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Introduction

The period from 1887 through the spring of 1890, though not without hope and accomplishment, was a time of disillusionment and defeat for Peirce.¹ Only a few years earlier, Peirce’s father, Benjamin, the great mathematician and astronomer, had proudly proclaimed to the Boston Radical Club that his son Charles would carry on his life’s work and would develop and fertilize vistas he had only glimpsed. No one doubted it. Charles’s star was rising. During the first half of the 1880s, he was one of America’s elite scientists and the only American logician known the world over. Peirce had just begun teaching at Johns Hopkins and had every reason to expect that he would spend his life there as Professor of Logic. But in April 1883, Peirce divorced his first wife, Melusina Fay, and married his reputed mistress, Juliette Froissy Pourtalais, a woman of unknown, or at least of unspoken, origin.² Nothing for Peirce would ever be the same again. Within a year he had been forced out of Johns Hopkins and by 1886 his scientific career with the Coast and Geodetic Survey was falling apart. By 1887 Peirce had come to be spurned by the society that had nurtured him—he was no longer welcome even in his family home. A sense of defeat grew in Peirce as he struggled with the realization that all the paths he had chosen were blocked and that he could neither have the life he wanted nor provide for Juliette the life her extravagant tastes demanded. In April 1887, Peirce and Juliette packed up and moved to Milford, Pennsylvania, a mountain village with a small but thriving French community, where they hoped to make a new start and where they imagined they could afford to live well. At first Peirce expected his exile to be temporary but he soon came to understand that he would be a man apart. When in the spring of 1890, mainly for the income, he helped organize a journalistic attack on Herbert Spencer, Peirce signed his contributions “Outsider.” That is what he had become.

In 1884, after his dismissal from Johns Hopkins, Peirce moved to Washington D.C. to refocus his career on his scientific work for the Coast and Geodetic Survey. In July he had begun an intensive program of field operations which he expected to continue until a vast expanse of the continental United States was linked through gravity determinations and added to the international geodetic network that would serve to calculate the figure of the Earth. This was a principal concern of mathematical geodesy and Peirce had already contributed to its solution (W4: sel. 76). At some point he knew he would have to turn a growing mass of data into a publishable report on gravity, but he kept putting it off in favor of continued field work. He assumed that when the time came to prepare reports he would have whatever computing help he needed, as he always had before. Then in March 1885, Grover Cleveland was inaugurated as the twenty-second President of the United States and Peirce’s plans were dashed. Cleveland came to power intent on reforming government service and by July had targeted the Coast Survey as the agency he would make an example of.³ Superintendent Julius Hilgard was fired and all administrators and field officers, including Peirce, were subjected to intense scrutiny. Frank Manly Thorn, a lawyer and friend of Cleveland, was installed as acting superintendent to carry out the President’s reform agenda. Greatly discouraged by what was happening, Peirce left Washington in March 1886 and moved with Juliette to New York City. He supposed that New York would be a better place to start a new life in case his Survey job should be lost. He carried out pendulum field operations at the Stevens Institute station in Hoboken until August when Thorn relieved him of further field duty and ordered him to prepare for publication the backlog of results already obtained. Funding for field operations had been slashed and Peirce’s gravity work, among the most costly, could no longer be supported. If pendulum operations were to continue they would have to be scaled back to meet only the demands of practical science, not those of pure science that guided Peirce. On 20 August Peirce wrote to University of Wisconsin astronomer, Edward S. Holden: “The president seems to have decided to keep Thorn in as Superintendent as long as he can, and under the influence of these men of Red Tape all the life and energy has gone from the Survey…. I am utterly discouraged and disgusted, and want to get out….” In October, trying to cheer him up, Peirce’s mother wrote: “Cleveland is a Dolt.”

Somehow Peirce managed to hang on to his Survey job for another five years, although it seems certain that he would have given it up many times over had he not needed the income so desperately. Peirce was clearly disaffected and frequently spoke of resigning, but then always reconsidered. His relations with Survey headquarters became increasingly strained, sometimes quite bitter, and except for brief periods of respite, the remainder of his tenure was marked by a suspicion in Washington that Peirce was not doing enough work and by a concern on Peirce’s part that there was a cabal conspiring to get him dismissed. One period of promise came just after July 1889 when Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, a trained scientist, succeeded Thorn as Superintendent. But it soon became evident that Mendenhall’s plans for gravity determinations left no room for pendulum operations of the sort Peirce practiced. By the close of the period covered in the present volume, Peirce’s second major gravity report, representing years of labor, was at risk of being rejected for publication, and Mendenhall’s patience with Peirce was rapidly reaching its limit.

Amidst the turmoil of a life in constant transition and a career that was falling apart, Peirce managed to carry on at least a thread of philosophical inquiry, inspired in part by his late work at Johns Hopkins and his reading of the 1885 books by Royce and Abbot, and fueled by his continuing lexicographic research for the Century Dictionary.⁴ In the August 1886 letter to Holden quoted above, Peirce added: “You remember that I told you something of a sort of evolutionist speculation of mine. This has grown much….” When he wrote to Holden, he had already begun to write a book entitled One, Two, Three in which he would make a guess about the constitution of the universe and use his categories as the key to an all-encompassing system of philosophy (W5: sels. 47–50). After his move to Milford in 1887 this work would grow into his “A Guess at the Riddle” (sels. 22–28) and, although never finished, it would set the course for much of his subsequent thought. But as 1886 drew to a close, it was logic that was uppermost on Peirce’s mind. For a while he resumed work on a book on general logic (W5: sel. 54) which would evolve into his “How to Reason” of 1894. But as his insecurity with his career increased, his interest turned from the advancement of the science of logic to how he could use his specialty to make a living adequate to the demands of the lifestyle he and Juliette had set for themselves in Baltimore in the first months of their marriage. Peirce’s income had taken a serious hit with the loss of his lectureship at Johns Hopkins, and now that his Coast Survey salary was in danger, he had to find a substantial new source of income. He began writing elementary accounts of his logic of relatives (W5: sels. 55–56) and Boolean algebra (sel. 1), perhaps initially for a course of lectures he hoped to deliver at the University of Wisconsin, but at least in the latter case it is likely he had paying students in mind.

Peirce entered 1887 with some confidence that he had found a way to survive his anticipated separation from the Survey. Were there not hundreds, nay, thousands of citizens abroad in the land in the greatest need of improving their reasoning skills? Would not a good course in reasoning, customized for individual capabilities and taught by a master logician, increase opportunities and, in general, better the lives of students—and thereby serve well the country as a whole? Could not one expect to attract large numbers of occasional students to sign up for a course of study that virtually guaranteed a high degree of self-improvement? Peirce was convinced that he had found a niche and that with clever marketing and efficient operations he could make good money with a correspondence course on the art of reasoning. He wrote to Cyrus W. Field, financier for the first transatlantic cable, that for years he had carried in his pocketbook a clipping quoting Field on the value of right reason: “My fortune was made by working a gold-mine, and that gold-mine is the power of right reason.” Peirce might not make a fortune, but surely he would make a good living.

To set this promising plan into motion, Peirce needed capital. Brochures would have to be printed, lessons duplicated, typewriters purchased, assistants hired, and field-agents engaged. Peirce wanted fifteen hundred students and imagined that once things got rolling he would send out around five hundred letters a day. He would begin by advertising in popular magazines and would send out a hundred thousand circulars. He wrote to his cousin, Henry Cabot Lodge, and asked for a loan to get his scheme off the ground. Lodge declined and apparently with no other prospects Peirce decided to start up piecemeal. In May an advertisement for his course circular (reproduced on p. 14) ran in the Century Magazine and he sent circulars (sel. 2) to seven hundred people. He wrote to his brother James Mills (Jem) that he doubted he would attract “a single pupil from so small a number,” but letters of interest began to come in. Records for the course are very incomplete, so it is difficult to tell how many responded or exactly what the content of the course was, but it is clear that by the end of March Peirce had received more than fifteen inquiries and at least eight students had begun lessons. While far from what Peirce needed to make a living, and certainly not enough to let him resign from the Survey, the response was promising and indicated that a major promotional effort could succeed. Peirce imagined an army of agents dispersed throughout the country, all soliciting students to sign up for his course. He drew up directions for agents (sel. 5) which bring to mind the hucksterism of turn-of-the-century medicine peddlers or of modern telephone solicitors: “The levers upon which you have to rely are first, cupidity, second, shame, and third, fatigue.” Still, there is no doubt that Peirce believed he could deliver good value for the price of his course, and from what can be reconstructed from the fragments that remain (see sels. 3–13), that belief seems justified.

Peirce’s plan for the correspondence course was set out in his circular (sel. 2) and his follow-up letter (sel. 3). The course would be divided into three parts—traditional logic, mathematical reasoning, and scientific reasoning—and the full course would require a minimum of one hundred and eighty letters. From the exercise sets that have survived—only a small part of the series Peirce had prepared—and from surviving student letters, it is possible to get a sense of what Peirce taught and how he interacted with his students. He seems to have gone to some lengths to address his students’ individual interests and capabilities, but it is likely that he was aiming too high. Certainly the reasoning exercises (sel. 9) and the three lessons in Boolean algebra with additional exercises (sels. 10 and 13) involved rather high-level logical content; there is a one-page fragment (in RL 100) that indicates that Peirce even hoped to convey some of his favorite philosophical ideas through his reasoning exercises. For example, the second exercise from the fragment gives a brief lesson in Peirce’s theory of signs:

Let us use the word “sign” to mean anything which on being perceived carries to a mind some cognition or thought which is applicable to some object. Thus, I would call a portrait a sign. I would call a pointing finger a sign. I would call a spoken sentence a sign. I now ask you to make a list of a good many different kinds of signs, and to attempt to classify them according to their different modes of standing for their objects. To do this will require a good deal of thought.

Such questions might well serve the purpose of evaluating student preparedness but they seem aimed at minds more elastic and capable than might be expected to turn out in the large numbers Peirce expected. Still, a letter he wrote at the end of March to J. M. Hantz of Northwestern University indicates continuing enthusiasm for his course and reveals no dissatisfaction with his initial students:

It is my fate to be supposed an extreme partisan of formal logic, and so I began. But the study of the logic of relations has converted me from that error. Formal logic centers its whole attention on the least important part of reasoning, a part so mechanical that it may be performed by a machine, and fancies that that is all there is in the mental process. For my part, I hold that reasoning is the observation of relations, mainly by means of diagrams and the like. It is a living process. This is the point of view from which I am conducting my instruction in the art of reasoning. I find out and correct all the pupil’s bad habits in thinking; I teach him that reasoning is not done by the unaided brain, but needs the cooperation of the eyes and hands. Reasoning, as I make him see, is a kind of experimentation, in which, instead of relying on the intelligible laws of outward nature to bring out the result, we depend on the equally hidden laws of inward association. I initiate him into the art of this experimentation. I familiarize him with the use of all kinds of diagrams and devices for aiding the imagination. I show him just what part abstract thought has in the process—a quite subsidiary one.

Peirce added that he assigns his students “a large number and great variety of exercises in dealing with real facts” and that “the invention of these exercises is the thing for which I hope to be remembered, for I believe they are destined to exert no little influence in the future.” In the years that followed, as Peirce used his exercise sets for other purposes, the package of exercises was broken up and dispersed. The small set that has been reassembled (sels. 9,10,13) is at best an indication of what Peirce was so proud of, as many of the exercises derive from other authors. Had Peirce’s students successfully worked their way through all of his lessons, they would likely have become the proficient reasoners he promised, but in the end no one ever finished the course. Peirce did carry on with a few students for a year or two, and later even tried to revive the course, but his lack of capital from the outset and his move to Milford in April thwarted any real chance for success.

Still, in the spring of 1887, prospects seemed good, though Peirce’s circumstances were becoming more and more difficult. New York was an expensive place to live and Peirce’s salary from the Survey was barely enough to maintain a satisfactory lifestyle. With enough paying students he would have welcomed separation from the Survey, but with only a handful he could not afford to resign. Unfortunately, his Survey work, now confined to the reduction of observation data—which in better times would have been handled by computing assistants—was extremely time-consuming, and severely limited the time he could spend answering letters and promoting his logic course. More disturbing, starting in September of 1886 a crisis had been brewing over the report on pendulum operations from the ill-fated Greely Expedition to Lady Franklin Bay in the Arctic, and Peirce was caught in the middle of it.⁵ In 1881, then Lieutenant Adolphus Greely led an Army expedition of twenty-five men to the northeastern part of Ellesmere Island to establish a scientific station above the 81st parallel at Fort Conger off Lady Franklin Bay. Greely’s party had been organized to participate in the first International Polar Year, an eleven-nation effort to advance earth science in the Arctic and Antarctic during 1882–83. The astronomer for Greely’s party, Sergeant Edward Israel, had been specially trained by Peirce in the use of pendulums for gravity determinations, and for sixteen days in January 1882 he diligently swung Peirce Pendulum No. 1 in a specially constructed ice shelter. Greely’s party met with disaster when supply ships failed to reach Fort Conger in 1882 and 1883, and when a navy vessel finally reached the retreating expedition about two hundred miles south of Lady Franklin Bay at Cape Sabine in June 1884, only seven men had survived and only six would make it home. Throughout the agonizing final winter, with starvation threatening his men, Greely took great pains to preserve the scientific data obtained at such a high price. Knowing that the heavy pendulum was a dangerous burden as his party retreated from Fort Conger to Cape Sabine, Greely had given his men the option of abandoning it, but they had declined. Fearing that his party’s camp might be missed by the much hoped-for relief expedition, he sent a party on 23 October 1883 to a prominent point on an island a few miles south of Cape Sabine in Payer Harbor to cache the records. Peirce’s pendulum, sealed in its case, was erected as a towering marker over the cache (see woodcut on p. 219).

The rescue of the expedition made international headlines, and Greely became an instant celebrity. There was some initial concern that the tragedy might have resulted from poor judgment on his part, and it was rumored that the survivors had resorted to cannibalism, but Greely was quickly exonerated. However, discord over the cost of the expedition and rescue troubled President Arthur and Secretary of War Lincoln, and they remained cool to Greely and even used his disaster as an opportunity to argue against future federal support for dangerous scientific missions. Not until Cleveland was elected President would Greely be duly recognized for his achievement and promoted first to Captain in 1886 and then to Brigadier General in 1887. The initial controversy over his leadership and the attempt to use his misfortune as an argument against federal support for science made Greely very sensitive to any criticism of his party's achievements.

In his first dispatch following the rescue, Greely had stated with much satisfaction that his party had saved and brought back the records of the meteorological, tidal, astronomical, magnetic, and pendulum observations, and he mentioned proudly that he had brought back the pendulum. In the 19 September 1884 issue of Science, the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science proclaimed that “nothing in the annals of scientific heroism exceeded the devotion of those hungry men in sticking to that ponderous piece of metal." In consequence of the criticism of his expedition, and the considerable attention given to the pendulum, Greely was determined to include Peirce's account of the Ft. Conger pendulum observations in his official report. Yet by September 1886, over two years after Peirce had been given the pendulum records, and with everything else in hand, Greely was still waiting for the gravity results. Knowing that Superintendent Thorn feared bad publicity, Greely threatened to go to press without Peirce's report: “It is needless for me to point out the comments which will be called forth in America and Europe, if these observations are wanting when the final report appears.”⁶ Responding as Greely hoped, Thorn put tremendous pressure on Peirce to turn in his report at once.

Thorn knew that Peirce had delayed his report because of some remaining uncertainties over the expansion coefficient for Pendulum No. 1 which he believed could not be resolved without taking No. 1 to a northern station, preferably St. Paul or Minneapolis, where it could be swung in the summer and again in the winter under extreme conditions as similar as possible to those at Ft. Conger. Peirce felt it his duty to turn Greely’s hard-won data into the most significant results possible and he knew what that required. As early as April 1886, he had informed the Assistant in Charge of the Survey’s Washington office, Benjamin A. Colonna, of his concerns and of his plan to swing the pendulum at a suitable northern location, and by September he had informed Superintendent Thorn directly. As the Coast Survey authority on pendulum operations, and given the importance of the Greely observations, Peirce probably expected his recommendation to be accepted without opposition, but he did not count on, nor perhaps even fully comprehend, the political pressures on Thorn. Peirce’s stubbornness, however justified from the standpoint of pure science, rankled Thorn, who threatened to take the matter entirely out of Peirce’s hands. Finally seeing the urgency of issuing the report, even if not fully adequate, Peirce reluctantly conceded: “You are aware that my judgment is averse to the publication of the Greely matter; but as you were plainly determined upon it, I thought it my duty to do all I possibly could to try to render that publication useful …” When Peirce wrote this on 22 March 1887 he added: “I have wasted more time upon this than I should have thought it worth while to do, except for my desire to make the best of this Greely publication…. I perceive you are becoming very impatient, and I will give up trying to perform the impossible, and send on the work as soon as I can.”

Three weeks later Peirce submitted his report, but instead of settling things down it made matters worse. Although in muted terms, Peirce had included all of his criticisms and concerns. In accordance with Peirce’s instructions, after the pendulum at Ft. Conger had been swung for eight days, the knives had been removed and interchanged. But after that interchange, the periods of oscillation were noticeably different, too different to be accounted for, Peirce believed, by the contraction of the pendulum due to colder temperatures or by slippage of a knife, as suggested by one of Peirce’s past assistants, Henry Farquhar (see annotation 220.4), who, in the past, had frequently been assigned to assist Peirce. There was a remote possibility, Peirce suggested, that the change was the result of frost accumulation on the knives during the interchange, but he thought it really could not be satisfactorily explained and would detract from the usefulness of the results until further experiments could be made at a northern station. To make matters worse, he pointed out that the pendulum appeared to have lost between 10 and 15 grams of mass,⁷ probably as a result of an accident during the difficult retreat from Ft. Conger to Cape Sabine. Such a loss of mass would explain a variation in the pendulum’s period of oscillation after its return. In raising these concerns, it is clear that Peirce’s purpose was to present the Ft. Conger results in a way that made sense, and being fully aware of how often damage occurs to scientific equipment, especially in rough conditions, he had no idea his report would give offense. But Greely’s high sensitivity to criticism blinded him to Peirce’s good intentions and he became furious. Thorn set the Survey office to work to diffuse the tension. Farquhar was asked to write a supplementary report to mitigate Peirce’s account and Greely added a memorandum (pp. 243–44) in which he fervently denied that any accident had happened to the pendulum. He went so far as to accuse Peirce of having given Sergeant Israel inadequate training and of failure to supply any written instructions, even though he had earlier praised Peirce for the care with which he had instructed Israel—care documented by Peirce’s detailed written instructions, which have survived and can be found with the papers that Greely brought back from Ft. Conger (see annotation 216.19).

When he saw Greely’s memorandum, Peirce was dismayed that such offense had been taken, and he immediately submitted a conciliatory note to be printed with Greely’s memorandum (pp. 244–45). In this note, Peirce stressed that he had no intention whatsoever of imputing any blame for what he considered to be normal occurrences under the circumstances, and he emphasized that Greely and Israel deserved nothing less than the highest honor for their “signally successful” gravity determination. He did refer, though, to “the only doubt which affects the result, namely, that which relates to the temperature-correction,” but added that this doubt was destined to be resolved when further experiments could be made in the North. Greely’s two-volume report, including Peirce’s Ft. Conger “Pendulum Observations” (sel. 30), finally appeared in the fall of 1888, and Peirce’s “Explanatory Note” was inserted to appear with Greely’s “Memorandum.” Greely was satisfied and wrote to Peirce on 30 November 1888 that he understood that no blame had been intended. He added: “I beg to assure you that I have always been impressed with your earnestness and zeal in connection with these observations, and I know that you were very decided in insisting upon the conditions under which the work should be done. I cannot well believe that any one should consider you as desirous of pulling down a house which has been substantially built with your hands; for to your assiduity, skill, and knowledge must be credited, as I have always understood, the latest and most important advances in the methods of application of pendulum observations.” That brought to an end an unfortunate episode largely fueled by misunderstanding; but while Peirce’s relations with Greely seemed to have been mended, his relations with the Survey had suffered further damage.

As he grappled with the Ft. Conger pendulum results, Peirce continued working on his definitions for the Century Dictionary—before long his main concern. And, typically, from time to time other topics would catch his attention. In 1886, three members of the English Psychical Research Society, Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers, and Frank Podmore, published a book which recounted hundreds of cases of the hallucination of the appearance of a person who would die or had died within twelve hours of their “appearance” and a scientific case was made for the authenticity of telepathic and apparitional phenomena. William James, a close friend of Gurney and a member of the English Psychical Research Society as well as of its American counterpart, gave the book, Phantasms of the Living, a very positive review in the January 1887 issue of Science. Peirce, who would have known of the book in any case because of his many acquaintances in the American branch of the Society (to which he never belonged), including his own brother Jem, must have been struck by James’s praise for the book. Only two years earlier, Peirce had speculated (W5: sel. 24) that presumed telepathic phenomena were the result of faint sensations, and he had endorsed the field as worthy of further scientific study. So in early 1887, Peirce was working his way through the main argument of this huge book with his own review in mind—it would appear later in the year in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research (sel. 16) and trigger a controversy with Gurney that would continue for two years.

Probably in March, Peirce and a few other prominent American scientists were asked to contribute short articles to The Christian Register for a series on how science viewed belief in a future life. Peirce agreed to participate and drew material from his ongoing examination of Phantasms for his contribution (sel. 14). He wrote to his mother on 3 April 1887 that his work for his correspondence course was improving his writing style and that he hoped in a year or two to be “as good a writer as these men who write the editorials in the New York papers, who turn out so much good English and good sense.” The little piece for the Register, published on 7 April, gave Peirce an opportunity not only to try out his developing style, but also to “announce” a few ideas that were growing more and more important for him and that would become signature doctrines. Among these were his ideas that the variety in the universe could not have come about by strict adherence to mechanical law and that there are no definite limits to human knowledge. According to Max Fisch, it is here that Peirce first made his case in print against the doctrine of necessity.⁸ Peirce thought that although the evidence in favor of afterlife was not strong, it might be expected to become stronger. As to the “shades” who supposedly survive physical death, existing evidence could only bring Peirce to conclude that they were mere ghosts of their former selves—and so painfully solemn. Perhaps revealing more of his own circumstances than he intended, he wrote that were he suddenly to find himself “liberated from all the trials and responsibilities of this life, my probation over, and my destiny put beyond marring or making, I should … regard the situation as a stupendous frolic, should be at the summit of gayety, and should only be too glad to leave the vale of tears behind.” He certainly would not “come mooning back … to cry over spilled milk.”

Probably while he was working on his contribution for the “Science and Immortality” series, possibly slightly later, Peirce wrote a paper entitled “Logical Machines” (sel. 15) for the November inaugural issue of G. Stanley Hall’s American Journal of Psychology. Peirce argued for the superiority of Allan Marquand’s logic machine over that of Jevons, but he offered some improvements and suggested that it should be possible to construct a machine “which should work the logic of relations with a large number of terms.” Peirce believed that the study of such machines was a good way to improve logic. In this paper Peirce did not mention his recent recommendation to Marquand to use electrical switching circuits for logical operations (W5:421–22),⁹ but he did, in passing, make some interesting remarks about “the secret of all reasoning machines” and the appropriateness of calling such machines “reasoning machines,” and then suggested that to some extent every machine is a reasoning machine—to the extent that they depend on “the objective reason embodied in the laws of nature.” Peirce claimed that “reasoning machines” are destitute of originality and initiative: “it cannot find its own problems; … it cannot direct itself between different possible procedures.” The absence of originality, however, is no defect for a machine: “we no more want an original machine, than a house-builder would want an original journeyman, or an American board of college trustees would hire an original professor”—a clear reference to himself.

It is not surprising that what we see of Peirce’s life mirrored in his writings from this period appears as troubled and somewhat embittered. He had been forced to leave Johns Hopkins and, though not without hope, saw no good prospect of an appointment at another university. The Coast Survey was in disarray and he knew that it was just a matter of time until his career there would come to an end. His one hope was his correspondence course. He felt sure it could succeed—but without the capital to begin his scheme at full strength it would have to grow to a critical mass before he could devote himself to it fully, and reaching that point would take time. Could he and Juliette survive in New York while they waited? On 3 April, Peirce wrote to his mother:

It seems to be pretty certain that there is going to be enough to live on from my lessons any way, even in New York. But I shall go into the country the first of May and economize a little; and can stay there next winter if necessary. The expenses have so far eaten largely into the profits, but I have made arrangements to reduce the cost of my advertising, and at the same time make it more effective. My clerks will get trained and will make the letters less costly, and the purchases of type-writers, etc. will cease, or nearly so, as I reach my maximum. For the next few months, this will be a heavy expense, but then I expect to retain the Coast Survey two, and perhaps three, months more. That gives me more than enough to pay for type-writers. I think I shall eventually make a handsome thing of this. At any rate, I shall make a living, and earn the everlasting gratitude of the country, when the effects of the training come to be seen. I have had an enormous quantity of extremely interesting letters from teachers, professors, lawyers, business men, etc. I am also getting numerous suggestions to invest money. But I have not yet been obliged to purchase a steam coupon-cutting machine.

Peirce’s spirits sound high but he must have been putting his best face on for his mother—in fact, during most of this period he was in emotional turmoil. He was under constant, often extreme, pressure from Thorn to submit reports, yet congressional budget cuts made it virtually impossible for him to receive sustained computing assistance, especially since he had moved out of Washington. There were some exceptions, but Peirce was left to his own devices most of the time. He thus confronted a mountain of data at the very time he found his powers as a mathematical computer to be weakening. A few years later, in December 1891, as he was about to resign, Peirce wrote to then Superintendent T. C. Mendenhall what amounted to a confession about his hidden struggle with his loss of computing proficiency.

My mind, as it seems to me, is generally sound and decidedly strong. But of late years, in a certain direction a singular weakness has been growing upon me; though I cannot but believe that with a good rest I should recover. When Thorn had been in about a year I think it was that I found I got all mixed up about my computations, and at first complained of it openly. Then, I began to see that it would injure me and kept quiet about it. We were constantly expecting that Mr. Thorn would go, and I was determined that when he did I would ask to be sent into the field. Then I came into the country and found myself better at first. Besides, I got upon hydrodynamics which did not affect me the same way. I worked very hard, and could find nobody who could give me much help. But my tendency to become confused about complicated computations increased, and was aggravated by having no aid. I became almost incapable of reading certain kinds of mathematics, though other kinds, much more difficult to most minds, afford me little difficulty. The more trouble I had, the less I liked to acknowledge it. So I temporized and got along as well as I could … (18 December 91)

It is easy to imagine Peirce’s frustration when Thorn pushed him beyond limits he was prepared to acknowledge. Peirce’s relations with Thorn grew acrimonious and they became impatient and sarcastic with each other. To make matters worse, Peirce imagined that there was some kind of conspiracy to get him out of the Survey. While this may have been a paranoid response, there is evidence that B. A. Colonna (who during Thorn’s tenure¹⁰ was officially in charge of the Survey’s Washington office but unofficially acted as the de facto superintendent) was working behind the scenes to turn Thorn against Peirce. It was Colonna who had created a stir in the scientific community during the 1885 investigation of the Survey by describing Peirce’s gravity work as of “meager value” (see W5:xxix) and Peirce’s letters to Thorn frequently contain marginal notes added by Colonna, seemingly intended to dispose Thorn against him. For example, in the margin of a 30 September 1886 letter to Thorn in which Peirce outlined some of his concerns with the Greely data and asked for help with the computations, Colonna wrote: “It is plainly evident that if we depend on Peirce we get nothing. I would suggest a letter to him directing that he turn over to the office all the Greely records and any others that he may already have made bearing on them & that he do so at once.” And when on 9 July 1887 Peirce sent in a few unpaid vouchers from his pendulum operations at Hoboken the previous year, Colonna sent this exasperated note to Thorn: “Mr. Peirce extended time and time again his allotment and still left these bills unpaid. Open with him again and where will you stop?” The simple fact is, there was bad blood between Peirce and Colonna,¹¹ and whatever his motives, Colonna did want Peirce out of the Survey: “Charles Peirce about crazes me. He has no system, no idea of order or business & with all his talent is a dead-weight. I wish he could get a larger salary somewhere else and leave us. We could spare his talent for the sake of a better order.”¹²

More stressful than his career instability were his increasingly bad relations with his family and friends over his marriage to Juliette. Established society wanted no part of Juliette and even old friends, including Samuel P. Langley, withdrew from Peirce. Peirce’s Aunt Elisabeth (Lizzie), who owned the house his mother and brother Jem lived in, despised Juliette, and made it plain that she was not welcome in her home. Aunt Lizzie wrote to Peirce’s sister Helen after the death of Herbert’s (Bert’s) baby girl: “I had a little talk with Berts about Juliette & he feels about her just as I do…. It seems she is studying for the theater to learn how to act; it will be an easy lesson for her—though I don’t see that there is much left for her to learn” (22 April 1886). She wrote later (4 July 1886): “I have many sad hours thinking of Charles. He did wrong to marry Zina—& he suffered for it—but he was young then. Now there is no excuse for him in tying himself to that miserable Juliette—whom we ought not & cannot receive. There is no question about it. She is, I feel sure, a very dangerous person—& our only course is to keep her at a distance.” In January 1887, Peirce had a flare-up with Jem over Juliette. Peirce had written to Jem pleading with him to warm up to her:

If you had any discernment of human nature you would see that the worst thing you could do for me and the worst thing all round is to treat Juliette with any want of love & confidence. We have bad things to face in the near future, all of us; and you may be sure we had best stick together. That we can’t do if you are going to be distrustful of Juliette. She burns under a sense of your injustice to her. Half our misery comes from that. (c. 20 January 1887)

Jem’s reply was not conciliatory. He wrote that he had “no wish to enter on a disagreeable discussion,” but he went on to say that he could not permit himself “to be called to account for sentiments & conduct to which I am driven by the hard stress of facts” (21 January 1887). He insinuated pointedly that Juliette had acted disloyally to Peirce during that very week. Peirce responded sharply: “As you insist on putting me into the position of choosing between you and my wife,—quite unnecessarily—of course I choose my wife. You thus get rid of a troublesome relative very neatly, & at a time when he is more troublesome than ever” (c. 22 January 1887). The fact was, however, that Peirce’s own feelings for Juliette were mixed. Though he had become completely committed to her, he was aware that she had already caused him much harm and he did not fully trust her. When he had written to Jem earlier in January about the plans for his correspondence course, he said plainly that he was afraid Juliette would somehow interfere: “She may intercept letters from pupils & break up correspondence….” He added that Juliette would not permit him to have a clerk at their flat, nor have any woman work for him at all, and he revealed that he even suspected that Juliette was somehow to blame for his troubles with the Coast Survey. “Uncle Sam and Juliet [sic] are enough to drive me out of my wits.” But his feelings for Juliette fluctuated wildly. He ended by asking Jem to burn the letter, “which is imprudent, because I love her devotedly.”

As Peirce’s old social and family ties unraveled, he and Juliette began to associate with a more bohemian crowd—people like New York playwright and director Steele MacKaye and his wife Mary, writer and editor Titus Munson Coan, poet and stockbroker—and editor of the works of Edgar Allan Poe—Edmund Clarence Stedman, geologist and chemist Persifor Frazer, known for his atheism, and artists Albert Bierstadt, Alfred L. Brennen, and George B. Butler.¹³ One of Juliette’s New York friends, Mary Eno Pinchot, had a country estate in the Pocono Mountains just outside of Milford, Pennsylvania. Peirce and Juliette had visited Milford and were much attracted to the beauty of the surrounding countryside and, in particular, to the French community that had gathered there. The Peirce’s found that they were most easily accepted by people of French heritage. The need to economize, together with the attraction of an accepting community, convinced them to pull up stakes and move to Milford. It did not detract from this decision, as Joseph Brent has pointed out,¹⁴ that the Pinchot family had great wealth and that they regularly entertained the likes of the Vanderbilts, Stuyvesants, Harrimans, and Belmonts. Here seemed to be an opportunity for Peirce and Juliette to enter a rich society even if not the society of Peirce’s heritage. In later years, Peirce remembered the time differently. In a draft of his 1908 paper, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” (R 842), Peirce reminisced: “In 1887, when I had attained a standing among American scientific men sufficiently to satisfy a man of very little ambition, I retired to the wildest country of the Northern States, south of the Adiron-dacks and east of the Alleghanies, where I might have the least distraction from the study of logic.” But though this may be what he came to value most highly about his retreat from city life, it is far from certain that this motive had anything to do with his decision to move to Pennsylvania.

The Peirce’s arrived in Milford on Thursday, 28 April 1887, and checked into the Hotel Fauchere. Within two weeks the Peirce’s had leased a house in Milford, characterized by Peirce’s mother as “luxurious quarters” (3 June 87), and proceeded to enter into the village life. Peirce joined the Episcopalian church and became friendly with the local clergy.¹⁵ He and Juliette became frequent guests of the Pinchots at their Norman-style mansion they called “Grey Towers.” Brent has described how they spent many afternoons and evenings at Grey Towers playing charades, capped with Peirce reading and reciting, and in September the Peirce’s “wrote, produced, directed, and acted” in a play given in the Pinchot’s private theatre.¹⁶

Although the move disrupted Peirce’s correspondence course and the preparation of his reports for the Coast Survey, it did not take him long to resume those efforts. The correspondence course would never achieve a critical mass and would gradually expire, but his Survey work would continue for another four and a half years. His official assignment at that time was to reduce the data from his post-1881 pendulum observations and produce publishable results, but his main interest would soon become the theory of the hydrodynamical effect of air on pendulum movement. Peirce also went back to work on his definitions for the Century Dictionary, and would spend the following three years working more intensively on his definitions than on anything else.

Peirce’s relations with his family deteriorated further after the move to Milford. Aunt Lizzie became even more vitriolic about Juliette. She wrote to Peirce’s sister: “I think that your mother blames me for the stand I take about Charles & Juliette…. We can not have them here at all. In fact I know Juliette enough from my own observation, that she would be a dreadful creature to have in the house. She is a liar & very artful, & she cares for nobody but herself, & she wd be worse than a rattle-snake in the house” (8 August 1887). She wrote of Juliette’s alleged genius for acting that “she always has been on the stage & ought to be an adept by this time” but that “if she is a genius I fear it is a cracked one,” and that “I utterly distrust her & hope I never see her again” (5 May and 9 June 1887). Even Peirce’s mother, who had alone seemed always to maintain a genuine concern in Juliette, seemed to turn against her. In August, Mrs. Peirce traveled to Newport with Jem after vaguely inviting Charles and Juliette to meet them, but Jem waited until it was too late—nine days into their visit—to write that they could come. When Charles learned of this, he was furious and wrote a scathing letter draft that he never sent:

It is best I should say once for all a few plain words which I shall not repeat concerning an expression in your last. You say you hope Juliette will let me come on to Cambridge. I wish Juliette would not urge me to go but would resent as I think she ought your insufferable and vulgar insolence. You insult me deeply in supposing or pretending to suppose I ever would go into that house. Whatever your object may have been in driving me to this decision, you have succeeded in that.

Your inviting us to meet you and mother in Newport and then not letting us know till you had been there 9 days when mother writes that I can put any construction I like on her silence, confirms me in [the] decision self-respect ought to have brought me to long ago.

I was deeply attached to you all, but you have all behaved ignobly & contemptibly, & I will pay up what I owe & be done with you. (22 Aug. 1887)

He did send a telegram that he immediately regretted sending and wrote to Jem to express his “sorrow and shame at having used an insulting expression.” He promised that “As long as mother lives, at least, I want to have the best relations possible with those she loves” (21 Sept. 1887).

Peirce’s mother would not live for much longer. On 4 October, Peirce was called to her bedside and she died six days later. Unfortunately, the tensions toward Juliette, who accompanied Peirce to the funeral and stayed on with him as he helped settle affairs, did not let up during the period of mourning. On the 15th, Aunt Lizzie wrote to Helen: “I hope I shall hear today when Charles & Dulcinea are going. I hope today but this I cannot expect. I wish she was at the South Pole, the North being too much in the neighborhood….” She wrote again on the 21st: “I do not hear any thing yet of Charles’ going—I hope & trust they will go this week & never return.” A few days later she could finally write: “Charles is going tomorrow & then I shall breathe freely. I am always afraid she will make an invasion. I feel quite sure that she has got Charles into her power—& she would like to get us all if she could…. However we need not be afraid of her if we can only keep her at a distance.” When Peirce’s mother’s estate was eventually settled about a year later, his share came to about $2000, including $1000 he had borrowed in 1885. He also got back some books he had given his mother, in particular a Leopold Shakespeare which had been dear to her.¹⁷

The move from New York and his family troubles did not prevent Peirce from making some progress on the intellectual front. By mid-May 1887, he had finished his review of Phantasms of the Living, his first paper after arriving in Milford. Although Peirce did not believe that the postulation of telepathy and apparitions, Gurney’s “ghosts,” formed a good hypothesis for explaining the unusual phenomena recounted in Phantasms, that conviction was not why he devoted so much attention to that gigantic book. Gurney, Myers, and Podmore had put forward their results as a serious scientific study and had presumed to build their argument on the basis of probabilities, hoping to show that in an earlier investigation by Charles Richet the probability in favor of telepathic phenomena had been found to be too low.¹⁸ The critical use of probability theory in the design of scientific experiments and the analysis of results was relatively new, although not for Peirce, who was an expert in two sciences that were exceptions, astronomy and geodesy. In the preceding decade Peirce had devoted much thought to extending the use of statistical reasoning to new sciences, and in the 1883–84 experiments with Jastrow, he had introduced the first modern randomized experimental design for psychology.¹⁹ Peirce saw at once that the method of Gurney and his associates was inadequate to their task and that they had seriously misapplied the logic of probability. However well-intentioned, their work amounted to an attack on the logic of science, and Peirce could not let it go unanswered. It only made matters worse that William James had been impressed by the absurd claim made in Phantasms that the odds in favor of “ghosts” was about “a thousand billion trillion trillion trillions to one.”²⁰ In the first paragraph of his “Criticism” (sel. 16), Peirce alluded to this claim—“I shall not cite these numbers, which captivate the ignorant….”—and pointed out that “no human certitude reaches such figures as trillions, or even billions to one.” Gurney, Myers, and Podmore had presented thirty-one cases²¹ which they claimed established their hypothesis to this remarkable degree of certitude and Peirce’s aim was to show how their results were vitiated by inadequate sampling and control procedures; specifically, that in each of the thirty-one cases they had failed to meet one or more of sixteen conditions of an adequately designed experiment.

Peirce’s review was forwarded to Gurney for a reply to be published along with it. These papers, together with a rejoinder by Peirce probably written in the late summer or fall, appeared in the December 1887 issue of the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research. In his review (sel. 16) Peirce’s criticism of the thirty-one cases was somewhat casual and perhaps slightly derisive, containing a number of inaccuracies and exaggerations that Gurney, in his lengthy “Remarks” (sel. 17), pounced on. He answered Peirce point for point, often with an impatience that matched Peirce’s swagger. He did admit that perhaps he and his colleagues fell “far short of Mr. Peirce’s standard in respect of caution, shrewdness of observation, and severity of logic,” but he supposed that his deficiencies were not so great as to override the weight of the evidence. Peirce, stung a bit by some of Gurney’s rebuttals, wrote a “Rejoinder” (sel. 18) almost as long as Gurney’s “Remarks” and more technical and precise than his original criticism. He reiterated why he had felt the need to take a stand against Gurney, namely, that “to admit the existence of a principle, of which we certainly only meet with manifestations in very exceptional observations, is to rashly set the prosperity of scientific progress at hazard.” He then answered all of Gurney’s rebuttals and attempted to show that once the suspicious or problematic cases were weeded out there really was no “weight of evidence” at all. Peirce praised Gurney for adopting a statistical method “with a view of putting this question to rest,” but his badly designed study “leaves the question where he found it.” In response to Gurney’s claim that any bias he might have in favor of the supernatural was no greater than Peirce’s bias against it, Peirce agreed, but he added that “a bias against a new and confounding theory is no more than conservative caution; while a bias in favor of such a theory is destructive of sound judgment.” Gurney set about answering Peirce’s “Rejoinder,” but had not finished his remarks when, in 1888, he apparently took his own life. It is thought that the impetus for his apparent suicide was the revelation that his assistant, George Albert Smith, had manufactured evidence (annotation 61.23). Gurney’s final but unfinished answer to Peirce appeared posthumously in 1889 as “Remarks on Mr. Peirce’s Rejoinder,” with a concluding “Postscript” by Myers (sel. 19). In his final “Remarks” Gurney wanted to make it clear that he was really not an advocate for the supernatural and that, in fact, he agreed with Peirce “in professing ‘a legitimate and well-founded prejudice against the supernatural.’” The entire controversy had been acrimonious, with both parties sometimes verging on the scornful. Ian Hacking says “It is Peirce at his crankiest (but none the less sound for that),” and he suspects “that many of the Boston skeptics were egging him on.”²² On his side, Gurney had the resources and encouragement of the Psychical Research Society behind him, along with his co-editors and assistants. But, all in all, one senses that the disputants did not lose respect for each other and even understood that they were in a curious way working together in an effort to advance human knowledge. About a dozen years later, when Peirce revisited this subject for a paper he was writing on “Telepathy and Perception,” he reminisced: “I had a somewhat prolonged controversy with Edmund Gurney which was only interrupted by his death; and this brought me into fine touch with the spirit of the man. I was most strongly impressed with the purity of his devotion to truth” (CP 7.612).

After returning to Milford in October, following his mother’s funeral, Peirce finished the year working on the theory of hydrodynamics, concerned with the effects on pendulums of the viscosity of air, and he worked on other matters related to his Coast Survey investigations, including his postponed report on the construction of a practical standard of length calibrated against a specified wave length of sodium light (W4:269–98). Peirce was probably stimulated to resume that work by three papers on wavelengths that appeared in 1887, one of them a study by Michelson and Morley precisely on the point of Peirce’s own research. Michelson and Morley’s paper, and the others by Louis Bell and Henry Rowland, made reference to Peirce’s work.²³ Peirce also resumed work on his “Guess” and continued to write his definitions for the Century Dictionary. Possibly in connection with his dictionary work or his study of hydrodynamics, or his interest in mathematical pedagogy, and stimulated by an 1887 article in the Journal fur die reine und angewandte Mathematik,²⁴ Peirce began a systematic study of curves that he would carry on for at least two more years (see sel. 42; also see c. 1888.4 and 1889.3, 20–22 in the Chronological Catalog). Apparently in response to an invitation from Peirce to join in this study, Survey computer and occasional aid to Peirce, Allan Risteen, replied on 4 August: “It has often occurred to me that a collection ought to be made of these properties that are common to all curves of given kinds—say, closed curves—and that perhaps the close examination of such a set of general propositions might lead to others equally general, so that after a time we should have a general geometry in the truest sense.” Sometime during the year Peirce also returned to his work on the theory of number and applied quantification theory to his 1881 axiomatization (sels. 20 and 21).²⁵ It is noteworthy that in “Logic of Number” (sel. 21), Peirce gives a technical definition of the “hereditary character” for number that brings to mind Frege’s “hereditary property” (see annotation 156.11), but Peirce’s regrettable inattention to Frege, probably because of Schröder’s dismissal of him,²⁶ argues that Peirce’s innovations arose from an independent course of thought. It is not definite when or how Peirce’s interest in number theory was rekindled; perhaps it was in connection with his study of number for his Century definition. A few years later, in 1896, he would present a lecture on number to the mathematics department at Bryn Mawr College (probably R 25), and number theory would periodically occupy him for the rest of his days.

In the latter months of 1887, Peirce began a correspondence with Francis C. Russell, a Chicago attorney who had taken a sudden interest in Peirce’s logic. Russell soon became something of a disciple of Peirce and, after he became associated with the Open Court Press, was instrumental in paving the way for Peirce to publish in The Monist. Peirce also resumed correspondence with William James, writing to him in October about his “admirable work on Space.”²⁷ This was Peirce’s first letter to James after moving to Milford, and it may have been the first in two years—since his letter of October 1885 in which he had mentioned to James that he was working on “something very vast … an attempt to explain the laws of nature … to trace them to their origin & to predict new laws by the laws of the laws of nature.” Then Peirce had been at the seminal stage of what would become the systematic metaphysics of his “A Guess at the Riddle,” and not much later, his Monist metaphysical series. By October 1887, Peirce had penetrated much deeper into his “vast” undertaking, and he had been working through some of the same issues addressed by James in his article on space. After telling James how much he had learned, Peirce expressed some reservations: “I fancy that all which is present to consciousness is sensation & nothing assignable is a first sensation.” He was not ready to admit “that size is so nearly a primary sensation as red or blue.” Peirce suggested that “objective space” might be “built up” by a synthesis of fragmentary spaces and speculated that in the same way “objective time” might be built up by a synthesis of fragmentary times. Peirce concluded his letter by remarking that James had apparently not seen “Mayer’s argument against Helmholtz’s theory of audition.”

Perhaps Peirce’s most intellectually stimulating correspondent of the time was Alfred Bray Kempe who, in November 1886, had sent him an inscribed copy of his recently published “Memoir on the Theory of Mathematical Form.”²⁸ Peirce may have first learned of Kempe in July 1879, when it had been reported in Nature that he had proved the four-color conjecture that for any map only four colors are required to avoid having a boundary separating areas of the same color. Peirce seems to have had pre-publication access to Kempe’s paper, which had been submitted to J. J. Sylvester for publication in the Johns Hopkins American Journal of Mathematics, and in 1880, before Kempe’s paper appeared, Peirce offered some improvements on Kempe’s method.²⁹ But it was Kempe’s 1886 “Memoir” that would have a profound impact on Peirce, whose expertise in the logic of relations and interest in spatial logics enabled him immediately to see the genius of Kempe’s graphical approach to relations. In order to exhibit essential forms, Kempe had introduced a graphical notation of spots and lines modeled on chemical diagrams, and this notation would play an important role in Peirce’s innovation of his Existential Graphs (EG).³⁰ On 17 January 1887, after carefully reading Kempe’s memoir and making a list of new terms that he thought might be included in the Century Dictionary, Peirce wrote to Kempe with some suggestions that led Kempe to make revisions which he credited to Peirce.³¹ In January of 1889 Peirce would return to Kempe’s “Memoir” and still find it “so difficult that I was at work on it all day every day for about three weeks” (RL 80:105). Kempe’s influence can be found in Peirce’s correspondence course exercises (sel. 9), especially those on relational graphs, and in the 1889 paper, “Mathematical Monads” (sel. 34), and in many other writings. In R 714 (1889.4), his fragmentary “Notes on Kempe’s Paper on Mathematical Forms,” Peirce even introduced lines to stand for individuals, an important move in the direction of EG.

The year 1888 began on a positive note for Peirce. On 1 January, President Cleveland appointed him to the Assay Commission, charged with testing coins from different U.S. mints for fineness and weight. Peirce served on two committees for the Commission, the Committee on Counting and the Committee on Weighing, and was a signatory for the final reports, signed on 10 February in Philadelphia. On 13 January Peirce and Juliette went to New York to see Steele MacKaye’s new play, “Paul Kauvar,” which had opened to acclaim on Christmas Eve. Mary MacKaye had sent them tickets. The Peirce’s continued to be frequent guests of the Pinchots, mingling with their well-heeled friends, and they had successfully entered into village life in Milford.

On 4 February, Peirce’s Aunt Lizzie died in the family home in Cambridge. Jem wrote in her obituary that she had been “a woman of remarkable character & intelligence” but that she had been “very singular, almost eccentric” and that her “greatest real fault was a certain streak of jealousy which she could not always conquer.” He said that she had been devoted to reading, “especially to German literature & above all to Goethe, whom she esteemed the paragon of geniuses and of men.” In fact she had held virtually the same opinion of her brother, Benjamin, to whom, as Jem put it, she had been “devotedly attached.” Aunt Lizzie’s funeral was held on 8 February and Peirce attended, but it is not likely that Juliette was with him. Aunt Lizzie’s estate was divided among Benjamin’s children and Peirce’s share came to about $5000.

Peirce’s inheritance, from Aunt Lizzie and from his mother, created the possibility for a life in Milford that would otherwise have been impossible. Even though Peirce still held out hope that he could make a success of his correspondence course, it was hardly lucrative nor likely to be so any time soon, and his combined income from the Survey and from the Century Company was quite inadequate to the life he and Juliette had assumed in Milford—with its socializing in the Pinchot circle and with frequent trips back to New York. And, of course, Peirce’s income from the Coast Survey was tenuous at best. To make matters more difficult, there were few suitable homes available for rent in Milford. When at the end of their first year the lease expired on their first house, it seemed that there was no place to go and that they would have to leave Milford. On 26 April a note appeared in the Port Jervis Evening Gazette (taken from Milford News): “We fear that we are about to lose Prof. Charles A. Pierce [sic] and his excellent lady because of their inability to secure a suitable residence for the coming year.” At the last minute Peirce did find a house to rent, the Scheinmee Homestead on Broad Street, but his inheritance made it possible to consider something more permanent. On 10 May, the Peirce’s bought a farm about two miles northeast of Milford in the direction of Port Jervis. They paid $1000 for the 130 acres on the Delaware River, which included a parcel called “Wanda Farm” that had been the homestead property of John T. Quick, one of the colorful early settlers in the area, and another parcel known as the “Quick Saw Mill Property.” The property as a whole was called “Quicktown.” Altogether, there were two houses, two barns, a large ice-house, a sawmill, and some other outbuildings. The farmhouse on Wanda Farm, built in 1854, was the main house and the one the Peirce’s would begin renovating in January 1889 with the aim of turning it into a magnificent resort that could accommodate summer guests and perhaps even a residential school of philosophy. But on 10 May, when the Peirce’s bought Quicktown, there was an understanding that they would not move in immediately and that some members of the Quick family could continue living in the main house for a period of time. That understanding would lead to complications later in the year, and descendants of the Quicks would come to believe that they had lost their property to the Peirce’s by some trick.³²

It is hard to tell how Peirce divided his time in 1888, but as the year got underway it seems certain that his intellectual work was mainly devoted to three efforts: to his Coast Survey reports, to his definitions for the Century Dictionary, and to the articulation of a system of thought founded on his categories and his evolutionary metaphysics. After Peirce submitted his report on the pendulum work at Fort Conger, he turned his attention to working up results from the considerable unreduced records of the gravity work he had carried out during the preceding five years, and some from even earlier. It was becoming more and more difficult for Peirce to sustain the mental focus and intensity required for the complex calculations that typified these reductions and he persistently tried to convince Superintendent Thorn that he needed assistance with the computations. Early in April Thorn finally agreed to assign Allan Risteen to work with Peirce on a temporary basis. Risteen and his wife moved to Milford and probably stayed with the Peirce’s until sometime in July. During those months it is likely that the reduction of data from gravity determinations was a constant in Peirce’s daily routine. But the fact that Risteen was there to help with the reductions probably allowed Peirce to work more on the related hydrodynamical theory, and it also freed him to spend more time on the Century Dictionary. Although Peirce had been working on definitions for at least five years, he was just beginning his most sustained and concentrated effort. Definitions were now being set in galleys and there was no choice but to turn considerable attention to that work. When the local newspaper had printed the notice that Milford might lose Peirce, it noted that he was engaged “in compiling a dictionary to be issued by the Century Company of N.Y.” Clearly, Peirce’s lexicographic work was a prominent part of his life at that time.

The third undertaking that must have occupied Peirce a great deal as 1888 got underway was his philosophical system building. Sometime after moving to Milford, probably after his mother died, Peirce resumed work on his book, “One, Two, Three” (W5: sels. 47–50, but see also 35 and 36), rechristened as “A Guess at the Riddle” (sels. 22–28). It had been over three years since he had begun articulating his “evolutionary speculation” which by 20 August 1886, as he wrote Holden, had become “a great working hypothesis of science” (W5:xxxix). Peirce’s “speculation,” his “guess,” was that because of an “original, elemental, tendency of things to acquire determinate properties, to take habits” the universe itself has evolved from a state of “all but pure chance” to “the present almost exact conformity to law.” Peirce had come to conceive of the grand cosmic history of the universe as of a kind with the evolutionary growth of biological systems.

What led Peirce to these cosmological speculations at that time can only be surmised. Although it is clear that many of the roots of Peirce’s grand idea ran deep into the earliest layers of his thought, it does seem that after his marriage to Juliette in 1883, and after he found out that his career at Johns Hopkins had been lost, he became decidedly focused on the riddle of the universe.³³ In his outline of how the argument of his book had developed (sel. 23, pp. 175–176), he noted that after he had turned his illuminating categories to “the domain of natural selection,” he had been “irresistibly carried on to speculations concerning physics”: “One bold saltus landed me in a garden of fruitful and beautiful suggestions….” That “bold saltus” may have been the “guess” itself, perhaps as expressed in his January 1884 “Design and Chance” lecture to the Johns Hopkins Metaphysical Club: “Now I will suppose that all known laws are due to chance and repose upon others far less rigid themselves due to chance and so on in an infinite regress … and in this way we see the possibility of an indefinite approximation toward a complete explanation of nature…. May not the laws of physics be habits gradually acquired by systems.” For three or four years following his Metaphysical Club lecture, Peirce roamed in his Epicurean “garden of fruitful and beautiful suggestions”:—his “One, Two, Three” writings of 1885–86 were part of that exploration. By the fall of 1887, as he began writing “A Guess at the Riddle,” Peirce’s initial exploration had worked itself out and he had started looking for further implications or illuminations of his guess for sociology and theology.³⁴ The final two chapters, projected but probably never written, were to be expositions of the triad in those two subjects.

Another possibility is that the “bold saltus” was the “leap” he took, probably in the summer of 1885, from his growing understanding of the usefulness of his categories for logic to the speculation that they provided the key to a rich and unified system of science. By fall 1885 at the latest, he could show how “the whole organism of logic may be mentally evolved from the three conceptions of first, second, and third.” He would conclude that “if these three conceptions enter as we find they do as elements of all conceptions connected with reasoning, they must be virtually in the mind when reasoning first commences” and he would add that “in that sense, they must be innate ideas” and “there must be in consciousness three faculties corresponding to these three categories” (W5:245) which, in turn, “must be capable of a physiological explanation from three fundamental properties of the nervous system” (W5:247). It was Peirce’s conjecture that his categories, firstness, secondness, and thirdness, or perhaps even the underlying conceptions “one,” “two,” and “three,” were the building blocks for a vast, integrated system of knowledge, that led him by mid-1886 to turn the evolutionary speculation of his “Design and Chance” lecture into his guess at the riddle of the universe, namely, that the universe may be understood as a process in which chance brings forth first, or original, events, which, because of an inherent tendency “to acquire determinate properties, to take habits,” become more and more systematic and law governed. The evolving law produces seconds and the tendency to take habits, which generates law, is the third “or mediating element” between firsts and seconds (W5:293). By early 1888, when he sketched chapter seven for “A Guess at the Riddle” (sel. 28), he had refined his guess to this succinct statement: “three elements are active in the world, first, chance; second, law; and third, habit-taking.”

The main thrust of “A Guess at the Riddle” was an exploration of the fecundity of Peirce’s categories for different sciences and the construction of a unifying structure of fundamental conceptions. In each of the extant chapter sketches Peirce used his categories as a device for rethinking and refining old ideas. For example, in chapter 1, “Trichotomy” (sel. 23), he showed how ubiquitous firstness, secondness, and thirdness are by connecting them with common conceptions such as spontaneity, result, and bridge, or beginning, end, and process. But why stop with one, two, three, he asked. Because, he said, “any number, however large, can be built out of triads; and consequently no idea can be involved in such a number radically different from the idea of three.” He used a model of a road with three-way forkings to demonstrate his point. Peirce’s analysis of degenerate categories revealed that there are two distinct varieties of secondness, one internal and one external. It may have been Hegel’s failure to understand this, Peirce suggested, that led him to commit “the trifling oversight of forgetting that there is a real world with real actions and reactions.”

Chapter 2, “The Triad in Reasoning,” was probably never written, unless Peirce intended “One, Two, Three: Fundamental Categories of Thought and of Nature” (W5: sel. 35) to be a preliminary draft, or at least a precursor of it. However, it is very suggestively outlined in the “Contents” (sel. 22) with particular reference to Peirce’s 1885 paper in the American Journal of Mathematics (W5: sel. 30) where it was stressed that for “a perfect system of logical notation” it is necessary to employ three kinds of signs: icons, indices, and tokens (what would later be called “symbols”). Immediately following “A Guess at the Riddle” is a short selection on Steele MacKaye’s theory of dramatic expression entitled “Trichotomic” (sel. 29). This paper, probably written for oral presentation during the early part of 1888 while “Guess” was in progress, effectively though very briefly summarizes four of its chapters (1, 2, 4, and 5). The discussion of signs complements the outline given in the “Contents” (sel. 22), and, together, they give a good idea of what Peirce had in mind for Chapter 2.

Chapter 3, “The Triad in Metaphysics,” (sel. 24) is only a fragment of a sketch of what Peirce planned to write, but it strongly indicates that Peirce viewed his cosmology in relation to Greek thought, particularly pre-Socratic philosophy His plan was to “run over all the conceptions that played an important part in the pre-Socratic philosophy and see how far they can be expressed in terms of one, two, three.” He did not get far, but he pointed out that the Greek arche, the “primal matter out of which the world [was] made,” was quintessentially his first. A fragmentary list of pre-Socratic doctrines (annotation 181.4–5), probably to be used as a source-list for Chapter 3, indicates further some of what Peirce might have included had he completed that chapter. For example, the thirtieth item on this list is a quotation of Parmenides taken from Plato’s Symposium (178b): “He devised Love the very first of all the gods.” Peirce then remarked: “But this doctrine was of course infinitely more ancient. Hesiod, quoted by Plato in the same place in the Symposium, puts Chaos first, earth second, and love third.”

In Chapter 4, “The Triad in Psychology” (sel. 25), the application of his categories revealed to Peirce that there are “three radically different elements of consciousness”: immediate feeling (consciousness of the first), polar sense (consciousness of the second), and synthetical consciousness (consciousness of a third or medium). In Chapter 5, “The Triad in Physiology” (sel. 26), Peirce used his categories to find a threefold division in the physiology of the nervous system that would account for the three kinds of consciousness. As though anticipating that he might be accused of reductionism, Peirce wrote: “No materialism is implied in this, further than that intimate dependence of the action of the mind upon the body, which every student of the subject must and does now acknowledge” (p. 188). Peirce concluded that three fundamental functions of the nervous system were, “1st, the excitation of cells, 2nd, the transfer of excitation over fibers, 3rd, the fixing of definite tendencies under the influence of habit,” and he considered further whether these functions were “due to three properties of the protoplasm or life-slime itself” (p. 193).

In Chapter 6, “The Triad in Biological Development” (sel. 27), Peirce’s examination led him to three principle factors in the process of natural selection: “1st, the principle of individual variation or sporting; 2nd, the principle of hereditary transmission, which wars with the first principle; and 3rd, the principle of the elimination of unfavorable characters.” Peirce concluded that the principle of sporting is a principle of chance corresponding to his category of first, the principle of heredity is a principle of compulsion corresponding to his category of second, and the principle of the elimination of unfavorable characters is a principle of generalization corresponding to some extent to his category of third. But he acknowledged that the correspondence of the main principles of natural selection with his categories was not perfect and he speculated that “its imperfection may be the imperfection of the theory of development” (p. 202).

In Chapter 7, “The Triad in Physics” (sel. 28), the last extant chapter sketch for the book, Peirce delivered his guess that there are three active elements in the universe: “first, chance; second, law; and third, habittaking.” Finally, we know from the “Contents” that Peirce intended to finish with chapters on sociology and theology, but there is not much indication of what fundamental triads he expected to find. He does note under “The triad in sociology” that “consciousness is a sort of public spirit among the nerve-cells” and under “The triad in theology,” that “faith requires us to be materialists without flinching,” but this only gives a little of the flavor of what Peirce might have written. It is true, though, that in his first chapter, “Trichotomy,” when he was discussing “absolutes” in cosmology, he alluded to the theological triad: “The starting-point of the universe, God the Creator, is the Absolute First; the terminus of the universe, God completely revealed, is the Absolute Second; every state of the universe at a measurable point of time is the Third” (sel. 23, pp. 173–174). Although Peirce tended to identify the third with representation, here we find, that in leading from first to last (second), third is process. Insofar as Christian theology holds that the universe is developing from “God the Creator” toward “God completely revealed,” Peirce regarded it as an evolutionary doctrine. Perhaps this is the approach he wanted to develop in Chapter 9.

Peirce had a remarkable confidence in the importance of “A Guess at the Riddle.” He was convinced that not only was it “destined to play a great part in the future,” as he wrote to Holden (W4:xxxix), but that he was inaugurating a new philosophy which, like the earlier system of Aristotle, was so comprehensive that “for a long time to come, the entire work of human reason … shall appear as the filling up of its details” (sel. 23, pp. 168–169). He envisioned his new system as a “philosophical edifice,” constructed on a deep and massive foundation, which unlike the Schelling-Hegel mansion—found to be uninhabitable almost immediately upon opening its doors—would be the principal habitat of philosophers long into the future. But Peirce’s book was never published, nor even completed, and even though he managed to get some of his architectonic ideas into print in his 1891–93 Monist series, he remained virtually the only inhabitant of the “Peirce mansion” during his own lifetime. After May 1888, when Peirce and Juliette purchased the house that would become Arisbe, Peirce would become preoccupied with architectural renovations. Chapter 1 of Peirce’s “Guess” (sel. 23), which was written out of order, may have been composed about the time Peirce began planning the renovation of his country house—when sound architectural structures became a matter of immediate practical importance for him. It is lamentable that Peirce would never finish either of his mansions and that, in their different ways, they would trammel him.

The evidence for when the Peirce’s moved to Wanda Farm and into their new house is inconclusive as it stands. By early June Peirce was using “Westfall Township,” where his new estate was located, as his return address, and by July he was using the name “Quicktown.” In an 8 June letter to Thorn, Peirce remarked that “on leaving Milford” he had lost his local clerk and on 2 July he said that his “movings” had taken five days. Yet as late as November he and Juliette stayed for a few weeks in a hotel in Milford while they dealt with legal issues pertaining to the eviction of the Quicks, which finally took place on 18 December. Probably the Peirce’s had moved to Quicktown shortly after they purchased it and occupied the secondary house, or some portion of the Quick house until the difficulties with the Quick’s continuing occupancy became acute, but so far nothing conclusive has come to light. In any case, it was not until January 1889 that the Peirce’s finally moved fully into the main house and began rebuilding it to suit their purposes.

Wherever Peirce was residing during the second half of 1888, it is certain that his new estate was much on his mind. Except for the legal difficulties that arose concerning the Quick family, Quicktown was a place of promise for Peirce, a chance to make a good life for Juliette and himself. Together they must have spent many hours making plans and thinking about the hopeful future that now seemed within their grasp. Peirce tried to keep his Coast Survey work on track but without much success. He did manage on 10 August to send in a new paper on the mean figure of the earth, expanding on his previous paper of 1881 (W4:529–34), but Thorn, suspecting that it was somehow a ploy to ease the pressure he had been exerting on Peirce to complete his major gravity report, had it evaluated by Schott who returned an indecisive verdict. Schott made a vague insinuation that Peirce may have made some unattributed use of similar results of F. R. Helmert—“whose work came under the author’s notice while writing his report”—and recommended that work on the earths shape should be kept separate from “regular pendulum matter” in any case. Of course, for Peirce, determining the shape of the earth was the principal goal of his geodetic labors, and it was hardly beside the point to keep his gravity researches integrated with their ultimate purpose. But Peirce’s paper (which has not been located) was not published, although it was probably the source for the results that Peirce used in his definition of “Earth” for the Century Dictionary. Peirce’s work on the earth’s figure and on its compression would continue to be mentioned in his monthly reports.

The texture of Peirce’s life can only be painted in pale outline in an introduction such as this one in which the aim is to provide a context for and a sketch of the intellectual development that gave birth to the writings in this volume. A more complete account of 1888 would describe more fully Peirce’s family relations, especially concerning the settlement of his mother’s and aunt’s estates, and would say more about his and Juliette’s social and domestic lives. It would also say more about some of the correspondents who have been passed over in silence, and about some unmentioned incidents and flare-ups with the Survey’s Washington office and scientific activities that have been left out—and, of course, there would be more about Peirce’s friends and colleagues and external matters that affected his life and thought. Chapter three of Joseph Brent’s Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life should be consulted for a more complete account of these matters. Perhaps the main thing still to be said about the last half of 1888 is that Juliette’s health took a turn for the worse and she would sometimes stay in New York, perhaps to be near New York physicians or because of the unsettled living conditions in Quicktown. Her health had always been worrisome for Peirce, but beginning in the spring of 1889 it would become a major concern.

On Thanksgiving Day, 29 November, Peirce wrote a newsy letter to his brother Jem. He thanked Jem for a remittance toward his inheritance and for the explanation of “fleflexnode” which “went straight into the dictionary.” He said he had been “much occupied with small but pressing matters,” and mentioned in particular the lawsuit concerning the eviction of the Quicks. He told Jem he was taking Juliette to New York on the following day and would return to the farm by himself. He reported that “Mrs. Pinchot wants us to change the name Quicktown, but I dont know that I agree with her. It is the name we found & ’Tom Quick’ is rather a romantic figure in the history of the valley”—the following year a monument to Tom Quick was erected in Milford to mark the one hundred and fifty-sixth anniversary of its settlement. Peirce told Jem that if he was reading novels he should get Le Capitaine Fracasse by Gautier. “For my part I read little literature & I find serious novels dull. I am loitering through Pepys again, & have been reading Sidney’s Arcadia, Dr. Dee’s preface to Euclid, Thirion’s History of Arithmetic, Browning, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Montaigne (of which I have an old French copy), Mémoires de Casanova, Our Mutual Friend, some old Arithmetic & other old books.” He finished by remarking that the dictionary was coming along quickly. This letter gives a nice sense of the tone of Peirce’s life as the year was winding down. The final weeks of 1888 were dominated by the prospect of finally having full occupancy of the Quick house and plans for its renovation.

Peirce woke up at about 7:30 a.m. on New Year’s Day, 1889, at Quinn’s Halfway House, near Quicktown, from which he and Juliette would direct preparations for their move into their new house. He divided his day in a way that modeled how he would spend his time during the coming year. He devoted the morning to philosophy, in particular, to starting a new book, “Reflections on the Logic of Science” (sel. 31). After lunch he and Juliette drove to Port Jervis in their carriage to see a carpenter about an addition to the house. In later years, when Henry S. Leonard traveled from Harvard to interview elderly Milford residents about Peirce’s life, Mrs. Robert G. Barkley recalled that Peirce “drove a Phaeton with a white horse and gently waved a whip as he drove along.”³⁵ Upon leaving Port Jervis, the Peirce’s crossed back into Pennsylvania to the village of Metamoras where they saw a second carpenter. After dinner that evening, Peirce and Juliette worked on accounts—Peirce noted in his diary that “there was some disagreement.” Later he turned to galley proofs for the Century Dictionary, which he noted had reached “game,” and to his overdue Coast Survey reports—at least he recorded these tasks in his diary for 1 January.

A few days later the reconstruction of the Quick house was underway and, although more or less completed stages would be reached, remodeling would continue with varying degrees of intensity and disruption for the rest of Peirce’s life, and even afterwards under Juliette’s direction. Their home would become their prison in the way that Peirce’s philosophical mansion would imprison him, catching him up in a vision he could not resist but causing him much suffering as he steadfastly struggled against insurmountable odds to achieve it. But as 1889 lay before him, there was good reason to suppose that his hopes for his estate, as well as for his philosophy, would be realized. He could not then know what a great struggle he would endure trying to build these parallel edifices. Leonard recorded some anecdotes that give an idea of how this process appeared from the outside. Miss May Westbrook remembered: “When the Peirce’s built their house they built around an original house on the property. Mr. and Mrs. Peirce sometimes quarreled. Once when I was at their house for dinner the quarrel was violent. I don’t know what it was about because they talked in French. Mrs. Peirce was an unreasonable person.” Miss Westbrook noted that whenever she visited, Peirce was always in his study except for meals, but she added that when Juliette was in Europe, Peirce “took one meal a day here with mother. He was very pleasant. Mrs. Peirce sometimes spoke well of him and sometimes not.” Gifford Pinchot also talked with Leonard about the Peirce’s’ reconstruction project: “The alterations were of an absurd character. The attempt was to make the house irresistible as an Inn or a Gentleman’s Estate. Mrs. Peirce had two passions: devotion to Peirce and interest in land. In the latter respect she showed a characteristic common among French peasants. Peirce was extremely impractical. He submitted to her plans for alterations in the house loyally and cheerfully, living in one room while all the others were in a turmoil with carpenters.” Pinchot remembered how in 1887 and 1888 he had discussed forestry with Peirce and that those discussions had been instrumental in his decision to study forestry in Germany. Pinchot went on to become Theodore Roosevelt’s Chief Forester and would play a large role in establishing the National Park System in the United States. He also recalled that it was Peirce who had calculated the settings for a sundial built into the stone front of Grey Towers, “so that it gave exact normal time for the longitude and latitude” and that he “calculated the true North and South that were marked in the sidewalk in front of the house.” These markings are still visible today.

The book Peirce started writing on 1 January (sel. 31), might have been an outgrowth of Chapter VII of Peirce’s “A Guess at the Riddle,” where he had made a number of the same observations he now planned to examine in detail—for example, that in order to have any hope of making progress in physics, we cannot simply work through one hypothesis after another without some hint to guide our initial choices. Peirce wanted to set out in detail the logic of science that supported his guess and that would recommend it as the hypothesis to guide physics. It may be that Peirce intended “Reflections” to be his “Illustrations of the Logic of Science” (W3:242–74) brought up to date. It is interesting that on the following day, 2 January, Francis Russell wrote to Peirce that “when your ‘Illustrations of the Logic of Science’ came out the papers initiated in me a new era in my mental history and I am one of a necessary many who recognize in you a master to be followed.” Russell then asked Peirce if he had changed his views since the “Illustrations.” Peirce replied on the 8th, “Suffice it to say that I have not given up any of the more fundamental of my younger opinions so far as I recollect them, but am perhaps more sceptical & materialistic.”

Peirce did not get very far with “Reflections.” He began the second chapter with a discussion of the doctrine of chances but soon decided that a prior discussion of mathematics was needed. On 9 January he wrote a few paragraphs of a new draft of Chapter 2 and continued it on the 17th, but that was the end of it. On that day he began working on a mathematical paper, “Note on the Analytical Representation of Space as a Section of Higher Dimensional Space” (sel. 32), elaborating on a proof he had just sent to Simon Newcomb with the hope, soon dashed by Newcomb, that it would be published in the American Journal of Mathematics. It may have been Peirce’s interest in the mathematical foundations of the logic of science that caught him up in new mathematical investigations, or it may have been his work on hydrodynamics, but he continued working on mathematical topics throughout January and there are a number of other 1889 selections that may have been composed around that time. These include “Ordinal Geometry” (sel. 33), “Mathematical Monads” (sel. 34), “On a Geometrical Notation” (sel. 38), “On the Number of Forms of Sets” (sel. 39), “The Formal Classification of Relations” (sel. 40), “Dual Relatives” (sel. 41), and “Notes on Geometry of Plane Curves without Imaginaries” (sel. 42). Some of these papers, perhaps especially selection 34, and also the mathematical chapter of selection 31, may have been inspired by Peirce’s January study of Kempe’s paper on mathematical forms, and others may have been outgrowths of his work on mathematical definitions for the Century or his correspondence with mathematicians such as Alfred Mayer and his own brother Jem.

Peirce’s enthusiasm for what was coming to pass in Quicktown was dampened by a continuing decline in Juliette’s health. His diaiy reveals his growing concern. On 3 January he noted that “Juliette weighs 104 with thick clothes & heavy shawl” and on the 6th he wrote: “Much alarmed about Juliette’s health. She spits so much blood. Juliette getting quite ill. If I should lose her, I would not survive her. Therefore, I must turn my whole energy to saving her.” Peirce suspected tuberculosis and knew that living in a house under construction in the winter time was putting Juliette at serious risk, so he arranged for her to travel to the South. She left sometime in February, staying for a time in Brunswick, a resort town on the Atlantic coast of Southern Georgia, and then offshore at the very exclusive and expensive Jeckyl Island Club, where, at the request of Mr. Henry E. Howland, she had been extended privileges for two weeks. From Jeckyl Island, Juliette traveled to the new Hotel Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine where, Peirce wrote to Jem, “she found the greatest benefit” (30 March 89). She telegraphed Peirce from Jacksonville, Florida, on 30 March to say that she was much improved and would like to return, but Peirce tried to discourage her: “You must not think of coming back here so soon. This house is very unwholesome. I have not had a single well day since you left. The spring air would also be the death of you. You cannot come back till after the carpenter work is done…. We are rushing the work all we can, but I don’t expect it will be ready for you to move into the front part before May 1 & not into the new part for another month at the very least. To move into a new house with the plaster not thoroughly dry would be madness.” It must have added to his worry about Juliette to learn that on 29 March his friend and former student, O. H. Mitchell, had died of pneumonia at thirty-seven years of age.

As the days grew warmer Peirce’s own health improved and he became excited at the prospect of farming Quicktown. He purchased two farm horses for harvesting hay, decided to raise a calf that had been born to his Guernsey cow, had five hundred Palmetto asparagus plants set out, and was probably as content as he had been for many years. He missed his young wife and considered renaming Quicktown “Sunbeams” in her honor. When Juliette returned she had not improved and in May Peirce asked for a two-week leave from his Coast Survey duties to take her to New York for medical tests. The diagnosis was tuberculosis, as Peirce had feared. They returned to Milford for the summer and fall knowing that Juliette could not spend the next winter in Milford. That realization was perhaps less worrisome than it would have been had Peirce not recently received fairly substantial payments from the estates of his mother and aunt—$1450 in April alone.

Certainly given the demands of the farm and the renovations to the house, and his preoccupation with Juliette’s health, along with the pressure from his continuing responsibilities to the Century Company and the Coast Survey, Peirce had little time for anything else. But occasionally something would happen to turn his thought from its main course. Perhaps this happened most frequently as a result of the great variety of subjects he had to look into for his definitions, but there were other sources of intellectual stimulation and diversion. At the beginning of the year, Kempe’s paper on mathematical form had played that role. In March, Wolcott Gibbs had written to Peirce to ask if he had published any results from his color experiments that had been funded fourteen years earlier by the National Academy of Sciences with a grant from its Bache Fund. Gibbs’s request seemed to reawaken Peirce’s interest in color studies and for several days beginning 4 April, he recorded results of a new series of color experiments in a notebook labeled “Hue” (1889.12). Peirce traveled to Washington D.C. during the third week of April to present a paper “On Sensations of Color” (1889.14) to the National Academy. He presented a second paper, “On Determinations of Gravity” (1889.15), in which he discussed his work with the invariable reversible pendulums he had designed. The spring issue of the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research carried Gurney’s final reply to Peirce (sel. 19) which must have caught his attention, but with Gurney by then deceased, Peirce probably had no thought of any further response. Within a few months, however, he would take up the subject again for The Forum. And in June at Harvard’s commencement, Percival Lowell delivered the annual Phi Beta Kappa poem and took the occasion to commemorate Peirce’s father, Benjamin, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Lowell’s Peirce stanza ended: “Though but an echo find itself in verse, The Cosmos answers to the name of Peirce.”³⁶ Charles would surely have heard of this and it could not but have reminded him that he was expected to wear his father’s mantle. No doubt he felt the irony that while such grand things were being said about his father, he was, largely by his own doing, living in exile from his father’s social world. The promise of a new life may have made things easier for Peirce, but that would not last long.

During the years covered in this volume, the one continuous focus of Peirce’s intellectual energy was his lexicographic work for the Century Dictionary, which in its first edition ran to 7046 quarto pages. He had begun writing definitions as early as 1883 and he continued with varying degrees of concentration from then on, but his most sustained and intensive effort came between 1888 and 1891. Peirce’s contribution to the Century Dictionary was massive. He was responsible for six major subject areas—logic, metaphysics, mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, and weights and measures—but he contributed to many other areas including color terms, general philosophy, geodesy, psychology, and education (in particular, the words related to universities). Altogether he probably contributed or approved over 15,000 definitions, with many of them taking many hours of thought and research.³⁷

From the beginning, Peirce’s lexicographic work had a decided impact on his intellectual development. At Johns Hopkins, where Peirce began working for the Century Company, he developed a course in philosophical terminology structured around his dictionary work. His desire to express usefully but as fully and accurately as possible the meanings of words such as “classification,” “color,” “continuity,” “formal,” “law,” “logic,” “nominalism,” “predicate,” “probability,” “real,” “relation,” “science,” “sign,” “theorem,” “truth,” and “university,” among many others, often led to significant developments in his ideas or in the direction of his thought. Max Fisch believed it was Peirce’s return to the Greek philosophers for his dictionary work that led him to his evolutionary metaphysics, and it is likely that some of the mathematical selections in the present volume were stimulated by his lexicographic work (e.g. sel. 40). Certainly Peirce’s increasing interest in classification, in the history of language, in the ethics of terminology, and in such matters as spelling reform, grew directly out of his work for the Century Dictionary.

It is unclear in what order Peirce took up his dictionary work, but he appears to have begun in 1883 by working his way through the Imperial Dictionary (the basis for the Century) letter by letter, pronouncing judgment on the Imperial’s treatment of his words, emending what could be saved and supplying what more was needed—often a great deal. By 1886 he had reached “Words in E” (W5: sel. 57). But Peirce also worked on his definitions by subject areas, beginning in 1883 with definitions for selected mathematical terms, followed in the intervening years by similar efforts for color terms, metrological terms, university terms, and so on. The Century was an etymological dictionary and included carefully chosen quotations to illustrate the history of the use of its words, so during these years Peirce’s intellectual purview was profoundly expansive, covering the wide range of subject areas he was responsible for and the full history of the words from those areas, from their baptisms, if that could be found out, to their most current uses. He was always on the look-out for illustrative quotations to send in to the Century Company’s New York office.

Sometime near the beginning of 1888, but perhaps not until the spring, Peirce started to receive galley proofs for his definitions. The Century began appearing in print the following year in bound fascicles of about three hundred pages. This process of working over the galleys incrementally, while publication was proceeding with earlier fascicles, would continue until the final fascicle, the twenty-fourth, was published early in 1891. By the end of November 1888, Peirce was through the first galley proofs for the F’s and on 7 January he wrote Jem that he had received a second galley for “function.” By the spring of 1890, the end of the period covered in this volume, about half of the Century was in print. Because of this piecemeal production process, from 1888 to 1891 Peirce had to revisit all of the definitions he had written during the previous five years and compose for each fascicle, as a continuing matter of priority, any definitions he had put off along the way. There is nothing that occupied Peirce more completely during these years than his dictionary work, neither his work for the Coast Survey nor his philosophical system building. It was likely this concentration that led him to set aside his “A Guess at the Riddle” manuscript, just as he seemed to have the book well in hand.

It did not take long after the first of the twenty-four slim volumes of the Century Dictionary appeared in print for reviews to follow. One lone voice of dissent was heard—the voice of Simon Newcomb. In a letter to the editor of the Nation, published on 13 June 1889, Newcomb complained of certain Century definitions that were “insufficient, inaccurate, and confused to a degree which is really remarkable.” The examples he gave were for “Almagest,” “albedo,” “eccentric anomaly,” “absorption lines,” “law of action and reaction,” “apochromatic,” “alidade,” and “achromatic lens,” five of which, it turned out, were Peirce’s. Peirce replied in the 27 June issue of the Nation, admitting that his definition of “anomaly,” “perhaps the first I wrote in astronomy,” was flawed, but defending the rest. Newcomb confessed to great surprise when he found out it was Peirce he had taken to task, but privately, in a letter to William D. Whitney, Editor in Chief for the Century, he wrote: “I may say to you confidentially that several years ago I should have regarded Peirce as the ablest man in the country for such work but I fear he has since deteriorated to an extent which is truly lamentable.”³⁸ A few days earlier, Whitney had written to his brother that he did not understand why Newcomb felt “called upon to strain the truth and misjudge things in order to find fault” with the dictionary. “It seems,” he went on, “as if he must have some private grudge to satisfy.”³⁹ But Newcomb’s criticism quickly faded out against the countervailing tide of acclaim. Overall Peirce was quite satisfied with the results of his work, even though he would often remark, as he did to Paul Carus on 25 September 1890, “God forbid I should approve of above ¹/₁₀ of what I insert.”

The second major preoccupation of Peirce in 1889 was the preparation of scientific reports for the Coast Survey. For years he had accumulated gravity data with painstaking effort and at great expense, and beginning about 1887 had been trying to prepare results for publication. He had not published a major report since 1884, and that was a report on gravity determinations made in Pennsylvania in 1879 and 1880 (W5: sel. 1). Since then he had published some smaller reports, mainly on theory (e.g. W5: sels. 42, 43, 51–53) and, of course, his report on pendulum operations at Ft. Conger, but his principal gravity findings since 1880 remained unpublished. Most importantly, with the exception of the Greely report, these included all of the gravity work carried out with the Peirce invariable reversible pendulums. These unpublished results involved ten stations, six running along a north-south line between Montreal and Key West (including Albany, Hoboken, Ft. Monroe, and St. Augustine), three along an east-west line between Ithaca and Madison (including Ann Arbor), and the base station at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., which provided the constants for all the Peirce pendulum operations.

In addition to reports on gravity work involving the Peirce pendulums, results still had to be worked up for earlier operations with Repsold or Kater pendulums at Hoboken, Cambridge, and Baltimore and for some of Peirce’s early gravity work with less refined pendulums in Massachusetts (at the Hoosac Tunnel, Northampton, and Cambridge). Also, there were at least three volumes of unreduced data from observations made at Paris, Geneva, and Kew during Peirce’s final trip to Europe in 1883. All of these records together, in their raw data form, filled more than one hundred volumes of pendulum transit records and scores of chronograph sheets recording time observations.

Finally, in conjunction with his principal work of determining gravity, Peirce had applied his results to the problem of determining the shape of the earth and had made many studies and investigations of such issues as the flexure of the pendulum staff and the effect of air resistance (involving hydrodynamical theory). For that, too, he needed to prepare reports.

Peirce had begun in earnest reducing data and writing a report on operations with the Peirce pendulums in the fall of 1886, after being relieved of field duty, but his attention had soon turned to the Greely report. Upon settling in Milford, Peirce turned again to the preparation of the report he believed would carry forward the U.S. contribution to geodesy he had initiated with his 1876 “Report on Gravity at Initial Stations” (W4: sel. 13) and his “Determinations of Gravity at Allegheny, Ebensburgh, and York, Pa., in 1879 and 1880” (W5: sel. 1). His plan in June 1887 was to write first a report on what he thought was the best work done with the Peirce pendulums, the results from Ithaca, Madison, Ann Arbor, Key West, and perhaps Fort Monroe, and to give “a full account” of the pendulums, including a discussion of their theory and of the work that had been done at the Smithsonian, the base station, to determine their constants. Then, for a separate report, he planned to prepare the results from Hoboken, Albany, Montreal, and St. Augustine, also done with Peirce pendulums, but not “in the last approved way” (9 June 1887).⁴⁰ But by the end of the year, Peirce had decided to organize the work into two series of stations grouped by their approximate location on either the same east-west or north-south meridian. After he finished his reports on work with the Peirce pendulums, he planned to clean up the remaining backlog.

Peirce went to work on the report for the east-west series of stations and wrote to Thorn on 28 June 1887 that it was “shaping up” and that he would soon have a draft ready, but he added: “it is a larger job than I fully realized.” Two months later Peirce still had not finished his draft and he was forced to admit that he had run into a serious difficulty: he had found an error in the mathematical theory used to calculate the effects of the viscosity of air on the period of the pendulum. “This is one of the most difficult mathematical problems conceivable,” Peirce wrote to Thorn (29 Aug. 1887), but he expected that his work would lead to an improvement in Stokes’ hydrodynamical theory which would justify the delay; by the end of September Peirce decided that he should put off further treatment of hydrodynamics for a separate memoir. The final illness and death of Peirce’s mother kept him in Cambridge for most of the month of October 1887, but by the end of November he wrote Thorn that his “long report” was almost ready, “requiring only final touches.” Two months later, on 30 January 1888, Peirce sent in what he had ready “for the sake of suggestions of which I may avail myself in making the copy of it.” He acknowledged that a lot of work, mostly clerical, remained unfinished and asked if he could have some assistance. Thorn declined and returned the draft unreviewed to be finished and copied.

Weeks passed by and Thorn’s displeasure increased. On 30 March Peirce felt the need to explain the continuing delay. Pendulum work, he pointed out, is much more complicated than other geodetic work such as triangulation, longitude work, and leveling, because there are so many more sources of error that have to be studied and corrected for. “If these difficulties are only slightly increased, there results an enormous increase, first in the precautions which have to be taken in the field, and second in the puzzle of interpreting the observations.” Defects in the construction of the Peirce pendulums, which Peirce attributed to poor American craftsmanship, made it all the more difficult to reach useful results, and the problem of hydrodynamics, now to be treated separately, had taken considerable time. “Now anybody who has ever done such a Work in such a way,—ask such men as Langley or Newcomb,—will tell you that it is impossible to make any reliable estimate of how much time it will take.” Peirce’s emotions were at a high pitch and he could not resist an allusion to Colonna’s obstructionism: “In addition to this, I was subjected to false accusations of the most disgraceful kind, and the newspapers were filled with unbounded lies about me readily traceable to important personages. All of these things, and others which I omit to mention, distracted the equanimity of my mind considerably.” In the margin of Peirce’s letter, Colonna added the sarcastic remark: “What about other people’s distractions of mind[?] Also what distracted his mind at all except the last 3 stations?” This was a clear reference to Peirce’s relations with Juliette, and the fact that she had accompanied Peirce on many of his field assignments. Even though Peirce would not have seen Colonna’s remark, Thorn and others in the Washington office would have; it indicates that rumors of scandal had infected Peirce’s Coast Survey relations with the poison that had driven him from Johns Hopkins and had virtually sent him into exile. Peirce felt compelled to respond to the irritation and displeasure Thorn had been exhibiting:

The tone of your letters would seem to betray the opinion that I am myself completely insensible to the disparity between the time I estimated for the work and the time it has occupied. But can you suppose that I do not look upon the labor of my life seriously? Or that anything that you or the Hon. Secretary could say or do about it could possibly be as grievous to me as the want of my own self-commendation? When I agreed to do this work by myself my intention was to hire a computer; for I do not believe that anybody in the world could do such work advantageously without aid. The papers amount to at least a hundredweight and the mere picking out of such as are wanted in one day will all together often occupy hours.

Peirce took time in July to work on the method for calculating the figure of the earth from gravity determinations and on 10 August submitted his results for publication. For the rest of the year, again without an assistant, Peirce continued to work on reductions of data and on flexure and time calculations. On 31 December 1888, following a recommendation from C. A. Schott, he wrote to Thorn suggesting that both series of stations be included in one comprehensive report: “The amount of additional computation required is considerable, although not so great by any means as if the constants & behaviour of the instruments had not been studied.” Peirce added, with some obvious bitterness: “The labour of writing the report,—of composing it, writing it, copying, verifying copies,—which is in part mechanical and in part requires all the ability I can bring to the task,—but in every part the utmost care and consideration, has mostly to be done over.”

You will remember that about a year ago, I sent you my report in a substantially complete state (though then only embracing 4 stations) with the request that it be submitted to such critical examination as might be practicable and the result communicated to me for my aid in revision. The request was refused; and your letter embodying the refusal, conveyed to me the conviction that any flaws however trifling which might be detected would be husbanded to form material for an attack after the report was printed. Under these circumstances, my caution about parting my MS. out of my hands is naturally increased…. I am unable to say more definitely at what time my report will be ready, than that it will be during next spring.

On 11 January 1889, Peirce reassured Thorn that “the full report on the meridional line from Montreal to Key West inclusive & from Albany to Madison inclusive will be completed during the Spring,” but Thorn, at Colonna’s instigation, had lost faith in Peirce and decided that it was time to see exactly where things stood. He ordered Peirce to package up all of his work on the report and ship it to Washington for examination. Peirce complied, and two days later had packed and shipped twenty large books of reduced data and 2037 carefully inventoried and numbered manuscript pages and draft materials (see p. 636). Peirce could not let pass unaddressed the distrust that Thorn’s order so clearly revealed. He told Thorn that he was glad to send all of his working documents because, for one thing, it would rebut the insinuation that the draft report he had sent the previous year had represented little effort on his part. But Thorn would also see that a great deal had been accomplished since then “and that the principal cause of the delay in completing the work has been the great amount of time spent upon the general method of pendulum observations and reductions,—which lay directly in my way” Peirce estimated that he needed at least three more months to complete the report and he asked again if he could submit it in draft to be looked at by specialists before making his official submission. Taking Thorn to task for a previous refusal, he added presciently:

You say your object was to prevent my shifting the blame for the report to other shoulders. Now, for my part, I really do not think the report will sink below the zero of merit; but anyway, you overlook the fact that I never asked for binding directions but only for suggestions which I might be free to adopt or not. My main, not to say my only, motive was that I had reversed the usual order of presentation in a scientific memoir by stating the conclusions before the premises; and I wished to know how this would strike another mind competent to judge of it. (30 January 1889)

Peirce’s relations with Thorn were at a very low point, yet, having unburdened himself, Peirce put his rancor aside and tried to resume normal relations. He wrote to Thorn on 4 February to say that, while the Peirce pendulum records were in Washington, he had gone to work on the Kater pendulum records from his Hoboken observations. He asked if he might go into the field again in the South—without mentioning that he was about to send Juliette to Southern Georgia for her health. Thorn declined. A few days later, Thorn returned all of Peirce’s records “precisely as received from you—with the exception of Ms. report of pendulum work, which is in your handwriting and is retained for safe keeping in the archives here …” (13 Feb. 1889).⁴¹ Peirce resumed his work on the long report and by the end of April had finished the reductions for the Montreal and Albany stations.

Whether Peirce knew on 30 January, when he wrote his spirited letter, that Thorn was about to resign is uncertain, but by mid-February it was common knowledge that Thorn would tender his resignation in March to be effective when a new superintendent was appointed. Peirce had hoped for this for a long time; he thought that a new superintendent, if a scientist were chosen and not another lawyer, would want him back playing a more active role in Survey operations. This may have had something to do with Peirce’s request to go back into the field and was surely on his mind in May when he wrote to Thorn about a plan he had conceived “by which pendulum stations may be occupied perhaps at the rate of one a day, with good result, and not at an extravagant expense” (28 May 1889). He asked Thorn again to send him back into the field to institute his new plan as soon as he finished his pendulum report, which he said would be forwarded soon. Thorn replied on 14 June with a reminder of Peirce’s “repeated promises during the past winter” that he would soon forward the report, “and now the Spring has passed.” He advised Peirce “that no other enterprise or scheme be permitted to interfere with the prompt completion of that long delayed report, upon receipt of which your plan of daily pendulum stations will be in order for submission and consideration.”

On 10 July 1889, Thorn was succeeded by Thomas Corwin Mendenhall as Superintendent of the Coast Survey. Mendenhall, who had been a student of Simon Newcomb,⁴² was a physicist who had taught at universities in Ohio and Tokyo before joining the U.S. signal-service in 1884. In 1886 he had assumed the presidency of Rose Polytechnic Institute in Indiana, and it was from there that he had been called to the superintendency of the Coast Survey. Mendenhall seemed well suited to lead the Survey and Peirce was delighted with his appointment. Peirce’s telegram of congratulations, sent to Indiana, was the first that Mendenhall received and he replied that it had given him great satisfaction. Peirce sent his first monthly report to Mendenhall on 31 July and took the opportunity to give a very detailed account of his pendulum work for the many years he had been in charge of gravity research. He also described at length his relations with Thorn and his general unhappiness with the direction the Survey had taken over the last half-decade.

When Mr. Thorn came in, certain charges were made against me. Later, all these were retracted with the exception of one, which was a very vague one to the effect that I had not been under proper control and discipline. Now, if I were to be informed what the questions about gravitation were, and what the facts of the case on which the solution of those questions must depend, all the discipline in the world could hardly prevent my having my way, for the simple reason that “my way” is simply what I deem reasonable, and as my ideas on this subject are clearer than other persons’, they must prevail with those very persons themselves. Accordingly, to prevent my having “my way,” I have of late years been kept as far as possible ignorant of pendulum matters. I trust you will reverse this policy, and restore me to the charge of investigations into gravitation.

As to the report Thorn had been waiting for so impatiently, Peirce wrote that it was in a typist’s hands. He had been working on a new arrangement for the report and now intended to submit it in two parts with the first one covering the work done at the Smithsonian, Ann Arbor, Madison, Cornell, and Key West. There were yet further delays, but finally on 20 November Peirce was able to write the agreeable letter that would accompany his long-delayed report (sel. 36). Although it did not include the Key West results, his submission included all of the theory, history, and discussion of constants needed for the complete report on the Peirce pendulum operations. As it was, the report ran to one hundred and forty oversize typescript pages. Peirce promised that a report on Montreal, Albany, Hoboken, Fort Monroe, St. Augustine, and Key West would soon follow, and could be published later as the concluding part of the comprehensive report.

Although Peirce’s report included all of the basic component sections present in his 1879 report (W4: sel. 13), it strikingly reversed their arrangement. Peirce also used radically different methods, the most obvious one being the introduction of “logarithmic seconds” as a unit of measurement. He also made a different application of the “resistential formula” which occurs in both reports as the basis for calculating the effect of air resistance. It is in this determination of corrections for the “second atmospheric effect” that Peirce hoped to improve on the classical theory of G. G. Stokes. As the annotations in this volume help to make out, though all of the necessary components are present, they do not all fit together entirely smoothly, and the report is marred by computational errors. This is not surprising, given the massive quantity of calculations that Peirce had to make in order to achieve his results; it is clear, however, that the report needed a thorough overhaul before it could be published.

Perhaps had Thorn still been superintendent, Peirce’s report would have followed a standard course of technical examination, proofreading, and publication, but Mendenhall was new, and he had been encouraged not to fully trust Peirce’s work, so he chose to have Peirce’s report examined by specialists for “form, matter, meaning and suitability for publication.” One of the three people he asked to examine the report was his own mentor, Simon Newcomb. On 28 April 1890, only four days after Peirce’s long memoir had been mailed to him, Newcomb wrote to Mendenhall that it appeared to be “a careful and conscientious piece of work,” but that its form was wrong:

A remarkable feature of the presentation is the inversion of the logical order throughout the whole paper. The system of the author seems to be to give first concluded results, then the method by which these results were obtained, then the formulae and principles on which these methods rest, then the derivation of these formulae, then the data on which the derivation rests, and so on until the original observations are reached. The human mind cannot follow a course of reasoning in this way, and the first thing to be done with the paper is to reconstruct it in logical order.

Newcomb also objected to Peirce’s reliance on logarithmic seconds, which he believed accomplished nothing except to confuse the reader. “On the whole the paper does not seem to me one which would prove useful scientifically or would redound to the credit of the Survey if published in its present form.” Ultimately, Mendenhall would decline to publish Peirce’s laboriously ground-out report and would justify his decision with words that echoed Newcomb. On 21 September the following year, having decided that Peirce’s report as submitted was not publishable, and still waiting for the report for the north-south stations, Mendenhall would inform Peirce that his services would be discontinued at the end of 1891. That would bring to an end Peirce’s thirty-one years of federal service and, without a pension, Peirce would have no regular income. As for Peirce’s 1889 report, it would be bundled up in brown wrapping and sent to the archives where it would disappear, mislaid, for more than seventy-five years.

At the end of the period covered by the writings in this volume, Peirce’s report was still under review, and nearly a year and a half would pass before Mendenhall would write the letter informing Peirce that his services were no longer desired. But given how much time Peirce spent preparing the 1889 report, and how crucial a role it played in determining his fate, it seems appropriate to consider a little further some of the circumstances pertaining to the report’s composition and quality. A number of delaying factors have already been noted, including Peirce’s commitment to other writings and projects, his attending to family matters, and also his discouragement, perhaps even depression, over his treatment by the Washington office. But Victor Lenzen, in the best study to date of this report,⁴³ emphasized two additional factors that must be taken into account.

Since 1883, Peirce had waited in vain for new pendulums from Paris, with which he hoped to improve upon the results obtained with the set of Peirce pendulums. The latter had been manufactured in the U.S. in 1881, and data obtained from their use required many corrections that could be avoided with better constructed pendulums. While in Paris in 1883, Peirce had arranged with P. F. Gautier, instrument maker for the French Bureau of Longitude, for new pendulums to be constructed according to his own improved design, and it was a constant source of frustration that he had not been allowed to stay in France until the pendulums were finished. He kept hoping until his final days with the Survey that they would be sent for.

A related but more general reason for Peirce’s slow progress was his insistence, for his own reputation and that of the Survey, that his pendulum work met the highest standards of scientific performance. He could not accept the view that had become entrenched in all levels of U.S. Government that only fast practical results were wanted. Peirce was working to advance science, and it was thanks to the precision of his research that he had earned the respect of his peers. He could not surrender to what he believed to be anti-science.

Another important factor in that contributed to the demise of Peirce’s report was Mendenhall’s disagreement on how gravity results should be represented. Peirce was adamant in his view that gravity is best understood as an acceleration, not a force,⁴⁴ and that relative determinations of gravity—where gravity at a location is measured relative to gravity at another location—provide greater accuracy than absolute determinations and are all that is needed for determining the figure of the earth. In his report on gravity at Fort Conger (sel. 30), Peirce had introduced a new relative measure that he called “logarithmic seconds.” These new units, reintroduced in the 1889 report (sel. 36, pp. 289–90), were meant to facilitate the calculation and use of gravity results. Lenzen explains that when gravity is expressed in logarithmic seconds, “a difference of values of gravity at two stations in log. secs, is numerically equal to the difference in the corresponding numbers of oscillations per day at the stations of a pendulum that beats seconds at the mean equatorial station.”⁴⁵ Mendenhall, for his part, was equally adamant that gravity should always be expressed in units of force called “dynes” and, besides, he thought that Peirce’s logarithmic seconds were obscure and confusing. He was not moved by Peirce’s defense that they were not obscure to mathematical geodesists, “men who have to deal with the most intricate parts of the calculus,” and that they had the very useful effect of “making all the operations of reduction and comparison additions & subtractions in place of multiplications and divisions” (22 July 1890). Mendenhall told Peirce that of course it was his own business how he wanted to restrict the meaning of “g” for his personal use, but that “when acting for the public … one must be guided by the general consensus of opinion of those generally admitted to be the highest authorities; personal preferences and especially any weakness towards ‘eccentricity’ must often give way” (24 July 1890). Mendenhall was unwilling to recognize that at that time there was no one in the United States who was a higher authority in these matters than Peirce.

A more important disagreement between Peirce and Mendenhall concerned the method for conducting gravity operations and the precision to be aimed for. Mendenhall had become persuaded that it was acceptable to give up absolute determinations altogether and, in general, to sacrifice precision for economy as long as results were satisfactory for ordinary practical purposes. Accordingly, Mendenhall, following the lead of Robert von Sterneck of Austria-Hungary, had adopted a new style short “half-seconds” invariable pendulum that could be carried from station to station and put into operation at a fraction of the cost associated with Peirce’s use of the yard and meter pendulums, especially their use in the complex operations required to determine absolute values.⁴⁶ In his first gravity report, published in 1892, Mendenhall explained that the Coast Survey would no longer follow the traditional European-style gravity studies that Peirce had instituted in the U.S. because they were too expensive, cumbersome, slow, and inefficient. The half-second pendulum, by contrast, solved all of these difficulties: “One of the principal advantages of this apparatus is the ease with which it may be used, and the few and inexpensive preparations necessary for its installation.”⁴⁷

In June 1894, two and a half years after Peirce’s forced resignation, Mendenhall testified before the Congressional Committee on Naval Affairs where he was questioned about Peirce.⁴⁸ He told the Committee that much of Peirce’s work “was of the highest character, and it has received praise from the European geodesists and others, physicists, etc., but it lacked the practical quality which I believed to be essential.” He explained that after the successful introduction of his half-second pendulums, he “became convinced that Professor Peirce’s services to the Survey were no longer necessary.” Mendenhall added that the results Peirce had been working on in his final years had not been published because Newcomb and other experts had judged that they were “not valuable.”

Was that a fair assessment of the results Peirce worked so hard to obtain during his last years at the Survey? It is difficult to evaluate scientific work that never became part of the public record, but Lenzen concluded that Peirce’s unpublished monograph was much more important than Mendenhall supposed. Some of Peirce’s accomplishments, according to Lenzen, are the following:⁴⁹ 1. Peirce’s calculation of “provisional maximum values of the departure of the geoid from the mean spheroid” (pp. 289ff.) is one of the earliest applications, if not the first, of Stokes’s theory of the form of the geoid. 2. Several of the corrections used in the report were original with Peirce. These include the correction for flexure of the pendulum support (pp. 295–99), which Peirce had introduced in his 1876 “Report on Gravity at Initial Stations” (W4:131–33); the correction for the unequal expansion of the upper and lower parts of the pendulum, introduced by Peirce in 1885 (W5: sel. 53) but first applied in the 1889 report (p. 341); the correction for the inclination of the knife-edge (pp. 340–41); and the correction for the second atmospheric effect. 3. Peirce’s calculation of the absolute value of gravity for the Smithsonian station, appropriately converted, appears to match a result obtained seventeen years later by the Geodetic Institute at Potsdam, which became the reference value throughout the world.⁵⁰

In considering the importance of the 1889 paper, Lenzen emphasized the significance of Peirce’s “second atmospheric effect,” the effect of the viscosity of air on the motion of a pendulum. Peirce had introduced this correction in his report for 1876 (W4:104–106) but only as an a posteriori correction. In the 1889 paper he applied and compared both a priori and a posteriori corrections, for he had designed the Peirce pendulums to facilitate just such a comparison for the viscosity correction. The theory Peirce applied was that of G. G. Stokes, but the formula Peirce used for his calculations took account of more factors than did Stokes’s formula. Lenzen concluded that it was unfortunate that Peirce’s “highly original discussion of the second atmospheric effect” had not been published, for it would certainly have been of interest to “Professor Stokes, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, and in charge of the British Gravity Survey.” Lenzen closed his study with the following assessment: “In the light of a review that I have made of the development of pendulums for the determination of gravity, it is my firm judgment that the experimental and theoretical work represented in Peirce’s Report on Gravity at the Smithsonian, Ann Arbor; Madison, and Cornell was the best work of its kind in the nineteenth century.”⁵¹ However, as was pointed out above, Peirce’s report was far from finished, and had it been published without improvements, his innovations might well have gone unheeded.

Life for the Peirce’s in their new house, during its renovation in the summer of 1889 could not have been idyllic. Overseeing construction and running the estate would have been pressure enough, but Peirce was expected to give full days of attention to his work for the Coast Survey, and somehow find time to write his definitions. Besides, many other lines of thought were constantly working themselves out under his pen. In August, Peirce published in the Nation a review of St. George Stock’s Deductive Logic (sel. 35). It was Peirce’s first review for the Nation since reviewing Abbot’s Scientific Theism (W5: sel. 46) in 1886. Peirce’s review of Stock was the kind of review an author dreads; the best Peirce could say was that “it would be impossible for a man who has been studying and teaching logic at Oxford for seventeen years to write a thoroughly bad book on the subject,” but he added immediately that any teacher who decided to use Stock instead of Bain “would be doing his pupils an injury.” Peirce was not one to mince words. He declared that “the best expositions of the subject” force students step by step to see the close connection between “formal rules and the trains of thought which actually go on in their own mind” and that every logic text should have at least a brief treatment of symbolic logic. Stocks book failed on both counts. Peirce announced that “there is no subject in which there is more urgent need of a new book,” probably knowing he would soon resume his own effort to fill that need (see W5, sels. 54–56). By the end of 1890, he was working to transform his correspondence course lessons into a text book entitled “Light of Logic.” The fragment that the present editors have entitled “Reasoning” (sel. 37) probably dates from early 1890 and may have been written with such a book in mind.

By the end of September the first phase of construction at Quicktown was complete. Peirce wrote to Jem with some satisfaction that “our house” is “very comfortable, very pretty” and “not in the least in the Queen Anne nor any other style. It is our own original style” (30 September 1889). He continued with a description of his estate and plans for its development and added: “I am confident that we shall eventually make money from this place.” But this was to remain the elusive silver lining. Peirce’s enthusiasm for Quicktown, his dream of a comfortable, even elegant, country life with Juliette, had already begun to fade. In part this was due to the combined demands of managing the renovations, running the farm, and his professional work, but that was not all. He continued his letter to Jem: “But now I must turn to quite another side of the canvass.” The other side was “dear Juliettes health.” Peirce told Jem that her diseased lungs were even worse than they had been the previous year when she had been warned not to spend her winters in the North. Clearly, she would have to winter elsewhere again this year. To make matters worse, Juliette had become very depressed, a condition Peirce might have been prone to as well.⁵² On 11 July in an outburst of anger and frustration, Peirce struck a domestic helper, Marie Blanc, and a few days later was charged with assault. Joseph Brent speculates that Peirce may have lost his temper while attempting to upbraid Miss Blanc for not following Juliette’s orders.⁵³ Such domestic tension could only have added weight to the pall that was descending over Quicktown. The case was not resolved until October when Peirce pled guilty to one count of assault and was fined twenty-five dollars plus court costs. Everything taken into account, life for the Peirce’s in the summer and fall of 1889 had taken a decided turn for the worse and tensions were mounting. But Charles and Juliette were resilient and still usually hopeful. In November they added significantly to their land holdings by purchasing an additional 1200 acres of woodland. Apparently Peirce was growing used to his new life. He continued his 30 September letter to Jem: “This living in the country is highly conducive to reading long works in many volumes. I have not a rage for reading; indeed I think an impulse to study and an impulse to read are rather antagonistic; but I get through a good many books here. I find nothing wears better than Sainte Beuve.”

Had Peirce and Juliette been content with modest country living, with an excellent library to fill their idle hours and with only infrequent trips back to New York for a fashionable dinner or an evening at the theater, they might have managed to avoid the terrible poverty that lay ahead. But they seemed determined to amass a great estate—adding yet another five hundred acres the following year—and modest living seemed to be out of the question. When it became necessary to deal with Juliettes winter convalescence, much of Peirce’s inheritance had been used up—the greater part that he had already received. Yet cost does not appear to have been a factor. Peirce explained to Jem that because of Juliette’s depression, he thought it “absolutely indispensable that she should be where she finds amusement” (30 September 89), and he thought that Sicily might be the place for her. As it happened, Jem had been in Europe for nearly three months and would be there for several more. Relations with Jem had improved since Aunt Lizzie’s death, and Peirce was relieved to have him there to watch out for Juliette.

On 21 November 1889, one day after Peirce had finally submitted his long overdue gravity report, a notice appeared in the Milford Dispatch announcing that Juliette would soon make a journey abroad for the winter in quest of health. Six days later Peirce watched Juliette and their dog, Bliss, board the SS Entella in the New York harbor, bound for Naples. Two days later Peirce wrote to Juliette: “What a terrible afternoon & night it was after you sailed! How did you get through? I was terribly anxious.” He told her he had seen the Pinchots, who lived in New York City except for the summers, and they had invited him to dinner, but he had declined because he did not have dress clothes with him. He had taken his Thanksgiving dinner at the Century Club with John La Farge and Clarence King. “I expect to get away this afternoon, but may not. They haven’t been very polite to me at the Lenox, & are evidently trying to get rid of me. I could not stay there with the least self-respect. I don’t pay enough…. Dear little girl! I do nothing but think of you, & can’t help talking too much about you. Good bye! Write from Gibraltar.”

Indeed, Peirce could not stop thinking about Juliette or his money woes. He wrote to his friend Annibale Ferrero, an Italian mathematician and geodesist who lived in Florence, to ask if there was not some position for him in Europe. He indicated that he would be prepared to leave the U.S. at once—perhaps hoping secretly to find a way to join Juliette while she convalesced. He had inquired of G. S. Hall a few weeks earlier about the possibility of a position at Clark University, so apparently he had begun shedding his illusions about Quicktown. Ferrero wrote back on 25 November urging Peirce to be patient. He was sure there could be something for Peirce with the International Geodetic Association, something appropriate to a scientist of his international reputation, but that sort of arrangement could not be hurried. With Juliette away, Peirce decided to spend as much time as he could in New York to see if he could find a way to turn his writing into cash. By now he must have understood that the correspondence course would never bring him much income and that if the farm were ever to make a profit, it would not be soon. He may have been feeling a little more secure about his Coast Survey salaiy, having just turned in the long report, but he had promised, quite unrealistically, that the second part would be finished promptly and he knew that before long he would be asked to turn it in. But even if he could keep his income from the Survey, that would not be enough—at least not until the farm could generate a substantial annual income. The immediate problem was to keep Quicktown operating and to provide for Juliette in Europe. Peirce had used up all of his reserves, and he was not sure how he would earn the money for the monthly disbursements he had promised Juliette.

Peirce wrote to Juliette again on the 6th of December. At the top of his stationary in place of “Quicktown” he inscribed “Sunbeams,” a name he sometimes called Juliette as an endearment. He was feeling lonely and greatly missed her. Beside the word “Sunbeams” Peirce made the impression of a kiss. André De Tienne has speculated that it may be from an anagram play on “baiser,” the French word for kiss, that Peirce first got the idea to rename his estate “Arisbe” as he soon would do.⁵⁴ He wrote to Juliette about finances. He told her that he had returned to the farm and had been working twelve and thirteen hour days. In New York, Pinchot had encouraged him about the prospects for an arithmetic book he had started, but Peirce thought it doubtful that such a book could bring in more than $1000 a year, and other books he thought he could produce would not bring in more than half that. “Thus, you see if I write 4 with my own hand, the most I can expect is $3000 a year from them; and from all I can write myself or ever get written $5000 a year will be the most. We are spending that now.” On a more positive note, he told Juliette that he had learned that tuberculosis was not incurable, even though some lung damage might be permanent. Finding this out had been such a relief to him.

Peirce was running out of options. He tried to borrow from his friend George Butler. On 8 December, Butler wrote that he was “awfully sorry” but that he simply had nothing to loan: “I am probably harder up than you are.” Peirce did manage to raise a little money to ease the tension of the moment, but nothing would be more destructive of his relationship with Juliette or of his life overall than his constant and never diminishing, sometimes extreme, need of money. The problem would become almost intolerable in another year, after the loss of his income from the Coast Survey, but the expenses of Juliette’s trip abroad made the first half of 1890 almost as difficult. The day before Christmas, Peirce sent Juliette a check for six hundred and fifteen francs, apologizing for the delay and warning her that he might have some difficulty with “the next remittance.” Peirce knew that Juliettes steamer had reached Gibraltar on the 16th, but did not know that she had reached Naples when he wrote to her on the 24th: “I have had no letter from you yet…. I shall pass Christmas with the old bachelors of the club.”

Peirce spent New Year’s eve with George Butler and his wife at their country home in the Hudson Valley north of New York City. He had by then received a letter from Juliette, from Gibraltar, and was greatly distressed at how ill Juliette told him she was. He wrote back on New Year’s day expressing his concern: “I never would live without the sunbeam of my soul!” But Jem’s letters to Peirce suggest that Juliette’s stay in Europe came much closer to being the pleasant amusing time Peirce had wanted for her than she was ever willing to admit. On 23 January 1890 Jem wrote from Rome: “Your cablegram did not reach me till the 16th…. I telegraphed & wrote to the hotelkeeper at Palermo, & learned that Juliette had already left for Cairo. She is sure not to have been seriously ill, & to have been well lodged & cared for.” Jem’s opinion is confirmed by an extant medical report from a Cairo physician who examined Juliette on the 24th and found nothing seriously wrong with her. Juliette stayed in Cairo until the end of March. Jem wrote on 5 April that he had seen Juliette several times recently and that he wanted to send his impressions about her state of health. “I cannot help thinking that her winter has been of substantial benefit to her. She speaks of the serious attacks which she still has, & seems to regard herself as doomed. But whenever I saw her, she looked & appeared strong & vigorous, & has evidently enjoyed much in her Cairene life and is familiar with Cairo through frequent visits to its streets & bazaars…. I have a strong faith that you will find that she has gained ground since she came abroad.” Later Jem would write that he did not believe Juliette was as ill as she imagined but that “She is easily excited & depressed” (13 June 1890). After Cairo, Juliette stayed in Alexandria for two or three weeks and then traveled back to Naples where, according to Jem, she stayed “at the Grand Hotel, a delightful house,” waiting for a steamer to New York. There is some obscurity about Juliette’s final days in Italy and when she finally sailed for New York, but it seems unlikely that she arrived back before early June.

Juliette had been away for half a year. During that time, Peirce periodically returned to Quicktown to tend to the estate and probably to spend long hours on his definitions, but he spent the greater part of these months in New York where he had friends and where there was more opportunity to make money. On the first of February, Ernst Schröder wrote to Peirce, resuming a correspondence that had lapsed for five years. Schröder told Peirce that the first volume of his Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik (exakte Logik) would soon be published and that he had asked his publisher to forward a copy to Peirce. He was concerned that Peirce might have broken off their correspondence out of anger for “some unknown reason.” Their ensuing exchange of letters, until Schröders death in 1902, was a great stimulus to Peirce, especially concerning the logic of relations. On 5 March, Peirce received a letter of self-introduction from Ventura Reyes y Prosper, who also corresponded with Schröder.

Such communications, and meetings with scholarly friends for dinners or at the Century Club, were important intellectual anchors for Peirce during a difficult time. Juliette’s absence caused Peirce much distress. At first he just missed her and was worried about her health, but the hardship he endured trying to provide the money she needed led to anxiety and a growing sense of failure. Gradually, with so few letters from her and with those he did receive expressing disaffection and disapproval, his frustration turned to disillusion and sometimes bitterness. Peirce wrote on 23 January, after she had been away for two months: “I have only had two letters…. I hear nothing, nothing. Good God, I shall go crazy if I don’t hear soon. This is terrible.” Three months later, feeling that he had done his best for her but having received not the slightest indication of any appreciation from her, Peirce wrote: “Your letters to me are so full of hate and rage, that I know not how to write to you. What my difficulties have been you do not know.”⁵⁵ Using the third person, Peirce went on to describe the changes in Juliette’s character that he had observed, starting with when they had met.

She was a very true and noble heart, that nothing ever could corrupt. And then I knew her in Washington when she showed capacities which surprized me. Then there was a dreadful period when everything in life was terribly terribly embittered. I wish now I had been drowned before I had to pass through such things. Very gradually, the curse seemed to pass away, & there was a time in Milford when there seemed to be much happiness, shaded by some doubts only. All this time, I was getting to know and to adore this dear lady more and more and to love her more deeply. In the future I don’t know how it will be. The present is dreadful.

The letter from Juliette that had agitated Peirce so much is no longer extant, but it is evident that Juliette had made an urgent and probably indignant plea for more money, perhaps claiming that she could not return without it. She must have threatened to sell a watch Peirce had given her for he pleaded with her not to do it and promised to send more money “no matter what happens, very soon.” He tried to borrow from friends and acquaintances but apparently without success. He urged Pinchot to hire him to tutor his children at fifteen dollars a week, and probably asked for an advance, but on 5 May Pinchot replied that he could not immediately make up his mind. On 14 May, Peirce wrote to C. R. Miller of the New York Times, with whom he had just concluded a successful newspaper debate on Spencer, proposing a series of fifty articles on evolution, but Miller did not think it could sustain the interest of his readers. As late as the first week in June, Peirce sought a consulting assignment with the Astor Library. By this time, however, Juliette must have already been on a steamer for New York, if she had not already arrived. The record does not indicate how she managed to settle her final accounts in Europe.

It is difficult to know whether Juliette ever understood or even cared about how Peirce had managed to support her European convalescence, or whether Peirce became a changed man as a result. The scant evidence suggests that her anger over what he had not provided outweighed any appreciation for what he had managed to send. The fact is, Peirce had managed to raise money from his writing, and his urgent need for cash had disposed him to try writing as a tool to make money rather than for the straightforward exchange of ideas. Of course Peirce’s stock in trade was his ideas, but he had been more willing than ever to turn them, if he could, to commercial ends. How successful he was still remains to be discovered. Extensive searches of New York newspapers and of contemporary magazines remain to be made with the purpose of digging up anonymous reports or hack writings that might have come from his pen (or typewriter). More may be discovered, but we will probably never know how much he managed to sell during that difficult time.

Sometime early in 1890, Peirce and Wendell Phillips Garrison, editor of the Nation, reached an understanding that significantly increased the number of books sent to Peirce for review. Peirce had occasionally reviewed books for the Nation since 1869, but he had never reviewed more than three in a single year, and his August 1889 review of Stock’s Logic had been his first Nation review in three and a half years. Peirce published ten reviews during 1890, and would publish even more in each of the next five years. Only two of Peirce’s 1890 Nation reviews appeared during the period covered in this volume. The first was the review of Noel’s Science of Metrology (sel. 43). Noel was an Englishman who was opposed to the metric system of measurement but who believed that the English system should be reformed. Noel proposed changing the ratios of inches to feet, pounds to gallons, and so forth. Although Peirce saw some merit in Noel’s proposal, he suggested that to challenge the metric system was “like challenging the rising tide” and that the only thing more futile would be to try to change the length of the inch.” The second Nation review was a review of F. Howard Collins’s Epitome of the Synthetic Philosophy (sel. 46). This was a very brief notice praising Collins’ “secondhand synopsis” for reducing Spencer’s “heart-breakingly tedious” five thousand pages to a mere five hundred, but lamenting that Collins had gone over fifty.

If Peirce’s increasing number of reviews for the Nation, many of them also appearing in the New York Post, was in fact an outcome of his overwrought effort to raise money during Juliette’s European convalescence, then it should be regarded as his most striking success. For he would produce nearly three hundred more reviews for the Nation and the income supplement from those reviews would be crucial for his and Juliette’s survival—and the loss of that income in 1906, after Garrison’s retirement, would be a serious blow.⁵⁶ But Peirce’s most notable achievement in raising funds while Juliette was away was his success, working with New York Times’ editor C. R. Miller, in organizing a debate about the soundness of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy that ran for six consecutive Sundays, from 23 March to 27 April. Altogether, the debate consisted of twenty-nine articles and notes. At Miller’s urging, Peirce made a great effort to recruit respondents for this debate. One of his prospects, William James, replied on 16 March that nothing would please him more “than to help stone Uncle Spencer, for of all extant quacks he’s the worst—yet not exactly a quack either for he feels honest, and never would know that a critic had the better of him.” But James begged off because he was so pressed to finish Principles of Psychology. Peirce had sent James copies of his opening article for the Times and probably also his Nation review of Collins, and James wrote that the columns were clever but “possibly a bit too interrogative and transcendentally suggestive to captivate the vulgar.” Not having what it takes to “captivate the vulgar” was James’s usual criticism of Peirce’s writing. He closed by asking when Peirce’s own “radical evolutionary speculations” would see the light.

A 17 March letter from Miller to Peirce serves to illustrate the nature of their collaboration and how the Spencer series was organized.

I wanted to hold the Spencer article until I could be assured of something in reply to or in support of it for the following Sunday Prof. Marsh and Prof. Dana … are both too busy to take a hand, but Prof. Sumner is coming in, probably for a week from next Sunday, that is a week after we print the article. Won’t you stir up Powell and Cope or any of the other combatants you may have in mind and get them to send in their contributions promptly? It is a good thing to have King’s article appear on the same day with Sumner’s by way of ballast, can you get him? For Sunday, the 30th. None of them need sign the articles unless they wish, though we should prefer signatures.

William Graham Sumner, a Yale sociologist, was probably the leading exponent of Social Darwinism in the U.S., and could be counted on to give strong support to the mechanistic principles that Spencer preached—but apparently Sumner never came through with a contribution. The Powell that Miller wanted was Peirce’s friend John W. Powell, Director of the U.S. Geological Survey, but he did not enter the debate either. He wrote to Peirce that he would like to join in but did not have the time. King must have been Clarence King, the geologist who advanced the theory that catastrophes and cataclysms are important factors in evolution, particularly with respect to rapid evolutionary developments. King may have contributed as “Kappa.”

The debate opened on 23 March with an introductory editorial and a piece by Peirce, “Herbert Spencer’s Philosophy. Is it Unscientific and Unsound?” (sel. 45), and was framed as a set of questions, but the tone was such as to raise the temperature of Spencer supporters. For example, Peirce took Spencer’s recommendation that a good way to make intellectual progress was to compare competing opinions and settle on those that survive mutual cancellation, as an occasion to ask: “Are thinkers ever really obliged to give all opinions equal votes … ?” He pointed out that there are some things—matter, space, time, law—which Spencer’s “somewhat clumsy conception of evolution has left him no room to explain in any evolutionary sense.” Spencer claimed that these “inexplicables spring directly from the Unknowable” but, Peirce asked, is this resort to the Unknowable really “thoroughgoing evolutionism”? Finally Peirce explained that since Spencer’s intention was to produce “a great scientific theory, a philosophy worthy to form the crown of modern science”—Spencer’s own “guess at the riddle”—it should be evaluated by “the recognized touchstone of a scientific theory”: successful prediction. What scientific discoveries, Peirce wanted to know, can be attributed to Spencer’s synthetic philosophy? Almost at once, after his opening article appeared, Peirce wrote to Miller asking to be paid. Miller replied that “checks for contributions to The Times are made out on Fridays” and he added: “I hope you will stir up as many combatants as possible and promptly.”

Peirce stayed on the sidelines for the following two Sundays while the first seven respondents weighed in, but he contributed a second article on 13 April: “‘Outsider’ Wants More Light” (sel. 47). Claiming once again that he was only seeking light—“an attack would be veiy different”—he replied to all seven respondents, but principally to three who had tried to answer from the standpoint of science. Henry Osborn, a well-known paleontologist, received Peirce’s most serious and polite reply. Peirce drew support from Osborn for his “doubt” that Spencer’s work would have permanent value. He treated Hiram Messenger and Edgar Dawson much less respectfully, essentially ridiculing them; his intent throughout was to stir up interest and emotions to keep the series going. Peirce did raise two or three interesting points that he would develop more fully in later years. In response to Messengers claim that he could find no mathematical errors in Spencer’s extensive writings, Peirce gave a single example. Spencer claimed that all phenomena are “necessary results of the persistence of force.” Peirce pointed out that it would be perfectly consistent with the principle of the persistence of force if at any given moment all the molecules in the universe were assumed to be in their actual positions but with reversed velocities. From that moment on, history would run in reverse. But “eggs grow into birds, not birds back to eggs,” so clearly not all the phenomena of evolution can be mathematical consequences of the persistence of force. In response to “Kappa,” Peirce outlined the seven tasks that have to be performed by a good critic of philosophy. That was a subject that would interest Peirce for the rest of his days. In response to “R.G.E.” he made the interesting observation that his dissatisfaction with Spencer “is not that he is evolutionist, but that he is not evolutionist enough.”

Peirce’s use of the pseudonym “Outsider” for his contributions to this debate may have been partly a ploy to add an air of mystery to the proceedings but it was also intended to situate Peirce outside the prevailing ethos of Social Darwinism. When Miller introduced the debate he indicated that the pseudonym allowed “Outsider” to “stand apart from the adepts whom he calls upon to speak their minds.” He added, however, that the name, “Outsider,” was really too modest for “he is himself eminent for his attainments in science and might speak with some authority upon the questions he raises.” But it may be that Peirce’s use of a pseudonym was not so much to set himself apart from his respondents as it was a prudent decision based on his understanding that he could no longer pretend not to be standing apart and that his own name might keep some interested parties from participating. That he chose the pseudonym “Outsider” may have been Peirce’s wry way of stating an unpleasant truth.

Around the same time Peirce took up the cause against Spencer, perhaps a few weeks before, he arranged with Lorettus Sutton Metcalf to contribute to a series of articles on spiritualism Metcalf was organizing for his journal, The Forum. Peirce was known to be a skeptic concerning such matters, especially because of his recent dispute with Gurney, and Metcalf had engaged him to present a case against spiritualism. It is not known whether Peirce sought out Metcalf to offer his services, or whether Metcalf had become aware that Peirce was looking for magazine work, but it is likely that it was not until after the first article in the series had appeared that Peirce struck his deal with Metcalf. The first in the series was a piece by Mary J. Savage entitled “Experiences with Spiritualism,” which appeared in the December 1889 issue. The second, “Truth and Fraud in Spiritualism,” by Richard Hodgson, appeared in April 1890. Peirce’s article was to follow. It was never given a title by Peirce, but for the present volume the editors have entitled it “Logic and Spiritualism” (sel. 44). It could also have been called “The Case against Spiritualism.”

Initially Peirce must have thought he would make an easy go of this assignment, for he had worked through the arguments quite thoroughly during the Gurney controversy. But by the end of March he had run into a snag. His first draft ran to 6700 words and Metcalf had set a limit of 5000. Metcalf would not budge and Peirce was equally determined to say everything he wanted to say, so there ensued a curious battle of wills. Peirce finally conceded to Metcalf’s word limit, probably because he was in such great need of the remuneration, but Metcalf had to agree to Peirce’s peculiar way of cutting his article down to size. Peirce simply struck out hundreds of articles and pronouns transforming his paper into something not quite a poem but not really prose either. Peirce’s paper was set in galleys on 7 April, but he continued making revisions. He could not make it work and asked if he could start over. Metcalf agreed but asked Peirce to hurry it up and “please remember not to exceed 5000 words” (21 June 1890). Peirce never rewrote the paper.⁵⁷ Back in Quicktown, after Juliette’s return from Europe, other priorities had taken center stage.

Peirce began his essay by admitting that he was a man of science—a scientific specialist—and made it plain that he believed that “no mind with which man can communicate can act or feel otherwise than through its residential nerve-matter.” But he did not doubt that “unrecognized avenues of sense may exist” and he believed that telepathy was not an impossibility. Nevertheless, he thought that science had to reject spiritualism and telepathy as viable hypotheses to explain unusual and unexpected phenomena. His argument against spiritualism is complex and cryptically stated because of the many revisions and cuts his manuscript had suffered. Important for his argument are three assumptions which he believed psychology had sufficiently established: 1. The obscure part of the mind is the principal part. 2. It acts with far more unerring accuracy than the rest. 3. It is almost infinitely more delicate in its sensibilities. It is this vast “unconscious or semiconscious” part of the mind, which evolves through generations of interaction with external forces into instinct and common sense, which must be trusted to guide us in situations where reason does not know which way to turn. This is our “mother-wit” which, for all we know, may have access to the “unrecognized avenues of sense.” The secret of mother-wit is that over the course of her education, her evolution, she has “learned” to follow nature’s laws—natures reason. Now the general conclusions of mother-wit, our common sense, should not be dismissed in the face of some “special experience.” It is barely possible, of course, that any given strange occurrence might be an exception to law, a rebuff to common sense. But, generally, where there is a strange occurrence, the probability of a trick is greater than the likelihood that it is an exception to law.

After further development of his argument, Peirce looked back to Gurney’s attempt to prove telepathy by amassing favorable cases and proclaimed that “the myriad strange stories prove nothing.” Such supposed evidence for telepathy or spiritualism loses its force when we consider four simple facts: 1. “the fact that all men are liars”; 2. “the fact of deranged imagination, hypnotism, hysteria”; 3. “the fact that we may receive and act upon indications of which we are quite unconscious”; and 4. “the fact that a certain number of coincidences will occur by chance.” Taken together, these facts serve as a basis for explaining unusual and surprising perceptions without resort to ghosts or spirits. In an earlier draft Peirce wrote: “why should we draw upon such an extreme rarity as telepathy, so long as we have such ordinary elements of human experience as superstition, lying and self-lying (from vanity, mischief, hysteria, mental derangement, and perverse love of untruth), exaggeration, inaccuracy, tricks of memory and imagination, intoxication (alcohol, opiate, and other), deception, and mistake, out of which to shape our hypotheses?”

In his final paragraph, Peirce made it clear that he was not dismissing the importance of psychical research; on the contrary, it “should receive every encouragement.” But properly conducted, it would become a branch of experimental psychology—the branch of science “destined to be the most important experimental research of the twentieth century.” Even though this paper remained unpublished, some of the ideas would make their way into the fourth article of Peirce’s Monist metaphysical series, “Man’s Glassy Essence”; that series would, in fact, reverberate with ideas from this period, especially ideas from “A Guess at the Riddle” and the Outsider pieces.

Working out definitively how the writings in this volume contributed to the overall development of Peirce’s thought is a task for the community of scholars who will study them for that purpose, but a few additional thoughts might be helpful. Following again the method used in the introduction to W5, it may be revealing to consider how the W6 writings fit into Peirce’s general intellectual development as traced by Murphey and Fisch.⁵⁸ According to Murphey, the most telling demarcations in Peirce’s intellectual development are revisions to his system of categories necessitated by discoveries in logic. For Fisch, the single most important gauge of the growth of Peirce’s thought was its movement toward the robust three-category realism of his later years.

Murphey divides Peirce’s intellectual life into four phases dominated in turn by Kant’s system of philosophy, by syllogistic logic, by the logic of relations, and by the logic of quantification. According to Murphey, the fourth and final phase began about 1885 after Peirce, with his student O. H. Mitchell, discovered the quantifier. Only then could Peirce add pure indexical signs to his logic, signs that refer to individuals per se and not to conceptions. The individual, the non-general, quickly took on a special importance for Peirce as he came to realize that a non-conceptual acquaintance with individuals can provide a direct and immediate link to reality. According to Murphey, this allowed Peirce to retreat from the conceptualism of his “end of inquiry” theory of reality without having to resort to “first impressions of sense.”⁵⁹ Although Murphey makes the long final period of Peirce’s intellectual development range over the last three decades of Peirce’s life, he does notice that around 1896 Peirce formed a new conception of the continuum after discovering that continua must involve unactualized possibilities: “Whatever is continuous therefore involves real possibility and is accordingly of a general nature.”⁶⁰ Murphey notes that Peirce announced this discovery to William James in March of 1897 and that it led to a strengthening of Peirce’s realism. It is surprising that Murphey did not count the period following this important logical insight, the period of Peirce’s synechism—“the new Scholastic realism”⁶¹—as a new and final phase of Peirce’s development, one dominated by modal logic (and by Peirce’s Existential Graphs).

In Fisch’s account, Peirce’s thought is shown to have developed gradually from an early nominalism that attributed generality only to cognitions and that held all realities to be “nominal, significative, cognitive” (W2:181), to a robust form of realism that gave ontological place to each of the three categories. Fisch marks the major stages of Peirce’s intellectual journey by three principal revisions to his ontology: his acceptance, beginning around 1868, of “the long run” as providing an independence condition for reality; his admission, around 1890, that reality extends to the non-cognitive realm of actuality; and his admission in 1897 that even possibility is real. In line with Murphey’s understanding of the importance of Peirce’s logical discoveries of the mid-1880s, Fisch notes that Peirce had taken large strides toward acknowledging the reality of secondness with his 1884–85 acceptance of the necessity of indexes for logic and his 1885 reaction to Royce’s idealism (W5: sels. 30, 33), but he believes it was not until about 1890, when he accepted Scotus’s haecceities, that he saw that ultimate reality should be ascribed to seconds.⁶² It seems likely, however, that Fisch’s principal reason for locating this important intellectual event in about 1890 was his belief, following Hartshorne and Weiss, that Peirce’s “A Guess at the Riddle” had been composed then. It was there, in the chapter on physics, that Peirce stated clearly for the first time that what “Scotus calls the hæcceities of things, the hereness and nowness of them, are indeed ultimate” (p. 205). But it now seems much more likely that Peirce composed that important chapter as early as 1887 or 1888, and that he had started his “Guess,” as “One, Two, Three,” by 1886. These considerations, as well as the many references to the necessity of indices for logic, beginning as early as 1881 (W4:251), and his work, beginning as early as 1886, on definitions for “haecceity” and “scotism” for the Century Dictionary (see W5:389), all suggest that Peirce’s acceptance of the reality of secondness is better dated “around 1887” than “around 1890.” Accordingly, the step to Murphey’s fourth phase and Fisch’s second stage occurred near the beginning of the years covered by the present volume so that the writings in W6 may be viewed as inaugurating what Fisch calls Peirce’s period of two-category realism.

Fisch’s account of Peirce’s journey from nominalism to a robust realism has been challenged by a number of scholars, including Don D. Roberts, Fred Michael, and, most recently, T. L. Short. Roberts argued in 1970, soon after Fisch’s account first appeared, that there is no compelling reason for concluding that Peirce ever was an out and out nominalist and that it would be safer to conclude that he was always a realist. Roberts accepted, however, that there were nominalistic elements in Peirce’s thought.⁶³ Michael agrees with Fisch that Peirce was at first a nominalist, but argues that his nominalism continued until the mid-1880s, when he became a realist by taking the crucial step of accepting that there are singulars outside of cognition—what Fisch identifies as accepting the reality of secondness. Earlier declarations of realism were, at most, nominal.⁶⁴ Short, the most recent dissenter to Fisch’s account, argues that in at least one important sense, Peirce remained a nominalist all his life, namely, in his “continuing inclination toward a ‘nominalism’ that identifies reality with a world external to cognition.” Peirce’s “nominalism,” rather than something to be overcome, was an important component of Peirce’s realism, actually contributing to its depth.⁶⁵ These are valuable studies, each contributing important insights concerning Peirce’s development as a philosopher, and the disagreements, though going much deeper, serve to highlight the difficulty in reaching consensus on the meaning of “nominalism” and “realism” and on what constitutes a significant change with respect to these two positions. But whatever labels they use, these scholars all agree that there was a significant development within Peirce’s thought and that the repercussions that followed his introduction of logical quantifiers in the mid-1880s clearly constitute one of his major periods of change. Another would come around 1897 when he accepted that there are generals external to thought, a change that would breathe new life into his slumbering pragmatism.

Thus the present volume, most notably with “A Guess at the Riddle” (sels. 22–28), inaugurates a new period of philosophy for Peirce, one distinguished by a commitment to a thoroughgoing architectonic approach based on his categories. The difficult task of reforming his entire system of thought, always with an eye for improving it, would occupy Peirce for the remainder of his life. Having accepted the reality of seconds, Peirce could begin to build an account of perception that would make sense of direct acquaintance with reality and that would provide reason to hope that inquiry could be guided toward the truth by the obstinacy of reality rather than by a conception of it. In his definition of “real” for the Century Dictionary, Peirce distinguished between “real objects … external to the mind,” which are “independent altogether of our thought,” and internal objects which “depend upon thought,” though “not upon thought about them.” By 1903, this distinction became a basic feature of his semeiotic (EP2:276) and by 1906 it had turned into the now familiar dynamical object/immediate object duo (EP2:477).

Among the other noteworthy ideas that seem to have originated or come much more clearly into focus during this period, we find in Peirce a growing conviction that instinct and evolutionary attunement to the laws of nature—to the “objective reason embodied in the laws of nature”—give humans a predisposition for guessing nature’s laws (sels. 8, 15) and explain the importance of common sense (sel. 44). Peirce’s intensive work on reduction of observational data and modeling of hydrodynamic effects for his gravity reports, and perhaps even his critique of the design of Gurney’s “experiment” to prove telepathic phenomena (sels. 16, 18), strengthened his conviction that probable reasoning is “the logic of the physical sciences,” as he proclaimed in his definition of “probability” in the Century Dictionary. We find Peirce placing more stress on regulative principles, perhaps a step toward his later recognition of the normativity of logic, and on intellectual hopes (see sel. 28 and W5:221–34). There is an indication in some of the W6 writings that Peirce has begun moving toward his later accommodation with religion and his innovative theological ideas (sels. 14, 22, 23, 44). In science, including even his work for the Coast Survey, Peirce’s interest shows a definite turn toward dynamic and process-oriented concerns and, also, toward foundational and cosmological questions (sels. 25–28, 31, 36). Peirce reveals a timely grasp of the crisis that was developing in physics at the end of the 19th century⁶⁶ and perceptively recommended that progress would depend on a better understanding of physical matter at the molecular level and on fruitful new theories (sels. 28, 31). Peirce offered his “guess” as a candidate for a new paradigm in physics and began a book intended to promote and justify its embrace (sel. 31).

Peirce’s 1887 polemic against Herbert Spencer’s “mechanical notion of the universe” (sel. 14) provided his first occasion for stating his case against the doctrine of necessity,⁶⁷ and turned him into a public critic of necessitarianism, even a prophet of its doom. Peirce’s aggressive rejection of mechanical causation as adequate for the explanation of growth and development, forced him to defend a teleological form of evolution and moved him in the direction of a theory of sign action, or semiosis. Peirce’s “guess at the riddle,” as expressed about 1888, was that “three elements are active in the world: first, chance; second, law; and third, habit-taking”; there was not yet any explicit inclusion of signs among the basic components of the universe. But he was already committed to a close analogy between the growth of mind and the growth of physical law and he would make that connection explicit in 1892 when he proclaimed his tychistic thesis that matter is specialized or “effete” mind (R 972; see also, EP1:312). At least by 1907, Peirce would recognize that the end of semiosis of the highest kind is an intellectual habit, which realization may lead us to wonder whether the third basic element that is active in the universe, habit-taking, is a form of semiosis, and if that is what imparts the teleological current that Peirce finds in evolution.

In 1887, in a sketch of his “A Guess at the Riddle,” Peirce noted that he wanted a “vignette of the Sphynx” placed below the title.⁶⁸ Then after stating his guess in Chapter VII, he added, “Such is our guess of the secret of the sphynx.” On 5 April 1890, almost two years after he had put his manuscript aside, Jem wrote to him from Egypt: “I am now passing a few days on the edge of the desert & directly at the base of the Great Pyramid. It is by far the most stupendous structure I have ever seen, and the Sphinx is more imposing than I ever thought possible…. no calm that living man can experience approaches the sublime sweet god-like serenity of the sphinx under the full moon.” Although Peirce’s Sphinx was no doubt the one of Greek mythology, Jem’s letter would have moved him, and it must have been difficult not to take up his manuscript again; but he was working on “Logic and Spiritualism” for The Forum, and was still hard at work as the Outsider trying to raise money to send to Juliette in Europe. In July, Cams would invite him to contribute to his new journal, The Monist, and Peirce would take that opportunity to turn his “Guess” into the six articles known as the “Monist Metaphysical Series.” That would appease his sphinx.

Nathan Houser

1. In writing this introduction, I have depended on the results of Max H. Fisch’s many years of research, contained in his files and data collections at the Peirce Edition Project. To reduce the number of footnotes, I do not give references for items that can be easily located by keeping the following in mind: all references to manuscripts and Peirce family letters, unless otherwise indicated, are to the Peirce Papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard University; correspondence with employees of the Coast Survey is in Record Group 23 in the National Archives.

2. The Fisch Collection at IUPUI contains records of extensive research into Juliette’s origin, primarily conducted by Maurice Auger, Victor Lenzen, and Max H. Fisch, but no final conclusions were drawn. Elisabeth Walther’s Charles Sanders Peirce: Leben und Werk (Agis-Verlag, 1989), Joseph Brents Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (Indiana University Press, 1993; revised ed. 1998), and Kenneth Laine Ketner’s His Glassy Essence (Vanderbilt University Press, 1998), each contain helpful discussions of Juliette’s origin but do not settle the question.

3. See Thomas G. Mannings U.S. Coast Survey vs. Naval Hydrographic Office: A 19th-Century Rivalry in Science and Politics (University of Alabama Press, 1988), especially ch. 4, and his “Peirce, the Coast Survey, and the Politics of Cleveland Democracy,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 11 (1975): 187–94. Also see Brent, ch. 3, and the introduction to W5.

4. See Francis Ellingwood Abbots Organic Scientific Philosophy: Scientific Theism (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1885) and Josiah Royces The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, A Critique of the Bases of Conduct and of Faith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1885). For Peirce’s reviews of these works, see W5: sels. 33,46. For a brief account of Peirce’s work for the Century Dictionary, leading up to 1887, see the Introduction to W5, pp. xliii-xliv. See also W5: sel. 57.

5. For some background remarks on Peirce’s involvement with the scientific assignment of the Greely expedition, see the introduction to W4, p. xxxi.

6. Greely to Thorn, 29 March 87. NARG 23.

7. In his published report (sel. 30), Peirce gave 10 to 15 grams as the probable weight loss, but in a 28 February 1887 letter to Thorn (NARG 23), he estimated that 15 to 20 grams had been lost.

8. Fisch, p. 229.

9. Around 1950, Alonzo Church discovered in Marquand’s papers at Princeton a fairly elaborate circuit diagram for a logic machine, thus establishing that Peirce’s recommendation had been acted on. It is not known whether an electrical logic machine was built. Ken Ketner has argued that Peirce himself drew the wiring diagram, probably in 1887. See Ketner’s article, with Arthur F. Stewart: “The Early History of Computer Design: Charles Sanders Peirce and Marquands Logical Machines,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 45, 1984, pp. 187–211. Alice and Arthur Burks discuss the Marquand diagram in Appendix A of The First Electronic Computer: The Atanasojf Story (University of Michigan Press, 1989), pp. 339–48, and conclude that it marks a significant advance in computing engineering theory—or would have had it become known. Although they do not believe that Peirce drew the elaborate circuit diagram, they do argue that it is plausible to credit Peirce with being the first to have conceived of an electrical general-purpose programmable computer, but they find no clear evidence that Peirce’s or Marquand’s ideas had any influence in the development of electronic computing.

10. Manning (1988), p. 90.

11. Brent, pp. 171–2.

12. B. A. Colonna to George Davidson, 17 December 86. National Archives RG 23.

13. See Brent, p. 185.

14. See Brent, p. 186.

15. From Henry Leonards notes of conversation with Mrs. Robert G. Barkley, Milford resident. Fisch Collection.

16. Brent, p. 187.

17. The Leopold Shakespeare. The Poets Works in Chronological Order, from the Text of Professor Delius (London: Gasser, Petter, & Galpin, 1877).

18. Charles Richet, “La suggestion mentale et le calcul des probability,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de TEtranger 18 (1884): 609–74. See Ian Hackings “Telepathy: Origins of Randomization in Experimental Design,” ISIS 79 (1988): 427–51, for an account of the circumstances giving rise to Phantasms, and the Peirce-Gumey dispute. Many of the details of this paragraph are taken from Hackings article. Also see Stephen E. Braudes “Peirce on the Paranormal,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 34 (1998): 203–24.

19. See Hacking op. cit. and W5:xxv-xxvi.

20. Gurney, Myers, and Podmore were using the British system where a billion equals a U.S. trillion and a trillion equals, in U.S. terms, a billion billions.

21. Abstracts for these thirty-one cases, and others mentioned in selections 16–19, are available on the Electronic Companion for W6 (http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce).

22. Hacking, p. 445.

23. All three papers appeared in The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science: Henry A. Rowland, “On the Relative Wavelengths of the Lines of the Solar Spectrum,” vol. 23: 257–65; Louis Bell, “On the Absolute Wave-length of Light,” vol. 23: 265–82; Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley, “On a Method of making the Wave-length of Sodium Light the actual and practical Standard of Length,” vol. 24: 463–66.

24. The article in Journal fur die reine und angewandte Mathematik—referred to by Peirce as Crelle’s Journal—has not been identified. It is clear, from Risteen’s 4 Aug. 1887 letter, that Peirce had recommended a “demonstration,” probably in an 1887 issue, in connection with the study of curves.

25. Peirce’s landmark 1881 paper, “On the Logic of Number” (W4:299–311) is discussed in the introduction and annotations to W4 (see especially pp. 575–76, annotation 222.24).

26. See Ernst Schröder’s review of Frege’s Begriffsschrifi in Zeitschrift für Mathematik und Physik 25 (1880): 81–87, 90–94.

27. Peirce must have been referring to James’s “The Perception of Space,” which appeared in Mind, vol. 12, in four parts: I (Jan. 1887, pp. 1–30), II (Apr. 1887, pp. 183–211), III (Jul. 1887, pp. 321–53), and IV (Oct. 1887, pp. 516–48).

28. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 177 (1886): 1–70.

29. Peirce’s “improvements” were presented to the Johns Hopkins Scientific Association and reported in Johns Hopkins University Circulars 1 (1880): 16. Kempes paper, “On the Geographical Problem of the Four Colours,” appeared in American Journal of Mathematics 2 (1879): 193–200.

30. For a treatment of Kempes influence see Roberts (1973), pp. 20–25.

31. “Note to a Memoir on the Theory of Mathematical Form,” Proceedings of the Royal Society 42 (1887), 193–96.

32. Lenzen to Fisch, 11 July 1961. Fisch Collection.

33. See the introduction to W5, pp. xxxix-xlii for a discussion of the influences on Peirce.

34. Fisch, p. 229.

35. A record of this interview is in the Fisch Collection.

36. Ferris Greenslet. The Lowells and Their Seven Worlds. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1946, p. 356.

37. Peirce estimated that he had been responsible for about 16,100 words (RMS 1163:2). For a more complete account see “Peirce’s work for the Century Dictionary” by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Andre DeTienne, Peirce Project Newsletter 3 (1999): 1–2.

38. Simon Newcomb to William D. Whitney, 9 July 1889, Yale (Beineke).

39. William D. Whitney to Henry Whitney, 26 June 1889, Yale (Beineke).

40. Peirce did not mention Ann Arbor in this letter, but that was probably an oversight.

41. The National Archives “Register of Records” indicates that this report was received and stored as GO-401, 902 HG in Box 395. It is now missing.

42. Brent, p. 195.

43. Victor F. Lenzen, “An Unpublished Scientific Monograph by C. S. Peirce,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 5 (1969): 5–24.

44. In his definition of “gravity” for the Century Dictionary, Peirce wrote: “The words gravity and gravitation have been more or less confounded; but the most careful writers use gravitation for the attracting force, and gravity for the terrestrial phenomenon of weight or downward acceleration which has for its two components the gravitation and the centrifugal force.”

45. Lenzen (1969), p. 13.

46. Victor F. Lenzen and Robert P. Multhauf, “Development of Gravity Pendulums in the 19th Century,” Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology (Smithsonian Institution, Bulletin 240,1966), pp. 301–47.

47. Report of the Superintendent of the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30,1891, part II, Appendix no. 15, pp. 503–64.

48. See Lenzen (1969), pp. 6–7.

49. See Lenzen (1969), passim.

50. Peirce’s best value for gravity at the Smithsonian was 980.1037 cm/sec², but that was not the value given in the 1889 report; it comes from a letter of 3 July 1890 from Peirce to Herbert Nichols, Professor of Physics at Cornell University. The value from the report is 99.095 cm (as the length of the mean equatorial seconds’ pendulum), which converts to an acceleration slightly less than Peirce’s “best value.” Lenzen points out, however, that the value given in the 1889 report had not been corrected for flexure, which may account for the difference (see Lenzen 1969:17–20).

51. Lenzen (1969), p. 20.

52. See Brent, pp. 14–15, especially in revised edition.

53. This opinion was expressed in a private communication.

54. See De Tienne’s “The Mystery of Arisbe,” Peirce Project Newsletter 3 (1999): 11–12.

55. The first two lines of this letter of 22 April 1890 have been heavily crossed out. This reading is based on Max H. Fisch’s study of the document.

56. See Brent, pp. 303–08.

57. See the textual editor’s headnote to selection 44 (pp. 658–663) for further discussion of Peirce’s relations with Metcalf and the import on Peirce’s composition.

58. Max H. Fisch, Peirce, Semeiotic and Pragmatism, eds. K. L. Ketner and C. J. W. Kloesel, (Indiana University Press, 1986) and Murray G. Murphey, The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy, (Harvard University Press, 1961; Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1993).

59. See Murphey, pp. 301–03.

60. Murphey, p. 396.

61. Ibid.

62. Fisch, p. 190.

63. Don D. Roberts, “On Peirce’s Realism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 6 (1970): 67–83.

64. Fred Michael, “Two Forms of Scholastic Realism in Peirce’s Philosophy,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 24 (1988): 317–48.

65. T. L. Short, “Review Essay,” Synthese 106 (1996): 409–30.

66. See Murphey, pp. 327–48.

67. Fisch, p. 229.

68. It is commonly believed that Peirce’s allusion to “the riddle” and his reference to the Sphinx were beholden to Emersons poem, “The Riddle of the Sphinx.” But the story is more complicated: see the introduction to W5, pp. xli–xlii and annotation 165.title in this volume on pp. 438–39.