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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      It was also around this time when Ernst Schröder and his work in logic began to reenter Peirce’s stream of thought. Peirce and Schröder had corresponded during Peirce’s Johns Hopkins years but lost touch afterward. Schröder reestablished contact in February 1890 when he announced to Peirce that the first volume of his Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik (exakte Logik) would soon be published and that he would have a copy sent to Peirce. The volume did not come out until early in 1891, however, and Peirce would have presumably received his copy by March, or would have seen it at the Astor Library, and would have known that Schröder had built on his foundations.³⁵ As Christine Ladd-Franklin observed in her January 1892 review in Mind: “The plan of Dr. Schröder in his book follows closely upon that of Mr. Peirce as set forth in Vol. III. of the American Journal of Mathematics; that is to say, all the formulae are established by analytical proofs based upon the definitions of sum, of product, and of the negative, and upon the axiom of identity and that of the syllogism…. The proofs are, for the СКАЧАТЬ