­idioscopic distinction, see 1.241f, 8.199.

27. For Peirce's classification of the sciences as of 1902­03, see 1. 180­283. This is presented in tabular form between pages 48 and 49 of Thomas A. Goudge, The Thought of C. S. Peirce (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1950). See also the illuminating dissertation by Beverley E. Kent, Logic in the Context of Peirce's Classification of the Sciences (Waterloo, 1975; Dissertation Abstracts International 36A:2899).

28. SS is an edition of this correspondence.

29. See "Peirce at The Johns Hopkins," p. 51 above.

30. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.; New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1923), p. 125, referring to the article cited in note 16 above.

31. Mind 33 (1924):109.

32. See sections 2 and 3 above.

33. Two hundred and sixty monographs were contemplated, to be collected in twenty­six volumes, but World War II and Neurath's death intervened. The ten monographs of vol. I were collected in 1955. When nine of the ten for vol. 2 were ready in 1969, it appeared along with a reprint of vol. I under the title Foundations of the Unitv of Science: Toward an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. The remainder of the project was indefinitely postponed. Meanwhile the monographs of both volumes had been appearing singly, as they became ready, beginning in 1938. Morris's monograph appeared in that year as vol. 1, no. 2.

34. Charles Morris, Writings on the General Theory of Signs (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), p. 7. (The Foundations and other writings mentioned below are reprinted in this volume.)

35. Morris has recently given a collection of his correspondence and other papers and a part of his library, including these volumes, to the Peirce Edition Project at Indiana University­Purdue University at Indianapolis.

36. Philodenmus: On Methods of Inference: A Study in Ancient Empiricism (Philological Monographs published by the American Philological Association, no. io, 1941). Estelle Allen De Lacy, "Meaning and Methodology in Hellenistic Philosophy," Philosophical Review 47 (1938):390­409.

37. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 9 (1948):I 15­33. On the controversy between Morris and Dewey about Peirce see my "Dewey's Critical and Historical Studies," pp. 330­32.

38. MSS 842:8 and 848:10; SS 77; letter to Samuel Barnett, 20 December 1901, in Emory University Library.

39. Sir William Hamilton, Discussions on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1860), p. 126.

40. In 1864 Bowen began the preface to his own Treatise on Logic (Boston: John Allyn): "The revival of the study of Logic, at least in England and America, as an important element of a University education, dates only from the publication of Dr. Whately's treatise on the subject, little over thirty years ago."

41. Elements of Logic (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856), book 4, ch. 5, P. 299.

42. Ibid., pp. 294, 298, 302, 347.

43. Amos Bronson Alcott, writing to William Torrey Harris on 2 April 1868, and commenting on "Nominalism versus Realism" (W2:144­54; CP 6.619­24), says: "I take the author ... to be the son of the Cambridge Math­

Page 355 ematical Professor, and speaking the best he has for the Cambridge Metaphysics" (quoted from a typewritten transcript sent to me by Harris's daughter, Edith Davidson Harris, in 1949. She gave her Alcott­Harris collection to the Concord Free Public Library in 1952, but the entire collection, including this letter, has been missing since 1960.) In a draft of this letter among the Alcott Papers in the Houghton Library of Harvard University, Alcott puts it as follows: "I take Peirce to be the son of the Cambridge mathematics Professor, and perhaps defending as he best can the Professor's metaphysics, if not of the College." So Benjamin Peirce, too, was understood to be a nominalist.

44. Elements of 'Rhetoric (London: John W. Parker, 1846), p. 20f.

45. Editor's preface to Elizabeth Jane Whately, A Selection of English Synonyms, 4th ed. rev. (London: John W. Parker, 1858). Peirce's own copies of four of the five Whately books are listed in MS 1555. All are of editions published in Cambridge, or Boston and Cambridge; the Napoleon in 1832, the Logic, Rhetoric, and Synonyms in the 1850s.

46. The call number of this copy in the Harvard University Library is 9265.11.

47. "Peirce's Progress" (pp. 184­97 above) shows that he was espousing nominalism under that name in 1867, well into the period of what I have called the first founding. (Among the defects of this article are that it pays too little attention to the theory of signs, fails to mention Whately and Harvard nominalism, and ignores the gestation period altogether. Moreover, its title was misleading. It was short for "Peirce's progress toward that degree­or that extremity­of realism which he eventually reached." But it was also meant to leave room for a subsequent paper, not yet written, on "Peirce's Lifelong Nominalism.")

48. See section 7 above and note 25.

49. Lines 9­11 of p. 207 should read: "The third branch of logic is Methodetutic which shows how to conduct an inquiry. This is what the greater part of my life has been devoted to, though I base it upon Critic." The preceding sentence was left unfinished. From another draft of the same letter (MS L 231): "In my own feeling, whatever I did in any other science than logic was only an exercize in methodeutic and as soon as I had the method of investigation thoroughly shown, my interest dropped off." From an earlier draft letter to William James (NEM 3:874): "I have done a lot of work in Methodeutic that is valuable and very little of it is printed. This will be the most widely useful part of my Big Book."

50. See section 14 above and note 47.

51. Draft letters to James, 22 and 26 July 1905 (MS L 224).

Page 356

EIGHTEEN—Just How General Is Peirce's General Theory of Signs?

With the help of blackboard outlines and diagrams, I first improvised approximately the following answer at the second colloquium of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Semiotik, at Regensburg on 5 September 1978. Then, as my presidential address to the Semiotic Society of America (and to the Peirce Society meeting in conjunction with it) at Indiana University on 6 October 1979, I wrote out and read parts i and 3, but still improvised part 2 between them, again with the help of blackboard diagrams and outlines. Finally, for a meeting of the Chicago Center for Psychosocial Studies on 6 November 1979, I wrote out approximately the present outline of part 2 and sent copies of the entire paper in approximately its present form. I hope eventually to expand and revise part 2, but meanwhile I welcome the opportunity to submit it for criticism in its present form.

1. INTRODUCTION

Imagine reporting to a colleague on Monday that you have just returned from the second joint meeting of the Semiotic Society of America and the Charles S. Peirce Society. Imagine your colleague responding: "Do tell me about semiotics and Peirce. I've heard of him as a scientist, a mathematician, a logician, and a pragmatist, but not as a semiotician. I know in a vague way what general linguistics might be. I've heard of Saussure's semeiology. I've seen a book or two on semantics. But isn't semiotics as a research field or a division or department or program of academic instruction an affair of the last decade only? Were there any semiotic associations or meetings or journals before that? And isn't semiotics so far just a big umbrella raised over studies that have only the umbrella in common. Anyway, why these joint meetings with the Peirce Society?"

You might answer that what will eventually take the place of the umbrella is a general theory of signs, that Peirce's semeiotic is the

Page 357 most general theory so far put forward, that the Peirce Society was founded in 1946, that his semeiotic gets increasing attention from members of that Society, and that there is no other society that shares the interest of the Semiotic Society of America in the general theory of signs.

Your colleague might then inquire: "But just how general is Peirce's general theory of signs? By what steps did he bring it to that level of generality? And what is the use of so general a theory? What will it do for you that the umbrella doesn't do?"

In what follows I offer partial and tentative answers to these three main questions. The answer I propose to the first question is that Peirce's general theory of signs is so general as to entail that, whatever else anything may be, it is also a sign. How that may be will gradually emerge from the answer to the second question, which will take the form of a tentative retracing of some of the steps by which Peirce arrived at that ne plus ultra generality. The order in which I arrange the steps is neither strictly chronological nor strictly logical, but I hope it may help us decide how far we are ready to follow him. Since everything that is a sign for any other semiotician is a sign for Peirce, I shall invite special attention to signs for him that are not also signs for all other semioticians. The answer to the third question I shall reserve for my last paragraph.

Peirce began where most of us begin, with a model, which, taken by itself, would suggest too narrow a definition; namely, the model of conversation between two competent speakers of the same natural language—say, English. With some assistance from lip movements and gestures, each interprets the sequences of sounds uttered by the other as words, phrases, clauses, and sentences in the language they share. It goes without saying that words are signs; and it goes almost without saying that phrases, clauses, sentences, speeches, and extended conversations are signs. So are poems, essays, short stories, novels, orations, plays, operas, journal articles, scientific reports, and mathematical demonstrations. So a sign may be a constituent part of a more complex sign, and all the constituent parts of a complex sign are signs.

But Peirce draws a distinction here between token and type that has come to be generally accepted. To adopt his favorite illustration, there is only one definite article in the English language, but there are, say, twenty­one of them on this page. The one is the type; the twenty­one are tokens granted by the type as by a law. The conformity of a token to its type need be, and indeed can be, only approximate. Tokens are signs in the first place of their types, and only thereby are they signs of anything else. But the types are signs in a prior and preeminent sense; they confer signhood on their tokens. So there are signs of signs, and we are prepared to entertain the

Page 358 possibility that there may be signs of signs of signs, and perhaps even the possibility that there may be nothing that is a sign of anything that is not in turn a sign.

Everything we have said about words applies also to phrases, clauses, sentences, poems, plays, articles, and books. Emerson's "The Sphinx" is a single poem, and what I have open before me as I write this page is not that one poem but only one of its millions of tokens, printed or spoken.

Peirce's first major extension of the model of conversation in a natural language was prompted by passages in Plato's dialogues in which Socrates describes thinking as silent internalized dialogue, "the inward dialogue carried on by the mind with itself without spoken sound." Peirce found support for this in the colloquial expression, "I says to myself, says I." Among his own ways of putting it are these: ". .. thinking always proceeds in the form of a dialogue—a dialogue between different phases of the ego—so that, being dialogical, it is essentially composed of signs ...." "All thinking is dialogic in form. Your self of one instant appeals to your deeper self for his assent. Consequently, all thinking is conducted in signs that are mainly of the same general structure as words...."

It was at the age of twenty­eight, in 1868, in the second number of the second volume of the first philosophical journal in the English language, that Peirce first committed himself in print to this anti­Cartesian doctrine that all thought is in signs; and in the remaining forty­six years of his life he found no reason to abandon it. From the beginning it entailed for him the denial of intuitive knowledge and the adoption of a social theory of logic. In time it led him to return to the etymological meaning of the adjective "scientific"; that is, knowledge­making, or conducive to knowledge. But it led him also to abandon the notion of science as a body of organized knowledge, once­and­for­all and infallibly concluded, and to adopt instead the notion that science is what scientists do—the way of life of the scientific community.

Theologians may conceive a divine intelligence that knows everything—past, present, and future—unconditionally, immediately, infallibly; for which there is therefore no such thing as experience or learning, as finding out, as putting things together, as coming to know one thing by way of another, as making up its mind. But human intelligence, at least, is scientific intelligence—intelligence that makes or produces knowledge; intelligence whose knowledge must be worked up or inferred from experience; intelligence that knows nothing intuitively or infallibly but that both can learn from experience and must learn from experience whatever it is to know. In the several "sciences" the business of knowledge making has been both professionalized and specialized to certain ranges or kinds of experience,

Page 359 and has thereby gained efficiency. Even pure mathematics learns from experience—the experience of constructing diagrams or arbitrary hypotheses, performing experiments upon them, and observing consequences not specified or anticipated in the rule or precept of construction.

2. SOME OF THE STEPS TOWARD A MORE AND MORE GENERAL THEORY OF SIGNS (AND SOME OF THE PHRASEOLOGY USED BY PEIRCE TO CARRY HIS READERS WITH HIM)

In thought as internalized and silent dialogue, indexes and icons function more directly and obviously than in oral conversation.

Peirce found that his own thinking took the form of conceiving diagrams and trying operations upon them.

Once we have found indexes and icons in thought, it is easier for us to find them in oral conversation.

Soon we are ready to try the hypothesis that there are no absolutely pure symbols, indexes, or icons, but that these are elements or aspects that vary greatly in their relative prominence from sign to sign.

If that hypothesis seems confirmed, we are then ready for the hypothesis that there are two irreducible kinds of action—dynamic or mechanical action, which is irreducibly dyadic, and sign­action or semeiosis, which is irreducibly triadic—and that neither is found (though it may be conceived) without the other. If they seem most of the time to vary inversely in prominence, then we may be ready for the further hypothesis that exclusively dyadic or mechanical action and exclusively triadic or sign­action are ideal limits, to which actions may approximate so closely that we are encouraged to abstract each from the other and consider it separately.

So, just as signs do not sort themselves out into three mutually exclusive kinds, actions do not sort themselves out into two mutually exclusive kinds. Pure symbols, pure indexes, and pure icons are ideal limits in the same way in which dyadic and triadic actions are.

There are other irreducibly triadic actions than semeiosis; for example, giving (A gives B to C); but it is hard to think of any in which semeiosis is not an essential element; in fact, the essential element.

Natural signs (icons and indexes), as distinguished from instituted or conventional signs (symbols), need not be thought of as having an utterer. We may therefore drop the utterer from the general model in terms of which we construct our definition of a sign. And a sign does not cease to be a sign when no interpreter is present. So we may drop the interpreter also from our definition. But we cannot

Page 360 similarly drop the object or the interpretant. It is in this way that Peirce reaches his more general definitions, such as: A sign is a second something that is so determined (limited, specialized) by a first something called its object as to determine a third something called its interpretant. (On the other hand, the scientist may think of himself as putting questions to Nature and getting answers by a process of hypothesis­experiment­induction, which has an economic aspect somewhat analogous to that of the game of Twenty Questions.)

Early and late, Peirce made frequent and wide­ranging use of the distinction between thinking and thought. Thinking is matter for psychology, thought for logic. Thought is type; thinking is token.

Marine fossils found on a mountain are interpreted by the paleontologist as signs of the sea level having been higher than the levels of deposit of those fossils, at far distant dates the paleontologist proceeds to estimate. But the number of such fossils that ever has been, and perhaps that ever will be, accessible to paleontologists or to other interpreters is an extremely small fraction of their total number. Those that never have been and that never will be interpreted are nonetheless signs. Again, how extremely rare it is for an ill human being or other animal to be observed at all by a trained and skilled diagnostician, and how much escapes even the most skilled! But the symptoms and other signs are there, and so are the interpretants to which they would lead an ideally qualified observer and interpreter. The thought is ''there," though there be no thinker of it.

Once more, therefore, neither utterer nor interpreter can be any part of the general definition, however important both may be at lower levels of generality. It is only in this most general sense of "sign" that Peirce can say that "the entire universe ... is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs" (CP 5.448nl).

Among the linguistic devices used by Peirce to carry his readers with him to the higher reaches of generality, and perhaps to assist his own ascent, were "almost," "all but," "virtual," and, above all, "quasi­," as in "quasi­sign," "quasi­mind," "quasi­utterer," "quasi­interpreter."

3. CONCLUSION

Finally, I offer a brief answer to the third question: "What is the use of a general theory of signs—what will it do for us that the umbrella won't do?" It will give us a map so complete and so detailed as to place any one field of highly specialized research in relation to any other, tell us quickly how to get from one such field to another, and distinguish fields not vet explored from those long cultivated. It will

Page 361 give us semeiotic encyclopedias and dictionaries. It will supply the materials for introductions to semeiotics. It will improve the expository skills of specialists whose reports and expositions are at present unreadable by anybody who does not share their specialties. It will thereby greatly improve communication between specialists in nonadjacent semeiotic fields, as well as between semeioticians and nonsemeioticians, or between semeioticians and people who do not yet recognize themselves as such. It will enable us to place researches now in progress; it will supply perspectives in terms of which to view and evaluate their results. But, at least for a long time to come, the general theory of signs will itself require continual revision in the light of new findings.

Page 362

NINETEEN—The "Proof" of Pragmatism

There are very few topics of Peircean scholarship that are not dealt with in The Thought of C. S. Peirce or in other publications by Thomas A. Goudge. One of those few is the elusive "proof" of pragmatism.

When Herbert Spencer died in December 1903, Peirce was giving a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston. He began his next lecture with a tribute to Spencer in the course of which he said: "When philosophy becomes an adult science, as it will before the twentieth centurv is half over, the first question to be asked in weighing the importance of any philosopher will be what important truth did he prove, in the sense in which truths of philosophy can be proved" (MS 470:38).

Less than a year later, in the article "What Pragmatism Is," he called his own form of it "pragmaticism" and promised a second article on some of its applications and a third containing "a proof that the doctrine is true." That proof, it seemed to him, was "the one contribution of value'' that he had to make to philosophy. "For it would essentially involve the establishment of the truth of synechism" (CP 5.415).1

Still another year later, sketching his proof in a letter to the Italian pragmatist Mario Calderoni, he wrote that the "one contribution to philosophy" he had already made was his "New List of Categories," thirty­eight years earlier; and he went on to show how that contribution functioned in the contribution he had still to make, the proof of pragmatism (CP 8.213).

The "New List" had been confined to what Peirce later called universal categories, as distinguished from such particular categories as those of Hegel's Encyclopedia. In the end Peirce concluded that no final list of particular categories is possible, but he believed that he had proved that there are three universal categories and not more, and that he had accurately identified them. It was chiefly on that proof that the proof of pragmatism rested (CP 5.43).2

Our first question is, in what sense can truths of philosophy be proved? Not in the sense in which the theorems and problems of mathematics can be proved. For that kind of proof Peirce reserved

Page 363 the term demonstration. He produced several such demonstrations. But the question of the truth of pragmatism is a question of what is true, not of what would be true under an arbitrary hypothesis, such as those of pure mathematics. The proof of matters of fact consists in bringing them to the test of indubitable experience. "When I say indubitable, I mean of course indubitable today for me. Nothing can be imagined more absolutely satisfactory than that, being indubitable to me, it is equally so to you, for your doubting it would cause me to do so."3 "Now, proof does not consist in giving superfluous and superpossible certainty to that which nobody ever did or ever will doubt, but in removing doubts which do, or at least might at some time, arise" (CP 3.432).

Our second question is, in what does the pragmatism that Peirce is proving consist? What are the matters of fact that it asserts? For a first approximation, we go back to his first published account in the "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" in the Popular Science Monthly in 1877 and 1878, and particularly to the focal paragraph in "How To Make Our Ideas Clear": "It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness and apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object" (CP 5.402).

Construing this paragraph in the light of all six of the published "Illustrations," we gather that pragmatism consists in affirming (I) that there is a third grade of clearness of ideas beyond the two discerned by Descartes and Leibniz; (2) that this third grade of clearness is characteristic of the scientific way of fixing beliefs, as distinguished from such other ways as tenacity, authority, and apriority; (3) that the scientific way of fixing beliefs, including the application of this rule for attaining the third grade of clearness, is applicable to logic and metaphysics; (4) that the above formulation of the rule is accurate and adequate; and (5) that once we have applied the rule to a given conception and thus attained the third grade of clearness of apprehension of it, there will remain nothing in it to be brought into the clear by applying any different or additional rule.

Assuming that pragmatism, at a first approximation, consists in these five affirmations, our third question is, did the "Illustrations" contain a proof of it? Yes—of a sort. At least the greater part of one. It includes everything in the first two papers up to the focal paragraph. It includes the remainder of the second paper, in which Peirce brings us to the third grade of clarity concerning the rule itself by applying it to four important conceptions: hard, weight, force, and reality. It includes the third paper in which he goes on to apply the rule to a fifth and more difficult conception, that of probability. It

Page 364 is continued in the three following papers, in which he shows, or begins to show, that pragmatism yields an adequate account of the logic of science. But the six "Illustrations" were to have been followed by others; the whole series was then to be brought out in book form; the book was announced as forthcoming in Appleton's International Scientific Series; and there were to be French and German translations of it. Neither the book nor any further "Illustrations" appeared, so the published proof remained incomplete. But, as Peirce later said, the essential part of it, which opened the way to all the rest, consisted in showing, without mentioning him, that pragmatism was "scarce more than a corollary" of Bain's definition of belief. What Peirce neglected to add was that it was only by applying his own three universal categories to the conceptions of belief, doubt, and inquiry, without notifying the reader that he was doing so, that pragmatism was shown to be such a corollary (CP 5.12).4

Our fourth question is, what were the actual doubts that this first proof of pragmatism was intended to remove? Presumably the doubts that had been raised in the earlier 1870s in the Metaphysical Club in which pragmatism was born, and the doubts that had troubled Peirce since that time. As to what those doubts were, our evidence is still insufficient, and I therefore postpone the attempt to answer this question.

Our fifth question is, if Peirce had proved pragmatism in the later 1870s, and had got the greater part of the proof into print, why was he setting himself, more than a quarter of a century later, to prove it all over again, as "the one contribution of value" that he had to make to philosophy? And our sixth question is, had he made any intervening attempts, and if so, why, and in what respects had they failed?

To answer the sixth question first, there had been several intervening attempts, three of which must be mentioned here.

(1) In the spring of 1893, under the title Search for a Method, Peirce worked on a collection in book form of nineteen or more of his previously published essays, in chronological order, with the six "Illustrations" in the middle. The "method" of the Search was pragmatism, but a pragmatism purged of its initial errors by the addition of many new footnotes dated 1893, and with the original proof filled out by the other papers, both earlier and later. Before he had carried the notes far enough to remove his own intervening doubts, however, he had a falling out with the prospective publisher and the book never appeared.

(2) James arranged for Peirce to give a course of six lectures under the auspices of the Harvard department of philosophy in the spring of 1903, and Peirce chose to confine them "to the single subject of pragmatism ... Its foundation, definition and limitation, and ap­

Page 365 plications to philosophy, to the sciences, and to the conduct of life will make quite enough for six lectures."5 Peirce did not succeed in bringing the full proof as he then conceived it within the six, so he gave two additional lectures. The last was on mathematical conceptions of multitude and continuity. It included a brief exposition of Peirce's existential graphs. It was given under the auspices of the department of mathematics, but Peirce regarded it as an essential part of the proof (CP 5.201). Only in that lecture, for example, did it appear how a full proof of pragmatism "would essentially involve the establishment of the truth of synechism" (CP 5.415). The editors of the Collected Papers found notebooks containing complete texts for the first seven lectures and published over a hundred pages of extracts from them (CP 5.14­212). They found no text for the last lecture, and the notebook later found is incomplete and lacks continuity (MS 316a).

Peirce wanted to publish the lectures but James discouraged him. "They need too much mediation, by more illustrations ... (nonmathematical ones if possible), and by a good deal of interstitial expansion and comparison with other modes of thought. What I wish myself is that you might revise these lectures for your Lowell course, possibly confining yourself to fewer points (such as the uses of the first­, second­, and third­ness distinction, the generality involved in perception, the nature of abduction—this last to me tremendously important)...."6

(3) So Peirce's Lowell Lectures in the fall of 1903, from which we took our start, became one more attempt at the proof of pragmatism, and the most successful so far. At the fourth lecture he distributed a printed Syllabus. In a draft of it Peirce had sketched the proof at the very beginning (MS 478). This is one of his best statements of the case for pragmatism, but there wasn't room for it in the printed Syllabus, and it remains unpublished.7 In the lectures themselves, pragmatism was omnipresent though seldom named.8 The single last Harvard lecture on existential graphs, multitude and continuity was expanded into three ample lectures in the middle of the Lowell course. The key to the whole course was set in the opening lecture, "What Makes a Reasoning Sound?", and carried through to the eighth, "How To Theorize," answering James's plea for more on "the nature of abduction" (CP 1.606­11; 5.590­604; 7.182 n7). Looking back two years later, Peirce wrote: "Considering how it stood in the midchannel of pragmatistic thought to join ethics to logic, it seems to me strange that we had to wait until 1903 for any pragmatist to assert that logic ought to be based upon ethics. Perhaps some one of us had said it before; but I only know that it was then said in a course of lectures before the Lowell Institute in Boston, and was maintained on the ground that reasoning is thought subjected to

Page 366 self­control, and that the whole operation of logical self­control takes precisely the same quite complicated course which everybody ought to acknowledge is that of effective ethical self­control" (CP 5.533).

Peirce tried to interest George H. Putnam in publishing the lectures in book form, but Putnam thought the purchasers would be too few.9 Extracts from the notebooks are scattered through seven of the eight volumes of the Collected Papers, but there is still no publication from which any sense can be got of the continuity of the argument within the series, or of its continuity with the argument of the Harvard lectures.

So when Peirce less than a year later promised a proof of pragmaticism as "the one contribution of value" that he had to make to philosophy, it was still the case that the only exposition and proof he had got into print was in the unfinished "Illustrations" of 1877­8.

We are now ready to answer our fifth question in summary fashion by saying that the reasons why he was now promising to prove pragmaticism all over again were: (1) The original proof was incomplete. (2) Within five years of its publication, he had come to have radical doubts about the tenability of the doctrine itself, as well as about his proof of it. (3) All his attempts to put something better in its place had failed of publication if not also of completion. (4) James, Schiller, Dewey, and others had recently been putting forth varieties of pragmatism which Peirce welcomed as signs of the vitality of the movement, but which seemed to him to carry the doctrine to such extremes as to put it beyond the possibility of proof. (5) It seemed to him therefore more urgent than ever to pull the doctrine back within provable limits, and then to prove it (MS 328:2­3).

The Monzist series in which this was to be done was at first to consist of three articles, "What Pragmatism Is," "Consequences" or "Issues of Pragmaticism," and "The Basis of Pragmaticism." It was of course impossible that a three­article series should cover all the ground even of the eight Harvard lectures, to say nothing of the additional ground of the eight Lowell lectures. Much would have to be omitted. Peirce did not at first intend to bring in the existential graphs. But when the second article was already in print and he had produced several drafts of the third, he decided to devote the third to the graphs after all, and postpone the proof proper to a fourth. The third, on the graphs, appeared under the title ''Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism." But as Peirce worked away on the fourth article, it also was divided into two, and eventually into three. The fourth was to begin the apology or proof, the fifth to contain the main argument, and the sixth the subsidiary arguments and illustrations. In a draft of the fourth, Peirce says he began the series "under the clear conviction that no valid argument had

Page 367 ever been put forth for the truth of Pragmatism." Nor, as of the spring of 1908, three and a half years later, had he seen any such argument. "Of my own original promulgation of the doctrine," he adds in a footnote, "it is sufficient to say that it was published in a popular magazine, and therefore could hardly fail to be based on a begging of the question as it plainly is, in that it is entirely built upon the principle that that which a man believes is the proposition upon which he will be satisfied to act" (MS 296:39). In a later draft, he called it a "merely rhetorical defence" (MS 296:3).

Meanwhile the publisher of the Monist had offered to reprint the Popular Science Monthly papers in book form and Peirce had begun editing them, with preface, introduction, and extensive revisions. Some confusion arose between that project and the continuation of the Monist series. Neither project was brought to completion. Extracts from a few of the numerous drafts appear here and there in the Collected Papers, but there is still no publication from which any sense can be got of the form the last revision of the proof would have taken in either of these two versions. The present paper cannot fill that need. It can only raise some relevant questions and urge some younger student of Peirce to take up the task.

This brings me to our last five questions. What were some of the not­yet­mentioned doubts about pragmatism and its proof as originally formulated that led Peirce to such reformulations as those of 1893, 1903, and 1904­10? What were some of the novel features of these reformulations? What role were the existential graphs to play in the final proof? How was it to "involve the establishment of the truth of synechism" (CP 5415)? And why did Peirce fail to complete the Monist series and the editing of the Popular Science Monthly series for reappearance in book form?

In the best draft of the fourth Monist paper Peirce wrote that he had "passed through a doubt of pragmaticism lasting very nearly twenty years." He asks if we happen to know what "doubt" means. "What 'doubt' really denotes is to be insupportably discontent to dispose for oneself of the proposition that is said to be 'doubted,' in any suggestible way whatever, whether it be to affirm it to oneself, or to deny it, or yet to leave the question of its truth unsettled" (MS 300:16­17).

What years did the "nearly twenty" span? They ended not later than 1902, when the final proof "first stood out clearly" in his mind (MS 300:20). They began, therefore, not later than 1883, when he was lecturing on logic at The Johns Hopkins University. But they may have begun in 1878, when the "Illustrations" ceased with the sixth. They ended, therefore, not earlier than 1896­7, the year in which he committed himself to the doctrine of real possibility and then invented his Existential Graphs. In either case, they included

Page 368 the year in which he projected the Search for a Method, and that may help account for his failure to finish annotating the "Illustrations" for that volume.

And in either case I suggest that his doubts first became really acute in the year 1882­3 when he had but a single logic class of able graduate students at Hopkins meeting four times a week throughout the academic year. Most of them were mathematicians. The texts with which they began were "The Fixation of Belief" and "How To Make Our Ideas Clear." The announcement of the course had said: "Here, as everywhere throughout the course, the doctrine of the text will receive improvements, and the subject will be further illustrated by the aid of other works." Probably neither before nor later were those two papers ever submitted to severer criticism. It would be good to know what improvements their doctrine received.10

The "principal positive error" of the original exposition, Peirce later said, was its nominalism (CP 8.216). This was especially illustrated by his quoting the stanza from Gray's Elegy (CP 5.409). It was prominent also in the "grievous error," the "damnable error," of his application of the maxim to the idea "hard" (CP 5.403; MS 289:12, 17­18). He remained a nominalist in that sense until late in 1896, when he repudiated ''the nominalistic view of possibility, and explicitly" returned "to the Aristotelian doctrine of a real possibility. This was the great step that was needed to render pragmaticism an intelligible doctrine" (MS 845:26; cf. CP 5.526­32).

In the first flush of pragmatism, he had perhaps receded even from the minimal realism to which he had committed himself in his Berkeley review of 1871. If so, that was not unnatural. As he put it in 1903, "Berkeley is an extreme nominalist and Nominalism is itself of pragmatistic origin and its falsity is owing to its not fully planting itself upon pragmatistic ground ... [T]he faults of Berkeley's system ... arise simply from his deficient grasp of the pragmatistic principle" (MS 478: 160). Peirce's greatest single doubt about his original pragmatism was removed when he was able to see his own later and more thoroughgoing realism, not merely as a corrective of his earlier pragmatism, but as a consequence of his graduating into a more thoroughgoing pragmatism. It was a further development of pragmatism itself that led him to insist that "a mere possibility may be quite real" and to abandon the "strange rule" "that every conditional proposition whose antecedent does not happen to be realized is true"—that is, to make room for strict implication without denying that there is a conditional de inesse (CP 4.580­1 ).

One of Peirce's recurring sources of uneasiness about the original proof was its resting the case for pragmatism on psychological principles. Bain's theory of belief, of which pragmatism was "scarce more than a corrollary" (CP 5.12), was a psychological theory, pre­

Page 369 sented in a psychological treatise and in a psychological manual, both of them used by James and others in psychological courses at Harvard. Even the term "idea" in "How To Make Our Ideas Clear" was a term of psychology, not of logic. In his paper on "The Algebra of Logic'' in 1880 Peirce went so far as to begin with a physiological "derivation of logic" (CP 3.154­6 1). But from the 1880s on he attached increasing importance to the classification of the sciences. In all his classifications, each science depends for principles on those above it and for data on those below it (CP 3.427; 1.189, 197). And in all of them psychology and physiology are down among the special sciences, below logic and metaphysics. In his earlier classifications, logic has only mathematics above it. Now pragmatism is a regulative principle of logic. Therefore it cannot be derived from physiology or from psychology. But on the other hand it can scarcely be derived from or based on mathematics. On what, then?

Peirce dates his serious study of ethics from 1883 (CP 5.111 129). As we have seen, his nearly twenty­years doubt of pragmatism began not later than that year. He soon began to entertain the possibility of basing logic on ethics. What gave him pause was that the only ethics discernible in the original exposition of pragmatism was an incipient hedonism. "It is certainly best for us that our beliefs should be such as may truly guide our actions so as to satisfy our desires" (CP 5.375). It was only in conjunction with desires that the sensible "effects" of the pragmatic maxim would have "practical bearings"; that is, determine habits of action. Worse still, it was a vulgar and nominalistic hedonism. Desires were taken as ultimate given particulars, lacking in generality, not subject to dialectical or evolutionary development (CP 5.158). Moreover, all his efforts to base logic (including pragmatism) on ethics ran into the difficulty that ethics could be based only on esthetics, and that long seemed to him to lead once again into hedonism (CP 5.110). But by the early 1890s he had committed himself to a doctrine of agapism or evolutionary love, in opposition to hedonism. It was not until the Lowell Lectures of 1903 that he resolved this doubt by basing ethics on what he called "a transfigured Esthetics" or "esthetics in a transfiguration," whose chief if not sole function is to determine the summrn bonum.11l

In the implicit ethics of the original exposition, what was not hedonism verged on stoicism, which Peirce found equally objectionable. As he put it in the article on pragmatism in Baldwin's Dictionan, in 1902, "The doctrine appears to assume that the end of man is action—a stoical maxim which, to the present writer at the age of sixty, does not recommend itself so forcibly as it did at thirty" (CP 5.3).

In later attempts at the proof, the language of desire, pleasure, and satisfaction gave way to that of rational purpose and of self­control; that of action to that of conduct; that of belief to that of

Page 370 assertion. That is, psychological language gave way to logical and ethical. But, as if partly to justify his previous use of desire and pleasure, at least once he showed even their generality, in his apple pie illustration (CP 1.341).

Peirce was a mathematician and one of his most serious and longlasting doubts about pragmatism was whether it could be made acceptable to mathematicians and to himself as mathematician (CP 5.5­10). As he put it in the Baldwin article, he "subsequently saw that the principle might easily be misapplied, so as to sweep away the whole doctrine of incommensurables, and in fact, the whole Weierstrassian way of regarding the calculus" (CP 5.3; cf. 32­3). He resolved the doubt in part by an extension of the conceptions of sensible effects and habits of action (CP 5.201­5, 539, 541). But he resolved it in part also by developing a theory of mathematics that made it an experimental and observational science, differing from the special sciences by experimenting on diagrams of our own construction. In mathematics as in the special sciences, a point is reached at which "It is necessary that something should be DONE" (CP 4.233).

In a similar vein, one of the strengths he came to prize in his existential graphs is that, without loss of rigour and even with some gain, they lend themselves to a pragmatic understanding of logic itself. For example, even "The definitions shall all be given in strictly pragmaticistic form; that is in the form of precepts of conduct, more definitely speaking, as permissions to do certain things under expressed general circumstances" (MS 280:23).

But Peirce was not only a mathematician. He was a research scientist. And in the long history of classifications of the sciences, from Plato and Aristotle to the present, the nearest approach to a constant has been the distinction between theoretical and practical science. But pragmatism in all its forms, including Peirce's, seemed to blur if not to obliterate this distinction by turning theoretical into practical science. In "How To Make Our Ideas Clear" Peirce had said that "the whole function of thought is to produce habits of action" (CP 5.400). And in his Harvard lectures he said: "Pragmatism is the principle that every theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose only meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence having its apodosis in the imperative mood" (CP 5.18).

Nevertheless he was as insistent on retaining the distinction as Aristotle or any of his medieval interpreters, and nowhere more so than when he was making a more exhaustive study of the practical sciences than anybody before him or since (see especially MS 1343). In a draft of his third Monist article he listed among misapprehensions of pragmatism the notion that "it involves a depreciation of

Page 371 pure science. In my case, I am confident it has worked in the opposite way; and I do not believe I should have been able to endure my life's exclusive devotion to pure thought if I had not been sustained by the pragmaticistic belief" (MS 284:6). And in another draft he remarks that although research scientists "look upon their work as purely theoretical ... they are nevertheless particularly given to thinking of their results as affording possible conditions for new experiments ... This shows that regarding a truth as purely theoretical does not prevent its being regarded as a possible determinant of conduct" (MS 283:10­12).

One quite temporary solution of 1902 to the hedonism­or­stoicism objection was to admit a grade of clearness higher than the third or pragmatic, or even an indefinite series of higher grades. In the Baldwin article he says that the pragmatic maxim "should always be put into practice with conscientious thoroughness, but that, when that has been done, and not before, a still higher grade of clearness of thought can be attained by remembering that the only ultimate good which the practical facts to which it directs attention can subserve is to further the development of concrete reasonableness; so that the meaning of the concept does not lie in any individual reactions at all, but in the manner in which those reactions contribute to that development" (CP 5.3). And in his Carnegie application of the same year he says: "Moreover, my paper of 1878 was imperfect in tacitly leaving it to appear that the maxim of pragmatism led to the last stage of clearness. I wish now to show that this is not the case and to find a series of Categories of clearness" (CP 8.176n3).

But in the following year, by firmly basing logic on ethics and ethics on esthetics, he reabsorbed into the third or pragmatic grade all that the fourth and higher grades had promised to yield. After that, his only revision in this respect was to "subdivide the second grade into two, and the third into three" (MS 620:19).

In the original proof, Peirce had not sufficiently guarded against such misunderstandings as that to attain the second grade of clearness is to have no further need of the first, and to attain the third is to leave the second behind; or that the first and second are transcended or aufgehoben in the third; or that all the first and second are good for is to make way for the third. In his later attempts at the proof, he emphasizes that the third grade presupposes the second, as the second presupposes the first; that it supplements them but does not supplant them, or even swing free of them; that they remain indispensable; and that they retain all the values they had without it.

By the beginning of 1909, if not earlier, Peirce had decided to devote the fourth article in the Monist series—the first of the three that were still to come, and that were to contain the proof proper,

Page 372 as distinguished from the prolegomena—to the second grade of clarity in relation on the one hand to the first and on the other to the third. This fourth article, he said, would present "a theory of Logical Analysis, or Definition" which "rests directly on Existential Graphs, and will be acknowledged, I am confident, to be the most useful piece of work I have ever done ... Now Logical Analysis is, of course, Definition; and this same method applied to Logical Analysis itself—the definition of definition[, ­ ] produces the rule of pragmaticism. ... It is the very proof that I intended to bring out when I began this series of papers on Pragmaticism."12 In the following winter and the spring of 1910 he wrote at least six partial drafts of this fourth article. The sixth draft begins:

In my original essay on Pragmaticism I showed that there are three grades of attainment toward clearness of thought that are rendered distinct from one another by qualitative differences; the first and lowest imparting what may be more specifically called "Clearness," i.e. readiness in employing and in interpretatively applying the notion, idea, or other Sign to which it relates; the second imparting Distinctness, or analytic understanding of just what constitutes the essence of that meaning which the first grade has rendered Clear; and the third, or Pragmatistic, grade imparting what perhaps I may be allowed to call Pragmatistic "Adequacy," that is, not what has been, but what ought to be the substance, or Meaning, of the concept or other Symbol in question, in order that its true usefulness may be fulfilled.

I trust that, in that essay, I made my own opinion plain, that Pragmatistic Adequacy no more supersedes the need of Analytic Distinctness and of adherence to precise Definitions, than this latter, or Second Grade of clearness supersedes the need of intuitive or unintellectual Clearness in the specific sense just defined. It is evident that no abstract definition can possibly render needless the power of directly recognizing whether a given concept does or does not apply to a given image; and I believe I was sufficiently explicit as to my own opinion that no recognition of the utility of a concept, however just, could in the least affect the need of precisely defining it. (Please observe, by the way, that I speak of three distinct Grades of clearness, which I also call Kinds, but never Stages, as if one were done with before the next began; for the contrary will be found markedly their relation.) 13

But I have since found reason to regret that I did not reinforce this opinion by arguments . .. One of the purposes of the present paper is to supply that omission as well as I can.

Besides that, I think I may usefully formulate any notion of the proper way to perform the research requisite to the formulation of an accurate and precise Definition of a Concept which is already pretty Clear in the specific sense.... (MS 649:2­5)

But if the "principal positive error" of the original exposition was its nominalism, its principal negative error, its great sin of omission,

Page 373 was that, whereas Peirce had derived his pragmatism "from a logical and non­psychological study of the essential nature of signs" (MS 137:21), he said nothing whatever about signs in the "Illustrations" of 1877­8. Pragmatism is a method for generating a particular kind of interpretant of a particular kind of sign, and a doctrine concerning that method; and it is only within the framework of the theory of signs that it is possible to give any precision to the method and the doctrine, so as to make their limitations fully evident and thus forestall needless objections and misunderstandings. Even in the Harvard and Lowell lectures of 1903 this was but inadequately done. As he worked on the Monist series, he was content at first to cover only so much of the theory of signs as was indispensable for relating pragmatism to it; but a more systematic and complete treatment of semeiotic came to seem at least a desideratum, and he began working on a new treatise to be entitled A System of Logic Considered as Semeiotic. This in turn called for a more elaborate development of his universal categories. He had already reserved a place in his classification of the sciences for a science that should have this as its task. He called it at first "high philosophy," then phenomenology, then phaneroscopy. Its place was between mathematics and the normative sciences. There are still several unpublished partial drafts of a treatise on phaneroscopy. The proof of pragmatism turned on the relations between the universal categories, the classes of signs, their objects and interpretants, the logical modalities, and especially the logic of vagueness. Whatever the solutions, Peirce was convinced that his existential graphs would yield the best possible representation of the modalities. Yet if he reached a graphical representation of them that completely satisfied him, it does not appear from anything so far published what it was. Closely connected with all this is the question just how the proof of pragmatism would essentially involve the establishment of synechism.

I may best approach my final conclusions by way of Peirce's division of semeiotic into speculative grammar, critic, and methodeutic (CP 1.191; 4.9). If he had finished and published his System of Logic Considered as Semeiotic, that division would have been its organizing principle. And if we were now about to examine the System for its contribution to the proof of pragmatism, we might well be asking ourselves such questions as the following. Does the pragmatism being proved belong to all three parts, and, if so, what elements or aspects of it belong to the first, to the second, and to the third? Or does it belong to only two of the three parts, and, if so, to which two, and why? Or to only one, and, if so, to which one, and why?

The best accounts of the "proof" so far published are those by Manley Thompson and John J. Fitzgerald.14 Both have these ques­

Page 374 tions in mind, and both are aware that they are not explicitly answered in anything published by Peirce or included in the Collected Papers. Both remark that in the pragmatism lectures of 1903 Peirce identifies pragmatism with "the logic of abduction" and that this might seem to assign it to the first branch of critic. But Fitzgerald thinks the 1907 paper entitled by the editors "A Survey of Pragmaticism" tacitly and rightly assigns it to speculative grammar. And Thompson argues that Peirce's reason for identifying it with the logic of abduction is "precisely because it completes the analysis of significant assertion given by speculative grammar"; that it "begins the logic of abduction at the same time that it ends speculative grammar.

Neither Thompson nor Fitzgerald made use of the vast body of still unpublished Peirce papers. Had they done so, they would have found him, almost without exception, assigning pragmatism neither to speculative grammar nor to critic, but to methodeutic.15

So my final conclusions are two. First: The problem of the proof of pragmatism calls for further study of Peirce's still unpublished writings on phaneroscopy, semeiotic, existential graphs, the modalities, and the relations between pragmatism, tychism and synechism. Second: To facilitate such study we need a new edition of Peirce's writings, in a single chronological order, that will include extensive and expertly edited selections from these still unpublished writings. 16

Notes

1. The only merit Peirce claimed for the name "pragmaticism" was that it was "ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers" (CP 5.414). So it proved to be, as "pragmatism" had not. But it was also too ugly for constant use by Peirce himself. For example, nearly three years later, in what the editors of the Collected Papers mistitle "A Survey of Pragmaticism,'' Peirce's only title is "Pragmatism" (CP 5.464*), and in the more than five hundred manuscript pages (MSS 317­324) the uglier name does not once occur. Except in quotations, I shall seldom use it myself, but I trust the reader will understand that the pragmatism whose proof is in question is Peirce's, not anybody else's, and not pragmatism in general.

2. See "Hegel and Peirce," pp. 264­65 above.

3. Draft letter to J. S. Engle, 14 February 1905 (MS L 133).

4. See "Alexander Bain," pp. 93­100 above.

5. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1935), 2:426­27.

6. Ibid., pp. 427­28.

Page 375 7. Next year (1904) Peirce was invited by Hugo Munsterberg to present a paper or two to the Congress of Arts and Sciences at the St. Louis Exposition. Peirce responded that he could not afford to go to St. Louis but would gladly send two papers: for the logic section, "Classification and nomenclature for triadic relations"; and for the methodology section, "Pragmatism as the Methodeutic of Metaphysics (Outline of the proof of it. Definition. General character of its tendencies. Precautions to be observed in its employment.)." Miinsterberg replied that only papers to be presented by their authors in person could be accepted. (MS L 308; Boston Public Library Mss Acc. 2031, Peirce to Munsterberg, 19 July 1904.)

8. See however MSS 453:37­38; 462:22­28; 466:21­23.

9. Letters from Putnam of 15 and 21 December 1903.

10. See "Peirce at The Johns Hopkins," pp. 46­47 above.

11. Peirce to Schiller, draft of 12 May 1905 and letter of 13 May (MS L 390).

12. Peirce to Carus, draft letter of 6 January 1909 (MS L 77). See also Peirce's letter of January 8 to William James in the James Papers in The Houghton Library at Harvard University.

13. Actually in a draft of his Carnegie Application of 1902 he had used the phrase "four stages or degrees of clearness" (MS L 75).

14. See Thompson, The Pragmatic Philosophlty of C. S. Peirce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), and Fitzgerald, Peirces Thleon, of Signs as Foundation for Pragmtatisim (The Hague: Mouton, 1966).

15. For example, in drafts other than those used in CP 5.464­96 of "Pragmatism"­the paper on which Thompson and Fitzgerald chiefly rely—Peirce says "But pragmatism is plainly, in the main, a part of methodeutic" (MS 320:24) and "Pragmatism is, thus ... a mere rule of methodeutic, or the doctrine of logical method" (MS 322:13). Of course methodeutic depends on speculative grammar and on critic, and the way to pragmatism will have been cleared in these first two parts of semeiotic. That is, they will have made their contributions to the "proof." But, as Peirce puts it in a draft of a letter to C. A. Strong in 1904 (MS L 427), it is to "this third part,'' namely methodeutic, that pragmatism "belongs."

16. It should be added that Fitzgerald is preparing a revised edition of his book, which will take account of the unpublished manuscripts, and that Don D. Roberts has in progress a series of articles on the proof, which will also make use of Peirce's unpublished papers. Since writing the present essay, I have tried (in "Peirce's General Theory of Signs") to place Peirce's pragmatism within his semeiotic. As of February 1980 a new edition of Peirce's writings, in a single chronological order, in twenty or more volumes, with a high proportion of previously unpublished papers, is being prepared at the Peirce Edition Project in Indianapolis.

Page 376

TWENTY—Peirce as Scientist, Mathematician, Historian, Logician, and Philosopher

At a bicentennial international congress devoted to Peirce and held in Europe, we may well begin by remarking that Peirce himself was in Europe in the centennial year 1876. He was then on the second, the longest, and the most productive of his five European sojourns in the service of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, at that time the chief scientific agency of the United States Government. Peirce was in the first place a scientist, and his career was in the service of that agency. The years of Peirce's five European sojourns were: (1) 1870­1871; (2) 1875­1876; (3) 1877; (4) 1880; and (5) 1883. The five sojourns together added up to nearly three of those thirteen years.1

I. THE SCIENTIST

The occasion for Peirce's first European sojourn, that of 1870­1871, was an eclipse of the sun on 22 December 1870, whose path of totality was to pass through the Mediterranean. The last previous eclipse had been in the United States in the preceding year, and Peirce had been one of the observers there. The observations of the sun's corona and of its protuberances had prompted new theories as to the composition of the sun, but there was some skepticism about these theories among European astronomers. The eclipse of 1870 would provide an opportunity for an early test of them. There would not be another so favorable in the nineteenth century, and Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, and Spain planned expeditions. The United States Congress appropriated funds for an expedition under the Coast Survey, and Peirce was sent over six months in advance to visit possible sites for observation parties and to make recommendations and begin arrangements. From London, shortly after the Vatican Council had declared the conditions of papal infallibility, and just as the Franco­Prussian War began, Peirce journeyed eastward by way of Rotterdam, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, Pest,

Page 377 the Danube, and the Black Sea, to Constantinople. Then he began moving westward along the path of totality in search of eligible sites. He recommended sites in Sicily and southern Spain, and became himself a member of one of the Sicilian teams.

On the whole, the American observations and inferences of the preceding year were vindicated. This was Peirce's first experience of large­scale international scientific cooperation. He had already committed himself to the social theory of logic, but this experience and that of his four later European sojourns confirmed him in that commitment.

Between 1871 and 1875, the Coast Survey made Peirce responsible for two fields of research: photometric studies of the stars of a region of our galaxy, with a view to a more accurate determination of the shape of the galaxy; and pendulum­swinging determinations of absolute and relative gravity at stations in Europe and in the United States, with a view to a more accurate determination of the figure of the earth.2

By 1875, the greater part of the photometric researches was completed, but he had still to make a more thorough study of earlier star catalogues. During his second sojourn in Europe (1875­1876), he examined medieval and renaissance manuscripts of Ptolemy's star catalogue in several libraries. He also made inquiries as to the methods used in the preparation of the most recent star catalogue, the Durchmusterung of Argelander and Schönfeld at the Bonn Observatory. Peirce's book, Photometric Researches (1878), included his own edition of Ptolemy's catalogue, as well as a long letter from Schönfeld concerning the methods of the Durchmtusterung.

The chief purpose of his second sojourn, however, was to accept delivery from Repsold and Sons in Hamburg of a reversible pendulum apparatus suitable for absolute determinations of gravity, and to make such determinations at so­called "initial stations" in Europe; namely, those at Berlin, Geneva, Paris, and Kew. In April 1875 at the new Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge, England, he consulted Maxwell about the theory of the pendulum. At Hamburg in late May and early June, he took possession of the Repsold pendulum and made preliminary tests of it. He then conferred in Berlin with General Baeyer, founder and president of the Royal Prussian Geodetic Institute, who questioned the stability of the Repsold stand. Peirce went next to Geneva. By arrangement with Professor Plantamour, Director of the Observatory, he swung his new pendulum there, and detected and measured the flexure of the stand that General Baeyer had suspected.

The first international scientific association was geodetic. Its founding conference was at Berlin in 1864. In the French form of its name, it was called international from the beginning. In the

Page 378 German form, it was called at first middle­European, then European, and only in 1886 did it begin to be called international. Conferences were held every third year, but there was a "Permanent Commission" or standing committee that met annually. There was also a Special Committee on the Pendulum. In September 1875, the Permanent Commission met for ten days in Paris. On one of those days there was also a meeting of the Special Committee on the Pendulum, at which Peirce reported his Geneva findings. The Special Committee reported to the Permanent Commission. Peirce took part in the discussion of its report. He thus became the first invited American participant in the committee meetings of an international scientific association.

Later in 1875 and in 1876, Peirce swung his new pendulum for extended periods in Paris, in Berlin, and at Kew; and, after his return to the United States, at Stevens Institute in Hoboken. The Coast Survey's Report for the year 1876 contained 145 pages by Peirce on "Measurements of Gravity at Initial Stations in America and Europe," on the second page of which he said: "The value of gravity determinations depends upon their being bound together, each with all the others which have been made anywhere upon the earth .... Geodesy is the one science the successful prosecution of which absolutely depends upon international solidarity."

The next general conference of the International Geodetic Association was held at Stuttgart in late September and early October of 1877. By invitation, Peirce had sent well in advance a memoir in French on the effect of flexure of the Repsold stand on the oscillations of the reversible pendulum. This memoir and others by Plantamour and his colleague Cellérier confirming Peirce's findings were published as appendices to the proceedings of the conference. Peirce attended the conference as accredited representative of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey. That was the first formal representation of an American scientific agency in the sessions of an international scientific association. During the discussions, Hervé Faye, president of the Bureau of Longitudes in Paris, suggested that swaying of the stand could be prevented by swinging from the same stand two pendulums with equal amplitudes but in opposite phases. Peirce later made an analytic mechanical investigation of Faye's proposal, concluding that it was as sound as it was brilliant. Copies of this investigation were distributed at the 1879 meeting of the Permanent Commission.

Peirce was active in still other fields that called for international cooperation. One of these was metrology. Until the establishment of the National Bureau of Standards in 1901, the United States Office of Weights and Measures was a department of the Coast Survey. The American Metrological Society had been founded in 1873, and two

Page 379 years later, Peirce had become a member of its Committee on Units of Force and Energy. When he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in April 1877, he was immediately made a member of the Academy's Committee on Weights, Measures, and Coinage.

There were close connections between gravitational and metrological researches. Accurate determinations of gravity depended on accurate measurements of the lengths of pendulums. Peirce swung yard and meter pendulums for a fresh determination of the relation between the yard and the meter. At a meeting of the Permanent Commission during the Stuttgart Conference of 1877 he proposed the use of a wavelength of light to measure the standard yards and meters and to detect and measure changes in their lengths. This project, which involved the use of diffraction gratings, came to be called that of "the spectrum meter." Peirce made rapid progress on it during the next three years. He returned to Europe early in May 1880, authorized to remain through December if necessary. He was expected to attend the sixth general Conference of the Association at Munich in September, and to report there both on his latest gravity researches and on "the spectrum meter"; but he was called home in July by his father's final illness. He did, however, address the French Academy of Sciences on 14 June on the value of gravity at Paris, correcting an error in the then accepted value. The discussion of his paper was resumed a week later, with Peirce again present.

Peirce's fifth and last European sojourn was from May to September 1883. One of his many tasks was to obtain from Breguet's in Paris an instrument for determining the flexure of the pendulum stand. Another was to obtain from Gautier's in Paris two pendulums designed by Peirce himself to eliminate a cause of flexure inherent in the structure of previous pendulums. Still another was to compare the Coast Survey's Standard Yard No.57 with the Imperial Yard No. i, and also with the Iron Yard No. 58, at the British Standards Office in London.

More than a month after Peirce had returned home from this final sojourn, the Seventh Conference of the International Geodetic Association was held at Rome in mid­ October 1 883. At that Conference, Professor von Oppolzer of the Austrian survey made a comprehensive and critical report on different forms of apparatus for the determination of gravity. He reviewed the problem of flexure of the Repsold stand and stated that the solution proposed by Faye and shown by Peirce to be theoretically sound—namely, to swing two pendulums from the same stand with equal amplitudes but in opposite phases—was a solution in the right direction, but was not practicable.

Impracticable it was generally taken to be, for reasons chiefly of economy, for the next thirty years. But during the gravity survey of

Page 380 Holland in the years 1913­1921, because the mobility of the soil rendered the pendulum supports more unstable there than elsewhere, Vening Meinesz finally adopted the Faye­Peirce method and found that it solved the problem. Meeting as we are in Holland, it is fitting that we should take note of the fact that this first of several posthumous vindications of Peirce's scientific work took place here.

Meanwhile the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey had entered a long decline, mainly because of pressure from Congress to make drastic cuts in expenditures for instruments, for field work, and for travel. Shorter and more easily portable pendulums were adopted, but Peirce was unwilling to use them because the results would no longer be comparable in precision with those of the best European researches. His last trip to Europe had been in 1883; his last field work at home was in 1886. On 25 November 1889, Annibale Ferrero of the Italian Survey, who had coached Peirce in Italian, wrote him from Florence that, under such discouraging circumstances, the best place for him would be in the central office of the International Geodetic Association in Berlin. But Ferrero's efforts to that end were fruitless; Peirce's Survey appointment was terminated at the end of 1891, after thirty­one and a half years of service. In the remaining twenty­three years of his life he had no regular salaried employment.

Peirce now set up in private practice as a chemical engineer, thereby returning to the profession to which he had committed himself before he entered the service of the Coast Survey, and from which his career in the Survey had been a diversion. This brings me to the question how Peirce came to be a scientist, and more particularly a chemist, and how his diversion from chemistry to astronomy and geodesy, and thence to metrology and other sciences, came about.

He grew up in the scientific circle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1840's and 1850's. His father, Benjamin Peirce, was professor of astronomy and mathematics in Harvard College, and was one of the moving spirits behind the establishment there of the Lawrence Scientific School in 1847. Eben Norton Horsford had then recently returned from two years at Giessen studying chemistry under Liebig, who combined laboratory instruction with demonstration experiments during lectures. To Liebig more than to anybody else it was due that the experimental method of teaching was more highly developed in chemistry than in any other science, so that the study of chemistry offered at that time the best entry into experimental science in general. Horsford was now made professor of chemistry in the Lawrence Scientific School, where he developed, on the Liebig model, the first laboratory in America for analytical chemistry. Peirce's uncle, Charles Henry Peirce, until then a practising physician in

Page 381 Salem, became Horsford's assistant. Horsford encouraged him to translate Stockhardt's Principles of Chemistry, Illustrated by Simple Experiments for textbook use. Peirce's aunt, Charlotte Elizabeth Peirce, whose German was excellent, did most of the actual work of translation. During the years in which the chemical laboratory was being established and the translation was in progress, Peirce's uncle and aunt helped him set up a private laboratory at home and work his way through Liebig's hundred bottles of qualitative analysis (MS 619:6). In 1850, when the translation appeared, Peirce, then eleven, wrote "A History of Chemistry" (MS I634:5). In that year, his uncle became federal inspector of drugs for the port of Boston. Two years later, in 1852, he published Examinations of Drugs, Medicines, Chemicals, &c., as to their Purity and Adulterations, giving some of the results of his official labors. Not long before Peirce entered Harvard College in I855, his uncle died, and Peirce inherited his chemical and medical library. His college teacher of chemistry was Josiah P. Cooke, who had founded the undergraduate departments of chemistry and mineralogy just five years earlier. The textbook used in chemistry was Stöckhardt's, as translated by Peirce's aunt and uncle.

In his freshman year at college, Peirce began intensive private study of philosophy with Schiller's Aesthetic Letters (MS 1634:6). From that he moved on to Kant's Critic of the Pure Reason. In his later college years, while continuing with Kant, he added modern British philosophy. But all the while, as he later said, he "retained ... a decided preference for chemistry" (MS 1606:11), and it was well understood in the family that he was headed for a career in chemistry. He suffered so from ill health during his senior year, however, that an interval of outdoor employment seemed desirable before he proceeded further. His father was Consulting Geometer to the Coast Survey and a personal friend of its Superintendent, Alexander Dallas Bache. Bache offered Peirce a place in his own field party in Maine in the fall of 1859, and in another field party around the delta of the Mississippi in the winter and spring of 1860. In early August 1859, before joining Bache's party, Peirce spent a week at Springfield reporting sessions of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for six issues of the Boston Daily Evening Traveler.

During Peirce's absence in Maine and Louisiana, Darwin's Origin of Species appeared (CP 5.64; NEM 3:155), and also a separate edition of Agassiz's Essay on Classification. Chemistry was an experimental, but also a classificatory science. Biology was the chief other classificatory science. The differences between these two sciences were being brought into focus by the controversy between supporters of Darwin and supporters of Agassiz. In the latter half of 1860, while

Page 382 serving as proctor and tutor at Harvard College, Peirce was for six months a private student of Agassiz's, to learn his method of classification (MS 1634:6; SS I 14; NEM 4:64).

In the spring term of 1861, Peirce at last entered the Lawrence Scientific School. Two and one half years later he became its first summa cum laude Bachelor of Science in Chemistry. But during his first term the Civil War had begun, and his father had lost, by resignation, the computing aide who assisted him in his chief service to the Coast Survey, that of determining the longitudes of American in relation to European stations from occultations of the Pleiades by the moon. Peirce asked his father to obtain that appointment for him. His father wrote Superintendent Bache that he had at first urged his son to "keep to his profession and wait till he could get money by his chemistry—to which he replied that he wants to get the means to buy books and apparatus and devote himself longer to the study of his profession."3 Bache authorized Peirce's appointment as aide beginning I July 1861, and he was launched on the career that occupied his next thirty and one­half years and took him from chemistry into astronomy, geodesy, metrology, spectroscopy, and other sciences. To the indications already given of his eminence in some of them, I may add that his father proposed him for the chair of physics at The Johns Hopkins University to which Henry Augustus Rowland was appointed, and that he was the first modern experimental psychologist on the American continent.

Throughout those thirty and one­half years and on beyond them, however, when he had occasion to state his profession, or even his occupation, he continued to call himself a chemist. His first professional publication, in 1863 at the age of 23, was on "The Chemical Theory of Interpenetration." In later years, he found in Mendeleev's work on the periodic law and table of the elements the completest illustration of the methods of inductive science (MS 315:24). And he took satisfaction in having, in June 1869, when he was not yet thirty, published a table of the elements that went far in Mendeleev's direction, before Mendeleev's announcement of the law, a little earlier in that same year, became known in western Europe and America (MS 1042:1). At that year's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science it was remarked that Peirce "had greatly added to the illustration of the fact of pairing by representing in a diagram the elements in positions determined by ordinates representing the atomic numbers."4

I now conclude this brief sketch of Peirce as scientist by remarking that the words "scientist" and "physicist"—two of the ugliest in English—were both coined by William Whewell and were put forward together, in the year after Peirce's birth, in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. Peirce later came to admire that work, but he

Page 383 was never quite comfortable with "physicist," and was far less so with "scientist." "Physicist'' was at least all Greek, but "scientist" was an ill conceived Latin­Greek hybrid. He much preferred the older phrases "scientific man" and "man of science." It must have pleased him that in 1906 his friend and former student, the psychologist James McKeen Cattell, gave the title American Men of Science to the biographical directory in which Peirce was starred and the full range of his work was most succinctly and accurately stated. But we ourselves, living in a time when male chauvinism is under continual attack, and in which recent editions of that directory bear the title American Men and Women of Science, may find a virtue in Whewell's coinage which he did not claim for it.

II. THE MATHEMATICIAN

All the time that Peirce was a scientist, he was also a mathematician. Only an expert mathematical physicist could have had the scientific career we have been sketching. We knew from the Collected Papers that at the very least he published original contributions of some importance to linear algebra and matrix theory. But now the four­volumes­in ­five of The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce, edited by Carolyn Eisele and published here in Holland in this bicentennial year, bring us well over two thousand pages of previously unpublished writings that show technical competence, originality of comprehension, and pedagogical skill, in the whole range of pure mathematics.

His father, Benjamin Peirce, was Professor of Astronomy and Mathematics at Harvard University, and was the leading American mathematician of his day. Charles's older brother, James Mills Peirce, succeeded to their father's chair but not to his leadership. Charles was so well trained in mathematics that as early as 1869, at the age of thirty, before his major undertakings for the Coast Survey began, he was willing to be considered, and thought himself qualified, for the chair of mathematics and astronomy at Washington University in St. Louis, which William Chauvenet had resigned because of failing health. And when, early in 1892, just after his career in the Survey had ended, it was rumored that a chair of mathematics was about to be vacated at Columbia University, he wished to be considered for that.

Midway between those fruitless episodes, he was part­time Lecturer in Logic for five years (1879­1884) at The Johns Hopkins University, while continuing his work for the Survey.5 Before receiving the appointment in logic, Peirce had been proposed for the chair of physics to which Henry Augustus Rowland was appointed. The Johns Hopkins, which opened in our centennial year, 1876, was the first

Page 384 real university in the United States, and Peirce's courses in logic were our first graduate offerings in that field. Most of the philosophy students, including John Dewey, scarcely knew what to make of them. Peirce's best students came to him from mathematics. The head of the mathematics department was James Joseph Sylvester from England, a friend of Peirce's father. He founded the American Journal of Mathematics, and Charles had contributed to the first number in 1878 a review of his Italian friend Ferrero's treatise on the method of least squares. To the next three volumes he contributed four articles of his own a new edition of his father's Linear Associative Algebra, with notes by himself throughout and with two addenda.

Peirce was a member both of the Mathematical Society and of the Scientific Association at The Johns Hopkins. He presented papers at both, and took part in the discussion of papers by others. Abstracts of some of his papers were published in The Johns Hopkins University Circulars. On 28 March 1881, Sylvester wrote to President Gilman: "We now form a corps of no less than eight working mathematicians—actual producers and investigators—real working men: Story, Craig, Sylvester, Franklin, Mitchell, Ladd, Rowland, Peirce; which I think all the world must admit to be a pretty strong team." Of these, Franklin, Mitchell and Ladd had already studied with Peirce, and Story did so later.

Sylvester's leadership had already given an international character to the department, and this was strengthened when Arthur Cayley spent the first half of 1882 there. At the earliest meeting of the Mathematical Society after his arrival, that of 18 January 1882, papers were presented by Cayley, Sylvester, and Peirce. Peirce's was "On the Relative Forms of Quaternions."

Peirce had been elected a member of the London Mathematical Society in March 1880. In November 1891, he was elected a member of the New York Mathematical Society, which became the American Mathematical Society in 1894. He presented mathematical papers to the National Academy of Sciences, reviewed mathematical books for The Nation, and had extensive correspondence with mathematicians. He wrote the definitions of mathematical terms for the Century Dictionary (1889­1891), as well as those in logic, metaphysics, mechanics, astronomy, weights and measures, names of colors, many psychological terms, and all terms relating to universities. In the Dictionary's concluding "List of Writers Quoted and Authorities Cited," Peirce appeared (after his grandfather and father) as "American mathematician and logician."

Thomas Fiske was soliciting contributions by Peirce to the Bulletin of the New York Mathematical Society in 1894 (NEM :xviii­xix). H. B. Fine and E. H. Moore in 1900 were urging him to write up his dem­

Page 385 onstration of abnumeral multitudes and his critique of Cantor for the Bulletin or the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society or for the American Journal of Mathematics (NEM 3:xviii­xix). On 19 October 1902, Frank Morley, editor of the American Journal, sent Peirce a copy of the issue containing Whitehead's "On Cardinal Numbers," in the hope that that memoir would call forth one by Peirce on his own theory of multitude (MS L 302).

But until this bicentennial year most of his mathematical writings remained unpublished and so difficult of access that only one of the books on Peirce, that by Murray Murphey, has made any serious attempt to deal with them. With The New Elements of Mathematics now in our hands, we can proceed to try out answers to numerous such questions as the five following.

1. What were Peirce's contributions to pure mathematics, particularly in the way of demonstrations?

2. What were his contributions to the logic, the pedagogy, and the philosophy of mathematics?

3. From boyhood on, against views then prevalent, he argued that we can reason mathematically about infinity, and therefore about continuity. In later years, he labored at a mathematical theory of what he called true continuity, as contrasted with the pseudocontinuity of the calculus. Did he succeed in constructing a mathematical theory of "true continuity," and, if so, what was his best formulation of it?

4. Was he a foundationist in mathematics? Surely not in the sense of founding mathematics on logic. As early as 1869 he argued strenuously with his father against the view later embraced by Dedekind (NEM 3:526). He had no sympathy with the lines taken in Russell's Principles of Mathematics or in the Principia Mathematica of Whitehead and Russell. Yet he began a memoir on "Foundations of Mathematics," and in 1906 he placed "Foundations" first among the fields of his ongoing research. What foundations, then, did he contemplate?

5. What Peirce called topology, topical geometry, or topics, was something very different from what topology became. Is there any reason for returning to the parting of the ways and trying with Peirce the road not taken, as nonstandard analysis has returned from the doctrine of limits to that of infinitesimals?

These are but a few of the many questions for answers to which, in the decades ahead, we shall be searching The New Elements of Mathematics and the still unpublished mathematical manuscripts.

III. THE HISTORIAN

All the time that Peirce was a scientist and a mathematician, he was also a historian. In his classification of the sciences of discovery,

Page 386 mathematics and philosophy were followed by the special sciences in two branches, the physical and the psychical. The psychical sciences he cultivated most continuously and intensively were history and linguistics. Among the others were experimental psychology and mathematical economics. That he meant from the beginning to do original work in both the physical and the psychical sciences appears from the fact that his first professional publication, in 1863, was on the chemical theory of interpenetration; his second, in 1864, on the pronunciation of Shakespearian English.

He was a lifelong student of comparative and historical linguistics. He valued his first European sojourn in 1870­1871, not only for the experience it gave him of field work and international cooperation in astronomy, but also for the opportunity to study the languages spoken in the countries he visited. On 16 November 1870, five weeks before the eclipse, he wrote home that he had heard eighteen distinct languages spoken, seventeen of them (including Basque) in places where they were the languages of everyday speech (MS L 341). In Constantinople and later in Cambridge, England, he studied Arabic with Edward H. Palmer.

Modern experimental psychology was founded in Germany, in Peirce's youth, by men like Weber, Fechner, Wundt, and Helmholtz. The works that most impressed him at the time were Fechner's Elelmelte der Psychophysik (1860) and Wundt's Vorleslungen fiber die Menlschen­ ulnd Thierseele (1863). One thing that struck him in the latter was its "showing that every train of thought is essentially inferential in its character, and is, therefore, regulated by the principles of inference" (N 1:37). That was akin to, and may have been one of the sources of the doctrine that "all thought is in signs" which Peirce developed in three articles in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1868­1869. He sent Wundt copies of those articles in 1869 and obtained Wundt's permission to prepare and publish a translation of the Vorleslngen (MS L 478). Peirce did not carry out that plan, but he soon became himself the first modern experimental psychologist in the Americas.6

Thanks to the labors of Carolyn Eisele, Peirce is now recognized as one of the precursors in mathematical economics, and we shall be hearing from Nicholas Rescher of Peirce's work on "the economy of research." Passing over his contributions to those fields, I come now to the psychical science at which he worked longest, most continuously, and most intensively. This was history, and more particularly the history of science.

Peirce tells us that in 1850, at the age of eleven, he wrote "A History of Chemistry" (MS 1634:5) and later, in his twenties, a history of scientific methods (MS 958:48); but neither of these has so far been found.

Page 387 On 12 November 1863, at the age of twenty­four, at a reunion of the Cambridge High School Association, he delivered an oration on "The Place of Our Age in the History of Civilization," and extensive extracts from it were published nine days later. By "our age" he meant the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

Six years after that, in 1869­1870, he gave a series of fifteen Harvard University Lectures on the history of logic in the British Isles from the earliest times to his own day. The opening lecture was on "Early Nominalism and Realism" (MS 584; CP 1.28­34).

In the first half­year of his Lectureship in Logic at The Johns Hopkins University, he gave a course in Medieval Logic. The only Ph.D. thesis known to have been written under his direction was by Allan Marquand on "The Logic of the Epicureans," an introduction to and translation of the Herculaneum papyrus of Philodemus on inductive signs and inferences.

The planning of The Century Dictionary began in 1882. As I have already remarked, Peirce was made responsible for logic and metaphysics, mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, weights and measures, names of colors, many psychological terms, and all terms relating to universities. His chief qualification was that he had not only current but also historical competence in all these fields. As further preparation, in his last year at The Johns Hopkins (1883­84), he added two new courses, one in comparative biography called "The Psychology of Great Men," the other in "Philosophical Terminology." In the latter, his chief resource, and that of his students Dewey and Jastrow, was the Berlin Academy edition of Aristotle, with its Greek texts, Latin translations, and Bonitz's monumental index.

I have already spoken of his historical researches during his second and longest European sojourn. During his fifth and last, in 1883, he transcribed the manuscript of Petrus Peregrinus in the Bibliotheque Nationale, and a decade later, he circulated a handsomely printed prospectus of an edition that was to contain the Latin text and an English version with notes, preceded by an "Introductory History of Experimental Science in the Middle Ages." The prospectus began:

The brief treatise on the lodestone by Petrus Peregrinus, dated 1269, occupies a unique position in the history of the human mind, being, without exception the earliest work of experimental science that has come down to us. Nor can we learn that anything of this sort had been written earlier.

But the subscribers were too few, the book was never printed, and no complete manuscript for it has so far been found.

Page 388 Soon thereafter he was inviting subscriptions to a twelve­volume work called The Principles of Philosophy: or, Logic, Physics, and Psychics, considered as a unity, in the Light of the Nineteenth Century. The eleventh was to consist of Studies in Comparative Biography. But this project also failed because the subscribers were too few.

Meanwhile, in 1892­1893, Peirce had given in Boston a pathbreaking series of twelve Lowell Institute Lectures on "The History of Science."

In 1893, in response to criticisms of his theory of scientific method by the editor of The Monist, he wrote: "For the last thirty years, the study which has constantly been before my mind has been upon the nature, strength, and history of methods of scientific thought" (CP 6.604, my italics).

In 1896, in The American Historical Review, he reviewed Andrew Dickson White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.

When Lutoslawski's Origin and Growth of Plato's Logic came out in 1897, Peirce worked out his own improvements on Lutoslawski's methods for determining the chronological order of the dialogues, and on that basis he later made a study of the development of Plato's ethics (MS 434).

In 1898, he contracted with G. P. Putnam's Sons to write a history of science for their Science Series, edited by James McKeen Cattell. In a draft of a chapter called "The Principal Lessons of the History of Science," he wrote that

science ... does not consist so much in knowing, nor even in "organized knowledge," as it does in diligent inquiry into truth for truth's sake, without any sort of axe to grind, nor for the sake of the delight of contemplating it, but from an impulse to penetrate into the reason of things. This is the sense in which this book is entitled a History of' Science. (CP 1.44)

That work too remained unfinished, but, with The New Elements of Mathematics now behind her, Carolyn Eisele will return to an earlier project, that of making the nearest approach to the intended book that can be pieced together from Peirce's surviving manuscripts.

At the beginning of the twentieth century there were many reviews of the nineteenth. Perhaps the best of these was that which filled two sections of the New York Evening Post on 12 January 1901, and later appeared in book form. In previous advertising, the Post had promised thirty­eight essays by leading authorities in as many fields. The sixteenth was to be by Charles S. Peirce on "The Century's Great Men in Science." But when the essays were in hand, the Post moved Peirce's to first place, and leaned heavily upon it in an editorial,

Page 389 deciding that "the chief characteristic and the crowning glory of the century" had been such a "kindling and quickening of the scientific spirit" as to carry with it a change in the very meaning of the word "science." Peirce himself had written:

The glory of the nineteenth century has been its science. ... It was my inestimable privilege to have felt as a boy the warmth of the steadily burning enthusiasm of the scientific generation of Darwin, most of the leaders of which at home I knew intimately, and some very well in almost every country of Europe.... The word science was one often in those men's mouths, and I am quite sure they did not mean by it "systematized knowledge," as former ages had defined it, nor anything set down in a book, but on the contrary, a mode of life; not knowledge, but the devoted, well­considered life­pursuit of knowledge: devotion to Truth—not "devotion to truth as one sees it," for that is no devotion to truth at all, but only to party—no, far from that, devotion to the truth that the man is not yet able to see but is striving to obtain. The word was thus, from the etymological point of view, already a misnomer. And so it remains with the scientists of today. What they meant, and still mean, by "science" ought, etymologically, to be called philosophy

It was at least in part because travel, communication, organization and publication had become international if not worldwide, that the scientists of the latter half of the nineteenth century had come to think of science in this way. It was Peirce's European sojourns that had first brought him to this new vision of science. It was his work as historian that enabled him to see how new it was. And one function of our present international Peirce congress is to recognize in him the leading voice of this new conception of science.

IV. THE LOGICIAN

All the time that Peirce was a scientist, a mathematician, and a historian, he was also a logician; and he was a logician for whom his work as scientist, mathematician, and historian was in some sense subsidiary to his work as logician. What that sense is we may begin to gather from his oft repeated account of his first introduction to logic, within a week or two of his twelfth birthday in 1851. His older brother Jem (James Mills Peirce) was about to enter upon his junior year at Harvard College and had bought his textbooks for the year. Among them was Whately's Elements of Logic. Charles dropped into Jem's room, picked up the Whately, asked what logic was, got a simple answer, stretched himself on the carpet with the book open before him, and, over a period of several days, absorbed its contents. As he often said late in life, it had never since that time been possible for him to think of anything other than logic—including even chem­

Page 390 istry—except as an exercise in logic. And so far as he knew, he was the only man since the Middle Ages who had completely devoted his life to logic (MS 632:2).

No comprehensive account or assessment of Peirce's work in logic exists or is likely soon to exist, because every logician approaches him with a conception of logic narrower than his, and ignores or fails to comprehend the relevance of what transcends that narrower conception. I shall attempt here only the briefest sketch of Peirce's development as a logician, under six heads: (I) from logic within semeiotic to logic as semeiotic, (2) from nominalism to realism, (3) from classification of arguments to stages of inquiry, (4) from analytic through critic to methodeutic, (5) from Boolean algebra to existential graphs, and (6) from logic as non­normative to logic as normative. The most conspicuous constant through all the changes was his "unpsychological view of logic" (MS 726).

FROM LOGIC WITHIN SEMEIOTIC TO LOGIC AS SEMEIOTIC

It was from Whately that Peirce first took the premiss that all thought is in signs. If there be, then, a general theory of signs, called semeiotic, the question arises how logic is related to it. In the last chapter of his Essay, Locke identified the two. Peirce objected at first that, of the three most general kinds of signs, logic concerns itself only with symbols, and with symbols not in themselves, and not in relation to their interpretants, but only in relation to their objects, and only in respect of their truth or falsity. Logic is therefore at most but a third part of a third part—that is, a ninth part—of semeiotic. He defined it as objective symbolistic, "the science of the relations of symbols in general to their objects" (MS 726:14).

But he later came to see that logic cannot do business without icons and indexes, and cannot wait upon Speculative Grammar to define and classify its signs, or upon Speculative Rhetoric to place the logical interpretants of these signs in relation to their nonlogical interpretants. He passed through a stage in which he distinguished a narrow sense of logic in which it was the mid­member of the semeiotic trivium, and a broad sense in which it included the first and third members as well and was thus coextensive with semeiotic. Finally, he abandoned the narrow sense altogether, and the semeiotic trivium became for him the logical trivium: Speculative Grammar, Speculative Critic, and Speculative Rhetoric; or, more simply, Analytic, Critic, and Methodeutic (NEM 3:207). I shall use the latter three terms in what follows.

FROM NOMINALISM TO REALISM

Peirce's gradual progress from the minimal realism of Duns Scotus, which "was separated from nominalism only by the division of a hair" (CP 8. 11), to the full­fledged realism of his later years, is now

Page 391 a familiar story. Two essential parts of the story, however, are still far from familiar. (i) This progress not only paralleled that from logic­within­semeiotic to logic­as­ semeiotic, but was closely bound up with it in ways still to be shown. (ii) The starting point was apparently not a minimal realism but a nominalism as avowed and explicit as Whately's. During his Harvard University Lectures of 1865, "On the Logic of Science," Peirce projected a book to be entitled An Unpsychological View of Logic, drew up lists of chapters, and drafted several of them. The following quotations are from two drafts of Chapter I, "Definition of Logic":

Qualities are fictions; for though it is true that roses arc red, yet redness is nothing but a fiction framed for the purpose of philosophizing; yet harmless so long as we remember that the scholastic realism it implies is false. (MS 726:9)

Such words as blueness, hardness, loudness . .. . were framed at a time when all men were realists in the scholastic sense.... To use them, now, then, (and no philosophical doctrine is possible without their use,) is to make use of a fiction, but one which is corrected by a steady avoidance of all realistic inferences. (MS 726:20f)

But these are matters for another occasion. 7

FROM CLASSIFICATION OF ARGUMENTS TO STAGES OF INQUIRY

The chief focus of Peirce's early work in logic was on classifying arguments and determining the relative strengths of the several kinds. He started from Kant's distinction between two kinds of judgments: those that are analytic or explicative and those that are synthetic or ampliative. He first turned that distinction into one between two kinds of arguments: those called deductive and those commonly called, in a loose sense, inductive. He thus arrived at the then common distinction between the logic of mathematics (that is, of deduction) and the logic of the inductive sciences, or, for short, the logic of science. His first original contribution was to subdivide arguments loosely called inductive into two kinds: inductions more strictly speaking, and what he at first called hypotheses, later abductions, finally retroductions. He thus arrived at three kinds of inference: deduction, induction, and hypothesis.

He found support for this tripartite classification of arguments from two sources: his own "New List of Categories" and a discovery that he made in the course of examining Kant's essay on "The Mistaken Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures." What he discovered was that

no syllogism of the second or third figure can be reduced to the first, without taking for granted an inference which can only be expressed syllogistically in that figure from which it has been reduced.... Hence,

Page 392

it is proved that every figure involves the principle of the first figure, but the second and third figures contain other principles, besides. (CP 2.807; cf. CP 2.499)

His logic of relatives soon emancipated him from bondage to the syllogism, and he no longer needed the syllogistic figures as foundation for the distinction of the three main forms of inference. And he became even more assured of the forms of inference than he was of his categories (MS 312:43f).

So long as his focus was on the classification of arguments, Peirce set the logic of mathematics (that is, of deduction) over against the logic of science (that is, of hypothesis and induction). But in his later years, his focus shifted from the classification of the forms of inference to the functioning of inferences of the several forms in successive stages of inquiry. The order of the forms then became: hypothesis (abduction or retroduction), deduction, and induction (CP 6.468­473; 7.218). From one point of view, the logic of mathematics was thus no longer set over against but absorbed into the logic of science. From another, it was assimilated to the logic of science, because even the pure mathematician goes through the same three stages of inquiry as the scientist; the difference is that his experiments are performed upon diagrams of his own construction.

Peirce wrote to James McKeen Cattell in 1910 that the system of logic considered as semeiotic on which he was working was to be "a theory, of inquiry, intended to show the real nature of any inquiry's validity, and the degree thereof, and to consider how to build up a solid structure of science."8 Twenty­eight years later, when Dewey published his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, he thought of Peirce as his only predecessor in the general view taken.

FROM ANALYTIC THROUGH CRITIC TO METHODEUTIC

It will be apparent that the shift from classifying arguments, and determining the relative strengths of arguments of the several kinds, to considering how they function in successive stages of inquiry, is at the same time a shift from analytic through critic to methodeutic. For Peirce, critic presupposed analytic, and methodeutic presupposed critic. Analytic was for the sake of critic, and critic for the sake of methodeutic. In a letter of 1911 , Peirce wrote that "the greater part" of his life had been devoted to methodeutic, "which shows how to conduct an inquiry," and "of course in order to study methodeutic it is necessary to make researches in as great a variety of sciences as possible" (NEM 3:207). In what appears to have been a draft fragment of the same letter, he wrote: "In my own feeling, whatever I did in any other science than logic was only an exercise

Page 393 in methodeutic and as soon as I had the method of investigation thoroughly shown, my interest dropped off'' (MS L 231:81 [= MS L 482:75]).

But why was it necessary to be a historian of science? Because history is itself one of the sciences, with its own methodology (CP 7.162­255); but more particularly because "each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic" (CP 5.363), more exactly in Methodeutic, and because "the professional logicians" have slept through the lessons (CP 5.390). Peirce wrote to William James in 1909: "I have done a lot of work in Methodeutic that is valuable and very little of it is printed. This will be the most widely useful part of my Big Book" (NEM 3:874)—that is, of A System of Logic, considered as Semeiotic.

Among Peirce's contributions to Methodeutic that were printed, the best known were his "Note on the Theory of the Economy of Research" (CP 7.139­157) and his pragmatism. The latter was presented in 1878 as the lesson in logic taught by Darwin's application to biology of the statistical method, which had been used first in political economy and then in thermodynamics (CP 5.364). At this bicentennial congress, it is worth remarking that the "Note" appeared in the Coast Survey Report for 1876; that the "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" were invited by the publisher Appleton, on board the ship that took Peirce to his second European sojourn in 1875; that "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" was written in French on board the ship that took him to Europe for his third sojourn in 1877; and that the "Illustrations" began appearing in November of that year.

As we remarked earlier, Peirce gradually gave up conceiving science as a mode of apprehension by a single knower, or as systematized knowledge, and came to conceive it as a mode of life common to a community of investigators, and to conceive a particular science as a social group pursuing the same or closely related inquiries. Science is what scientists do, and a particular science is what scientists of a particular group do. This too was another form of the movement from analytic through critic to methodeutic.

FROM BOOLEAN ALGEBRA TO EXISTENTIAL GRAPHS

One of the tasks of methodeutic is the devising and improving of systems of notation. This was a lifelong concern of Peirce's. His first published paper in logic, in 1867, was "On an Improvement in Boole's Calculus of Logic." Three years later, in 1870, came his "Description of a Notation for the Logic of Relatives, Resulting from an Amplification of the Conceptions of Boole's Calculus of Logic." Ten years later, in 1880, came "On the Algebra of Logic," and five years after that, in 1885, "On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation." His Century Dictionary article, "notation—2,"

Page 394 in 1890, was probably the most extensive, detailed, and thorough ever written on that term for a general dictionary. One of his more interesting unpublished papers, of about 1904, is on "A Proposed Logical Notation" (MS 530). There and in a passage of his Minute Logic omitted by the editors of the Collected Papers (CP 4.261), he introduces two notations for the sixteen binary connectives of the two­valued propositional calculus. One of these may be called his box­X, the other his cursive notation.9

But at least as early as 1882, Peirce began taking steps toward a more graphical representation of logical relations and operations. In 1896, he invented two graphical systems to which he soon thereafter gave the names of entitative and existential graphs. He continued to work at the latter of these for at least another ten years, and in 1906, he projected "A Comparative and Critical Outline of the Useful Systems of Logical Representation," both algebraic and graphical (MS 283:345­361).

Peirce frequently contrasts the mathematical and the logical interest in notations. The mathematician's aim is to facilitate calculation, inference, and demonstration; the logician's, to facilitate the analysis of reasoning into its minimal steps.

Neither Peirce's notation for the logic of relatives nor his existential graphs has had much success as a calculus, and he never completed the adaptation of the graphs to modal logic; but both systems retain their value as instruments of logical analysis, and the graphs are unsurpassed for the teaching of beginners in logic.10

FROM LOGIC AS NON­NORMATIVE TO LOGIC AS NORMATIVE

In Peirce's later classifications of the sciences, the principal divisions are Theoretical and Practical, and the Theoretical Sciences are divided into Sciences of Discovery and Sciences of Review. The Sciences of Discovery are divided into Mathematics, Philosophy, and the Special Sciences, Physical and Psychical. In his earlier classifications, Philosophy included only logic and metaphysics. (He did not say whether it also included so much of formal or general semeiotic as lay beyond the narrow scope of logic as he at first conceived it.) Logic was not a normative science, and ethics and aesthetics were down among the Practical Sciences. The question of there being any heuretic normative sciences at all was not yet broached.

Yet Peirce, along with a classmate and close friend, had made an intensive study of Schiller's Aesthetic Letters during his freshman year in college, in 1855­1856. In notes for a prospectus of his lectures on logic for 1883­1884 at The Johns Hopkins University, under Lecture III, on "The Fixation of Belief" and "How To Make Our Ideas Clear," we read: ''Close connection between Logic and Ethics" (MS 745). By that time, Peirce had begun work for the Century Dictionary. His assignment included philosophical as well as mathematical words

Page 395 and a wide range of scientific terms. Under philosophical terms were included those of aesthetics and ethics, as well as those terms themselves. But neither in the first edition of 1889­1891 nor in the Supplementary Volumes of 1909 was there any recognition of aesthetics, ethics, and logic as normative sciences or as constituting a triad of sciences of any kind. In the classification of sciences under the term "science," ethics appears as a branch of sociology, and aesthetics is nowhere.

The need for a basis for the "ethics of terminology" (CP 219ff) and of notation (MS 530) probably had something to do with Peirce's growing interest in ethics. And almost certainly his increasing attention to methodeutic had more; for it is in methodeutic rather than in analytic or critic that the dependence of logic upon ethics becomes most evident.

The decisive event, however, was the appearance in 1897 of Lutoslawski's The Origin and Growth of Plato's Logic, with its chronological ordering of the dialogues on stylometric grounds. Peirce applied to Lutoslawski's data "all the refinements of the theory of probabilities" and then applied the results to a study of what, if published, we are tempted to say he might have called The Origin and Growth of Plato's Ethics—more exactly, of his views on "the single point of what is ultimately good" (MS 434:34).

But by 1902, Peirce was ready to assign that problem to aesthetics, and to recognize three normative sciences—aesthetics, ethics, and logic—with ethics depending "essentially" on aesthetics, and logic on ethics (NEM 4:19). Having reached that position, he found an adumbration of it in the last four paragraphs of his 1869 paper on the "Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic" (CP 5.354ff).

By that time, logic­within­semeiotic had become logic­as­semeiotic, and the latter now became "normative semeiotic" (CP 2. 111).

The most inspiring and suggestive passage in this sixth phase of Peirce's own development as logician is the following:

As to Plato, unless we are content to treat the only complete collection of the works of any Greek philosopher that we possess as a mere repertory of gems of thought, as most readers are content to do; but wish to view them as they are so superlatively worthy of being viewed as the record of the entire development of thought of a great thinker, then everything depends upon the chronology of the dialogues. (MS 434:33f)

V. THE PHILOSOPHER

All the time that Peirce was a scientist, a mathematician, a historian, and a logician, he was also a philosopher in a sense in which phi­

Page 396 losophy included from the beginning not only logic but at least metaphysics besides, and (presumably) so much of formal or general semeiotic as lay beyond the narrow scope of logic as he at first conceived it.

The relation between logic and metaphysics was always intimate. Metaphysics presupposed logic. The categories of metaphysics were those of logic in another application. Metaphysics was applied logic.

Peirce said his work in the sciences and in mathematics was for the sake of his work in logic. It would be equally true to say that his work in logic was for the sake of mathematics, of metaphysics, and, both directly and through metaphysics, of the special sciences, both physical and psychical. Both statements apply more particularly to methodeutic than to analytic or critic, but neither is limited to methodeutic.

At least from the summer of 1859 onward, one of Peirce's main metaphysical concerns was to establish that, contrary to what some metaphysicians were saying, we can reason mathematically and logically about infinity and therefore about continuity. On that assumption, synechism became a regulative principle first of logic and then of metaphysics (CP 6.171 ff).

Two interrelated aims of Peirce's metaphysics were mathematical exactitude (NEM 4:x) and testability (CP 7.516). But his work in metaphysics was far from being as continuous as was his work in logic. He had only two periods of intensive writing in metaphysics, one in the early 1860s and the other in the early 1890s; only the latter reached publication, in a series of papers in The Monist (1891­893); and that series remained unfinished. Furthermore, he thought his best work was not in that series, or in metaphysics at all, but in logic (NEM 3:872f).

Around the turn of the century he began recognizing philosophical sciences other than logic and metaphysics. In the late 1890's, there are several references to something he calls "high philosophy" (CP 7.526f), whose chief function seems to be to supply a list of categories for the guidance first of logic and thereby of metaphysics. When logic became normative semeiotic, and aesthetics and ethics were promoted to being normative philosophical sciences antecedent to logic, "high philosophy" became phenomenology, phaneroscopy, phenoscopy, or "phanerochemy,—the chemistry of appearances'' (MS 1338:22). The philosophical sciences, preceded only by mathematics, then became phanerochemy, the normative sciences (aesthetics, ethics, and logic), and metaphysics.

If we think of social philosophy as an integral philosophical science, it may strike us first that Peirce nowhere so recognizes it, and second that his writings, from early to late, contain numerous and often lengthy incidental passages, rich in insights, which, if assem­

Page 397 bled and organized, would constitute a major contribution to that science. For some of his students, this is his richest vein.

If now we try briefly to describe and assess Peirce as philosopher, we may say that he was a philosopher who was a wide­ranging scientist, mathematician, and historian, whose contributions to phenomenology, to normative semeiotic, and to metaphysics are eminently worthy of that developmental study which he himself, following Lutoslawski, applied to Plato. But the developmental study of Peirce's philosophy very much needs the full context of his work as mathematician, scientist, and historian of science.

CONCLUSION

In the latter half of our centennial year, Peirce completed his second, longest, and most fruitful European sojourn. He was already an international figure in science. We may associate with that year one of his major scientific papers and his two best­known published contributions to logical methodeutic, though they did not appear until from one to three years later.

In our bicentennial year, Peirce is again an international figure: already so in semeiotic, increasingly so in "logic considered as semeiotic" (and thereby in what we have come to call the philosophy of science), and about to become so in mathematics and in philosophy in general. With this year we may come to associate not only this Congress but also the new editions of his writings that are now in progress or about to begin.

Last year there appeared the first of four volumes of an edition of his contributions to The Nation, published by Texas Tech Press in Lubbock, Texas.

The four­volumes­in ­five of Carolyn Eisele's edition of The New Elements of Mathematics, published by Mouton at The Hague here in Holland, are now appearing in our bicentennial year itself; and I like to think of our Congress as a celebration of that event.

A microfiche edition of the writings Peirce himself published, accompanied by a letterpress bibliography both of those writings and of the secondary literature on Peirce to date, will appear next year, edited by Kenneth L. Ketner and other members of the Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism at Texas Tech University, all of them participants in our present Congress.

Carolyn Eisele will now resume work on her edition of Peirce's writings on the history of science.

And finally, work will begin next month in Indianapolis, Indiana, on a new and much more comprehensive letterpress edition of Peirce's writings, both of those he published and of those he did not, in a single chronological order, in about twenty volumes, which may

Page 398 fairly be expected to improve and enlarge our understanding of Peirce as scientist, mathematician, historian, logician, and philosopher, and facilitate the study of his development in those capacities. As a prerequisite to this new edition, there will be a complete chronological reordering of the known manuscripts by Peirce. A new catalogue of them, in that new order, will be separately published. There will also be a separate two­volume biography.

I wish now to conclude by appealing for international cooperation in the preparation of the new letterpress edition, the biography, and the catalogue of manuscripts. In every country represented at our Congress, and in many countries not represented, relevant and valuable materials may be found. Here are a few indications of the kinds of materials, the places in which to look for them, the reasons for expecting to find them, and the values they may have.

Peirce's scientific publications were abstracted in the Beiblätter of the Annalelr der Physik und Chemie; he was in personal communication with many of the European scientists I have named and with others I have not named; he visited some of them; wrote letters to others; sent or handed to some inscribed and annotated offprints of his publications, and, more rarely, drafts or copies of unpublished manuscripts. An annotated offprint may become the sole source for an essential correction in the text of an important paper. A manuscript may chance to be the sole surviving copy. A letter from Peirce, or a letter mentioning him, may fix the date of a manuscript, or supply a revealing biographical detail, or be the sole explicit evidence of an important influence in his intellectual development.

The archives of the instrument makers, Repsold und S6hne, preserved in Hamburg, contain valuable records of their correspondence with Peirce and the Coast Survey, and of their progress in preparing the pendulum apparatus that had been ordered for Peirce's use. Are there similar archives of the Paris instrument makers I have named?

On 29 October 1877, Edward L. Youmans, editor of the Popular Science Monthly, in whose November issue "The Fixation of Belief" was about to appear, wrote home from London to his sister in the United States that W. K. Clifford called Peirce "the greatest living logician, and the second man since Aristotle who has added to the subject something material."11 What other judgments of Peirce remain to be discovered in private correspondence?

Finding traces of Peirce's father and brothers in Europe may be an indirect way of finding traces of Peirce himself. His younger brother, Herbert Henry Davis Peirce, was Secretary of Legation at our Embassy in St. Petersburg. Herbert wrote him on 30 March 1899 that he had visited the Central Bureau of Weights and Measures, of which Mendeleev was director, and that "It was gratifying to find

Page 399 your name and work well known & highly regarded there." He had also visited the Observatory at Pulkhovo near St. Petersburg and found that "Peirce's criterion"— their father Benjamin's rule for preventing observations from being rejected without sufficient reason—was standard there (MS L 338).

In 1905, Herbert, then Third Assistant Secretary of State, was assigned by President Theodore Roosevelt to serve as host at the Portsmouth Conference at which the treaty between Russia and Japan was drawn up. Herbert was later our minister to Norway.

Peirce's older brother, the mathematician James Mills Peirce, spent many of his summers here in Europe, had many friends on this side of the Atlantic, and was an ally of John Addington Symonds.

And finally, the identity of Peirce's European second wife, Juliette Annette Pourtalai (de Pourtales? n6e Froissy? mother's family name Eyem?), is still not known. There are numerous bits of evidence leading chiefly to France, but also to Germany, Austria, Poland, Russia, Egypt, Italy, Spain, and Norway. That is the chief single unsolved problem of the biography.

It would be a great service to Peircean scholarship if our colleagues in other countries would visit the research libraries and archives of all kinds that are within their easy reach, in search of letters, offprints, manuscripts, newspaper items, and other relevant materials; and if they would urge their friends in other places to join the search. Even negative reports will be useful.

So among the many reasons for welcoming this International Congress is the opportunity it gives those of us from Peirce's native land to say to those of other lands: We need your help!

Notes

1. Adequate references for the following address would run to nearly the length of the address itself. The principal sources for Part I are the annual reports of the Coast Survey, the proceedings of the International Geodetic Association and of its Permanent Commission, the Comntes Rendus of the French Academy of Sciences, the Coast Survey files in the National Archives, and Peirce's official and private correspondence. See also the History of Science Society symposium on Peirce in Transactions 11 ( 975): 145­94; the other papers by Victor F. Lenzen listed on p. 225f of the same issue; Carolyn Eisele, "Charles S. Peirce, Nineteenth Century Man of Science," Scripta Mathematica 24 (1959):305­24; and her article on him in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970). The same Dictionan, has articles on most of the other scientists named in

Page 400 the address. (The two articles by Carolyn Eisele, along with other relevant papers, are now collected in her Studies in the Scientific and Mathematical Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, ed. R. M. Martin [The Hague: Mouton, 1979].)

2. Prior to these assignments, his chief duties in the Survey had been assisting in fieldwork on the coast of Maine and of Louisiana, aiding his father in determining the longitude of American stations with respect to European from observations of occultations of the Pleiades by the moon, and serving as assistant in the Harvard College Observatory.

3. Bache Papers 4.1803, Library of Congress Manuscript Division (Peirce to Bache, 11 June 1861).

4. Scientific American 21 (1 September 1869): 62.

5. For details see "Peirce at The Johns Hopkins," pp. 35­72 above.

6. See the article by Thomas C. Cadwallader in the History of Science symposium on Peirce cited in note I above.

7. See "Peirce's Progress," "Peirce's Arisbe," "Peirce and Leibniz," and "Peirce's General Theory of Signs."

8. Cf. MS 634:3­"From the point of view of Logic, considered as the theory of inquiry, there is no good ground for limiting [reasoning] to that part of the process of inquiry in which muscular action does not participate."

9. Shea Zellweger, taking a very similar approach but developing further some unexpected advantages of Peirce's efforts, is about to publish a new notation for the same connectives, which he calls "the logic alphabet." See "Peirce's General Theory of Signs," pp. 334­35 and note 22 above.

10. See Don D. Roberts, The Existential Graphs of Charles S. Peirce (The Hague: Mouton, 1973).

11. See "Chronicle of Pragmaticism," p. I29 above.

Page 401

TWENTY­ONE—Peirce's Place in American Life

The most obvious approach to the subject of Peirce's Place in American Life is to begin by taking "place" literally, physically, and plurally, from Peirce's birthplace to his deathplace. Imagine, then, that we are attending the Sesquicentennial Peirce Conference at Harvard University in September 1989, and that we are taking the guided tour of his Cambridge places.

I. THE MASON STREET HOUSE

Our guide leads us from Harvard Square northward and westward, past the First Parish Church (Unitarian), the old burying ground, Christ Church (Episcopalian), and the Fay House (in the Radcliffe yard), to the corner of Garden and Mason Streets. "The Washington Elm," our guide tells us, "stood in the middle of Garden here. There's a marker over there at the edge of the Common."

We turn left onto the south side of Mason Street, looking across to the Congregational Church and then to the large house behind it, on the east side of Phillips Place. Peirce referred to this house, our guide informs us, as "the stone­colored wooden building" in which he was born on September 10, 1839, and lived about five and a half years. His family later referred to it as "the old house" or "the Mason Street house."

"Of all the Peters and Peterses and Peirces (ei) and Pierces (ie)," our guide goes on, "Charles Peirce was the one most acutely and constantly aware that these were among the dozens of modern forms of the name Peter, which means simply rock or stone. If you will forgive the pun, this lent a personal touch to his later interest not only in Thomas Nash's 'Pierce Pennilesse' and William Langland's 'Piers Plowman'—he became in the end a plowman himself and was often penniless—but above all in the Bibliothèque Nationale's thirteenth­century manuscript of Petrus Peregrinus (Pilgrim Peter or 'Stone') on the magnet or lodestone, which Peirce said 'occupies a unique position in the history of the human mind, being without

Page 402 exception the earliest work of experimental science that has come down to us.' So there was something appropriate in Peirce's having been born in a house that had at least the color of stone, and in its having stood on Mason Street." (We note that our guide gives the pronunciation "purse" not only to Peirce but also to Pierce and Piers.)

"The new building across Phillips from Peirce's birthplace houses the library of the Episcopal Divinity School," our guide continues, "but his birthplace itself, since much enlarged, now houses the Weston School of Theology, which is Roman Catholic. They feel at home in the birthplace of a philosopher who devoted as much study as Peirce did to Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. They're expecting us. In fact, as you may have noticed, one of the sessions of our Conference will be held there." We cross Mason Street and enter the building from Phillips Place. We are warmly received and given some help toward making out what parts of the house go back to Peirce's time. Returning then along that side of Mason to Garden, we cross Garden and read the marker. (Our guide puns again: "So you see Peirce was born but a stone's throw from the Elm and the Common.") After glancing back at the Fay House, we cross the Common and enter the Harvard Yard. Our guide points out the buildings that already stood in Peirce's time. (For example: "His first series of Harvard University Lectures, 'On the Logic of Science' in the spring of 1865, was delivered over there in Boylston Hall. So was his lecture of 21 May 1879 to the Harvard Philosophical Club on 'The Relations of Logic to Philosophy.' ") We leave the Yard along the front of Emerson Hall, with Sever Hall behind us to the left; we cross Quincy Street; we stand on the steps of the Fogg Museum, facing the Yard; and our guide gives us the principal lecture of the tour, which I here abridge and paraphrase.

2. THE QUINCY STREET HOUSE

Benjamin Peirce, Charles' father, was Harvard's professor of astronomv and mathematics. In 1844 it built a house for him and his family, over there where Sever Hall now stands. It faced this way, and was approached by a semicircular drive from the street. There were delays in construction, and it was 1845 when the Peirces moved in. It was Charles' home for seventeen years, and it remained the home of his parents for another ten. They called it at first "the new, house" or "the Quincy Street house," but it soon came to be widely known by a much more distinctive name.

Benjamin's major works were still to come, but he was already America's most distinguished mathematician. In the six years from 1835 to 1841 he had published "elementarv treatises" on six branches

Page 403 of mathematics and the first volume of a seventh, on Curves, Functions, and Forces, the second volume of which came out in 1846. Not long thereafter, the author's friends and students began calling him "Function"; they called the house "Function Hall," and the trees that shaded it "Function Grove." Letters to him often began "Dear ??" and he sometimes signed himself ??. His wife was sometimes referred to as fna. If you visit the family graves in the Cambridge Cemetery, you will find his tombstone headed ??. We may safely assume that this was a title of honor, and that students who used his treatises as textbooks and wrote on the flyleaves "Who steals my Peirce ...'' intended no disrespect but only a humorous reminder of how this Peirce pronounced the name.

It was in Function Hall that Charles had his own chemical laboratory from the age of eight and worked his way through Liebig's hundred bottles of qualitative analysis; that he wrote a history of chemistry; that he read Whately's Elements of Logic around the time of his twelfth birthday; that he spent six months studying mathematics under his father's guidance (with the unfortunate consequence that Charles W. Eliot, his college instructor in mathematics, was for him a deadly bore); that he and his classmate Horatio Paine read and discussed Schiller's Aesthetic Letters in their freshman year at college; and that in the three following years he himself studied Kant's Critic of the Pure Reason more intensively than anything assigned in his courses.

The back yard of Function Grove was separated from the Harvard Yard by a hedge and a wooden fence, through a gate in which Charles passed from yard to Yard and back, as his father had since 1845; as his older brother James had also done; as his younger brothers Benjamin and Herbert did after him; and as the entire family, including his mother Sarah and sister Helen, did together when they went to church in the college chapel.

One of Charles' earliest excursions from the new house was on a drive with his father to the Blue Hill camp of Alexander Dallas Bache late in the summer of 1845. Bache, a great­grandson of Benjamin Franklin, was the second Superintendent of the U. S. Coast Survey, the first scientific agency of the federal government. Blue Hill, some ten miles south of Cambridge, was an important triangulation point in the Massachusetts segment of the survey of the Atlantic Coast. After graduating from college fourteen years later, Charles joined Bache's field party in the hills above Machias as a working member in the Maine segment, and in the following winter and spring he was assigned to a party working chiefly at sea in the Gulf segment, around the delta on the Mississippi.

But in early August 1859, fresh from college, before joining Bache's field party, Charles had spent a week at Springfield, Massachusetts,

Page 404 reporting sessions of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for six issues of the Boston Daily Evening Traveler. Named after the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Association was then only eleven years old. (This must have started such questions as: "Advancement" in what sense? How is science advanced? And what, more exactly, is it that is thus advanced?)

The site of the Fogg Museum, on whose steps we stand, was previously occupied by a house built for Louis Agassiz in 1854. Agassiz had come to the United States in 1846. Partly to attract and hold him, Harvard established the Lawrence Scientific School in 1847, and Agassiz accepted its professorship of zoology and geology and began teaching in the spring of 1848. He rented a house on Oxford Street. In 1850, two years after the death of his first wife, he married Elizabeth Cabot Cary. In 185l Bache provided a Coast Survey steamer for a survey of the Florida reefs by Agassiz and two of his students. In the fall of 1854 Agassiz and his wife and children moved into the new house built for him on this site. Benjamin Peirce and he became close friends, and he was a frequent caller at Function Hall. His wife and daughters and his son Alexander started in their new home the School for Young Ladies out of which Radcliffe grew. In the fall of 1859 Harriet Melusina Fay entered the School. She was a granddaughter on her father's side of the Judge Fay whose home we were admiring a while ago, and on her mother's side of John Henry Hopkins, the first Episcopal Bishop of Vermont. Her father, Charles Fay, who had been a Harvard classmate of Benjamin Peirce, was rector of the Episcopal Church at St. Albans, Vermont.

When Charles Peirce came back from the Gulf of Mexico he spent six months in private study of biological classification under Agassiz in the first wing of the new Museum of Comparative Zoology, for which Charles had collected specimens in the Gulf and in the Delta. One of the tasks that Agassiz set him was sorting out fossil brachiopods. During the same six months he also served as proctor and tutor in the college. He then entered the Lawrence Scientific School, from which in 1863 he graduated with a summa cum laude degree of Bachelor of Science in Chemistry. Meanwhile, if not earlier, he had met "Zina" Fay; he had begun courting her not later than Januarv 1861; though brought up a Unitarian, he had been confirmed by Bishop Hopkins in the chapel of the Vermont Episcopal Institute in Burlington, Vermont, in July 1862; and they had been married by her father at St. Albans in October.

Meanwhile Charles' father, as astronomer and mathematician, had become the "Functionarv" of the Coast Survey in charge of determinations of the longitudes of American in relation to European stations from occultations of the Pleiades by the moon; and it

Page 405 was as an Aide to his father in these determinations that Charles, on July 1, 1861, began his thirty and a half consecutive years of employment in the Survey.

One of Charles' memories of the old house on Mason Street was the wedding there of his mother's sister and Charles Henry Davis. In 1849 Congress made provision for The American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac; the Navy appointed Lieutenant (later Admiral) Davis as its Superintendent; and he established its office in Cambridge. The first volume, that for 1855, came out late in 1852, and Davis said in his preface: "The theoretical department of the work has been placed under the special direction of Professor Benjamin Peirce, LL.D., and most of the calculations have passed under his final revision." Chauncey Wright had graduated from Harvard earlier in the year and had begun his years of computing for the Almanac. Charles Peirce later did some work for it, but was never a regular member of its staff.

The Davis home was the next house to the north on this side of Quincy, where the Allston Burr Lecture Hall now stands. We'll be pausing there later.

Superintendent Bache of the Survey, if not also Superintendent Davis of the Almanac, had a lively sense of humor, found his title cumbersome, and preferred to be addressed and referred to, at least by his associates and friends, as the "Chief." Benjamin Peirce as the "Functionary" of the Almanac as well as of the Survey, in a sense "depunding" on that of "Function."

The American Association for the Advancement of Science was organized in 1848. Bache, Agassiz, and Peirce were early presidents. Davis and they were leading members also of an informal group of scientists and friends of science seeking federal support of research. They called themselves at first the Florentine Academy, after the Florence oyster houses, their favorite Manhattan retreats. Later they adopted the Italian name for the beggars of Naples and called themselves the "Scientific Lazzaroni." They advocated a national university, at first in Albany, later in New York City, with Albany's Dudley Observatory to serve as national observatory in either case. In these efforts they failed, but they did succeed in 1863 in establishing the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, with Bache as its first president. Of the Lazzaroni, as well as of the Survey, Bache was the "Chief" and Peirce the "Functionary." More humorously, perhaps, Agassiz was sometimes called the "Fossilary." Certainly from the point of view of these research scientists, most of the country's professors of science were fossils.

There was a Cambridge Scientific Club which met for the most part every other Thursday evening from fall through spring in the homes of its members. The host for the evening was also the speaker,

Page 406 and the meeting was followed by dinner. Benjamin Peirce, Agassiz, and Davis were active members. During Charles Peirce's residence at Function Hall, the Club met there at least fifteen times, at Agassiz' home thirteen, and at Davis' twelve.

In Charles' numerous and wide­ranging recollections of his youth, what most stood out for him, and most stands out for us, is his having grown up in the Cambridge scientific community, and his awareness of the roles of some of its members in the emerging national and international scientific communities.

3. THE ARROW STREET HOUSES

Our guide now remarks that after their marriage, and after shorter stays elsewhere in Cambridge, Charles and Zina settled for a dozen years on Arrow Street, first at No. 2, then at No. 6; so we walk southward on Quincy Street, then cross Quincy Square to Bow Street, and turn from Bow into Arrow. Along the way, we learn that in those years the second house south of the Agassizes' was occupied by Charles Russell and Anna Cabot Lowell. It was she who lent Charles the Aesthetic Letters of Schiller, which led him back to Kant; and it was in the Lowell home that he first met Chauncey Wright. Farther south, where the Faculty Club now stands, was the house into which the James family moved in the fall of 1866. Charles had known William for at least five years, from their Lawrence Scientific School years, and he now became acquainted with William's father Henry Sr. and brother Henry Jr. and with other members of the family. It was probably in the James home, in the second Arrow Street home of Charles and Zina, and in the nearby homes of Chauncey Wright and Nicholas St. John Green (of which more later) that the Metaphysical Club in which pragmatism was born met most frequently in the early 1870s.

But it was while Charles and Zina still lived at 2 Arrow Street that Charles gave his first series of Harvard University Lectures in the spring of 1865 and his first series of Lowell Institute Lectures in the fall of 1866, both in the logic of science; that he was elected a Resident Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in January 1867; that he presented five papers in logic to the Academy at later sessions that year, and a memoir on "the logic of relatives" in January 1870; that he contributed three memorable articles to the second volume of the first philosophical journal in the English language, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (a series in which he took his first deliberate step from nominalism toward realism); that by these contributions to the Proceedings and Mezmoirs of the Academy and to the Journal (and more particularly by "On a New List of Categories" and "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities") he became

Page 407 the founder of present­day "semiotics"; that his second series of Harvard University Lectures, on "British Logicians" in 1869­1870, gave him a prominent part in what was later called "The Germ of the Graduate School"; and that, without ceasing to be primarily a chemist, he became a professional astronomer.

Superintendent Bache of the Coast Survey had been incapacitated by a stroke in the summer of 1864. He died on February 17, 1867. Benjamin Peirce became the third Superintendent on February 26 and continued in that position into 1874. He retained his professorship at Harvard and, except for short stays in Washington, he conducted the business of Superintendent from Cambridge. Julius E. Hilgard served as Assistant in Charge of the Survey's Washington office. On July 1, 1867, Charles was promoted from Aide to Assistant, the rank next under that of Superintendent. (Assistants were responsible directly to the Superintendent; Aides were responsible directly to Assistants or to special officers who, like Assistants, were responsible directly to the Superintendent.) He continued in that rank for twenty­four and a half years, through December 31, 1891.

Joseph Winlock had become the third Director of the Harvard College Observatory in 1866, and working relations between the Survey and the Observatory became much closer than they had hitherto been. By arrangement with Winlock, Charles began in 1867 to make observations that were reported in subsequent volumes of the Annals of the Observatory. In 1869 he was appointed an Assistant in the Observatory, where, as in the Survey, the rank of Assistant was next to that of Director.

In 1867 the Observatory received its first spectroscope. Among the most immediately interesting of the observations it made possible were those of the auroral light. In Volume 8 of the Annals it was reported that "on April 15, 1869, the positions of seven bright lines were measured in the spectrum of the remarkable aurora seen that evening; the observer being Mr. C. S. Peirce."

By that time, he had begun reviewing scientific, mathematical and philosophical books for The Nation. His second review was of Roscoe's Spectrum Analysis, on July 22, 1869, and it was both as chemist and as astronomer that he reviewed it. With Winlock's permission, he reported that

in addition to the green line usually seen in the aurora, six others were discovered and measured at the Harvard College Observatory during the brilliant display of last spring, and

four of these lines were seen again on another occasion. On the 29th of June last, a single narrow band of auroral light extended from east to west, clear over the heavens, at Cambridge, moving from north to south. This was found to have a continuous spectrum; while the fainter auroral light in the north showed the usual green line. (N 1:31)

Page 408 Peirce was a contributor to the Atlantic Almanac for several years, beginning with the volume for 1868. In that for 1870 he had, among other things, an article on "The Spectroscope," the last paragraph of which was devoted to the spectrum of the aurora borealis and the newly discovered lines.

As an Assistant both in the Survey and in the Observatory, Peirce was an observer of two total eclipses of the sun, at Bardstown, Kentucky, on August 7, 1869, and near Catania, Sicily, on December 22, 1870. And as late as 1894 he would write: "Of all the phenomena of nature, a total solar eclipse is incomparably the most sublime."

In 1871 the Observatory acquired a Zöllner astrophotometer and Winlock made Peirce responsible for planning its use. (By that time Zina and he had settled at 6 Arrow Street.) In February 1872 he began his photometric researches toward a better determination of the shape of our Galaxy. On March 12 he addressed the American Academy on stellar photometry and exhibited the instrument. His final report of the researches on which he was then embarking filled Volume 9 of the Annals, published in 1878 at Leipzig. But, as you must have noticed, our Conference includes a plenary session at the Observatory, devoted primarily to Peirce as astronomer; so I turn now to the early stages of his work in geodesy and metrology. In 1871 his father obtained authorization from Congress for a transcontinental geodetic survey along the 39th parallel, to connect the Atlantic and Pacific coastal surveys. (Eventually, in 1878, the agency's name was officially changed from the U. S. Coast Survey to the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey.) A geodetic survey called for a gravity survey, and the recently founded European Geodetic Association had recommended the reversible pendulum as the best instrument for determinations of gravity. On November 30, 1872, Peirce was instructed by his father to take charge of the pendulum experiments of the Survey, and, in consultation with Assistant Hilgard, to devise ways of making such experiments yield a better determination of the earth's ellipticity. Charles ordered a reversible pendulum apparatus from Repsold in Hamburg, which he received there in May 1875, during the second of his five European sojourns on Survey business, which added up to about three of the fourteen years 1870—1883. Meanwhile for extended periods in both 1872 and 1873 he had served in Hilgard's absence as Assistant in Charge of the Washington Office; and for extended periods in 1873 and 1874 he had swung invariable pendulums at the top and bottom of the shafts in the Hoosac Tunnel then under construction near North Adams, Massachusetts, and, under very unfavorable conditions, he had tried the experiment of "weighing the earth" there with a common balance. And both in Washington and near North Adams he had continued his photometric researches.

Page 409 The Office of Weights and Measures was an office of the Coast Survey until the creation of the Bureau of Standards in 1901. Peirce's new researches would in any case have made metrology one of his chief concerns for the remainder of his career in the Survey, and led to his becoming an active member of the American Metrological Society; but substituting for Hilgard made him responsible for that Office in 1872 and 1873; and a little more than a decade later, during Hilgard's superintendency, he was again in charge of it for nearly five months, from October 1, 1884, to February 22, 1885; and he was then responsible for a resolution of the Society on December 30, 1884, and presented testimony to the Allison Commission on January 24, 1885, which were the first two steps toward the Bureau of Standards.

The Arrow Street years were a period of experimentation and productivity for Zina also. She and Charles had no children. Her major concerns were two: (1) reducing the burden of housekeeping drudgery for married women, and (2) creating institutions to give women a voice in public affairs without their having to compete with men. For the first she advocated "Co­operative Housekeeping" in a series of five articles in The Atlantic Monthly from November 1868 through March 1869 (when Charles' Journal of Speculative Philosophy articles were appearing), and she took a leading part in the organization of the Cambridge Co­operative Housekeeping Society. Most of its early meetings, beginning on May 6, 1869, were held in Function Hall, with Benjamin Peirce in the chair; but several months later the Society voted to rent the old Meacham House back there on Bow Street, for its meetings as well as for its laundry, store, and kitchen. Support of the Society's efforts proved insufficient, however, and by April 1871 the Bow Street house was closed. For her second concern, Zina was active in the movement for a "Woman's Parliament" and was elected president of its first convention in New York City, on October 21, 1869. That movement was still active under the name of "The Women's Congress" at least as late as 1877.

Zina accompanied Charles during parts of his first two European sojourns. She was one of the observers of the total solar eclipse of December 22, 1870, near Catania, Sicily, and her account was included in the Survey's annual report. Both in 1870­1871 and 1875­1876 she investigated cooperative housekeeping in Europe, and especially in Great Britain, where her articles had been reprinted in book form in Edinburgh and in London. While they were still living at 2 Arrow Street she made a record of conversations with Charles in which he had argued at length for proportional representation. In 1875, during their 6 Arrow Street years, she published a small volume entitled The Democratic Party in which she briefly presented his views and connected them with the representation of women.

Page 410 Her fullest account of them appeared as late as 1918, in her novel New York: A Symphonic Study. Her younger sister, Amy Fay, studied piano in Germany from 1869 to 1876, under Liszt and other teachers. Charles and Zina visited her there at different times. Selections from her letters home appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1874, and Zina edited a more comprehensive collection in book form in 1880 under the title Music­Study in Germany. It went through more than twenty printings in the United States and England, and was translated into French and German.

Zina accompanied Charles on his longer stays in Washington and published a severe critique of "The Externals of Washington" in The Atlantic Monthly for December 1873. Charles' principal Washington place was the elegant Richards Building, which was occupied by the Survey from 1871, during Benjamin Peirce's superintendency, until it and adjacent buildings added later were removed in 1929 to make room for the Longworth House Office Building. Those who knew the history of federal support of science sometimes called it "Lazzaroni Castle." (Our guide here shows us photographs.)

From its first year, 1871, Peirce was active in the Philosophical Society of Washington, in whose name "Philosophical" meant Scientific. (In the mid­1880s he was listed as a member of its Mathematical Section.) And he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences at its spring meeting in 1877, and was at once appointed a member of its Committee on Weights, Measures, and Coinage. The Academy's spring meetings ("stated sessions") were regularly held in Washington; its fall meetings ("scientific sessions") in various other places, but most often at Columbia College in New York City.

"But now back to the early 1870s and the Metaphysical Club and pragmatism. Arrow heads (or is shot from Bow) into what was then Main Street but is now Massachusetts Avenue." We walk east along Massachusetts and turn north onto Trowbridge. "In those years Chauncey Wright lived in Mrs. Jacobs' boarding house here on Trowbridge near Main." We continue northward on Trowbridge to Harvard and westward on Harvard, and pause on the north side of Harvard near the east side of Prescott. "At 391 Harvard here, Nicholas St. John Green, with his wife and children, then lived with his widowed and invalid father, whose house it was. Wright and Green were the most active and the most influential older members of the Club. (Lawyer Green, you remember, was the 'grandfather' of pragmatism.) James and Peirce were the most active younger members. (Peirce, of course, was the father.) To a meeting in the study of any one of these four, none of the other three had as much as four minutes to walk. From here to the James house was less than a

Page 411 minute. The entire circuit of the four houses in either direction, without traffic lights, would have taken less than ten."

We cross Prescott, turn north on Quincy, pause briefly again where the James house then stood, and are brought to a second stop on the steps of the Fogg Museum. "I want you now to take a second look at Sever and Emerson over there, before we go on to the last of the Peirce family homes in Cambridge. We've been talking about the birth of pragmatism in the early 1870s. But its maturity is usually dated from James' California address of 1898 and Peirce's seven Harvard lectures on pragmatism in the spring of 1903, over there in Sever Hall's room 11, which were followed by an eighth lecture in its room 8, under the auspices of the Division of Mathematics, on 'Conceptions of Mathematical Multitude and Continuity.' Have a look at those rooms when you can, remembering that the architect of Sever was Peirce's classmate Henry Hobson Richardson, that it was built in 1878­1880, that Function Hall had been moved to Oxford Street to make room for it and had later been destroyed, and that Richardson had died in 1886.

"Peirce's last stay in Cambridge was from November 1906 through June 1907, beginning with the Boston meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, the last which he attended, and which he reported this time for the New York Sun. (He had reported eight previous meetings for the New York Evening Post and The Nation.) By that time Emerson Hall had been built and the Department of Philosophy was at home in it. In April 1907, in Emerson B, he gave three lectures to the Philosophy Club on Logical Methodeutic: (1) Retroduction, or the Framing of Hypotheses; (2) Deduction; (3) Induction, or the Experimental Method. The mathematician Huntington attended and asked him at the first lecture how he would regard the great hypotheses of pure mathematics, and Peirce recorded his own dissatisfaction with the reply he had given. So have a look at Emerson B too, and imagine the sense Peirce must have had in Sever of speaking from the site of Function Hall, and in Emerson from next door to it. He and Emerson had been colleagues in the Harvard University Lectures of 1869­1870, and his first memories of Emerson went back to the old house on Mason Street."

4. THE KIRKLAND PLACE HOUSE

We now walk northward on Quincy Street. We pause briefly in front of Allston Burr Lecture Hall, where the Charles H. Davis home had previously stood and had housed the Harvard University Press for many years. We are soon looking across to the Delta, on which Memorial Hall and Sanders Theater now stand, but which was the

Page 412 playing field in Peirce's youth. We make a brief detour into Sanders Theater, and are told that it was named for the same Charles Sanders for whom Peirce was named. So both the Delta and the Theater are Peirce places, though in different derivative senses.

We then turn right onto the south side of Kirkland Street, with William James Hall across from us. We soon cross over, enter Kirkland Place, and come to a stop at the first house on our right, which is No. 4. Our guide tells us that it originally faced Kirkland Place and its yard extended to Kirkland Street; but, when the apartment house on Kirkland Street was built, the house was turned clockwise 90°, so as to turn its back on the apartment house and face the garden and trees in the yard to the north, in the center of which there was a pond which served for skating in winter and for goldfish in summer.

When the widow of Charles Sanders died in 1872, she left a modest fortune to her niece Charlotte Elizabeth Peirce, Benjamin's sister (and Charles' "Aunt Lizzie"), who used it to buy this Kirkland Place house and make it the last home of Benjamin and Sarah. Benjamin died there in 1880, Sarah in 1887, and Lizzie herself in 1888. James Mills ("Jem") Peirce, Charles' older brother, had moved in after their father's death, and it was his home until he died unmarried in 1906. It was the family home during the 6 Arrow Street years of Charles and Zina. It was from this home that Benjamin Peirce served the last year and a half of his superintendency of the Coast Survey. It was while living here that Jem succeeded him as professor of astronomy and mathematics and later became dean of the graduate school and dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, and carried on the correspondence with Charles that is so prominent in Carolyn Eisele's introductions to The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce. It was here that Charles himself stayed for several weeks in the late spring of 1879, when he gave a lecture to the Philosophy Club on "The Relations of Logic to Philosophy," and for a shorter time in February 1886 when he presented his new "logical theory of evolution" to a gathering at the house itself that included James, Royce, Fiske, Abbot, and T. S. Perry. And, to cite just one more of many further occasions, it was here that, on Tuesday, January 12, 1893, Charles gave a reading of his ''Tale of Thessaly."

Our guide shows us a touching photograph of Sarah sitting in the Kirkland Place living room after Benjamin's death, and then leads us back to William James Hall. We take elevators to the top floor. From the east end we look down on the roof of 4 Kirkland Place. From the front we look south over the whole area of the Yard and of the homes of the most active members of the Metaphysical Club, and on beyond to the Charles River, the Cambridge Cemetery, and Blue Hill. From the west end we get a good view of the Common,

Page 413 of Radcliffe, Mason Street, and the Observatory; and our guide's last words to us are: "On the way to or from that session at the Observatory, make a detour along Brattle and have a look at 1898. Back in 1898 it was called Studio House and was the home of the Cambridge Conferences. It was there that in February and March Peirce gave his eight lectures on 'Reasoning and the Logic of Things,' which Royce wrote James in 1901 'will always remain quite epoch­marking for me. They started me on such new tracks.' And before or after the session at the old Mason Street house, have a look at 3 Berkeley Street near by, where he roomed while giving those lectures."

A few of us linger and ask questions. For example, "What about Peirce's Boston places?" "They would be matter for another tour of much greater length. Perhaps the three most important places would be the site of George Winship's gymnasium where Peirce practiced weight­lifting (which gave him an illustration of his second category); the site of Marlboro Chapel (reached through an arched passageway in the Marlboro Hotel on Washington Street between Winter and Bromfield), in which he gave his Lowell Lectures of 1866 on 'The Logic of Science; or, Induction and Hypothesis'; and the site of the Rogers Building, in whose Huntington Hall, which seated nearly a thousand, Peirce gave his Lowell Lectures of 1892­1893 on the history of science, and those of 1903 on 'Some Topics of Logic Bearing on Questions Now Vexed.' The Rogers Building was the first building of M.I.T. It was over on Boylston, where the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company's building now stands. M.I.T. later moved across the Charles to its present location. So Peirce has a place in the history of M.I.T. as well as of Harvard." And our guide helps us find these sites on the Boston skyline.

5. NEW YORK CITY

Soon after Charles and Zina returned in August 1876 from the second and longest of his five European sojourns, he began consultations with Superintendent Patterson of the Coast Survey looking toward the use of his new Repsold pendulum apparatus for new determinations of gravity in this country. Over the next decade he swung his pendulums at selected stations from Montreal to Key West; from Albany, New York, to Madison, Wisconsin; and from Hoboken, New Jersey, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (At Pittsburgh he was Acting Director of the Allegheny Observatory for several months in 1878­1879 in the absence of Director Langley.) The Stevens Institute of Technology at Hoboken was to serve as "initial station" here, as Geneva, Paris, Berlin, and Kew had served in Europe. For readier access to it and to other stations, as well as to the Survey's Office in Washington, it was decided that Peirce should take up residence

Page 414 in Manhattan. After several weeks at the Brevoort Hotel, he settled at 558 Lexington Avenue. Zina had refused to accompany him, and she refused to join him there. In the following spring she left 6 Arrow Street herself. They were never reunited. Six years later, in Baltimore, he obtained a divorce on the ground of desertion in order to marry Juliette Froissy Pourtalai.

Since we are celebrating the publication of Carolyn Eisele's edition of The New Elements of Mathematics, and since, though as widely traveled as he, she was born and grew up in the Bronx, did her undergraduate work at Hunter College and her graduate work at Columbia University, had her teaching career at Hunter, and continues to reside in Manhattan while at work on two further Peirce volumes, it is worth remarking that Peirce's Manhattan places were as numerous as those of Cambridge and Boston together. I shall mention only a few. I hope that some resident of Manhattan will make a comprehensive study of them, and be ready to give us a guided tour on some future occasion. It might begin at Bryant Park, on the site of the World's Fair of 1853 and of its imitation of London's Crystal Palace. At the age of fourteen, Charles accompanied Jem and their mother on a visit of over a week, chiefly to take in that Fair. Her brother­in ­law Charles Henry Davis had been the chief representative of our federal government in preparations for the Fair. Among the Manhattan places that Peirce later frequented most were the Astor Library and the Century Club. So the second stop might be the nearby New York Public Library, into which the Astor Library of Peirce's time was absorbed, and the third might be the Century Club, at 7 West 43rd Street. Our guide might read to us there from the letter that John Jay Chapman wrote to his wife at 1 a.m. in the night of Friday, August 11, 1893:

I am too tired to write. Went to the Century, where I happened to sit down next to Charles Peirce, and staved talking to him ever since, or rather he talking. He is a most genial man—got down books and read aloud. He began by saying Lincoln had the Rabelais quality. It appears he worships Rabelais. He read passages from Carlyle in a voice that made the building reverberate. He also read from an Elizabethan Thomas Nash—a great genius whom he said Carlyle got his style from, but he is wrong. Nash is better. I almost died over the language of this Elizabethan—he is a gargantuan humorist of the most splendid kind, as good as Falstaff, and Peirce read with oriflamme appreciation. He then talked about—plasms—force, heat, light—Boston, Emerson, Margaret Fuller, God, Mammon, America, Goethe, Homer, Silver, but principally science and philosophy—a wonderful evening. It was ask and have, and, but that he talked himself positively to sleep with exertion, he would be talking yet, and I have many more things I want to ask him, chiefly Helmholz....

Page 415 The next day Chapman wrote to Mrs. Henry Whitman:

Charles Peirce wrote the definition of University in the Century Dictionary. He called it an institution for purposes of study. They wrote to him that their notion had been that a university was an institution for instruction. He wrote back that if they had any such notion they were grievously mistaken; that a university had not and never had had anything to do with instruction; and that until we got over this idea we should not have any university in this country. He commended Johns Hopkins and Gilman ....

Helmholtz visited New York less than two months later. Peirce attended a reception for him at Columbia College and had conversation with him. And exactly two months after that, W. P. Garrison, editor of The Nation, which was then a weekly edition of the New York Evening Post, wrote Peirce: "Every well conducted paper keeps a 'graveyard' of obituary notices of eminent personages against their decease.... Do you feel competent to do Huxley? Helmholtz? ...." And Peirce proceeded to write obituaries of Helmholtz and other scientists, and of Sylvester, Cayley, and other mathematicians, for the "graveyard" of the Post, which served also for the Nation. In several cases his long obituary appeared in the Post the day after the decease of its subject. So, in a sense of "place" not more extended than that of "graveyard," the graveyard of the Post and Nation became another of Peirce's Manhattan places.

I like to think of the George Washington Bridge as another of Peirce's Manhattan places, though it was not built until after his death. George S. Morison, our greatest 19th­century bridge­builder, was appointed in 1894 by President Cleveland to serve on the Board of Engineers of a bridge across the Hudson at New York, and he employed Peirce as mathematical consultant. In a draft of one of his reports, Peirce began:

When, after having agreed to calculate the effects of live loads upon your projected Hudson River bridge, I came to study the plan of it, I became more and more impressed with the honor of being concerned, even in that entirely obscure way, with such an instrument for the elevation of man. For whoever, in allowing his eve of a morning to rest a moment for refreshment on that splendid scene, should catch sight of that bridge and should reflect upon how calmly and simply it performed a great duty, conforming in every detail to the principles of good sense and of sound reason, would certainly receive a moral lesson which would have its effect upon his conduct for all that day.

At the beginning of the 20th century there were many reviews of the 19th. Perhaps the best of these was that which filled two sections of the New York Evening Post on January 12, 1901, and later appeared

Page 416 in book form. In previous advertising, the Post had promised thirty­eight essays by leading authorities in as many fields. The sixteenth was to be by Charles S. Peirce on "The Century's Great Men in Science." But when the essays were in hand the Post moved Peirce's to first place, and leaned heavily upon it in an editorial, deciding that "the chief characteristic and the crowning glory of the century" had been such a "kindling and quickening of the scientific spirit" as to carry with it a change in the very meaning of the word "science." Peirce himself had written:

The glory of the nineteenth century has been its science.... It was my inestimable privilege to have felt as a boy the warmth of the steadily burning enthusiasm of the scientific generation of Darwin, most of the leaders of which at home I knew intimately, and some very well in almost every country of Europe.... The word science was one often in those men's mouths, and I am quite sure they did not mean by it "systematized knowledge," as former ages had defined it, nor anything set down in a book, but, on the contrary, a mode of life; not knowledge, but the devoted, well­considered life­pursuit of knowledge; devotion to Truth—not "devotion to truth as one sees it," for that is no devotion to truth at all, but only to party—no, far from that, devotion to the truth that the man is not yet able to see but is striving to obtain. The word was thus, from the etymological point of view, already a misnomer. And so it remains with the scientists of today. What they meant, and still mean, by "science" ought, etymologically, to be called philosophy.

That is our best clue so far to Peirce's place in American life. (We shall return to New York City in section 7 below.)

6. THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY AND STUDIES IN LOGIC

The change in the meaning of "science" was connected with the rise of postcollegiate education other than that of the professional schools of theology, medicine, and law, and the attaching of primary importance to research rather than to assignments, lectures, recitations, and examinations. Peirce had found his undergraduate courses at Harvard a bore, and ranked nearer the bottom than the top of his class; but his degree of Bachelor of Science for his graduate work in chemistry at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School was summa cum laude. Eliot had been one of his undergraduate teachers of mathematics and one of his graduate teachers of chemistry.

Eliot became President of Harvard University on May 19, 1869. Two days later he wrote to George Brush of Yale: "what to build on top of the American college.... This is what we have all got to think

Page 417 about." His first thought was to try turning the University Lectures into sequences running through the academic year, with optional comprehensive examinations on each sequence at the end of the year. He arranged two such sequences for 1869­1870; one in philosophy, the other in modern literature. For philosophy he enlisted Francis Bowen, John Fiske, Peirce, F. H. Hedge, J. Elliott Cabot, Emerson, and G. P. Fisher, in that order. Peirce's eighteen lectures, from December 14 to January 15, were on the history of logic in Great Britain from Duns Scotus to Mill. James attended at least his seventh, on nominalism from Ockham to Mill, and wrote next day to his friend Henry P. Bowditch that "it was delivered without notes, and was admirable in matter, manner and clearness of statement. ... I never saw a man go into things so intensely and thoroughly." The Graduate School was not established until 1890, with Jem as dean, but the experiment of 1869­1870 was later called "The Germ of the Graduate School." (In the interim, from 1872 to 1890, there had been a small "Graduate Department" and Jem, as secretary of the "Academic Council,'' had been its administrator.)

What The Johns Hopkins University did, beginning in 1876, was first to build a graduate school, and only then, when that was fully in being, to decide what, if anything, to build underneath it. (Early on, however, it yielded to local pressures so far as to set up a small undergraduate department.) After being considered for the chair of physics that went instead to Rowland, nine years his junior, Peirce was part­time Lecturer in Logic there for five years (1879­1884). His best students came to him from mathematics. The American Journal of Mathematics had been founded there in 1878, with Sylvester as editor; and the first of Peirce's seven contributions to it was a review in its first issue, a year before he joined the faculty. Sylvester counted him as one of the University's "eight working mathematicians— actual producers and investigators—real working men." In the introductory public lecture of the single course that he gave in his fourth year, Peirce argued that "this is the age of methods; and the university which is to be the exponent of the living condition of the human mind, must be the university of methods"; and that "the true and worthy idea" of the science of logic is that "it is the art of devising methods of research,—the method of methods."

By that time a volume was in an advanced stage of preparation, Peirce's preface to which was dated at Baltimore, December 12, 1882, and which appeared early in 1883 under the serial title Studies in Logic by Members of The Johns Hopkins University. (All published pre­announcements gave it the title "Contributions to Logic by Members of The Johns Hopkins University.") It contained five papers and a "Note" by four of his students, to which, at the end of the volume, were added a paper and two "Notes" by Peirce himself. This was to

Page 418 have been the first of a series of such volumes, in which future students—and future teachers—would be equally "members" of the University, and equally contributors to the advancement of logic. The business of students as well as teachers in a university is scientific—that is, knowledge­making, not knowledge­learning.

Peirce's first step, at the beginning of his appointment, had been to found the Metaphysical Club, named for the one at Cambridge in which pragmatism was born. Students and faculty members alike presented papers and participated in the discussion of them, as well as in elections of officers. The Club's meetings were reported in The Johns Hopkins University Circulars, and its Minute Book, with fuller summaries of papers and discussions, is still preserved, and may be counted as another of Peirce's places. Most of the work in the Studies in Logic had been first presented and discussed in meetings of the Club, and this would surely have been true of later volumes also.

(Peirce was active also in the Mathematical Society and in the Scientific Association.)

7. ARISBE

Peirce and his second wife, Juliette, moved from New York City to Milford, Pennsylvania, in 1887. Late in 1888, with inheritances from his mother and from his aunt Lizzie, they bought a sixty­acre farm along the Delaware River about two and a half miles northeast of Milford, with a house and other buildings on it. During the remaining twenty­six years of his life they frequently enlarged, refinished, and to some extent redesigned the house. They called the farm Arisbe after the Greek town of that name just south of the Hellespont; a colony of Miletus, the early source of Greek philosophy, cosmology, and science. Milford itself was a summer resort, chiefly for New Yorkers, and more particularly for French­speaking New Yorkers. From Arisbe it was not more than four and a half miles by stagecoach to the Erie station in Port Jervis, New York, and from there it was only two and a half hours by rail to Jersey City and its ferry to lower Manhattan. There was scarcely a year from 1887 to 1907 in which Peirce was not several times in Manhattan, often for extended stays, so that those years may be counted as New York City years also. His business as a chemical engineer was largely there. And it was not without reason for hope that he aspired to establish a summer school of philosophy at Arisbe.

The closest Milford friends of the Peirces were the Pinchots. The vertical sundial on Grey Towers was placed there by Peirce. His encouragement had something to do with young Gifford's going into forestry.

Page 419 On April 19, 1914, Arisbe became Peirce's deathplace. Juliette had his body embalmed at Milford and, after the funeral, cremated at Jersey City. She kept his ashes in an urn on a fireplace mantle at Arisbe until her own death there in 1934. It was buried with her body in the Milford Cemetery. In the literal, physical, and plural sense of "place," that is his last so far. Arisbe itself now belongs to the National Park Service and is in the care of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.

Though Peirce's assistantship in the Coast and Geodetic Survey was terminated at the end of 1891, the Survey published a new edition of his quincuncial map during the Second World War, and in 1962 it christened and launched (and in 1963 commissioned) a research vessel bearing his name. The Survey has since been absorbed into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the ship is most often called the NOAA Ship Peirce. It carries a framed portrait of him and a small Peirce library. On May 4, 1980, there was a gathering on board at Washington to celebrate the ship's tenth anniversary under NOAA, and Carolyn Eisele was the speaker.

8. CONCLUSION

If now we turn from taking "place" literally, physically, and plurally to taking it metaphorically, culturally, and singularly, we shall not be looking for anything abstruse, recondite, or technical. We shall not be inquiring how and to what extent Peirce's pioneer determination of the meter in terms of a wavelength of light opened the way toward the Michelson­Morley experiments, and how far they in turn opened the way toward Einstein's theory of relativity. We shall not be trying to assess the importance of his quincuncial projection of the sphere, or of his triadic logic, existential graphs, or logic of relations. We shall not be considering him as a precursor of nonstandard analysis, mathematical economics, or the economy of research. We shall make no attempt to place him in the history of attempts to solve the four­color problem. We shall say nothing of his tychism, agapism, or synechism, and shall barely touch his fallibilism and his pragmatism.

Our focus will be on the wide range of his researches in the sciences, in mathematics, and in the history of science; on the equally wide range of his memberships in scientific and mathematical societies and associations (including the London Mathematical Society); on his five European sojourns, adding up to three of the fourteen years 1870­1883, on business for the Coast and Geodetic Survey; on his newspaper reporting of the 1859 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of nine meetings of the National Academy of Sciences from 1901 to 1906; on his

Page 420 own graduate work in chemistry; on his participation in the development of graduate work at Harvard and at The Johns Hopkins; on his definition of "university" in the Century Dictionary; on the elimination of the polarized teacher­student relation from the meaning both of "Studies" and of ''Members" in Studies in Logic by Members of The Johns Hopkins University; and on the shift of "The Century's Great Men in Science" from sixteenth to first place in the New York Evening Post's review of the 19th century.

Our answer, then, to the question of "Peirce's Place in American Life" will be that he was the seer and the voice of a great change in the place of science in American life. Not the rapid increase both in the numbers and in the proportion of our population devoting their lives to science, and in both public and private support of science, and not the concomitant industrialization of our society, all of which were evident to many observers; but a change in the very meaning of the word "science." Just as "philosophy" had always meant not what philosophers know but what they do, so "science," both in the broad sense in which it includes (for examples) mathematics and logic and in the narrow sense in which it excludes them, came to mean not what scientists know but what they do. What they do, moreover, not in the privacy of their own retreats but as members of a community, or of communities local, national, international, and at least potentially worldwide.

Though nobody was better placed than Peirce to observe and report this change, there were doubtless many others well enough placed to do so. If we pursue the question why he, incomparably more than anybody else, was the seer and the voice of the change, our best answer may be that, early on, he rejected both continental rationalism and British empiricism, and became the modem founder of a semiotics whose fundamental premise is that all thought is in signs. The papers in which he did so were "On a New List of Categories" (1867) and "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities" (1868).

From about 1893 onward, he frequently distinguished three senses of the word "science":

(1) Certain and evident knowledge (as in the second rule of Descartes' Regulae).

(2) Systematized knowledge (as in Coleridge's introduction to the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana); a body of knowledge; "the corpse of science."

(3) Research, investigation: "the business, the total principal industry of a social group, whose whole lives, or many years of them, are consecrated to inquiries to which they are so devoted as to be drawn to every person who is pursuing similar inquiries."

Page 421 (1) was obsolete well before the beginning of the g9th century, and was excluded by Peirce's fallibilism; (2) was prevalent through the first half of the I9th century, and Peirce continued into the 20th to reserve a subordinate place for it in his classifications of the sciences, under the head of "science of review," and cited Humboldt's Cosmos and Comte's Positive Philosophy as examples. The reference of (1) and (2) is backward; that of (3) alone is forward. (2) can be done by single individuals, as (1) could also if it could be done at all. (3) is an essentially social conception of science. Peirce's pragmatism is the chief of his many contributions to the logic of science in this social and forward­looking sense. In Germany it has recently been called "logical socialism."

Here, finally, is the corrected text of a key sentence on the social and forward reference of "science" from "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities": "Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of an indefinite increase of knowledge" (CP 5.31 I).

9. EPILOGUE

If now we were to apply our conclusion to the particular occasion that brings us together, we should be remarking (1) that the 19th century change observed and reported by Peirce in the meaning of "science" was concomitant with a corresponding change in the meaning of the name of each particular science; (2) that in his classifications of the sciences mathematics headed the list of the research sciences (the heuretic sciences or sciences of discovery); (3) that he was not only a son of one mathematician and a brother of another, but a mathematician in his own right; (4) that he was for five crucial years at the mathematical center of the United States; and (5) that he was ideally situated to observe the 19th­century change in the meaning of "mathematics" from (a) a particular sort of cognition and (b) a particular body of knowledge to (c) what mathematicians do as members of a subcommunity within the larger community of investigators. That would bring us to the question: "But what do mathematicians do?" And it is not the least of the many services of Carolyn Eisele's edition of The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce that it puts us in position for the first time to study and evaluate his several attempts to answer that question.

Page 422

TWENTY­TWO—The Range of Peirce's Relevance

"Arisbe," the Peirce home near Milford, Pennyslvania, belongs to the National Park Service, and the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area is responsible for its care. In 1979 a geodetic triangulation station was installed in the front yard and named the "C. S. Peirce Station."1 This was intended, at least in part, as a recognition of the fact that Peirce's scientific career was in the service of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and that the first of his more than thirty years in its service was spent with triangulating parties along the coasts of Maine and of the Gulf states. It offers a suggestive metaphor for the present occasion. If the questions, methods, answers and reasons of another thinker, or of a whole movement of thought, whether earlier or later than Peirce, are illuminated by locating them, directly or indirectly, positively or negatively, in relation to those of the C. S. Peirce station, we may count that as part of the range of Peirce's relevance. In the case of an earlier thinker or movement, the relevance does not depend on Peirce's awareness or acknowledgment; in the case of a later thinker or movement, it does not depend on awareness or acknowledgment by that thinker or by one or more representatives of that movement. If the thinker is oneself, the triangulating will of course require a certain detachment. At least within limits, and perhaps even without limit, degrees of nearness or remoteness, likeness or difference, do not as such constitute degrees of relevance. And even if our interest is primarily in philosophical relevance, mathematical or scientific relevance may entail philosophical, and so be counted.

What follows is the first part of a planned longer study, the second and third parts of which will appear in a later paper. The first part works backward from 1980 to the last year of Peirce's life (1913­14), sampling claims, recognitions and acknowledgments along the way; the second surveys the present range of acknowledged relevance; and the third looks forward to recognitions of relevance still to come.

Page 423

1 A BACKWARD GLANCE

In August 1980, at the Joint Mathematics Meeting, the Mathematical Association of America is sponsoring a "minicourse on Teaching calculus using infinitesimals," the way to which has been opened by Abraham Robinson's Non­standard Analysis (1966) and H. Jerome Keisler's Elementary Calculus (1976). Neither Robinson nor Keisler mentions Peirce, and he may not be mentioned in the minicourse, but Carolyn Eisele sees in non­standard analysis a vindication of Peirce's almost single­handed advocacy of infinitesimals against the long dominant method and doctrine of limits.2 The philosophical relevance in this case lies in the proof that we can reason logically and mathematically about infinity, and therefore about continuity.

The May 1979 issue of Synthese ("An International Journal for Epistemology, Methodology and Philosophy of Science" published in Holland since 1936) consisted of five "Essays on the Philosophy of Charles Peirce" and might itself have been called "The Relevance of Peirce" if The Monist had not already announced its present issue as in preparation.

At the annual meeting of the Semiotic Society of America in 1978 there was a plenary session on methodology. One of the five papers was by Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker­Sebeok, entitled "'You Know my Method': A Juxtaposition of Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes." This was published in 1979.3 It began with two epigraphs: Holmes's "I never guess" and Peirce's "But we must conquer the truth by guessing, or not at all." In March 1980 it appeared in book form.4 This is the first book in which Peirce appears as a working detective and in which his philosophy of science is interpreted as a theory of detection.

At the International Congress for the History of Science in Edinburgh in August 1977, Carolyn Eisele presented a paper on "Peirce as a Precursor in Mathematics and Science" which is noteworthy not only for its own substance but also as representative of what is probably the most frequent type of relevance claim.5

When the C. S. Peirce Bicentennial International Congress was held in Amsterdam in June 1976, it was remarked in the presidential address that Peirce himself had been in Europe in 1876 on the second of five European sojourns in the service of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey; that he represented the Survey at meetings of the International Geodetic Association; that that was the first international scientific association, and that Peirce was the first American participant in the meetings of such an association. It was also remarked that it was Vening Meinesz's gravity survey of Holland in 1913­1921 that first proved the practicability of a method proposed by Faye in 1877 and shown by Peirce in 1879 to be theoretically

Page 424 sound, for avoiding the flexure or swaying of the pendulum stands then used in determinations of gravity.6 One of the hosts of the Congress remarked that recognition of Peirce's importance had been more continuous in the Netherlands than elsewhere in Europe because of the "significs" movement going back to Gerrit Mannoury and L. E. J. Brouwer. (Mannoury had followed Schröder in recognizing Peirce's priority over Dedekind in analyzing the distinction between a finite and an infinite collection.)

A Bicentennial Conference on the History of Geology was held at the University of New Hampshire in October 1976, and its proceedings were published in 1979 under the title Two Hundred Years of Geology in America.7 In the latter half of the nineteenth century geology became an—indeed the—American science. Several of the twenty­eight papers trace its emergence from the earth sciences as a complex whole. Institutionally, it was the Coast Survey that, when Peirce began his more than thirty years in its service, had become "the center of the American scientific community."8 Val Dusek's paper on "Geodesy and the Earth Sciences in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce" assumes that he was "America's greatest philosopher" and "perhaps the one truly universal mind that nineteenth­century America produced," and argues that both the wide range and the main focuses of his work for the Survey gave him a ''background in the observational and experimental sciences" and thereby "a balanced view of science" such as few philosophers have ever had. Dusek acknowledges that Peirce concluded a review of his acquaintance with the sciences by saying that he was more completely ignorant of geology than of any other, but remarks that "this was comparative ignorance, not absolute." He mentions that Peirce "studied classification with Louis Agassiz for six months," but does not mention that one of the tasks Agassiz set him was sorting fossil brachiopods, and that fifty years later he was still drawing illustrations from paleontology. Nor does Dusek mention that Peirce's father in the 1850s was one of the early theorists of the formation of continents and of "continental drift," or that Peirce himself in 1897 was chosen by the Director of the Geological Survey to adjudicate a controversy between two of the leading geologists, Becker and Van Hise, concerning slaty cleavage; that the founder and editor of the Journal of Geology wished to publish a paper by Peirce detaching the positive general substance of his report from the details of the controversy; and that Peirce agreed to write such a paper but never found time for it.9

The Johns Hopkins University celebrated its centennial by holding a series of symposia extending throughout the academic year 1975­76, beginning with "The Charles Sanders Peirce Symposium on Semiotics and the Arts" on September 25­26, 1975. The five contributors included Thomas A. Sebeok on "Iconicity," Umberto Eco on

Page 425 "Peirce's Notion of Interpretant," and Roman Jakobson in "A Few Remarks on Peirce, Pathfinder in the Science of Language." The papers were published in Modern Language Notes, and Jakobson's illuminating "Remarks" have just made a prominent reappearance in his The Framework of Language, inaugurating the Michigan Studies in the Humanities.10

In 1974 The Philosophy of Karl Popper appeared in The Library of Living Philosophers. It contained a three­part paper by Eugene Freeman and Henryk Skolimowski on "The Search for Objectivity in Peirce and Popper." In the first part Freeman found the germ of Popper's notion of falsification in Peirce's remark that "the best hypothesis, in the sense of the one most recommending itself to the inquirer, is the one which can be the most readily refuted if it is false."11

At the semi­centennial meeting of the History of Science Society in 1974 a morning session was devoted to "Charles Sanders Peirce: Scientist, Mathematician and Historian of Science."12

At the 80th annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in 1972, Thomas C. and Joyce V. Cadwallader presented the first of a series of papers leading gradually to the conclusion that Peirce was the first modern experimental psychologist in the Americas.13 (One of these papers was presented to the History of Science Society's Peirce session in 1974.)

In 1970 Kathleen Nott in her Philosophy and Human Nature gave greater prominence to Peirce than to any other of the philosophers she found most helpful.

At a time in 1970 when IBM's great "Computer Perspective" exhibit was in preparation, Preston Tuttle was examining the Allan Marquand papers at Princeton University. He came upon a letter from Peirce dated "1886 Dec. 30" containing the first known design for an electric switching circuit machine for performing logical and mathematical operations. The letter became a feature of the exhibit and was published in the book that grew out of it.14

In 1968 W. J. Baumol and S. M. Goldfeld included Peirce among their Precursors in Mathematical Economics on the basis of correspondence between him and Simon Newcomb in 1871 which Carolyn Eisele had published in 1957.

Also in 1968, on page 5 of The Origins of Pragmatism, A. J. Ayer wrote: "We shall indeed find that the theory of scientific method for which Professor Popper has become justly celebrated in our own times was very largely anticipated by Peirce."

When Rosser and Turquette published their Man,­valued Logics in 1952, the first known system of three­valued logic was that of Post in 1921. When Peirce's system of 1909 was discovered in his logic notebook in 1965, Turquette collaborated with me in an article on

Page 426 "Peirce's Triadic Logic," and he then went on in three further articles, and in two papers presented at professional meetings, to develop Peirce's system in greater detail.

When Karl Popper published his Logik der Forschung in 1934 he knew nothing of Peirce. When he published its English translation in 1959 and Conjectures and Refutations in 1962, his first­hand acquaintance with Peirce's work was still very slight. But in his 1965 Compton Memorial Lecture Of Clouds and Clocks he was ready to say:

Among the few dissenters [to physical determinism—the doctrine that all clouds are clocks] was Charles Sanders Peirce, the great American mathematician and physicist and, I believe, one of the greatest philosophers of all time. .... So far as I know Peirce was the first post­Newtonian physicist and philosopher who thus dared to adopt the view that to some degree all clocks are clouds; or in other words, that only clouds exist, though clouds of very different degrees of cloudiness.... I further believe that Peirce was right in holding that this view was compatible with the classical physics of Newton. I believe that this view is even more clearly compatible with Einstein's (special) relativity theory, and it is still more clearly compatible with the new quantum theory. In other words, I am an indeterminist—like Peirce, Compton, and most other contemporary physicists; and I believe, with most of them, that Einstein .was mistaken in trying to hold fast to determinism. (I may perhaps say that I discussed this matter with him, and that I did not find him adamant.)15

In 1964 the Yale department of philosophy commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Peirce's death by holding a series of lectures which was published in 1965 under the title Perspectives on Peirce. ,16 Among them was Norwood Russell Hanson's "Notes Toward a Logic of Discovery." This was one of several papers by Hanson developing further the argument of his Patterns of Discovery. 17 In these, as in the book, though he referred incidentally to Artistotle, Whewell, and F C. S. Schiller, it was chiefly on Peirce that he built.

In 1962 the Coast and Geodetic Survey launched a research vessel named for Peirce. It was commissioned in 1963 and is still in the service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which makes frequent reports of its findings. A ceremony honoring Peirce, with an address by Carolyn Eisele, was held aboard the vessel at Washington on May 4, 1980.

In 1958 (the year in which volumes VII and VIII of the Collected Papers appeared, edited by Arthur W. Burks), the Joulnal of Public Law published a symposium of three papers on Peirce, followed by a republication of his 1892 paper "Dmesis," introduced as "one of

Page 427 the very few writings in which this philosopher deals directly with law."

During World War II the charting of air routes became of increasing strategic as well as scientific importance, and the Coast and Geodetic Survey published a new and enlarged edition of Peirce's 1879 quincuncial map of the earth, with the major international air routes now charted upon it. After the war an edition without the air routes was published for more purely educational purposes. Not only did the quincuncial projection yield the best map for the charting of air routes, but

An added advantage in the use of a projection on which the whole sphere can be repeated in a transposed position is to provide peoples residing in either the Eastern or Western Hemispheres with a world pattern in accordance with their inherent geographical conception. A citizen of the United States using the map is able to observe the relationship of world land areas from his point of view as occupying a central geographical position; likewise a resident of Asia, by means of the repeated world image, is able to visualize the relationship of continents with Asia as the geographical center.18

When Dewey in 1938 published his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, the first six volumes of the Collected Papers had appeared (1931­1935) and he had reviewed them. In the book he wrote that, as far as he was aware, Peirce was "the first writer on logic to make inquiry and its methods the primary and ultimate source of logical subjectmatter," and that, "with the outstanding exception of Peirce," he had learned most from writers with whose positions he had in the end been compelled to disagree.19

Of the many eminently publishable papers that Peirce had not succeeded in publishing, The Hound & Horn in 1929, at a time when the Collected Papers were already in preparation, was permitted to publish his 1907 paper entitled "Guessing."20 In some respects it remains the best introduction to Peirce. It puts into more colloquial terms such as "guessing" what elsewhere he had called hypothesis, abduction, or retroduction. Excerpts from it reappeared in 1958 in volume VII of the Collected Papers, but the detective episode was omitted (CP 7.36­48). That episode became the chief single Peircean source for the 1980 book by the Sebeoks.

When Russell and Whitehead published the second edition of Principia Mathematica in 1927, the most relevant things were Henry Sheffer's stroke function and his "General Theory of Notational Relativity." From that we may infer that, had they known of it, one of the most relevant things when they were preparing the first edition

Page 428 would have been Peirce's anticipation of the stroke function about 1880.

In 1923 two books of major importance for extending the awareness of Peirce's relevance appeared in the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method. One was Chance, Love and Logic, edited by Morris R. Cohen. It contained two of Peirce's most important series of papers—the "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" of 1877­78 and the Monist series of 1891­93—along with the most thematic paragraphs of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy series of 1868­69. The other book was The Meaning of Meaning, by Ogden and Richards, containing in Appendix D relevant extracts from papers published by Peirce from 1867 through 1906, and also from his unpublished letters to Victoria Lady Welby.

The first journal issue devoted to Peirce was that of the Journal of Philosophy in December 1916, nearly sixty­four years ago. It began with an article by Royce and his student Kernan on Peirce's leading ideas—his evolutionism, his insurance theory of induction, his tychism, his objective idealism—and on his unpublished manuscripts, which, at Royce's urging, had been acquired by Harvard University from Peirce's widow just two years earlier. It ended with a bibliography of Peirce's published writings by Morris R. Cohen. In between there were an article by Dewey on "The Pragmatism of Peirce" and articles by two of Peirce's ablest students, Joseph Jastrow and Christine Ladd­Franklin.21

In May 1913, early in the last year of Peirce's life, Royce sent him the two volumes of The Problem of Christianity, for the solution of which, in lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston and at Oxford University, he had gone back to the theory of signs in four of Peirce's earliest published papers: "On a New List of Categories" (1867) and the three papers of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy series of 1868­69. Royce later said that he had received "a very kind letter of acknowledgment which I deeply prize, and which showed ... that my interpretation of him gained on the whole, his approval."22 Peirce had written to Victoria Lady Welby in December 1908, nearly six years earlier, that he had been "entirely absorbed" in the theory of signs "since 1863, without meeting, before I made your acquaintance, a single mind to whom it did not seem very like bosh'' (CP 8.376). In 1911 she wrote him that she thought she had found a disciple for him in C. K. Ogden, then still a student at Cambridge University.23 Royce, in this last major work of his, was the third. Their number now is legion.

The above are of course but a few samples of the claims and acknowledgments of Peirce's relevance that have been made—or, in a few cases, that might have been made—from the last year of his life to the present time. Every student of his work will think of others

Page 429 more important than many of mine. I shall mention still others in parts 2 and 3 of the present essay (forthcoming). But I trust the above have served their immediate purpose, that of affording a first impression of the range of Peirce's relevance. Part 2 will offer a more systematic survey of the present range, and part 3 will venture predictions of recognitions still to come. Those that came during his active lifetime are matter for his biography.

2. THE PRESENT RANGE

A survey of the fields in which Peirce's relevance is now recognized may best begin with that in which such recognition is most nearly universal. The commonest English form of the name of that field is now semiotics. As a field of systematic study, it is still so young that there are as yet few if any university departments bearing its name; but there are several interdisciplinary programs and research centers, and several national societies and journals; and there is an International Association for Semiotic Studies, which was founded at Paris in 1969; which publishes the most voluminous journal in the field, Semiotica; and which held its first congress at Milan in 1974 and its second at Vienna in 1979. At the latter there were three "working sessions" devoted to "Investigations into Peirce's Theory of Signs."

The Charles S. Peirce Society holds its regular single­session annual meeting in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association; but, by invitation, it has been holding two­ or even three­session meetings in conjunction with the annual meetings of the Semiotic Society of America. Moreover, the latter Society frequently has one or more Peirce sessions in its own program. Papers on Peirce are increasingly frequent in the semiotic societies of other countries also. It may soon be the case, if it is not so already, that more papers on Peirce are presented to semiotic societies and published in semiotic journals than to all other professional societies and in all other professional journals taken together.

Though the history of semiotics may be traced back to the ancient Greeks, and though Peirce and Saussure had modern predecessors, it has become common to recognize them as the modern founders of semiotics. (Saussure's term "semiologie" is already obsolete, and so, apparently, is Peirce's preferred spelling "semeiotic.") Peirce's most fundamental published papers go back to 1867­1871, a decade before Saussure's Memoire and half a century before his Cours. Those early papers of Peirce were first republished, and much of his relevant later work was first published, in 1931­1935, in the first six volumes of his Collected Papers, one of whose two editors was Charles

Page 430 Hartshorne, an older colleague of Charles Morris at the University of Chicago. Morris acquired and annotated those six volumes as they came out, and drew upon them in his own major works in the field, Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938) and Signs, Language, and Behavior (1946). In the former he said that Peirce's work was "second to none in the history of semiotic." If by semiotics we mean the general theory of signs, then there is certainly one respect in which Peirce's work still is (and will almost certainly remain) second to none; namely, in the degree of its generality. Morris had become more focally conscious of this by the time of his second work, in the appendix to which he explained his preference for beginning and remaining at a lower level. It may safely be predicted that in this field at least Peirce will long remain relevant as providing a framework within which semioticians can locate the more limited ranges of their own researches.

More scholars have come to semiotics from cultural anthropology and from linguistics or philology than from any other single field. (It is to an anthropologist, Margaret Mead, that we owe the prevalence of the form "semiotics.")

Saussure was himself a linguist. Peirce was a chemist and his first professional publication was in chemistry, but his second was on the pronunciation of Shakespearian English, and he was a lifelong student of comparative linguistics. In 1870, during the first of his five European sojourns,24 he wrote home that he had heard eighteen distinct languages spoken, seventeen of them (including Basque) in places where they were the languages of everyday speech. His escape from the provincialism of the Indo­European family had begun.

For forty years the most distinguished linguist in the United States has been Roman Jakobson. He came to us from the Moscow and Prague linguistic circles, and to Peirce from Husserl and Saussure. I have already mentioned his Johns Hopkins remarks on Peirce as "Pathfinder in the Science of Language." In his 1971 foreword to the second volume of his own Selected Writings, Jakobson says it is Peirce who in this country has been for him "the most powerful source of inspiration." Besides the thirty indexed passages on Peirce in the volume, there are several unindexed ones. In one of these he refers to Peirce as "the deepest inquirer into the essence of signs," and in another he says that Peirce's statement that "a symbol may have an icon or an index incorporated into it" ''opens new, urgent tasks and far­reaching vistas to the science of language."25

To the Scientific American's September 1972 issue on communication Jakobson contributed the article on "Verbal Communication." He quotes Peirce in the first paragraph and in two later ones, the first of which speaks of him as "the initiator of semiotics." One of

Page 431 Jakobson's three illustrations is from Peirce's rendering of Poe's "The Raven" in "art chirography." Jakobson says "He intended to show how ties between sound and meaning ... can be transmuted into autonomous interplay of letter and meaning."

In his inaugural address, in French, at the first congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, at Milan in 1974, Jakobson gave great prominence to Peirce, "the most inventive and the most universal among American thinkers," and called attention both to his three earliest relevant publications, of 1867 and 1868, and to an "amazing" still earlier Lowell Institute Lecture of 1866 on consciousness and language, which had remained unpublished until 1958.26

Noam Chomsky, of generative and transformational grammar fame, has a narrower Peircean range, focusing on a collection of passages on abduction brought together in chapter 13 of Vincent Tomas's 1957 anthology of Peirce's Essays in the Philosophy of Science.27 In 1976, when his conversations with the French linguist Mitsou Ronat moved into the philosophy of language, and she asked him to which philosophy he felt closest, he replied: "In relation to the questions we have just been discussing, the philosopher to whom I feel closest and whom I'm almost paraphrasing is Charles Sanders Peirce."28

Among still younger linguists, one of the most productive and influential is Michael Shapiro. He specializes in Russian and other Slavic languages and in Japanese, and thinks of himself as continuing Jakobson's work, with amplifications and revisions. In a recent article on "Poetry and Language; 'Considered as Semiotic,' " he says that "Linguistics and poetics as disciplines have yet to undergo what must eventually become a full­blown Peircean revolution in the humanities and social sciences."29 Partly as a means of hastening that revolution, he thinks it is not too soon to begin preparing for a sesquicentennial Peirce conference, preferably in Cambridge, and ideally to climax on Sunday, September 10, 1989, the 15th anniversary of Peirce's birth there in 1839.

One of the most striking features of the last quarter of a century has been the high frequency of articles, chapters, journal issues, and entire books on metaphor, many of them by philosophers.30 No single article is more often referred to than Paul Henle's, whose approach is by way of Aristotle's definition of metaphor and Peirce's distinction between symbols and icons as kinds of signs.31 There is a more recent and more comprehensive brochure by Michael and Marianne Shapiro, entitled Hierarchy and the Structure of Tropes, the last of whose five parts is on "Tropes in the Framework of Peircean Semiotic." In the first, called "Background," we read: "What

Page 432 has been insufficiently apperceived, to echo Henning Andersen's phrase (following C. S. Peirce), is the fact that all figures of speech are a particular kind of 'abductive innovation.' "32

Developments in linguistics often lead to developments in cultural anthropology, in sociology, and in other social sciences. It should not surprise us, therefore, if advances in semiotics, as a field more general than and embracing linguistics, should likewise lead to advances in the social sciences, directly as well as by way of linguistics. Claude Levi­Strauss's Structural Anthropology acknowledges its debt to the structural linguistics of Saussure and Jakobson. If it owes anything to Peirce, it may be only indirectly, through Jakobson and other post­Saussurean linguists.33

In 1978, the Chicago anthropologist Milton Singer, in "For a Semiotic Anthropology," gave an account of "the tilt of culture theory to semiotics and semiology in the 1960s," compared Saussure's language­centered dyadic semiology with Peirce's logic­centered triadic semeiotic, gave reasons for preferring the latter to the former, and intimated that Levi­Strauss and other anthropologists who had adopted the former had done so without really examining the latter.34

Singer was the American Anthropological Association's "Distinguished Lecturer" for 1978. His lecture, published in 1980 under the title "Signs of the Self: An Exploration in Semiotic Anthropology," was devoted entirely to Peirce. Its first section, headed "Man's Glassy Essence," was a detailed examination of Peirce's concluding Lowell Lecture of 1866, which had so amazed Jakobson. Singer went on to explore "the thesis that an application of Peirce's general theory of signs will produce a semiotic conception of the self that is also a phenomenological and a pragmatic conception."35

Singer has continued his argument in "Personal and Social Identity in Dialogue" and in his book, Man's Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology. The latter is now the most comprehensive and persuasive argument for a Peircean anthropology.36

In sociology and social psychology one of the liveliest movements is called symbolic interactionism. Back in 1938, in a volume edited by Emerson P. Schmidt and entitled Man and Society: A Substantive Introduction to the Social Sciences, Herbert Blumer contributed the chapter on social psychology. He distinguished three schools, proposed the name "symbolic interactionists" for the third, to which he himself belonged, and cited George Herbert Mead's Mind, Self, and Society as "the most illuminating treatment of the self" from its point of view. In 1969 Blumer published a book called Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method, with a chapter on "Sociological Implications of the Thought of George Herbert Mead." To the philosophers who had contributed to it he now added Dewey

Page 433 and James, but said he relied chiefly on Mead, "who, above all others, laid the foundations of the symbolic interactionist approach."

In 1973 John M. Lincourt and Peter H. Hare published an article on "Neglected American Philosophers in the History of Symbolic Interactionism"37 in which they called attention to Chauncey Wright, Peirce, and Royce as other philosophers not yet recognized in this connection but deserving recognition along with Mead, Dewey, and James.

In 1942 C. Wright Mills took his Ph. D. degree at the University of Wisconsin with a thesis entitled "A Sociological Account of Some Aspects of Pragmatism." In 1964, two years after his death, his thesis was published by Irving Louis Horowitz under the title Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America.38 Long chapters on Peirce, James and Dewey are preceded by an introductory chapter whose longest section is on the "Biographical Composition of the Metaphysical Club" in which pragmatism was born. At the end of the book there is a postscript of 1943 in which Mills traced most of the faults of his thesis to its not including a chapter on Mead.

And now comes a book of 1980 by two young sociologists, J. David Lewis and Richard L. Smith, entitled American Sociology and Pragmatism: Mead, Chicago Sociology, and Symbolic Interaction.39 They take off from Mills's postscript, and supply not only the deficiencies he acknowledged but others of which he was unaware. In the first half of their book, to their chapters on Peirce, James and Dewey, they add one on Mead. But in the latter half they supply the materials for "an intellectual history of Chicago sociology." Mills had remarked on Peirce's realism and James's nominalism. Lewis and Smith go on to associate Mead and Peirce as realists, James and Dewey as nominalists; they present evidence that Mead's influence on Chicago sociology has been greatly exaggerated; they reject Blumer's nominalistic interpretation of him; and they argue that by adopting their own interpretation of him, and thus by associating him with Peirce rather than with James and Dewey, we shall greatly enhance his claim to sociological recognition.

From anthropology, sociology and social psychology it is a natural next step to psychiatry, and more particularly to the interpersonal psychiatry of Harry Stack Sullivan and of his journal Psychiatry. Though Peirce was the first modern experimental psychologist in the Americas, he was scarcely a psychiatrist. (Some of his critics, and even some of his admirers, think he could have used one.) But at least three Peircean articles have appeared in that journal. By far the longest and most substantial article in the first issue, in February 1938, was Albert M. Dunham's Chicago Ph. D. thesis of 1933, written under the direction of Charles Hartshorne, on "The Concept of Tension in Philosophy." Dunham began with Peirce in his introduction,

Page 434 devoted by far the longest chapter to him, entitled "Peirce and the Aesthetic of Events," and returned to him in the conclusion. (The other philosophers to whom he paid most attention in chapters I­IV were Whitehead and Santayana.)

The second Peircean article was Walker Percy's "Toward a Triadic Theory of Meaning" in the issue for February 1972, and the third was "C. S. Peirce and H. S. Sullivan on the Human Self," by John M. Lincourt and Paul V. Olczak, in that for February 1974.40

The other chief American journal in the field is Psychiatric Quarterly. The psychiatrist Maurice R. Green at the 1958 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association presented a paper on "The Roots of Sullivan's Concept of the Self" which traced those roots through Mead and James to Peirce. In the following year Green presented to the Harry Stack Sullivan Society a paper on "Prelogical Processes and Participant Communication" in which he went back to one of the great classics of experimental psychology, the memoir on subliminal perception which Peirce and his student Jastrow presented to the National Academy of Sciences in 1884. Both of Green's papers were published in the Qutarterly.41 In both he compared Sullivan's pretaxic, protaxic and parataxic modes of experience with Peirce's three categories.

So much for Peirce's relevance to American psychiatry. But what of Freud? I am not aware that Peirce knew anything of Freud, or Freud of Peirce, though each might have heard of the other through G. Stanley Hall. But Svend Erik Larsen has recently published an essay on Freud and Peirce in which he first outlines the generative structure of jokes, as analyzed by Freud in his 1905 book on Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious; then outlines the generative structure of semiosis, as analyzed by Peirce; and then finds a close relation between the triadicity of the one and that of the other.42 His paper should encourage some student of Freud and Peirce to bring Freud's Ego, Id, and Superego into comparison with Peirce's I, It, and Thou.

There is an extensive and growing literature on perception—philosophical, psychological, physiological, model­theoretic, and computer­theoretic. One of the most comprehensive and interesting anthologies was edited in 1966 by the psychologist and computer scientist Leonard Uhr under the title Pattern Recognlition.43 Its five parts range from "Conceptual Framework" through "Computer Simulations of Complex Models." The first begins with three selections from Peirce, a short one from his Harvard Lectures of 1903 on pragmatism (CP 5.115­119) and two long ones from his 1868 article on "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities" (CP 5.283­ 287, 295­317). All the other selections in the volume are of much more recent date. None is as fundamental.

Page 435 Passing now to recognitions of Peirce's relevance by professional philosophers, I remark first that the present issue of The Monist and that for July 1980 supply their readers with ample materials for making their own preliminary surveys.44 I shall assume that they have done so, and limit myself to some supplementary remarks, the first of which is that he has contributed more than any other American philosopher to the vocabulary of philosophy—and inspired others to such coinages as Wilfrid Sellars's "Peirceish" and his use of Peirce's initials CSP for "conceptual structure Peirceish."45

As late as 1905 Peirce could say that his "one contribution to philosophy" was his 1867 "New List of Categories" (CP 8.213). Many philosophers (as well as semioticians) have asked: "But what of his theory of signs?" The answer to that is: "Not only does the 'New List' contain the first published exposition of his theory of signs, but the categories of the new list were and remained the very foundation of the theory of signs." Some philosophers have gone on to ask: ''But what of his pragmatism?" The answer to that is: "His pragmatism is a theorem of his theory of signs." Some of the philosophers ask next, "What is the proof of that theorem?"; others, "But what of his synechism?" The answer to those questions is: "Peirce in 'What Pragmatism Is' in The Monist in 1905 wrote that the proof of pragmatism was 'the one contribution of value' that he had still to make to philosophy, 'For it would essentially involve the establishment of the truth of synechism'" (CP 5.415).

If some of the philosophers go on to ask, "Is there anything in Peirce's later philosophy that does not depend upon the 'New List'? His realism, say, his tychism, or his fallibilism?", the answer is "No." So a philosopher who finds relevance in anything else in Peirce should find it in the "New List" too.

But most of the philosophers who have read "On a New List of Categories" have read it not in the Proceedings of the American Academy for 1867, in which it appeared as the third of five papers on logic, and not in the collective offprint of the first three entitled Three Papers on Logic, but in volume I of the Collected Papers where it appears toward the end of Book III, which is entitled "Phenomenology" (CP 1.284­572 at 545­559). How did that much of what was logic in 1867 become phenomenology in 1931?

Locke at the end of his Essay had identified logic with semeiotic, the general theory of signs. Peirce in the "New List" distinguished three kinds of signs: likenesses (which he later called icons), indexes, and symbols. He then confined logic to symbols and went on to exclude from logic such studies even of symbols as belonged to formal grammar and to formal rhetoric, so that

Page 436 logic was but a third part of a third part—that is, a ninth part—of semeiotic (CP 1.559). And even before the "New List" he had rejected the notion that logic is a normative science.46

But well along in his five­year Lectureship in Logic at The Johns Hopkins University (1879­1884) Peirce discovered, with some help from his student Mitchell, that logic cannot do business without icons and indexes (CP 3.363). And at least as early as 1882 he had begun conceiving logic as "the method of methods" (CP 7.59). In the 1890's if not earlier he began distinguishing a narrow sense of logic in which it excluded and a broad sense in which it included what he now called Speculative Grammar and Speculative Rhetoric or Methodeutic, and he inclined more and more to the broad sense. But a logic that included Methodeutic would be in some sense a normative science. Around the turn of the century, moreover, Peirce was inclining more and more toward including ethics and even aesthetics among the research sciences. A normative logic would presuppose a normative ethics, and a normative ethics would presuppose a normative aesthetics. But aesthetics and ethics and therefore also logic would then presuppose the theory of categories, which must therefore be assigned to a nonnormative philosophical science antecedent to aesthetics. Peirce at first called that prior science High Philosophy, Categories or Categorics (NEM 4:17); but by the time of his Minute Logic of 1902 he was at least trying out Phenomenology (CP 1.280). These new developments were all reflected in his Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism in the spring of 1903 and in his Lowell Lectures that fall. Their first printed presentation was in the Syllabus which he distributed at the latter (CP 1.183­192). The choice of the name Phenomenology was a bow toward Hegel (CP 5.37f.); but Peirce had misgivings about it almost from the beginning, lest it should suggest too close a relation. In 1903 he was already trying out Phaneroscopy; in 1904 Phenoscopy; in 1905 Phanerology and Phanerochemy. From 1905 onward his most frequent name is Phaneroscopy; and, for the object it analyzes, Phaneron.

Why, then, did the editors of the Collected Papers choose "Phenomenology" as the title of Book III of Volume I? Because that was the name to which Peirce had given greatest publicity; because he had used it in several of his major unpublished writings; and because they had become acquainted with Husserl at Freiburg and thought it important not only to associate Peirce retrospectively with Hegel but also to associate him prospectively with the leading phenomenologist of the 1930's, when the Collected Papers were appearing. (Weiss would later call Hegel, Husserl, and Peirce "the three great phenomenologists."47) Perhaps they were also struck by the fact that Husserl first gave prominence to the

Page 437 term "phenomenology" in the title of the second volume of his Logische Untersuchungen in 1901, the year before that in which Peirce's most frequent use of it began.

The first book on Peirce's categories was written under Hartshorne's direction by our editor, Eugene Freeman, and published in 1934. It is still an excellent introduction, and it raises objections to which no adequate reply has yet been made.48 Chief of these is that, though phenomenology may be competent to prove that there are three categories, it is incompetent to prove that there are not more; so that, if there is such a proof, it must be the work of that first branch of metaphysics which Peirce calls ontology. I suggest rather that it is the work of logic; more exactly, of the logic of relations. Though Peirce frequently claimed to have a proof and to have presented it, nobody has so far found it in his surviving writings, and until 1981 nobody had even published a plausible reconstruction of it. But now we have Hans G. Herzberger making use of the resources of "bonding algebra" to construct a proof of "Peirce's Remarkable Theorem" which is certainly neither phenomenological nor ontological but logical.49 We may fairly infer that when Peirce inserted phenomenology in his classification of the sciences, he did not move up into it the whole of that part of his categoriology that had previously been assigned to logic. But we may also hope that readers who are in position to shed further light on these matters will seize the early occasion for doing so that is offered by The Monist's July 1983 issue on Categories.

Two further remarks about phenomenology. (1) In his pioneering article of 1957 Herbert Spiegelberg concluded that while there is no evidence of any historical interaction, and there are deepseated differences, "there are enough parallels between Husserl's and Peirce's phenomenologies to justify the question about a common root for them both."50 Charles J. Dougherty has recently pursued that question and proposed a positive answer.51(2) Sandra Rosenthal and Patrick Bourgeois have recently published a book extending the comparison by including pragmatists other than Peirce and phenomenologists other than Husserl.52 They do not mention that Heidegger in the last months of his life was intently reading the recent two­volume German translation of Peirce by Gerd Wartenberg, with long introductions by Apel.53

The range of Peirce's relevance in logic, both acknowledged and unacknowledged, both in the narrow sense of logic with which he began and in the broad sense with which he ended, is so much greater than that of any other logician that we very much need a comprehensive and critical guidebook. A few examples: (1) Don Roberts, Kenneth Ketner, and others have found Peirce's existen­

Page 438 tial graphs ideally suited for beginning courses in logic. (2) A. R. Turquette has published a series of articles on Peirce as pioneer in triadic or three­valued logic. (3) Though the Boole­Peirce Schröder line in logic was partially eclipsed for a time by the Frege­Peano­Russell/Whitehead line, it has emerged from the eclipse, and Hilary Putnam and others have given strong reasons for preferring it. (4) There is an extensive and growing literature on Peirce's contributions to mathematics itself, to the history of mathematics, to "the logic of mathematics" as including methodeutic and more particularly heuretic, and to mathematical pedagogy. For better measures of this range of his relevance, we very much need a comprehensive, well organized and critical survey of this literature. (5) Of all the great logicians, Peirce has most to offer to students of tense logic, speech act logic, erotetic logic, game­theoretic logic, general systems theory, and the logic of vagueness. (6) In inductive logic, and more particularly in probability theory, I. J. Good, responding recently to criticisms of his "probabilistic causality," explained that it involves the concept of "weight of evidence" "as used by C. S. Peirce (1878), and by myself in over forty publications.''54 (7) Philosophers of law have often remarked that there were several distinguished lawyers in the Metaphysical Club in which pragmatism was born, and have traced connections between pragmatism and "legal realism"; but more recently Roberta Kevelson and others have found relevance to legal reasoning in a much wider range of Peirce's work in logic.

On two further points of relevance I take space to enlarge somewhat.

(A) No other logician compares with Peirce in attention to systems of notation and to sign­creation. For the psychologist and logician Shea Zellweger, as to the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch before him, the most relevant part of Peirce's Minute Logic of 1902 is in the eleven pages of manuscript omitted by the editors (at the end of CP 4.261) in which he introduces two notations for the sixteen binary connectives of the two­valued propositional calculus. One of these may be called his box­X, the other his cursive notation. He says it was his Johns Hopkins student Christine Ladd­Franklin "who first proposed to put the same character into four positions in order to represent the relationship between logical copulas, and ... it was a part of her proposal that when the relation signified was symmetrical, the sign should have a right and left symmetry" (NEM 3:272n). Peirce's own notations simply carry out that proposal in a particular way.

Zellweger has recently patented a new notation for the same connectives, which he calls "the logic alphabet," the essentials of which he had worked out over a period of several years before he saw or

Page 439 even heard of those pages of Peirce. He accepts four of Peirce's criteria for a good notation, and follows Peirce in calling two of them iconicity and cursiveness. The other two, in substance contained in Peirce's box­X, he calls frame consistency and eusymmetry. Although his logic alphabet differs from Peirce's notations, he conceives his own notation as directly continuing Peirce's work. He has also invented and has recently patented a number of extremely simple and novel devices (such as a logic bug, a flipstick, and a logical garnet) for displaying the sixteen binary connectives as a single system, and especially for performing the logical operation of negation when it acts upon the symbols for these connectives. There is probably no other contribution to formal logic whose fullest exposition so far in print is in the Official Gazette of the United States Patent and Trademark Office and contains a paragraph on Peirce's relevance.55

(B) Peirce's first discovery in logic was that, besides deduction and induction, which he associated with the first and third figures of the syllogism, there is a third kind of inference which he associated with the second figure, and which he at first called hypothesis, later abduction or retroduction. (Closely linked with this discovery was his discovery in 1866 that "no syllogism of the second or third figure can be reduced to the first, without taking for granted an inference which can only be expressed syllogistically in that figure from which it has been reduced" [CP 2.807].) Deduction was "the logic of mathematics"; hypothesis and induction were "the logic of science." Peirce later shifted focus from the classification of arguments to the stages of inquiry; the order then became abduction, deduction, induction; and the stages in mathematics paralleled those in the sciences.

K. T. Fann's book on Peirce's Theory of Abduction, written in 1963, published in 1970,56 and favorably reviewed by F. Michael Walsh in Philosophy in 1972,57 begins with the questions: "Is there a logic of discovery? If so, what is the nature of such a logic?" The questions go back, if not to Aristotle, at least to Bacon and Whewell, Gore and Carmichael. (Carmichael's book grew out of articles in The Monist and was published by its publisher.58) At the time Fann wrote, the chief proponent of a logic of discovery was Norwood Russell Hanson, and he found his chief support in Peirce's theory of abduction. That was the occasion for Fann's book. The questions are still very much alive. As late as 1978 there was a Conference on Scientific Discovery at the University of Nevada which resulted in two volumes edited by Thomas Nickles: Scientific Discover', Logic, and Rationality, and Scientific Discovery: Case Studies.59 Peirce is prominent in Nickles's introduction and in the papers by Laudan, Curd and Gutting in the first volume, and in that by Schaffner in the second. It

Page 440 seems likely that Peirce's relevance will be recognized as long as the questions are discussed.

Turning briefly to rhetoric, I note that there is something that calls itself "the new rhetoric." Its most representative work is a treatise bearing that title by Ch. Perelman and L. Olbrechts­Tyteca. In the United States, one of its chief representatives is Henry W. Johnstone of Pennyslvania State University, where the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric is published. When the editors of that journal heard that Peirce had drafted an essay on the rhetoric of scientific writing, they were glad to be its first publishers.60 Another range of rhetoric is represented by a manuscript apparently intended to be the first of six lessons for Episcopalian rectors on the reading of the order of worship at morning and evening prayer. This first lesson focuses on the address to the congregation (MS 1570). It has not yet been published, but several Episcopalian rectors have read it with great interest.

I shall assume that our readers have made their own surveys of the range of Peirce's acknowledged relevance in metaphysics. I mention it again only to remark that the principal papers he published appeared in The Monist; and I move on now to another range of relevance: that of suitability for inclusion in collections of "the great books," in dictionaries of quotations, and in other anthologies.

When Mortimer Adler in 1940 included a "purist" list of the great books in his How To Read a Book, volumes I­VI of the Collected Papers had appeared and he included them along with Chance, Love, and Logic (1923). But the only book that Peirce himself had published was Photometric Researches, and that was quite properly thought not suitable for inclusion in the Great Books of the Western World in 1952. In the Syntopicon, however, which constituted volumes 2 and 3 of the set, there were 102 chapters each devoted to one of "the great ideas." Additional readings were recommended at the end of each chapter, and readings from Peirce were recommended in the following 37: Being, Cause, Chance, Dialectic, Evolution, Form, God, Good and Evil, Habit, Hypothesis, Idea, Induction, Infinity, Logic, Love, Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Nature, Necessity and Contingency, One and Many, Opinion, Opposition, Philosophy, Quality, Quantity, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Science, Sign and Symbol, Truth, and World.

There were several selections from Peirce in James R. Newman's four­volume anthology The World of Mathematics in 1956, and one of these, to which Newman had given the title "The Essence of Mathematics," was repeated in the 1975 volume of The Great Ideas Today.

Page 441 Charles P. Curtis and Ferris Greenslet in 1945 included several passages from Peirce in a one­volume "thinker's anthology" called The Practical Cogitator (after Bowditch's Practical Navigator). It has gone through several editions and is still in print.

The first dictionary of quotations to contain numerous ones from Peirce was Edward F. Murphy's The Crown Treasury of Relevant Quotations in 1978. Though known from the age of five to John Bartlett, he was not admitted to the latter's Familiar Quotations until the "Fifteenth and 125th Anniversary Edition" in 1980, seventy­five years after the compiler's death. This tardiness may be explained in part by the fact that his style was rather dialogical than aphoristic or epigrammatic. We may recall his saying that for him every language, including his native English, had been a foreign language; that he thought in diagrams and in experiments on diagrams rather than in words. Or we may recall his frequently saying that all thought is dialogic in form, as Socrates in the Theaetetus and the Stranger in the Sophist had said. Even in what we might at first describe as private thought, the self of one moment appeals to the oncoming self of the next moment for confirmation or correction or further development. (Peirce's own career was chiefly that of a research scientist in the service of the Coast and Geodetic Survey; and he extended the dialogic model of thought to scientific research as the business of putting questions to Nature and getting answers. Considerations of economy were much more prominent there than in mathematics or philosophy, and he found the dialogic model of the economy of research in the game of Twenty Questions.)

This suggests a different sort of anthology. Scattered through Peirce's writings are a number of passages in explicitly dialogic form. It would be worth collecting these. But there are much more numerous passages in which, without the obvious form of a dialogue, assigning names to the participants, Peirce is anticipating objections to the position he is taking, and meeting those objections. The same anthology might include several of these.

On the other hand, with a view to better representation of Peirce in dictionaries of quotations of the traditional kind, it would help if some Peirce scholar with a sense for style would compile an anthology of single sentences and short paragraphs which are specimens of Peirce at his best within such limits.

I now conclude part 2 by citing one example of recognized relevance of a kind quite different from any of the above. When the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin thought to take some notice of the Bicentennial of American Independence in 1976, it adopted the proposal of its Committee for Philosophy to have a lecture on an outstanding American philosopher, and invited Professor J. A. Faris of

Page 442 Queen's University, Belfast, to give it. His lecture on "Charles Sanders Peirce, Philosopher and Logician" was delivered on December 13, 1976, and a shortened version was published in the Academy's Proceedings in the following year.61

3. SOMETHING PEIRCE HIMSELF FOUND RELEVANT—AND A GLANCE FORWARD

There are no more pervasive themes in Peirce's work, from early until late, than that all thought is in signs and is dialogic in nature, and that even at its most private and silent it is none the less dialogue between the self of one moment and the oncoming self of the next. And he found relevance from the beginning, not only in the vernacular "I says to myself, says I," and in Socrates's arguments in the Theaetetus and the Stranger's in the Sophist, but also in the fact that one major philosopher had put so nearly his entire thought­life into the written form of dialogues.

For Peirce it was a theorem of semeiotic that "the entire thought­life of any one person is a sign."62 In the case of Plato, however, on the assumption that his dialogues contain an approximately complete and accurate record of his thought­life, the first problem becomes that of arranging his dialogues in chronological order, determining the time­spans between them, and reading them in that order. Steps in that direction were taken by Lewis Campbell in the introductions to his editions of the Theaetetus (1861; 2d ed. 1883) and of the Sophist and Statesman (1867). Then, in 1897, Wincenty Lutoslawski, in The Origin and Growth of Plato's Logic, which he dedicated to Campbell, applied the "stylometric method" as well as content analysis to determine the chronological order of about twenty of Plato's most important dialogues.

Peirce was a frequent reviewer for, and a regular reader of, The Nation, in which Lutoslawski's book was listed under "Books of the Week" on January 13, 1898, and Paul Shorey's review of it appeared on September 1, 1898. Peirce wrote Lutoslawski on November 20 a letter which has not yet been found. Lutoslawski made a preliminary reply to Peirce's criticisms on a postal card from Leipzig on December 3 and promised to reply at length later (MS L 259). If he did so, his letter has not been found.

Peirce's annotated copy of Lutoslawski's book is preserved in The Houghton Library at Harvard University. On page 376, where Lutoslawski quotes Plato's Socrates as defining thought at Theaetetus 189E as "a conversation of the soul with itself," Peirce writes in the margin: "This is, I think, Plato's greatest contribution to thought."

In 1901 Peirce presented to the National Academy of Sciences a paper "On the Logic of drawing History from Ancient Documents."

Page 443 After developing his general theory, he applied it to three illustrations: the nature and history of the Aristotelian corpus, the chronology of Plato's dialogues, and the life of Pythagoras. In the second of these, which runs to forty­four pages, he assumes "that Lutoslawski's treatment of the facts has been judicious up to the point when the matter becomes a question for the mathematician" (MS 690:201).

In 1902 Peirce drafted four preliminary chapters of a treatise to be called Minute Logic.

I. Intended Characters of this Treatise

II. Prelogical Notions Section I. Classification of the Sciences Section II. Why Study Logic?

III. The Simplest Mathematics

IV. Ethics

By that time, logic had become for Peirce a normative science, connected through ethics with aesthetics. In Chapter IV he first reviews the pre­Platonic theories of the supreme good, and then says:

As to Plato, unless we are content to treat the only complete collection of the works of any Greek philosopher that we possess as a mere repertory of gems of thought, as most readers are content to do; but wish to view them as they are so superlatively worthy of being viewed as the record of the entire development of thought of a great thinker, then everything depends upon the chronology of the dialogues. I have critically examined the data brought together by Lutoslawski, and have applied to them all the refinements of the theory of probabilities, with the result of being firmly convinced of the correctness, in the main, of that writer's conclusions. It is necessary that an entirely new study of Plato's philosophy should be founded upon that view of the chronology. I will endeavor briefly to do this for the single point of what is ultimately good. (MS 434:23­24)

And Peirce proceeds to devote more than two hundred pages to that single point, without reaching the end.

Our survey of the range of Peirce's recognized relevance is sufficient evidence that his writings, both those he published and those he left unpublished, are a "repertory of gems of thought." But suppose we were now to try the hypothesis that they are also "worthy of being viewed as the record of the entire development of thought of a great thinker," and the further hypothesis that much, if not everything, depends upon their chronology. The writings he published would pose few difficulties, as their dates of publication are sufficiently close to their dates of composition; but he dated less

Page 444 than a fourth of the writings he left unpublished. Our first task, then, would be, from all the surviving evidence, to assign at least approximate dates to the undated ones. We could then arrange all his known writings in a single chronological order. We might find reason to treat each series of papers as a unit, and place it as of the date of publication or composition of the first paper of the series. Unpublished papers datable only within a year or two might be placed next to the dated papers within that period to which they seem most closely related in content. We would then be in position to begin preparing a chronological edition of his writings. No such edition exists. A nearly complete edition might run to eighty volumes. A selective twenty­volume chronological edition is just beginning to come from the Indiana University Press. It will be more comprehensive than all previous letterpress editions taken together. More than a third of the writings it contains will be appearing in print for the first time. Each volume will contain a chronological list which will guide the reader to everything it omits that Peirce published or wrote within the span of years the volume covers, an historical introduction that will give the reader some idea of Peirce's occasions for what he wrote and what he published within that span, and an index that includes the introduction as well as the Peirce texts.

What bearing will such an edition have on the range of Peirce's relevance? For readers who are already students of the development of thought, concerning particular questions if not in general, the labor of bringing Peirce within the scope of their studies will be immeasurably reduced. For readers for whom every idea of Peirce's has so far been a "detached idea"—detached not only from his ideas on other questions but also from his earlier and later thoughts on the same question—it will become relevant at least to justify preferring a particular detached idea of his to any of his later or earlier thoughts on the same subject.

Here in conclusion are a few of the questions concerning the development of Peirce's thought that the new edition should put us in position to resolve, and thereby to move his later thoughts to higher levels of relevance.

Who were the thinkers whose writings he studied most intensively after the first three, which were Whately's Elements of Logic in 1851, Schiller's Aesthetic Letters in 1855­56, and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason from 1856 onward? In what order, and at what stages of the development of his own thought? What were the questions with which he began? What others did he take up, in what order, and when? To what questions did he return again and again? To which of them did his answers change, and what was the sequence of changes? To which did his answers remain the same? Were there significant changes in his arguments for those answers? To what

Page 445 extent were his philosophic views modified from time to time by his own original researches in mathematics and in the sciences, and by the major scientific discoveries and controversies of his time?

In each distinguishable period, to what degree did he bring his thought to systematic completeness? Did he have a single system from beginning to end, with only minor internal adjustments from period to period, or were the changes so great that we may fairly describe the development of his thought as a succession of three or four incompatible systems?

If he was above all a logician, and if he conceived logic from the beginning as a branch of semeiotic, the general theory of signs, but moved gradually in the direction of making it coextensive with semeiotic, then what was the place of semeiotic itself within his thought as a whole at each stage of its development?

Is it the case, as it seems to be, that he was a declared nominalist throughout the period of volume I of the new edition (1857­1866), that he took his first steps toward realism in that of volume 2 (1867­1871), and that he continued to move in that direction on the whole, but with occasional lapses back toward his original nominalism? Or is the story of the development of his thought in that respect much more complicated than it has so far been made out to be? And in any case what were his reasons for each step that he took?

Beginning with his earliest study of Kant at the age of seventeen, he attached more importance to categories than any other postKantian philosopher has done; perhaps than any other philosopher has ever done. We very much need a chronological and critical study of his categoriology from beginning to end. When he finally recognized (perhaps created?) a philosophical science (antecedent to the normative sciences and to metaphysics) which for a time he called phenomenology, just how much of his categoriology was moved into it, and how was the rest distributed? How would he respond to the criticisms of Freeman, Hartshorne, Schneider and others, and what should our own conclusions be?

Though he was always extremely modest about his competence in aesthetics, he never ceased to value highly his early study of Schiller.63 Several students of aesthetics have found more illumination in his incidental remarks here and there than in the books of professional aestheticians. The new edition should open the way to a more consecutive and complete study of his thoughts on aesthetics (and on ethics) than has so far been feasible.64

Philosophers will readily think of other questions equally worth pursuing, and now, like those above, about to become more readily pursuable. So also will inquirers coming to Peirce from mathematics, from the natural and social sciences, and from humanistic studies—say, for examples, from chemistry and physics, astronomy and

Page 446 geodesy, cartography and metrology; from anthropology and psychology, economics, history, and literature; from folklore, linguistics, and lexicography. The amazing range of his relevance we are only beginning to guess at. A decade from now we may have begun to measure and comprehend it.

Notes

1. Studies in the Scientific and Mathematical Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce: Essays by Carolvn Eisele, ed. R. M. Martin (The Hague: Mouton, 1979), p. 376n, hereafter SSMP

2. SSMP, pp. 61­69, 166, 204, 215n, 240, 246­48, 269f, 285­88, 297f, 35355.

3. Semiotica 26, 3/4:203­50.

4. Gaslight Publications, 112 East Second, Bloomington, IN 47401.

5. SSMP, pp. 292­99.

6. Proceedings of the C. S. Peirce Bicentennial International Congress (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1981).

7. Cecil J. Schneer, ed. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

8. P. 147.

9. The sixty­five documents I have collected for this episode come chiefly from the Becker papers in the Library of Congress, the Geological Survey files in the National Archives, the Van Hise papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and the Chamberlin papers in the University of Chicago archives.

10. Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, University of Michigan, 1980; pp. 31­38. See also pp. ix, 3, 7­12, 14, 15, 19, 22, 23f, 45, 50, 76, 87f, 90, 98f.

11 Open Court Publishing Co., ed. Paul A. Schilpp, p. 479.

12. The papers were published in the Transactions 11 (1975):145­94.

13. Proceedings of the 80th Annual Convention, American Psychological Association (1972), pp. 773­74.

14. A Computer Perspective, by the office of Charles & Ray Eames, with an introduction by I. Bernard Cohen (Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 33. (See also p. 53.)

15. Of Clouds and Clocks (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1966), P. 5f.

16. Ed. Richard J. Bernstein. Yale University Press.

17. Cambridge University Press, 1958.

18. Albert A. Stanley, "A Quincuncial Projection of the World," Surveying and Mapping 61 (1946):19. Cf. SSMP, pp. 145­59. (Peirce was a student of balloon, glider and other flying machines, reviewed books about flight, and in the 1890s thought of his Arisbe farm as "an admirable place for experiments in flying" and claimed to have "a very convenient method of experimenting." Cf. SSMP, p. 42.)

19. Pp. 9n I and iv.

20. The Hound & Horn 2 (April­June 1929):267­82.

Page 447 21. Journal of Philosophy 13 (1916):701­37.

22. J. H. Cotton, Royce on the Human Self (Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 218.

23. SS 138f.

24. See "Peirce as Scientist," pp. 376­79 above.

25. Pp. v, 261, 357.

26. See the English translation in The Framework of Language, pp. 7­12. The part of Peirce's lecture first published in 1958 is in CP 7.579­96; the whole lecture is in Wi:490­504.

27. See especially Chomsky's Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), pp. 78­79.

28. Language and Responsibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), p. 71.

29. Transactions 16 (1980):97­117. This particular article is noteworthy as drawing nearly all its Peirce quotations from The New Elements of Mathematics rather than from the Collected Papers.

30. There is even a book entitled Science as Metaphor, ed. Richard Olson (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1971).

31. Language, Thought, & Culture, ed. Paul Henle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), pp. 173­95.

32. Studies in Semiotics 8 (Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies, Indiana University, 1976), p. 2.

33. There are two indexed references to Peirce in his The Savage Mind, one appreciative, the other critical.

34. In Sight, Sound, and Sense, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 202­31.

35. American Anthropologist 82:486.

36. The first is forthcoming in New Approaches to the Development of the Self, ed. Benjamin Lee (New York: Plenum Press), the second from Indiana University Press. See also his "On the Semiotics of Indian Identity," American Journal of Semiotics I (1981 ):85, 88­9 i, 96, 113­19, and "Emblems of Identity," forthcoming in On Symnbols in Anthropology: Essays in Honorof Harr, Hoijer, ed. Jacques Maquet (Malibu: Undena Publications, 1981).

37. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 9 (1973):333­38.

38. New York: Oxford University Press (3rd printing, 1969).

39. University of Chicago Press, 1980.

40. See also Lincourt and Olczak, "H. S. Sullivan and the Phenomenology of Human Cognition," International Journal of Social Psychiatr, 25 (1979):10­16.

41. 36 (1962):271­82; 35 (1961):726­40.

42. "La structure productrice du mot d'esprit et de la semiosis: essai sur Freud et Peirce," Degrds 8:21 (1980):d1­18.

43. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966.

44. Four other wide­ranging collections: Proceedings of the C. S. Peirce Bicentennial International Congress (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1981). Pragmatism and Purpose: Essays Presented to Thomas A. Goudge (Toronto: Toronto University Press), Part One. Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Wiener and Young (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952); Second Series, ed. Moore and Robin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1964).

45. Science and Metaphysics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 140ff.

46. Frederick and Emily Michael ("Peirce on the Nature of Logic," Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 20 [1979]:84­88) argue that, despite the disclaimer, his logic was normative from the beginning.

Page 448 47. Beyond All Appearances (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974), PP. 21, 24.

48. The Categories of Charles Peirce (Chicago: Open Court, 1934), PP. iii, 5­6, 10­11 , 20, 29­30, 47, 56.

49. In Pragmatism and Purpose, pp. 41­58.

50. ''Husserl's and Peirce's Phenomenologies: Coincidence or Interaction," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 17 (1957): 185.

51. "The Common Root of Husserl's and Peirce's Phenomenologies," The New Scholasticism 54 (1980):305­25.

52. Pragmatism and Phenomenology: A Philosophic Encounter (Amsterdam: B. R. Gruiner, 1980).

53. J. Glenn Gray, "Heidegger on Remembering and Remembering Heidegger," Man and World 10 (1977):77.

54. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61 (1980):301.

55. Vol. 1007, no. 3, 16 June 1981, Patent No. 4,273,542. Of Zellweger's forthcoming papers see especially "Sign­Creation and Man­Sign Engineering" in Semiotica.

56. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

57. 47:377­79­

58. Is it the case that R. D. Carmichael's article in The Monist for October 1922 was the first article, that his book published by the Open Court Publishing Company in 1930 was the first book, and that the first chapter of the book was the first chapter to bear the title "The Logic of Discovery"? The New York Times' Arno Press reprinted the book in 1975 in its History, Philosophy & Sociology of Science Series.

59. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vols. 56 and 60 (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1980). See also the articles by Gutting, Blackwell, and Kisiel in Revue Internationale de Philosophie 131­132 (1980).

60. I 1:3 (Summer 1978):147­55 (with a bibliographical note by John Michael Krois).

61. 77:C (1977):279­300.

62. MS 1476, page numbered 'Nichols 5 1/2' (1904), continuing from a point corresponding roughly to CP 8.191 in the final draft.

63. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), p. clxxxviiif.

64. See for example his 1857 college theme on Ruskin's criticism of Schiller (WI: 10­I 2).

Page 449

Bibliography

Omitted are the published juvenilia of 1915­26, as well as all hook reviews. Items marked with an asterisk are published in the present volume.

"The Influence of Stoicism on Roman Law." Cornell diss. 1930. (Typescript in Cornell University Library.)

"Alexander and the Stoics." American Journlal of Philology 58 (1937):59­82, 129­5 1.

*"Charles Sanders Peirce." Introduction to Part 4, Section 20 of the following entry.

Philosophy in America: From the Puritans to James. (Edited in collaboration with Paul Russell Anderson.) New York: D. Appleton­Century, 1939. Reprinted New York: Octagon Books, 1969.

"The Christmas Fallacy." The Mather Record (Western Reserve University), 13 December 1940, 2.

*"Justice Holmes, the Prediction Theory of Law, and Pragmatism." Journal of Philosophy 39 (1942):85­97.

"Vesalius and His Book." Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 31 (1943):208­21. Reprinted in Classics and Other Selected Readings in Medical Librarianship, ed. Jack D. Key and Thomas E. Keys (Huntington, NY: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Co., 1980), pp. 595­609.

"The Printer of Vesalius's Fabrica." Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 31 (1943):240­59.

"Joint Authorship." Current List of Medical Literature 5:13/14 (5 October 1943):inside front cover.

"Kos and Salerno." Bulletin of the Academy of Medicine of Cleveland 28:11 (November 1943): 10­11.

"The Coleridges, Dr. Prati, and Vico." Modern Philolog, 41 (1943):111­22.

The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. (Translated from the Italian by Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin—with introduction [pp. 1­107], notes, and chronological table by M. H. E). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1944. Second printing (revised), November 1944. Great Seal Books paperback edition (revised), 1963. Cornell paperback edition, 1975; second printing, 1983.

"Rare Book Collection of Army Medical Library." Bulletin of the Academy of Medicine of Cleveland 29:11 (November 1944):9.

"Vesalius in English State Papers." Bulletin of the Medical Librar, Association 33 (1945):231­53.

"The Cleveland Restoration." Bulletin of the Medical Libranr, Association 34 (1946):224­25.

"Nicolaus Pol Doctor 1494." Bulletin of the History of Medicine 20 (1946):294­98.

"Nicolaus Pol and Veit Bild." Journal of the History, of Medicine and Allied Sciences I (1946):677­81.

*"Evolution in American Philosophy." Philosophical Review 56 (1947):35773.

"The Marshall Collection of Herbals." (With Ruth B. Fisch.) Bulletin of the History of Medicine 21 (1947):224­61.

Page 450 "The Mather Bibliographies." (Thomas J. Holmes's bibliographies of Increase and Cotton Mather.) Journal of the Histort of Medicine and Allied Sciences 2 (1947):121­23.

Nicolaus Pol Doctor 1494. New York: Herbert Reichner, 1947.

"Vico on Roman Law." In Essays in Political Theory Presented to George H. Sabine, ed. Milton R. Konvitz and Arthur E. Murphy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948), pp. 62­88.

Foreword in The Life of Science: Essays in the History of Civilization, by George Sarton. New York: Henry Schuman, 1948. (Also in Spanish translation in La Vida de la Ciencia: Ensavos de Historia de la civilisación, por George Sarton. Buenos Aires: Espasa­Calpe Argentina, 1952.)

Preface in A Catalogue of lncunabula and Manuscripts in the Armyn Medical Library, by Dorothy M. Schullian and Francis E. Sommer. New York: Henry Schuman, 1948.

Selected Papers of'Robert C. Binklev. (Edited with a biographical sketch and a bibliography by M. H. E) Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948.

The New Science of' Giambattista Vico. (Translated from the Italian by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch.) Ithaca: Cornell Universitv Press, 1948. Anchor Book edition, abridged and revised, with introduction (pp. xxi­liii) by M. H. F, 1961. Revised edition of the complete translation, and revised introduction by M. H. F., Cornell 1968. Revised reissue of the abridged translation, Cornell 1970. Cornell paperback edition, revised, unabridged, with the addition of "Practic of the New Science," 1984.

Blakiston's New Gould Medical Dictionary. (Member of Editorial Board and Contributor.) Philadelphia: The Blakiston Co., 1949.

"Dewev's Place in the Classic Period of American Philosophy." In Essays for John Devwev's Ninetieth Birthday, ed. Kenneth D. Benne and William 0. Stanley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), pp. 9­36.

Classic American Philosophers. (General Editor and Author of General Introduction; with A. W. Burks, Paul Henle, Otto Kraushaar, Philip B. Rice, Gail Kennedy, Victor Lowe.) New York: Appleton­Century­Crofts, 1951. Fifth printing (revised), 1966. (Now published by Prentice­Hall.)

*"Peirce at The Johns Hopkins University." (With Jackson I. Cope.) In Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Philip P. Wiener and Frederic H. Young (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 277311, 355­60. See pp. 363­74 for four appendixes at: "James's Letter to Gilman Recommending Peirce for a Hopkins Professorship," "Peirce's Letter to Gilman Concerning the Hopkins Physics Department," "Peirce's Courses at The Johns Hopkins University,'' "The Metaphysical Club at The Johns Hopkins University." [These appendixes are not included in the present volume.]

"Some Additions to Morris R. Cohen's Bibliography of Peirce's Published Writings." Ibid., pp. 375­81.

"The Academy of the Investigators." In Science, Medicine, and History: Essays on the Evolution of Scientific Thought and Medical Practice Written i n Honour of'Charles Singer, ed. E. Ashworth Underwood. 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 1:521­63. ("L'Accademia degli Investiganti," Italian translation bv Dora Beth Marra, in De Homine 27­28 [1968]:17­75.)

*"Alexander Bain and the Genealogy of Pragmatism." Journal of the History ofl Ideas 15 (1954):413­44.

"The International Association of Universities." Educational Record 35 (1954): 157­59.

Page 451 "Croce, Benedetto." In Twentieth Centurv Encyclopedia of Religious Know'ledge (an extension of the New Schaff­Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge). 2 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1955), 1:31213.

"Elijah Jordan." Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 28 (1955):62­63.

"The Critic of Institutions." (Presidential Address, Western Division, American Philosophical Association, 1956.) Ibid., 29 (1956):42­56. Reprinted in Studies in Philosophy and in the Histon, of Science: Essays in Honor of Max Fisch (1970), pp. 182­92; and in Tihe Owl of Minerva: Philosophers on Philosophy, ed. Charles J. Bontempo and S. Jack Odell (New York: McGraw­Hill, 1975), PP. 135­51. [The last is the only accurate printing.]

Metaphysics: An Unfinished Essay by the Late Elijah Jordan. (Edited with a preface and bibliography by M. H. F.) Evanston: Principia Press of Illinois, 1956.

"The Philosophy of History: A Dialogue." Philosophyv (Tetsulgakul, Keio University, Tokyo) 36 (1959): 149­70. Reprinted in Studies in Philosophy and in the History of Science: Essays in Honor of Max Fisch (1970), pp. 193­206.

"The University Ideal." Bulletin of the International Association of Universities 7 (May 1959):125­27.

"Keio 2058 nen: Daigaku no Honshitsu to Sekinin" (Keio 2058: The Nature and Function of a University). Keio Shinbun no. 241 (15 January 1959):6. (Revised translation, "Daigaku wa ikaniarubekika: Keiogijuku no kitarubeki Hyakunen no tameni," in Mita Hyoron no. 583 [July 1959]:2­5.

"Vico, Giambattista." Encyclopaedia Britannica (1959), 23:122­23.

*"Some General Characteristics of American Philosophy." In Basis of the Contemporary Philosophy: Essays in the Philosophical Analysis, ed. Seizi Uyeda (Tokyo: Waseda University Press, 1960), pp. 473­77.

"The Idea of Institution in the Major Religions." Proceedings of the IXth International Congress for the History of Religions. Tokyo and Kyoto, 27 August­9 September 1958 (Tokyo: Maruzen, 1960), pp. 513­18.

"The Creation of Universal Institutions." Ibid., pp. 723­25.

Foreword in Corporate Society and Education: The Philosophyv of Elijah Jordan, by George Barnett and Jack Otis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961.

"Was There a Metaphysical Club in Cambridge?" In Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, Second Series, ed. Edward C. Moore and Richard S. Robin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1964), pp. 3­32. [See "A Postscript" under 1981.]

"A First Supplement to Arthur W. Burks's Bibliography of the Works of Charles Sanders Peirce." Ibid., pp. 477­85.

"A Draft of a Bibliography of Writings About Charles Sanders Peirce." (With Barbara E. Kretzmann and Victor F. Lenzen.) Ibid., pp. 483­514.

*"Philosophical Clubs in Cambridge and Boston: From Peirce's Metaphysical Club to Harris's Hegel Club." Coranto (Journal of the Friends of the Libraries, University of Southern California) 2:1 (Fall 1964):12­23; 2:2 (Spring 1965):12­25; 3:I (Fall 1965):16­29.

"The American Proposition." Pacific Philosophy Forum 2 (1964):96­l00.

*"A Chronicle of Pragmaticism, 1865­1879." Monist 48 (1964):441­66.

Preface in European Philosophy Today, ed. George L. Kline. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965.

Page 452 "A Second Supplement to Arthur W. Burks's Bibliography of the Works of Charles Sanders Peirce." Transactions 2 (1966):51­53.

"A First Supplement to 'A Draft of a Bibliography of Writings About Charles Sanders Peirce.'" Ibid., 54­59.

*"Peirce's Triadic Logic." (With Atwell Turquette.) Ibid., 71­85.

*"Peirce's Progress from Nominalism toward Realism." Monist 51 (1967): 159­78.

"Croce e Vico." (Translated and edited by Maria Donzelli.) Rivista di Studi Crociani 5 (1968):5­30, 151­71. Original English version, "Croce and Vico," published in Thought, Action and Intuition: A Siymposiuml on the Philosophy of Benedetto Croce, ed. L. M. Palmer and H. S. Harris (Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms, 1975), pp. 184­233.

*"Vico and Pragmatism." In Gia mbattista Vico: An International Sympositum, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), pp. 401­24. (Consulting Editors: Isaiah Berlin, Max H. Fisch, and Elio Gianturco.) Italian translation, "Vico tra Cartesio e Peirce," published in Leggere Vico, ed. Emanuele Riverso (Milan: Spirali Edizioni, 1982), pp. 67­91.

"Dewvey's Critical and Historical Studies." In Guide to the Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Bovdston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), pp. 306­38.

Studies in Philosophy and in the History of Science: Essays in Honor of Max Fisch. (Festschrift). Ed. Richard Tursman, with a preface by D. W. Gotshalk. Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press, 1970. [Contains fourteen essays by former students, biographical sketch, bibliography, list of theses directed, and reprintings of "The Critic of Institutions" (1956) and "The Philosophy of History: A Dialogue" (1959).]

*"Peirce's Arisbe: The Greek Influence in His Later Philosophy." Transactions 7 (1971):187­210.

"The Peirce Homestead as a National Memorial." Transactions 8 (1972): 123­27.

*"Peirce and Leibniz." Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972):485­96.

"Final Report of the Committee on the Peirce Homestead." Transactions 9 (1973):55­59.

"Dorothy Schullian's Retirement." Bulletin of the History of Medicine 47 (1973):91­96.

"Dilman Walter Gotshalk" (Memorial Minute). Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 46 (1973): 180­81.

"Supplements to the Peirce Bibliographies." Transactions 10 (1974):94­129.

"Peirce, Charles Sanders." Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia (1974), 13:1 108­9. [Published anonymously by request, because of unacceptable editorial changes.]

"The Idea of a University." (A brochure.) Texas Tech University, 1974.

*"Hegel and Peirce." In Hegel and the Histor, of Philosophy, ed. J. J. O'Malley, F. G. Weiss, and K. W. Algozin (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), PP. 171­ 93.

Introduction to The Divorce Between the Sciences and Humanities (The Second Tykociner Memorial Lecture), by Sir Isaiah Berlin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974.

"The Poliscraft." In Philosophy and the Civilizing Arts: Essays Presented to Herbert W. Schneider on His Eightieth Birthday, ed. John P. Anton and Craig Walton (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974), pp. 24­48.

"Vico's Pratica." In Giambattista Vico's Science of Humanity, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald P. Verene (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1976), pp. 423­30.

Page 453 "The Practic of the New Science." (Translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch.) Ibid., pp. 451­54.

"A Unique Resource." Ex Libris (Journal of the Friends of the Library of Texas Tech University) 7:1 (March 1975):8­1 I.

"Salomon Bochner on Charles S. Peirce." American Mathematical Monthly 82 (1975):478­81.

"Victor F. Lenzen (1890­1975)." Transactions 11 (1975):225­26.

"Dewey in the Minute Book of the Metaphysical Club at The Johns Hopkins University." The Dewey Newsletter 10:1 (April 1976):3­4.

"What Has Vico to Say to Philosophers of Today?" Social Research 43 (1976):399­409. (Italian translation by Enrico Nuzzo, "Cosa ha da dire Vico ai filosofi contemporanei?", published in Atti dell'Accademnia di Scienze Morali e Politiche [Naples] 87 [1977]: 199­207.) Reprinted in Vico and Contemporary Thought, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo, Michael Mooney, and Donald Phillip Verene (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), PP. 9­19, 55­57.

"Comment on Professor Pompa's Paper." Social Research 43 (1976):445­47.

*"American Pragmatism Before and After 1898." In American Philosophy from Edwards to Quine, ed. Robert W. Shahan and Kenneth R. Merrill (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), pp. 78­110.

*"Peirce's Place in American Thought." Ars Senzeiotica: International Journal of American Semiotic I:2 (1977):21­37.

Charles Sanders Peirce: Complete Published Works, Including Selected Secondary Materials, ed. K. L. Ketner, et al. (Consulting Editor) Microfiche Collection. Greenwich, CT: Johnson Associates, 1977 (revised edition to appear Philosophy Documentation Center, 1986).

A Comprehensive Bibliography and Index of the Published Works of Charles Sanders Peirce, with a Bibliography of Secondary Studies, ed. K. L. Ketner, et al. (Consulting Editor.) Greenwich, CT: Johnson Associates, 1977 (revised edition to appear Philosophy Documentation Center, 1986).

*"Peirce's General Theory of Signs." In Sight, Sound, and Sense, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 31­70.

"Charles Morris (1901­1979)." Semiotic Scene 3:3 (1979):159­60.

"The New Tools of Peirce Scholarship, with Particular Reference to Semiotic." (With Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel.) In Peirce Studies (no. 1), Studies in Peirce's Semiotic: A Symposiuml by Members of the Institute for Studies in Pragnaticisim (Lubbock, TX: Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism, 1979), pp. 1­17.

Foreword in "You Know My Method": A Juxtaposition of Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes, by Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker­Sebeok (Bloomington, IN: Gaslight Publications, 1980), pp. 7­13. Reprinted in The Play of Musement, by Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), pp. 17­21.

*"The Range of Peirce's Relevance." Monist 63 (1980):269­76; 65 (1982):12341. Reprinted in The Relevance of Charles Peirce, ed. Eugene Freeman (LaSalle, IL: The Hegeler Institute, 1983), pp. 11­37.

"Was There a Metaphysical Club In Cambridge?—A Postscript." Transactions 17 (1981):128­30.

*"Peirce as Scientist, Mathematician, Historian, Logician, and Philosopher." (Presidential Address, 1976.) Proceedings of the C. S. Peirce Bicentennial International Congress, ed. K. L. Ketner, et al. (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1981), pp. 13­34.

Page 454 *"The 'Proof' of Pragmatism." In Pragmatism and Purpose: Essays Presented to Thomas A. Goeudge, ed. L. W. Sumner, John G. Slater, and Fred Wilson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), pp. 28­40, 295­97.

*"Peirce's Place in American Life." Historia Mathematica 9 (1982):265­87.

"Peirce and the Florentine Pragmatists: His Letter to Calderoni and A New Edition of His Writings." (With Christian J. W. Kloesel.) Topoi 1 (1982):6873.

Introduction to Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 1: 1857­1866 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. xv­xxx".

Introduction to Volume 2: 1867­1871 (1984), pp. xxi­xxxvi.

*"Just How General is Peirce's General Theory of Signs?" American Journal of Semiotics 2 (1983):55­60.

Page 455

Index

A

A priori: judgment, 151, 153, 155, 287

and perception, 148

method, 3, 217, 287

theory of signs, 339

Abbot, Francis E., 23, 101, 115, 137, 191, 195

and Hegel Club, 138­40, 162­65

and Metaphysical Club, 140­41, 143

Abduction, 115, 121, 239, 274, 294, 296, 336, 365, 392, 439

Action, 115

and belief, 29, 81, 82, 83­85, 91, 92, 94, 95, 101, 117

dyadic, 274, 307, 330, 359

and experience, 26

and habit, 3, 94, 96, 189, 217, 218, 286, 291, 328­29, 369, 370

sign­action, 241, 273­74, 306, 321­22, 329­30, 359

and thought, 4

triadic, 330, 359

Actuality, 83, 177­78, 228

Agapism, 2, 5, 292, 369

agapasm, 193

Agassiz, Louis, 20, 37, 116, 234, 381, 405, 406, 423

American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 37, 117, 121, 146, 185, 310, 324, 406, 408

American Journal of Mathematics, 54, 59, 63, 331, 384, 385, 417

Angström, Anders J., 63, 64

Argument: classification of arguments, 115, 214­15, 336, 390, 392, 439

Aristotle, 64, 120, 138, 140, 146, 151, 152, 153, 154, 159, 238, 240, 250, 370, 431, 443

categories of, 263­64, 324

entelechy, 235­36

and habit, 235

metaphysics of, 210

logic of, 31, 209, 214, 221, 288

on possibility, 195, 368

on potentiality and actuality, 83, 179

on reasoning, 201­202

Analytics, 52, 201, 240

On Interpretation, 232

Organon, 201, 232, 240

Physics, 232, 233

Rhetoric, 202

Art: Peirce's interest in, 311­12

And semiotic, 340

Associationism, 23, 24, 66, 82, 84, 220

association of ideas, 83, 120, 228, 241

Astronomy:

auroral spectrum, 119

photometric studies, 132, 408

solar eclipse, 37, 120, 122, 242, 376­77, 408

Augustine, St., 159

Austin, John: on sources of law, 11, 26, 292

B

Bache, Alexander D., 381­82, 403, 404, 407

Bacon, Francis:

on method, 203, 206, 211

Novurn Organum, 202, 214

Bain, Alexander, 22

his theory of belief, 9, 25­26, 29, 79­101, 117, 364, 368

Baldwin, James M., 23

Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, Peirce's contributions to, 4, 51, 114­15, 294, 295, 311, 335, 369, 370, 371

Belief, 115, 124, 327

and action, 81, 29, 82­83, 85, 91, 92, 94, 95, 101, 117

Bain's theory of, 9, 25­26, 29, 79­101, 117, 364, 368

and doubt, 29, 84, 86, 92­94, 96, 98, 217, 290

vs. disbelief, 84, 92

empirical, 26, 91

fixation of, 3­4, 29, 96, 286

and habit, 3, 29, 94, 189, 217, 287, 363

natural, 90

strength of, 83, 92­93

three properties of, 93­94, 96

Bentham, Jeremy, 9, 10, 79, 81

Berkeley, George, 122

on abstract ideas, 4

on language, 290

nominalism of, 2

Peirce's review of, 184, 188, 189, 191, 253, 368

Biology, 19

evolutionary, 23, 229

statistical method in, 29, 99­100, 217, 286, 393

Boole, George, 117

his logical algebra, 47, 267

The Laws of Thought, 129, 330, 347

Bowen, Francis, 119, 138, 139, 150, 152;

and Metaphysical Club, 140­42, 144, 148

Bowne, Borden P., 138, 150, 152

Browne, William H., 52, 54

Burks, Arthur W., 426

C

Cabot, James E., 119, 278

and Hegel Club, 162­63, 165

and Metaphysical Club, 138, 140­56

Caird, Edward, 144, 145, 146, 149, 154, 155

Cantor, Georg, 190, 192, 194

Peirce's letter to, 197

Category, 203

Artistotelian, 263­64, 324

firstness or first, 96, 119, 194, 195, 228, 231, 244, 265, 266, 269­71, 272

Hegelian, 264­67, 290, 362

Kantian, 263­64, 290, 324

mediation as, 262, 263, 265

Peirce's doctrine of categories, 96­97, 98, 180, 189, 228, 229, 231, 234, 241, 262­67, 269­71, 272, 290, 324, 326, 327, 362, 364, 392, 435, 436, 437

quality as, 194, 262, 263, 264­65,324

Page 456 reaction as, 263, 265

relation as, 264, 324

representation as, 262, 263, 264, 324

secondness or second, 96, 119, 180, 194, 195, 265, 266, 269­71

thirdness or third, 96, 119, 180, 194, 195, 228, 265, 266, 268­71

Cayley, Arthur, 57, 58, 59, 69, 331, 332

Cenopythagoreanism, 180

Centurn, Dictionarv: Peirce's contributions to, 1, 36, 71, 89, 189, 191, 192, 232, 235, 236, 237, 253, 297, 311, 312, 333, 340, 384, 387, 393­95, 415, 420

Church, Alonzo, 171, 176

Circular of Johns Hopkins University, 50, 51, 54, 59, 60

Clearness: of apprehension, 94, 286, 290, 363

grades of 4, 94, 98, 124, 268­69, 290, 291, 327, 328, 363, 371­72

of ideas, 4, 120­21, 202, 205, 208, 210, 253, 268­69, 363

Clifford, William K., 22, 53, 91, 126, 127, 129, 245, 331, 333

Coast Survey

See United States Coast (and Geodetic) Survey

Coast Survey Report, 37, 316, 378, 393

Cognition: cognitionism, 185­86, 187

cognizability, 216, 223, 325

nominalistic theory of, 186, 349

object of, 95, 102

as phenomenon of consciousness, 95, 101­102

pragmatic theory of, 95, 97, 99, 101, 216

sign­theory of, 325­26, 327, 350.

See also Intuition, Knowledge

Community:

beliefs of, 3

of investigators, 97, 111­13, 217, 291, 340, 393, 420, 421

of interpretation, 298

of minds, 2

of philosophers, 215

and settlement of opinion, 29

unlimited, 328, 421.

See also Society

Comte, Auguste: Positive Philosophy, 421

Concept: general, 3

meaning of, 4, 29, 94, 130, 286, 327

object of, 94, 130, 327­28, 363

Conceptualism, 214­15, 217

Consciousness, 115, 212, 221

individual, 2, 215

phenomena of, 95, 101­ 102

Continuity:

principle of, 5, 252, 267

Peirce's definition of, 233, 263

Cudworth, Ralph, 236, 237, 252

D

Darwin, Charles R., 21, 126, 238, 286, 287, 393

on language, 27

natural selection, 29, 31, 90­91, 99­100

Peirce on, 23, 29

and pragmatism, 24­25, 116, 123

social Darwinism, 22, 23

theory of evolution, 30, 91, 133

On the Origin of Species, 9, 19, 24, 31, 99, 233, 234, 289, 291, 292, 297, 327, 381

Davidson, Thomas, 160, 162, 163, 165

and Hegel Club, 138­39, 157, 165

and Metaphysical Club, 140­46, 150­55

De Morgan, Augustus, 54, 118, 119, 122, 125, 242, 245

logic of, 120, 250, 347

on probability, 185

Syllabus ofLogic, 47

Deduction, 115, 215, 217, 238­39, 262, 274, 296, 411, 439

of categories, 264­67

corollarial and theorematic, 334, 336­37

deductive logic, 46, 133, 134, 209, 314, 320, 392

deductive method, 213­14

deductive physics, 211

deductive reasoning, 202, 287

statistical, 47

and symbol, 324

and thought, 96

Definition, 328

abstract, 4

as analysis, 10, 117, 372

nominal, 208

real, 196

of university, 36, 71, 415, 420

Descartes, René, 217

certainty, 214

clearness, 202, 205, 208, 210, 253, 257, 286, 363

cogito, 204, 207­208, 212, 215

dualism, 210, 216, 219

Peirce's anti­Cartesianism, 2, 215­16, 218­23, 288, 325, 328, 358

Vico's anti­Cartesianism, 201­12, 214, 218­23

Discourse, 288, 311

Meditations, 204

Determination, 177

absolute, 186

indeterminate sign, 178

principle of indeterminacy, 178­79

Determinism, 5, 426

Dewey, John, 1, 6, 13, 45, 67, 111, 301, 305, 309­310, 346, 366, 433

on logic of inquiry, 31­32

on reconstruction of philosophy, 7

Logic, 31, 100, 392, 427

Doubt, 115, 124, 327

actual, 3

And belief, 29, 84, 86, 92­94, 96, 98, 217, 290

Cartesian, 2, 204, 215

Irritation of, 93­94, 96

Duns Scotus, John, 53, 120, 195, 236, 250, 402, 417

and clearness, 253

grammatica speculativa, 273

principle of individuation, 254

realism of, 2, 187, 188, 228, 390

and truth, 203

E

Eisele, Carolyn, 317, 350, 383, 386, 388, 397, 412, 414, 419, 421, 423, 425, 426

Eliot, Charles W., 38, 39, 41, 89, 119, 123, 403, 416­17

Emerson, Ralph W., 163, 165

Emery., Samuel H., 156­58, 159, 160, 162, 166

Page 457 Emotion: and belief, 83­84, 93

Epicurus, 231, 242

and chance, 230, 232, 235

cosmology of, 233, 244

and freedom of will, 236

and logic, 240, 241

Ethics, 7, 83, 233, 369, 371, 395, 436

Epicurean, 230

Plato's, 388

Euclid, 206

Elements, 201

Everett, Charles C., 53

and Hegel Club, 164­65

and Metaphysical Club, 139­41, 147­48, 151, 152, 155

Evolution, 262, 428

Evolutionary biology, 23, 229

Evolutionary cosmology, 233, 238

Evolutionary love, 5, 193, 369

Evolutionary naturalism, 23

idea of in America, 19­20, 22­23

and language, 27­28

of laws, 234, 235, 236

James on, 29­30

of mind, 30­31

natural selection, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 90­91, 99­100, 229

Peirce on, 23­24

Existence: of universals and particulars, 2, 3

Experience, 127, 144, 195, 271

And action, 26

and belief, 26, 84, 90­91

inference from, 358­59

and meaning, 284

and prediction, 197

Experiment, 218, 360, 370

experimental physics, 219

experimental psychology, 43, 66­67, 119­20, 122, 133, 154, 221, 255, 386, 434

experimental science, 2, 9, 11, 209, 211, 387

F

Fechner, Gustav T., 117, 120, 122, 133

Elemente der Psychophysik, 119, 386

Feeling, 83, 193, 231

and belief, 84, 96

as phenomenon of consciousness, 95, 101

Fiske, John, 20, 22, 23, 87, 91, 119, 126, 155, 384

and Metaphysical Club, 92, 101, 140­42, 152, 153, 155

Flint, Robert, 41, 43, 44

Fraser, Alexander C., 9, 122, 184

Frege, Gottlob, 252, 314

G

Generality: and belief, 25­26

And categories, 194

general type, 3

generals, 228

Geodesy: pendulum experiments, 37, 124, 377­79, 408, 423­24

God, 211

and creation, 203, 207, 208, 209­10, 212, 213

existence of, 190, 204, 235

Godel, Kurt, 179

Gilman, Daniel C., 36, 51, 56, 59, 60, 65, 384

at Johns Hopkins, 38­45, 54, 55, 57, 58, 62, 68­72

Graph: existential, 194, 196, 255, 274, 294, 314, 332­37, 338, 394, 438

Gray, Asa, 12, 19, 23, 24

Green, Frederick, 86, 87

Green, Nicholas St. John, 9, 121, 123, 133, 289, 410

and Metaphysical Club, 8, 79, 93, 101, 140­41, 406

and origins of pragmatism, 80­82, 86­87, 95, 98, 99, 127, 146

Green, Thomas H., 142, 145, 146, 149

H

Habit, 89, 177, 220

and action, 3, 94, 96, 189, 217, 218, 286, 291, 328­29, 369, 370

in Aristotle, 235­36

and belief, 3, 29, 94, 189

and evolution, 235

and experience, 90

formation of, 94, 96­97, 328­29

and law, 193, 235

Hall, G. Stanley, 37, 39, 72, 154, 163

and Hegel Club, 162, 238­40

at Johns Hopkins, 1, 41­42, 43­45, 49, 51, 54, 66, 68, 72

Metaphysical Club, 64, 146­48, 150, 152, 155

And psychology, 43, 44­45, 66­67, 69

"Philosophy in the United States," 37, 41, 132, 152

Halsted, George B., 41, 54, 55, 69

Hamilton, William, 114, 116, 124, 144, 214, 253, 277, 346

Hamilton, William R., 59

Harris, William T., 118, 137, 148, 157, 186, 271, 277

and Hegel Club, 138­40, 161­66

and Metaphysical Club, 140­54

Hartshorne, Charles, 346, 430, 433, 437, 445

Harvard College Observatory., 9, 35, 37, 38, 119, 120, 124, 310, 315, 407

Harvard University, 37, 41, 45, 115, 119, 140, 142, 143, 146, 315, 323, 326, 338, 350, 387, 391, 407, 411, 416­17

Hegel, G. W. F, 31, 66, 127, 144, 150, 155, 167, 190, 241, 436

on being, 186

categories, 264­67, 290, 362

Logic, 138, 139, 147, 152, 156, 157­64

Helmholtz, Hermann L. von, 117, 133, 386, 415

Physiologische Optik, 122, 132

Hilgard, Julius E., 39, 63, 407, 409

History: great­men theory of, 31

Logic of, 239

as science, 221­22, 385­86, 393

of science, 238, 316, 317, 349, 393, 419;

of semiotic, 429­30

Vico on, 211, 213­14, 222

Hobbes, Thomas, 144, 201, 236, 252

his egoism, 229

nominalism of, 249, 253, 254

Peirce on, 227­30

Page 458 Holmes, Oliver W., 6, 10, 13, 25, 28, 87­88, 93, 116

and Metaphysical Club, 140­41, 151, 155­56

prediction theory of law, 7­8, 11­12, 26, 27, 98­99, 123, 133, 285

The Common Law, 28

"The Path of Law," 7, 12, 292

Howison, George H., 137, 157, 158, 160, 163, 164

and Metaphysical Club, 140­56, 165, 289

Hume, David, 100, 142, 144, 145, 151, 236, 252

on mind, 2

nominalism of, 193

phenomenalism of, 191

Treatiseof Human Nature, 140, 141, 146

Husserl, Edmund, 436­37

Huxley, Thomas H., 24, 44

Hypothesis, 115, 120, 121, 187, 216, 217, 238­39, 262, 287, 296, 336, 360, 392, 411, 439

hypothetical inference, 47, 214­15

hypothetical reasoning, 325

and likeness, 324

mathematical, 330, 334

metaphysical, 210

scientific, 123

and syllogism, 116­17

and thought, 96

theory of, 46.

See also Abduction; Retroduction

I

Idea, 177, 195

asbtract or general, 2, 4, 5

association of ideas, 83, 120, 228, 241

clear, 4, 120­21, 202, 205, 208, 210, 253, 268­69, 363

comprehension of, 205

meaning of, 94

Individuation: principle of, 254

Individual: and community, 112

individualism, 3

Induction, 46, 115, 120, 187, 202, 206, 211, 216, 217, 218, 229, 238, 262, 274, 296, 336, 360, 392, 411, 428, 439

and habit formation, 96­97

and index, 324

inductive inference, 214­15, 239

inductive method, 213­14

inductive reasoning, 47, 287

and syllogism, 116­17

Inference, 392

deductive, 214­15

from experience, 358­59

hypothetical, 47, 214­15

inductive, 214­15, 239

knowledge as, 325

probable, 187, 217, 291

scientific, 219

and thought, 120

Inquiry, 196, 296, 420, 427

as attaining belief, 96

and fixation of belief, 3

logic of, 31­32

object of, 29

scientific, 112, 392

Intellect, 3, 4, 48, 325

and belief, 83­85

and mind, 90­91

International Geodetic Association, 127, 128, 129

Interpretation, 202

interpretant, 274, 321, 327, 328, 329, 360, 390

interpreter, 359

of sign, 95, 102, 186, 189, 274­79, 328, 329, 342

sign­interpretant, 342

sign­interpretation, 274­75, 279, 321­22

of thought, 97

Intuition, 165, 325, 328

Cartesian, 216, 202

object of, 3

of truth, 2

Investigation, 392­93

community of investigators, 97, 111­13, 217, 291, 340, 393, 420, 421

J

Jakobson, Roman, 425, 430, 431

James, Henry (1811­1882), 315, 406

James, Henry ( 1843 ­1916), 98, 123, 406

James, William, 1, 22, 24, 36, 38, 111, 117, 123, 126, 130, 132, 137, 158, 179, 194, 262, 301, 305, 364, 365, 366, 369, 393, 406, 410, 417, 433

on evolution, 29­31

at Hegel Club, 138­40, 160­63

at Johns Hopkins, 39­41, 127

at Metaphysical Club, 8, 12, 13, 25, 69, 101, 124, 140­54, 289

on mind, 30­31, 88­89

and origins of pragmatism, 6, 9, 80, 88­89, 91­93, 98, 100, 118, 132, 283­85, 290­92, 295, 298

on psychology, 43

"Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," 6, 167, 283, 337

Pragmatism, 125, 296

The Principles of Psychology, 31, 43, 67, 149

"Remarks on Spencer," 130

The Will to Believe, 283, 292, 294

Jastrow, Joseph, 50, 66

Jevons, William S., 54, 126, 127, 148

Principles of Science, 125

Johns Hopkins University, 1­2, 35­36, 38, 39, 100, 131, 192, 230, 232, 254, 289, 306, 308­309, 323, 329, 331, 417­18, 424, 436

Hall at, 41­42, 44­45, 49, 51, 54, 66, 68, 72

James at, 39­41, 127

Peirce at, 35­37, 42, 46­49, 54­57, 383­84, 387, 394

purchase of Peirce's library, 51­54

Jordan, Elijah, 111, 137

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 37, 38, 97, 100, 118, 130, 143, 146, 148, 153, 154, 157, 161, 184, 186, 201, 215, 241, 261, 271, 276, 277, 278, 290, 291, 324, 326, 386, 406, 428

Judgment: analytic and synthetic, 151, 152, 391

a priori, 151, 153, 155, 287

perceptual, 195

theoretical, 370

K

Kant, Immanuel, 114, 120, 133, 154, 158, 167, 233, 276, 277, 284, 406

on categories, 263­64, 290, 324

Copernican revolution of, 116

On judgment, 151, 152, 153, 155, 287, 391

his logic, 180, 236, 256, 288

phenomenalism of, 192

and pragmatism, 9, 295

Critique of Pure Reason, 140­45, 149, 252, 294, 381, 403, 444

Page 459 The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, 288, 391

Ketner, Kenneth L., 397, 437­38

Knowledge, 111, 115, 144, 195, 358

evident, 202

and evolution of mind, 31

of fact, 325

mathematical, 221

pragmatic theory of, 95, 207, 222­24

See also Belief; Cognition

L

Ladd­Franklin, Christine, 47, 50, 57, 128, 300, 335, 384, 438

Language, 370, 430, 431

artificial, 312

deceits of, 4, 122, 290

development of, 27­28

nominalistic interpretation of, 2, 348­49

and semiotic, 357­58

Law, 194

of association, 220

evolutionary, 236­37

general, 3

of logic, 94, 118, 186, 187, 217, 295, 327

of nature, 5, 220, 228, 230, 235, 237

psychical vs. physical, 219­20

reality of, 193

Law, 133, 291

legal duty, 7­8, 10, 293

legal pragmatism, 285, 293

origins of, 7­8, 11­12, 26, 28, 292

prediction theory of, 7­8, 11­12, 26, 27, 98­99, 133, 285

Leibniz, Gottfried W., 58

on clearness, 218, 286, 363

and logic, 249­52

and Peirce, 318­19

and synechism, 267

on transcendentals, 204

Meditationes, 254, 257

Monadology, 254

Locke, John, 144, 236

nominalism of, 349

and semiotic, 324, 338­39, 390, 435

Essay Concerning Human

Understanding, 323, 390, 435

Logic, 195, 241, 249, 308, 313, 360

algebra of, 126, 314, 332, 331, 371, 396

assertion, 177, 180, 370

and categories, 194, 266

and critic, 392­93, 396

and Darwinism, 29, 99­100, 289

deductive, 46, 133, 134, 209, 314, 320

of discovery, 218

dyadic, 179

of fallibilism, 245, 421

history of, 213

of history, 239

implication, 181, 196, 332

nductive, 46

of inquiry, 31­32

law of, 94, 118, 186, 187, 217, 295, 327

logical breadth and depth, 124

logical idealism, 127, 144

logical realism, 192­93

logical socialism, 421

many­valued, 171­77, 438

and mathematics, 49, 314, 320, 325, 331, 334, 336, 392

medieval, 202, 214

method of, 308­310, 436

and methodeutic, 390, 392­93, 396, 397, 411, 436, 438

normative, 48, 269, 272­73, 390, 394­95, 396, 436, 443

and physiology, 95­96, 101

Port­Royal, 204­205

principle of contradiction, 177

principle of excluded middle, 177, 180

principle of indeterminacy, 178­80

quantification, 189, 332

of relations, 118­19, 120, 189­90, 221, 394, 437

of relatives, 47, 57­61, 69, 125, 242, 330, 332, 392

and rhetoric, 202, 273, 322, 324, 390, 436

of science, 46, 99­100, 120­21, 123, 133, 134, 209, 217­19, 230, 238, 286, 287, 288, 314, 315­16, 318, 325, 328, 392, 421

and semiotic, 306, 319, 320, 323­24, 326, 338­41, 343, 350, 390, 391, 396, 435­36

sentential (propositional) calculus, 171­76, 394, 438

social theory of, 97, 216, 326, 327, 358

and speculative grammar, 273, 373, 374, 390, 436

Stoics, 202, 205, 209, 211, 214, 231, 241

and syllogism, 116­17, 124, 190, 206, 214, 288, 315, 391­92, 439

symbolic, 334­35

theory of multitudes, 190, 294

three­dimensional, 181­82

and topic, 202, 205, 206, 209, 212, 213, 218

triadic, 171­78, 181­82, 213, 218.

See also Graph

Lukasiewicz, Jan: many­valued logic, 171­76

Lutoslawski, Wincenty, 239, 311, 397, 443

Origin and Growth of Plato's Logic, 388, 395, 442

M

MacColl, Hugh, 47

three­dimensional logic, 181­82

Marquand, Allan, 65, 72, 230, 237, 329, 387

Mathematics, 46, 58, 126, 204, 218, 231, 254, 271, 333, 341, 386, 421, 438

and experience, 359

geometry, 94, 192, 206, 208­209, 210

and icon, 336

and logic, 49, 314, 320, 325, 331, 334, 336, 392

mathematical hypothesis, 330, 334

mathematical method, 208­209, 210, 211, 214, 370

mathematical reasoning, 47, 94, 124, 201­202, 221, 330

quaternions, 59, 61

nonions, 59­60

topology, 385

Maxwell, James C., 125, 126, 286, 287

Theory of Heat, 123

Mead, George H., 23, 111, 346, 370, 432, 433

Meaning, 224, 325

of belief, 83

and experience, 9, 284

and practice, 4, 29, 94, 122, 130, 286, 327­28, 363, 370

of sign, 95, 102

Metaphysical Club (Cambridge), 12, 37, 51, 87, 99, 122­23, 124, 132, 133,139, 166­67, 188, 234, 289, 438

Page 460 and origins of pragmatism, 8, 11, 25, 79, 83, 91­93, 146, 188­89, 364, 406, 410­11, 418

revived, 140­56

Metaphysical Club (JHU), 1­2, 50­51, 53, 65, 69, 254, 418

Method, 49, 204, 427

architectonical, 238, 310

deductive, 213­14

of fixing belief, 3­4, 29, 96, 217, 286, 287, 363

geometrical, 206, 208

inductive, 213­14

mathematical, 208­209, 210, 211, 214, 370

methodeutic, 390, 392­93, 396, 397, 411, 436, 438

methodology, 2, 393

pragmatic, 12, 364, 373

or research, 48, 308­309, 417

scientific, 2, 3­4, 5, 29, 46, 111­13, 206­209, 211, 217­19, 286, 310, 363, 370, 387

of settling opinion, 29, 98, 124

statistical, 29, 99­100, 393

Mill, James, 91

Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 82, 83, 86, 88, 98, 120, 315

Mill, John S., 23, 82, 83, 89, 100, 116, 120, 122, 133, 417

on hypothesis, 123

principle of utility, 24

his significance, 124­25

Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy, 115, 124, 185, 214

Political Economy, 185

System of Logic, 196, 341

Mind, 2, 83, 273, 325, 358

and body, 209­210, 216, 220­21

evolution of, 23, 25, 30­31

individual, 25, 26, 90, 121

and instinct to generalize, 90­91

law of, 5, 88­89, 130, 291

and matter, 219

mental phenomena, 193

mental sign, 344

pragmatic theory of, 37

quasi­mind, 343

rational, 26, 91

Mind, 37, 41, 80, 132, 146, 148, 152, 160, 163, 164, 181, 288, 345

Modality, 274, 374

real, 196

triadic, 176­78

Monist, 184, 188­89, 192­96, 219, 238, 241, 249, 251, 292, 296, 297, 301, 338, 351, 366, 367, 371, 373,

396, 435, 437, 440

Morris, Charles, 345­46, 430

Morris, George S., 1, 2, 40, 41, 42, 45, 51, 68, 230

and Peirce, 65­66

N

Nation, 37, 56, 63, 71, 79, 115, 120, 123, 124, 126, 256, 341, 384, 397, 407, 415, 442

National Academy of Sciences, 64, 128, 222, 240, 255, 313, 316, 322, 378, 405, 406, 419, 434, 442

Nature, 22, 25, 361

law of, 5, 220, 228, 230, 235, 237

natural selection, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 90­91, 99­100, 229

Necessity, 5, 177, 179, 193, 228

Nominalism, 222, 417

and language, 2, 348­49

Peirce on, 2­3, 184­97, 214­15, 217, 228­29, 232, 236, 253­54, 256­57, 258, 264, 344­45, 348­50, 368, 372, 390­91, 445

and probability, 185, 189

vs. realism, 2­3, 120, 186

O

Object, 186, 228

of cognition, 95, 102

of concept, 94, 130, 327­28, 363

of opinion, 3, 29, 131

real, 95, 102, 216, 228, 286

of sign, 274, 321, 327, 336, 342, 360, 390

sign­object, 342

Observation, 5, 206, 218

Ogden, C. K., and I. A. Richards,

Meaning of Meaning, 344­45, 428

Opinion: fated or ultimate, 29, 131, 144, 189

object of, 3, 29, 131

reality independent of, 286­87

settlement of, 29, 98, 124

P

Palmer, George H., 148, 149, 152, 154, 155, 156

and Hegel Club, 138­40

his seminar on Hegel, 158­60

Patterson, Carlile P., 35, 39, 125, 128

Peirce, Benjamin, 37, 38, 39, 54, 56, 60, 119, 121, 131, 154, 221, 245, 252, 254, 315, 316, 333, 341, 380, 381, 382, 383, 402­403, 404, 406, 409, 410, 412

Linear Associative Algebra, 59, 122, 331, 384

Peirce, Benjamin M., 121, 244, 315

Peirce, Charles S., 13, 23, 88, 111, 137

academic career of, 1­2, 35­42, 45­51, 55­56, 62­63, 67­69, 100, 115, 120­22, 127, 154, 185, 192, 195, 222, 230, 276­77, 287­88, 289, 294, 306, 308­ 310, 314­15, 322­24, 326, 331, 338, 364­65, 367­68, 383­84, 387, 388, 391, 394, 407, 411, 417, 433, 439

anti­Cartesianism of, 2, 215­16, 218­23, 288, 325, 328, 358

at Arisbe, 227­29, 235, 237, 241­42, 244­45, 418­19; on belief, 25, 29, 86­87, 89

book collection of, 51­54

on evolution, 23­24

on great men, 49­50

and Greek philosophy, 231­33, 235­36, 238­44

and Hegel, 261­81

idealism of, 66, 144, 305, 428

and Kant, 9, 114, 167

and Leibniz, 249­58, 318­19

on logic of relations, 118­19, 120, 189­90, 221

on logic of relatives, 47, 57­61, 69, 125, 242, 330, 332, 392

logical machine, 425

and Metaphysical Club, 8, 11, 12, 50­51, 125, 139­40, 146, 150, 152, 153

metaphysics, 219­20

on nominalism, 2­3, 184­97, 214­15, 217, 228­29, 232, 236, 253­54, 254­57, 258, 264, 344­45, 348­50, 368, 372, 390­91, 417, 445

Page 461 and origins of pragmatism, 4, 12, 28­29, 79­82, 86­88, 91­101, 133, 188­89, 218, 364, 435

on pragmaticism, 114, 118

on realism, 184­97, 254, 258, 345, 348, 368, 390­91, 433, 435, 445

as scientist, 37, 63­64, 125­30, 221­22, 237, 307­310, 313, 315­17, 322­32, 370, 376­80, 382­86, 389, 398, 404, 405, 407­409, 413, 419­20, 422­24, 426­27, 441, 445­47

and semiotic, 320, 321­30, 338­47, 350­52, 356­60, 429­31, 435­36, 442, 445

system of, 1, 5, 263

triadic logic, 171­82

and verum­factum principle, 223

''Algebra of Logic," 47, 369

"The Architecture of Theories:' 238, 292

"The Art of Reasoning Elucidated," 177

"The Basis of Pragmaticism," 366

"A Brief Description of the Algebra of Relatives," 47, 57, 59, 254

"The Century's Great Men of Science," 49, 416, 420

"Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis:' 29, 96, 131, 327

"Description of a Notationfor the Logic of Relatives," 47, 59, 61, 121, 122, 126, 264, 393

"Design and Chance:" 234, 287

"The Doctrine ofChances," 29, 96, 131, 327

"The Doctrine of Necessity," 292

"The Ethics of Terminology," 335

"Fixation of Belief," 46, 93, 95, 96, 99, 123, 124, 126, 130, 131, 286, 290, 327, 368, 394

"FurtherConsequences of Four Incapacities

The Validity of the Laws of Logic:'," 47, 118, 324, 395

"Grand Logic:' 179, 193; "Guess at the Riddle," 229, 232, 234, 235, 237, 238

"How to Make Our Ideas Clear," 4, 46, 93, 96, 124, 125, 128, 130, 131, 132, 257, 286, 290, 291, 293, 300, 327, 363, 368, 369, 370, 393, 394

"Illustrations of the Logic of Science," 22, 29, 37, 96, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 152, 189, 217, 232, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 292, 300, 301, 327, 328, 363, 364, 366, 367, 368, 393

"Issues of Pragmaticism:' 118, 178, 366

"Kaina stoicheia," 335

"Logic Notebook," 172

"The Logic of 1873'," 98, 99, 124, 189

"The Logic of Mathematics," 194, 272

"The Logic of Mathematics in Relation to Education:'," 334

"Logic of Relatives," 47, 59, 264

"The Logic of Science," 133, 276, 288, 315

"Logical Machines," 67

"Memoranda Concerning the Aristotelian Syllogism," 116, 288

"Minute Logic," 180­81, 239, 273, 334, 394, 436, 438, 443

"Note on the Theory of the Economy of Research:" 393

"Notes for Lectures on Logic:" 98

"On a New List of Categories:" 229, 253, 261, 262, 264, 277, 290, 324, 326, 327, 362, 391, 406, 420, 435, 436

"On an Improvement of Boole's Calculus of Logic," 117, 330, 393

"On Quantity," 333

"On Reasoning and the Logic of Things," 261

"On the Algebra of Logic," 332, 393

"On the Algebra of Logic: A Contributionto Philosophy of Notation," 393

"On the Logic of Drawing History," 311, 334, 442

"On the NaturalClassification," 288

"On the Theoryof Errors of Observation:' 289

"The Order of Nature," 29, 96, 131, 287, 327

"An Outline Classification of theSciences," 335

Photometric Researches, 35, 37, 131, 132, 377

"Pragmatic, Pragmatism:' 114

"Pragmatism," 4

"The Prescott Book," 177

"Probability of Induction," 29, 96, 131, 287, 327

"Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism," 366

"A Proposed Logical Notation," 394

"Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man," 46­47, 97, 118, 186, 324

"Questions of Great Men," 50

"The Rules of Existential Graphs:' 336

"Search for a Method," 364

"Some Consequences of Four Incapacities," 97, 118, 122, 179, 324, 366, 406, 420, 421, 434

Studies in Logic, 1, 45, 309, 329, 417, 418, 420

"Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic," 335, 365, 436

"Theory of Economy of Research," 289

"Upon Logical Comprehension and Extension," 253

"What Pragmatism Is," 338, 362, 366, 435.

See also Category; Graph

Peirce, Harriet M., 40, 69, 404, 406, 408, 409­410, 412, 413­14

Peirce, James M., 56, 70, 221, 383, 389, 399, 412

Peirce, Juliette F., 53, 69, 227, 238, 244, 311, 312, 399, 418­19, 428

Peirce, Sarah H., 56, 123, 126, 127, 130, 237, 412

Perception, 120

and action, 94

of space, 145­48

Petrus Peregrinus, 67, 70, 387

Philodemus: De signis, 329

Philosophy: American, 1­2, 6, 22­23, 37, 110­13, 132, 152, 167, 283, 289

a priori, 148, 151

of art, 113

British, 2­3, 24, 66, 91, 125, 145, 167, 216

Page 462 cognitionism, 185­86, 187

critical common­sensism, 118, 195, 255, 258, 338

empiricism, 2­3, 9, 24, 91, 140, 151, 216

entelechy, 235­36

epistemology, 111

of forms, 204

German, 149

Greek, 203­204, 230­33, 235­36, 238­44, 321, 324

idealism, 66, 140, 144, 186, 189, 191, 197, 305, 428

logical empiricism, 345­46

of law, 10, 133

materialism, 185, 189, 228

medieval, 150, 188, 202, 215

metaphysics, 185­86, 203, 209­11, 219­20, 236, 241, 328, 396

modern, 144, 145

monadology, 256

necessitarianism, 228­29

ontology, 234, 437

Peirce's system of, 5, 263

and perception, 145­47

phenomenalism, 2­3

phenomenology (phaneroscopy, phenoscopy), 147, 241, 269, 396, 436­37

and philology, 212

positivism, 129

rationalism, 2, 4

scholastic, 2, 118, 195, 203, 207, 215, 224, 228, 232, 235, 338

and science, 2, 45, 101, 111, 133, 212, 317, 389, 423

sensationalism, 3, 149

social, 13, 23

of transcendentals, 203, 204, 207, 209, 211, 224

truth of philosophical doctrines, 362­63

utilitarianism, 24.

See also Category; Nominalism; Realism

Physiology, 229

and habit formation, 96­97

and logical distinctions, 95­96, 101

of perception, 145­48, 154

and pragmatism, 119

and psychology, 30, 83, 146­47, 148, 154, 369

and semiotic, 340

Plato, 159, 213, 238, 240, 242, 305, 311, 358, 370, 388, 395, 397, 442, 443

Parmenides, 239

Republic, 204

Theatetus, 239

Timaeus, 204

Pollock, Frederick, 6, 11, 12, 21

Popular Science Monthly, 22, 29, 37, 54, 93, 96, 97, 98, 101, 125, 128, 129, 130, 133, 152, 191, 201, 217, 241, 256, 257, 284, 285, 288, 296, 327, 328, 348, 363, 367

Possibility, 194, 195, 264, 367, 368

Post, Emil: many­valued logic, 171­76, 425

Potentiality, 83, 177, 179

Practice, 298, 369;

and meaning, 4, 29, 94, 122, 130, 286, 327­28, 363, 370

practical logicality, 100

Pragmaticism, 114, 283

principle of, 118, 297

proof of, 267­69, 338, 351, 362, 366

realistic, 191, 195, 196

and semiotic, 195, 273­74

Pragmatism, 29, 32, 119, 274

And Bain's theory of belief, 9, 25, 79­82, 86, 93­100, 117, 364, 368

and Darwinism, 23, 24­25, 99­100, 116

and law, 6, 8, 10, 12, 28, 285, 293

as logic of abduction, 115

maxim or principle of, 4, 93­94, 95, 97­98, 100, 122­23, 130, 167, 189, 218, 257, 284, 288, 289, 291, 297, 298, 300, 368, 369, 370­71, 372

origins of, 2, 4, 6­13, 25, 28­29, 37, 79­83, 86­89, 91­101, 118, 123, 132, 133, 137, 146, 188­89, 218, 254, 283­85, 289, 290­92, 295, 298, 337­38, 364, 406, 410­11, 418, 435

practicalism, 283, 284, 285, 291, 295

pragmatic method, 12, 364, 373

proof of, 362­68, 371­74, 435

and theory of signs, 134, 195, 273­74, 435

and Vico, 201, 222­24

Probability, 124, 131, 196, 202, 287, 328, 363

chance, 193, 218, 230, 231, 232, 234­35, 237

nominalistic, 185, 189

probable argument, 214­15

probable inference, 187, 217, 291

theory of, 46, 47, 117, 229, 230

Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 127, 287

Proposition, 186, 189, 197, 368

propositional calculus, 171­76, 394, 438

Psychology, 49, 82, 87, 88, 91, 92, 99, 115, 117, 155, 323, 360

disposition to act, 83­85, 94

of great men, 50

experimental, 43, 66­67, 119­20, 122, 133, 154, 221, 255, 368, 434

and logic, 369­70, 390

and physiology, 30, 83, 146­47, 148, 154, 369

and pragmatism, 368­69

and semiotic, 340, 343

Q

Quality, 98, 124, 274, 391

as category, 194, 262, 263, 264­65, 324

R

Realism, 5, 7, 222, 224

logical, 192­93

vs. nominalism, 2­3, 120, 186

Peirce on, 184­97, 254, 258, 345, 348, 368, 390­91, 433, 435, 445

scholastic, 2, 118, 195

Reality, 124, 130, 189, 421

And cognition, 186­87

definition of, 3, 29, 97, 131, 186

independent ofthought, 3, 188, 216­17, 286­87, 326

real object, 95, 102, 216, 228, 286

and truth, 186­87, 194­95, 197

Reasoning, 296

corollarial and theorematic, 94, 334

deductive, 287

dialectical, 201­202

hypothetical, 325

inductive, 47, 287

mathematical, 47, 94, 124, 201­202, 221, 330

method of, 46, 124

scientific, 47, 125

Page 463 Religion, 23, 44, 45, 101, 298­99

theology, 203, 209­210, 234;

and science, 44­45, 386

Renouvier, Charles, 89, 91, 92, 158

Representation, 29, 115, 131, 189, 321

category of, 262, 263, 264, 324

kinds of, 323

and sign, 278, 323­24

See also Sign

Research, 420

method of, 48, 308­309, 417

Retroduction, 115, 121, 239, 296, 336, 392, 411, 439

Revue Philosophique, 101, 128, 129, 132, 288

Rowland, Henry A., 39, 57, 62­64, 310, 384

Royce, Josiah, 23, 41, 45, 51, 111, 137, 153, 160, 237, 238, 262, 297, 299, 300, 301, 305, 326, 433

The Problem of Christianity, 275, 298, 320, 345, 428

Religious Aspects of Philosophy, 190, 235

The World and the Individual, 267, 268, 345

Russell, Bertrand, 179, 181, 341, 385, 427

S

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 429, 430, 431

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 144, 424

Schröder, Ernst, 47, 193, 251, 252, 314, 424

Science, 191, 195, 202, 313, 340, 371, 420

on change, 31­32

classification of sciences, 369, 370, 373, 385­86, 394­95, 421, 437, 443

history as, 221­22, 385­86, 393

history of, 238, 316, 317, 349, 393, 419

logic of, 46, 99­100, 120­21, 123, 133, 134, 209, 217­19, 230, 238, 286, 287, 288, 314, 315­16, 318, 325, 328, 392, 421

method of, 2, 3­4, 5, 29, 46, 111­13, 206­209, 211, 217­19, 286, 310, 363, 370, 387

normative, 269­73, 394­95, 396, 436, 443

and philosophy, 2, 45, 101, 111, 133, 212, 317, 389, 423

physics, 63­64, 206, 208­209, 210, 211, 217, 231

and religion, 44­45, 386

of representation, 115

scientific reasoning, 47, 125

utility of, 25

Sebeok, Thomas A., 346­47, 423, 424

Selection: natural, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 90­91, 99­100, 229

unconscious, 27

Semiotic (Semeiotic), 196, 305, 337, 338, 361, 374, 407

cenoscopic, 339­40

divisions of, 323, 373

history of, 429­30

and language, 357­58

and logic, 306, 319, 320, 323­24, 326, 338­41, 343, 350, 390, 391, 396, 435­36

normative, 397

pragmaticism as, 195, 273­74

and psychology, 340, 343

as science of representation, 115

semiosis, 273­74, 306, 321­22, 329­30, 332, 359

semiotic idealism, 186, 216­17

and speculative grammar, 373, 390

zoosemeiotic, 347

Sensation, 115, 127, 144, 148

atomic, 2

and thought, 94

Sign, 2, 98, 124, 178, 186, 231

And cognition, 325­26, 327, 350

conventional, 359

degenerate, 335

icon, 320, 332, 335­36, 339, 359, 390, 430, 431, 435, 436

index, 320 332, 334, 335, 336, 339, 359, 390, 430, 435, 436

interpretant, 274, 321, 327, 328, 329, 342, 360, 390

interpretation of, 95, 102, 186, 189, 274­79, 324, 328

man­sign, 325

natural, 359

object of, 274, 321, 327, 336, 342, 360, 390

and representation, 278, 323­24

semiosis, 273­74, 306, 321­22, 329­30, 332, 359

sign­action, 241, 273­74, 306, 321­22, 329­30, 359

sign­giver, 343

sign­interpretant, 342

sign­interpretation, 274­75, 279, 321­22

sign­object, 342

sign­utterer, 343

signification, 340

symbol, 253, 320, 332, 335, 336, 339, 359, 390, 430, 431, 435

theory of, 134, 148, 216­17, 273­75, 290, 298, 302, 320, 321­27, 332, 334, 335, 337, 338­40, 342, 345, 346, 350, 356­57, 360, 373, 430, 435, 445

thought in, 278, 325, 349, 359, 372, 390, 442

token, 332, 358, 360

type, 360.

See also Representation

Society, 7, 224

philosophy of, 111­13

social Darwinism, 22, 23, 30

social theory of logic, 97, 216, 326, 327, 358

Socrates, 203­204, 358, 442

Spencer, Herbert, 27, 31, 82, 91, 92, 126, 151

his theory of mind, 30

his thought in America, 20­22

Descriptive Sociology, 22

Education, 20, 21

First Principles, 21, 24

Psychology, 21, 88

Social Statistics, 20, 21

Study of Sociology, 22

Synthetic Philosophy, 21

Statistics, 44, 119

statistical deduction, 47

statistical method, 29, 99­100, 217, 286, 393

Story, William E., 56, 57, 72, 384

Sylvester, James J., 54, 55, 56, 58, 65, 68, 331, 332, 333, 384;

on logic of relatives, 59­64

Synechism, 2, 5, 190, 192, 255, 257, 262, 263, 264, 267, 268, 274, 292, 294, 295, 365, 374, 396, 435

Page 464 Tarski, Alfred, 171

Term, 10­11, 46, 47, 124, 214

Thing: incognizable, 216, 223

particular, 3

real, 286

Thomas Aquinas, 150, 151, 236

Thought, 124, 130, 291

and action, 4

elements of, 96­97

function of, 94

inferential nature of, 120

interpreted by another thought, 97

and inquiry, 97­98

and irritation of doubt, 93­94

meaning of, 325

reality independent of, 3, 188, 216­17, 286­87, 326

as semiosis, 274

in signs, 278, 325, 349, 359, 372, 390, 442

vs. thinking, 360

triadic, 278, 290

Truth, 2, 3, 25, 30, 97, 98, 127, 144, 165, 202, 216, 224, 296, 371, 390

criterion of, 194­95, 207­20;

and many­valued logic, 171­77, 438

of philosophical doctrines, 362­63

and reality, 186­87, 194­95, 197

true cognition, 186­87, 216

truth­table, 332

and ultimate opinion, 29, 131, 189

verum­factum principle, 206­207, 210, 211­13, 218, 219­20, 223

Tvchism, 2, 5, 179, 192, 193, 229, 296, 374, 435

U

Uberweg, Friedrich, 150

System der Logik, 53

Umiker­Sebeok, Jean, 423

United States Coast (and Geodetic) Survey, 1, 9, 37, 39, 40, 43, 51, 57, 63, 64, 70, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 237, 238, 242, 279, 306, 307­308, 310, 312­13, 315­16, 322­23, 376­83, 398, 404­405, 407­409, 412, 413, 419, 422, 423, 424, 426, 427, 441

Utility: of abstract principles, 25

And meaning, 4

principle of, 24

V

Venn, John, 189

The Logic of Chance, 117, 131, 185, 214, 315

Verification: empirical verifiability, 11;

of laws of nature, 5

Vico, Giambattista:

on history, 213­14, 222

and pragmatism, 201, 218, 222­24

verton­factuin principle, 206­207, 210, 211­13, 218, 219­20, 223

Volition: as phenomenon of consciousness, 95, 101

W

Wallace, Alfred R., 25, 28, 90

Warner, Joseph B., 8, 9, 121, 138

And Metaphysical Club, 140­41

Weiss, Paul, 249, 251, 306, 346, 436

Welby, Lady Victoria, 180, 320, 340;

her correspondence with Peirce, 341­42, 344­45, 350, 428

What is Meaning?, 341

Whately, Richard, 244, 390, 391

Logic, 227, 228, 314, 342, 344­45, 347­48, 389, 403, 444

Whewell, William, 120, 122, 125, 133, 381

Will, 83, 85

and belief, 93

freedom of, 228­29, 231, 236

William of Ockham, 52, 120, 191, 228, 249, 402, 417

Wright, Chauncey, 8, 23, 29, 30, 89, 92, 93, 101, 111, 115, 116, 122, 123, 126, 133, 140, 146, 147, 152, 185, 289, 317, 405, 406, 410, 433

on belief, 25­26

on Mill, 124­25

on mind, 90­91

"The Evolution of Self­Consciousness," 9, 28, 99, 148

"Limits of Natural Selection," 25, 90

"The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer,” 24

Wundt, Wilhelm, 43, 117, 122, 133

Mechanik der Nenven, 124, 129

Principles of Physiological Psychology, 119

Vorlesungen u'ber die Menschen­und Thierseele, 119, 120, 386