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7

[Orientation Letter to Marie Noble]

11 May 1887

Houghton Library

Milford, Pa., 1887 May 11.

MISS MARIE B. D. NOBLE,

Care Messrs. Gorham, Turner, & Co., Mills Building, New York City.

My dear pupil:

I am glad that you have applied to me; for I am entirely confident of being able to be of service to you. Your letter is a very clear one, and shows good intellectual powers. You have had a long period of ill-health, which has impaired the vigor of your will-power. Your difficulty of seeing two sides of every practical question is a familiar fact to me, though I have never experienced it myself. It is no symptom of intellectual weakness, but rather the contrary. Almost every question has two sides, and it is only the thoughtless and the passionate who can fail to see it. But what we have to do, after we have considered the question as long as it is convenient to do, is somewhat arbitrarily to make a choice between the two sides, and having once made our choice to stick to it. Your difficulty lies, no doubt, in making a vigorous choice, in the absence of the vis a tergo of demonstrative reasons. Will is also needed for the act of concentrating the mind, although this is a less willful kind of will. We often see people whose external will is weak, but whose control over themselves is strong. I suspect this is the case with you. How is it? Have you good power of concentration? Next, I want to know how your observing powers are. “A little botany” is the only study of observation that you mention. You also say nothing about any studies, except school-studies. What else have you applied your mind to, and with what success? Have you any taste or turn for mathematics? Do you learn readily? I do not mean lessons merely. But are you pliant? Do you readily adapt yourself to a new situation? I would like to have you answer all these questions. Then, I want to know whether you are prepared to give an hour a day of good, solid and intense work to my exercises. One of the things that is the quickest improved by exercise is the power of making an exertion. And if my diagnosis is correct, one of the things you want is the power of making suddenly a violent effort. For that reason, I will not allow you to spend a long time over the exercises, you must do them as well as you can in a short space of time, and learn to throw yourself into them with sudden energy. During this time you must be absolutely alone, without fear of interruption. If an hour a day is too much, name a shorter time; but the time once fixed, let it be as the Law of the Medes and Persians. I will thank you to enclose in your letter about 5 or 6 pages of your writing on any subject you please, written for the occasion, to serve as a favorable exhibit of your intellectual powers at the outset. This will not only furnish me with needful information, but it will serve as a term of comparison with something similar that I shall ask you to write at the end of the Quarter, so that there may be no difference of opinion as to the amount of benefit that you have received from the exercises.

Yours very truly,

C. S. Peirce.

P.S. I have taken a house here for the summer, and my address until further notice will consequently be Milford, Pa.