Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 8. Charles S. Peirce

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СКАЧАТЬ in holding that “space is not a non-entity, but a real property of things,” but, overall, Peirce’s review was not favorable. According to Kee Soo Shin, Peirce’s review raised doubts about “several important aspects of Carus’s monistic philosophy” and it marked the beginning of a famous controversy between Peirce and Carus that would start in earnest with Carus’s reply to Peirce’s second Monist paper, “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” (sel. 24), and would run throughout 1893.²⁰

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

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

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

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

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

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

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