Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 6. Charles S. Peirce

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ