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

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СКАЧАТЬ at the Riddle,” where he had made a number of the same observations he now planned to examine in detail—for example, that in order to have any hope of making progress in physics, we cannot simply work through one hypothesis after another without some hint to guide our initial choices. Peirce wanted to set out in detail the logic of science that supported his guess and that would recommend it as the hypothesis to guide physics. It may be that Peirce intended “Reflections” to be his “Illustrations of the Logic of Science” (W3:242–74) brought up to date. It is interesting that on the following day, 2 January, Francis Russell wrote to Peirce that “when your ‘Illustrations of the Logic of Science’ came out the papers initiated in me a new era in my mental history and I am one of a necessary many who recognize in you a master to be followed.” Russell then asked Peirce if he had changed his views since the “Illustrations.” Peirce replied on the 8th, “Suffice it to say that I have not given up any of the more fundamental of my younger opinions so far as I recollect them, but am perhaps more sceptical & materialistic.”

      Peirce did not get very far with “Reflections.” He began the second chapter with a discussion of the doctrine of chances but soon decided that a prior discussion of mathematics was needed. On 9 January he wrote a few paragraphs of a new draft of Chapter 2 and continued it on the 17th, but that was the end of it. On that day he began working on a mathematical paper, “Note on the Analytical Representation of Space as a Section of Higher Dimensional Space” (sel. 32), elaborating on a proof he had just sent to Simon Newcomb with the hope, soon dashed by Newcomb, that it would be published in the American Journal of Mathematics. It may have been Peirce’s interest in the mathematical foundations of the logic of science that caught him up in new mathematical investigations, or it may have been his work on hydrodynamics, but he continued working on mathematical topics throughout January and there are a number of other 1889 selections that may have been composed around that time. These include “Ordinal Geometry” (sel. 33), “Mathematical Monads” (sel. 34), “On a Geometrical Notation” (sel. 38), “On the Number of Forms of Sets” (sel. 39), “The Formal Classification of Relations” (sel. 40), “Dual Relatives” (sel. 41), and “Notes on Geometry of Plane Curves without Imaginaries” (sel. 42). Some of these papers, perhaps especially selection 34, and also the mathematical chapter of selection 31, may have been inspired by Peirce’s January study of Kempe’s paper on mathematical forms, and others may have been outgrowths of his work on mathematical definitions for the Century or his correspondence with mathematicians such as Alfred Mayer and his own brother Jem.

      Peirce’s enthusiasm for what was coming to pass in Quicktown was dampened by a continuing decline in Juliette’s health. His diaiy reveals his growing concern. On 3 January he noted that “Juliette weighs 104 with thick clothes & heavy shawl” and on the 6th he wrote: “Much alarmed about Juliette’s health. She spits so much blood. Juliette getting quite ill. If I should lose her, I would not survive her. Therefore, I must turn my whole energy to saving her.” Peirce suspected tuberculosis and knew that living in a house under construction in the winter time was putting Juliette at serious risk, so he arranged for her to travel to the South. She left sometime in February, staying for a time in Brunswick, a resort town on the Atlantic coast of Southern Georgia, and then offshore at the very exclusive and expensive Jeckyl Island Club, where, at the request of Mr. Henry E. Howland, she had been extended privileges for two weeks. From Jeckyl Island, Juliette traveled to the new Hotel Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine where, Peirce wrote to Jem, “she found the greatest benefit” (30 March 89). She telegraphed Peirce from Jacksonville, Florida, on 30 March to say that she was much improved and would like to return, but Peirce tried to discourage her: “You must not think of coming back here so soon. This house is very unwholesome. I have not had a single well day since you left. The spring air would also be the death of you. You cannot come back till after the carpenter work is done…. We are rushing the work all we can, but I don’t expect it will be ready for you to move into the front part before May 1 & not into the new part for another month at the very least. To move into a new house with the plaster not thoroughly dry would be madness.” It must have added to his worry about Juliette to learn that on 29 March his friend and former student, O. H. Mitchell, had died of pneumonia at thirty-seven years of age.

      As the days grew warmer Peirce’s own health improved and he became excited at the prospect of farming Quicktown. He purchased two farm horses for harvesting hay, decided to raise a calf that had been born to his Guernsey cow, had five hundred Palmetto asparagus plants set out, and was probably as content as he had been for many years. He missed his young wife and considered renaming Quicktown “Sunbeams” in her honor. When Juliette returned she had not improved and in May Peirce asked for a two-week leave from his Coast Survey duties to take her to New York for medical tests. The diagnosis was tuberculosis, as Peirce had feared. They returned to Milford for the summer and fall knowing that Juliette could not spend the next winter in Milford. That realization was perhaps less worrisome than it would have been had Peirce not recently received fairly substantial payments from the estates of his mother and aunt—$1450 in April alone.

      Certainly given the demands of the farm and the renovations to the house, and his preoccupation with Juliette’s health, along with the pressure from his continuing responsibilities to the Century Company and the Coast Survey, Peirce had little time for anything else. But occasionally something would happen to turn his thought from its main course. Perhaps this happened most frequently as a result of the great variety of subjects he had to look into for his definitions, but there were other sources of intellectual stimulation and diversion. At the beginning of the year, Kempe’s paper on mathematical form had played that role. In March, Wolcott Gibbs had written to Peirce to ask if he had published any results from his color experiments that had been funded fourteen years earlier by the National Academy of Sciences with a grant from its Bache Fund. Gibbs’s request seemed to reawaken Peirce’s interest in color studies and for several days beginning 4 April, he recorded results of a new series of color experiments in a notebook labeled “Hue” (1889.12). Peirce traveled to Washington D.C. during the third week of April to present a paper “On Sensations of Color” (1889.14) to the National Academy. He presented a second paper, “On Determinations of Gravity” (1889.15), in which he discussed his work with the invariable reversible pendulums he had designed. The spring issue of the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research carried Gurney’s final reply to Peirce (sel. 19) which must have caught his attention, but with Gurney by then deceased, Peirce probably had no thought of any further response. Within a few months, however, he would take up the subject again for The Forum. And in June at Harvard’s commencement, Percival Lowell delivered the annual Phi Beta Kappa poem and took the occasion to commemorate Peirce’s father, Benjamin, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Lowell’s Peirce stanza ended: “Though but an echo find itself in verse, The Cosmos answers to the name of Peirce.”³⁶ Charles would surely have heard of this and it could not but have reminded him that he was expected to wear his father’s mantle. No doubt he felt the irony that while such grand things were being said about his father, he was, largely by his own doing, living in exile from his father’s social world. The promise of a new life may have made things easier for Peirce, but that would not last long.

      During the years covered in this volume, the one continuous focus of Peirce’s intellectual energy was his lexicographic work for the Century Dictionary, which in its first edition ran to 7046 quarto pages. He had begun writing definitions as early as 1883 and he continued with varying degrees of concentration from then on, but his most sustained and intensive effort came between 1888 and 1891. Peirce’s contribution to the Century Dictionary was massive. He was responsible for six major subject areas—logic, metaphysics, mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, and weights and measures—but he contributed to many other areas including color terms, general philosophy, geodesy, psychology, and education (in particular, the words related to universities). Altogether he probably contributed or approved over 15,000 definitions, with many of them taking many hours of thought and research.³⁷

      From the beginning, Peirce’s lexicographic work had a decided impact on his intellectual development. At Johns Hopkins, where СКАЧАТЬ