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In March, Peirce contributed five notices or editorial responses and one review to the Nation: his note on Mendeleyev above; an editorial reply to a discussion on the state of mathematics education in America (3 March); an editorial response to J.McL.S.’s remarks about induction, especially to his claim that induction is not inference (10 March); a perfunctory note on Halsted’s translation of Bolyai’s Science of Absolute Space, which Halsted had personally sent Peirce in early February (17 March); a note on William James’s abridged edition of his Principles of Psychology in which Peirce briefly took James to task for carrying further his “natural science” method, “which consists of ignoring all general doubt”—the doubt that should arise when truths based in experience are extended so far beyond the domain of observation (whether in molecular physics or in psychology) as to become dubiously metaphysical, thus entrapping readers “into confident but dangerous and unexamined assumptions” (17 March); and a review of William J. M‘Clelland’s Treatise on the Geometry of the Circle (24 March).

The Nation was providing Peirce his only relatively steady income, far too little to meet his and Juliette’s needs. They were sinking into serious debt. On 8 March, the Court of Common Pleas of Pike County issued a mechanics lien on Arisbe for $464.99 for “carpenter work and material furnished.” Peirce had to bring in more money. His attention returned to the prospect of public lectures. A selection from about this time that might have been intended for a popular audience, either as an article or lecture, is “Keppler” (sel. 49). Peirce’s proposal for his Lowell lectures had called for three lectures to be devoted to Kepler, and so this selection may well be the start of Peirce’s research, but it also connects with his renewed attention to the study of great men, an attractive subject for a set of popular essays. In this paper, as was typical for Peirce, the reader was told that “[t]o gain any idea of a scientific research, one must look with one’s own eyes and brain at the things with which it deals,” and that 1892 “happens to be a good one for watching Mars.” Peirce then gave instructions for how to record the path of Mars on a star-map. As in his review of Harrison’s New Calendar of Great Men, Peirce reminded his readers that Kepler’s momentous achievement had been made possible by a rare university appointment that actually provided the opportunity and means to do his singular work, a necessary condition for greatness. Peirce stressed Kepler’s “admirable method of thinking” which consisted in forming diagrams to represent “the entangled state of things before him,” “observing suggestive relations between the parts of the diagram,” and then “performing diverse experiments upon it, or upon the natural objects, and noting the results.” The main requirement for success in reasoning by this method is “a docile imagination, quick to take Dame Nature’s hints.”

Also around this time Peirce wrote up a proposal for a “Summa Scientiæ” (sel. 50) to be organized according to his classification of the sciences and intended to appear in a single volume of 1500 pages. The seven divisions with their sixty-four sections would be filled with articles mostly of less than one page in length, about one third of which Peirce would write himself. The rest would be assigned to young men, selected for their “exceptional mental power and special competence” but “who have not yet achieved great reputations.” Peirce probably had Allan Risteen in mind as one of his young specialists; on 24 February, Risteen had written to Peirce about a scheme Peirce was about to take up and asked “if it is anything you might want me for.” It is likely that much of the material for Peirce’s own entries was to come from his Century Dictionary definitions and, with ninety pages reserved for biographies, his research on great men would have been put to good use as well. It is not known which publisher Peirce submitted his proposal to, or even if he sent it out, but had it been accepted it would have given the Peirces a chance to reorganize their lives without the severe threat of total financial collapse. Peirce was asking for $3000 a year for two years and, additionally, for $10 to $15 per one thousand words.

Meanwhile, Peirce had undertaken another project of quite a different kind. Since February he had been consulting geography and travel books on Thessaly in Northern Greece and taking a lot of notes. He was assembling the background information he needed to compose an embroidered tale of his travels in that province in the fall of 1870, when he had scouted out sites for the American party of astronomers who would come to the Mediterranean region to observe the solar eclipse of 22 December 1870.⁸⁶ Thessaly was then still under Ottoman rule and the Greeks, animated by the “Great Idea” of reconstituting a free Greek state, were in nearly continuous rebellion against Ottoman domination.⁸⁷ Peirce set his tale, with its “fictional embroideries,” about 1862, the year King Otto was expelled from Greece. It was the story of Karolos Kalerges,⁸⁸ a young Harvard graduate on a grand tour of Europe, who, by a curious turn of events, “landed one bright summer’s morning from an Aegean steamer at the little town of Bolos” in southeastern Thessaly. Thus began Karolos’s eventful tour of Thessaly, during which he was befriended by Thodores Maurokordato, with whom he became a blood-brother on the way to Larissa; ingratiated himself to the Turkish governor-general Husni Pasha (as a precaution, since Karolos was a Christian) and contrived to borrow his carriage, the only one in Thessaly; was captured by a band of klephts and saved by Thodores; was wounded while participating in a raid on a Turkish estate during which he abducted a young Persian widow (or so she believed), Roshaná, with whom he fell in love. There is some exploration of friendship and love in Peirce’s tale, and occasional revealing moments, such as when Karolos and Thodores discuss the abduction of Roshaná and Karolos remarks that “In America … more women than horses are stolen by gentlemen in one way or another,” but it was not a story of ideas. Peirce’s experience in Thessaly had been singular and deeply impressive and, as he wrote many years later in a revised preface to his “Tale,” he wanted “to give an idea of the place and the people as I saw them, and to express the sentiment which they strongly excited in the breast of a young American.”⁸⁹

Peirce wrote his tale to be presented orally, but on 26 March he wrote to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the Century Magazine, offering his story, “An Excursion into Thessaly: a Tale” (sel. 51), for publication: “I have just written a Tale, which without being extraordinary, is pretty, fresh, interesting, and well adapted to woodcut illustration.” On 1 April, after a positive reply from Gilder, Peirce sent his “Tale” under cover of a letter expressing doubts that it was right for the Century but remaining hopeful: “But still I venture to ask you to read it, because if you think the vein would be popular, I could write half a dozen such describing picturesque countries with an ingenuous & foolish young man getting into fearful predicaments in them; and all in a poetical and naive fashion.”⁹⁰

On that same first day of April, the second article of Peirce’s metaphysical series, “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” (sel. 24, discussed earlier), appeared in the Monist. Peirce had been waiting for his article on necessity to appear; he wrote to Carus on 3 April inquiring if the new issue was out and requesting six copies. He told Carus that he would soon send a third article. Peirce had begun some preliminary work for his next two Monist articles, which he thought of as his papers on mind (sels. 27 and 29), and over the coming weeks he would catch up on current debates on various related topics including the molecular theory of protoplasm, theories of time, and theories of infinity and continuity. For months, Peirce had been casting about for financial opportunities and living a life of interruptions. April would be a month of more focused reflection and concentration, and only two things would occupy him, his “Tale of Thessaly” and his next Monist articles.

While his Thessalian story was in Gilder’s hands, Peirce kept working to improve the story line. It is surprising that he had taken up this complicated writing project at this time in his life since it was a new genre for him and his chance of reaping significant returns could not have been good. It is true that Peirce thought his story would make a compelling popular lecture and he had great confidence in his skill as an orator. Yet given the sheer length of the story and the considerable historical, geographical, and linguistic research necessary to give his tale a cachet of genuineness, he must have known that the effort spent on the tale could have been devoted to more lucrative writing in one of his areas of expertise. All things considered, it seems unlikely that monetary return was Peirce’s deepest motive. What was it, then? In part, it was the newness of it, as he told Gilder: “[It is my] first attempt in the line of writing except scientific and philosophical discussion, and therefore it is important and exciting to me.” Fourteen years later, he explained to Lady Welby that the story had been “an experiment to test a certain psychological theory of mine…. What I aimed at was to reproduce the psychical effect of a peculiar atmosphere, both meteorological and social.”⁹¹ But one senses that there was a sentimental factor motivating Peirce to dwell on this romantic and valiant episode in his life, a time of vibrancy and confidence. Peirce’s life in April 1892 was on the brink of ruin and it must have been consoling to remember back to such a time and to compose the story, embroidered though it was, of the young man he had been.

Peirce’s philosophical energies in April were focused on the next two papers for his Monist series (sels. 27 and 29). Though writing for the Monist to make money, he was engaged in some of the most profound philosophical ruminations of his life. It is not certain precisely when the surviving working papers for “The Law of Mind” were composed, but selections 25 and 26 surely represent the early work on “The Law of Mind” that he told Carus he would soon be sending. These selections, and some pages entitled “A Molecular Theory of Protoplasm,” preliminary to “Man’s Glassy Essence” (sel. 29), are products of Peirce’s April cogitations.

In “The Law of Mind [Early Try]” (sel. 25), Peirce reveals a stronger religious cast than ever before expressed:

I propose next to show, by the study of the soul, that, if my previous conclusions are accepted, we shall be naturally led to the belief that the universe is governed by a father, with whom we can be in real relations of communion, and who may be expected to listen to prayer, and answer it. In short, necessitarianism once out of the way, which puts nature under the rule of blind and inexorable law, that leaves no room for any other influence, we find no other serious objection to a return to the principle of Christianity.

It was to be expected, perhaps, that in writing for the Monist, a journal devoted to the reconciliation of science and religion, Peirce would bring religion into his work more than he might have under other circumstances; but whatever the motivation, it seems clear that Peirce was becoming increasingly interested in questions bearing on religion.⁹² Peirce continued with a sketch of an argument he would develop much more fully in sel. 27. The “study of the soul” was really to be an attempt to formulate the core principle of mental action. Agreeing with James that ideas are not discrete, Peirce emphasized the irreducible tendency for ideas to “spread” and to “affect” other ideas standing to them in a relation of “continuous affectibility.” Transplanting such an organic metaphor into the realm of the psychical, the logical, and the metaphysical was a crucial move announcing a vast research program, for Peirce would have eventually to elucidate such conceptions as final (tendential) causation, continuity, logical connectivity, association, and generalization. Important, too, was the insight that there was but one law of mind to be ferreted out, one essential principle common to all ideas whatsoever and so powerful that it was the key to everything else that ideas could be or do: their active relationality. When Peirce states that “ideas tend towards uniformity,” it is to indicate not that they tend to lose their distinctness but that they tend to “interpenetrate one another and become more and more mingled, welded, and generalized.” It is precisely because ideas do not have definite boundaries that they are growing toward greater determination. This is why the law of mind “essentially involves time,” not neutral time but flowing time, a flow with a direction that “no complication or specialization of physical law can possibly impart,” but which stems from the fact that “the relation of a state of thought to another which it draws with it is a transitive relation, like the copula of logic.” This suggests that the active relationality of ideas is akin to their predicability in the widest sense. It also follows that psychical law cannot result from physical law. And when Peirce says that “all that psychical law does is to regulate the formation of habits,” he implies that it is within the process of live generalization that that law exercises its irreversible power.

Peirce tried a number of approaches for his third Monist article before settling on the strategy taken in sel. 27.⁹³ In “The Law of Mind [Excursus on the Idea of Time]” (sel. 26—a capital complement to sel. 27), Peirce sought to clarify his theory of time in view of its centrality for his theory of mind—the temporal irreversibility of psychical processes fundamentally distinguishes them from physical processes. Peirce’s key idea was that “the properties of time” could “be conveniently stated” as four properties of instants—directionality, transitivity, infinite divisibility, and continuity: (1) “Of two different instants, the one is previous to the other, the latter subsequent to the former; and no instant is both previous and subsequent to the same instant.” (2) “This general temporal relation is a transitive one.” (3) “If one instant is previous to another, there is a continuously infinite series of instants, subsequent to the former and previous to the latter.” (4) “Given any three instants, A, B, C, there is a fourth instant D as much previous or subsequent to C as B is to A.” In working out his third condition, first expressed more simply as “time is infinitely divisible,” Peirce noted that infinite divisibility was often confounded with continuity but that Cantor had refuted that idea. Peirce made some comparisons between his views on multitudes (collections, or sets) and continuity and those of Cantor, insisting in particular on a distinction he had made as early as 1881 between finite and infinite collections (W4, sel. 38): Fermatian inference (mathematical induction) is applicable to finite collections but not to infinite ones. Claiming that the number of points on a line “however short” is “continuously infinite,” he added that a “continuously infinite multitude” is the greatest infinity that can be “present” to us in a mathematical construction. By contrast, there may be an incomparably greater continuum of an infinite number of dimensions, but it would not be one that could be exhibited in a construction.⁹⁴ Peirce concluded his discussion by defining time as a “hyperbolic” continuum in which “the infinitely past and the infinitely future are distinct and do not coincide,” which he believed “accords with our natural idea of time.”

On 17 April, Harvard student Justus Pearl Sheffield invited Peirce to speak to the Graduate Philosophical Club: “We have all been very anxious to hear you, on any topic that you might be pleased to select: all the more anxious in that your paper would in all likelihood be to Harvard men ‘the other side.’” Peirce must have been pleased with this invitation and on May 21st he would read his “Law of Mind” to the Philosophical Club, only three days before submitting it for publication. On Friday evening, 22 April, Peirce gave his premier reading of his “Tale of Thessaly” to a select group at the Century Club and the following month, mentioning the experience to Francis Russell, he said it had been before “some of the very best judges of such things” and that “they were much struck and delighted” with his story. Peirce said that the reading had taken an hour and a half, but was “not at all tedious” (14 May 1892).

The strengthening religious motivation that revealed itself in the opening paragraph of Peirce’s “The Law of Mind [Early Try] (sel. 25), was not the result of an intellectual turn but was deeply personal, a consequence of Peirce’s manifest experiences. The transformational power of the religious feelings Peirce had begun to experience is revealed in the famous letter he wrote on Sunday morning, 24 April 1892, to Rev. John Wesley Brown, Rector of St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue. It is not known whether the letter was ever sent.

Dear & Reverend Sir:

I took the Holy Communion at St. Thomas’s this morning,—in fact, just now,— under peculiar circumstances, which it seems proper to report.

For many years I have not taken the Communion and have seldom entered a church, although I have always had a passionate love for the church and a complete faith that the essence of christianity, whatever that might be, was Divine; but still I could not reconcile my notions of common sense and of evidence with the propositions of the creed, and I found going to church made me sophistical and gave me an impulse to play fast and loose with matters of intellectual integrity. Therefore, I gave it up; though it has been the cause of many a bitter reflection. Many times I have tried to cipher out some justification for my return to the communion of the church; but I could not. Especially, the last two nights I have lain awake thinking of the matter.

This morning after breakfast I felt I must go to church anyway. I wandered about, not knowing where to find a regular episcopal church, in which I was confirmed; but I finally came to St. Thomas. I had several times been in it on week days to look at the chancel.⁹⁵ I therefore saw nothing new to me. But this time,—I was not thinking of St. Thomas and his doubts, either,—no sooner had I got into the church than I seemed to receive the direct permission of the Master to come. Still, I said to myself, I must not go to the communion without further reflection! I must go home & duly prepare myself before I venture. But when the instant came, I found myself carried up to the altar rail, almost without my own volition. I am perfectly sure that it was right. Anyway, I could not help it.

I may mention as a reason why I do not offer to put my gratitude for the bounty granted to me into some form of church work, that that which seemed to call me today seemed to promise me that I should bear a cross like death for the Master’s sake, and he would give me strength to bear it. I am sure that will happen. My part is to wait.

I have never before been mystical; but now I am. After giving myself time to reflect upon the situation, I will call to see you.

Yours very truly

C. S. Peirce

It does not seem to me that it would be wise to make the circumstances known; but I conceive it my duty to report them to you.

I am a man of 52, and married.

This letter is sometimes taken as sufficient evidence for the conclusion that Peirce had undergone a religious conversion on 24 April 1892 after undergoing a profound mystical experience.⁹⁶ One must be cautious, however, in drawing conclusions based on this letter, coming as it did, at a time when Peirce was feeling much stress and an increasing sense of helplessness. What Peirce meant by “mystical” is also open to question. Presumably he meant what is found in the Century Dictionary under “mystical theology” (not one of Peirce’s definitions, however): “the knowledge of God or of divine things, derived not from observation or from argument, but wholly from spiritual experience, and not discriminated or tested by the reason.” But it should be noted that in his 1878 article, “The Order of Nature,” the paper Peirce pointed to as the ancestor of his Monist metaphysical series, he wrote that by “mystical theories” he meant “all those which have no possibility of being mechanically explained” (W3: 321). In any case, it is clear that Peirce was undergoing a profound change, a conversion of some kind, that he might have felt most directly and pointedly at St. Thomas’s on the morning of 24 April.

Peirce’s state of mind at this time is further revealed in a letter he wrote to Carus offering to write an article for the Open Court on the positive value of unusual personal experience:⁹⁷

Dear Sir:

I think I could write an acceptable article or even two for the Open Court on the following materials[:]

1. Personal experience has a positive value always. This is greater the more unusual the experience. That which I have to report seems worth mention.

(A) Of late years I have suffered extreme adversity & affliction, being

(B) In the somewhat unusual situation of a student of philosophy, laboratorybred, who holds on essentially to the creed & communion of the church.

(C) Now, the facts which seem worth reporting are 1^st, what kind of reflections I have found really consoling, 2^nd, how the different literary works addressed to those in such circumstances sound.

2. Of course, it is nothing but the experience of a single individual; still, it is out of individual experiences that general experience is built. But I wish to say clearly that a single case can have, until verified & supported by others, no importance at all. Still, I write as a means of collecting other testimony.

Under the 1^st head, my experience would, if generally borne out by others, go to support the law of continuity. For first, I find, ideas about heaven of very little or no support, evidently because that life is completely cut off from this. Myself in a life the whole aim, motives, means, problems, of which radically differ from those of this life, does not seem to come within my special interests.

Second, I have found immense help from certain other reflections. Such as this. “If,” I would say to myself, “by voluntarily enduring what I am forced to bear I could further certain objects I had at heart, would I not do so and more? And if I could comprehend the purposes of God, would I not give an absolute preference to these purposes over the objects I actually have at heart,—which indeed I only now prefer as being as near as I can make out the objects it is God’s will I should pursue? Since then God is doubtless using me, so far as I can be of use, to promote his own purposes[, why] should I not be content?

Why should I not feel particularly honored that I have been selected to undergo all this agony?

Peirce’s reflections on the agony and aim of his life seem to have instilled in him a new point of view, one that would receive clearer expression in his forthcoming articles for the Monist, especially the final two (sels. 29 and 30). And one cannot but sense that his conception that general experience is built out of individual experiences is attuned to his notion that it is by spreading that ideas get generalized.

As April drew to a close, Peirce’s inward focus seemed to yield to the need to more quickly alleviate the dire straits he and Juliette were suffering. He resumed his writing for the Nation and his efforts to place articles in other publications. But he did not devote his time exclusively to writing for pay. The leading story in the New York Evening World on 4 May was about a murder committed by a sixteen-year old boy, Robert Alden Fales. The murder was gruesome and the Fales boy was unrepentant, but Peirce was struck by the fact that though criminal behavior seemed to run in the boy’s family, he had a loving mother who had done all she could to protect him from “the danger of contamination.” Pressure was building to execute the boy and Peirce did not see the point of it and especially felt sympathy for the boy’s mother. He wrote a letter to the editor of the Independent questioning why we punish criminals and outlining a case against it based on Christian, scientific, and economic principles (sel. 52). Peirce urged that “the facts of science” should be recognized, “disagreeable as they may be to [the] blood-thirsty and politico-economical heart,” and that society should accept that “the criminal is a man of diseased mind.” Criminals should be put in asylums, treated respectfully, and rehabilitated if possible, but they should not be allowed to breed. “I do not believe in punishments, unless it be in summary inflictions of bodily pain springing from natural indignation. But as for the slow tortures we inflict upon criminals, if that be the outcome of ideas of right and wrong, I think ideas of right and wrong were better given up. I notice those ideas have might[y] little influence in deterring men from evil; they serve chiefly to steel our hearts against other offenders.” Peirce signed his letter “Outsider,” the pseudonym he had used in 1890 when he was feeling ostracized, and urged the editor to publish his letter: “I beg you will take it.” Peirce’s letter was not published.⁹⁸

On 8 May, Peirce received a letter from Carus asking if he would assist with a translation of Ernst Mach’s Der Geschichte der Mechanik that was underway at the Open Court: “Although the translation is made with great care I should nevertheless like someone who is an authority in this province or as learned in similar fields of investigation to look over the proof sheets before they go to press.” Peirce accepted Carus’s offer at once and in the ensuing months he would devote a great deal of effort to helping with the translation, even rewriting an entire section in the chapter on units and measures because Mach’s original was not applicable to the United States and, besides, was “slightly out of date.”⁹⁹ Peirce assured Carus that he was working on his next two articles for the Monist and expected them to be “the most valuable things I have done,” and he took the opportunity to offer to come to Chicago for a reading of his Thessalian story if he could be assured of an audience large enough to pay expenses: “I should like to go and read it there, and so have an opportunity of meeting you.”

Carus also wanted to meet Peirce so he asked Francis Russell to arrange for a reading in Chicago. But when Russell wrote to Peirce on 10 May asking for details, he concluded his letter with the question: “Why don’t you come here and be a Professor in our new Chicago University where they are paying $7000 per year?”¹⁰⁰ Peirce was instantly interested and he replied on the 14th that “The idea of a professorship in Chicago is new to me, but I confess rather pleasing. I have always felt that Chicago was the real American city.” This was an opportunity Peirce was anxious to pursue. He wrote to Russell again on the 17th:

I have been reflecting upon your suggestion that I should go to Chicago and become professor there. It seems to be the thing for me to do, provided they call me. During many years, I felt that for my peculiar powers the world had no use. Hence, I only threw off pieces here and there, and my deeper studies in logic remain today unpublished, and nobody dreams of the things I have found out. But during the last year or two, I have been getting more and more impressed with a prevision of the miserable consequences which must ensue from the prevalent necessitarian conception of the universe. It makes God a limited monarch or roi fainéant, acting under law so blind and inexorable as to leave no room for any acts of paternal love, or any listening & answering of prayer. Now whoever will follow out with me the higher logic of relations will see as clearly and as evidently as can be the baselessness of the materialistic-necessitarian fabric. Nor can his eyes fail to be opened to the fearful abyss into which that machine-made doctrine is precipitating society. A return to christian principles, to which a knowledge of my discoveries would lead, is the sole way of salvation. Accordingly, I now feel that if a way is shown to me to teach logic, it is my sacred duty to pursue it.

Peirce decided to cancel plans for the Chicago reading of his “Tale”: “I fear the telling of emotional stories is hardly compatible with the self-abnegation and exclusive devotion to the cause of sound learning and education to which a man who proposes to become a professor must surrender himself.” Peirce noted that he was about to leave for Cambridge and would be there until further notice. Russell replied on the 19th with information about the Chicago position and with some suggestions for pursuing it. Cambridge, Russell thought, was a good place to find the support Peirce would need. George Herbert Palmer, from Harvard’s philosophy department, had been recruited by President William R. Harper for the Chicago position but eventually declined: “so he ought to know about the avenues towards such a place.” President Harper was, of course, “the Great Mogul in all the appointments,” so Russell advised Peirce to arrange for influential friends to write to Harper on his behalf.

Meanwhile, as he told Carus around 11 May, Peirce was “suffering torments” with his two articles “on the nature of mind,” in part probably because he had not fully figured out how to disentangle them. He was busy developing the molecular theory of protoplasm he had begun working up in April and managed, in mid-May, to sketch out the molecular theory that he would use to make his case for a new conception of mind (sel. 28). Peirce began by noting that the “problem is to elucidate the relation between the physical aspect of a substance and its psychical aspect.” He argued that nerve-cells do not seem to do much “mechanical work” but that “the phenomenon of taking habits” is “strongly predominant” in nerve action, so it is necessary to consider how habits can form. Peirce suggested that the capacity to feel is crucial to habit-taking and that the molecular theory of protoplasm has to account for feeling. This would be elaborated in the finished form of “Man’s Glassy Essence” (sel. 29).

The Nation carried three brief book notices in Peirce’s hand in May: on the 12th, Frank N. Cole’s translation of Eugene Netto’s Theory of Substitutions—an improvement over the German original—and Joseph Edwards’s Elementary Treatise on the Differential Calculus; on the 19th, a highly critical oneparagraph notice of Robert Grimshaw’s Record of Scientific Progress for the Year 1891—blind to real scientific progress, especially in astronomy; and a somewhat longer review of W. W. Rouse Ball’s Mathematical Recreations, appearing also on 12 May. Peirce’s notice of Ball was not one an author would have hoped for: an entertaining book with “as good a notion of a fourth dimension … as could be acquired without serious study,” but scrappy throughout, with a bad sketch of non-Euclidean geometry and with the results of Klein and Riemann misstated.

Peirce travelled to Cambridge around 17 May and stayed for about a week. He spoke at the Philosophical Club on the 21st and a day or two later he gave what William James described as “a godlike talk at Royce’s.” Much of what we know about the Philosophical Club talk comes from Frank Abbot’s diary. He recorded that some twenty graduates and friends, including Peirce’s brother Jem, attended the talk on synechism, Peirce’s “new system of philosophy.” The paper Peirce read was his “Law of Mind” (sel. 27), which he was about to submit to the Monist. Royce was probably also at the Philosophical Club talk, possibly occasioning a little tension in light of the recent battle between him and Abbot. James did not see Peirce at all because he was too occupied with preparations to depart on the 25th for a fifteen-month trip to Europe with his family. James sent a note to Peirce probably on the 23rd: “It has been a great chagrin to me to have you here all this time without meeting or hearing you. I especially wanted to hear you on Continuity, and I hear of a godlike talk at Royce’s. But Continuity will appear in Monist. Talks can never come again!!” James added a friendly remark about Peirce’s recent paper “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined”: “I meant to write you long ago to say how I enjoyed your last paper in the Monist. I believe in that sort of thing myself, but even if I didn’t it would be a blessed piece of radicalism.”

It is unclear what the “godlike talk” was that James had heard about. Peirce may have given a talk at Royce’s home or lectured in Royce’s seminar, “several séances” of which had been devoted to a discussion of Peirce’s “Doctrine of Necessity” prior to his visit, as Peirce wrote to Carus on 24 May, adding that Royce intended to attack the paper in the Philosophical Review.¹⁰¹ But one of Royce’s students, Dickinson S. Miller (1868–1963), reminiscing about Peirce’s Cambridge visit many years later, told Max Fisch that he and Sheffield had been allowed to attend silently a long informal conversation between Peirce and Royce in Royce’s study, and this might have been all that the “talk” amounted to.¹⁰² While in Cambridge, Peirce probably followed Francis Russell’s suggestion to rally support for his candidacy for the University of Chicago philosophy professorship, and he may have tried to learn more about it from Palmer. With his note mentioned above, James enclosed “a scrap for Harper which you can send with your other ‘credentials,’” and promised to write to Harper from the steamer. Carus also wrote to recommend Peirce to Harper, and others must have as well. But when Palmer learned that James had written, he wrote to Harper to warn him about Peirce: “I am astonished at James’s recommendation of Peirce. Of course my impressions may be erroneous, and I have no personal acquaintance with Peirce. I know, too, very well his eminence as a logician. But from so many sources I have heard of his broken and dissolute character that I should advise you to make most careful inquiries before engaging him. I am sure it is suspicions of this sort which have prevented his appointment here, and I suppose the same causes procured his dismissal from Johns Hopkins.”¹⁰³ Palmer’s letter took Peirce out of the running.

With his 24 May letter to Carus Peirce had enclosed “The Law of Mind” (sel. 27). This article plays a crucial role in his Monist series since it is an examination of the general law of mental action, which was claimed by Peirce to be fundamentally distinct from mechanical action. Peirce’s main objective in “The Law of Mind” was to argue for the importance of continuity for mental operations and to examine the law of mind guided by a mathematically informed understanding of continuity. Peirce’s ideas about the “prime importance” of continuity for understanding mental processes, and for philosophy in general, were brought together in the theory or doctrine he called “synechism.” About a year later, Peirce wrote an article for the Open Court, “Immortality in the Light of Synechism” (W9, sel. 54), in which he stated, concisely, that he “proposed to make synechism mean the tendency to regard everything as continuous.” Peirce said that this third Monist paper was “intended chiefly to show what synechism is, and what it leads to,” and he connected his work for the Monist to his 1868–69 Cognition Series (W2, sels. 21–23) where his study of mind was explicitly based on semiotic principles.

Peirce’s key challenge is to explain what makes mental or psychical processes fundamentally irreversible, in contradistinction to physical processes, which, when they are irreversible, are so only in a statistical sense owing to their inherent complexity (such as with the behavior of gases). As seen before, Peirce hypothesizes that the general law of mental action is that “ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain others which stand to them in a peculiar relation of affectibility.” In spreading, ideas lose intensity as they gain generality. Ideas must not be supposed to be fleeting events in consciousness that come and go abruptly but, rather, to be states of consciousness occupying infinitesimal intervals of time. In this infinitesimal interval “we directly perceive the temporal sequence” and are thus able to immediately perceive relations between emerging and passing, but temporally overlapping, ideas. “We are thus brought to the conclusion that the present is connected with the past by a series of real infinitesimal steps.” Through inference, or mediate perception, a train of thought can be built up and comprehended.

The “peculiar relation of affectibility” is what gives the movement of thought (and mental time) its forward direction. Ideas can only be affected by ideas that have preceded them, not by ideas yet to come: “The present is affectible by the past, but not by the future,” but the present affects the future. Affectibility is a non-associative transitive relation like the copula of Peirce’s algebra of logic, a point stressed in the earlier versions of “The Law of Mind” (sels. 25 and 26). According to Peirce, we “encounter three elements” in considering how ideas affect other ideas: their intrinsic qualities as feelings, their energy, and “the tendency of an idea to bring along other ideas with it.” As ideas spread, their intrinsic quality remains “nearly unchanged,” but their energy dissipates quickly while their tendency to affect other ideas increases. As more and more ideas are affected they become “welded together in association,” which results in a general idea. The feeling associated with a general idea is that of “a vague possibility of more than is present.”

Peirce says that the law of mind follows the forms of logic. By the “hypothetical process” (abduction), sensations somehow “suggest” general ideas; by induction, habits become established (“a number of sensations followed by one reaction become united under one general idea followed by the same reaction”); and by deduction, the mind functions under the domination of habit (by “calling out certain reactions on certain occasions”). But a telling difference between the law of mind and physical law is that the mental law is not “rigid” and allows for some spontaneity in mental action: “the uncertainty of the mental law is no mere defect of it, but is … of its essence.” If the law of mind acted with the rigidity of physical law, intellectual life would come to “a speedy close.”

Peirce’s introduction of infinitesimals into his philosophy of mind required support from mathematics. Peirce held that the “spread-out” feeling in a moment of consciousness was not just “consciousness continuous in a subjective sense” but was “ipso facto continuous.” Peirce devoted a lengthy section of “The Law of Mind” to his philosophy of continuity and infinity to provide the formal basis for his theory of mind. One can see how Peirce’s distinction between instants and moments of consciousness is elucidated, and justified, by his distinction between mere (dimensionless) points on a line and the “thick” (infinitesimal) points he employs to construct his theory of real continuity— especially as his theory will be developed in his 1898 Cambridge Conference Lectures. Peirce supposed that it was the spreading of infinitesimal feelings through continuous space, by means of their overlapping and welding, that could explain how “communities of feeling” arise and how communication is possible.

In a section on personality, near the end of “The Law of Mind,” Peirce argues that “personality is some kind of coördination or connection of ideas” and that a “personality, like any general idea, is not a thing to be apprehended in an instant.” Personality, as something really continuous, is a welding of infinitesimal moments, like any general idea, and not a concatenation of instants of “immediate self-consciousness.” Peirce claims that there is a “teleological harmony” in coordinated ideas and that “in the case of personality this teleology is more than a mere purposive pursuit of a predeterminate end; it is a developmental teleology…. A general idea, living and conscious now, it is already determinative of acts in the future to an extent to which it is not now conscious.” This account of personality explains the continuity of feeling and consciousness that is generally supposed to attach to personal identity but Peirce’s old semiotic account from his 1868 Journal of Speculative Philosophy papers may provide a clearer sense of the role of the other (the interpreter) in the development of a personality.

Peirce concludes by arguing that the synechistic philosophy “is forced to accept the doctrine of a personal God” and, moreover, that “we must have a direct perception of that person and indeed be in personal communication with him.” How, then, can God’s existence be doubted? This may have been the beginning of the line of thought that would lead to Peirce’s “Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” sixteen years later.

Back in New York after his Cambridge visit, Peirce quickly resumed his “academic journalism” for the Nation. Toward the end of May, he reviewed Arabella Buckley’s Moral Teachings of Science (sel. 53). The subject of Buckley’s book, though not the book itself, struck a chord with Peirce. One thing that science teaches is “perfect fairness and moral indifference as to the outcome of any inquiry.” Truth may well be pursued by the same inquirer in the church and in the laboratory, but both pursuits are radically different in their objects and methods of study. Fairness and honesty require that each approach exclude the other’s point of view. Should any conflict arise, the scientist would reason that the inquiry was still in progress on either side, the regulative hope being “that there is an ultimate resting-place which will be satisfactory from both points of view.” Another important “teaching of science” is the need for perfect candor in recognizing facts, “without trying to explain away real difficulties so as to make out a decided conclusion”: this “is the very first point of scientific morals.” Unlike the practice of law, with its “rules for excluding certain kinds of testimony,” science must exclude nothing: “It must let instincts and superstitions have their say, unchecked, and listen to them; and then it must let scientific observation have its say, equally unchecked. Science will erect a theory which shall do full justice to both orders of facts, if it can.”

But these are more the teachings of “scientific logic” than the “moral teachings” that concerned Buckley, who meant to derive moral and spiritual beliefs compatible with science. Only “airy optimism” could suppose such beliefs to be necessarily sound, Peirce objected. As a historical process of progressive discovery, science “is essentially incomplete” and fundamentally incapable of expressing anything about “eternal verities” or “teaching spiritual things.” Besides, Peirce remarked grimly, moral teachings derived from science are “in the main distinctly anti-Christian.” Science follows the mechanical philosophy which leaves no room for final causes and reduces “God to the condition of a limited monarch, acting under laws which leave no room for personal favors.” One can see how the thought Peirce was devoting to his Monist papers was flowing over into his more “popular” writings.

Following a brief spat Peirce had with Carus at the end of May over misgivings regarding Carus’s negative attitude toward Peirce’s philosophical views, Peirce wrote to Carus on 3 June to clarify his concerns:

As for the flags and parties in philosophy, I think it is 10 to 1 we are all in the wrong. We should therefore exercise the utmost toleration. Besides philosophy has little practical value. It is a poor thing to base religion or conduct or politics or business of any kind on. And I for one am not at all disposed to risk any skin upon it [the dictates of philosophy] or make a party to advocate any particular variety of philosophy. When I enter a philosophical disputation it is in the hopes that I and the audience will learn something, not at all to cause the triumph of any doctrine. In fact, when philosophy becomes partisan, it may be sophy but it ceases to be philosophy…. The scientist, like the philosopher, does not busy himself with vindicating doctrines but in searching out truth. He is a student, not a party-leader…. I as a philosopher have no more to do with the cause of religion than the chemist has. I am just pegging away at my studies and giving the results to the world, without any ulterior purpose. I want to publish them in a journal which does not care a straw what the results may be, or what cause they forward or injure.

In mid June, Peirce wrote for the Nation a review of William Ridgeway’s Origin of Metallic Currency (sel. 54). As a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Weights, Measures, and Coinage, and once in charge of the U.S. Office of Weights and Measures (in 1884–85), Peirce was clearly an expert on the book’s subject-matter. His review provided a brief but compelling critique of the history of standards and finished with restrained praise for Ridgeway, who, despite being “old school”—“he attaches more importance to documents than to monuments”—had admittedly managed to produce a “strong work.”

Earlier in the month, on 9 June, pressed for money, Peirce had asked Carus for immediate payment for “The Law of Mind” and for an advance for his next article (sel. 29): “A succession of misfortunes in the last year has put me for the time being into great straits financially. I am on the point of placing two inventions each for a very large sum, but negotiations are slow, and it is essential that I should keep up appearances. Consequently, a few hundred dollars now will be worth to me many thousand a little later.” The next day Carus sent a check for $200 for “The Law of Mind” and on the 16th he advanced $100 for “Man’s Glassy Essence.”

One of the inventions Peirce was referring to was his improvement of a new bleaching process.¹⁰⁴ In June, Peirce was brought into an investment scheme, headed by Wall Street promoter Thomas J. Montgomery, formed to profit from the efficiencies of a new electrolytic bleaching process recently patented by the inventor, Albert E. Woolf. Woolf, who lived in New York and was apparently aware of Peirce’s expertise as a chemical engineer, had invited him to examine his bleaching process. Peirce’s examination and suggestions led Montgomery to engage Peirce to thoroughly analyze the Woolf process and prepare a report on its chemistry, and on possible improvements, for the investors. Montgomery agreed to pay Peirce $500 for the analysis and report and offered him $100,000 in stock for significant improvements to the process (there is some indication that Peirce expected even higher fees and yields). Peirce spent a great deal of time analyzing the Woolf process for bleaching by electrolysis and succeeded in discovering patentable improvements that would make the process more efficient and more effective (doubling its “intrinsic economy”).¹⁰⁵ Peirce’s improvements included a new chemical action “hitherto unknown to science,” a new “cyclical process” that preserved the effectiveness of the bleaching solution, a new procedure for handling the bleaching solution in relation to the electrodes in the decomposing tank, and a new alternating process of repeatedly bleaching in an acid solution and cleansing in an alkaline solution that could yield marked efficiencies. Peirce reported these findings in detail to Montgomery on 6 July and recommended that the latter waste no time in applying for patents: “Woolf’s patents in my opinion are of no great market value, because there is nothing new in his process except making the solution alkaline. But the invention here described is certainly new in its first claim, and I believe in all; and it cannot be superseded.” Peirce’s innovations were not only relevant for the bleaching process but had relevance for the electrolytic treatment of solutions more generally.

Peirce believed he had succeeded in finding a way out of his financial hardship. But near the end of July, when Montgomery gave Peirce a check for $500, it was returned for inadequate funds. Peirce’s brother, Herbert, who was somehow involved in this scheme and was more familiar with the business world, intervened to help resolve what he assumed was an inadvertent mix-up. If the problem could not be resolved, however, Herbert was sure they could find someone who would pay more for Peirce’s report: “In fact it is a pity to see so much sold for so little” (31 July). But Peirce became impatient and made some unwise remarks in correspondence that turned Montgomery and others in the investment group against him, forcing Herbert to abandon his efforts. Regrettably for Peirce, he had not held back his report as Herbert had recommended, and he never received a penny for his work or his ideas. This unfortunate episode would be alluded to in Peirce’s fifth Monist paper, “Evolutionary Love,” where Montgomery made an appearance as Peirce’s “Master in glomery.”¹⁰⁶

Not long before the promise of the bleaching enterprise evaporated, Peirce had written a note to Juliette listing his rather exaggerated expectations for earnings from his 1892 ventures: Vanderbilt contract, $57,216.35; Montgomery, $5,500.00; Woolf’s business, $106,018.14; Carus, $1,721.18; Interest, $4, 567.75; for a total of $165,023.42. “Pretty well for hard times,” Peirce concluded exuberantly. With the collapse of the bleaching scheme, his hopes dissolved; it would be only his work for Carus that would pay, and his Lowell lectures and work for the Nation, neither on his list. Financial hardship again loomed before him.

“The Law of Mind” appeared as planned on the first of July.¹⁰⁷ Peirce must have been pleased that a crucial part of his argument against mechanical philosophy was now before the intellectual public, and that he was on track with the Monist for a continuation of his series in consecutive issues. The appearance of his article would not yield much-needed income, though, since he had already been paid. Peirce turned to the ever dependable Garrison and picked up two more books to review.

He first took up Karl Pearson’s Grammar of Science (sel. 55, published on 7 July), a widely influential book whose second edition greatly inspired the young Einstein ten years later. As Peirce saw him, Pearson was a compelling archetype of the scientific nominalist carrying forth the Kantian agenda with originality and gusto by applying it to contemporary scientific problems while relying on an obsolete psychology, an uncritical logic, and an exploded metaphysics. Peirce could not but object to Pearson’s conceptualist account of science that entailed that laws of nature were the products of the perceptive faculty, that Newton had not discovered the law of gravitation but had created it, and that motion was “wholly relative.” Pearson saw concepts where he should have seen percepts. Peirce’s criticism of Pearson’s nominalistic account of reality as dependent on immediate sense-impressions (and thus on an outdated theory of perception) was aimed at showing how any attempt at denying the reality of generality ends up refuting itself. But Peirce acknowledged that Pearson’s book was “one of considerable power” and contained “matter for salutary reflection for anybody who cares to think deeply.”

Peirce had cultivated an interest in elocution since his youth, even gaining an early reputation for his mastery of oratory. His competence was such that, toward the end of 1892 or a bit later, he would apply for a position to teach elocution at the Episcopal Church’s General Theological Seminary in New York.¹⁰⁸ So it is not surprising that he agreed to review Samuel Silas Curry’s Province of Expression (sel. 56, published on 14 July). Though admitting that the work was “thoughtful and refined,” he was disappointed that Curry had “degraded” the art of eloquent delivery known as “elocution” to “an offensive display of technique without soul or real art” that he called “expression.” Curry’s criticisms of the methods of the four main “schools of delivery”—the imitative, the mechanical, the impulsive, and the speculative—were not entirely convincing, and Curry did not offer a clear substitute. In evaluating rules of delivery, it was important to discuss their “truth and utility” independently of their “stupid, unrefined, and tasteless application.” Peirce observed that an expert in elocution theory need not be a great orator. Indeed, “excessive devotion to the theory of any art is somewhat unfavorable to its practice,” he said, adding perhaps self-reflectively that this was true even in the principal art, that of thinking.

Meanwhile, Peirce had been working on his Lowell lectures in his rare spare time. By mid-year he was losing hope that he could finish by December, when the course was scheduled. On 5 July, Peirce wrote to Augustus Lowell to tell him he was in a great quandary; he did not want to cause any serious inconvenience for Lowell but was afraid his lectures could not “be as good as they ought to be.” Describing his impecunious state despite sustained efforts, Peirce dramatically suggested that, since “no man can do good work on the brink of starvation,” it might be in the “interest of the Lowell Institute and of its audiences” to cancel his December engagement—but “I will go ahead and execute my contract, if desired, or ‘perish in the attempt’.” Lowell replied on the 8th that he would be glad to advance part of the payment for the lectures: “let me know how much you would require to secure the proper leisure for their preparation.” Lowell assured Peirce that his lectures on the history of science would be a credit to him and to the Institute, and that they “might afterwards be published upon favorable terms.” Surely “it would be a mistake & misfortune if it were to be given up.” Peirce was much relieved and asked for half his payment in advance, “one fourth soon, and one fourth about October 1^st,” and he promised to be ready in December. On 12 July, Lowell mailed Peirce a check for $450, one fourth of what the Lowell Institute paid for a course of twelve lectures.

On 15 July, Peirce finally sent Carus the fourth article of his Monist series, at first entitled “Our Glassy Essence” but soon renamed, by an alteration to the galley, “Man’s Glassy Essence.”¹⁰⁹ This was the second of the two papers on mind Peirce had begun working on in April—the companion to “The Law of Mind.” He told Carus that the article was not as good as it should have been “owing to preoccupations and anxieties” but that it still had “some value.” In his “Notes” (sel. 28) for this second paper, Peirce had written that the “problem is to elucidate the relation between the physical aspect of a substance and its psychical aspect.” In effect, he was aiming to contribute to the solution of the mind-body problem,¹¹⁰ the crux of which, in his view, had to do with the nature of habits and habit formation. “The Law of Mind” had concluded that the growth of mind was a process of generalization, infinitesimal feelings welding together to become general ideas; yet the spreading and coordination of feelings that results in a general idea works, somehow, through molecular transformations and the dissipation of energy in a process that is essentially mechanical. “Man’s Glassy Essence” was to explain the process of habit formation in physical organisms: how general ideas formed under the law of mind can gain “the power of exciting reactions.”

Peirce’s first step was to frame a general molecular theory of matter as a basis for a molecular theory of protoplasm. He then reviewed the properties of protoplasm that had to be accounted for (reaction to disturbances, nutrition and growth, reproduction, and so on) and constructed a molecular theory of protoplasm accordingly. Assuming matter to be composed of molecules in swift motion exerting significant mutual attractions and repulsions, he hypothesized that critical molecular changes occur because of dissociation or decomposition, when molecules “throw off” atoms or when they are “broken up” into atoms or sub-atomic atomicules.¹¹¹ Two especially important properties of protoplasm are the capacity to take habits and to feel (in sum, to exercise all the functions of mind). Peirce gave a complicated account of how repeated disturbances to complex molecules of protoplasm that result in derangements of its atomic and sub-atomic parts and repeated restorations of equilibrium by the exchange or replacement of similar but not necessarily exactly equivalent parts (from nutrients or from neighboring molecules) can account for “the law of habit.” This explanation of habit is “purely mechanical,” Peirce noted, so it might be thought “unnecessary to suppose that habit-taking is a primordial principle of the universe.” But this account of habit (as well as all cases of actions apparently violating the law of energy) depends on “aggregations of trillions of molecules in one and the same condition and neighborhood” which Peirce believed couldn’t be accounted for by conservative forces: “let the mechanical explanation be as perfect as it may, the state of things which it supposes presents evidence of a primordial habit-taking tendency.” Only “a principle of habit, itself due to the growth by habit of an infinitesimal chance tendency toward habit-taking,” can bridge “the chasm between the chancemedley of chaos and the cosmos of order and law.”

It remained for Peirce to account for the property of feeling, for he believed that all protoplasm is conscious to some degree. Could feeling also be accounted for by a mechanical explanation of constituent molecular processes? Peirce speculated that if protoplasm were synthesized in a laboratory out of its component chemical elements, which he assumed to be possible, it would be “puerile and ultra-puerile” to refuse to admit that it would feel. Nevertheless, it would be futile to try to account for its feeling by the three laws of mechanics: “It can never be explained, unless we admit that physical events are but degraded or undeveloped forms of psychical events.” Once this is granted, Peirce could explain how the “breaking up of habit” in nerve-protoplasm, given the considerable instability of protoplasm in general, leads to “fortuitous departures from regularity … accompanied by an intensification of feeling.” Thus, Peirce said, the idealist “has no need to dread a mechanical theory of life.” Chance-spontaneity, which engenders diversity, is always accompanied by feeling, in fact “chance is but the outward aspect of that which within itself is feeling.” The tendency to take habits, which strengthens by its own operation, increases uniformity, which reduces the intensity of feeling but doesn’t eliminate it: “wherever actions take place under an established uniformity, there so much feeling as there may be takes the mode of a sense of reaction.” With this, Peirce concluded his account of “the relation between the psychical and physical aspects of a substance,” the principal aim of “Man’s Glassy Essence.”

Peirce finished his paper by remarking that “it would be a mistake to conceive of the psychical and the physical aspects of matter as two aspects absolutely distinct…. [M]echanical laws are nothing but acquired habits, like all the regularities of mind” and the “action of habit is nothing but generalization, and generalization is nothing but the spreading of feelings.” A general idea, according to Peirce, is “a certain modification of consciousness which accompanies any regularity or general relation between chance actions.” There is a “unity of the ego” in the consciousness of a general idea that is “quite analogous to a person.” Peirce pointed out that as early as 1868, in his Journal of Speculative Philosophy paper, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” (W2, sel. 22), he had claimed “that a person is nothing but a symbol involving a general idea,” but he had been too nominalistic then to “see that every general idea has the unified living feeling of a person.” Peirce now believed that what was necessary for personhood is a congeries of feelings—feelings that are “in close enough connection to influence one another.” Based on this conception of personhood, Peirce put forward a theory of “corporate personality,” the view that esprit de corps, national sentiment, and sympathy “are no mere metaphors” and that churches and even corporations can have real personalities. This idea could be put to the test, he believed, by observing whether there is “something like personal consciousness in bodies of men who are in intimate and intensely sympathetic communion.” Peirce noted that when some “thirty thousand young people of the society for Christian Endeavor” gathered in Madison Square Garden on 7 July 1892, “there seemed to me to be some mysterious diffusion of sweetness and light.”¹¹² Peirce added that “if such a fact is capable of being made out anywhere, it should be in the church.”

“Man’s Glassy Essence” appeared at the beginning of October in the third volume of the Monist. On 7 October, Peirce sent in the fifth and last article of his cosmological series, “Evolutionary Love” (sel. 30).¹¹³ It was composed while the U.S. was rapidly descending into a severe economic depression and when labor unrest was escalating. Peirce’s personal finances were in terrible shape and his career prospects were dismal. The bleaching project he had hoped would solve his financial problems was falling apart and he would soon find out that he had been swindled and would never see a penny of return for his considerable efforts. He had been turned down for every university position he had sought and the chance of university life seemed to have slipped from his grasp. He had the Lowell lectures ahead of him and they would bring him an additional $1350, certainly a great relief, but he would have to devote most of his time in the coming weeks to their preparation and that would stop other initiatives. Peirce was working as diligently and intensely as he ever had but for much less return, and on a job-by-job basis with no security for the future. And yet, instead of simply losing faith in the institutions that were failing him or of becoming cynical and dejected, Peirce had been undergoing a personal transformation all along that is reflected in “Evolutionary Love.”

This article, one of the most metaphorical in the Peirce corpus, adds a new law to his account of the legal canon of the Universe. The law of love will take its place alongside the mechanical laws and the law of mind. The love that plays a role in the development of the cosmos is not the “exuberance-love” of Eros, nor the “passionate-love” of Empedocles, but something closer to the “cherishing-love” that John, the Ontological Gospeller, attributed to the Supreme Being. From the message of 1 John 1:5, “that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all,” together with the assurance of 1 John 4:8, that “God is love,” Peirce concluded that just as darkness is the defect of light, so evil must be the defect of love, and that God’s love must be great enough to embrace its opposite. Henry James, Sr., a Swedenborgian, had expressed a similar position: “It is no doubt very tolerable finite or creaturely love to love one’s own in another, to love another for his conformity to one’s self: but nothing can be in more flagrant contrast with the creative Love, all whose tenderness ex vi termini must be reserved only for what intrinsically is most bitterly hostile and negative to itself.”¹¹⁴ This is true Christian love whose law is expressed in the Golden Rule, which, on Peirce’s reading, is “Sacrifice your own perfection to the perfectionment of your neighbor.” It is this Christian love, in some primeval form, that somehow permeates the universe as the agent of development and growth. “Everybody can see that the statement of St. John is the formula of an evolutionary philosophy, which teaches that growth comes only from love, from—I will not say self-sacrifice, but from the ardent impulse to fulfill another’s highest impulse…. Love, recognizing germs of loveliness in the hateful, gradually warms it into life, and makes it lovely. That is the sort of evolution which every careful student of my essay ‘The Law of Mind,’ must see that synechism calls for.”

Fundamental as the law of love may be cosmically, Peirce saw that it was but rarely expressed in his age, especially as he had just been the victim of a swindle. Historians of the future, Peirce supposed, would come to think of the nineteenth century as the economical century “for political economy has more direct relations with all the branches of its activity than has any other science,” and Peirce expressed its “formula of redemption” in bitter terms: “It is this: Intelligence in the service of greed ensures the justest prices, the fairest contracts, the most enlightened conduct of all the dealings between men, and leads to the summum bonum, food in plenty and perfect comfort. Food for whom? Why, for the greedy master of intelligence.” Peirce made it clear that he was not impugning political economy as a science,¹¹⁵ yet just as physics “has encouraged necessitarianism,” a false and dangerous doctrine in Peirce’s opinion, so political economy “has induced an exaggeration of the beneficial effects of greed and of the unfortunate results of sentiment, until there has resulted a philosophy which comes unwittingly to this, that greed is the great agent in the elevation of the human race and in the evolution of the universe.” Peirce believed that utilitarianism, a great force in the nineteenth century which regarded persons only as abstractions, was a natural ally of the political economists who openly endorsed the gospel of greed.

So in “Evolutionary Love” Peirce depicted two opposing gospels, “the gospel of Christ” and “the gospel of greed.” According to the gospel of Christ, “progress comes from every individual merging his individuality in sympathy with his neighbors.” According to the gospel of greed, “progress takes place by virtue of every individual’s striving for himself with all his might and trampling his neighbor under foot whenever he gets a chance to do so.” The gospel of Christ was an expression of the law of love. The gospel of greed was an expression of the mechanical law that had been embraced so unreservedly by the age. Peirce saw Darwin’s theory of evolution as a natural extension of the gospel of greed to the “entire realm of animal and vegetable life.” The struggle for existence was endorsed as the natural and appropriate engine for driving the evolution of the species, an endorsement, Peirce thought, of “ruthless greed.” Darwin should have added a motto to the title-page of his Origin of Species: “Every individual for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost!”

After confessing to have a “passionate predilection” for the law of love over the law of greed, and cautioning his readers to be on guard because of his “one-sidedness,” Peirce considered the different theories of evolution for their “logical affinities.” To some extent Peirce recapitulated his discussion of evolution in “The Architecture of Theories,” but from a different standpoint. In “Evolutionary Love,” Peirce identified three principal kinds of evolution and a number of sub-varieties. The main varieties were evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution by creative love. Darwinian evolution is evolution by fortuitous variation, or chance, but with a secondary action required to “secure advance in a definite direction.” The secondary action is “struggle for existence” in which greed is the motivating desire. Although chance is the critical factor in Darwinian evolution, the success of nineteenth-century physicists in bringing non-conservative processes into the domain of mechanical law by means of the statistical method satisfied the prevailing nominalist scientific community that the non-conservative action of organic development must also be fundamentally mechanical. Peirce named evolution by fortuitous variation tychastic evolution, or tychasm.

The second principal kind of evolution was evolution by mechanical necessity. There are different varieties of evolution of this general kind, including August Weismann’s theory that all biological forms are “mechanical resultants of the heredity from two parents,”¹¹⁶ and the theory of geologists, like Clarence King, that evolution is the result of cataclysmic changes in the environment of the evolving organisms (other geologists point to environmental factors but think cataclysms unnecessary). For Weismann, there is an inner necessity at work and for King it is an external necessity, but for all varieties of evolution of this kind, chance is not a factor. Peirce named evolution by mechanical necessity anancastic evolution, or anancasm.

The third kind of evolution was Lamarckian evolution, or evolution by the transmission to offspring of acquired characteristics (“hypertrophies or atrophies which have affected individuals early in their lives”). According to Peirce, Lamarckians recognize that some transmitted characteristics, or “modifications of form,” may have been initially due to mechanical causes, but he identified “the straining of endeavor” and “exercise” as the key factors. “Now, endeavor, since it is directed toward an end, is essentially psychical, even though it be sometimes unconscious; and the growth due to exercise, as I argued in my last paper, follows a law of a character quite contrary to that of mechanics.” Peirce was tempted to say that Lamarckian evolution is “evolution by the force of habit,” but habit is “mere inertia, a resting on one’s oars, not a propulsion.” Yet habit “serves to establish the new features, and also to bring them into harmony with the general morphology and function of the animals and plants to which they belong.” Peirce’s discussion of Lamarckian evolution focuses mainly on the development of mind; he even remarks at one point that the “first step in the Lamarckian evolution of mind is the putting of sundry thoughts into situations in which they are free to play.” This seems compatible with the current view that Lamarckian evolution is not as applicable to biological evolution as it is to social evolution—but Peirce’s objective idealism may provide the necessary theoretical bridge to span these realms. Peirce finally pointed out, what had surely become obvious to any careful reader, that his “account of Lamarckian evolution coincides with the general description of the action of love.” Peirce considered this kind of evolution to be “evolution by creative love” and called it agapastic evolution, or agapasm. Related names that are probably more familiar to students of Peirce’s philosophy are tychism, anancism, and agapism, which name the doctrines “that absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and the law of love, are severally operative in the cosmos.”

In the final section of “Evolutionary Love,” Peirce pointed out that there is no sharp line of demarcation between the three kinds of evolution and that the main questions were “whether three radically different evolutionary elements have been operative” and “what are the most striking characteristics of whatever elements have been operative.” He briefly considered these questions from the standpoint of “the historical development of thought.” After identifying the main features of tychastic, anancastic, and agapastic developments of thought, Peirce gave historical examples supporting the conclusion that these different kinds of evolution really are operative in the world and revealing some interesting characteristics, such as that what distinguishes anancasm from agapasm “is its purposelessness.” Peirce’s description of the agapastic development of thought stressed the key role that sympathy plays and that the power of sympathy depends on the continuity of mind. Agapasm and synechism are closely linked. A telling conclusion Peirce drew from this exercise was that “all of the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the powers of unaided individuals.”

Although one might read the conclusion of “Evolutionary Love” as a satisfactory culmination of Peirce’s cosmological series, it was not intended as such, and Peirce always regretted having to end it so abruptly. His lengthy “Reply to the Necessitarians” (W9, sel. 38), a rejoinder to Carus’s attack on his tychism, appeared in the Monist in July 1893, but was not the sixth paper he had in mind. “Man’s Glassy Essence” included a statement suggesting that Peirce expected to consider in a sixth paper how the number and distribution of regions of positive and negative potential surrounding atoms would determine their valency. Early in 1893, when Peirce was negotiating with Hegeler to publish a book of his philosophical papers, he planned to include twenty papers, the final six being the five Monist papers followed by chapter 20, a general sketch of the theory of the universe—maybe what he intended for the sixth paper. In 1895, Peirce wrote to Russell that had Hegeler kept his promise to allow him another article, “the 6^th article, which would have been the keystone of the whole, would have related to that branch which I variously call Second intentional Logic, Objective Logic, & Pure Rhetoric. By this I mean the doctrine of the Evolution of thought.” Finally, ten years later, in 1905 in another Monist paper, “What Pragmatism Is,” Peirce described what he had planned for the concluding article of his cosmology series (EP2: 345):

Had a purposed article concerning the principle of continuity and synthetizing the ideas of the other articles of a series in the early volumes of The Monist ever been written, it would have appeared how, with thorough consistency, that theory involved the recognition that continuity is an indispensable element of reality, and that continuity is simply what generality becomes in the logic of relatives, and thus, like generality, and more than generality, is an affair of thought, and is the essence of thought. Yet even in its truncated condition, an extra-intelligent reader might discern that the theory of those cosmological articles made reality to consist in something more than feeling and action could supply, inasmuch as the primeval chaos, where those two elements were present, was explicitly shown to be pure nothing. Now, the motive for alluding to that theory just here is that in this way one can put in a strong light a position which the pragmaticist holds and must hold, whether that cosmological theory be ultimately sustained or exploded, namely, that the third category,—the category of thought, representation, triadic relation, mediation, genuine Thirdness, Thirdness as such,—is an essential ingredient of reality, yet does not by itself constitute reality, since this category (which in that cosmology appears as the element of habit) can have no concrete being without action, as a separate object on which to work its government, just as action cannot exist without the immediate being of feeling on which to act.

Thinking back on his Monist series around 1906, Peirce regarded it as “a first crude” try at a modern scientific metaphysics, no longer up-to-date in all its detail but still “serving to indicate just what sort of a thing is wanted.”¹¹⁷ Peirce’s assessment of the series is pretty close to the settled view of those who over the years have studied it. As the details of the science become less relevant, the radical and landmark nature of some of his main ideas has become all the more apparent. Peirce’s clever reversal of the received view that uniformity was primordial and that it was its absence that required explanation, so that in his new cosmology the initial condition was one of total chaos out of which uniformities evolved by habit, was a true milestone for both science and philosophy. Ilya Prigogine has recognized Peirce’s introduction of absolute chance into his cosmology as “a pioneering step”¹¹⁸ and Ian Hacking has noted Peirce’s success in his Monist papers in putting “emergentism together with ideas of statistical mechanics, to form a new and vigorous indeterminism.”¹¹⁹ By bringing together his absolute chance with the law of mind, Peirce could comprehend an indeterminate and irreversible course of events through time, a process of real growth. If, that is, we also admit his law of love, which has received too little attention to this day. Peirce’s tychism and his synechism have been for a long time topics of research for students of philosophy; agapism much less so but perhaps that is beginning to change. It may be that Peirce’s law of love will one day be understood to be the greatest contribution of Peirce’s first Monist series.

The reaction to Peirce’s Monist papers varied greatly when they first appeared. William James, as noted above, thought Peirce’s “Doctrine of Necessity Examined” was “a blessed piece of radicalism.” Much attention was given to Peirce’s papers in the pages of the Monist, and some in many other publications that treated philosophical or theoretical subjects. In his presidential address to the American Medico-Psychological Association in 1919, Elmer E. Southard, Director of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, introduced Peirce to his audience as “perhaps the most original of American philosophers.” After summarizing Peirce’s cosmology, with a surprising reference to “Peirce’s celebrated paper on Evolutionary Love,” Southard concluded:

“Somehow Peirce has always seemed to me the most American of all philosophers. He was, as you might say, with his Tychism, just the sort of thoroughgoing sport that the Yankee prides himself on being, whereas, with his agapistic doctrines, he worked into the world just that degree of bonhomie that the Yankee never quite can succeed in concealing. If it were possible to combine most intimately some of the elements of the chance doctrine of the universe, namely Tychism, with some of the elements of the love doctrine, namely Agapism, then we should perhaps find that Charles S. Peirce stood for being not merely a sport, but a good sport, and this is perhaps a sufficient description of the American end and aim.”¹²⁰

Of course Peirce’s Monist articles were not universally celebrated. Peirce expected this when he exclaimed:¹²¹ “[A]s long as I have only begun to explain my position, people have no disposition to wait to hear me state my meaning in full; … and these may have a public interest if they prevent me, as they threaten to do, from completing the exposition of a philosophy which might lead science into the way of truth.” E. B. Wilson reported that Peirce’s former student, Christine Ladd-Franklin, believed that “Man’s Glassy Essence” showed “very definitely” that he “was losing his mind as early as the first half of the nineties.” Wilson added: “And I must say that it has always seemed to me that his writings after 1890 gave much evidence of this when compared with those before 1885.”¹²² If any of Peirce’s principal papers prior to 1885 is compared with “Man’s Glassy Essence” or “Evolutionary Love,” one can see why Ladd-Franklin thought Peirce was losing his mind—if she meant no longer being of one mind with one’s former self. She believed Peirce’s transformation to be pathological, but that is not the only explanation.

Peirce’s 24 April 1892 letter to the Rector of St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church represented a pivotal moment in Peirce’s life. If his experience was one of true conversion, it was in the sense of “becoming a new man.” Peirce’s letter shows that he was thinking of himself and his life in a new way. Many of his friends and colleagues also saw him differently. When Peirce started working on “Man’s Glassy Essence,” he took up a project which in a sense he had put on hold twenty-four years earlier when he finished “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.” In that paper he had argued that man was an external sign and that as a sign, what a man was depended on “the ultimate decision of the community.” If both Peirce and his community were interpreting the sign that he was in a new way, then by the logic of it he was a new man, and he had now accepted it.

It may be argued in the end that what the transformation described above led Peirce to was to become a contrite fallibilist. As a lifelong practicing scientist, Peirce had always known that the path toward knowledge demanded acceptance of the facts of the matter regardless of one’s wishes and expectations. The humbling experiences Peirce had endured in recent years, together with the cold truth that he could no longer achieve his best, for want of opportunity and means—for want of a cooperating community—had intensified his realization that we must approach our quest for knowledge with humility. None of us alone can make progress or ever know if we have reached the truth. Our greatest contribution is our dedicated participation in the quest for truth along with our fellow searchers. Peirce’s deliberate turn toward contrite fallibilism may well be his most significant advance during the period covered by this volume. It is the path Peirce would continue on for the remainder of his days.

Nathan Houser

1. This introduction was abridged by André De Tienne because of space limitations. The unabridged final draft is available electronically in the Companion to W8 on the PEP website (www.iupui.edu/~peirce). In writing this introduction, I have made heavy use of the Max H. Fisch files and data collections at the Peirce Edition Project. Footnote references are not given for items that can be easily located by keeping the following in mind: all references to manuscripts and Peirce’s letters, unless otherwise indicated, are to the Peirce papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard University or in the Open Court collection; correspondence with members of the Open Court is in the Open Court collection in the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University; letters used are also from these collections or from the Coast Survey collection in the National Archives. Readers should consult the annotations and the textual notes at the back of the volume for additional information about circumstances related to the composition of the volume’s selections. This introduction continues those to the previous volumes and assumes their acquaintance in order to minimize repetitions.

2. These episodes are described in the introduction to W6. See W6, sel. 44 for the article rejected by Metcalf.

3. See the Introduction to W6 for a more detailed account of Peirce’s life in New York during the winter and spring 1889–90.

4. The library’s annual report for 1891 records that “The most notable accession has been a large number of mathematical works kindly suggested by Professor Charles S. Peirce after a careful examination of our collection.” Forty-third Annual Report of the Astor Library for the year 1891, p. 18. Also see “A Year at the Astor Library; Additions to the Collections—Visitors and Their Work,” NYT, 11 February 1893, p. 9.

5. Quoted by H. W. Henshaw, book notice, American Anthropologist 5.2 (Apr. 1892): 184–85.

6. Science 13.314 (8 Feb. 1889): 103.

7. See the introduction to W6, pp. lvii–lix, for a fuller treatment of Peirce’s Century Dictionary work. W7, a special volume featuring Peirce’s contributions to the Century Dictionary, is in preparation at the University of Quebec at Montreal (PEP UQAM) under the direction of François Latraverse. Professor Latraverse will write the historical introduction for that special volume.

8. See W6: lix–lxix for an extensive account of this.

9. See NEM 1: xxix; W6: lxxii.

10. See the textual commentary for sels. 17 and 18, pp. 553–56. Sometime in 1890, Peirce had decided to turn his correspondence course lessons into a textbook entitled “Light of Logic.”

11. See annotations p. 380.

12. While arguing this point in sel. 19, Peirce makes the passing remark that “there is a world of difference between fallible knowledge and no knowledge,” thus implicitly contrasting fallibilism and skepticism.

13. Hegeler, “The Basis of Ethics,” Open Court 1: 18–22; quoted in Harold Henderson, Paul Carus of Open Court; Catalyst for Controversy (Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), from which other biographical information in this paragraph was taken.

14. Henderson, p. 24.

15. Science 16.398 (19 Sept. 1890): 166–67.

16. See annotation 111.3–5, pp. 386–87. Peirce was slightly under in his count of years, assuming he was referring back to his 1878 “Illustrations” article, “The Order of Nature” (W3, sel. 64), which he usually cited as the beginning of his serious work on cosmology.

17. Peirce made this distinction in his definition of “reason” for the Century Dictionary and quoted Hobbes’s Leviathan, pt. 1, chap. 4, as his source.

18. See the textual headnote for this selection, p. 564. To compare with James’s work, see, for example, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, pp. 588ff. Much of “The Stream of Thought” had been published under the title “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” in the January 1884 issue of Mind.

19. See annotation 33.2, p. 368.

20. Kee Soo Shin. Paul Carus’s “Positive Monism” and Critique of Other Types of Monism (Mach, Haeckel, Peirce). Dissertation, Philosophy Dept., Temple University, 1973, p. 344.

21. In his 1887 paper on “Logical Machines” (W6, sel. 15), Peirce had made an in-depth comparison of Jevons’s and Marquand’s logical machines and had demonstrated the superiority of Marquand’s.

22. See annotation 99.36, p. 384.

23. This was actually a misquotation: see annotation 38.13–15, p. 371.

24. See Victor F. Lenzen, “An Unpublished Scientific Monograph by C. S. Peirce,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 5.1 (1969): 5–24, and W6: lxv–lxix, for more details.

25. See Peirce to Thorn, 28 May 1889; Mendenhall to Peirce, c. 4 October 1890; and Peirce to Mendenhall, 15 October 1890.

26. See the textual headnote for sel. 14, pp. 547–48.

27. In the Chronological Catalog for this volume, several manuscripts are noted to be possibly related to Peirce’s work for the Century Dictionary.

28. See the following entries in the Chronological Catalog: 1890.41 and c.1890.17–20, 23–25.

29. W4, sel. 38; W5, sel. 45; W6, sels. 20 and 21.

30. In 1931, Gödel proved that number theory was incomplete, and in 1970 Yuri Matiyasevich gave a negative answer to Hilbert.

31. See the textual headnote for sel. 16, p. 551.

32. Open Court 5 (31 Dec. 1890): 3076.

33. Book Chat 6.1 (Jan. 1891): 11.

34. Ferrel to Mendenhall, 19 October, 1890; see also W6: 481–82, annotation 301.18–19.

35. Peirce would also have noticed that in Schröder’s bibliography he was listed as “Peirce, Charles S(antiago),” just below an entry for his father with guidance for pronouncing his surname: “Peirce, Benjamin (gesprochen: Pörss).” This is no doubt the first occurrence of “Santiago” as Peirce’s middle name. It is not known why Schröder gave Peirce this name but the fact that all but the ‘S’ is in parentheses suggests that it was only a guess. Soon, however, Schröder’s correspondent, the mathematician Ventura Reyes Prósper, would begin using “Santiago” as Peirce’s middle name in letters and publications. In 1903, when Peirce was preparing a personal entry for a biographical dictionary (R 1611), he wrote: “I am variously listed in print as Charles Santiago Peirce, Charles Saunders Peirce, and Charles Sanders Peirce. Under the circumstances a noncommittal S. suits me best.” Eventually, after William James came so crucially to his aid in later years, it occurred to Peirce to honor James by putting “Santiago” (Saint James) to use and by 1907 he had become Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce.

36. W4, sel. 19 and W5, sel. 30.

37. See the annotations on pp. 419–24 for further discussion of these selections.

38. Fisch stated emphatically that his explanation was “pure hypothesis.” Perhaps the Peirce estate had been named for the Arisbe butterfly or for something else. (Max H. Fisch, “Peirce’s Arisbe: The Greek Influence in His Later Philosophy,” Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism, eds. Ketner and Kloesel, n. 40, p. 248.) For a different guess, see André De Tienne’s “The Mystery of Arisbe” in Peirce Project Newsletter 3.1 (1999); see also the introduction to W6, p. lxxii.

39. See the annotations for sel. 35 for further commentary on Peirce’s question and his solution, and annotation 173.29–30, p. 407, for references to Cayley’s publications on trees.

40. Of course sel. 35 is part of the general study of the copula that includes sels. 31–34.

41. James’s Principles also “offended the scientific scruples” of James Sully and G. Stanley Hall, according to Ralph Barton Perry; see his Thought and Character of William James, vol. 1, pp. 104–11.

42. That Peirce took James’s Psychology quite seriously is attested to by the fact that he continued to work with it and correspond with James about it. Sometime between 1894 and 1897, Peirce composed a set of forty-six questions on volume one. On 1 January 1894, Peirce wrote to James to tell him how much he liked his “distinction between substantive and transitive parts of the train of thought” and told him that there was “nothing in your psychology which serves my purposes better.” But Peirce believed that James should choose more appropriate “psychological terms” for this key distinction and “leave grammar-words for logic.” These “Questions on William James’s Principles of Psychology,” will be included in a later volume. Some of the questions were published by Perry, ibid., and some in CP 8.72–90. See Mathias Girel’s “The Metaphysics and Logic of Psychology: Peirce’s Reading of James’s Principles,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 39.2 (2003): 163–203.

43. See annotation 240.3, pp. 429–30, for the complete editorial.

44. Peirce’s claim that growth is irreversible was promptly challenged and Peirce elaborated and defended his position in the 22 October and 12 November issues of the Nation: see annotation 244.6–7, pp. 432–33.

45. See annotation 123.16–17, p. 389.

46. “Mr. Charles S. Peirce on Necessity,” Monist 2.3 (April 1892): 442.

47. “Mr. Charles S. Peirce’s Onslaught on the Doctrine of Necessity,” Monist 2.4 (July 1892): 560–82.

48. “The Idea of Necessity, Its Basis and Its Scope,” Monist 3.1 (October 1892): 68–96.

49. Monist 3.4 (July 1893): 571–622.

50. See annotation 125.35, p. 389. Except for Carus’s final rejoinder, the exchange will be published in W9 and the controversy will be discussed more fully in the introduction to that volume.

51. See annotation 245.3–4, pp. 433–34.

52. Josiah Royce, “Dr. Abbot’s ‘Way Out of Agnosticism’,” International Journal of Ethics 1.1 (Oct. 1890): 98–113.

53. See John Clendenning’s Life and Thought of Josiah Royce (Vanderbilt University Press, 2nd ed., 1999) for a full discussion of Royce’s health and of his conflict with Abbot.

54. Bruce Kuklick. The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860– 1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 250n.

55. See W5: 279–82.

56. See Kuklick 1977, p. 250n.: “For some reason or other, however, Royce had set out to annihilate Abbot’s reputation.”

57. “Abbot Against Royce,” Nation 53 (19 Nov. 1891): 389–90.

58. “The Suppression of Dr. Abbot’s Reply,” Nation 53 (26 Nov. 1891): 408.

59. “Mr. Warner’s ‘Evidence in Full’ Completed,” Nation 53 (3 Dec. 1891): 426.

60. See Clendenning, p. 168.

61. Clendenning, p. 148.

62. See John McDermott’s introduction to The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce (University of Chicago Press, 1969), vol. 1, p. 7.

63. As to the general public’s perception of the whole affair, it was probably best expressed in the subtitle of a short satirical play John Jay Chapman composed after the controversy: The Two Philosophers: A Quaint and Sad Comedy (Boston: J. G. Gupples, 1892), where Royce is Josias Josephus Jeremiah Regius, and Abbot is Georgius Gregorius Xavier Gottfried Theisticus.

64. In this regard, see Carolyn Eisele’s “General Introduction” to New Elements of Mathematics, vol. 1.

65. Peirce delivered his Lowell Lectures on “The History of Science” in Boston, between 28 November 1892 and 5 January 1893. The lectures will be included in W9 and will be discussed more fully in the introduction to that volume.

66. See W6: xxvii–xxx and sels. 2–13.

67. See the following entries in the Chronological Catalog: c.1891.6; 8–10.

68. Lodge to Peirce, 18 Dec. 1891.

69. For more of this letter, see W6: xxxvi.

70. Science 19.466 (8 Jan. 1892): 18.

71. See Victor Lenzen. “An Unpublished Scientific Monograph by C. S. Peirce,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 5.1 (1969): 5–24, and W6: lxviii.

72. Lenzen, ibid., p. 20.

73. U.S. Coast Survey vs. Naval Hydrographic Office; a 19th-Century Rivalry in Science and Politics (University of Alabama Press, 1988), p. 110.

74. Now we would say “historiometry,” a term Frederick Adams Woods introduced in his book, The Influence of Monarchs, 1913, for which Peirce contributed a promotional comment, as did Royce, to support sales. Peirce told Woods that “biometry” would have been a better word.

75. The added names were: St. Bernard, John Bernoulli, St. Charles Borromeo, Canova, Carlyle, Chopin, Claude Lorraine, Sir Humphrey Davy, Diderot, Dryden, Alexandre Dumas, Froissart, W. L. Garrison, Pasteur, Madame Roland, Marshall [Maurice de] Saxe, Solomon, Swift, Vauban, and Daniel Webster.

76. The five names Peirce removed were: Aristophanes, Grassmann, Haroun-al-Rashid, Riemann, and Sylvester.

77. In 1893, Halsted published an article in the Educational Review on “The Old and the New Geometry” in which he described the “three possible geometries of uniform space” and reported that “Charles S. Peirce claims to have established, from astronomical measurements, that our particular space is hyperbolic, is the space first expounded by Lobatschewsky and Bolyai It is thinkable that our space, the space in which we move, may be finite and recurrent; nor would this contradict our perceptive intuition (Anschauung), since this always relates only to a finite part of space. Just so there is nothing absurd in C. S. Peirce’s claim to have proved that what Cayley calls ‘the physical space of our experience’ belongs to Lobatschewsky-Bolyai, not to Euclid.”

78. Nicholas Murray Butler, editor of the Educational Review, asked Peirce on 15 February 1892 to submit a brief article “following out the hint contained in your Nation paper concerning the teaching of geometry. It would be most interesting and valuable to have clearly stated what changes should now be made in the method of presenting elementary geometry owing to the discoveries of modern mathematics.” Peirce did not write the article requested unless it was his paper on “The Logic of Mathematics in Relation to Education” that appeared six years later, apparently the only paper he ever published in the Educational Review.

79. John Tyndall, New Fragments, 2nd edition, Appleton, 1892.

80. “A look” at his classification is literally what he intended to give his auditors; when he wrote to Lowell on 13 January 1892 to confirm that his twelve lectures would be on the “History of Science from Copernicus to Newton,” he asked if Lowell would like to have “the lectures illustrated with magic lantern slides.” One of Peirce’s drafts of his first lecture confirms that he intended to show a diagram of his classification (R 1274).

81. See the entry, “Herbert Spencer,” Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, New Edition, vol. IX, Philadelphia, 1892.

82. See the first annotation for this selection, p. 447, for an account of the differences.

83. Studies in the Scientific and Mathematical Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, ed. R. M. Martin (Mouton, 1979), p. 74.

84. Ibid, pp. 73–75.

85. The theory of atomicules may first have been introduced by J. J. Sylvester in 1878, in “On an Application of the New Atomic Theory to the Graphical Representation of the Invariants and Covariants of Binary Quantics” (American Journal of Mathematics 1, pp. 64–82), where he extended “the new Atomic Theory” to include sub-atomic “atomicules” of differing valencies for a better analysis of chemical elements. Peirce referred to Sylvester’s paper when first introducing his reduction thesis (see W4, sel. 20). Boscovichian points are atomicules that are presumed to be centers or fields of force of which matter is composed. See the textual headnote, pp. 649–50, and the annotations, pp. 450–51, for more historical discussion of sel. 48.

86. See W2: xxxi–xxxv for Max H. Fisch’s account of Peirce’s Mediterranean assignment.

87. See the end of the first annotation for sel. 51, p. 454, for more details about the origins of Peirce’s Thessalian tale.

88. “Karolos,” the Greek equivalent of “Charles,” and “Kalerges” taken from the famed Greek military leader, Demitrius Kalergis (1803–1867), who played the leading role in the “Bloodless Revolution” of 1843 that led to the adoption of the Greek constitution the following year and Greece’s transition from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy. Kalergis was granted the title “Great Citizen of Greece” for his wisdom and leadership in the bloodless Revolution (The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, vol. 1, 1847, pp. 45–49).

89. The two versions of Peirce’s revised preface are reproduced on pp. 453–54.

90. Later Peirce would rename his story “Embroidered Thessaly.” See the lengthy textual headnote for sel. 51, pp. 655–63, for the complicated story of its composition and development.

91. From a letter Peirce wrote to Lady Welby on 9 March 1906 but the letter appears not to have been sent.

92. See the first annotation for sel. 25, pp. 389–90, for a similar quotation from an alternative draft.

93. Five “intermediate attempts” between sel. 25 and Peirce’s earliest notes specifically for sel. 27 are listed in the Chronological Catalog: 1892.50–54. The earliest notes for sel. 27 are dated 10 May (1892.64).

94. See the annotations for sel. 26, pp. 390–91, for more background information on the development of Peirce’s views on time and for more on his views in comparison to those of Cantor.

95. The decorative art in the chancel at St. Thomas’s included works by John La Farge, an acquaintance of Peirce’s.

96. The letter is in RL 482: 12–13. See Joseph Brent’s discussion of this episode in the second (1998) edition of his Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, pp. 209–212. Also Henry C. Johnson, Jr., “Charles Sanders Peirce and the Book of Common Prayer: Elocution and the Feigning of Piety” in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42.4 (2006): 552–73, esp. 562–64.

97. This letter draft is undated but is thought to have been written around the end of April. It is not known if a finished letter was sent.

98. See the textual headnote for sel. 52, pp. 670–72, for a more complete account of the Fales case. Peirce’s views on punishing criminals were developed further in “Dmesis,” an article he published in the Open Court in September 1892. It will be published in W9.

99. Peirce worked closely with Open Court translator Thomas J. McCormack. Writing to the latter on 5 July, Peirce made clear his views on translating: “Now let us not treat Dr Mach’s book as if it were a Bible; but just find out what he means to say & express that.” Work on the translation continued into May 1893 and The Science of Mechanics was published a few weeks later. The section on “Mechanical Units in Use in the United States and Great Britain” will be published in W9, the introduction to which will discuss Peirce’s work on the translation more fully.

100. The University of Chicago was established in 1891 with the support of John D. Rockefeller. William Rainey Harper was appointed as its first president on 1 July 1891.

101. Royce’s “attack” did not appear in the Philosophical Review. He pronounced against Peirce’s tychism in a paper read to the Philosophical Club at Brown University on 23 May 1895. The paper was later expanded into chapter 8 of his Studies of Good and Evil (Appleton, 1898), where Royce says on p. 237: “I do not myself accept this notion that the laws of phenomenal nature, where they are genuinely objective laws, and not relatively superficial human generalizations, are the evolutionary product of any such cosmical process of acquiring habits, as Mr. Peirce has so ingeniously supposed in his hypothesis of ‘Tychism’.”

102. From notes typed up by Max H. Fisch after an interview with Miller on 6 May 1960. Miller could not remember anything about the conversation except that Royce was making “continuous utterances,” suggesting that he had the lion’s share of that conversation, and that Peirce would interrupt from time to time beginning with a polite “Pardon me.” Still, the thrill of the experience may have made Miller speak about it in high terms to James, his favorite professor.

103. Darnell Rucker, The Chicago Pragmatists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 10.

104. What the second invention was is unclear. It might have been a process for distilling wood-alcohol or a process for preventing scaling in locomotive boilers.

105. See various related manuscripts listed in the Chronological Catalog: 1892.78–80, 89, 96, 110–11.

106. See annotation 188.39, pp. 411–12.

107. A lengthy summary extraction from Peirce’s “The Law of Mind” was published in the Philosophical Review in September 1892, pp. 583–85.

108. See Henry C. Johnson’s paper referred to in note 96 above.

109. See the general headnote for sels. 28 and 29, pp. 594–96, for a detailed account of the genesis of “Man’s Glassy Essence” and its relation to earlier writings. Peirce’s title, especially his use of the word “glassy,” is discussed in the first annotation for sel. 29, pp. 400–401.

110. In 1890, in “Logic and Spiritualism” (W6, sel. 44, pp. 391–93), Peirce sketched out the solution to the mind-body problem—which he referred to as “a rational account of the connection of body and soul—that he would elaborate in “The Law of Mind” and “Man’s Glassy Essence.”

111. See note 84 above. The theory of atomicules was also treated by Ira Remsen in his Principles of Theoretical Chemistry with Special Reference to the Constitution of Chemical Compounds (Philadelphia: Lea Brothers & Co., 1892). Remsen was a professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins when Peirce and Sylvester were there; he attended Peirce’s 1884 lecture on “Design and Chance.”

112. See annotation 183.7–8, p. 409.

113. “Man’s Glassy Essence” was published and “Evolutionary Love” was submitted several weeks into the period covered by W9. “Evolutionary Love” would not appear in print until January 1893. The introduction to W9, whose chronological span starts in August 1892, will provide more biographical and historical context for these selections.

114. See annotation 185.7–13, p. 411.

115. See James Wible’s article “Complexity in Peirce’s Economics and Philosophy: An Exploration of His Critique of Simon Newcomb.” Chapter 5 in David Colander, ed., Complexity and the History of Economic Thought: Perspectives on the History of Economic Thought (London & New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 74–103.

116. Weismann strictly ruled out the inheritance of acquired characteristics in opposition to the views of Lamarck and also Darwin.

117. See annotation 110.7–9, p. 386.

118. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984), pp. 302–303.

119. Ian Hacking, “Nineteenth Century Cracks in the Concept of Determinism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983): 455–75.

120. Elmer E. Southard, “Cross-Sections of Mental Hygiene, 1844, 1869, 1894,” American Journal of Insanity 76.2 (1919): 91–111, esp. 95–96.

121. See annotation 126.3–12, pp. 389–90.

122. E. B. Wilson to Paul Weiss, 22 November 1946.