20. Charles Peirce

CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE, credited with founding semiotics and called “the most original and versatile of American philosophers and America’s greatest logician,” was the gifted and doomed son of the “facile, brilliant, impatient, and error-prone” Benjamin Peirce, professor of mathematics at Harvard College. Benjamin was convinced from the start that Charles was destined for greatness, and he announced the boy’s birth by referring to his “coming, almost come celebrity,” and adding, “As soon as he publishes his Celestial Mechanics I will send you a copy.”¹

By his own account, written with who knows what inherited or youthful exaggeration when he was a college senior, Charles “fell violently in love with Miss W. and commenced my education” at age five. At seven he “fell violently in love with another Miss W whom... I will designate Miss W¹.” At ten he wrote a story called “The Library,” which starts, “Charles was one day sitting in his room when suddenly he heard a rustling noise and looking up he saw all the books moving from their places and coming toward him.”² It might have been true: early and late, Peirce pulled knowledge to himself as though he were a magnet. At eleven he wrote a history of chemistry, at twelve became interested in logic, at fourteen “set up for a fast man and became a bad schoolboy.” At sixteen he began to study Kant, whose work he knew almost by heart before he was out of college. Peirce graduated from Harvard in 1859, stayed on in Cambridge, and entered the Lawrence Scientific School one year before William James did.

James’s first glimpse of Peirce, in September 1861—just a month before Peirce married Harriet Melusina Fay, called Zina—was enough to reveal Peirce’s brilliance, his energy, and a troubling hint of violence. James told his family about “a son of Prof. Peirce, who I suspect to be a very ‘smart’ fellow with a great deal of character, pretty independent and violent though.”³ Peirce was, when James first knew him, a stocky man, standing about five feet seven and very handsome. His class picture shows a clean-shaven, dark-haired young man with enormous dark eyes, a heavy nose, and a large mouth with sculptured, sensuous lips. Peirce suffered all his life, as did his father, from severe “facial neuralgia” (what is now known as trigeminal neuralgia), for which he took ether, tincture of opium, and, later, morphine. “When the pain was on him,” his biographer writes, “he was, at first, almost stupefied, and then aloof, cold, depressed, extremely suspicious, impatient of the slightest crossing, and subject to violent outbursts of temper.”⁴

Peirce was left-handed, and his nephew reported that he had the ability “to write on the blackboard, ambidextrously and simultaneously, a logical problem and its answer.”⁵ He was an accomplished amateur actor, he loved to declaim, and he knew a great deal of Shakespeare by heart. He lived extravagantly and was always in debt. He was a dandy and an aesthete. He once hired an expensive sommelier and spent two months acquiring a knowledge of Médoc wines.

In the mid-1860s, when James was flailing away at medical school, Peirce worked for the U.S. Coast Survey as a gravimetrician (he made an important contribution to the use of pendulums to measure the earth) and in his off hours pursued an interest in logic. He gave a series of public lectures on the logic of science in the fall of 1866, at least one of which William James went to hear.⁶

Peirce published a series of papers on logic in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1868 and 1869, just as Zina, an active feminist, was publishing five articles on “cooperative housekeeping” in the Atlantic. In 1867, at twenty-eight, Peirce published a bold and far-reaching piece, “A New List of Categories,” in which, implicitly putting himself on a level with Kant, he argued that there are only three major categories, that everything is a quality, a relation, or a representation (that is, a sign).⁷ Later he called these three categories—with no improvement in clarity—the monadic, the diadic, and the triadic. Still later he labeled them “firstness,” by which he meant something like “feeling”; “secondness,” which is to say “reaction”; and “thirdness,” or “mediation.” This austere system, with its faintly Hegelian implication of progress and its emphasis on mediation, was the beginning of Peirce’s lifelong involvement in what would come to be known as semiotics.

The Metaphysical Club, which we know mainly through Peirce’s later descriptions of it, was apparently set up after Peirce’s return, in March 1871, from an extended stay in Europe. It is hard to measure, but not hard to imagine, the impact of Peirce’s strange, brilliant, eccentric, and deeply original mind on the members of the club.

Peirce had the superb scorn of the young for American philosophy; he was primed for new work, convinced that everything was yet to be done. “No American philosophy has as yet been produced,” he said in 1866. “Since our country has become independent, Germany has produced the whole development of the Transcendental Philosophy, Scotland the whole philosophy of Common Sense, France the Eclectic Philosophy and Positive Philosophy, England the Association Philosophy. And what has America produced? Hickok has made a not very creditable modification of German Philosophy and Frothingham has supposed two Absolutes, which is a contradiction in terms. That is all.”⁸

Peirce possessed a happy gift for phrase and had obvious powers of mind. “Reality,” he once said, and James recorded it in a notebook, “is that which finally and universally will be believed.”⁹ “Thought,” he says elsewhere, “is a thread of melody running through the succession of our sensations.”¹⁰ In his sixties Peirce would say, “The truth is that the whole fabric of our knowledge is one matted felt of pure hypothesis confirmed and refined by induction.”¹¹ With grand simplicity that still echoes for us, he observed that “chance begets order.”¹² He could make direct, winning appeals. “Let us not pretend,” he once said, “to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”¹³ Describing what would later be called pragmatism, he said, “The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit.”¹⁴ Like the Englishman Alexander Bain and like his friend James, Peirce put considerable emphasis on habit. James once told, in conversation, about a meeting of the Metaphysical Club: “They assembled; Peirce did not come; they waited and waited. Finally a two-horse carriage came along and Peirce got out with a dark cloak on him. He came in and began to read his paper... He set forth,”James said, “how the different moments of time got into the habit of coming one after another.”¹⁵

Peirce had a rigorous mathematical mind; he was systematic and went into things so deeply as to require new terminology, in which he clearly delighted. For example, he distinguished among three basic kinds of evolution, the tychastic, the anancastic, and the agapastic—that is, evolution by fortuitous variation, by mechanical necessity, and by creative love—and he insisted that “tychasm and anancasm are degenerate forms of agapasm.”¹⁶

Peirce considered himself a scientist first and last. “I am,” he wrote, “saturated through and through with the spirit of the physical sciences.” He came early to accept Darwin’s idea of random, fortuitous variation (what he called tychasm or tychism; James would, on occasion, use the same term), but he never accepted the idea that natural selection is sufficient to account for the evolution of mind. For the latter Peirce would require “the gentle purposive action of love,” or what he called agapasm.¹⁷

Peirce was what philosophers call a realist, someone who believes that general concepts have an existence independent of individual cases. Realists stood in opposition to nominalists—James was a nominalist—who believe that concepts have no real existence at all, being only verbal generalizations of individual cases.

Pragmatism was born and formed in Cambridge in the early 1870s, in the Metaphysical Club, though we must wait until 1878 for Peirce’s “pragmatic maxim”: “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we might conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”¹⁸ Peirce firmly believed that “a prerequisite for successful experimentation is an external world resistant to actions arising from misconceptions of it.”¹⁹ And indeed Peirce’s later life, which more and more resembled a Greek tragedy, may be said to have borne this out with grim regularity.

The young Peirce was breathtakingly ambitious. He intended to “outline a theory so comprehensive that... the entire work of human reason... shall appear as the filling up of its details.”²⁰ Peirce’s father had taught mathematics “as a kind of Pythagorean prayer. He proclaimed the mystical doctrine that, however the supernatural might be, it existed in the natural world and was experienced there.”²¹ Benjamin Pierce believed, and his son Charles came also to believe, “that nature and the mind have such a community as to impart to guesses a tendency toward the truth, while at the same time they require the confirmation of empirical science.”²²

Peirce’s later career was one long series of dreams, controversies, and disasters, the turbulent swings of which make James’s life look tranquil by comparison. He made enemies readily. His first wife, Zina, left him after fifteen years. Unable to get an academic position after having served a five-year appointment at Johns Hopkins, and forced to resign his Coast Survey job at the end of 1895, Peirce retired with his second wife, Juliet, to a house in the country, in Milford, Pennsylvania, a town on the Delaware River.

Peirce was broke, his wife’s income did not cover their taxes, he had to sell books from his library, but he continued to go to New York City, where he spun great dreams with his friends at the Century Club. His friend the painter Albert Bierstadt invented a railroad car that opened out into a room; Peirce had a scheme to license these. Peirce, Bierstadt, and E. C. Stedman (a poet, banker, and anthologist) decided they could make a fortune producing light from acetylene gas; Peirce invented and patented a key piece for the generator. And then there were the philosophical projects, prospectuses for books, and all the writing by this astonishing genius, thought by many to be the “most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americans have so far produced.” Between 1884, when he had left Johns Hopkins, until his death thirty years later, Peirce wrote some eighty thousand unpublished pages. That is sixteen million words, five times the length of Henry Thoreau’s fourteen-volume Journal.

By the mid-1890s Peirce was sinking. His brother James Peirce told William James, “I fear [Charles’s] total breakdown... The case is one of real urgency.” Peirce was by now essentially destitute. He asked his cousin Henry Cabot Lodge for work at a dollar an hour. He wrote a friend in November 1894, “I don’t know where anything to eat is to come from tomorrow. In the last 25 hours, one cracker and a little oatmeal.” James met every appeal from Peirce or on behalf of Peirce with solid help. Sometimes he sent money, sometimes he arranged paying lecture engagements.²³

One morning in late December 1906, just after James had returned to Cambridge from giving a talk in New York, one of his students, Henry Alsberg, who was living in a rooming house called Prescott Hall, at 472 Broadway in Cambridge, near James’s home, was called by his landlady “to come into one of the rooms to see an old gentleman, who had been ill and was very likely dying. When he went in he saw a sick, worn body of a man obviously suffering from undernourishment and lack of care; and when he asked his name, he was told ‘Charles Peirce.’ In a wild confusion of emotion, Alsberg and a friend went to find William James, and caught him coming out of class. James listened to the story. ‘Why,’ he said, his face changing, ‘I owe him everything!’ and he swung them into a cab to call for Peirce and take him home.”²⁴

Peirce had come to Cambridge with Juliet to make a few dollars reporting on a meeting of the American Academy of Sciences for a New York paper. Juliet had returned to their Pennsylvania home, but Peirce had stayed on to write his report, living for a week on a loaf of bread and $1.70 before James and Alsberg rescued him. Peirce’s life and career were now an Ozymandian wreck. His biographer writes, “With a distant grief, I muse about his tragic life—about the pain, the folly, the failed great ambitions, the immense and exacting labors; the unrelenting search for truth; the great loyalty of his friends, the blindness of his enemies; the power, the prescience, the care for truth and the startling beauty of his philosophical creations.”²⁵

Over the next few months James wrote to well-off friends and acquaintances to raise a pension of a thousand dollars a year for Peirce. Whatever Peirce’s failings, he had a grateful heart. He renamed himself Charles Santiago (for Saint James) Peirce. The money made a difference to him, to be sure, but it was James’s esteem more than his money Peirce valued. Writing about James in 1911, Peirce said, “I really lack the self-command to repress my reflections when I have once set down his name. Who could be of a nature so different from his as I?” While Peirce was one of the world’s great logicians, James was a man for whom logic was “an inconvenience.” “He so concrete, so living,” Peirce went on, “I a mere table of contents, so abstract, a very snarl of twine. Yet in all my life I found scarce any soul that seemed to comprehend, naturally, (not) my concepts, but the mainspring of my life better than he did.”²⁶

The Metaphysical Club in the early 1870s would have been an extraordinary group in any age, by any standard. Most extraordinary, perhaps, is that its heyday came at the start of the intellectual lives of James, Peirce, and Holmes, among other gifted members. The era and the place were charged to the muzzle with new beginnings. Positive science, laboratory science, the life sciences, the ideas of Comte, Mill, Helmholtz, and Darwin, were bringing a new world into being. Those young Americans, who had enough intellectual energy, singly and together, to “twist the tail of the cosmos,” as Holmes put it, give an impression of blithe hubris. They were young, unknown, untested; the yet more powerful sons of already powerful fathers, they talked and thought and wrote a new world of mind into existence. William James bravely copied out for the front of one of his early notebooks the superbly impertinent lines that conclude Emerson’s poem “Give All to Love”: “Heartily know, when half gods go, the gods arrive.”²⁷