Illustrations of the Logic of Science

Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.

—T.S. Eliot

Editing text is a risky business. This is true even if all we have is printed material, as with the various altered and expanded editions of John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic. Should spelling and punctuation be modernized? What changes are truly Mill’s? Could Mill, while making changes for later editions, have misinterpreted his own work? Should mistakes made by the author (or by past editors or compositors) be corrected? Even when extracting a scholarly edition wholly from previously published work, the potential for problems is endless. This increases exponentially when we must also sift through troves of unpublished manuscripts that are often repetitive, often incomplete, and always abandoned. Such is the case with Peirce’s Illustrations of the Logic of Science, or Illustrations for short. The Illustrations first appeared in print in the form of six articles that were published in the Popular Science Monthly in 1877–78. There are only a few surviving prepublication manuscripts, and they were written roughly half a decade earlier with a quite different aim in mind. However, many post-publication manuscripts are related to the Illustrations. In the early 1890s Peirce revisited them when seeking to have his work republished in book form. What eventually came out of this is one fairly complete book manuscript, the 1894 How to Reason, which contains a number of the Illustrations articles, sometimes in significantly emended and expanded form. Though Peirce sent How to Reason to various publishers, the manuscript was never published.1 Peirce returned to the Illustrations at the close of the first decade of the twentieth century, aiming to publish an updated version as a monograph with Open Court Publishing Company. By this time pragmatism had gained ground as a school in philosophy, mostly thanks to William James and Ferdinand Scott Schiller. James, moreover, vocally identified Peirce as the founder of pragmatism and identified the second Illustrations article as its birthplace.² Peirce, grateful for the long-overdue recognition, responded by seeking to carve out his place in it. He did so in part by discussing his contributions in the Metaphysical Club gatherings in the early 1870s, and in part by distancing himself from both James and Schiller, whose interpretations he thought were not only wrong, but also dangerous. Peirce responded extensively in the Monist, famously rebranding his view as pragmaticism, a term he believed was “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” (EP2:335). Part of this response was a renewed attempt to republish the Illustrations in book form. A selection of this is included here as chapters 7 to 9, and in the form of footnotes to the original articles. Peirce failed, however, to get much beyond several aborted prefaces and miscellaneous revisions. In the end Peirce bowed to repeated requests from Open Court publisher Paul Carus (1852–1919) to have the Illustrations reissued in their original form. In 1913 Carus prepared such an edition, composing a brief “Publisher’s Preface” (which is included in this edition as well) and a few notes, but this final effort notwithstanding, the book did not make it into print. Published close to a century later, still with Open Court, the present edition is the first stand-alone edition of the Illustrations of the Logic of Science. Though plans existed to republish the papers as a single volume in Appleton’s International Scientific Series, those plans never came to fruition.

The Illustrations originally appeared as a series of articles in the Popular Science Monthly in 1877–78. For the current edition only a selection of Peirce’s later revisions could be included. It is oft argued that when several versions of the same text survived, one should publish the one that is most mature, as it is closest to the author’s final intention. I have chosen to deviate from this practice. In the present case, which is not atypical for Peirce, the various versions differ considerably with regard to content, which is due in part to Peirce’s proclivity to digression. Since painful cuts had to be made, I have opted to include those versions that are most useful to a reader who is interested in the subject of the Illustrations—the logic of science—and how Peirce’s views about what he wrote in the Illustrations changed over time. The texts included, however, reproduce versions as Peirce originally wrote them as completely and as faithfully as the surviving manuscript material allows for—they are not composites of multiple versions. As for editorial intervention, I tried to be as conservative as possible. For instance, Peirce’s spelling, which is an amalgam of American and British English enriched by personal idiosyncrasies, is retained unless it is thought to be too jarring to the reader. Applying Peirce’s own pragmatic maxim to the process of editing, I have further sought to ensure that any editorial intervention that could conceivably cause a practical difference in interpretation was made in such manner that the reader can easily determine what was done to the text. Interventions, however, are kept to a minimum. The American historian Henry Adams once cynically observed, “It is always the good men who do the most harm in the world,” and this is particularly true for well-intending scholarly editors. The temptation to improve upon a text is simply too great.

In this introduction I discuss the publication history of the Illustrations, running from its earliest prepublication material to the most recent posthumous renditions.3

The Popular Science Monthly was founded in 1872 by Edward L. Youmans (1821–1887) with the aim of putting scientific knowledge in the hands of the educated layman. It was a scholarly journal that contained eight to ten articles in each issue of about a hundred pages. The monthly was published by D. Appleton & Company till 1901, when it was sold to James McKeen Cattell (1860–1944). Fourteen years later, Cattell sold the title of the journal to the Modern Publishing Company—which used it for a general-audience science magazine (today’s Popular Science)—while continuing the periodical under the more daunting title Scientific Monthly. The latter was published until 1958, when it was absorbed into Science.

In the monthly each of Peirce’s articles was introduced as follows:

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE LOGIC OF SCIENCE.

BY C. S. PEIRCE,

ASSISTANT, UNITED STATES COAST SURVEY

The header is followed by an indication where the paper fits within the series and its title—for instance,

THIRD PAPER.—THE DOCTRINE OF CHANCES.

Reserving a discussion of the series title for later, I focus first on the author and what it meant to be an Assistant at the United States Coast Survey.

Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced “purse”) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 10, 1839, as the second son of the distinguished mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Peirce. Charles Peirce is one of a handful in the history of thought that can truly be called a universal intellect. Robert Crease called him “a prolific and perpetually overextended polymath,” and that pretty well sums him up.4 He was deeply involved in the main currents of thought (mathematics, logic, experimental science), most of which were at the time in a rapid transition, and he made significant contributions to a great variety of areas, scientific as well as philosophical. Some have called him the American Aristotle, others the American Leibniz,⁵ and it would certainly be no less appropriate to call him the American Leonardo. He did pioneering work on the magnitude of stars and the form of the Milky Way. He worked extensively determining the exact shape of the earth—designing instruments and improving methodologies. He invented a new map projection that gave a world map with a minimum distortion of the distance between any two points. He was a pioneer in mathematical logic and mathematical economy, did important work on Shakespearean pronunciation, engaged in experimental psychology, wrote several books on logic and mathematics (none of which were published), gave lectures on the history of science, developed a bleaching process for wood pulp, wrote on spelling reform, made calculations for a suspension bridge over the Hudson river, and was the first to use a wavelength of light to determine the exact length of the meter, making the standard of length no longer dependent on some physical artifact. Almost as an aside, in a short letter to his former student Alan Marquand, Peirce invented the electronic switching-circuit computer. Till then computing machines had all been wholly mechanical. None of these accomplishments, however, were of much help to Peirce. He died in abject poverty and mostly forgotten on April 19, 1914 in a small town called Milford, Pennsylvania. He was survived only by his second wife (whose identity is still a mystery) and by a disarray of more than a hundred thousand manuscript pages.

Peirce grew up in and around Harvard University, which had just begun its transformation from a rather unsuccessful small Christian college into the world-renowned institution it is today. His father, a professor of mathematics and astronomy at Harvard, felt that the young Peirce was destined for greatness and he took an active role in his education. The elder Peirce was an unconventional teacher who taught his students by inspiring them rather than by carefully guiding them through proofs and to the solutions of problems. This instilled in the young Peirce a habit of thinking things out for himself, which never left him. In this milieu Peirce was early on exposed to logic and chemistry. At twelve, he fell in love with logic after reading Richard Whately’s Elements of Logic, a work that revitalized the study of logic in the English-speaking world.6 Peirce claimed repeatedly that from that moment on, logic was his strongest passion. As a consequence he always displayed a keen, sometimes even overriding, interest in methodology when working as a scientist, and he sought to penetrate, as he liked to put it, “into the logic of things.” Around the same time he was introduced to logic, Peirce’s uncle, Charles Henry Peirce, helped him set up a small chemistry laboratory that was designed to work through Liebig’s method of chemical analysis. On this method the student is given a number of bottles each marked with a letter of the alphabet and the student is asked to analyze their content using only an introductory textbook in qualitative analysis. In Peirce’s case this was his uncle’s translation of Stöckhardt’s Principles of Chemistry, most likely supplemented with the Nouveau Manuel Complet de Chimie Analytique, of which Peirce’s stained copy survives.⁷ At sixteen, Peirce went to Harvard, obtaining the A.B. in 1859. In 1861 he entered Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School, graduating summa cum laude in Chemistry in 1863. In the same year that he entered the Lawrence Scientific School, Peirce was appointed a regular aide in the United States Coast Survey, which brings us back to his father. Benjamin Peirce played a key role in the establishment of scientific institutions in the United States, including Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Smithsonian. In 1867, he reluctantly became the chief administrative officer, or Superintendent, of a rather troubled Coast Survey—a position he held till 1874. During his short tenure as Superintendent, Benjamin transformed the Coast Survey into an internationally recognized scientific institution. A central pillar of the new Coast Survey was gravitation research, and in line with this Benjamin changed its name to U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. On November 30, 1872 Benjamin put his son in charge of gravitation research, which required giving him the proper administrative clout. Consequently, on December 1, 1872, Charles Peirce was promoted to Assistant to the Superintendent of the Coast Survey. This meant that Peirce held the second highest rank in what was then America’s premier scientific institution. In other words, for the Popular Science Monthly to have the Assistant of the Coast Survey write a series of papers was quite a catch. Peirce continued to work for the Survey for nineteen more years, devoting much of his energy to gravitation research.

More than any other decade in Peirce’s life, the 1870s were dominated by the actual practice of scientific research. The two main areas Peirce was working in were astronomy and geodesy. Peirce’s work in astronomy began in 1867 with his involvement with the Harvard Observatory, where he was appointed Assistant to the Director in 1869. Peirce’s major research interest was to determine the relative brightness of stars, the purpose of which was to determine the shape of the Milky Way and the orientation of its axis. To do this Peirce used a modified Zöllner’s astrophotometer that enabled him to directly compare the incoming light from a star with light from a kerosene lamp. Three polarizing prisms and a quartz plate then enabled him to modify the brightness and the color of the lamplight to have it match that of the star.8 Peirce did most of his observations on the stars in 1872–1873. By subsequently comparing his findings with the earlier findings of Ptolemy, Ulugh, Sûfi, and Tycho Brahe, he was further able to address the issue of the variability of the brightness of stars. Peirce published his findings around the same time he published the Illustrations, in what was to become the only book he published in his lifetime: Photometric Researches (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1878).

In November of 1872 Peirce was put in charge of gravitation research at the Coast and Geodetic Survey. The purpose of this research was to map out local gravity (abbreviated g), by which is meant the acceleration the earth imparts to objects on or near its surface. Because our planet is not a perfect sphere of uniform density, there are slight deviations in the magnitude of g across its surface. Such deviations can be measured by swinging a pendulum at different locations, as the period of swing of a pendulum is a function of g and other factors that are relatively easy to control, such as the length of the pendulum. Carefully mapping the values of g would thus allow us to precisely determine the shape of the earth. However, since the variations in g are extremely minute, pendulum research requires immense precision. Even the smallest deviation—say when a drop in temperature causes the pendulum to slightly contract—suffices to discredit the result. Peirce spent countless long days swinging pendulums at various locations within the United States, from Key West to Ann Arbor, and in 1882 the Greely expedition swung a pendulum for him as far north as Ellesmere Island, the most northerly point of the North American continent (W6, sel. 30). Much of Peirce’s pendulum research takes place in 1873–74. A location of particular interest is the Hoosac railway tunnel in northwestern Massachusetts where Peirce compared the values of g at the top and the bottom of the 1028-foot central ventilation shaft. This allowed him to estimate the mass of the earth, which is a function of g, the earth’s radius, and the gravitational constant G (WMS 256; Summer 1874). In April of 1875, Peirce sailed to Europe to receive a newly designed pendulum made to his specifications and to test it against established values of g at various locations in Europe. One of Peirce’s fellow passengers on his voyage to Liverpool was the publisher W.H. Appleton. It was during this voyage that Appleton invited Peirce to write a series of articles on the logic of science for the Popular Science Monthly. It would take Peirce two more years and another trip to Europe to begin working on it in earnest, as much of the writing seems to have taken place shortly before the publication dates (Peirce regularly missed his publishing deadlines). To sum it all up, Peirce began working on the Illustrations following a period of intense empirical research. Moreover, the areas of research that Peirce was engaged in put him fairly directly into contact with that external permanency upon which our thinking has no effect, which comes to play such a central role in his conception of the fourth method of fixing belief: the method of science (see chapter 1).

Before delving deeper into the compositional history of the Illustrations themselves, I want to pay some attention to earlier work of Peirce that is clearly precursor to it. Later in life—mostly when seeking to establish himself as the founder of pragmatism—Peirce referred several times to a paper he read at the Metaphysical Club that he said contained the key points of both “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” This paper is often considered the place where pragmatism was first conceived. Letters from William James and from Thomas Sergeant Perry reveal that Peirce most likely read this paper sometime in the second half of November 1872. Peirce himself first reminisces about it in a letter to his former student Christine Ladd-Franklin dated October 28, 1904.⁹ Peirce wrote Franklin that his paper was well received at the time and that “the ms. went around to different members who wished to go over it more closely.” No manuscript matching this description, however, has been identified. Peirce continued his letter by explaining that in 1873 he worked to put “that piece into literary form” (most likely his 1872–73 attempt to write a logic book [W3, sels. 4–39]) and that after being invited to write some articles for the Popular Science Monthly he “patched up the piece” for the first paper, “The Fixation of Belief.”

Does this correspondence indicate a lost manuscript, one of great historical importance no less? Possibly. However, given Peirce’s almost obsessive urge to preserve everything he wrote, such a hypothesis should not be raised lightly.¹⁰ It is certainly not the only option. It is not inconceivable that Peirce read to the Club parts of the logic book that he was working on at the time. This alternative hypothesis is confirmed by one of the draft openings of “My Pragmatism” of 1909, where Peirce explains that sections III–V of “The Fixation of Belief” and section II of “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” “reproduce almost verbatim” what he read to the Club in 1872 (R 620:53). With the exception of section II of “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” for which no manuscript material has been identified, the sections Peirce mentions reproduce almost verbatim three chapters of the logic book material. Moreover, in a letter of November 24, 1872, William James, one of the Metaphysical Club members, wrote to his brother Henry that Peirce “read to us an admirable introductory chapter to his book on logic the other day.” Assuming James refers to the same event Peirce does, this not only connects the Metaphysical Club reading with a logic book, but also dates it after the relevant parts of the logic book material were written. On November 25, Thomas Sergeant Perry also wrote Peirce regarding the Metaphysical Club reading, asking whether he could publish the paper Peirce had read in the North American Review: “I write to beg you to let me have that paper you read the other night at Cambridge for the N.A.R. It ought to be published. I’ll pay you bountifully & I must have it.”11 Nothing came of this, possibly because only days later Peirce was put in charge of pendulum experiments at the Coast Survey and soon thereafter was promoted to the rank of Assistant to the Superintendent. If what Peirce read was not a completed paper but rather parts of his logic book material, the added work pressure at the Survey and his work on the brightness of stars most likely made it impossible for him to grant Perry’s request.

The absence of manuscript material for section II of “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” referred to in the “My Pragmatism” draft, is troubling, as this is precisely where Peirce would have spoken of the principle of pragmatism, presumably even using the term pragmatism itself—something he does not do in the published article. As we can see from other writings, however, Peirce easily could have discussed the pragmatic maxim, or more likely a precursor thereof, at the Metaphysical Club. For instance, in his 1871 review of the works of Berkeley, Peirce criticized Berkeley for claiming that a word can only have meaning if we have the corresponding idea. On this view, Peirce observed, all abstract ideas must be dismissed as meaningless (W2:483). In response, Peirce introduced a new criterion of meaning, which presages the pragmatic maxim: “Do things fulfil the same function practically? Then let them be signified by the same word. Do they not? Then let them be distinguished” (W2:483). In the logic book Peirce connected this idea of practicality with his doubt-belief theory. If the difference between doubt and belief is merely that they are different sensations, Peirce wrote, the distinction would be “almost without significance.” Instead, he continued, “the sensible distinguishability is attended with an important practical difference” (W3:21, 1872; emphasis added). Earlier, in “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” Peirce discussed another aspect of the maxim, that of conceivability, arguing that because “the meaning of a word is the conception it conveys, the absolutely incognizable [like Locke’s substratum, or Kant’s things in themselves] has no meaning because no conception attaches to it” (W2:238; 1868). In brief, when Peirce made his presentation for the Metaphysical Club in November of 1872, many of the trappings of the pragmatic maxim were already in place. Moreover, since historically the maxim emerged within the context of Peirce’s discussions of reality, a discussion that is very much at the fore of his mind in the fall of 1872 (W3, sel. 15–20), it is not unlikely that he discussed some form of his famous criterion of meaning in his Metaphysical Club presentation.

Whether Peirce actually coined the term pragmatism, as he later repeatedly said he did, is a separate issue and is somewhat doubtful. The term appears nowhere in Peirce’s manuscripts, nor in his correspondence, before James publicly called Peirce’s maxim “the principle of pragmatism,” in 1898. In contrast, James himself did use the word in the 1870s. In manuscript notes for his 1879 “The Sentiment of Rationality” James wrote, “The general principle of pragmatism proves every thing by its result,” and, “the principle of ‘pragmatism’ . . . allows all assumptions to be of identical value so long as they equally save the appearances.”12 Hence, when Peirce was writing the Illustrations, James too was seeking to express the significance of our ideas in terms of their practical consequences, and he explicitly referred to it as the principle of pragmatism.¹³ By 1898, however, James strongly preferred the term practicalism instead, most likely because of the negative connotations of the word pragmatism. The Century Dictionary, for instance, having defined the pragmatist as someone “who is impertinently busy or meddling,” defines pragmatism as “busy impertinence” and described the pragmatizer as “a stupid creature [for whom] nothing is too beautiful or too sacred to be made dull and vulgar by its touch” (CD:4667–8). Such definitions cast some suspicion on Peirce’s later claims that he deliberately decided not to include a philosophical definition of pragmatism in the dictionary because “it did not seem to me its vogue was sufficient to warrant that step” (CP 5.13; see also chapter 7 below).

Before discussing the Illustrations in more detail, a little more should be said of the early logic book material. The logic book is far from completed and the surviving material suggests various attempts at writing such a book, all of which can be dated 1872–73. As for its content, and its proposed content, the material falls conceptually somewhere between, on the one hand, the American Academy series of 1867 and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy series, and on the other, the Illustrations. What distinguishes the Illustrations from Peirce’s earlier work is that in the Illustrations, the science of logic, as all science, must start from an examination of existing beliefs, doubts, and practices. This notion, that it is important for logicians to learn from the actual practice of science, is wholly absent in the logic book.

As said, Peirce met the publisher W.H. Appleton when they were sailing to Europe in April of 1875, and it was during this voyage that Appleton invited Peirce to contribute a series of papers on the logic of science to the Popular Science Monthly. As is noted also, it took him almost two more years to begin working on the project in earnest. On March 3, 1877, Peirce wrote his mother: “I am writing a paper for the Popular Science Monthly but it is not complete yet. I think when I have done one, I can write others more rapidly.” For this paper, which appeared in December 1877 under the title “The Fixation of Belief,” Peirce relied quite heavily on material that he had written for the logic notebook half a decade earlier. Comparing the text of “The Fixation of Belief” with the logic book material confirms what he wrote Christine Ladd-Franklin in 1904. Sections III and IV copy almost verbatim chapter 1, “Of the Difference Between Doubt and Belief” (W3, sel. 9; written between May 11 and 14, 1872) and chapter 2, “Of Inquiry” (W3, sel. 10; dated May-June 1872). In addition, much of section V comes from chapter 3, “Four Methods of Settling Opinion” (W3, sel. 11; also dated May-June 1872). Most likely sections I and II were composed only after Peirce had decided to explain the validity of synthetic inference in terms of the doctrine of probabilities in the third and fourth articles. The Ohio Medical Recorder wrote in its review of the November issue of Popular Science Monthly, “The place of honor is ably filled by the first of a series of “Illustrations of the Logic of Science,” By C. S. Pearce [sic], assistant of the United States Coast Survey; the title of the paper is the “Fixation of Belief;” it will be read with interest and pleasure by those who are accustomed to criticize the bigotry and intolerance of the clergy.”¹⁴

The second paper in the series is “How to Make our Ideas Clear.” On November 2, 1877, Peirce wrote his mother that he wrote the best part of “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” between September 13 and 24 while sailing from Hoboken, New Jersey, to Plymouth, England. In a letter to his brother James Mills Peirce, written in December or January, Peirce wrote that he is sending him the second paper, adding that he had written it on board of a ship. In this paper Peirce distinguishes three criteria for the clearness of ideas, the third of which is what James later called “the principle of pragmatism.” This principle is followed by several applications, mostly to concepts used in physics. The first of these, the application of the principle to the concept “hardness,” would cause Peirce quite a bit of trouble. Though the general import of the paper is realist, this particular application is clearly nominalist, inviting a nominalist reading of the principle itself. Later in life Peirce says several times that he wrote the paper first in French, and even that he preferred the French version to the English one. I will return to that claim below when discussing the French publication of the first two papers.

On February 4, 1878 Peirce wrote his mother that the March number of Popular Science Monthly “will contain my article on the Theory of Chances which I fear they will have to divide into two.” This is indeed what happened. The article was split in two, with the first half, “The Doctrine of Chances,” appearing in March and the second half in April under the heading “The Probability of Induction.” Circumstantial evidence suggests it is most likely that Peirce wrote “The Doctrine of Chances” and “The Probability of Induction” between December 1877 and March 1878. By publishing “The Doctrine of Chances” directly after “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Peirce began his discussion of logical inference by discussing the theory of probability, which in the fifth paper returns as his ground for justifying induction. Hence, in contrast to traditional logic books, which typically focus their attention on the syllogisms and deductive reasoning, Peirce, with a clearer sense of what is valuable to science, started with an extensive discussion of induction, relegating deduction to a fairly short account in the sixth paper. Shortly after the fourth paper was published, Peirce wrote his mother: “I hear a good many people—Sylvester, for instance—express the opinion that the third and fourth papers are better than the first and second, which seems to me the most melancholy incapacity for judging such things.”15

The fifth paper, “The Order of Nature,” was most likely written from February to April 1878, as Peirce missed the deadline for the May issue of Popular Science Monthly, because he had “so many interruptions last month it was impossible for me to be ready in time.”¹⁶ In this paper, Peirce takes aim at the prevailing view, held most prominently by John Stuart Mill, that induction is justified by the order of nature. Induction is valid, Mill argued, because it contains a suppressed major premise that pronounces the uniformity “which we know to exist in the course of nature”; and it is this uniformity that allows us to draw the inference.¹⁷ In its stead Peirce argued that what justifies induction is the theory of probability that he developed in the previous two papers. Later, when reflecting in the third person upon this article in a summary of his work for Friedrich Überweg’s Grundriß der Geschichte der Philosophie, Peirce said of the uniformity of nature that,

while it afforded opportunities for inductive reasonings, it does not constitute the general ground of validity of such reasonings. He also argued that as a fact there appears to be as little orderliness in the universe as we can conceive that a universe should have, and further that the degree of orderliness of the universe is relative to the mind that contemplates it, consisting merely in the breadth (Umfang) of that mind’s interests.¹⁸

The sixth and final paper, “Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis,” was most likely written from April to June 1878, as this time Peirce missed the deadline for the July issue. The paper appeared in the August issue. Peirce discussed the three kinds of reasoning that can be extracted from the general form of the syllogism as different orderings of rule, case, and result. The three modes of reasoning Peirce distinguished are deduction, induction, and hypothesis (which, at times, he called abduction or retroduction). Much of the paper is devoted to establishing hypothesis as a mode of inference, something he does in part by drawing upon examples from the history of science.

The six articles here described originally appeared under the general heading “Illustrations of the Logic of Science.” Some, including Peirce himself, have found this heading troublesome. The word “illustrations” suggests at best a rather thin thread of continuity throughout the papers. Rather than a coherent set of articles with a clearly defined topic, it suggests a series of rather detached articles with no aim of being comprehensive. Later on Peirce explicitly voiced his dislike of the heading for the series, which seems to have been the product of a compromise between him and Popular Science editor Edward Youmans (1821–1887), a person whom Peirce greatly disliked. The French translation of the series—on which more later—appeared under the title “The Logic of Science,” which may have been more to Peirce’s liking. In the spring of 1909 Peirce wrote that the Illustrations “appeared under the general title,—an inappropriate one, taken to please either the publisher or the editor, I forget which,—‘Illustrations of the Logic of Science’” (R 620:61). At least on one occasion he even pretended that the articles originally appeared “without any title for the whole” (R 619:2). That Peirce amply displayed his disapproval of the heading does not tell us who proposed it and why. If it was the editor, he was most likely inspired by the opening section of “The Fixation of Belief,” were Peirce writes that “each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic” and proceeds by briefly reviewing three such lessons. If it was Peirce, it may suggest that at the time he envisioned relying more heavily on actual examples, but veered away from that during the actual writing. It is clear, however, that the Illustrations break with Peirce’s earlier work, in that he now very deliberately argues that the science of logic, like all science, must start from an examination of existing beliefs, doubts, and practices, which implicitly gives prominence to historical examples that can count as illustrations of the logic of science. In an offprint of “The Fixation of Belief” which Peirce prepared for possible republication, Peirce deleted the entire phrase “Illustrations of the Logic of Science” and replaced it with “Essays on the Reasoning of Science” (R 334:40, 1910).

The failure of the book project raises the question whether the series in the Popular Science Monthly is complete, or whether it was broken off prematurely. Based in part on a comparison with the earlier logic book material, and in part on an 1881 letter Peirce wrote to his mother, Max Fisch concluded that the Illustrations remained unfinished (W3, Introduction). As Fisch pointed out, Peirce never touched upon the theory of the categories, nor upon the doctrine of signs, two central themes in his earlier work, and two themes that return in the 1894 logic book How to Reason. Moreover, in the 1881 letter to his mother Peirce confessed, “I am thinking of undertaking some more papers for the Popular Science Monthly though I can hardly screw myself up to that point yet” (W3:xxxvi), possibly suggesting that he was thinking of continuing the series. Long after the fact (in “My Pragmatism” of 1909—included as chapter 7 below) Peirce wrote that he had been engaged by Appleton “to write half a dozen articles for the Popular Science Monthly on the Logic of Science.” Whether this means that the series was complete after all (as six articles were published) is impossible to say. What can be said is that a regular subscriber to the monthly who had just finished the sixth article would not naturally conclude that no additional installments were to follow. The series does not naturally come to a close, but ends rather with the observation that it makes good sense to distinguish induction from hypothesis (or abduction). This is an observation that strictly confines itself to the topic of the sixth paper, without any reference to the series as a whole. Adding further that two of the essays Peirce wrote were so long that he had to split them in two—so that arguably he wrote only four papers, not the six he said he had promised—I tend to agree with Fisch that more likely than not the Illustrations were unfinished. What counts against this interpretation is that whereas Peirce voiced many complaints about the original publication, especially to Carus when preparing a new edition of the Illustrations at the end of the first decade, he never says that the original series was left unfinished.

Shortly after the publication of the original series, the first two papers, “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” also appeared in French in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger under the general heading “La logique de la science.” The first appeared in December of 1878 as “Comment se fixe la croyance”; the second appeared the following month under the title “Comment rendre nos idées claires.”19 The two French versions are included in volume 3 of the Writings. In a letter to Christine Ladd-Franklin of October 28, 1904 Peirce wrote that during his 1877 voyage to Europe to attend the International Geodetic Association conference in Stuttgart, he wrote “an article about pragmatism in French” to practice his French. Peirce wrote also that he later “translated the steamer article into English and in that dress it appeared in the Popular Science Monthly.” He also translated his earlier article, “The Fixation of Belief,” from English into French.²⁰ In 1905, in an unpublished and unfinished manuscript called “Consequences of Pragmatism,” Peirce explained that he wrote “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” in French to avoid the criticism he received from Youmans on “The Fixation of Belief,” that it was too metaphysical for a scientific monthly: “The second article was entirely written on a French steamer, and was written first in French, although only an English publication was contemplated, with the idea that the temptations to be too darkly philosophical would by that means be diminished, and the editor be in some measure appeased” (R 289:3). This also suggests that Peirce wrote “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” in French before any arrangements were made with the Revue philosophique to publish French versions of the papers.

On several occasions Peirce remarked that he preferred the French versions above the English ones. For instance, in a note clipped to a collection of offprints entitled Papers in Logic, which Peirce left to the Johns Hopkins University Library, Peirce wrote: “The two French versions, which I prefer to the English of the same papers, derive their merit from the skill of M Léo Seguin, who was killed in Tunis in 1881.” And in his 1903 Harvard Lectures, Peirce even went so far as to quote the French version of the pragmatic maxim, even though he was addressing an English-speaking audience (CP 5.18). The reference to Seguin suggests that Peirce was not solely responsible for the French. Peirce confirms this in a February 3, 1879 letter of reference to George Davidson, in which he praises Seguin’s translation of “The Fixation of Belief.” Comparing this text with other texts Peirce wrote in French, Gérard Delledalle concluded that Peirce did translate “The Fixation of Belief” into French himself and that Seguin corrected the translation, sometimes for grammatical reasons, sometimes to render the text more clear to the reader.²¹ The French version, however, contains some dubious translations that make it hard to believe that it is superior to the English, as Peirce at various times claimed it to be. For instance, Seguin, a libertarian anarchist who in 1871 had been banished from France for his role in the revolt of the Paris Commune, was an avowed individualist who was ill at ease with the communal aspect of Peirce’s theory of inquiry. Consequently, he “corrected” the text for it (see the footnotes to chapter 1 below). According to Delledalle, the French of “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” is superior to the French translation of “The Fixation of Belief,” and the sort of interventions that were found there are absent here. Nevertheless, Delledalle continues, the English version, which is more precise and explicit, is superior to the French and there is no evidence that Peirce originally wrote the paper in French and subsequently translated it into English.

In 1887, close to a decade after the Illustrations were published, the wealthy zinc manufacturer Edward Charles Hegeler (1835–1910) founded the Open Court Publishing Company with the aim of stimulating the discussion of religious issues from a scientific viewpoint, and he appointed his future son-in-law Paul Carus (1852–1919) as its managing editor. Besides books, the company published two periodicals: the Open Court and the Monist. In July of 1890, Carus, who had read the Illustrations and was impressed by them, recruited Peirce to contribute an article on logic for the Monist’s inaugural issue.²² Though Peirce missed the deadline, it proved the beginning of a lifelong and sometimes stormy relationship with the Open Court Publishing Company. Peirce contributed to both periodicals, and although he never published a book with the Open Court, a number of book proposals were discussed over the years, several of which involved the Illustrations.

In the winter of 1893, while he was working on a lengthy reply to Carus’s critique of one of his Monist articles, Peirce visited Hegeler and Carus in LaSalle, Illinois. The experience must have been a good one as Peirce instantly submitted a proposal for a two-volume edition of mostly previously published work, to be titled Collected Papers.²³ In the proposal Peirce included the Illustrations, as chapters 11–16 of a total 42 chapters. The entire work, Peirce estimated, would run somewhere between seven and eight hundred octavo pages. On March 7, 1893, not having heard back, Peirce mailed a second proposal in which he changed the title of the work to Quest for a Method. In this proposal he discussed the contents for the first volume only. The new proposal also included the Illustrations, complete and in their original order.²⁴ Peirce further explained that he chose to call it A Quest for a Method to distance himself from the views he ascribed to Hegeler and Carus on the reconciliation of religion and science, which in his opinion essentially meant that religion had to adopt a new creed, namely the creed of science. Peirce rejected this as too superficial; it merely meant exchanging one creed for another. Peirce instead sought to dismiss all creeds, whether religious or scientific. As he put it in the letter, “My book is to be entitled A Quest. Now the very idea of a quest implies that what is said is not in harmony with any fixed creed, like yours. Worse yet, it is a quest for a Method, and what that method is cannot be predetermined. The presumption must be that it will be hostile to any creed formulated in advance.” In this way A Quest for a Method continued the path Peirce had taken with the Illustrations, where the method of science is not something externally imposed upon inquiry, but itself a product of that inquiry. In what seems a different version of the same project, Peirce used the title A Search for a Method (R 592:2). Peirce, however, could not make himself republish his papers unaltered, and he began making sometimes-extensive revisions to the existing papers. Both A Quest for a Method and A Search for a Method open with a revised version of Peirce’s 1867 “On a Natural Classification of Arguments” (see R 594 and R 592 respectively), with the revisions for the former being the more far-reaching.25 A table of contents for the entire work survives as R 1583:2, and it shows that Peirce intended to include nineteen of his former publications in chronological order. It lists the entire Illustrations series as essays 8–13. Though several of the revised essays survive, it is quite evident that Peirce did not bring this project to completion. What happened instead was that it inspired him to embark upon a more ambitious project: the 1894 logic book How to Reason, to which we turn next.²⁶

The aim of How to Reason is to make “the nature of inquiry into real facts illuminate that of demonstration from fixed assumptions, and vice versa” (R 397:2), which is commensurate with the previous projects. After significant reshuffling,²⁷ How to Reason is finally divided into nineteen chapters over three books (R 339:4): Of Reasoning in General, Demonstrative Reasoning, and Quantitative Reasoning.²⁸ An introduction on the association of ideas precedes the three books and they are followed by a set of recreations and exercises. Only three, possibly four, of the Illustrations articles make it into How to Reason, and they are not grouped together.²⁹ How to Reason starts off with a discussion of the categories and of signs—two topics discussed in the 1872–73 logic book material, but notably absent in the Illustrations. The next three chapters are grouped together under the heading “Transcendental Logic.”³⁰ The first two, “The Materialistic Aspect of Reasoning” and “What’s the Use of Consciousness?” lay the groundwork for “The Fixation of Belief,” which appears as chapter 5.

In the first of these two chapters, Peirce argues that we can already discern what we call reasoning at the mechanical level of protoplasm. The argument is similar to what he had recently done in “Man’s Glassy Essence,” which appeared in the Monist in October 1892. The chapter concludes with the following observation: “A decapitated frog almost reasons. The habit that is in his cerebellum serves as a major premise. The excitation of a drop of acid is his minor premise. And his conclusion is the act of wiping it away. All that is of any value in the operation of ratiocination is there, except only one thing. What he lacks is the power of preparatory meditation” (R 405:10). In “What is the Use of Consciousness,” Peirce argues against the mechanistic interpretation that the preceding chapter might elicit—an interpretation on which the role of consciousness is at best that of a spectator. In its stead Peirce argues that the only viable option is to consider consciousness as being part and parcel of the process itself: “The spectator is no longer on one side of the footlights, and the world on the other” (R 406:4). Next follows “The Fixation of Belief,” in which Peirce explains how his doubt-belief theory is a natural outcome of this. Hence, in contrast to the Illustrations, where Peirce felt that he could simply start with the scientist’s actual experience of doubt, Peirce here takes the view that significant groundwork is first needed. This groundwork includes several themes of his work in the 1860s, such as his theory of the categories and his semeiotics—themes that were also present in the 1872–73 logic book material. In chapter 6, “The Essence of Reasoning,” Peirce gives an outline of traditional logic with the aim of explaining “the excellent and well-established terminology” of logic (R 408:2). As we will see shortly, Peirce later recycles the title of this chapter for a new edition of the Illustrations.

Book II of How to Reason, called “Demonstrative Reasoning,” contains much of Peirce’s technical work on logic. The bulk of it consists of mathematical logic (nonrelative as well as relative), to which are added two chapters under the heading of methodology. The first is an annotated offprint of the 1867 “Upon Logical Comprehension and Extension”; the second is the second Illustrations paper “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” The separation of “The Fixation of Belief” (chapter 5) from “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (chapter 16) is interesting, given Peirce’s later insistence, discussed below, that the two papers were originally conceived as one and that they are truly inseparable.³¹

Book III of How to Reason, is called “Quantitative Logic.” It consists of three chapters: “Logic of Quantity,” “The Doctrine of Chances,” and “Induction Etc.” The first (chapter 17) is a longish holograph manuscript that was written for the occasion (R 423). All that survives for “The Doctrine of Chances” (chapter 18) is a barely corrected typescript made from the published paper; and the final chapter (chapter 19), which Peirce listed on the table of contents under the no-doubt-provisional title “Induction Etc.,” is altogether missing. Peirce could have intended to use the fourth Illustrations paper, “The Probability of Induction,” for the final chapter 19. However, given that “The Doctrine of Chances” and “The Probability of Induction,” were originally conceived as a single paper, it is also possible that Peirce intended the latter to also be part of chapter 18. There are other options for chapter 19 besides the fourth Illustrations paper. It is possible, for instance, that Peirce intended to use his 1883 “Theory of Probable Inference” (W4, sel. 64). Earlier, when discussing his logic book in a long letter to Francis Russell, Peirce lamented that “The Doctrine of Chances” was “the worst chapter in the book. A mere revision of my Popular Science Monthly article. This chapter demands amplification.”32 The last two Illustrations articles, “The Order of Nature” and “Deduction, Induction, Hypothesis,” were not included in How to Reason.

How to Reason, possibly in the state in which it survived (it was almost, but not quite completed) was sent to publishers, but it was not accepted for publication.

Though “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” is generally considered the birthplace of pragmatism, as already mentioned, the term itself did not appear in print until 1898, when William James published his “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results.”³³ It became a household term within philosophic circles not long after, when James used the term again in his 1901–1902 Gifford Lectures to help us “decide, among the various attributes set down in the scholastic inventory of God’s perfections, whether some be not far less significant than others.”³⁴ On both occasions James gave full credit to Peirce, calling it “the principle of Peirce,” and identified “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” as his source. These events mark the beginning of many years during which Peirce sought to claim ownership of pragmatism while at the same time distancing himself from what other self-proclaimed pragmatists, like James and F.C.S. Schiller, were doing. The first major outcome of this is Peirce’s 1903 Harvard Lectures, entitled “Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking.”³⁵ After plans of publishing the lectures had fallen through, Peirce reconnected with Open Court, and in 1905 he published the first of a series of papers on pragmatism in the Monist. This is when, in a paper titled “What Pragmatism Is,” Peirce famously baptized his own view “pragmaticism,” a term he believed would be “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” (EP2:335). Two more papers appeared, but that series was never completed.

In their rendition of the Illustrations for the Collected Papers, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, included several notes that they drew from a manuscript entitled “My Plea for Pragmatism,” which they dated 1903, the same year as the Harvard lectures. When compiling the bibliographical data at the end of volume 8 of the Collected Papers, Arthur Burks changed the date to 1909. Burks correctly identified the passage as coming from R 619:2–3, which is unambiguously dated, in Peirce’s own hand, March 26, 1909.36 No mention is made in that document, however, of “My Plea for Pragmatism,” which Hartshorne and Weiss insert in square brackets. Peirce called it “The Import of Thought: An Essay in Two Chapters,” which is the first chapter of a volume to be titled Studies in Meaning. Peirce used the phrase “My Plea for Pragmatism” in a different, undated manuscript that was recovered in 1969 from an old desk at Harvard that appeared to be full of Peirce manuscripts (RS 77), and in a letter to Paul Carus dated January 7, 1909.³⁷ Both the letter and RS 77 identify the first two articles of the Illustrations as Peirce’s “plea for pragmatism.” The first sheet of RS 77 opens with the book or series title Essays on the Reasoning of Science, followed immediately by what appears to be the title of the first essay “My Plea for Pragmatism.” The latter is followed by a simple “Part I” and the opening paragraph of “The Fixation of Belief,” suggesting that this opening essay was to combine the first two Illustrations articles, which matches what Peirce wrote on R 619:2. Combining the first two Illustrations papers is not unique to R 619, but is a general strategy characteristic of Peirce’s 1909–1910 rewritings, and is in line with the compositional history of the original series, as the first two articles seem to have found their origin in Peirce’s 1872 Metaphysical Club presentation (see above).

The attention that was drawn to the Illustrations due to the discussions about pragmatism may have played a role in Carus’s renewed interest in seeing the Illustrations republished. In January 1907, he wrote Peirce that he wished to see the Illustrations “republished either by Appleton & Co., or by anyone who would bring it out,” and hinted that he would be interested in publishing the series himself.³⁸ As noted earlier, the Illustrations had been Carus’s own introduction to Peirce’s writings and the reason why he had solicited Peirce to write for the Monist in the early 1890s. Peirce responded swiftly, and Carus convinced Hegeler that they should take on the book. As Carus explained in his answer to Peirce, “I have strongly recommended the publication of your book which I wish to bring out because I think that your papers on logic in the Popular Science Monthly are the best introduction to the new movement in logic that have been written in the English tongue, perhaps in all tongues.”³⁹ Carus’s typewritten letter mentions an advance of $100 with an additional royalty of $50 to be paid at a later date from the net returns. Carus further expressed his hope that he can receive the copy “very soon,” so he can send it to the compositor before leaving for Europe. The positive tone of the letter is somewhat dampened by a handwritten insertion, no doubt inspired by Peirce’s past failures to keep his promises: “I am just told that Mr. Hegeler is opposed to making any advanced payments, but I will do what I can do.”

Notwithstanding a supportive letter of William James,40 the project failed to get off the ground. The issue again resurfaced in December when Carus responded to a different proposal by Peirce that Carus would rather republish the Illustrations. In his response Carus is particularly critical of Peirce’s later work: “although your articles contain valuable propositions, you enwrap them unnecessarily in such difficulties, and sometimes switch off your ideas without explaining why you do so, that you tax the patience even of our most attentive readers.” “That you can write well,” Carus continued, “is plainly shown in your former articles on logic in the Pop. Sci. M. I wish you would continue in that same forceful style which is at once instructive and to the point.” Carus then reminded Peirce that about a decade earlier, when discussing the Collected Papers project mentioned above, Peirce had given him permission to republish the Illustrations, but added, “Yet I have not been able to do so.”⁴¹

Another year passes until, in December of 1908, Carus rekindled his plan of publishing the Illustrations: “in thinking over and planning the scope of the work of the Open Court Publishing Company for the coming year, I think again of an old and cherished plan of mine which I had proposed to you some time ago, and which consists in the reproduction of your ‘Illustrations of the Logic of Science.’”⁴² “If I am not very much mistaken you gave me once the permission,” Carus continued, “but I hesitated to do so because I was afraid of complications. Now there have elapsed thirty years since then and I think there is not the slightest doubt that you can dispose of it freely,” and he repeated, with slight modification, the financial terms that he had given Peirce two years before: “Would you accede to my wish to publish it in book form for a honorarium of $100, and in addition thereto $50 for your trouble in revising these five [sic] essays, altering, adding or changing as you may see fit, and the proofreading.”⁴³ From Carus’s perspective the main reason for having the original articles revised was, as he explained, “to justify our taking out a new copyright.”⁴⁴

Peirce did not reply immediately. First he wrote his long-term friend and confidant Francis Russell. Francis Calvin Russell (1838–1920), an attorney and counselor at law in Chicago, was also a long-term friend of Paul Carus and was employed by Carus to vet articles, translations, and proposals related to logic for the Open Court Publishing Company. Peirce wrote Russell that Carus had offered him $100 for the copyright and the revision of the Illustrations. Noting that it would require the better part of a year to make the revisions, he called it “less than a starvation prize” and announced that he planned to seek out other publishers. Finally, he added, “anything from you in the way of faultfinding with definite passages of those articles will be valued by me.”45 Six days later, on January 7, 1909, Peirce officially replied to Carus’s letter, asking him to keep the offer on the able for another three months, as he could not presently accept it,⁴⁶ and he included the following plan for revision:

My plan is to reprint them with alteration except mere clerical ones but, firstly, to delete passages which were due to my trying to mollify Youmans’s wrath at the engagement which old Mr. Wm. Appleton forced upon him. He had not an atom of the scientific spirit. He was devoted to Spencerianism just as he might have been to a scheme to get up a revolution in some country; and the idea of allowing an individual to express views in the Pop. Sci. that at all conflicted with Spencer’s was disgusting to him. That accounts for various features of the articles, and as I was paid $150 an article, I was bound to take great pains with the style and all that. I still think them sound in the main; but I did not then see the whole truth of the matter. Consequently, in revising them, I might enliven them considerably by a little sparring match with my self on special points. Such passages to be in brackets, and perhaps with a different font of type. Besides that, secondly at the end of each, I should add a supplement setting forth what I have learned since then. The first and second of the original articles would make one essay in two parts, the third and fourth would make another. The fifth would be one part of an essay in two or three parts. The sixth would be replaced altogether by an account of the Methodeutic of Scientific Research; and I should add two chapters at least in the way of Illustrations of Science, setting forth, for example, the nature of the actual reasoning in detail for today’s views on the chemical constitution of compounds. This would follow a method essentially different from Mach’s treatment of dynamics;⁴⁷ for in chemistry there have been too many refutations of theories that always had been bad, i.e. unwarranted, from the very start. I shall insert also my classification of the sciences (perhaps the entire scheme, which has never been printed yet)⁴⁸ my criticism of Pearson in the Pop. Sci. for Jan. 1901,⁴⁹ and my Evening Post article on The Great Men of Science of the XIXth century.⁵⁰ The book will be much stronger and a good deal more popular (if I can succeed in making it so, with handwork,) than the original articles.⁵¹

The first two Illustrations articles taken together were to be called “A Plea for Pragmatism,” and it seems that Peirce began his revision of the Illustrations almost immediately (RS 77).

Carus’s response to Peirce’s letter is supportive, but also cautious:

Your letter just comes to hand and I will say in reply as follows: I give you all the time you want to revise it but I did not expect you would have to rewrite so much but of course if you have had to adapt yourself to Mr. Youmans I can only wish myself that you would make such changes as you deem necessary, but please do not tamper too much with your own thought of former years. I remember of Goethe that he treated the writings of his younger years with great respect and did not change unnecessarily. Of Cantor I can only say that he changed his article on Pythagoras in the later edition and took out the best, most ingenious and most interesting part of his thought, so I hope you will not touch your own old thoughts but limit your revision to what is foreign to yourself in the articles. I had offered the pecuniary amount of revision on purpose of $50 because I did not want you to make supererogatory changes. However, as you state the case it is different.

As to the payment I am now willing to add another $100, and so I will pay you for the whole $250. I think very much of this article of yours and shall be very glad to have the revised copy within about three months, payment to be made of receipt of copy.52

Carus also emphasized again that there was little money to be made with a book like this, but that he hoped it would “contribute a good deal to clear up the ideas concerning pragmatism and the difference that obtains between pragmatism and pragmaticism.”⁵³ In Carus’s view, republishing the Illustrations would also have the good effect of drawing attention to Peirce’s “more recondite work on the Algebra of Logic.”⁵⁴

On January 22 Peirce began an essay that was meant to be an extensive revision of the third and fourth Illustrations papers, a project he continued to work on till the end of that month (the essay survives as R 706). It is not till March 9, however, that Peirce officially agreed to work on the Illustrations, and not without first asking whether he could be paid the entire sum of $250 in advance, citing his wife’s poor health as the reason:

If I could persuade you to advance the whole $250 on my solemn promise to devote all my energies after drawing plans for my wife’s work (which are nearly complete now) exclusively to those two jobs for you; namely the completion of the revision of the Pop. Sci. articles and the article on my method of analyzing concepts (i.e. of defining them) a theory completely worked out now—then I would close with you with the understanding that your holding these articles should not be a reason for your not accepting new articles, being pestions of my System of Logic, which would be written with a view to their being widely read, and decidedly more perspicuous than my article in the Hibbert Journal of October 1908.⁵⁵

Carus agreed, writing Peirce on March 15 that he will mail him a check for $250.⁵⁶ In response, Peirce began his revision of the Illustrations, presumably with the undated manuscripts R 628 and R 629. He called the volume Studies in the Meaning of Our Thoughts and the first essay was to consist of “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” This first essay, called “What is the Aim of Thinking?,” Peirce explained, “contains the earliest formulation of the doctrine of Pragmatism” (R 628:2). Except for some minimal corrections to enhance their clearness, and a “few bracketed clauses to reinforce the original arguments,” Peirce believed that the papers could be republished in their original form, while “such statements in it as are more or less incorrect are reconsidered in notes appended to this reprint” (R 628:2). On March 22, Peirce starts anew, opting for the shorter volume title Studies in Meaning under the pen name Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce. At this time he also started the practice of dating each sheet separately (R 630:2). Peirce wrote ten pages between March 22 and March 29, divided over three drafts that survive in R 618 and R 630.

It seems that Peirce only began working in earnest on the Illustrations after receiving his $250 check from Carus. The check arrived in the afternoon on April 3, which was a Saturday. Peirce confirmed its receipt the following Monday and began working on Essays Toward the Interpretation of our Thoughts (chapter 7 below) that Monday as well.⁵⁷ The letter and the check, he explained, “fired me with the desire to pitch in and make my ‘Essays on the Meaning of Thought’ as useful to a relatively large circle of readers as I possibly can.”⁵⁸ With only a few intermissions Peirce worked till the end of October almost daily on his revision of the Illustrations. Roughly five hundred manuscript pages survive of this effort (R 620–40). This material covers several attempts. Peirce began his first main attempt on April 5 under the volume title Essays Toward the Interpretation of our Thoughts. He worked on it pretty much continuously until June 24, creating in the process a number of abandoned branches.

After a hiatus of about a month, Peirce returned to the Illustrations at the end of August. Peirce first attempted to start anew on August 24 (R 631–32), labeling that document simply “Preface,” and abandoning it on August 27. Peirce continued his work on August 30, only to abandon the project a few days later, on September 1. On September 4 Peirce once again began afresh, doing the same again on September 7, and on September 8, at which point the volume title Eƒsays on Meaning was introduced, which Peirce chose to spell with a long s, even though the practice had fallen out of use in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The September 8 version is included below as Version I of chapter 8. Peirce worked on it till October 13. A week later he started over again, which resulted in his final run, written in a two-day period (October 22–23). This shorter version is included below as Version II of chapter 8. From what Peirce was doing it becomes increasingly clear that he is no longer aiming to just reprint all six of the Illustrations papers. As Peirce explains in an eight-page discarded draft composed September 4–6: “The remainder of the volume sets forth some of the matured ideas of a man who from boyhood to old age has longed and laboured to learn all he could of the right methods of the conduct of thought in the research of truth” (R 633:2–3). Instead of reworking the four remaining papers, Peirce is now seeking to develop the groundwork for a system of logic, considered as semeiotic.

Despite his significant output Peirce made but little progress. All he ended up with were a number of unfinished drafts of a preface he was dissatisfied with. He had barely begun working on the actual papers themselves, making the promised corrections and inserting new material between square brackets as he had told Carus he would do. Instead, Peirce got pretty much stuck in the very first paragraph of “The Fixation of Belief,” trying to explain to a general audience why a study of logic is worthwhile. Unsatisfied with his progress, Peirce did not write Carus to keep him informed of the situation. On November 26, Carus wrote Peirce a diplomatic letter in which he inquired why he had not received the promised “corrected article on logic,” and he was clearly dissatisfied with Peirce’s reply to his inquiry. On December 6 Carus wrote Francis Russell, whom he had made responsible for readying the Illustrations for publication at the press:59

I shall go to Chicago (Tuesday) and will be in my office Wednesday forenoon. I wish to talk over with you the problem of Peirce’s logical papers. I paid for a revision of them $250, and maybe the condition of his present state of mind is such that the condition would merely mean a deterioration. Please look at the papers once more. Perhaps it would be advisable to republish them as they stand. He says that his memory fails him as to the $250 and what he promised.⁶⁰

Two days later, on December 8, Carus sent Peirce a second letter with a detailed summary of previous correspondence in an attempt to force Peirce to fulfill his obligation. Peirce wrote back on December 14, explaining in a shaky hand that he was suffering from a really bad cold, after which he continued:

Whether I did originally or not, certainly I did not later appreciate that you cared particularly to have the account of my method of logical analysis i.e. of making definitions separate from my Pragmatism essay, this latter being obviously a part of the former.

I have been at work upon that ever since, but my style has become atrocious. I shall not be satisfied until what I write can be followed by any intelligent person who is willing to take the trouble to think, and not only can be followed but will be read with interest and pleasure. My internal difficulties are great, but I shall be able to overcome them. But I can’t say how soon. I can’t write much per diem. After three hours I become fatigued and find it best to stop; and I write very slowly because it is needful to be extremely accurate in this subject.61

On receipt of your last letter, I laid aside what I was writing and began to write a separate article on my method of logical analysis.⁶² I hardly think I can compress it into one article; but it shall count for one. I expect to have the first part of it ready for your April number of the Monist, but I won’t promise absolutely. For my health is bad. Some days I cannot handle a pen at all; and every week I have more than one attack of a nervous nature in which I can move hardly a muscle and am in danger of falling. If I had not had so many that I know how to manage, I should fall often.⁶³

The letter seems to confirm the concern Carus expressed in his letter to Russell—Peirce is no longer up to the task—and Carus again admonished Peirce to have the Illustrations published unchanged: “If after a perusal you are satisfied with them, I might publish them as they stand or perhaps I might add in an appendix notes of yours in which you state either a change of view or a dissatisfaction with the form in which they have appeared.”⁶⁴

It is unclear whether Peirce ever responded. On April 30, 1910, Carus wrote him again urging him to submit a corrected copy of the Illustrations for publication:

You have promised again and again to send me the revised copy of your logical papers. I wish you would bear your promise in mind and send them at your earliest convenience. I am anxious to publish them, not only because I think they are good, but also to keep before the public that kind of pragmaticism I deem to be sound. You wanted to make alterations and perhaps write a few words of introduction for the new edition.

Perhaps it would not be advisable to change too much because the papers are good as they stand, and the little shortcomings which they may have according to your present conception, or which may have slipped in through the influence of Mr. Youmans, are perhaps not very important. Please let me hear from you, and if possible send the corrected logical papers.

You ought to do so not only to make good your promise but in your own interest as an author and a thinker.⁶⁵

It would take Peirce a long time to respond. On 19 July he drafted a letter to Carus taking up Carus’s suggestion to publish the articles pretty much as they were originally written (RL 77:208–17). Peirce acknowledged that it would be best to reprint the Illustrations as they originally appeared, but with three exceptions (RL 77:209):

1^st Minor changes to render the English etc. better.

2^nd The Articles of 1877 Nov. and 1878 Jan. to have a common title, say “Pragmatic Clearness of Thought,” and be divided into two parts, namely, the two articles, each with its original title.

3^rd With a prefatial note setting forth what I conceive to be the main error of the Essay, as it originally appeared…. The error of the Essay lies in its Nominalism.

The draft letter, which is incomplete and most likely unfinished, derails in a detailed description of the nominalism-realism debate and its implications. Somewhat dramatically, Peirce folded his sheets and wrote only on half of them, “so that, if I would suddenly die in one of the fits to which I am almost daily subject, what I write could be set up and printed.”

It seems that Peirce was unable to complete the letter, leaving Carus once again in the dark, as about two weeks later, on August 1, Carus mailed Peirce a letter in which he practically threatened Peirce that he will publish the Illustrations unaltered, and asked for a clear statement from Peirce that he owns the copyright while also making clear that he doesn’t really need such a statement to proceed:66

I have been waiting in vain for a review of your papers “Illustrations of the Logic of Science.” You had even forgotten that I had paid you for them, and I am afraid you have again forgotten that after some reluctance you had acknowledged your promise. It was for sundry considerations including the right of re-publishing your Logical papers, revising and proofreading them, writing a new preface, if you were so minded, etc., that I paid you in April 1909 the sum of $250. You have not yet revised your articles and I think that I might publish your articles as they stand. They may contain some objectionable points, which you do not mean to endorse but they are good as they stand and contain many valuable ideas. Perhaps it would even be sufficient if you would point out to me the passages which you would have altered and where as you stated in a former letter you yielded to Mr. Youmans’s wishes, but at any rate I should like to have your acknowledgment under your own signature that the Open Court Publishing Company has acquired the right of republishing these essays, in which statement you have also to insert that (as you informed me in a former letter) you, not Appleton, hold the copyright and are the sole owner of these said essays. I wish to be on the safe side in case Appleton or their successors or heirs would later on trouble me, and claim an infringement on their rights. Yet I may add that the copyright has either or will soon run out for the papers were published in 1878. I do not wish to seem to appropriate the article without just a title. I could prove my claims by submitting to any judge our reference to these papers scattered through several letters of correspondence, but I would prefer to have the statement made in one document; either in your own handwriting or under your signature. I enclose a form which I wish you would sign and return.67

The form which Carus enclosed was short and to the point. Peirce was asked to acknowledge that he owned the copyright and to “authorize the Open Court Publishing Company to publish [the Illustrations] in such a form as they may deem advisable” (emphasis added). Peirce responded by drawing up a contract of his own.⁶⁸ His version of the contract is dated August 26. Peirce gave the Open Court the right to publish the Illustrations, acknowledged that he had been given that right by Appleton, and added that he “should be glad if they would include with them the article that appeared in that same Monthly in the number for January 1901 either in whole or omitting the first four and a half or five pages.”⁶⁹ Peirce further granted the Open Court the right to publish the papers, albeit alone or collectively, in the Monist. Next he stipulated two conditions: (1) The papers may only be published, whether alone or together, when they are accompanied with a “statement of a change of views on my part as I may furnish upon notice that the printing is to commence at once, my Appendix to be mailed by me within a month of my receiving such notice.” (2) Peirce be given the opportunity to, as he put it, “make such corrections in the copy to be used by the printer as I can write clearly in the side margins.” Peirce further added, in square brackets, “I entirely abandon my original wish to make further alterations, since I find it far more feasible to state how I have changed my mind in an appendix or appendices” (RL 77:248). The contract, which is signed and dated, survives among the Peirce papers, together with a signed cover letter. There is no indication that Carus ever received such a contract, and the presence of Carus’s original contract among the Peirce papers, pristine and unsigned, suggests that Peirce never sent that contract either (RL 77:245).⁷⁰

Contractual issues notwithstanding, Carus’s strategy worked: Peirce mailed him a 52-page letter (reproduced below as chapter 9) in which he described his poor health and announced that he would limit himself to a preface in which he stated “in general terms how what I then say ought to be altered,” adding that “I will here (if my strength holds out) try to indicate the points I should make.” The letter, which Carus received on August 29, is undated, though its latter part is dated separately August 23.⁷¹ The revisions suggested in this letter are far more extensive than what is implied in the contract—the urge to do more than what could be written clearly in the margins of the compositor’s copy was clearly far too strong. It is difficult to assess when exactly Peirce worked on Essays on the Reasoning of Science (R 334), an undated, marked-up offprint of the Illustrations with a number of significant additions, however handwriting and context suggests that it might have been composed around this time as well. (The alterations are included as footnotes in chapters 1 and 2 below). From manuscripts R 703–4 it is clear that Peirce worked extensively on the third Illustrations article, “The Doctrine of Chances,” that same month. These manuscripts are reproduced as notes and an appendix in chapter 3.

Carus responded the very same day he received Peirce’s bulky letter, writing, “Your letter and enclosure came duly to hand this morning and I hasten to acknowledge their receipt and express to you my best thanks.”⁷² In the same letter he warned Peirce that he might not be able to publish the book in the near future: “I only wish to be ready to do so whenever the time may arrive. I have in preparation an English edition of Couturat’s Logic and when I see the attempts of others to deal with the logical problem I wish you not to be forgotten, hence my anxiety to be ready to bring you before the public as soon as the time comes.”⁷³ Financial considerations were an issue, and possibly Carus still worried about copyright.⁷⁴ That same day Carus also wrote Russell, telling him that he received a letter from Peirce that morning, including “an introduction to his papers on Logic, published some time ago in the Popular Science Monthly, which I bought from him.” Peirce, Carus added, “feels the approach of his age and seems to think that it would be better not to touch the old papers because he is no longer capable of doing the work to his satisfaction.”⁷⁵

Two days later, on September 1, Carus wrote Russell again, offering him the job of editing the Illustrations:

I’m in receipt of a long letter from Peirce which I think of handing over to your tender mercies. It would involve on you some work which I am sure you will like. It is an explanation of how his logical works should be treated, what other article should be inserted, and what alterations should be made. If you wish I will hand over to you the editing of the papers after you have finished with the Couturat book. Please let me know at once, and I will forward the original copy. Peirce wants it returned but it may be better to have it first copied. He wants to work it out into good shape so as to have it ready for publication for use in connection with the republication of these articles. I assume that you know to what articles he refers, and I also assume that they are in your hands. You might use your own copy and make ready the whole as soon as you can. I am almost inclined to publish the work now and have it set in Chicago provided the copy of the MS. will be in good shape so as not to cause unnecessary corrections in the text. I have a feeling that Peirce may die at any time, and I would like to have these articles in as good a shape as possible brought before the public. I have slight fear that he will not improve the articles, and I want you to watch over it. He is apt to insert his later aberrations and at least even though they may be valuable his more intricate notions. This may especially be true of the insertion of his theory of graphs.76

Russell replied the following day, stating optimistically “I have Peirce’s consent to use all that I have learned from his non-published MSS and letters to me,” adding that Peirce himself,

will never round up his extensive projected work on Logic…. the lure of study and of anticipated discovery has such a dominance with him that he cannot buckle down to the drudgery of working out a report of his progress. He is essentially and constitutionally an explorer and discoverer and not a good expositor at all. He is diffuse on making an unimportant point and laconic and blind to the last degree on many a point of prime import.⁷⁷

In response, Carus forwarded Peirce’s letter to Russell, who had three copies typed up at the Open Court’s Chicago office on September 17.⁷⁸ One copy went to Russell and another to Carus, while the original letter was returned to Peirce.⁷⁹ Carus, however, remained unsure whether Russell had actually accepted the job. Almost two months after Russell had the copies made, on November 7, Carus wrote to him, “I have not heard from you for a long time. I wish to know whether you accept my proposition to edit Peirce’s logical papers including additions which he suggested to me to make. Please let me hear from you soon because I am anxious to publish the logical papers in good form.”⁸⁰ Russell responded two days later, writing, “As to Peirce’s logical papers, I am at work on them and am delighted to have the task of editing them. Hope to report some progress very soon.”⁸¹ Progress clearly did not come soon enough for Carus, as on November 22 he wrote Peirce:

I am rather disappointed that nothing is doing concerning the republication of your logical papers. I handed it over to Mr. Russell, and he is anxious to do the work. In my opinion he is well prepared for it for he has read every line you have written, and is a most enthusiastic admirer of yours. … He will accomplish the work by adding footnotes and references to the text and when this is done the result of his labors shall be submitted to you for your approval. I believe that he is better fitted than even you yourself to revise the work for the simple reason that he will stick to the plan more as an editor than you would do. You seem to be anxious to introduce new material which would be foreign to the subject of these logical papers. Your existential graphs should not be introduced here nor your theory of probability. They are a subject by themselves and would only burden this splendidly popular exposition of logical papers. Accordingly I advise you to leave out what is not absolutely necessary for the present purpose.

I hope to be able to have this book of yours edited by Russell ready by the end of this year, and would like to be able to present you with a copy during the spring of 1911.82

Russell too was disappointed with the lack of progress. Also on the 22nd he wrote to Carus:

I wrote Peirce a long letter nearly a month ago and expected an answer very soon in reply but he has not replied yet and I have written him again. In my first letter I told him what I understood to be the plan and asked him if I was well informed.… What I personally have been at work on is going over the papers studiously and getting together and collating data for footnotes. His extensive though scattered writings afford a wealth of resources to one who like me has kept up with his output, for the elucidation and amplification of every point he makes in the papers in question. My own persuasion is that he has said in some form or other all he has got to say that he can say without completely overlaying the papers with a mass of recondite text that will completely extinguish the popular quality of the papers as they are originally made up.

For instance he wants to put in a paper on the Existential Graphs and then he wants to write a new essay on probability depending largely for its justification on these Graphs. If you will look over your copy of his last letter you will see.⁸³

In other words I think we could make up a better book without him and still not under-represent him nor mis-represent him. There is not a point touched upon in the papers that he has not within ten years past expressed his mature ideas upon. Now these when collected and referred to in footnotes and perhaps in some instances quoted at length would give a better survey of his views in the [work,] as he put them forth in the papers for popular consumption than anything he will be likely to furnish.

Another thing, if he was simply going to furnish a Preface that would be all right enough but he proposes to alter the order of the papers put a chapter on Graphs &c &c. Now would that break up the unity of the original schema? I fear so.”⁸⁴

In his response, Carus gave Russell the green light to begin editing the papers, and he agreed with Russell that the Illustrations should not be burdened with the existential graphs and Peirce’s views on probability, as doing so would “spoil the logical papers.”85 Afraid that Peirce might die before the project could be completed, Carus was eager to see the work commence, and hoped that the edited version could be sent to the compositor before the end of the year.

Carus also planned to write Peirce about it, but it seems that a bad fall may have prevented him from doing so. He had broken tendons from both kneecaps and, as he explained to Marie de Souza Canavarro, he would be “laid up for some time at the Presbyterian Hospital in Chicago, and … keep both legs in plaster casts for a long time.”⁸⁶ Russell visited Carus in the hospital on December 19. The Illustrations must have been a topic of conversation, as later that day Russell asked the Chicago office of the Open Court to return to him his personal bound copy of the Illustrations, explaining that he needed it to edit the papers, and he also asked for Carus’s copy of Baldwin’s Dictionary, which he needed to write his notes.⁸⁷

On Christmas Eve, Peirce wrote Carus voicing his strong reservations about Russell adding anything to the Illustrations:

A postal card from Russell informs me that you do not want the book (i.e. my papers in the Pop. Sci. of 1877–8) added to or subtracted from or altered over very much. Only to have noted my present dissents.

I feel that I owe you my thanks for this decision. I hope no notes will be added, in any form, by anybody else; for I should regard it as very unfair to exclude my own explanations and print in the volume any other person’s.⁸⁸

Peirce continued by mentioning the last tortures of his wife’s pulmonary tuberculosis, problems with carpenters, masons, and plumbers, the early frosts, and the critical condition of his own health, all in an attempt to show Carus “why I have been unable to get much done on this book, though I have written a good deal which your kind decision will enable me to publish separately, after a reasonable interval.” At the end of the letter, Peirce returned to Francis Russell and his role in republishing the Illustrations:

Our friend F.C.R. [Francis Russell] has I suppose seen his best days. I wrote a few words of thanks to him for his attempt to say in The Monist of July 1908 what I was driving at in the last part of my article therein. I did it simply because he so hopelessly missed the point as to convince me that it would be foolish to attempt to set him right, and I wanted to spare the poor fellow’s feelings. His wonderings about the doctrine of parallel’s (which might better be called the principle of similar triangles) fixed my estimate, and I hope he won’t do much on the volume to be printed. But, above all, I don’t want to hurt his feelings; and I think you had better not show him this letter.⁸⁹

To further ensure that Carus would not share the letter with Russell, Peirce added at the top, firmly underlining each word: “Don’t read this to F.C.R.”

In a technical sense, Carus conformed to Peirce’s wish. He did not show Russell the letter, but instead he paraphrased it:

I have a letter from Mr. Peirce, which he does not want me to send to you, although I have no objection to telling you what he thinks. He complains about being short of cash, speaks again of his dying wife, and thinks that you have become feebleminded, a thought which it se[ems] you heartily reciprocate. He is afraid of your notes, and wants me to incorporate only his own dissent from his former position. I would propose to have your comments on him published as a comment in the MONIST, and we can use that article as a kind of introduction in a second edition of his logical papers. What do you think of this plan?90

The letter clearly quenched Russell’s enthusiasm, as he altogether stopped working on the Illustrations. Nothing happened until April, when Carus pretty much threatened to fire him:

I wish you had sent me some of the work which is in your hands. I have been waiting for it and I ought to have something to show that you are engaged with the Open Court Publishing Company.

Today I send you word that I would like to see you next week so as to explain to you how it is impossible to continue our engagement. It may be disappointing to you, but I do not see how under the circumstances, I can avoid it. I hope to be in Chicago during the next week.⁹¹

Russell responded defensively, writing, “Last winter you wrote me that Peirce kicked against my editing the book and you either said or implied that I was to suspend my work on that behalf, and write an article on the book and the philosophy of Peirce after the publication of the book,” and he added that he had been working diligently on the latter.⁹² To this Carus responded with a scathing letter, denying that he ever suggested that Russell should suspend his work and accusing him of not doing the work for which he was being paid. “I never told you to stop the work,” Carus wrote, “I told you not to insert your critical views in the book itself but to make the book ready by going over the Peirce articles, make your explanations so far as Peirce would not object and bring out your criticism and your own views in a special article to be published in either The Monist or The Open Court.” In contrast to both Peirce and Russell, Carus steadfastly maintained that the original papers were good as they stood, and that they should be interfered with as little as possible. The differences were ironed out and on April 13, Carus wrote an optimistic letter urging Russell to finish up editing the Illustrations:

I have not heard from Peirce for a longtime, but I think it would be easy for you to let the Peirce logical papers be set in Chicago. The changes ought to be few, if any, only where you are positive that Peirce has changed his views. You can send him proofs and he will naturally reply and write what changes he wants to make while reading the proofs.93

Not much happened after that. More than two years later, in June of 1913, having heard nothing from either Peirce or Russell, Carus sent the Illustrations to the British logician Philippe Jourdain for a consult.⁹⁴ Since 1910, Jourdain had been in charge of the new London office of the Open Court Publishing Company, and he had become deeply involved not only with the journals—Jourdain took over the editorship of The Monist—but also with book publications. Jourdain received the Illustrations on the 7th of July,⁹⁵ and after writing Carus several times that he was working on them, finally explained to Carus on August 8, “I did very little in the way of alterations of Peirce’s papers on logic, as I do not think that old papers, when republished, should be cut about more than necessary. They should have a good sale, and I hope they will be published soon.”⁹⁶

Jourdain’s response gave Carus the confidence he needed to edit the Illustrations himself. Fairly certain that the articles would be free of copyright, he added several notes and wrote the “Publisher’s Preface” that is included in the current edition as well.⁹⁷ On August 23, 1913, he sent a copy of his preface to Peirce, adding the following in an accompanying letter:

I have gone over your Logical Papers and have written a preface of which I enclose a copy. I believe you will be quite pleased at having these lectures on Logic published. You will remember that I paid you for the republication, further that you have assured me that you possess the right to republish it. Moreover the copyright of the Popular Science Monthly either has expired or will expire very soon. In case your copyright should be doubtful in any way, I would rather wait until the copyright expires.

You wish to have it revised because you think that you could improve several passages, but I believe that the article is very good as it stands. Moreover I have submitted this series of articles to one of the most critical modern logisticians, Mr. Philip E. B. Jourdain. He has returned the copy to me, and approves its publication as it stands.⁹⁸

Peirce quickly responded, explaining his long silence by telling Carus that on December 13, 1911, he slipped on the well-polished floor in his study breaking a few ribs, “the broken ends sticking into the pleura and almost stopping my breath.” This, Peirce continued, long prevented him from doing any strenuous intellectual work. He further reiterated his wish to have his review of Pearson’s Grammar of Science99 included, or some of his earlier papers, such as his “old paper on Logical Extension and Comprehension” (W2, sel. 6), for which, he added, “I have a lot of notes … which I will send you as they are pasted into stiff covers and can be easily looked over.”¹⁰⁰ Carus was open to the suggestion of including the Pearson review, but suggested in lieu of republishing earlier papers Peirce write a resume of his theories that “will whet the appetite of readers to study your system more carefully in your former publications.”¹⁰¹ Carus further warned Peirce that he did not think the Open Court would make any money of the papers (“Books on logic are not much bought.”), but that it was his main intention to keep Peirce’s thought before the public.

Two months before Peirce’s death Russell wrote a long letter to Carus, complaining that for a long time Peirce was not answering his letters. Russell continued his letter with a portrait of Peirce that is markedly different from his often quoted obituary of Peirce. “Peirce,” he writes, “is a case of a remarkably penetrating mind, well-furnished with appropriate information but just as remarkably lacking in synthetic faculty. I don’t believe he has ever been able to master and deploy the several very, very fertile insights and atsights he has had so as to organize the same into a sound system with what was already known.” Russell cites the Illustrations as an example:

No better example of the ‘scrappiness’ of his work can be cited than his six papers in the Popular Science Monthly. The domain of logic as traditionally conceived, that is to say, formal logic, embraces 1^st a doctrine of Terms, 2^nd a doctrine of the Proposition, 3^rd a doctrine of the Syllogism, and 4^th a doctrine of Fallacies. To this many logicians have annexed a doctrine of Induction. To me it is evident that Peirce would also add a doctrine of Hypothesis. But in the Popular Science Monthly Papers Formal Logic or the doctrine of necessary reasoning is referred to only in an almost incidental way while most of the text is not properly logical at all unless Methodology is to be taken as properly logical while his doctrine of Induction and his doctrine of Hypothesis is very cursorily treated. Nothing whatever therein leads up to any branch of Calculative (Boolean) Logic or to the extension of the same to the exigencies presented by the use of relative terms, that is to say, the Logic of Relations. In fact the papers are “scrappy,” “scrappy,” “scrappy.”

Even with respect to these scraps Peirce seems not to be satisfied with them… He wants to alter paper No.2 in respect to the illustrations of the applications of his test of meaning. Also he wants to enunciate a new doctrine of mathematical probability by holding that Laplace and Mill have a vicious influence in this regard. This is as much as to say that Mill’s doctrine of induction has no sound basis, for materialistic probability as opposed to subjective probability must be founded upon a perfectly sound mathematical theory of probability and any doctrine of induction founded upon subjective probability is fallacious as has been shown by Boole and others.102

Peirce died on April 19, 1914. Three days later, Carus asked Russell to write Peirce’s obituary for the Monist, adding that he is still planning to publish the Illustrations, but that Russell better not mention it as he is does not yet know how and when to publish them.¹⁰³

The subject of republishing the Illustrations resurfaces three years later, in December 1917. Carus had received a letter from Irving C. Smith from Harvard, who Carus explained to Russell was working on a posthumous edition of Peirce’s work, which presumably was to include the Illustrations, though Smith called them “Peirce’s stories in logic.”¹⁰⁴ In his response to Smith, Carus wrote that several years earlier he had purchased the rights to those papers from Peirce “for a couple of hundred dollars,” and had not yet “come to a conclusion concerning the republication of these papers on logic.” Smith, as it turns out, was assisting Morris Cohen, whose 1923 Chance, Love, and Logic, was to be the first posthumous edition of Peirce’s papers. Carus’s claim that he possessed the rights to the Illustrations did little to stop Cohen. Chance, Love, and Logic consists of two parts. The first, “Chance and Logic,” is nothing other than the Illustrations; the second, “Love and Chance,” reprints five other articles Carus had the copyright to: the five cosmological papers that Peirce published in the Monist in the early 1890s. Carus himself never ended up publishing the Illustrations, nor did he live to see Chance, Love, and Logic appear in print. He died in 1919, four years before the book came out.

Chance, Love, and Logic is not the only posthumous work to include the Illustrations. Possibly the most influential rendition appeared in the Collected Papers of the 1930s. In the Collected Papers, however, the Illustrations is divided over several volumes, and even where three of the articles are included back-to-back, they are out of sequence.¹⁰⁵ The Collected Papers editors did include some of Peirce’s later reworking, but they did so in a way that makes it difficult to see where their printed text was truly drawn from, leading to significant confusion, as Peirce’s views shifted over time. In 1986 a far more responsible version appeared in volume 3 of the 30-volume Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition. This edition, however, includes only the papers as they originally appeared in the Popular Science Monthly and in Revue Philosophique de la France et de L’Étranger, reserving subsequent revisions by Peirce for later volumes, yet to be published. The current edition, which began with an email to Paul Carus’s grandson, André Carus, seeks to combine Peirce’s original Popular Science articles and Peirce’s subsequent attempts at reworking them in a single volume, and it does so in a way that makes it easier to see when Peirce altered what, and for what purpose. This volume too, however, is unlikely to contain the final word on the Illustrations: words do not stay still.

Cornelis de Waal

2013

NOTES

1. Some details can be found in Cornelis de Waal, “The History of Peirce’s 1894 Logic Book,” Peirce Project Newsletter 3.2 (2000): 4–5. How to Reason is forthcoming as volume 11 of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce.

2. The most influential attribution probably occurs in William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: The Modern Library, 1902), 434–35. James’s first attribution in print appeared four years earlier in “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” The University Chronicle (Berkeley, California). The latter was reprinted, with some modifications, as “The Pragmatic Method” in Journal of Philosophy 1 (1904): 673–87. It is found also in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans, 1907), 46–47.

3. An earlier account of the publication history of the Illustrations is found in Donald R. Koehn, Charles S. Peirce’s “Illustrations of the Logic of Science,” MA Thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1966.

4. Robert Crease, “Charles Sanders Peirce and the first absolute measurement standard,” Physics Today (December 2009): 29–44, 39.

5. Whitehead called Peirce the American Aristotle in a letter to Charles Hartshorne. Paul Weiss in his Dictionary of American Biography article on Peirce called him the American Leibniz.

6. Raymie E. McKerrow, “Richard Whately and the revival of logic in nineteenth-century England,” Rhetorica 5.2 (1987): 163–85.

7. Julius Adolph Stöckhardt, The Principles of Chemistry, Illustrated by Simple Experiments (Philadelphia: E. H. Butler, 1861); Heinrich Will, F. Voehler, Justus Liebig, and Francois Malepeyre, Nouveau Manuel Complet de Chimie Analytique (Paris: Librairie Encyclopédique de Roret, 1855).

8. For a detailed discussion of the instrument, see Klaus Staubermann, “The Trouble with the Instrument: Zöllner’s Photometer,” Journal for the History of Astronomy (2000): 323–38.

9. The letter is included in Christine Ladd-Franklin, “Charles S. Peirce at the Johns Hopkins,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 13.26 (21 December 1916): 715–22; see esp. 718–20.

10. This being said, with regard to the preservation of manuscript material we should distinguish between the period before Peirce moved to Milford and the period thereafter. Whereas Peirce moved around quite a bit during the early part of his life, in Milford he remained in a single location that was spacious enough to not having to throw anything away.

11. A little over a year earlier, Peirce published in the North American Review a long essay inspired by Frazer’s edition of Berkeley’s Works. Peirce’s review received in turn a positive review by Chauncey Wright in the Nation. See W2, sels. 48–50.

12. William James, Essays in Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 352, 364.

13. See e.g., ibid., 335.

14. Ohio Medical Recorder 2.5 (October 1877): 236.

15. Charles Peirce to Sarah Mills Peirce, 8 April 1878.

16. Ibid.

17. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive (8th edition; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1882): Bk. III, Ch. iii, § 1, 225.

18. Written by Peirce in response to an October 26, 1904 request by Matoon Monroe Curtis, who was responsible for the section “Geschichte der Philosophie in Nord America,” for Friedrich Überweg and Max Heinze, Grundriß der Geschichte der Philosophie.

19. “Comment se fixe la croyance,” Revue philosophique (December 1878): 553–69; “Comment rendre nos idées claires,” Revue philosophique (January 1879): 39–57.

20. Ladd-Franklin, “Charles S. Peirce at the Johns Hopkins,” 719.

21. See Gérard Deledalle, “Peirce’s First Pragmatic Papers (1877–1878),” in Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Science: Essays in Comparative Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 23–36.

22. That the Illustrations inspired Carus to recruit Peirce can be surmised from a letter Carus sent to Peirce on January 30, 1907 (27.91.23; reference to sources held in the Open Court Archives at SIU’s Morris Library are by collection, box, and folder number).

23. Charles Peirce to Edward Hegeler, undated, but most likely mid-February 1893 (27.91.7).

24. The table of contents for A Quest of a Method lists in historical order three papers of the 1867 American Academy series (W2, sel. 3, 4, 6), all three 1868 Journal of Speculative Philosophy papers (W2, sel. 21–23), the 1871 Berkeley review (W2, sel. 48), the Illustrations, the 1883 “Theory of Probable Inference” (W4, sel. 64), and the Monist papers of the early 1890s (W8, sel. 23, 24, 27, 29, 30).

25. Both versions of this first essay are scheduled to be published in an appendix in W11.

26. This work is posthumously also referred to as the Grand Logic (see e.g. CP 8:278), possibly to contrast it with Peirce’s 1902–3 Minute Logic. There is no evidence that Peirce ever referred to this work (or any other work) by the name Grand Logic.

27. See Peirce’s September 8, 1894 letter to Francis Russell for two earlier tables of contents, the first describing “its present condition,” the second “how I would like to improve it.” The first table of contents includes the first four Illustrations papers; the second matches the description of the second volume of the announced twelve-volume Principles of Philosophy entitled Theory of Demonstrative Reasoning, which Peirce states is “substantially ready” (CP 8:284). Judging the letter to Russell, this second volume might have included “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” though Peirce’s description of the fifth volume, Scientific Metaphysics, suggests he might have planned to use them there.

28. A table of contents for How to Reason can be found in CP8:278–80, which also indicates which parts were published in the Collected Papers. A new edition of How to Reason is forthcoming as volume 11 of the Writings.

29. The same is true for the first table of contents given in the September 8, 1894 letter to Francis Russell, where “The Fixation of Belief” is listed as chapter 4, “The Doctrine of Chances” as chapter 13, “The Theory of Probable Inference” as chapter 14, and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” as chapter 15.

30. In an September 8, 1894 letter to Francis Russell devoted primarily to How to Reason, Peirce explains: “By transcendental I mean in Kant’s sense that is the epistemological aspect.”

31. In the first table of contents in his September 8, 1894 letter to Russell, Peirce even went so far as to move the third and fourth Illustrations papers between the first two.

32. Charles Peirce to Francis Russell, September 8, 1894.

33. The paper is included in The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition. Edited by John J. McDermott (Chicago, 1977), see esp. 347–48.

34. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature (London: Longmans, Green, and Co.), 444f.

35. The most complete edition of the lectures, edited by Patricia Ann Turrisi, is found in Charles S. Peirce, Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997).

36. Collected Papers, vol. 8, 300, entry G 1909–1; see also Robin’s catalogue, R 229).

37. The contents of this desk are not included in Richard Robin’s catalogue (which had been published two years earlier). They were catalogued separately by Robin in “The Peirce Papers: A Supplementary Catalogue,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 7.1 (1971): 37–57. This discovery was also made after volume 8 of the Collected Papers appeared. The letter to Carus is preserved in the Open Court Archives at the Morris Library, Southern Illinois University. This January 7, 1909 letter of Peirce to Carus is found at 27.91.25; two drafts of this letter are preserved at Harvard, RL 77:198–203.

38. Paul Carus to Charles Peirce, January 23, 1907, 27.91.23; RL77:190.

39. Paul Carus to Charles Peirce, January 30, 1907, 27.91.23; RL77:191.

40. William James to Paul Carus, February 18, 1907, 27.91.7.

41. Paul Carus to Charles Peirce, December 2, 1907, 27.91.23.

42. Paul Carus to Charles Peirce, December 9, 1908, 27.91.24.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid. A letter from M.A. Sacksteder, the Open Court’s office manager in Chicago, to Paul Carus, dated 9 February 1914, and unrelated to Peirce or the Illustrations, sheds some light on the copyright situation: “As regards the copyright law, the first period is 28 years and then by making a proper application, a renewal may be made for 14 years thus making the total length of the copyright 42 years” (27.12.14).

45. Charles Peirce to Francis Russell, January 1, 1909 (RL 387:445).

46. A draft of the letter, dated January 6, reveals that part of the reason why Peirce could not accept it was the work he was still engaged in for the Monist; Peirce did not mention this in the letter he sent (RL 77:199).

47. The reference is to Ernst Mach’s Science of Mechanics, the English translation of which was published by the Open Court in 1893. For this translation Peirce had been an advisor.

48. For a general overview of Peirce’s classification of the sciences see Beverly Kent, Charles S. Peirce: Logic and the Classification of the Sciences (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987).

49. Charles S. Peirce, “Pearson’s Grammar of Science. Annotations to the First Three Chapters,” Popular Science Monthly 58 (January 1901): 296–306 (P802).

50. Charles S. Peirce, “The Century’s Great Men in Science,” Evening Post, New York City (Saturday, January 12, 1901), section 3, page 1, columns 1–3 (P779).

51. Charles Peirce to Paul Carus, January 7, 1909, 27.91.25; a draft is preserved at Harvard (RL 77:202–3).

52. Paul Carus to Charles Peirce, January 11, 1909, 27.91.25.

53. Ibid. On the difference between pragmatism and pragmaticism, see especially Peirce’s 1905 “What Pragmatism Is,” which Carus published in the Monist (EP2, sel. 24, esp. 335).

54. Paul Carus to Charles Peirce, February 6, 1909, 27.91.25.

55. Charles Peirce to Paul Carus, March 9, 1909, 27.91.25.

56. Paul Carus to Charles Peirce, March 15, 1909, 27.91.25. Inter-office correspondence leaves the impression that Carus pushed for Peirce to get paid, even though the company’s publishing funds were low at the time.

57. Charles Peirce to Paul Carus, 27.91.25.

58. Ibid.

59. Paul Carus to Francis Russell, October 20, 1909, 27.91.25.

60. Paul Carus to Francis Russell, December 6, 1909, 27.91.25.

61. Looking at the manuscripts written for the Illustrations during 1909, we can estimate how long Peirce worked each day and the speed of his writing, as he gives each sheet a date and time stamp.

62. This work is preserved as R 643–50.

63. Charles Peirce to Paul Carus, December 14, 1909, 27.91.25.

64. Paul Carus to Charles Peirce, December 17, 1909, 27.91.25. Note, though, that on December 25, 1909 Peirce wrote William James, “my Essay on Pragmatism, as it will appear in the revised edition, is more important than the Evolution of Laws of Nature series”—the latter is a reference to the papers Peirce wrote for the Monist in the early 1890s.

65. Paul Carus to Charles Peirce, April 30, 1910, 27.91.26.

66. This letter is practically identical to one Carus wrote on July 27, 1910, but apparently did not send (27.91.26).

67. Paul Carus to Charles Peirce, August 1, 1910, 27.91.26. On Peirce’s copy of the letter, but absent on the carbon copies, Carus played with the possibility of publishing the Illustrations without any mention of their former publication by Appleton.

68. The contract Carus sent Peirce is preserved at Harvard as RL 77:245; Peirce’s (draft) versions of the contract are preserved as RL 77:246–51.

69. RL 77:247. Peirce did not make any reference to copyright issues related to the 1901 paper—a paper that was written for the Monthly after Appleton had sold the magazine.

70. In the margin of the cover letter, which Peirce also held back, Peirce wrote, “Of course I will sign that paper & forward it. I can’t at the moment lay my hands on it” (RL 77:253). There are no signs that he ever did send Carus a contract.

71. Further down Peirce entered a third date, this time only stating the month without identifying the day, suggesting he did not complete the letter on the 23rd. Furthermore, in the unsent cover letter of August 26 Peirce mentions “a long letter that should have gone two days ago” (RL 77:252–53).

72. Paul Carus to Charles Peirce, August 29, 1910, 27.91.26.

73. Ibid.

74. On the copy of the letter Peirce received (RL 77:254) Carus had written by hand “At present our funds are low and I have to economize”—a comment not found on the carbon copies of the typed letter.

75. Paul Carus to Francis Russell, August 29, 1910, 27.91.26.

76. Paul Carus to Francis Russell, September 1, 1910, 27.91.7.

77. Francis Russell to Paul Carus, September 2, 1910, 27.91.7.

78. See Paul Carus to Francis Russell, September 3, 1910, 27.91.7, and Catherine Cook to Paul Carus, September 19, 1910, 27.14.3. The typescript is preserved at 27.91.27.

79. Most likely the third typescript was mailed to Peirce together with the original holograph, as one sheet of the typescript survives among the Peirce papers at Harvard (RL 77:242). This sheet, which is in a very poor shape, contains corrections that appear to be in Peirce’s hand.

80. Paul Carus to Francis Russell, November 7, 1910, 27.91.26. Though Carus forwarded Peirce’s letter to Russell on September 3, he did not interpret Russell’s September 2 letter as a sufficiently clear statement that Russell would take on the project. When forwarding the letter, Carus wrote: “You can understand that I myself would not have the time to edit Peirce’s papers. If I would wait for him he would never do it, and so I would be very glad if you would take charge of it” (Paul Carus to Francis Russell, September 3, 1910, 27.91.7).

81. Francis Russell to Paul Carus, November 9, 1910, 27.14.5.

82. Paul Carus to Charles Peirce, November 22, 1910, 27.91.26.

83. This letter is reproduced below as chapter 9.

84. Francis Russell to Paul Carus, November 22, 1910, 27.91.26.

85. Paul Carus to Francis Russell, November 28, 1910, 27.91.26.

86. Paul Carus to Marie de Souza Canavarro, December 6, 1910, 27.40.6.

87. Francis Russell to Lydia Robinson, December 19, 1910, 27.91.26. James Mark Baldwin, Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1901–05). Peirce’s 181 contributions to the dictionary, all signed C.S.P, are catalogued as P 761–78, 806–970.

88. Charles Peirce to Paul Carus, December 24, 1910, 27.91.26.

89. Ibid.

90. Paul Carus to Francis Russell, December 30, 1910, 27.91.26.

91. Paul Carus to Francis Russell, April 1, 1911, 27.91.27.

92. Francis Russell to Paul Carus, April 5, 1911, 27.91.27.

93. Paul Carus to Francis Russell, April 13, 1911, 27.91.27. In the Peirce papers at Harvard the first two sheets are preserved of an undated holograph editor’s preface to the Illustrations that is clearly in Russell’s hand. In rather bland prose Russell wrote that the papers “are issued in their original text,” thereby preserving the format “upon which the voluminous literature of Pragmatism has arisen” (RL 387b:471–2).

94. Philippe Jourdain to Paul Carus, July 5, 1911, 27.43.77; earlier Jourdain had listed “Peirce’s papers” among several prospected book publications (Jourdain to Carus, November 28, 1911, 27.43.77).

95. Philippe Jourdain to Paul Carus, July 7, 1911, 27.43.77.

96. Philippe Jourdain to Paul Carus, August 8, 1913, 27.43.77; see also Jourdain to Carus July 9 and 11 in same folder. In the latter, Jourdain writes: “Peirce is getting on quickly.”

97. The Publisher’s Preface and a printers’ copy of the Illustrations articles, lightly annotated by Carus, are preserved in 27.91.40.

98. Paul Carus to Charles Peirce, 23 August 1913, 27.91.28.

99. Charles S. Peirce, “Pearson’s Grammar of Science. Annotations on the First Three Chapters,” Popular Science Monthly 58 (January 1901): 296–306; P802. Draft material related to this is preserved as R 1434.

100. Charles S. Peirce to Paul Carus, August 28, 1913, 27.91.28. Most likely this is a reference to an undated notebook preserved in R 725 (WMS 170), which has the original publication pasted in it with ample handwritten annotations. Peirce used these annotations when updating the article for How to Reason (R 421).

101. Paul Carus to Charles Peirce, December 10, 1913, 27.91.28.

102. Francis Russell to Paul Carus, February 20, 1914, 27.91; Russell’s Obituary appeared as “In Memoriam Charles S. Peirce,” Monist 24 (July 1914): 469–72.

103. Paul Carus to Francis Russell, April 22, 1914, 27.91.7.

104. Irving Cranford Smith, a student of physics and mathematics at Harvard, published anonymously “Further Bibliography of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce,” Journal of Philosophy 15.21 (October 10, 1918): 578–84, which is a supplement to Morris Cohen’s “Charles S. Peirce and a Tentative Bibliography of His Published Writings,” Journal of Philosophy 13.26 (December 21, 1916): 726–37. Smith was also involved in Cohen’s Chance, Love, and Logic: Philosophical Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1923), the first posthumous edition of Peirce’s papers.

105. In the Collected Papers the Illustrations papers are found at the following locations: “The Fixation of Belief” (CP 5.358–87); “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (CP 5.388–410); “The Doctrine of Chances” (CP 2.645–68); “The Probability of Induction” (CP 2.669–93); “The Order of Nature” (CP 6.395–427); “Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis” (CP 2.619–44).