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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ