Читать книгу Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 8 - Charles S. Peirce - Страница 12

Introduction

The period from the spring of 1890 into the summer of 1892 was a time of emotional turmoil for Peirce, a time of rash ventures and dashed hopes that would culminate in a transforming experience and a new sense of purpose.¹ In the previous decade, Peirce had suffered the loss of his teaching appointment at Johns Hopkins University and the stripping away of his leadership in gravity determinations for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. He and Juliette had left New York for Milford, Pennsylvania, in 1887, hoping to find acceptance in Milford’s thriving French community. By the time he turned fifty, Peirce had been pushed from center stage and his native sense of entitlement had been crushed. When in the spring of 1890 he helped organize a debate in the pages of the New York Times on the soundness of Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary philosophy, he signed his contributions with the pseudonym “Outsider,” reflecting his increasing estrangement from mainstream society.

Diagnosed with tuberculosis, Juliette went abroad in November 1889 to escape the cold northeastern Pennsylvania winter. During most of the winter and spring of 1890, while she convalesced in Cairo and in various Mediterranean port cities, Peirce stayed in New York City where he looked for opportunities to supplement his income. Peirce’s relations with Juliette had never recovered from the blow of his termination from Johns Hopkins in 1884 which had plunged the newly married couple into the first of many financial crises. For a while after their move to Milford things looked up, especially after their finances were augmented with inheritances from the estates of Peirce’s mother and his Aunt Lizzie. Charles and Juliette had been accepted into the high society of Milford, primarily the social circle that revolved around the prominent Pinchot family, and they were determined to live accordingly. By the end of 1889, the Peirces had invested nearly all of their assets in the old John T. Quick homestead, “Wanda Farm” (or “Quicktown”), and in surrounding woodland, altogether amounting to nearly 2000 acres. They had risked everything on the prospect of generating a good income from their new estate, from farming and from harvesting the timber and other natural resources, and perhaps from turning the old Wanda Farm, on the banks of the Delaware River, into a grand resort. This would have been a good plan had a projected bridge been built at Port Jervis to bring through a rail line from New York, but the bridge project failed and the Peirces ran out of reserves too soon to have any chance of success.

After his separation from Johns Hopkins in 1884, Peirce’s principal source of income was the Coast and Geodetic Survey, but he also drew significant supplemental pay for his work on the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia as the contributing editor in charge of definitions in the fields of logic, metaphysics, mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, and weights and measures. But Peirce’s income from the Century Company did not make up for the loss of his salary from Johns Hopkins and, to make matters worse, Peirce was well aware that his position with the Survey was at risk. He therefore tried his best to add to his income. He convinced Wendell Phillips Garrison, the editor of the Nation, to give him more books for review and, during the period covered by this volume, over three dozen reviews or notes by Peirce appeared in the Nation (many duplicated in the New York Evening Post). Garrison paid Peirce well for his contributions and he proved to be a crucial source for supplementing Peirce’s income for several years to come. Peirce tried to form dependable connections of this kind with other periodical publishers (Charles R. Miller, Editor-in-Chief of the New York Times, and L. S. Metcalf, editor of the Forum²) but with little success. Desperate for additional funds, he sought loans from friends and acquaintances and he tried his hand at inventions and various investment schemes, with no luck.³ He was constantly on the lookout for opportunities to market his expertise. He was for instance a regular patron of the Astor Library, New York’s largest reference library (in 1895 it would be consolidated to form the New York Public Library). Sometime in May 1890 he presented the library with a detailed list of missing “works on mathematical subjects” which he thought especially important and he offered to continue his efforts, probably hoping to be a paid consultant.⁴ His offer was declined; on 4 June 1890, he received a letter from Trustee Thomas M. Markoe thanking him for his “very full & valuable list” but letting him know that he “need give [him]self no further trouble about the matter.”

In May or early June 1890 Juliette arrived back in New York and the Peirces returned to their Pennsylvania home. Their return to Wanda Farm freed Peirce for a time from the daily hustle and allowed him to refocus his priorities. His work for the Coast Survey and the Century Company was the most pressing.

The Century Dictionary, hailed as the “most conspicuous literary monument of the nineteenth century,”⁵ was not only a dictionary of historical and common English usage but was distinguished by its comprehensive inclusion of scientific terms and was said to embody “the scientific spirit and work” of its time.⁶ Peirce had been recruited for the dictionary project while still teaching at Johns Hopkins and had begun drafting definitions as early as 1883, but his most intensive and sustained work began around 1888, when he began receiving proofs, and ran at least until the fall of 1891, when the first printing of the dictionary was completed. The first edition ran to 7,046 large quarto pages, included nearly half-a-million definitions for over 215,000 words, and as a measure of its encyclopedic scope was reported to contain “from a printer’s point of view” two-thirds as much information as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Even after the Century Dictionary was published, Peirce continued with his lexicographical work, writing corrections and new definitions in his interleaved copy and hoping to be paid on a per-word basis for a supplement that would eventually appear in 1909.⁷ Peirce would also look for other dictionary work and would propose various lexicographical projects. As the Century was nearing completion, Peirce tried for a position with Funk & Wagnalls to help with their famous single-volume Standard Dictionary, which would appear in 1894, and in 1892 he would draw up a “Plan for a Scientific Dictionary” that would provide a summary of human knowledge in 1500 pages (sel. 50). It is hard to overstate the importance of Peirce’s lexicographical work, not only for the income it produced but especially for its impact on Peirce’s intellectual development.

In July 1889 Thomas Corwin Mendenhall was appointed Superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. His predecessor, Frank M. Thorn, was a lawyer with no scientific training who had been appointed four years earlier to reform the Survey. In contrast, and to the relief of many government scientists, Mendenhall was a trained scientist and was expected to restore the Survey’s leadership in scientific research; certainly that was Peirce’s hope. Peirce’s career had been dedicated to advancing the theoretical foundations of geodetic science and his field work had always been conducted with the greatest care, using the most refined instruments, so that his results could contribute not only to the immediate practical needs of economic and social life but also to the growth of the science. Under his leadership, American gravity research took its place alongside the best gravity research in Europe. But the turn away from pure research that the Survey had taken under Thorn could not be reversed in the political and economic climate of the times and Peirce and Mendenhall soon reached an impasse.⁸

Peirce had good reasons for being discontented with the Survey’s administration, especially under Thorn, but his unveiled discontent got him off to a bad start with Mendenhall, who regarded Peirce as uncooperative and set in his ways. It did not help that Peirce had been working for over three years to prepare the results of extensive field operations conducted from 1882 through 1886 for publication in what was expected to be his second major gravity report. This report had been a major source of conflict between Peirce and Thorn and it is certain that Thorn told Mendenhall that it was long overdue. Mendenhall would also have been aware that Peirce was working as a major contributor to the Century Dictionary project, then in its most demanding production phase, and that Peirce may have had too many irons in the fire. And Mendenhall would have known Thorn’s reservations about the quality of the overdue report and read about Peirce’s decision to reverse “the usual order of presentation in a scientific memoir by stating the conclusions before the premises.” When Peirce finally submitted his completed report on 20 November 1889, Mendenhall decided to have it reviewed for “form, matter, meaning and suitability for publication.” When Peirce and Juliette returned to Milford the following spring, Peirce had still heard nothing back from Mendenhall about plans for publication.

An exchange of letters between Mendenhall and Peirce in July illustrates the impasse they had reached. On 30 June, Mendenhall wrote to Peirce asking him for a definite value for “the force of gravity” for Ithaca, the place of one of the four main gravity stations dealt with in the report that was under review. Physics students at Cornell needed this figure as a constant for their laboratory work. All of relevance that Mendenhall could find in Peirce’s report was a “nearly unintelligible use of the so-called ‘logarithmic second’ which … renders the discussion uselessly and unnecessarily obscure.” Peirce replied quickly to explain how to derive the desired value from the data in his report; he lamented that the result would be at least one ten thousandth too small because he had not received the new pendulums he had requested for flexure corrections (3 July 1890), and wrote later to criticize Mendenhall’s conception of gravity as a force “calling for expression in dynes” (22 July 1890). Peirce argued that gravity should really be understood as a measure of acceleration and strongly defended his use of logarithmic seconds. Mendenhall replied that his disagreement with Peirce was not one that could be easily settled and gave Peirce a warning: “When acting for the public … one must be guided by the general consensus of opinion of those generally admitted to be the highest authorities; personal preferences and especially any weakness towards ‘eccentricity’ must often give way” (24 July 1890). In the coming months, Mendenhall would weigh Peirce’s obvious strengths as a physical scientist against his “weakness toward eccentricity.”

One of Peirce’s first compositions after returning to Milford, possibly finished just prior to his return, was “Familiar Letters about The Art of Reasoning” (sel. 1). It is not certain what Peirce had in mind for this paper, dated 15 May 1890, but, given the title of the piece, it might have been intended as a lesson for his correspondence course in logic, a course in the “art of reasoning” he planned to resume after his return to Milford. Peirce may have had something else in mind, perhaps a series of letters on logic for a newspaper or magazine or maybe a new kind of arithmetic textbook that would use pedagogical methods anchored in a more sophisticated understanding of reasoning processes at work in counting, adding, and multiplying. His reference to Thomas Murner, famous for his success in teaching logic to weak students through the use of cards, would seem to bear that out. For two years Peirce had been surveying arithmetic textbooks with the idea of writing one of his own.⁹ And, spurred by his research at the Astor Library, he had begun amassing an ample collection of old arithmetics. By 1893 he would work out a deal with Edward Hegeler, the owner of the Open Court Company, to finance an innovative arithmetic textbook. “Familiar Letters” is an example of a writing that can hardly be appreciated unless readers perform the operations they are called on to perform. Even though Peirce was teaching card tricks, he intended to be teaching something more general about reasoning and a modern reader is likely to notice that the mechanical operations of multiplying and adding with cards are suggestive of early computing operations. Peirce’s admonition that “one secret of the art of reasoning is to think” where he seems clearly to regard “thinking” as an activity, like manipulating cards according to general rules, is reminiscent of the “new conception of reasoning” expressed in his 1877 “Fixation of Belief” as “something which was to be done with one’s eyes open, by manipulating real things instead of words and fancies” (W3: 243–44).

Some other writings from this period seem clearly to have been intended as lessons for Peirce’s correspondence course; sels. 17 and 18 derive from lessons Peirce used in his correspondence course three years earlier (see especially W6, sels. 1 and 6). Precisely when Peirce resumed working with them is not certain but we know that he had not given up the idea that he could make this course pay and that within a few months he would again advertise for students. There are a number of related manuscripts, at least two of which, with sel. 18, were composed as opening chapters for a book on logic, probably intended as a text for Peirce’s course but plausibly also as a general logic text to parallel what his “Primary Arithmetic” would do for teaching arithmetic.¹⁰ In “Boolian Algebra. First Lection” (sel. 18), Peirce gives Boole a rare compliment, namely, that Boole’s idea for the algebra of logic “sprang from the brain of genius, motherless” so far “as any mental product may.” Before taking up the elements and rules of his algebra of logic, Peirce reviewed some of the deficiencies of ordinary language for exact reasoning: its “deficiency of pronouns,” its “feeble marks of punctuation,” and its inadequacy for diagrammatic reasoning. Peirce’s modification of “the Boolian calculus,” what he here calls a “propositional algebra,” was intended to overcome these deficiencies of ordinary language. It is noteworthy that Peirce has the idea of expressing the truth of propositions in degrees “as temperatures are expressed by degrees of the thermometer scale,” although he goes on to say that there are only two points on this scale, true and false.

In Peirce’s 19 June “Review of Théodule Ribot’s Psychology of Attention” (sel. 2), his third book review of 1890 to appear in the Nation and the first during the period covered by this volume, Peirce drew together ideas that would tie several lines of thought from his philosophical work of the W6 period to the systematic philosophy he was about to take up for the Monist. Born like Peirce in 1839, Ribot became the leading French psychologist of his time. He argued for the separation of psychology from philosophy and introduced his compatriots to the “new psychology” then emerging in both Germany and England. Ribot was instrumental in promoting an experimental approach in psychology, and though Peirce could not but approve of this modern trend, he saw in Ribot’s enthusiasm for it the workings of a metaphysical confusion. In offering his critical assessment, Peirce previews a number of important ideas that will be developed especially in his third Monist paper, “The Law of Mind” (sel. 27). Casting doubt on Ribot’s emphasis on a physiological conception of mental association, Peirce objects that it is the “welding together of feelings” that “seems to be the only law of mental action” and he argues that instead of focusing on “attention” (an “unscientific word”), which Ribot wrongly viewed as principally inhibitory, Ribot would have done much better by recognizing the centrality of the positive role played by “emotional association, aided in certain cases by acts of inhibition.” Peirce rejects Ribot’s monism, the monism of the “physiological psychologists” which is put forward as a psycho-physical double-aspect theory, “a happy compromise between materialism and spiritualism,” though it is really a materialism that makes mind “a specialization of matter.” Peirce objects that “common sense will never admit that feeling can result from any mechanical contrivance,” insisting that “sound logic refuses to accept the makeshift hypothesis that consciousness is an ‘ultimate’ property of matter in general or of any chemical substance.” The school of physiological psychologists, in “forever exaggerating the resemblances of psychical and physical phenomena, forever extenuating their differences,” remains blind to the distinction between the law of mechanics and the law of mind. Still, this is not an absolute distinction, and the road toward a more balanced metaphysics is to acknowledge that there are physical phenomena “in which gentle forces seem to act” and others “which seem to violate the principle of energy,” such appearances being due to the action of probability.

Sometime in the spring of 1890, Peirce composed the short paper (possibly a fragment), “The Non-Euclidean Geometry Made Easy” (sel. 6), likely in connection with his plan to produce textbooks in logic and mathematics, or perhaps to summarize for expository purposes the theoretical advantages afforded by a clarified non-Euclidean perspective. As with Peirce’s review of Ribot, much of the substance of this paper would soon find its way into his Monist articles, especially, in this case, the first one, “Architecture of Theories” (sels. 22 and 23). Peirce had noticed early in his career that philosophical logic tends to be modeled after the example of geometry and by 1865 he had pointed out that a functioning geometry requires the introduction of a “purely arbitrary element,” a “point of view,” and that although one point of view may be “more natural than another,” given human capacities, that is not the case for pure mathematics (W1: 268) where, as he would say later, “the great democracy of may-bes” holds sway (W6: 251). By 1870, Peirce would appeal to non-Euclidean geometry in support of his revolutionary logic of relatives (W2: 416–17). While teaching at Johns Hopkins, Peirce lectured on non-Euclidean geometry (W4: 486), and in his pivotal JHU Metaphysical Club lecture, “Design and Chance” (17 Jan. 1884), he announced that the Darwinian turn had started a new “epoch of intellectual history” marked by a “tendency to question the exact truth of axioms,” and he suggested that non-Euclidean geometry might be relevant for interstellar measurements (W4: 544–46).

During the decade following his Metaphysical Club lecture, Peirce became increasingly interested in the theory of space. In 1885, in his review of William Kingdon Clifford’s Common Sense of the Exact Sciences, Peirce wrote that to form “clear ideas concerning the non-Euclidean geometry” we must understand that “the geometrical conception of space itself is a fiction”—that there is no definite meaning to the conceptions “absolute position” and “absolute velocity” and that “space only exists under the form of general laws of position” (W5: 255). It was up to the philosophers of science to question why our “natural idea” of space came to be what it was and to consider whether observations could be made that were better explained by alternative geometries. In his “Logic and Spiritualism” essay of 1890, Peirce, marveling at the clarity, beauty, and incomparable scientific significance of the common sense conception of space, mused that if some of the principles of the geometry defining it could be shown to be measurably erroneous, it “would be the most remarkable [discovery] ever made by science” (W6: 388).

So we find Peirce, in sel. 6, entertaining doubts about the exact correctness of our “a priori or natural idea of space,” and of any other natural ideas, and emphasizing the need for correction “by comparison with observations.” This fallibilistic stance gives warrant to non-Euclidean approaches to geometry, of which Peirce considers two: that space is immeasurable, or infinite, but limited (hyperbolic) or that it is measurable, or finite, but unlimited (spherical or elliptic). These two alternatives, along with Euclidean geometry—that space is both immeasurable and unlimited (parabolic)—will be taken up again in “Architecture of Theories” (sels. 22 and 23) as conceptual “materials” for the construction of systematic philosophy.

Two other short working pieces included in this volume were probably composed during the first half of 1890: “Notes on the Question of the Existence of an External World” (sel. 19) and “Note on Kant’s Refutation of Idealism” (sel. 20). Both of these selections revisit Kant’s famous “refutation of idealism,”¹¹ and sel. 20, which glosses on Kant’s claim that “his argument beats idealism at its own game,” suggests a more direct and simpler method of refutation. In sel. 19, Peirce states that if the idealists were right to assume that only the inner present can be immediately perceived, then the impossibility of perceiving the external immediately would indeed entail, “as a matter of logic,” that the existence of anything external was inadmissible.¹² The problem, however, is that the idea that we can only immediately perceive what is present in the mind is “a vulgar prejudice” parallel to the idea that “a thing cannot act where it is not.” For Peirce, this idea, by appealing to a naïve view of space and time, helps underscore how misleading inductions from ordinary experience can be. In sel. 20, he adds that we can only apprehend our own ideas as flowing in time, and since neither the past nor the future are immediately present, our perception of the internal can be no more immediate than our perception of the external. If idealism is so easily beaten at its own game, then, it is because its conception of the present fails to grasp the continuity of experience.

Why Peirce took up Kant’s refutation of idealism at this time can only be guessed at, but just two years earlier Peirce had been engaged with related theories of Kant’s for his “Guess at the Riddle,” and his reflections on space and time had been invigorated by William James’s 1887 paper in Mind on “The Perception of Space” (see W6: xliv) and probably also by James’s 1886 paper in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, “The Perception of Time,” which developed E. R. Clay’s idea of “the specious present.” Perhaps also of relevance is that in 1889 Edward Caird published in Glasgow his two-volume work on The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, which included a thorough treatment of Kant’s refutation of idealism that would likely have caught Peirce’s eye. Caird’s book was reviewed by A. Seth in Mind in April 1890 with specific mention of Kant’s refutation—discussions of Kant’s refutation of idealism were not uncommon in the literature of the day. Any of the above could have rekindled Peirce’s interest in Kant’s ideas about the present and his refutation of idealism. Soon after composing these notes, Peirce would again take up his Kant-inspired cosmology project, and the nature of the present would again play an important role.

On 1 July 1890, Francis C. Russell, a Chicago judge and an admirer of Peirce, wrote to him a letter that was more consequential for the remaining course of his life than anyone could have foreseen. Russell wrote at the request of Paul Carus to invite Peirce to contribute an article on logic for Edward C. Hegeler’s new philosophy journal, The Monist: “It is the intention of the management of the journal to make it the vehicle of such utterances only as shall be competent to the topics treated and they expect to pay for their articles after a measure in some degree fitted to the dignity of the writers and the customary recognition of the value of their productions.” Hegeler was a wealthy industrialist with a zeal for reconciling religion with science. He was an evolutionist who rejected what he regarded as Spencer’s hedonism and who embraced a quasi-Platonic idea that the process of growth is a teleological movement toward the fulfillment of higher forms. He was a fervent monist who believed that “God and the universe are one … the continuous ALL of which man is a limited part and phenomenon.”¹³ Hegeler supported religiously radical groups, including the Free Religious Association that Francis Ellingwood Abbot had helped found in Boston in 1867, but he objected to the agnosticism of many secular freethinkers, regarding it “as a form of defeatism and an obstacle to scientific progress.”¹⁴ In 1886, Hegeler reached an agreement with Benjamin Franklin Underwood, the editor of the Free Religious Association’s periodical, The Index, to start jointly a new monthly magazine to advance his monistic philosophy; Hegeler would be the publisher and Underwood the editor. The Free Religious Association ceased publication of the Index, which Abbot had founded and edited for ten years before Underwood, and signed over its subscriber base to Hegeler and Underwood for their new monthly to be called The Open Court. The premier issue appeared on 17 February 1887, ten days before Paul Carus, an advocate of free religion and a contributor to the Index, arrived in Chicago to serve as Hegeler’s secretary and to tutor his children, but with a vague understanding that he would play some part in editing the Open Court. By the end of 1887, Underwood was gone and Carus was editor. In the fall of 1890, Hegeler and Carus launched their new quarterly journal, The Monist, to be “devoted to the establishment and illustration of the principles of monism in philosophy, exact science, religion, and sociology.”¹⁵ The Open Court Publishing Company now published the monthly magazine, The Open Court, the quarterly journal, The Monist, and a line of books.

Russell had written to Peirce the previous year (22 Jan. 1889) to tell him about Hegeler’s and Carus’s plans to launch the Monist and to let him know that he had given a bound set of Peirce’s “Illustrations of the Logic of Science” to Carus, whose intellect he admired and who he supposed could do Peirce some good. He said that after giving Carus Peirce’s papers he thought he could “discern the influence its perusal and study has had upon him.” That Carus had seen fit to ask Russell to ask Peirce to contribute to his new journal was perhaps influence enough for Peirce, especially given Russell’s intimation that Carus paid well. Russell suggested that Peirce consider contributing an article “on the lines of your introductory lecture at Johns Hopkins University” (W4: 378–82) and he complimented Peirce by noting that “Everybody is talking about scientific method and yet outside of yourself no one so far as I can see has any definite conception as to what that scientific method consists in.” The following day, Carus himself wrote to assure Peirce of the quality of his new quarterly: “I wish that … our most prominent American authors should be represented and shall be greatly indebted to you for an article from your pen on ‘Modern Logic’ or some similar topic—perhaps ‘Logic and Ethics.’ You may choose any theme with which you are engaged at present” (2 July 1890).

Peirce replied to Russell at once, thanking him and agreeing to contribute but he wrote that “[o]ne can profitably put but very little into a single article” and he said he would prefer to write “a number” of articles: “I would write in a general way about the ways in which great ideas become developed, not about verification and assurance, to which my Johns Hopkins lectures used chiefly to be directed…. A philosophy is not a thing to be compiled item by item, promiscuously. It should be constructed architectonically” (3 July 1890). Peirce told Russell that he had studied this subject out in his “minute way,” that he would like to give “some general notion of [his] results,” and that he usually was paid “$25 a thousand words.” On 19 July, Peirce replied directly to Carus agreeing to write an article of 4000 words entitled “The Architecture of Theories.”

This was the beginning of an association rivaled in importance for income only by the Peirce-Garrison connection and it would become by far the most important outlet for Peirce’s mature philosophy. Carus took a special interest in Peirce and for twenty years, notwithstanding some periods of acrimony, he did more to promote Peirce’s philosophy than anyone. Between 1891 and 1910, Carus persuaded Hegeler to publish nineteen of Peirce’s articles (thirteen in the Monist and six in the Open Court), and many of Peirce’s unpublished writings were written for Carus. The important role played by Carus in Peirce’s later life, in particular the fact that after 1890 Peirce wrote most of his best work for the Monist, is what led Max Fisch to call that time Peirce’s Monist period.

Peirce was hoping to turn Carus’s offer into an opportunity to publish the general substance of his unfinished “Guess at the Riddle” (W6, sels. 22–28). Chapter 1 of that work had begun with a discussion of how to “erect a philosophical edifice” that would “outlast the vicissitudes of time,” and to achieve that goal Peirce posited his three categories as the core conceptions to follow out “in a sort of game of follow my leader from one field of thought into another” (W6: 168, 174–75). In like manner, “The Architecture of Theories” would explain how one should go about the business of constructing a philosophy and would rearticulate in summary form much of the cosmological project Peirce had sketched in his “Guess.” As he wrote to Christine Ladd-Franklin in August 1891, “my chief avocation in the last ten years has been to develop my cosmology.”¹⁶ This was the intellectual work that continued to excite him and it provided the conceptual link for many seemingly detached writings.

Three selections included in this volume help link Peirce’s “Guess at the Riddle” with his Monist papers. “Six Lectures of Hints toward a Theory of the Universe” (sel. 3) outlines a set of lectures that incorporate the vision of Peirce’s “Guess” and pick up themes from “Logic and Spiritualism.” On 12 July, G. Stanley Hall wrote in response to Peirce’s request to give a paid course of lectures at Clark University to say that no decision could be made until September but that a positive answer was unlikely. Nevertheless, Hall wrote, “Such a course as you outline … would interest & stimulate every man on the ground in a most admirable way.” That the course of lectures Peirce wanted to deliver was that outlined in selection 3 is plausible though not demonstrable, and since the time of Peirce’s request to Hall coincided with the Monist invitation, the “Six Lectures” on cosmology could be viewed as prefiguring Peirce’s plan for his Monist series.

Another closely related selection is Peirce’s “Sketch of a New Philosophy” (sel. 4). It may be that this “Sketch” was intended as a reformulation of the ideas of the “Guess” for a lecture, or perhaps for a series of articles or for a book, but given the many conceptual overlaps with the Monist papers, it may have been drawn up to help organize the Monist project. Or, since Peirce had recently reviewed a book by Ribot, who was a major proponent of what had been dubbed the “new psychology” (alluded to in topics 10 and 11 of the “Sketch”), Peirce may have decided to follow the trend and sketch the kind of “method” it would take to launch a “new philosophy.” In his 3 July acceptance letter to Russell, Peirce summarized what he would include in his first article and pointed out what would be necessary “even in so much as drawing the general sketch of the structure to be erected.” Again, selection 4 may well be the “sketch” Peirce had in mind. One interesting difference between the outline of Peirce’s “Six Lectures” and his “Sketch” is that in “Six Lectures” Peirce included the topic of “the development of Consciousness, individual, social, macrocosmic.” In his “Sketch” this topic became “Consciousness. Development of God,” perhaps giving a clue as to Peirce’s conception of God at that time. It is also interesting that in the ninth topic in his “Sketch,” Peirce refers to the “Darwinian hypothesis” as a “skeleton key to philosophy” that can also open “a theory of evolution applicable to the inorganic world.” Although the “Darwinian hypothesis” plays a key role in Peirce’s Monist papers, its limitations will be made there more prominent.

The third selection clearly related to “The Architecture of Theories,” either as an independent study or as a preliminary attempt to work out part of his argument, is “On Framing Philosophical Theories” (sel. 5). Here Peirce discusses the logic of philosophical theorizing and the nature of the conceptions to be used in a theory of the universe, a central concern of his “Architecture of Theories.” Peirce’s brief but eloquent treatment of logic is of considerable interest. He begins by asking if there are not two kinds of logic, an “unphilosophical logic” which, like mathematics, has not “the least need of philosophy in doing its work” and a more developed logic remodeled “in the light of philosophy.” The question anticipates Peirce’s later struggles to disentangle logic from mathematics and, to some extent, his distinction between logica utens and logica docens. Another key distinction Peirce introduces is that between logic as λογος, which “embodies the Greek notion that reasoning cannot be done without language,” and as ratio, which embodies the Latin idea that “reasoning is an affair of computation, requiring, not words, but some kind of diagram.”¹⁷ Peirce claims that “modern formal logic” takes the Latin view and holds that words, though necessary, “play but a secondary role in the process; while the diagram, or icon, capable of being manipulated and experimented upon, is all-important.”

A fourth selection, Peirce’s working “Notes on Consciousness” (sel. 21), might also have been jotted down to help Peirce organize some of the thoughts on consciousness from his “Guess” for “Architecture of Theories” and other Monist papers, including “The Law of Mind.” Many of the ideas listed—that consciousness is not a property of a mere mechanism but is a state of nerve matter, that “ultimate facts” are illogical, that feelings spread, and so on—are certainly key ideas Peirce will develop in the metaphysical series. It is interesting that many of Peirce’s notes also relate to topics discussed by William James in the first volume of his Principles of Psychology, in particular the chapter on “The Stream of Thought,” almost as though they could have been drawn up while reading his book—but James’s Psychology wouldn’t appear until sometime in September.¹⁸

Peirce spent many hours in July working on his opening article for the Monist. He finished an initial version of “The Architecture of Theories” (sel. 22) toward the end of that month, and he spent the month of August, as time permitted, revising and expanding it. Peirce’s plan at this stage was to begin much like he had in his “Guess,” with an account of his categories, and then to consider other “maxims of logic” that “require attention in the prolegomena of philosophy.” Then he took up mathematics, “the science which, next after logic, may be expected to throw the most light upon philosophy.” Among the mathematical conceptions Peirce examined were imaginary quantities, the absolute, and space—much from the context of non-Euclidean geometry. He then took up dynamics, remarking that “the natural ideas of the human mind tend to approximate to the truth of nature, because the mind has been formed under the influence of dynamical laws” and that “logical considerations show that if there is no tendency for natural ideas to be true, there can be no hope of ever reaching true inductions and hypotheses.” Finally Peirce moved to psychology, where he identified three “elementary phenomena of mind” as feeling (which does not essentially involve consciousness proper), the sensations of reaction, and general conceptions. To have a general conception is to be “conscious that a connection between feelings is determined by a general rule” or, from another point of view, to be “aware of being governed by a habit.” Peirce concluded this initial version of his first paper with a brief discussion of the law of mind. Sections of the manuscript for this selection are missing so it isn’t known if Peirce considered all of the sciences he would take up in the finished version of “The Architecture of Theories”—where he reversed their order of consideration, treating dynamics first and the categories last.

In his reply to Russell on 3 July, Peirce had mentioned that he had “just written a little notice” of Carus’s Fundamental Problems (Open Court, 1889). He was referring to his review for the Nation (sel. 8) which, perhaps fortunately for Peirce, did not appear until 7 August, well after his agreement with Carus had been settled.¹⁹ Peirce opened his review rather condescendingly by claiming that “The questions touched upon are all those which a young person should have turned over in his mind before beginning the serious study of philosophy” and that the “views adopted” are “average opinions of thoughtful men.” He then criticized Carus’s denial that there has ever been a chaos and he challenged Carus’s claim that the highest laws of nature are identical with the formal laws of thought. Peirce even disapproved of Carus’s and Hegeler’s mission of reconciling religion with science: “to search out [some possible reconciliation, by] dragging religion before the tribunal of free thought, and committing philosophy to finding a given proposition true—is this a wise or necessary proceeding?” Peirce did note with approval that Carus had “correctly rendered” the “views of modern geometers” in holding that “space is not a non-entity, but a real property of things,” but, overall, Peirce’s review was not favorable. According to Kee Soo Shin, Peirce’s review raised doubts about “several important aspects of Carus’s monistic philosophy” and it marked the beginning of a famous controversy between Peirce and Carus that would start in earnest with Carus’s reply to Peirce’s second Monist paper, “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” (sel. 24), and would run throughout 1893.²⁰

Peirce published several other reviews in the Nation throughout this period. His review of the posthumous edition of William S. Jevons’s Pure Logic, and Other Minor Works appeared on 3 July 1890 (sel. 7). Peirce had long been familiar with Jevons’s contributions to logic, even having called on Jevons while in England in 1870 to present him with a copy of his memoir, “Description of a Notation for the Logic of Relatives” (W2, sel. 39), but Peirce had always held mixed views about Jevons’s work. In 1872, in one of his early reviews for the Nation, Peirce expressed respect for Jevons’s originality while voicing a general disappointment with his work (W3, sel. 1). Now again, Peirce gave a mixed review, praising Jevons’s clearness of thought but questioning its power. Peirce praised Jevons for being the first to employ the inclusive form of logical addition but criticized him for not seeing that the copula of inclusion was logically simpler than the copula of identity, and he challenged Jevons’s critique of Mill. Peirce further claimed that Jevons’s logical machine was “in every respect inferior to that of Prof. Allan Marquand,” Peirce’s former student, and went on record with the claim that “the higher kinds of reasoning concerning relative terms cannot (as far as we can yet see) be performed mechanically.”²¹

Peirce’s short review of the first volume of Thomas Muir’s chronological history of The Theory of Determinants (sel. 9) appeared in the 28 August issue of the Nation. Rather than discussing the substance of the book Peirce used about half of his space to comment on history as a genre of scholarship. Only histories of “the human mind,” of “the general development of man and his creations” are of much interest. Biography is too focused on individual achievements and still too “prescientific” to be historically interesting. Histories of mathematics, on the other hand, are attractive, largely because the historical record is continuous, the subject-matter definite, and its development invariably triumphant. Peirce appreciated the way Muir organized his volume around his “ingenious table show[ing] the history of forty-four theorems,” perhaps because Peirce had just been himself amassing a large catalogue of theorems for the Century Dictionary’s corresponding entry. Peirce tellingly regretted, however, that Muir attached more importance to theorems than to methods and ideas.

On 30 August, Peirce sent Carus his finished manuscript, “The Architecture of Theories” (sel. 23). Peirce had finally managed to work out the speculative vision he had been cultivating since 1878, when he published “The Order of Nature” (W3, sel. 64). In a way, “Architecture of Theories” was an outline of, or a prolegomenon to, what Peirce conceived to be the philosophy of the future, a systematic philosophy reconciling metaphysics with the most up-todate science and rejecting, at least implicitly, armchair philosophy. In this opening paper for his Monist series, Peirce undertook to find conceptions that “ought to form the brick and mortar of a philosophical system.” He began with a survey of several successful sciences, including dynamics (physics), biology, psychology, cosmology, and mathematics, looking for basic conceptions important for philosophy. His survey recapitulated, to some extent, his review in his “Initial Version” (sel. 22), though in reverse order.

Among the key conceptions Peirce considered were the law of the conservation of energy, the linked conceptions of force and law that had given rise to “the mechanical philosophy,” three conceptions of evolution (Darwinian, Lamarckian, and Kingian), three conceptions of space (that it is unlimited and immeasurable, immeasurable but limited, or unlimited but finite), mathematical conceptions of the infinite, the absolute, and continuity, and the fundamental conceptions of one, two, three. Peirce’s examination of these and other conceptions, especially the metaphysical conceptions of chance, law, and the tendency to take habits, led him to some of his signature ideas: that “the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and for uniformity in general is to suppose them results of evolution,” that intellectual power is “facility in taking habits,” that “the one primary and fundamental law of mental action [the growth of mind] consists in a tendency to generalization,” or the spreading of feeling, and, finally, that of the three kinds of monism, the “one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind.” This complex of conceptions led Peirce to a cosmology that posited an original chaos of feeling from which, by pure chance happenings, a generalizing tendency took hold and habit started to form and the world grew more regular and law-governed.

A principal concern of Peirce’s, previewed a few months earlier in his review of Ribot’s Psychology (sel. 2), was to show the limits of mechanical causation and the need for a conception of growth that was non-reversible and not merely the statistical outcome of billions of physical interactions as with the behavior of gases. The cosmological philosophy Peirce was aiming for would not sanction the idea that causal explanation is constrained by the causal closure of the physical. Peirce’s growing sense of mission to develop a comprehensive philosophy that could challenge and hopefully supplant the mechanical philosophy led him to look at the history of ideas in new ways. Though Helmholtz’s discovery of the law of the conservation of energy may have been the first great achievement of modern science, Peirce now looked back with renewed interest to Galileo, who had taken the first step of modern scientific thought with the inauguration of dynamics, and asked how Galileo could have accomplished such a thing. Peirce concluded that Galileo had depended more on common sense and il lume naturale, a “natural prompting” of a mind “formed under the influence of phenomena governed by the laws of mechanics,” than on experiment.²² This seemed fully compatible with Peirce’s objective idealism and with his ideas about the growth of law and the growth of mind and would frequently be invoked in coming years as he became more and more intrigued with the centrality of abductive cognition. In bringing to a close his survey of the “elementary ideas [that] ought to enter into our view of the universe,” Peirce singled out chance and continuity as key conceptions necessary for constructing a philosophy informed by and fully consistent with modern science. These two conceptions would be examined in detail in his next two Monist papers (sels. 24–27).

After finishing his first paper for the Monist, Peirce found time to review Alexander C. Fraser’s Locke for the Nation; the review appeared in the 25 Sept. 1890 issue. Peirce began his review (sel. 10) with a reference to Galton’s “eminent persons” and an indirect reference to his own study of great men (W5: 26–106). Peirce discounted the importance of heredity for producing great men but, perhaps in an allusion to his own situation, he acknowledged the importance of “gifts of fortune” and quoted Palissy who held that “the majority of geniuses are crushed under adverse circumstances.”²³ Peirce gave Locke as an example of a man who attained true greatness even though his family did not show distinguished ability. Beyond his intelligence and other qualities, the key to Locke’s greatness, in Peirce’s eyes, was his “public spirit,” “the benevolent wish to improve the condition of his country and the world.” It was that spirit of devotion that inspired all that Locke wrote and that explains the “vast influence” of Locke’s philosophy on the development of Europe. To those who would question Locke’s merits or seek to reduce him to a “mouthpiece of the ideas which were destined to govern the world,” Peirce answers that there is nothing greater “than so to anticipate the vital thought of the coming age as to be mistaken for its master.” Locke’s grand lesson, for Peirce, was to discount two of the methods of settling belief—that of authority and the a priori method—and to invite men to think independently, critically, and anew. It may interest readers of this volume that Peirce concluded his review by supporting Fraser’s plea for a new edition of Locke’s works: “this great man, whose utterances still have their lessons for the world, with wholesome influences for all plastic minds, should be studied in a complete, correct, and critical edition.”

During the summer of 1890, Mendenhall had weighed his options for resuming gravity operations and had concluded that the Survey could no longer afford the traditional European-style pendulum operations Peirce had introduced to U.S. science. Under the influence of Robert von Sterneck, a geodesist from Austria-Hungary, Mendenhall decided to reprogram the Survey’s gravity operations by basing them on the use of short half-seconds invariable pendulums of his own design that could be easily transported from station to station and operated at a fraction of the cost of Peirce’s operations.²⁴ On October 1st, Mendenhall wrote to Peirce to let him know that he was “contemplating a renewal of activity in Gravitation work with field operations under the direction of Assistant Preston” and that “to reduce greatly the time and expense” he would make use of the new half-seconds pendulums.

Peirce was not pleased. Not only was Mendenhall indirectly giving him notice that his leadership of gravity research would not be restored, but also that the world-class research operation Peirce had built up over the years would be abandoned. The radical change of apparatus and technique would inevitably tend to disconnect the results of future research from those of the past—Peirce’s for the most part. Peirce might have suspected that this decision would influence Mendenhall’s judgment about the value of the long report he had submitted the previous November. In fact, Mendenhall had heard back from at least one reviewer: Simon Newcomb. Newcomb acknowledged that the report was “a careful and conscientious piece of work” but he advised that Peirce’s “inversion of the logical order” of the presentation made it impossible to comprehend. He recommended that the report not be published unless Peirce reconstructed it “in logical order” (28 April 1890). Of course Peirce did not know how things stood with his report; what he knew was that his leadership and his legacy were being threatened by Mendenhall’s changes.

Peirce held little back. He replied at once (2 Oct. 1890) that “[t]o go back to a non-reversible bar pendulum would be an unintelligent and ostrich-like policy,—a way of concealing from oneself any source of constant error.” He insisted that there were factors more important than time and money relevant to “the economy of the subject”: “One of these is accuracy; for if this is not attained, the work is useless; and the time and money, however little, are thrown away. The other is assurance of accuracy; for however accurate the work may be, if we do not positively know that it is so, it is little better than if it were not so.” Peirce added that more than a year earlier he had shared his own plan for conducting pendulum operations quickly and inexpensively (occupying three stations a week), and that that plan should be adopted and he should be in charge. Mendenhall asked in reply to see the details of Peirce’s plan but reminded him that it was not accuracy that he wanted to sacrifice but unnecessary refinement.²⁵

The inaugural issue of the Monist was published in October without Peirce’s “Architecture” article, but Peirce celebrated the event with an appreciative note in the Nation (sel. 11): “the establishment of a new philosophical quarterly which may prove a focus for all the agitation of thought that struggles today to illuminate the deepest problems with light from modern science, is an event worthy of particular notice.” He wrote that the first number opened “with good promise,” the articles having been authored by reputed European and American psychologists, biologists, and physicists with a keen interest in the philosophical questions of the day. Peirce questioned what the editors meant by “monism.” Referencing Carus’s explanation in his Fundamental Problems where monism was offered in opposition to a two-substance dualism and as an alternative to both idealism and materialism, Peirce warned that “metaphysicians who call themselves Monists are usually materialists sans le savoir.” Here was already a public intimation that Hegeler’s program might be based on a philosophical misconception.

As 1890 drew toward a close, Peirce knew that the coming year would bring an end to his work for the Century Company and that his Coast Survey position was not secure. It was critical to find alternative means for his and Juliette’s livelihood, and he would launch himself into various pursuits, many of them seemingly haphazard or short-lived. It appears, for instance, that he began to develop an investment scheme that involved rapid transit out of New York City. On 12 November 1890, Samuel Dimmick Mott, an inventor who had worked for Thomas Edison, wrote to say that he was sorry to have missed Peirce when he tried to see him to discuss the “rapid transit matter.” Mott then explained expected costs and gains for a project to construct a rapid transit rail line between New York and Philadelphia and told Peirce that if he could “succeed in doing anything in my behalf with good parties I will cheerfully make it worth your while, by agreeing to give you 10%.” This railroad scheme, which ultimately went nowhere, was only one of several investment or marketing ideas that Peirce pursued around this time. On 22 November, his brother Herbert wrote: “With regard to your inventions I am immediately in the way of taking them up and doing the best possible with them and should be glad to do so—I have a good patent lawyer …” Among those inventions there was a barrel head, which Herbert recommended that Peirce tried to sell to a barrel maker, and there was a table of logarithms (see sel. 14), which Herbert believed could be marketed through a publisher and was more likely to yield “immediate returns.” Except for a brief discussion of his experiments with logarithmic scales in a letter from Peirce to Mendenhall (4 Feb. 1891), there is no further record concerning these inventions until 1894 when Peirce unsuccessfully tried to get Ginn and Company to publish his logarithmic table.²⁶

During the years of Peirce’s most intensive work for the Century Dictionary, his research on definitions would frequently carry over into other writings. As a result, it is sometimes difficult to determine whether some of the shorter, often fragmentary, manuscripts of this period are preparatory to a definition or are independent studies stimulated by his lexicographical research.²⁷ “Note on Pythagorean Triangles” (sel. 13), is a good example. This short selection might be a variant form of Peirce’s definition of “Pythagorean triangle” for the dictionary or it might be only the beginning of a paper based on the research for that definition.

During the first half of the 1890s, Peirce undertook quite a number of textbooks, often simultaneously, but because of lost manuscripts and reorganizations on Peirce’s part, a precise recounting of his textbook projects may no longer be possible. Among the books mentioned by Peirce in his correspondence are a primary arithmetic, a practical arithmetic, a vulgar arithmetic, an arithmetic for young readers, a geometry, a projective geometry, a revision and expansion of his father’s 1873 Elementary Treatise on Plane and Solid Geometry, a trigonometry, and a topology—much of which would be reshaped into two books, the “New Elements of Geometry” (1894–95) and the “New Elements of Mathematics” (1895–96). Peirce also worked on several different logic books during the same period, including “The Light of Logic,” “The Short Logic,” and volume two of his proposed “Principles of Philosophy” on the “Theory of Demonstrative Reasoning.” And there were other book projects not aimed at the classroom. It is evident that Peirce turned to writing as one of his main hopes for increasing his annual income to a sufficient level and that textbooks fit centrally into his plans.

Several manuscripts listed in the Chronological Catalog for 1890, including two W8 selections, may belong to one of these book projects.²⁸ In “Logical Studies of the Theory of Numbers” (sel. 15), a short document that continues earlier work on number theory,²⁹ Peirce plans to investigate whether a proof procedure can be found for “higher arithmetic, so that we can see in advance precisely how a given proposition is to be demonstrated.” This is equivalent to asking whether there is an algorithm for finding solutions to equations in number theory, and in raising that question Peirce anticipates, in a more general way, David Hilbert’s “Tenth Problem,” posed in 1900 at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris, of determining whether there is an algorithm for solutions to Diophantine equations.³⁰ Peirce probably aimed to translate such equations into Boolean algebra, but the paper stops a long way short of showing how he would have actually proceeded. In writing it, Peirce was perhaps stimulated by his recent work on the definition of “number” for the Century Dictionary, or he might have conceived it as preliminary work toward a foundational chapter for a mathematics textbook. “Promptuarium of Analytical Geometry” (sel. 16), on the other hand, seems clearly to have been intended to introduce students to analytical geometry and is very likely to have been written for a textbook on geometry.³¹ It was intended to demonstrate to the student how “the whole theory of lines is exactly like that of points.”

As the year came to an end, Peirce’s thoughts turned to personal matters— although not exclusively: he wrote a very long letter to Newcomb, apparently the day, perhaps the night, before Christmas, defending his views of infinitesimals and limits. Around this time, maybe on Christmas Day, Peirce drew up a list of all of the places where Juliette had spent her Christmases beginning in 1857—presumably the year of her birth. This is something they would have done together. And maybe in turning his attention to a record of events in Juliette’s life he was stimulated to jot down what he could recollect of his own beginnings, as we find in “My Life” (sel. 12). It is curious that he says he could remember nothing before he could talk and yet the earliest memories he recounts seem to be quite sensory, even imagistic.

1891 began auspiciously for Peirce with the publication of “The Architecture of Theories,” the lead article for the January issue of the Monist. The issue was announced in leading periodicals and free copies were widely distributed to advertise the journal. The Open Court, in noticing that issue, described Peirce as “one of the subtlest thinkers and logicians not only of America, but of the whole globe.”³² The January issue of Book Chat, published by Brentano’s, reported that:³³

The January number of The Monist contains a most masterful philosophical paper on “The Architecture of Theories,” the first of a series from the pen of Prof. Charles S. Peirce, formerly lecturer on Logic at Johns Hopkins University, and well known as an original thinker. Prof. Peirce has heretofore written mostly upon the most recondite themes of Logic and Mathematics, but in this paper he undertakes, for the first time, to sketch out his general philosophical system, and he does so with a scope and competence that are truly singular. He breaks ground for his foundations in strata that far underlie any heretofore chosen for that purpose, and shows the outlines of a philosophy at once all-embracing and organic. The series, it is expected, will create considerable commotion in the philosophical world when its iconoclastic constructiveness shall be realized.

Writing to Carus on 12 January, Peirce told him that his views were “the fruit of long studies” and that he didn’t “expect or desire people to fall in” with his views at once. He welcomed Carus’s criticism of his conception of chance but explained that he regarded “chance, without any degree of conformity to law … as nonexistence, a mere germ of being in so far as it may acquire habits.”

As the new year began, it is doubtful that Peirce had much time to spare for anything except his enormous work on the Century Dictionary, and his concentration on his definitions would continue through the summer. The fourth volume of the Century had been published in November 1890, so as 1891 got underway, Peirce would have been working on proofs for the fifth volume, covering Q–Stro words, and even though the process was in the proof phase, Peirce was making a lot of revisions and additions that required considerable research. One consequence is that he could not have managed to make marked advances on the continuation of his report on gravity for Mendenhall. The manuscript under review Peirce had submitted more than a year earlier covered all of the technical, theoretical, and historical issues necessary for a comprehensive report on all of his unpublished gravity operations, but it only gave results for four stations: the Smithsonian, Ann Arbor, Madison, and Cornell. Peirce had promised to follow up with a second and concluding part giving the results for the Montreal, Albany, Hoboken, Fort Monroe, St. Augustine, and Key West stations. The reduction of the raw data, for which there were massive quantities, was slow and exceedingly demanding work and, though he had asked more than once for an assistant to be sent to Milford to help with the calculations, he was left to complete the work on his own. Mendenhall had written on 12 December 1890 to ask Peirce for a report on his progress, noting that “it would seem that all of the reductions ought to be finished by this time” and advising that some revisions were necessary before the report already in hand could be published. By that time, Mendenhall had heard back from two other reviewers, Hubert A. Newton, a mathematician from Yale, and mathematician and meteorologist William Ferrel, a Coast Survey Assistant famous for inventing the Survey’s tide predicting machine. Their reviews were mixed. Ferrel had found Peirce’s report to be “unnecessarily complicated” and thought that Peirce had made some mistakes, but he praised Peirce’s method and gave a positive assessment overall.³⁴ Assuming that Peirce would rearrange his report in a more traditional way and add a final section of results from the remaining stations, Mendenhall had been given no grounds for rejecting the report.

On 4 February 1891, Peirce sent Mendenhall an accounting of both his progress and his projections. Indeed, he had completed the reductions and finished the work on the relative force of gravity for all of the stations. But a lot of time and money had gone into determining the absolute force of gravity using the Peirce pendulums and the report on that work could not be completed until Peirce had better data for flexure corrections, which required a new round of pendulum swinging. Peirce assured Mendenhall that these flexure determinations could be “readily made” and that, after the corrections, his report “would give for the first time pretty accurate determinations of the absolute force of gravity.” Peirce also reported on the progress of his work on absolute gravity at Hoboken using the Repsold pendulum, further studies of the motion of the noddy, and his study of the hydrodynamical problems connected with the motion of pendulums. The need to correct for the viscosity of air, and the corresponding need to develop the theory of hydrodynamics for that purpose, were of special interest to Peirce. Peirce concluded by mentioning his work on the distribution of gravity and his studies of “the relative advantages of different methods of computation,” especially his experiments with logarithmic scales (see sel. 14). It is not known how Mendenhall responded to this report. There was some reason for optimism, but it must have been growing increasingly clear that the full value of Peirce’s years of service would require further investment in the Peircean program of gravity research which Mendenhall was planning to abandon. What Peirce needed for his flexure corrections no doubt fit perfectly under what Mendenhall regarded as “unnecessary refinements.”

In March, Peirce began a discussion by correspondence with his former Johns Hopkins student Allan D. Risteen about how to conduct experiments to measure the curvature of space. On 3 March, Risteen wrote that the application of Peirce’s method for determining “the constant of Non-Euclidean space” was “very beautiful,” and on the following day he sent Peirce a list of twentythree “double (or triple) stars to which the spectroscopic method might perhaps be applied.” About three weeks later, on the 24th, Peirce wrote that he intended to go ahead with the investigation: “I propose to see what the evidences of the curvature of space may be. Probably there is no argument on the subject not open to objection. Yet if they all tend one way, it will come to something.” Peirce’s “Methods of Investigating the Constant of Space” (sel. 36), would guide his experiments. On 16 February, at Peirce’s request, Mendenhall had shipped a crate of instruments to him including a theodolite, a wye level, a plane table and alidade, and two telemeters. Presumably, Peirce needed these instruments for his curvature observations.

It was also around this time when Ernst Schröder and his work in logic began to reenter Peirce’s stream of thought. Peirce and Schröder had corresponded during Peirce’s Johns Hopkins years but lost touch afterward. Schröder reestablished contact in February 1890 when he announced to Peirce that the first volume of his Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik (exakte Logik) would soon be published and that he would have a copy sent to Peirce. The volume did not come out until early in 1891, however, and Peirce would have presumably received his copy by March, or would have seen it at the Astor Library, and would have known that Schröder had built on his foundations.³⁵ As Christine Ladd-Franklin observed in her January 1892 review in Mind: “The plan of Dr. Schröder in his book follows closely upon that of Mr. Peirce as set forth in Vol. III. of the American Journal of Mathematics; that is to say, all the formulae are established by analytical proofs based upon the definitions of sum, of product, and of the negative, and upon the axiom of identity and that of the syllogism…. The proofs are, for the most part, the same as those given by Prof. Peirce.” Of course there was a lot more Schröder than Peirce in Schröder’s Logik, and some notable differences of opinion, but Peirce must have been pleased with the promise of Schröder’s book for the future of his line of logical thought. It would not be until 1893, after Peirce had received three more letters from Schröder, that they finally resumed a regular correspondence (by then Peirce had also received the second volume of Schröder’s Logik).

In the spring of 1891 Peirce resumed work on his own “exact logic,” specifically on the algebra of the copula (sels. 31–35). This work was the successor to Peirce’s well-known treatment of the algebra of the copula in his famous American Journal of Mathematics papers of 1880 and 1885,³⁶ papers that had much influenced Schröder. Peirce might have been working up a presentation paper, possibly stimulated to resume his study of the copula because of Schröder’s rejection of the copula as the preferred logical connective. Peirce may also have been working toward a logic book; his 1894 “How to Reason,” more commonly known as his “Grand Logic,” would include a substantial chapter on “The Algebra of the Copula.” It is noteworthy that Peirce began sel. 32 with what is in effect the truth table for the copula of inclusion—or the copula of consequence, as he called it in sel. 33. In these selections, Peirce showed some movement toward a graphical approach that would gain momentum with his recognition in his summer 1892 “Critic of Arguments” papers that there are significant diagrammatic features in logical algebras. Peirce’s attention to operations with parentheses and rules for inserting or omitting propositional variables into or from parenthetical spaces bears some resemblance to later existential-graph operations.³⁷

It was likely in March 1891 that the Peirces decided to name their estate Arisbe. In December 1890, they had settled a claim made against their property by Levi Quick and at last gained clear title to all of their estate. They had finished a first round of home renovations the previous year and now that Charles had begun construction of his philosophical mansion in the pages of the Monist, he and Juliette returned to making grand designs for their house and their estate. They made a survey of Wanda Farm, they unsuccessfully petitioned the township to reroute the public road that passed nearby, and they received confirmation that they held the timber and quarry rights to their property. With the return of hope for the possibilities of life in their Milford home, and perhaps with the idea of symbolizing that the estate was ready to assume a new character, they must have felt that the time was right to settle on a new name. How they came to choose the name “Arisbe” is unknown and has given rise to a lot of speculation. Max H. Fisch for example suggested that Peirce named his Arisbe after the Milesian colony northeast of Troy along the Hellespont in ancient Greece,³⁸ because Miletus was the home of the first Greek philosophers, and the scientific philosophy they aspired to was of a kind with the philosophical program Peirce had inaugurated with his “Guess at the Riddle.” Or perhaps it was because Peirce was familiar with Book IV of Homer’s Illiad, which tells the story of Axylus, whose home on the road through Arisbe was known as a place of welcome to all who passed by. Whatever the source of the inspiration (other explanations exist), the estate became known as “Arisbe” in 1891 and by the fall, the Peirces had begun using “Arisbe” regularly in their correspondence.

The fifth volume of the Century Dictionary was published in May, so sometime before that Peirce turned to the proofs for the sixth and final volume. Under much work pressure, he arranged in mid-May for the Century Company to hire Allan Risteen to help him with the research for his remaining definitions. Risteen worked as a safety engineer for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut, but he was able to spend much of June and July helping Peirce, often traveling to New York or Cambridge for library research. Surviving correspondence indicates that Peirce used Risteen to help with specialized mathematical or scientific terms, working up material for the constellations in the S to Z letter range, for example, but much of Risteen’s effort focused on three words given encyclopedic treatment: theorem, transformation, and triangle. By the middle of July, Risteen had finished his work as Peirce’s special assistant and Peirce must have concluded his work by the end of August. The 18 September 1891 issue of Science carried a notice that the Century Dictionary “is at last completed; the sixth and concluding volume will soon be brought out, the final pages being now on the press.”

In early June, Peirce asked Risteen to add “trees” to his research list of mathematical subjects. It had occurred to Peirce that Arthur Cayley’s diagrammatic method of using branching trees to represent and analyze certain kinds of networks based on heritable or recurrent relations would be useful for his work on the algebra of the copula and his investigation of the permutations of propositional forms by the rearrangement of parentheses. In “On the Number of Dichotomous Divisions: A Problem in Permutations” (sel. 35), Peirce sought to determine how many propositional forms there were given a certain number of copulas (or any other non-associative connective) and a continuous supply of parentheses, and used Cayley’s method of trees to work out his solution.³⁹ When Risteen wrote back on 10 June, his report, illustrated with diagrams, dealt fairly extensively with Cayley’s 1875 article, “On the Analytical Forms called Trees, with Application to the Theory of Chemical Combinations.” This may have given Peirce the idea that Cayley’s tree method for analyzing propositional forms could help him improve on the brief treatment of slime-molds and protoplasm he had given in “Architecture of Theories.” Cayley’s analytical treatment of chemical combinations had the potential to produce a “molecular theory of protoplasm” that was more in tune with the current physics and more straightforwardly subject to a mathematical treatment of continuity. In his fourth Monist article, “Man’s Glassy Essence” (sel. 29), when discussing the “enormous rate” of increase of the numbers of chemical varieties as the number of atoms per molecule increases, Peirce remarked that “Professor Cayley has given a mathematical theory of ‘trees,’ with a view of throwing a light upon such questions.”⁴⁰

One of the writings in this volume that might puzzle readers is Peirce’s two-part unsigned Nation review of William James’s Principles of Psychology (sel. 37), not so much for its content as for its tone. The content itself is not surprising, for it reflects Peirce’s practice of zeroing in on logical inconsistencies committed by authors who should know better, and of displaying and criticizing the hidden metaphysics that underlies naïve anti-metaphysical claims. But Peirce and James were friends of long standing, and Peirce knew that James had spent many hard years writing his first major work. Peirce was one of five persons whom James expressed gratitude to in his preface for intellectual companionship. So it might be surprising that Peirce took James rather severely to task (merciless Royce, on the other hand, would have appreciated the deed, as we shall soon see). After calling into question James’s inexact writing style, Peirce wrote that James’s thought “is highly original, or at least novel,” but it is “originality of the destructive kind,” and that “the book should have been preceded by an introduction discussing the strange positions in logic upon which all its arguments turn.” James, Peirce found, “seems to pin his faith” on “the general incomprehensibility of things,” and he is “materialistic to the core … in a methodical sense”—according to James, once psychology “has ascertained the empirical correlation of the various sorts of thought and feeling with definite conditions of the brain,” it can go no farther. This is part and parcel of the mechanistic philosophy that Peirce had taken it upon himself to refute. Peirce accused James of employing the “principle of the uncritical acceptance of data,” which “would make a complete rupture with accepted methods of psychology and of science in general.” To illustrate his case, Peirce chose in the second part of his review to examine with some care one section of James’s book: “Is Perception Unconscious Inference?” Peirce went to some length to explain in what sense he believed perception to involve unconscious inference and challenged James’s claim that although there is inference in perception there is nothing unconscious about it. According to Peirce, James failed to understand that what was meant by “unconscious inference” was only that “the reasoner is not conscious of making an inference,” and, furthermore, James “forgets his logic” in assigning the inference in perception to “immediate inference,” because it has no middle term, when, in fact, modus ponens is the form it takes in that sort of analysis (which Peirce thinks is wrong, having long concluded that the inference is hypothetical in form). Peirce concluded by characterizing James’s reasoning as circular and virtually self-refuting.

Peirce was one of very few reviewers who did not lavishly praise James’s book as a landmark work for psychology.⁴¹ And yet, he sincerely believed James’s Psychology to probably be “the most important contribution that has been made to the subject for many years” and certainly to be “one of the most weighty productions of American thought.”⁴² Aware of the tone of his review, Peirce clarified that the “directness and sharpness” of his objections “must be understood as a tribute of respect.” That he was truthful is beyond doubt; throughout their lives, Peirce and James practiced candor and forthrightness in their personal relations. Yet what may have been understood to be “intellectual jousting” by James was not recognized as such by many of the Nation readers and naturally not by William’s brother, Henry, or his sister, Alice. Henry wrote to William from Ireland on 31 July to report on Alice’s health—she had been diagnosed with cancer—and said that “the main thing … that has happened to Alice, appears to have been the disgust & indignation experienced by her over the idiotic review of your Psychology in the Nation.” Henry said he didn’t know “what to make of the way the Nation treats, & has mainly always treated us…. It is some vicious, pigheaded parti-pris of Garrison’s.” William wrote back to Henry on 20 August to express his amusement at his and Alice’s indignation over the Nation review. He made light of it, speculating that it was an “eccentric production probably read by no one” and likely the work of “some old fogy.” James added that he “didn’t care a single straw for the matter one way or the other, not even enough to find out who wrote it.” It seems unlikely that James didn’t recognize Peirce’s hand in the review so perhaps he was protecting Peirce from his family’s indignation. James would not have seen the relevance of Peirce’s logical criticisms, at any rate, and few would have.

On 9 July the Nation published an editorial, entitled “A Plain Moral Question,” that addressed “the idea which the Christian Union keeps reiterating … that a minister may honorably remain in the service of a church though repudiating leading articles of its creed.” The Nation praised the open-mindedness of churchmen who could “see how the new wine of modern research is hopelessly bursting the old ecclesiastical wine-skins,” but held that if they could not “conscientiously read the new meanings into the old shibboleths” and in continuing to serve their church would have to flout its creed, to do so would be “an immoral thing.”⁴³ Peirce felt strong disagreement with the Nation’s position and wrote a reply to the editor advocating a fallibilistic stance (sel. 38). Peirce said that to represent a matter of conduct “wherein serious men differ” as a plain moral question was “highly offensive.” Curiously, he argued that while he, a layman, had severed his “visible connection with the Church, and so put [his] soul in jeopardy” because he could not believe “a certain article of faith in the sense in which it is commonly understood,” yet “the opposite course of allegiance to God and His Church” was the duty of ordained ministers. The only possible way that the Church can correct its errors is if the “clergy to whom they become known” acknowledge them to be errors “while remaining in their posts.” Peirce concluded with a prediction that there would be great “changes in religious beliefs during the course of the coming century” and that any denomination that “pins its existence upon an unyielding creed,” as the Nation says morality requires, is headed for “break up.” Peirce’s letter was never published and may not have been sent.

Over seven months had passed since on 4 February Peirce had sent Mendenhall the full report on the state of his work for the Survey. Since then, Peirce had continued to send in his monthly “personal reports,” but nothing more substantial. Committed to high standards for his scientific publications, he had neither the time nor resources for the work still required before completing his reports. Mendenhall had come to see that he could not count on Peirce to help move the Survey to a new era of pendulum research using the half-seconds pendulums he had designed, and Mendenhall was not willing to commit more resources to advance Peirce’s gravity program. A clean break was necessary and the time had come to do a hard thing.

On the 21st of September, Mendenhall wrote to ask for Peirce’s resignation from the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Peirce had shown no inclination to revise his long report in the way Newcomb thought necessary for publication and Mendenhall had waited long enough for the additional reports Peirce owed. It was time for Peirce to go. Peirce had long anticipated that he would be forced out, even admitting to Mendenhall in his letter of reply (29 Sept. 1891) that it was “a necessary act,” yet the fact of it must have been a brutal blow.

Peirce admitted that his work had been going slowly, in part because he could no longer perform the difficult mathematical work needed to finish his reports with the ease of his younger days, but also because of his treatment during Superintendent Thorn’s administration and because it had been necessary for him to develop other means of livelihood. But Peirce insisted that he had not been idle and he defended the organization of his gravity report. And even while admitting that Mendenhall was right to ask for his resignation, Peirce suggested ways that he might stay on, asking for a bright assistant for a short time to help him finish his gravity reports and perhaps to help with some new fieldwork at two very interesting sites on his own estate. He noted, again, that his “chief study for a long time” had been “to produce an efficient method for the practical solution of questions in hydrodynamics,” a problem of importance for pendulum research and perhaps the most important current issue for applied mathematics. So, without much hope, Peirce tried to make a case for staying on, but if Mendenhall thought it “more convenient” that his “connection with the survey should be severed” then, Peirce wrote, “I shall depend upon you to indicate to me the date at which my official resignation must be sent at latest, so that it may precede all other official action.”

Mendenhall replied with a friendly letter, assuring Peirce that he appreciated his “rare abilities and long service” and he promised to occasionally use Peirce for “discussion of observations” and the like. But he asked Peirce to forward his resignation “at once to take effect on Dec. 31^st.” On 1 October 1891, Peirce tendered his resignation to take effect on the last day of the year. That would end thirty years of service and would eliminate Peirce’s principal source of income, a frightening prospect now that his regular work for the Century Company had concluded.

It was clear that making ends meet was fast becoming a truly vital concern. Peirce wrote to Garrison asking for more books to review for the Nation. His review of Herbert Spencer’s Essays, Scientific, Political, and Speculative (sel. 39) appeared in the 8 October issue. It opened with a remark on work being done in ethical theory, which Peirce appreciated for its supplying “a worthy motive to conservative morals at a time when all is confused and endangered by the storm of new thought, the disintegration of creeds, and the failure of all evidences of an exalted future life.” Eager to criticize Spencer once more for the latter’s stubborn attachment to indubitable first principles, absolute exactitude, and the belief in the supreme explanatory power of the law of the conservation of energy, Peirce previewed some of the key ideas he was developing for his second Monist paper: there “cannot be the slightest warrant” for holding that the three laws of motion are exactly true, the law of vis viva is “plainly violated in the phenomena of growth, since this is not a reversible process,” methods of inquiry must be self-corrective, and intelligibility requires more than a recourse to the Unknowable for its comprehension.⁴⁴

After finishing his definitions for the Century Dictionary, Peirce had been able to return to his Monist project and on 5 November he was able to send Carus the manuscript for his second article, “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” (sel. 24). In his letter accompanying the manuscript, Peirce wrote that he considered it “the strongest piece of argumentation” he had ever done. He enclosed his bill for $160 and asked Carus if he would consent to printing weekly advertisements in the Open Court for his “Instruction in the Art of Reasoning by Correspondence.”

In the first paper of his Monist series (sel. 23), Peirce had stressed that chance should be an essential element in “our view of the universe” and that it ought to play a key conceptual role in any scientific philosophy. He had reached this conclusion perhaps as early as 1883 (W4, sel. 79), and had been developing its consequences since then, but now he would test it by examining the contrary doctrine, “the common belief that every single fact in the universe is precisely determined by law.” Peirce, as a man of science, was looking for a cosmology that explained the world in its fullness and, like Epicurus before him, and Aristotle too, he was convinced that some things could not be explained without appeal to real chance. Peirce was also motivated by his belief that strict determinism left no room for freedom of the will, something he believed there was good reason to admit.

According to Fisch, Peirce had first stated his case against the “doctrine of necessity” in 1887 in “Science and Immortality” (W6, sel. 14), where he took a strong stand against Spencer’s “mechanical notion of the universe.” In “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined,” Peirce constructed a more substantial argumentation by systematically considering and rejecting the main arguments for determinism and then building a positive case for the claim that an element of absolute chance prevails in the world. Within the massive philosophical literature that discusses determinism, Peirce’s article deserves to attain classical status in view of the singular insightfulness of his counter-arguments at a time when the vogue of determinism was at its historical apex. Peirce named his anti-necessitarian doctrine “tychism” (from τυχη, the Greek word for chance) and claimed that “tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and mind are regarded as products of growth.” Basic to Peirce’s case against determinism were several key ideas, among them, that the prevalence of growth in the universe is inconsistent with the conservation of energy; that the great variety within the universe is inexplicable unless due to chance; that law, also prevalent in the universe, must be explained by something other than law, which can only be chance; and that the reality of feeling is “a patent fact enough, but a very inconvenient one to the mechanical philosopher.” The connection between chance, spontaneity, variety, life, growth, and increased complexity is at the center of Peirce’s tychism, the consequences of which, he claims, can be “traced out with mathematical precision into considerable detail” and can be tested as scientific predictions. The line of his argumentation adduces severe criticisms of the belief in the power of scientific postulates, in the exactitude of measurements, and in the inconceivability of certain explanations, while it clarifies the rationale of induction, the purport of probabilities, and the limits of regularity. It is noteworthy that Peirce recommended tychism because it did not barricade “the road of inquiry” as determinism did by insisting on “the regularity of the universe.” This marks a step in Peirce’s progress toward fallibilism.⁴⁵

Peirce’s article would appear five months later in April 1892, accompanied with a note in which Carus remarked on the philosophical depth of Peirce’s analysis and announced his intention to issue a reply.⁴⁶ Carus indeed published an “editorial treatment” in July 1892,⁴⁷ and a second response in the October number,⁴⁸ attacking tychism at great length in defense of determinism; Peirce would then compose a long “Reply to the Necessitarians” in the winter that appeared in the July 1893 issue of the Monist, followed immediately by Carus’s extensive rejoinder, “The Founder of Tychism, His Methods, Philosophy, and Criticisms.”⁴⁹ The latter, if anything, demonstrated the inability of a deterministic point of view to grasp the gist of Peirce’s sophisticated logic of inquiry and synechistic metaphysics. The entire exchange between Peirce and Carus is well worth studying, for it conveniently consolidates a large number of forceful philosophical arguments on a classical issue between two spirited and fully engaged opponents.⁵⁰

Near the end of October 1891, Peirce traveled to New York City for the early November meetings of the New York Mathematical Society and the National Academy of Sciences. Why he went early to New York is unclear, but it was probably to drum up more income-producing projects. He went to visit his friend and Harvard classmate James Harrison Fay, a lawyer who had recently become Vice President of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad Company. Peirce noticed in Fay’s office a pamphlet written by another Harvard classmate of theirs, an occasional participant in the old Metaphysical Club and the chief American founder and leader of the radical movement for Free Religion and secularism, Francis Ellingwood Abbot. Titled Professor Royce’s Libel: A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University,⁵¹ the pamphlet was an appeal to Harvard to redress “the wrong” perpetrated against Abbot by Josiah Royce, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, who Abbot alleged, had, in his “‘professional’ position as one of [Harvard’s] agents and appointees,” publicly attacked his reputation “with no imaginable motive other than mere professional jealousy or rivalry” and who had “gone to the unheard-of length of ‘professionally warning the public’ against a peaceable and inoffensive private scholar.” Abbot had been aggrieved by Royce’s stinging review of his book, The Way Out of Agnosticism, which had appeared in the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Ethics (of which Royce was a founding editor).⁵² Ironically, Abbot had based his book on a course of lectures he had given at Harvard when, with Royce’s approval, he had filled in while Royce was on leave to recover from a period of serious depression.⁵³ According to Bruce Kuklick, Abbot had high hopes for his book, thinking it might finally win him an academic post and the respect he thought he had earned, so when Royce’s devastating review appeared accusing him of “an unconscious and blundering borrowing from Hegel” and warning readers of his “philosophical pretensions,” Abbot knew that he had suffered a severe blow.⁵⁴ Royce had concluded his review with muted praise for Abbot’s “devotion to high ideals” and his “heroic sacrifices in the service of duty,” but he justified his harsh assessment of Abbot’s book by holding that “in judging of the actual work of philosophical writers, we must lay friendly esteem aside … we must show no mercy,—as we ask none.” Abbot, wounded and angered by Royce’s unkind treatment, prepared a strong reply and submitted it in January to the International Journal of Ethics, but after disagreements over demands for revisions and the timing of a rebuttal by Royce, Abbot withdrew it and produced the 48-page pamphlet.

Peirce had not read Abbot’s Way Out of Agnosticism, but he knew him from earlier times, had liked his 1885 book on Scientific Theism,⁵⁵ had recently selected a lengthy quotation from that work for the Century Dictionary entry on “realism,” and thus he was sympathetic. He wrote to Abbot from Fay’s office saying that, even though he doubted that the pamphlet was “a wise publication,” he was confident that Abbot had not plagiarized Hegel and, moreover, that he had himself long regarded Royce as “one of the large tribe of philosophical blunderers,” so he was prepared to lend a hand (c. 30 Oct. 1891). Peirce wrote a letter to the Nation editor in support of Abbot and it was published about two weeks later (sel. 40). In his letter, Peirce reviewed Abbot’s charges against Royce—that Royce had maliciously libeled Abbot and had used unfair means to stifle Abbot’s reply—and concluded that while Royce’s “warning” was clearly an “unwarranted aspersion,” it could not strictly be regarded as libelous though it seemed clear enough that Royce had contrived to have Abbot’s reply first postponed and then excluded from publication. Peirce noted that Royce seemed almost openly intent on “ruining Dr. Abbot’s reputation,” and that is a conclusion often drawn by scholars who examine this dispute.⁵⁶ Abbot quickly wrote to thank Peirce for his support, noting that of course Royce had “every advantage of position” on his side: “All the more do I feel the nobility of spirit which moves you to strike a brave blow for me…. If it is a high minded thing to champion a just cause against great odds, you have earned, as you certainly receive, my very grateful thanks” (15 Nov. 1891).

Peirce’s letter, appearing in such a prominent periodical, brought to the public eye a dispute that had up to that point been isolated to a rather small circle of insiders. James quickly wrote to set Peirce straight, admitting that Royce had taken a harsh and pretentious tone and that Abbot was justified in feeling “sore,” but fully taking Royce’s side in the dispute (12 Nov. 1891). “Abbot,” he wrote, “seems to me simply insane, in all that touches on his philosophic or personal pretensions.” James said he wished Peirce had just “let the thing die away in silence.” Peirce replied that Abbot surely didn’t deserve Royce’s “sweepingly contemptuous criticism” and that if, indeed, he was “almost insane,” then “all the more reason for gentle treatment.” James responded that Peirce’s view of the matter “does honour to your head and heart, but doesn’t convince me that Royce is not now the party sinned against” (16 Nov. 1891). James felt duty-bound to now come openly to Royce’s defense in the pages of the Nation.⁵⁷ He wrote that Peirce’s professed neutrality in the dispute was perhaps more apparent than real, given that Peirce’s knowledge of the facts had come principally from Abbot, so “it seems but fair that one with a less exparte knowledge of the facts should also be heard.” James sought to completely absolve Royce and the editors of International Journal of Ethics from any moral or legal blame and concluded by asserting that “Mr. Abbot’s remedy of heaping personal outrages upon Prof. Royce and his motives, admits of no excuse but a pathological one” and he chastised Peirce for spreading the quarrel “beyond the academic world.”

Peirce, having been shown James’s letter in the offices of the Nation prior to its publication, wrote privately to express his irritation (17 Nov. 1891): “I am sorry you should see fit to sneer at my impartiality.” Peirce told James that he knew Abbot and Royce about equally well and that “in searching my consciousness, I cannot detect any more leaning to one side than to the other.” Peirce acknowledged that he had adduced some new facts concerning the conduct of the editors of the Journal which he would reflect on but he insisted that a philosopher could criticize another without hoping to injure him, contrary to what he thought James had implied: “Philosophy has not reached the position of an exact science where being in the wrong is somewhat of a reflection upon a man’s competence.” Royce was plainly trying to injure Abbot, Peirce wrote; his general tone “is that of contempt.”

James showed Peirce’s letter to Royce and, to his credit, Royce wrote a long and respectful letter to Peirce hoping both to defuse the controversy and to win Peirce’s respect: “James knows that I like candid criticism … [and] that I deeply respect your work, and your opinion of philosophical matters” (18 Nov. 1891). Royce proceeded to set out a long explanation of the dispute and a detailed defense of his position—he assured Peirce that previously his relations with Abbot “had always been cordial” and that he deeply regretted “having so touched his heart when I struck home at his work.” This might have ended the matter for Peirce had not yet another letter appeared in the Nation, just two days later, purporting to present evidence mitigating, if not refuting, Peirce’s account of the Abbot-Royce dispute. The author of the new letter was Joseph Bangs Warner, a lawyer who had been retained by Royce as an advisor, and who, like Abbot, had been a member of the old Cambridge Metaphysical Club. Warner, like James, while admitting that Royce may have “transgressed the limits of courteous controversy,” contended that Abbot’s transgressions were greater than Royce’s. Warner downplayed any legal culpability on Royce’s part but openly warned Abbot that the circulation of his reply to Royce “in its present shape” might “entail a serious legal responsibility” on his part.⁵⁸ By so openly demanding that Abbot revise his reply or face legal consequences, Warner was unwittingly strengthening Abbot’s position and Peirce’s representation of the controversy.

Yet, with Warner’s letter, the Abbot-Royce controversy had about run its course. On 3 December, one final letter would appear in the pages of the Nation, Abbot’s retort to Warner.⁵⁹ Abbot proclaimed Warner’s letter to be “the lawyer’s attempt to put forward his own baseless assumptions in his client’s behalf” and took the opportunity to quote three long paragraphs from his “suppressed” reply to Royce’s review. He concluded by arguing that “when Dr. Royce blew his bugle-blast of defiance, ‘We must show no mercy, as we ask none,’ he deprived himself of all excuse … for seeking refuge behind a menace of prosecution.” Following Abbot’s letter, Nation editor W. P. Garrison announced that no more letters respecting the controversy would be printed. Peirce had submitted a second letter but withdrew it and nothing further appeared in the Nation. Two months later, a second pamphlet by Abbot was issued: Is Not Harvard Responsible for the Conduct of her Professors, as well as of her Students? A Public Remonstrance Addressed to the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, but Harvard ignored it and the controversy came to an end.⁶⁰

It is difficult to comprehend this strange altercation. Abbot and Royce, though cordial up to this point, could no longer hide their lack of mutual professional respect. Abbot hoped for a Harvard professorship and had even offered to endow a chair for himself, but Royce, as Assistant Professor, clearly had the inside track. Each may have seemed a threat to the other. Abbot was convinced of his importance as a philosopher,⁶¹ but was far from having garnered the professional recognition that the much younger Royce had achieved. Abbot was unstable and tended to react brashly to criticism, while Royce was surprisingly insensitive to the human factors involved in philosophical debate.⁶² In hindsight, Royce was admittedly the superior philosopher, but he unfairly discounted the strength and originality of Abbot’s thought. Royce’s review was overly aggressive, but Abbot’s response was so abrasive that there was really no chance for reconciliation.

Why did Peirce, alone among Abbot’s peers, come to his defense? He had long harbored genuine esteem for Abbot’s philosophical powers, so that he could not but have been struck by how arbitrary Royce’s “professional warning” was. That sort of condemnation, to be credible, would require “that there could be no two opinions about it on the part of men qualified by mature study to pass judgment on the merits of philosophical writers” (W8: 245). Explaining to James why he had made a “plea for gentleness of criticism,” Peirce argued that a journal “is bound not to say a book is mere rubbish, when persons highly qualified to judge may regard it as valuable. As long as that is the case, it is not rubbish” (30 Nov. 1891). From Royce’s cynical dismissal of Abbot Peirce initially concluded that Royce had been trying to ruin Abbot. But as things evolved, particularly with the personal communications from James and Royce, Peirce warmed to Royce (who would eventually become Peirce’s hope for American philosophy). Without condoning Royce’s treatment of Abbot, Peirce was content to step away from the battle. In the end, Abbot’s pretentious and caustic treatment of Royce, and of Harvard, left him the loser and surely cost him any chance of a professorship. One general conclusion was well expressed in an editorial that appeared in January 1892 in the Educational Review, which described the controversy between Abbot and Royce as “the literary cause célèbre of the year.” Considering Abbot to be the main aggressor, the editors of the Review pinpointed his principal error: “University professors … will be surprised and amused to find Mr. Abbot assailing their Lehrfreiheit.” Abbot’s appeal to Harvard to discipline Royce, they said, was the sort of thing “expected from the political partisan and the religious fanatic, but not from a student and teacher of philosophy in this day and generation.”⁶³

The meeting of the New York Mathematical Society that Peirce had come to New York to attend was held on Saturday, 7 November 1891, at Columbia College and Peirce was elected to its membership, along with Simon Newcomb and others. Peirce had been invited to join the society by Harold Jacoby, Professor of Astronomy at Columbia. Peirce would become an active participant in the meetings of the New York Mathematical Society and his intellectual development from this time on was to some degree influenced by his association with the society’s members and his involvement in debates over the latest developments in mathematics.⁶⁴

The following Tuesday, 10 November, the National Academy of Sciences began its three days of meetings, also at Columbia College. Peirce was the discussant for a paper by Ogden Rood, “On a Color System,” and also for Seth C. Chandler’s paper, “On the Variation of Latitude.” A presentation that surely attracted Peirce’s attention was Mendenhall’s paper, “On the Use of a Free Pendulum as a Time Standard.” But principally, Peirce presented a paper entitled “Astronomical Methods of Determining the Curvature of Space,” described as presenting “astronomical evidence tending to show that space possesses a negative curvature, and [calling] attention to various methods of conducting an investigation of this property of space.” The paper, no longer extant, must have been based on methods set out in selection 36 and the results of subsequent measurements of curvature following those methods. Edward C. Pickering, Director of Harvard College Observatory, was the discussant. Three months prior to the meeting, on 9 August, Pickering had sent Peirce the following remark: “Your hypothesis regarding the distribution of the stars is very interesting. As I understand it, hyperbolic space is a mental conception and not a physical fact. It is therefore difficult to understand how it can represent a material phenomenon except by an accidental coincidence.” The content of Pickering’s response at the meeting was not reported. Peirce’s paper continued to attract attention after the meeting. On 7 December, George Bruce Halsted wrote to express his great interest in it and asked for a reprint of it if one was available, and on 27 February 1892 E. H. Moore, then of Northwestern University but soon to be Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago, asked for the same favor.

After the Academy meetings concluded, Peirce had a brief meeting with Mendenhall on Sunday, 15 November, in Hoboken to talk about his “retirement” from the Survey, but Mendenhall decided that they should continue their discussions in Washington. The next day, he issued “official instructions” for Peirce to “proceed to Washington, D.C., for conference with Superintendent,” and promised to cover travel expenses. On the 18th, Peirce wrote to Mendenhall about their discussion in Hoboken: “I feel impelled to say that one or two things you said to me on Sunday appear to me quite wrong.” Peirce objected to Mendenhall’s dismissal, for mere fiscal reasons, of the aspirations of assistants striving to meet higher standards:

That view seems to me in the first place to overlook the facts of human nature. If you pay a man a very low salary to begin with, and then forbid him to have any warmth or zeal in the conduct of his office, carefully remove all intellectual interest it might have and leave him nothing but the pure money to work for, and finally construct a series of fiscal regulations the main purpose of which seems to be to take up as much time with accounts as possible,—if you do all that you will have the heads of bureaus even worse than they are now. In the second place, it rather shocks me to hear you who know what a slough of materialism this country is sunk in, where nothing is considered as sacred except the holy, holy, holy dollar,—giving in to complaints against heads of bureaus that they are spending a little money in trying to advance science…. Then you say that the prosecution of science should be left to the Universities. Well, I admit the official science here is not very much, but I must say it is better than any our universities can give.

On 19 November, probably before receiving Peirce’s impassioned letter, Mendenhall recorded in his diary: “A.M. office: meet Professor Peirce. He walks with me to E. 18 St. N.E. and we arrange for his withdrawal from the Survey.” He met Peirce again the following evening at his club where, presumably, they discussed arrangements for the conclusion of Peirce’s employment—although Peirce was not yet ready to accept that his career as a professional scientist was so quickly coming to an end.

Probably on the same night, Peirce met with his old friend, George Ferdinand Becker, a member of the U.S. Geological Survey, and regaled him with an account of his cosmology; they had a lively conversation, Becker providing objections Peirce found most beneficial. Peirce must have then told Becker about the loss of his Coast Survey position and the financial predicament it put him in, for soon afterwards Becker wrote to Mrs. Louis Agassiz to see if she would approach Augustus Lowell about engaging Peirce for a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute. Mrs. Agassiz had always liked Peirce and was happy to oblige; she forwarded Becker’s letter to Lowell and urged him to engage Peirce. Lowell readily agreed to offer Peirce a course of lectures for the following winter. Peirce was touched when he learned of this outcome and thanked Becker at once: “Now this is a truly charming thing that you have done…. I hope I shall some day be able to reciprocate.”

Peirce wrote to Lowell on 6 December offering to lecture either on the history of science from Copernicus to Newton or on the comparative biography of great men. He sketched what he had in mind for each alternative, outlining the first course as follows:

Two introductory lectures would be required, one to sketch the whole history of science and show that the period in question is the heart of the whole, the other to run over that period and show in a general way what are the works calling for further study. It is to the methods of reasoning that I should draw special attention; and Kepler who on the whole was I think the greatest reasoner who ever lived, would claim three hours. Newton would call for two, Leibniz for one, Galileo for one, Copernicus, Harvey, Gilbert, and Bacon would together want two, Descartes, Pascal, Fermat, would want one. I have counted up to 12, though I have omitted Huygens, Boyle, and other great names, for whom, and for a résumé and concluding sketch of subsequent history, room would have to be made by compression.

Lowell chose the lectures on the history of science, “a subject which your studies have led you to explore so deeply that there is probably no one who could treat it with so much knowledge and acumen as you,” and agreed to twelve lectures (8 Dec. 1891). Peirce knew that Lowell would pay well but it would be several months before he could expect to see a check from him.⁶⁵

From Washington Peirce returned to New York to make some money, not wanting to go home to Milford empty-handed. Garrison obliged Peirce by giving him an advance, assigning him a piece on Oliver Wolcott Gibbs for the Nation’s graveyard (Gibbs would live until 1908), and asking him to review George F. Chambers’s Pictorial Astronomy for General Readers and Dascom Greene’s Introduction to Spherical and Practical Astronomy. Peirce’s dismissive review of Chambers appeared in the Nation on 26 November (sel. 41), and his review of Greene on 17 December. In the latter, Peirce took the opportunity to express his opinion about textbooks: “A book such as this might easily have been, which should touch upon every necessary matter with logical severity, giving all that is needed and excluding all that is superfluous, would serve as an intellectual tonic for the young man, and operate in some degree as a corrective to the dissipating and demulcent influences of other modern textbooks.”

Peirce attempted vainly to revive his correspondence course on the art of reasoning. It had had a promising start five years earlier but then petered out after the Peirces moved to Milford.⁶⁶ In November 1891, Carus agreed to run a weekly advertisement for the course in the Open Court for a full year:

Mr. C. S. Peirce has resumed his lessons by correspondence in the Art of Reasoning, taught in progressive exercises. A special course in logic has been prepared for correspondents interested in philosophy. Terms, $30, for twenty-four lessons. Address: Mr. C. S. Peirce, “Arisbe” Milford

Ten months later, on 25 August 1892, Peirce wrote that he had “never got a reply” and asked that the advertisement be discontinued. Selection 42, and several other manuscripts composed around this time were probably intended for the correspondence course.⁶⁷

While in New York, Peirce renewed his acquaintance with Albert Stickney, another Harvard classmate who had become an attorney. Stickney was glad to reconnect with Peirce, “one of the few men who reason—and think” (30 Sept. 1891). Peirce had invited Stickney to visit Milford, ostensibly to “shoot,” but he may already have been thinking that it might become necessary to rent out their main house on a seasonal basis and that Stickney might be useful for finding wealthy New Yorkers interested in vacationing in the Poconos near the famed Delaware Water Gap. With their relations reestablished, Stickney would serve as Peirce’s legal counsel for several years to come.

Mid-way through December, with the date for his resignation from the Coast Survey drawing close, Peirce became increasingly anxious over its dire portent for him and Juliette. He made a final attempt to postpone the inevitable. On 18 December, he wrote to Mendenhall to request a furlough without pay and he asked Henry Cabot Lodge, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, for support. Lodge wrote to Mendenhall but failed to persuade him.⁶⁸ In his reflective letter to Mendenhall, Peirce acknowledged that his computing proficiency had declined in recent years and that the lack of an aid to help with calculations explained the slow productivity. But he still had strengths and had been counting on Mendenhall to call him back into the field. Though now more accepting of being let go, Peirce pleaded with Mendenhall to grant him more time to finish his reports.

Now if you insist on these papers being ready before December 31, I fear I shall be so crazed by it that it will be the end of me. Yet even that would be less cruel than making me return them as they are. Let their return be postponed. About the report I sent you, you have treated me unjustly. Nothing could be more carefully done. The separation of the treatment of relative from absolute gravity is logical. To insert in that paper the value of g I earnestly protest against as illogical. The expression g in dynes I hope you see yourself is a total violation of the C. G. S. system to which the word dyne belongs. The expression by means of logarithmic seconds is in my opinion a great convenience. And I think considering Mr. Thorn’s formal promise to that effect, the paper should be printed as I wish it. But I cannot complain at your wanting my resignation. I say to myself that I am the victim of a malady the result of excessively hard work in the Survey.⁶⁹

Mendenhall wrote back the day before Christmas denying Peirce’s request for a furlough but offering again to keep him on as an occasional paid consultant. Mendenhall allowed Peirce to retain his work in order to “put it into shape as you feel able to do so,” or, if Peirce couldn’t, to “put the material in such condition that something might be made of it by others.” Mendenhall then asked him to return promptly the books and other property of the Coast Survey. On 26 December, Mendenhall forwarded Peirce’s letter of resignation to the Secretary of the Treasury. On 8 January 1892, the following notice appeared in Science:⁷⁰

Mr. Charles S. Peirce has tendered his resignation as Assistant in the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, to take effect Dec. 31. Mr. Peirce was first attached to the Survey about thirty years ago. During the greater part of the time he has had charge of its operations relating to the determination of the force of gravity. Some of the results of his investigations have been published as appendices to the Annual Reports and have embodied contributions of great importance to science. It is understood that Mr. Peirce will continue to furnish the Survey from time to time special discussions of topics related to the subject to which he has devoted so many years.

When, two years later, Mendenhall was questioned about Peirce’s dismissal by a Congressional Committee, he said that Peirce’s work, though of the highest character, “lacked the practical quality” that was essential, and that he had not published Peirce’s gravity report because Newcomb and other experts had found them to be “not valuable.”⁷¹

Looking back on these events seventy-five years later, Victor Lenzen, professor of physics and the man who, as a philosophy student at Harvard in 1914, had been sent by Josiah Royce to Milford to help Juliette pack up Peirce’s manuscripts and books for shipment to the Harvard Philosophy Department, considered the justification for some of the key decisions that had led to Peirce’s dismissal. With respect to Mendenhall’s decision to replace Peirce’s gravity program with one that employed half-seconds pendulums, Lenzen wrote to Max Fisch that Etienne Gilbert Defforges, “the foremost French pendulum swinger” who was in Washington in 1891, agreed with Peirce’s criticism of half-seconds pendulums and considered the work of Von Sterneck to be of no value (7 July 1965). Later, in his study of Peirce’s disputed “Report on Gravity,” Lenzen concluded that “the experimental and theoretical work … was the best work of its kind in the nineteenth century.”⁷² Finally, in 1988, the late historian Thomas G. Manning examined this transitional period in the long history of the Coast Survey and gave this concluding assessment: “The departure of Peirce meant the end of world renown for the Coast Survey in gravity studies.”⁷³

It is ironic that Peirce spent the final days of 1891 in epistolary debate with Simon Newcomb, the very man who, unbeknownst to Peirce, had cemented Mendenhall’s resolve to let him go. But Newcomb was, after all, the Superintendent of the Office of the Nautical Almanac and was one of the most influential scientists in the United States. Peirce wrote to Newcomb on 17 and 21 December about the possibility of getting a grant in order to continue investigating the curvature of space: “The discovery that space has a curvature would be more than a striking one: it would be epoch-making. It would do more than anything to break up the belief in the immutable character of mechanical law, and would thus lead to a conception of the universe in which mechanical law should not be the head and centre of the whole.” Newcomb wrote back on 24 December pointing out several experimental problems that in his mind precluded the possibility of any positive conclusion regarding space curvature, and advised Peirce not to seek any grant given the futility of his pursuit in the eyes of the scientific world, and given that it would be wrong to use funds allocated to the advancement of science to help an independent investigator. Clearly, Peirce would get no help from Newcomb, and he felt compelled to reply on Christmas Day that he had “for the present given up the idea that anything can be concluded with considerable probability concerning the curvature of space.” The results he had already obtained favored a negative curvature, but he had to admit that they were seriously affected “by intrinsic brightness and absolute motion,” so much so that he could “only say that excessively doubtful indications favor a negative curvature. In point of fact, we remain in ignorance.”

On Friday, 1 January 1892, at 12:05 A.M., Peirce penned a note: “I have a hard year, a year of effort before me; and I think it will help me to keep a diary. My greatest trial is my inertness of mind. I think I shall very soon be completely ruined; it seems inevitable. What I have to do is to peg away and try to do my duty, and starve if necessary. One thing I must make up my mind to clearly. I must earn some money every day.” New Year’s day was the beginning of a life of financial instability such as Charles and Juliette had never known.

In the morning he packed up Coast Survey instruments, books, and records that Mendenhall had asked him to return and sent them by express to Washington. But Peirce was not ready to sever all ties with the Survey; he still hoped to finish his report and see his results in print. On the 9th he wrote to Mendenhall to ask for some materials to help him complete his work and on the 20th Mendenhall sent what was needed.

Peirce knew that to fulfill his resolution to earn some money every day he would have to find additional sources of income and that it would help to be in New York. Stickney wrote to him on 2 January that he would do anything in his power to help him find a good opportunity, cautioning that “the rarer a man’s powers are, the harder it is to find their channel.” Peirce asked John Fiske for advice about entering the public lecture circuit. Fiske replied on the 2nd with helpful hints from his own experience. He told Peirce that he didn’t bother with agents: “I write a few months beforehand to the people in different places, and arrange dates, prices, and subjects; and it is an infernal bore.” He wanted to hear back from Peirce after he had “made a start with it,” and wished him success. Peirce would soon begin preparing a few popular lectures to see how it would go—one of his first tries would be a literary rendering of his experiences in Thessaly in 1870, when, as a young man, he had traveled there for the Coast Survey. He also began working early in January on his Lowell lectures on the history of science, aware that they could provide materials for spin-off lectures of a popular nature.

Early in the new year, Peirce returned to the study of great men that he had conducted with his students at Johns Hopkins in 1883–84 (W5: xxiii–xxiv). Several circumstances had converged to renew his interest in comparative biography,⁷⁴ beginning with his recent review of Fraser’s Locke (sel. 10)— Locke had been the subject of one of his detailed great men questionnaires (W5: 68–70). When in December he had offered as one option for the Lowell Institute course to lecture on “the comparative biography of great men,” Peirce evidently planned to develop his earlier study, explaining how he wanted to examine, not Galton’s “eminent men,” but “the phenomena of the history of mankind.” Peirce would form a list of 300 such men, develop a method for their comparative study and apply it to the lives of a few of them, and conduct an inductive examination “of a large number of general questions relating to the nature, kinds, causes, and characters of greatness.” And then the Nation asked Peirce to review two books that had immediate relevance for his project: Harrison’s New Calendar of Great Men and Lombroso’s Man of Genius.

Peirce undertook to revise the provisional list of 287 great men he had stopped with in 1884 (W5, sel. 3). His intention from the beginning had been to compile a list of 300 names, but his departure from Baltimore had ended the great men project prematurely. Now he took up his old list again, renamed it “The Great Men of History,” and brought it to 300 names as originally planned (sel. 43). He added twenty new names to his list,⁷⁵ removed five,⁷⁶ and bracketed two, Paul Morphy and Lavater, including them with nineteen other bracketed names of persons thought to be “very extraordinary” but not “exactly great.” All but five of the added names had come from Peirce’s early “Materials for an Impressionist List of 300 Great Men” (W5, sel. 2); the five new names were Claude Lorraine, Alexandre Dumas, W. L. Garrison, Madame Roland, and Daniel Webster.

On 10 January, Peirce sent Garrison his review of Harrison’s New Calendar of Great Men which appeared in the Nation on 21 January under the title “The Comtist Calendar” (sel. 44). Peirce focused on Comte’s method and choice of “worthies” and severely took him to task for misranking or excluding a large number of indisputably great persons (including Berkeley, Calvin, Epicurus, Fresnel, Gauss, Herschel, Jesus, Laplace, James Mill, Napoléon, Ockham, Rousseau, Duns Scotus, Vesalius, and William the Conqueror, to name but a few in Peirce’s list). No study of truly great persons can be valuable if it is beholden to an agenda that turns heroes into biased abstractions that neglect their “living reality and passion” or their “concrete souls.” Comte’s selections were “plainly animated by some ulterior purpose,” not by the genuine “admiration and sympathy for great men,” Peirce lamented. Incensed by Comte’s unfair treatment of Fermat, Peirce deplored the general incomprehension in which reasoners are held in a utilitarian world: reasoners are of use only to posterity, and that makes them perpetually irrelevant since “ordinary men have not imagination enough to be interested in posterity”—an indirect answer to an acid remark Newcomb had made to Peirce in his Christmas eve letter: “you could have no other satisfaction than that of doing a work for posterity.” As Peirce went on reflecting on the conditions favorable to greatness, he must have been, in part, thinking of his own circumstances. Kepler’s great work, “the most marvellous piece of ampliative reasoning ever executed,” was made possible “only by his wife’s riches and the bounty of the Emperor,” and it was “only a sinecure professorship … that enabled Newton to do his work.” Peirce’s favorite example of the dependence of greatness on opportunity and material support was Aristotle and Alexander. Without Alexander, Aristotle “would scarcely … be heard of today…. [T]he greatest man of thought of all time was beloved by the greatest man of action. It needed an Alexander to appreciate an Aristotle.” Men of thought faced the most difficulty in America: “There is no civilized country where a great work of reasoning is less feasible than in ours.” And yet, Peirce suggested, a civilization cannot advance quickly without the reasoners’ path-breaking work.

Peirce next took up Lombroso’s Man of Genius. A founder of criminal anthropology, Lombroso was much discussed in the psychological literature of the day, as in G. Stanley Hall’s American Journal of Psychology, whose April 1890 issue had carried Hall’s notice of the French edition of Lombroso’s book. Lombroso was a biological determinist whose work contributed to the theoretical framework supporting the eugenics movement. In his dismissive Nation review published on 25 February (sel. 47), Peirce examined in some detail Lombroso’s inductive argument that genius is a mental defect or disease, with its unintended corollary that “the whole of civilization is due to insanity,” and demonstrated that Lombroso’s inductive method was seriously flawed. Peirce used his own list of “Great Men of History” (sel. 43) to expose the unsoundness of Lombroso’s conclusion that geniuses tend to be “of smaller stature than ordinary men” and rendered his verdict: “the main argument of the book proves nothing and renders nothing probable.” Peirce did not dispute the obvious fact that genius is abnormal, but if genius is a disease, then “we had better try to propagate it” rather than committing “our Napoleons, our Pythagorases, our Newtons, and our Dantes” to “Genius Asylums.” Trying to gauge the importance of abnormality for genius, Peirce speculated that how a normal brain is structured, with its abundance of commissures, tends to determine how we shall naturally act and behave. It is true that, over time, we can control our actions “a great deal” by forcing ourselves to “take habits, certain commissures becoming partially atrophied, while others are brought into activity under exercise.” Primarily, though, we behave according to our nature just like wild animals do, and our sense of rationality is mostly an illusion stemming from our nature being well adapted to our circumstances. Peirce hypothesized that “an excess of medial commissures, or those between the two halves of the brain,” might cause stupidity, “deliberation becoming impossible,” and that in such cases a “disease of the brain may cause an improvement in the general intelligence.” But if the brains of the greatest geniuses are significantly different from ordinary brains, perhaps by being more complicated or by unusual connectivity, it will likely be “less adapted to the ordinary purposes of life” making its owner “the victim of his own higher organization.” Peirce supposed that such brains could benefit mankind in ways “ordinary heads” could not but that the genius would “have to pay for it … vainly trying to make [his brain] do things for which it is entirely unadapted, though other brains do them with ease.” It is difficult to read the final paragraphs of Peirce’s review of Lombroso without thinking that he, again, had himself in mind.

Peirce’s interest in the geometry of space did not lessen with his decision to suspend his experimental investigation regarding its possible negative curvature. On 15 January, Halsted wrote to express interest in a suggestion of Peirce’s for “a modern-synthetic-geometry treatment of non-Euclidean geometry.” Halsted enclosed a copy of the fourth edition of his translation of Lobachewski and promised to soon send his translation of Bolyai. Halsted’s translation of Lobachewski had not yet been reviewed in the Nation, and Peirce set out to remedy that neglect. Peirce’s review, “The Non-Euclidean Geometry” (sel. 45), appeared in the Nation on 11 February, and Peirce took the opportunity to promote non-Euclidean geometry. He began by announcing that Lobachewski’s “little book” marked “an epoch in the history of thought, that of the overthrow of the axioms of geometry,” and that the “philosophical consequences” of this revolution “are undoubtedly momentous.” He told the story of how Euclid’s fifth postulate had been the “one little speck” that Lobachewski had found in Euclid’s “empyrean of geometry” that was susceptible of refutation, and how Riemann, in 1854, had demonstrated that Euclid’s “pretended proof” was fallacious. “The truth is,” Peirce wrote, “that elementary geometry, instead of being the perfection of human reasoning, is riddled with fallacies” and its study really “ought to begin with the theory of perspective.” Peirce pointed out that for Lobachewski, we cannot be sure that “the infinitely distant parts of an unbounded plane represented in perspective by a straight horizon” would actually be straight—it might be “a hyperbola like the perspective of the terrestrial horizon”—while for Riemann there might not be any line at all, as we might be back to our starting-point. As Peirce wrote elsewhere, each view yields a different philosophy: elliptic, hyperbolic, or parabolic, and Peirce had been leaning toward the hyperbolic for quite a while.⁷⁷ He concluded his review by advocating for a “new synthetic exposition” of non-Euclidean geometry—what he had proposed to Halsted.⁷⁸ There is some evidence that Peirce did not altogether give up on his investigations of curvature, as he told Newcomb he had; in February 1892, Risteen wrote that he could give Peirce a list of about twelve “determinations of stellar parallax that came out negative” if he wanted them, information related to Peirce’s curvature investigations.

On 29 January, Garrison wrote to apologize to Peirce for unthinkingly sending the 1891 English edition of Dmitry Mendeleyev’s Principles of Chemistry to someone else for review: “By way of compensation I turn over to you rather than to your rival Tyndall’s new book,⁷⁹ which has several “men of genius” in it & other good matter. I trust a simple notice of it can be made to suffice.” Garrison offered to let Peirce add something about Mendeleyev’s Principles if the occasion arose and he asked Peirce to look over a letter that Werner Stille had sent about Peirce’s “Comtist Calendar.” Peirce wrote up a review of Tyndall which never appeared, but in March he would get a chance to add something about Mendeleyev (sel. 48). The letter from Stille, with an editorial reply written by Peirce, appeared in the Nation for 11 February.

By February, Peirce had started working on his Lowell lectures on the history of science, no doubt making use of the resources of the Astor Library. He decided to begin with a look at the classification of the sciences.⁸⁰ This was then a frequently discussed subject, usually with reference to the well-known classifications of Comte and Spencer. Comte, although given credit for having made the first clear distinction between abstract and concrete sciences, had proposed a classification of the sciences according to their generality, while Spencer arranged them according to their abstractness.⁸¹ In his c. 1890 definition of “science” for the Century Dictionary, Peirce gave a classification that arranged the sciences according to “their degree of specialization,” but in February 1892, when he sketched essentially the same classification for use in his first Lowell Lecture, he referred to it as one based on “order of generality” (sel. 46 and the page opposite it).⁸²

Early in March 1892, Peirce sent Newcomb a question involving “fundamental points relating to infinity” and said he would like “to see how you would answer it.” It was a problem involving parallel lines and an infinite series of equidistant perpendiculars. On 9 March, Newcomb responded: “Your last letter seems decisive in favor of a proposition which I have often been inclined to maintain, to wit, that all philosophical and logical discussion is useless. If there is any one question which illustrates the correctness of the doctrine of infinities, always maintained by me, it is the very one suggested by the demonstration you and Halsted sent me. I have always held that infinity, considered in itself, could not be treated as a mathematical quantity, and that it is pure nonsense to talk about one infinity being greater or less than another.” This astonishing response, as Carolyn Eisele put it well, reveals Newcomb’s “extreme conservatism,”⁸³ which refused “to entertain a hypothesis which had not yet come completely unscathed through the acid test of experiment…. Peirce was, without doubt, the more daring intellectual of the two.”⁸⁴

Peirce’s opportunity to write something about Mendeleyev’s Principles came when the editor of the Nation received a letter, signed “C. De K.,” responding to the review of 4 February (written by Peirce’s “rival”) in which it was claimed that Mendeleyev was the discoverer of the Periodic Law. C. De K. acknowledged that Mendeleyev, along with Lothar Meyer, had been recognized by the Royal Society of London “for their discovery of the periodic relations of the atomic weights,” but he claimed that the priority for discovering the Periodic Law belonged to John A. R. Newlands, a fact later recognized by the Royal Society. C. De K.’s letter appeared in the 3 March issue of the Nation followed by an editor’s reply written by Peirce (sel. 48). Peirce pointed out that the Royal Society “did not commit themselves very far” in their acknowledgment of Newlands’s contribution and that “the step taken by him was not a difficult one.” Peirce named Josiah P. Cooke as the “principal precursor” of Mendeleyev for having “first proved that all the elements were arranged in a natural series.” Peirce suggested that “[a]fter the new atomic weights came in” it was inevitable that “every well-informed and ingenious chemist” would begin “speculating upon the relations of the properties and atomic weights of the elements” and that these speculations would naturally be laid out in tables. He gave, as an example of such early speculations, a table based on one he had published anonymously in 1869 (W2, sel. 25)—which he ascribed to an “obscure American chemist”—and noted that “this was all, if not more than all, that Newlands did.” It was Mendeleyev alone who “had the sagacity to discern the true scheme of relationship,” thus accomplishing one of the greatest inductions in the history of science. Peirce concluded his editorial reply by speculating that the atoms of the chemical elements may have “been built up from a few kinds” of subatomic “atomicules that are Boscovichian points,” an idea he would take up in his fourth Monist article, “Man’s Glassy Essence” (sel. 29), which he would begin writing a few weeks later.⁸⁵