NOTES*

1. IMMORTALITY IN THE LIGHT OF SYNECHISM

1. The root verb for is to hold or keep together, to continue, to preserve. Peirce’s surgical etymology does not appear prominently in Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, which gives many examples related to the continuity of space, time, numbers, and arguments. The edition of the Lexicon Peirce most likely used only indicates that is a form of encountered in medical writers (a more recent edition identifies two authors, but without specifying the context). This is apparently the only basis for Peirce’s claim that the word meant, as he put it in a draft, “‘the establishment of continuity’ in a surgical sense” (MS 946:5).

2. “The Law of Mind,” The Monist 2 (July 1892): 533–59; EPl:312–33.

3. This is a paraphrase of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, first expressed in print in his 1878 paper “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (EP1:132), but anticipated in earlier publications, including the 1868 “Cognition series” (EPl:11ff.). Other expressions are found throughout this volume; see for instance selection 8, p. 96, selection 10, pp. 134–35, and selection 24, pp. 340–41.

4. From Parmenides’ poem fragment 6, lines 1–2. Peirce miswrote the last word as it is here corrected into

5. The hymn, according to MS S70:7, is from the beginning of The Metaphysics of the Upanishads, or Vichar Sagar, a work by Niscaladasa (d. c. 1863), originally titled Vicarasagara; translated by Lala Sreeram (Calcutta: Heeralal Dhole, 1885; New Delhi: Asian Publication Services, 1979).

6. Edward Stanton Huntington (1841–1895) wrote, under the pseudonym Edward Stanton, Dreams of the Dead (Boston, 1892). The Nation published a review by Peirce on 8 September 1892: see CN 1:165–66 (a partial draft is in MS 1513).

7. Gustav Freytag (1816–1895), German writer, published Die verlorene Handschrift, a novel of university life, in 1864. The novel was translated and serialized in The Open Court in the late 1880s, and published in book form as The Lost Manuscript: A Novel (Chicago: Open Court Pub. Co., 1890).

2. WHAT IS A SIGN?

1. Section numbers, which in the manuscript begin with §31, here begin with §1, since the first chapter of Peirce’s projected book is not included.

2. Book II of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels opens on a fanciful map of Brob-dingnag merged into a map of the North American Pacific coast.

3. Peirce wrote “signs” instead of “indices,” a mistake given the preceding context. Some early writings, however, do refer to indices as “signs” (see EP1:7).

4. De interpretatione, II.16a.12.

5. Peirce wrote “in Greek” rather than “in Greece” because he is working through the list of alternative translations provided by Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon under the entry

6. Cf. William of Ockham’s Summa totius logicae, part I, ch. 14.

7. “Every symbol follows from a symbol.”

8. Peirce often quotes this verse from the fourteenth stanza of Emerson’s poem “The Sphinx” (Dial, Jan. 1841).

3. OF REASONING IN GENERAL

1. Archibald Henry Sayce (1845–1933). As Peirce noted in parentheses here removed, Sayce’s article is in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia, 6:43.b.

2. Joseph H. Allen and James B. Greenough, Allen and Greenough’s Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges, Founded on Comparative Grammar (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1884), 131n.

3. Horace, Odes, 1.2.

4. Priscian (fl. c. A.D. 500), best known of all the Latin grammarians, author of the influential Institutiones grammaticae.

5. Four paragraphs have here been omitted; they present a long discussion of certain logico-grammatical features of Egyptian and other languages.

6. Despite Peirce’s claim, Martin Grabmann showed in 1922 that the Tractatus, found in the first volume of Duns Scotus’s Opera Omnia (1639), was written by Thomas von Erfurt (first half of fourteenth century).

7. Siger de Brabant (c.1235–c.1284), radical Aristotelianist who taught at the University of Paris. Peirce may be confounding him with Siger de Courtrai, however, who was also a master of arts in Paris around 1309, and the author of a Summa modorum significandi. Michel de Marbais is one of many lesser known authors of similar treatises De modis significandi. Albert of Saxony (d. 1390), German Ockhamist philosopher, was rector of the universities of Paris and Vienna, and the author of many works of logic, physics, and mathematics.

8. That other chapter was not written, but selection 8 probably discusses many of the points Peirce would have made. See also his “Note on the Theory of the Economy of Research” (W4:72–78).

9. Thomas Davidson (1840–1900), Aristotle and Ancient Educational Ideals (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1892). Davidson, born in Scotland, moved to the United States in 1867 where he was highly respected as an independent philosopher, scholar, and teacher by a circle of friends that included Peirce and William James.

10. A composite photograph, according to a Century Dictionary definition, is a single photographic portrait produced from more than one person. The negatives taken from each person show the faces as nearly as possible of the same size and lighting, and in the same position. The negatives are then printed in superposition on the same sheet of paper, and are each exposed to light for an equal amount of time. Study of such photographs was thought to manifest general types of countenance and other traits.

11. William de la Mare (d. c.1290), English philosopher and Franciscan theologian, leading critic of Thomas Aquinas, and author of Correctorium fratris Thomae (1278; “Corrective of Brother Thomas”). William Ware (d. after 1300), also a Franciscan, very probably a teacher of Duns Scotus at Oxford. Scholars are divided on whether the two Williams were the same person.

12. No such chapter was written, and Peirce does not appear to have treated of compound icons elsewhere.

13. Shakespeare, The Tempest, act 4, scene 1, line 151. This appears to have been a favorite line of Peirce’s parents (see W5:xlvii).

4. PHILOSOPHY AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

1. Peirce alludes, among others, to Eduard Zeller and Christian August Brandis (see notes 4 and 10 below).

2. See selection 8, “On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents.”

3. Theaetetus, 174a.

4. Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), A History of Greek Philosophy: From, the Earliest Period to the Time of Socrates, tr. S. F. Alleyne (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1881), l:213n.2.

5. A History of Greek Philosophy, 2:4n.l and 2:213n.l.

6. Diogenes of Sinope (4th century B.C.), prototype of the Cynics. Zeller’s statement comes from his Socrates and the Socratic Schools, tr. Oswald J. Reichel (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1885), 288.

7. Socrates and the Socratic Schools, 288n.1. Zeller says “so greatly exaggerated by tradition.”

8. Pyrrho of Elis (c.360–c.272 B.C.), the founder of Skepticism.

9. Timon of Phlius (c.320–c.230 B.C.); his works, which have survived in fragments only, preserved and propagated Pyrrho’s teaching.

10. Christian August Brandis (1790–1867), German historian of classical philosophy, editor of Aristotle and author of, among other works, Geschichte der Entwickelungen der griechischen Philosophie und ihrer Nachwirkungen im romischen Reiche.

11. The “arduous madness of the learned Lucretius”—author of the celebrated Epicurean poem De rerum natura.

12. Republic, VII.532a–534e; Phaedrus, 276–277a.

13. Aristotle’s father, Nicomachus, was a member of the medical guild of Asclepiadae, “the descendants of Asclepius” (the god of healing)—physicians whose school was located in the island of Cos (Hippocrates’s home), and who took their name from the Homeric

14. Peirce refers to a set of eight lectures on the “Logic of Events,” which he described in an 18 December 1897 letter to William James.

15. The “word” came from William James, in a letter to Peirce dated 22 December 1897: “I am sorry you are sticking so to formal logic. . . . Now be a good boy and think a more popular plan out. . . . You are teeming with ideas—and the lectures need not by any means form a continuous whole. Separate topics of a vitally important character would do perfectly well.”

16. Peirce wrote a number of lectures on “Detached Ideas on Vitally Important Topics”; they are found in MSS 435–36, 438–40.

17. Peirce probably refers to a letter from William James, dated January 23, 1898, to which he responded three days later.

18. The next lecture is “Types of Reasoning” (MS 441), in RLT 123–42.

19. At first Peirce had written: “Such men are intellectual petits crevés, nice to have around”; he then deleted it.

20. By “the fly on the wheel” Peirce means a device that regulates the rotation of a wheel, such as is used in clockwork and other machinery; also called a flywheel.

21. The Greek expression (found in Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 1.22) means “a possession for all time.” Used by Carus in his Fundamental Problems (Chicago: Open Court, 1891), 22.

22. “Everyone believes it is difficult to die. I believe it as well. But I see that once we reach that moment, everyone can do it.” (The author has not been identified.)

23. Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive (Paris, 1835), 2nd lesson.

24. As Peirce explains later, Heraclitus’s two “errors” are that the continuous is transitory (or that the eternal is not continuous), and that the being of the Idea is potential.

25. Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787), Jesuit natural philosopher, mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geodesist, engineer, and poet. Boscovichian points are centers of force interacting with each other according to an oscillatory law.

26. Peirce is referring to Wincenty Lutoslawski’s The Origin and Growth of Plato’s Logic, which had appeared the year before (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897). Lutoslawski determined that the Sophist belonged to the late dialogues through a stylometric study (see table pp. 178–79 in his book). See selection 13, note 2.

27. Metaphysics, 987b20–30; De anima, 404b19–26.

28. In 1903, if not earlier, Peirce changed his mind and made ethics the second branch of the normative sciences (after esthetics and before logic), themselves the second branch of philosophy, between phenomenology and metaphysics.

29. The eighth and last lecture was “The Logic of Continuity” (MS 948); in RLT 242–68.

30. Metaphysics, 988a7–14.

31. Alexander Pope (1688–1744). Fulke Greville (1554–1628), first Baron Brooke, born in Beauchamp Court (Warwickshire, England), philosophical poet. Sir John Davies (1569–1626), English jurist and poet.

32. Peirce is probably referring, not to the “Book of the Dead,” but to a fragment of writing known as the Ebers papyrus, written about 1600 B.C. and found in 1862 by Edwin Smith. The Ebers papyrus includes a large collection of prescriptions for numerous ailments, interspersed with magical spells and incantations. A number of other Egyptian medical texts had been found but not published by the time of Peirce’s lecture.

33. Attributed to Thucydides by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ars rhetorica xi.2): “The contact with manners then is education; and this Thucydides appears to assert when he says history is philosophy learned from examples.”

34. Sir William Herschel (1738–1822), British astronomer, noted especially for his discovery of Uranus; praised as the father of the new astronomy in Peirce’s 1901 review of a Herschel biography (CN 3:21).

35. Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), English scientist, studied heredity and intelligence, and founded the science of eugenics. Galton’s work influenced Peirce’s study of great men. Alphonse de Candolle (1806–1893), Swiss botanist, was also known for his bio-bibliographical study Histoire des sciences et des savants depuis deux siècles (Geneva: H. Georg, 1873).

36. Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev (1834–1907), Russian chemist who in 1869 formulated the periodic law that allowed him to classify and tabulate the chemical elements. Alexander William Williamson (1824–1904), English chemist, known for work on reversible reactions, dynamic equilibrium, and catalysis.

37. This is an allusion to the last two verses of Alfred Tennyson’s poem Will (1855), which read “Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill, I The city sparkles like a grain of salt.”

38. On 30 January 1898 Peirce wrote to William James: “I have now finished my first lecture and I have no doubt that when you hear it you will admit that it is far superior to the one on the First Rule of Logic. Every trace of personal vexation as well as of condemnation has been completely erased. One sentence of 5 words ‘There is a lesson there’ is all I utter in recommendation of the cultivation of mathematics.”

39. Arthur Cayley (1821–1895), “Sixth Memoir Upon Quantics,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 149 (1860):61–90. “A Memoir on the Theory of Matrices,” ibid., 148 (1858):17–37. “A Memoir on Abstract Geometry” (1870), in Collected Mathematical Papers (Cambridge, Eng.: The University Press, 1889–97), 6:456–69. In the manuscript, Peirce mistakenly wrote “Memoir on Absolute Geometry.”

40. Felix Klein (1849–1925), German mathematician, famous for his contribution to non-Euclidean geometry and for his Erlanger Programm which presented connections between geometry and group theory.

41. Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) and Johann Benedikt Listing (1808–1882), German mathematicians. Riemann initiated a general non-Euclidean system of geometry and contributed to the theory of functions. Listing was a naturalistic geometer, a founder of topology, and the author of Vorstudien zur Topologie (Göttingen, 1848; reprinted from the Göttingen Studien, 1847) and of the memoir “Der Census raümlicher Complexe” (Abhandlungen der K. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaft zu Göttingen, vols. 9–10, part II (1861):97–180), which greatly influenced Peirce.

5. THE FIRST RULE OF LOGIC

1. An exact reference has not been found, but some statements by Aristotle approaching this idea can be found in Prior Analytics, bk. 1, chapters 12–14, bk. 2, ch. 27, and in Posterior Analytics, bk. 1, chapters 1–3, 10, 13–14, 24 and 33.

2. By “in a Pickwickian sense” Peirce usually means “in a sense that has no effect” (CP 8.277). The phrase originates in Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers.

3. Peirce reviewed Phantasms of the Living, by Edmund Gurney, Frederic William Henry Myers, and Frank Podmore (London: Society for Psychical Research, 1886) in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 1 (December 1887):150–56.

4. See J. L. Adams, “On the Secular Variation of the Moon’s Mean Motion,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 143 (1853):397–406.

5. The pons asinorum (asses’ bridge) is the fifth proposition of the first book of Euclid, so named from its figure resembling a bridge, and from the difficulty many experience in getting over it. John Stuart Mill, A System, of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1865), bk. 2, ch. 4, §4, pp. 247–51. See Peirce’s “The ‘Pons Asinorum’ Again” in New York Daily Tribune (6 January 1891), and HP 1:568–69.

6. See the third lecture, “The Logic of Relatives,” in RLT 151–56, where Peirce provides an example of how the construction of diagrams according to the rules of his Existential Graphs illustrates logical inference in a way suggested by his theory of categories. For a full discussion of Existential Graphs see Don D. Roberts, The Existential Graphs of Charles S. Peirce (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1973).

7. William Whewell, Novum Organum Renovatum, 3rd ed. (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1858), II, iv.

8. This passage is followed in the manuscript by the deleted sentence: “I am happy to find this point receives valuable confirmation of an entirely independent thinker, whose care and thoroughness gives weight to all he says, Dr. Francis Ellingwood Abbot.”

9. See Peirce’s paper “Logical Machines” in The American Journal of Psychology 1 (November 1887):165–70, reprinted in Modern Logic 7 (1997):71–77.

10. Republic, VII.532C Republic, VII.526d Prior Analytics, bk. 2, ch. 23, 68b 15

11. William Whewell (1794–1866), Architectural Notes on German Churches (Cambridge: J. and J. J. Deighton, 1835).

12. William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences: From the Earliest to the Present Time (London: J.W. Parker, 1837).

13. The Greek phrase is explained in note 21 of selection 4.

14. To shorten reading time, Peirce deleted the passage ending here in the manuscript, from “But, then, Whewell” to “utterly exploded.”

15. Alexander Dumas (1802–1870), Impressions de voyage (Paris: Revue des Deux Mondes, 1834).

16. Peirce deleted the end of this paragraph to save time, from “I have been reading Alexandre Dumas” to “befalls it.”

17. Peirce cites the three most prominent English mathematicians of his time. Arthur Cayley (1821–1895) developed the theory of algebraic invariants together with James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897), who taught at Johns Hopkins while Peirce taught logic. Peirce had a high regard for Sylvester, the first editor of the American Journal of Mathematics, though Peirce claimed that Sylvester failed to properly recognize Peirce’s priority for certain algebraic results. William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879), also an English mathematician and philosopher, known for the theory of bi-quaternions and for his work on non-Euclidean space and topology; for Peirce’s review of Clifford’s best known work, see W5:254–56.

18. This passage is followed in the manuscript by the following crossed-out paragraph:

Since I myself am in no sense a teacher, but only a learner, and at the very foot of my class at that, for the reproach made against me is a just one that I am all the time modifying my doctrines, it is only to please you and not by any means myself that I have elected to address you upon topics of vital importance. To me no subject could possibly be more distasteful. For I know nothing about matters of vital importance. All I think I know concerns things which I hope may prove of subsidiary importance. As to topics of vital importance I have nothing to inculcate but sentiments. True, I am a sentimentalist in theory. I believe sentiment is far more deeply important than science. But by my training I am nothing [but] a scientific man myself and am quite out of my element in talking about things vitally important. My only excuse for attempting it is my desire to conform to your wishes. But I find that struggle as I may and do, I cannot keep dry details altogether out of my lectures. For if I did I should have nothing to say.

It is likely that Peirce decided to tuck in, at the precise location of this deleted paragraph which hinges between two pages in the manuscript, three additional leaves written later (located in MS 825); they contain the seven paragraphs that begin with “Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason” and end with “denial of an unusual phenomenon.” Other editors, however, have concluded differently.

19. Peirce’s strong interest in the economy of research is manifested in his 1879 paper “Note on the Theory of the Economy of Research” (W4:72–78).

20. This is the Academy founded by Plato c.387 B.C., which lasted until A.D. 529.

21. Cours de philosophie positive, 19th lesson.

22. In 1897 Salomon August Andrée (b. 1854), a Swedish engineer, died in an attempt to fly in a balloon to the North Pole from Spitzbergen.

23. Reported in Sir David Brewster’s Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (Edinburgh : T. Constable and Co., 1855), vol. 2, ch. 27.

24. Listing’s theorem, formulated in 1847, gives, for a geometrical configuration, a relation between the numbers of its points, lines, surfaces, and spaces. Though he is counted as a founder of topology (the name he coined), Listing’s work in this area has been largely supplanted by other approaches. Peirce devised more general “Listing numbers” that applied to a wider range of configurations, including ones that were not confined to three dimensions as were Listing’s. See chapter 9 in Murray Murphey’s The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy (1961) and Hilary Putnam’s commentary in RLT 99–101 and 279n.70–271n.75, and the last note to the previous selection.

25. The rest of this paragraph (beginning with “In favor”) and the beginning of the next one (up to the sentence ending with “and nothing more.”) was deleted by Peirce in the manuscript to save time.

26. Peirce’s reference to Captain Edward Cuttle (“a kind-hearted, salt-looking” old retired sailor in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son) alludes to the nautical origins of the phrase, meaning “in one direction and another.”

27. Paul Charles Morphy (1837–1884), American chess player, world’s chess master (1857–1859). Wilhelm Steinitz (1836–1900), born in Prague, naturalized American in 1884; world’s chess champion from 1866 to 1894.

28. The beginning of this paragraph, from “Passing to” to “application,” was deleted by Peirce to save time.

29. Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, bk. 3, general scholium. “I frame no hypotheses.”

30. Hilary Putnam has called these last three sentences “the first really anti-foundationalist metaphor,” in Giovanna Borradori’s The American Philosopher (University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 62). He added, in RLT 73, that “the idea that knowledge does not need to start with a foundation in the traditional epistemological sense has rarely been more beautifully expressed.” Peirce’s metaphor stands comparison with Otto Neurath’s famous “ship metaphor” (in his 1921 Anti-Spengler).

31. Peirce deleted the entire last paragraph in the manuscript (here restored), either to save time, or, as H. William Davenport has suggested, at the possible urging of William James, who might have advised Peirce against criticizing Paul Carus publicly. (James recommended Peirce’s lectures to Carus for publication, but Carus did not pay heed.)

32. Peirce refers to Paul Carus’s paper “The Founder of Tychism, His Methods, Philosophy, and Criticisms: In Reply to Mr. Charles S. Peirce” in The Monist 3 July 1893):571–622. The passage alluded to is pp. 592–93.

33. Peirce may be misquoting Duns Scotus (he wrote the same phrase on interleaf 395 of his copy of the Century Dictionary). Consulted sources have “ille maledictus Averroes” instead. See John Duns Scotus, Philosophical Writings, tr. by Allan Wolter (Indianapolis & Cambridge: Hackett Pub. Co., 1987), 138 (Opus oxoniense, IV, dist. XLIII, q. ii).

6. PEARSON’S GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE

1. Karl Pearson (1857–1936), British scientist and philosopher of science, professor of geometry, applied mathematics, and mechanics (mostly at University College, London). A friend of Francis Galton, he applied statistics to biological problems, and was one of the founders of modern statistical theory and biometry. Appointed to the chair of eugenics in 1911, he was for a time the editor of the Annals of Eugenics. His main philosophical work is contained in The Ethic of Freethought, a Selection of Essays and Lectures (London: T. F. Unwin, 1888), and in The Grammar of Science (second edition here reviewed; London: Adams and Charles Black, 1900). Of the latter work, Peirce also reviewed the first edition (London: Walter Scott, 1892) for The Nation in July 1892 (CN 1:160–61). Peirce regarded Pearson as a champion of contemporary nominalism.

2. Multiplicamini: from the biblical injunction for mankind to be fruitful and “multiply” (Genesis 1:28).

3. The Grammar of Science, ch. 1, §3.

4. “Dr. Karl Pearson . . . declares that the only valid excuse for the encouragement of scientific activity lies in its tending to maintain ‘the stability of society.’ This is truly a British phrase, meaning the House of Lords and vested rights and all that” (Peirce’s review of Clark University, 1889–1899: Decennial Celebration, published in Science, new series 11 (20 April 1900):620).

5. This idea of the mind reflecting or mirroring the cosmos is one of the major tenets of Peirce’s philosophy. See for instance MS 900, “The Logic of Mathematics,” where Peirce says: “Under the third clause, we have, as a deduction from the principle that thought is the mirror of being, the law that the end of being and highest reality is the living impersonation of the idea that evolution generates” (CP 1.487, c.1896). This recalls Peirce’s use of the Shakespearian phrase “man’s glassy essence,” which Richard Rorty set out to shatter in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1979).

6. See also Peirce’s classification of “motives from which a man may act” in MS 1434:21–28.

7. Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual, Gifford Lectures Delivered before the University of Aberdeen. First Series: The Four Historical Conceptions of Being (New York: Macmillan, 1899). Peirce’s review of the first series appeared in The Nation 70 (5 April 1900):267; see CP 8.100–116 and CN 2:239–41.

8. Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), English critic, biographer, and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Peirce refers to Stephen’s Science of Ethics (1882).

9. In MS 641:17 (6 November 1909), Peirce explained this sentence thus: “I meant by this expression that something in my consciousness made me virtually aware that I could not directly will the appearance down.”

10. Commenting on this passage (beginning with “I see an inkstand”) in 1909, Peirce wrote (MS 641:18–19, “Signifies and Logic,” 6 Nov. 1909):

Thus, the Signs of the Reality of an appearance are, 1st, its Insistency (of which Sign its Vividness is again a Sign), 2nd, its sameness to all witnesses, except for differences that are but corroborative, and 3rd, its physical reactions; and the Reality is that which these Signs go toward proving; so that we have only to ask what they do prove, and the answer to that question will be the Definition of a Percept.

What they prove as thoroughly as any Actual Fact can be proved, is that genuine Percepts represent, both in their qualities and their occasions, Facts concerning Matter as independent of themselves, the Perceptions.

11. Chapter 3 in Pearson’s book is entitled “The Scientific Law.”

12. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Novum Organum. (The New Organon, 1620).

13. “The Order of Nature,” in Popular Science Monthly 13 (June 1878):208; EP1:175–76, W3:311–12.

14. The Grammar of Science, ch. 3, §3.

15. Hamlet, act 1, scene 5.

16. Chapter 4 in Pearson’s book is entitled “Cause and Effect—Probability.”

7. LAWS OF NATURE

1. Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871). See article “Logic” in the English Cyclopaedia (1860), Essay on Probabilities (1838), Formal Logic, or the Calculus of Inference, Necessary and Probable (1847).

2. Also called the Titius-Bode Law, from German astronomers Johann Daniel Titius (who announced it in 1766) and Johann Elert Bode (who popularized it in 1772), it is a formula giving the approximate distances of planets from the sun. It has the form d = 0.4 + 0.3 x 2ⁿ where d is the distance (in astronomical units) of a planet from the sun, and n takes the values – ∞, 0, 1, 2, 3, etc. Though approximately correct for the first seven planets, the law fails for the eighth planet, Neptune, giving a result that roughly equals the distance of Pluto.

3. Nicholas Amhurst (1697–1742), English poet and publicist, was expelled from Oxford for Whig sympathies. Terrae Filius (1721–26) is a series of satirical papers about the university.

4. In MS 870:43 Peirce attributes this view to Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688): “Cudworth in particular advocated this doctrine [of the plastic nature] in his True Intellectual System of the Universe published in 1678.” Peirce may also be alluding to Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, whose third epistle contains the verse “Plastic Nature working to this end.”

5. The quoted phrase follows the full title of Fulke Greville’s book Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes of the Right Honorable Fulke Lord Brooke (London: Henry Seyle, 1633), and the verses come from stanza 74 of the “Treatie of Humane Learning.” Philip Sidney (1554–1586) was an English poet and politician.

6. Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), Scottish philosopher, author of Inquiry into the Original Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) and System of Moral Philosophy (1755).

7. William Wollaston (1659–1724), English philosopher, author of The Religion of Nature Delineated (1722), of which there had been eight editions by 1750.

8. Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), French scientist, mathematician, and Epicurean philosopher, author of Disquisitio Metaphysica (1644), an expansion of his skeptical objections against Descartes’s Meditations, and Syntagma Philosophicum, posthumously published in his Opera Omnia (1658). The “perfected form” in which Peirce reawakened Gassendi’s theory is the metaphysics blending tychism and synechism that he began to conceive in his 1884 lecture on “Design and Chance” (EP 1:215–24). Gassendi was an Epicurean, and the main difference Peirce sees between the Epicurean and the evolutionist view of the development of the universe is described both in “A Guess at the Riddle” (EP1:251) and in “The Architecture of Theories” (EP1:294–95). For the Epicurean, the development of the universe proceeds forever without tending toward anything unattained, while for Peirce the universe sprang from a chaos in the infinitely distant past to tend toward something different in the infinitely distant future.

9. Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London: Thomas Tegg, 1845), 2:599. The “atomic Atheist” mentioned in the quote is Gassendi. The last sentence, shortened by Peirce, ends with the following words in the original: “or else being, by the mere necessity of things, at length forced so to move, as they should have done, had art and wisdom directed them.”

8. ON THE LOGIC OF DRAWING HISTORY FROM ANCIENT DOCUMENTS

1. In the second half of MS 690, not published here, Peirce discusses at great length three examples illustrating how solid hypotheses can be made to reconcile the facts reported in ancient testimonies. The first example (published in CP 7.232–55) attempts to show that Strabo’s historical account of the transmission of Aristotle’s manuscripts can be trusted on the basis of a careful examination both of the reasonableness of the reported facts and of the texts themselves as presented in their Berlin edition. Special focus is given to the second book of Prior Analytics, in which Peirce detects misplaced chapters and two corrupt passages, one of which involves changing a word in order to improve (or restore) Aristotle’s account of abduction (see selection 14, note 11). In the second example (in HP 2:763–91) Peirce attempts to determine the chronology of Plato’s life, including his birth date (late in June of 428 B.C.), the question of whether Plato ever went to Megara, and the dating of the dialogues. The third example (in HP 2:791–800) attempts to discern what is believable in the various accounts of Pythagoras’s life, including where and when he might have travelled, whether he was a mystical person, and why the Pythagoreans made such a mystery of their doctrine.

2. Section x in Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is titled “Of Miracles” (1748).

3. Peirce is referring here to three key works in the early history of probability. Abraham De Moivre (1667–1754) was a French mathematician who emigrated to England. The first edition of The Doctrine of Chances: or, a Method of Calculating the Probabilities of Events in Play appeared in 1718 and not 1716 as Peirce had it (London: printed by W. Pearson); the second edition appeared in 1738, and not 1735 as Peirce had it (London: printed by H. Woodfall). Pierre Rémond de Montmort (1678–1719) was also a French mathematician; the dates Peirce gives for Montmort’s Essay d’analyse sur les jeux de hazard (Paris: J. Quillau) are correct. Jakob Bernoulli (1654–1705), Swiss mathematician, died before completing his posthumously published Ars conjectandi (Basilae: Impensis Thurnisiorum, 1713).

4. Peirce alludes notably to Eduard Zeller and Christian August Brandis (see selection 4), and maybe also to George Grote (1794–1871), Carl Steinhart (1801–1872), Carl M. W. Schaarschmidt (1822–1909), Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915), and Wincenty Lutoslawski (1863–1954).

5. Richard Bentley (1662–1742), English philologist and critic, whose editions of classical writers were renowned for their scholarship.

6. The remaining long part of this paragraph has been omitted in this edition; it consists first of Peirce’s answer to F. Y. Edgeworth’s objection that Peirce confuses testimonies with arguments, and second of the illustration of a confusion of thought that might lead to the idea that the theory of the probability of testimonies cannot be applicable to arguments in general.

7. Christoph Sigwart (1830–1904), German philosopher and logician, author of a two-volume Logik (1873 and 1878), a treatise about the theory of knowledge translated by Helen Dendy as Logic (London, 1890). Peirce frequently criticizes Sigwart’s psychologism in his later writings (and thus throughout this volume).

8. Eduard Zeller (A History of Greek Philosophy, 1:338n.4) cites more than three authorities: Aristotle (according to both Aelian and Apollonius), Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius, and Nicomachus (according to both Porphyry and Iamblichus).

9. Diogenes Laertius states merely that “there is a story that once, when he [Pythagoras] was disrobed, his thigh was seen to be of gold” (Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 8.11).

10. These authorities include Plato (Theaetetus, 174a), Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 6, ch. 7, 1141b3), and Diogenes (Lives, 1.34).

11. Eduard Zeller, A History of Greek Philosophy, 1:212n.2.

12. From this point on in this volume, the spelling “premiss(es)” replaces that of “premise(s)” found in the earlier selections. In the article “premiss” he wrote for Baldwin’s Dictionary in 1901, Peirce insisted that the word’s etymology demanded that it be so spelled, a practice he followed consistently afterward. See selection 21, pp. 293–94 for a similar argument.

13. Johannes Kepler, Astronomia Nova ( 1609).

14. At the time Peirce was composing this essay, he had also begun to write a book titled “Minute Logic” (MSS 425–34), of which selection 9 is a part, with the financial support of his friend Francis Lathrop. Peirce contended that the study of logic requires minute analysis in a manner analogous to the physical sciences.

15. Peirce deleted the second half of the sentence, after “successfully”: “and they may be supplemented by a sketch of how, if the reasons for it were given, one might embrace the whole of logic in one comprehensive, unitary conception, in which the method here advocated for treating ancient historical documents shall find its native and fitting place.”

16. Peirce addressed the question of miracles in an earlier set of papers (see MSS 692 and 869–73, and the Smithsonian manuscript of which selection 7 is a part). Some of this material has been published in Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings (Values in a Universe of Chance), ed. by Philip P. Wiener (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), ch. 18, pp. 275–321.

17. The “St. Petersburg problem” was first discussed by Nicholas Bernoulli in a paper published posthumously in the journal of the St. Petersburg Academy in 1713. What is the equitable fee Paul should pay to enter the following game of chance: Peter promises to pay him one dollar if a fair coin lands heads on the first toss, two dollars if it lands heads on the second toss, and in general 2^{n – 1} dollars if it first lands heads on the nth toss? If we agree with Bernoulli that the fair price for a game is its moral expectation, the formula derived from the standard theory leads to the paradoxical answer that Paul should pay an infinite amount for the privilege of playing.

18. Samuel Butler (1612–1680), Hudibras, part 3, canto 3. The original reads “He that complies against his will, I Is of his own opinion still.”

19. The Italian medical professor Luigi Galvani (1737–1798) is credited with initiating the study of electricity in animals. Accounts of the discovery state that his wife, for whom he was preparing a frog-leg soup, called his attention to the violent convulsions she had observed in a skinned frog lying on a table when its legs were accidentally touched by a scalpel while sparks were being mechanically generated nearby.

20. Paul Carus, “The Idea of Necessity, Its Basis and Scope,” The Monist 3 (Oct. 1892):68–96 (especially p. 86 in the section “Necessity and Chance”).

21. The great earthquake of Lisbon occurred on 1 November 1755.

22. John Venn (1834–1923), The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic (London: Macmillan, 1889), 492–93.

23. Ibid., 495.

24. See Raymond Clare Archibald’s account of the discovery of Uranus in his Benjamin Peirce, 1809–1880 (Oberlin: The Mathematical Association of America, 1925), 14.

25. Venn, Empirical or Inductive Logic, 494, 498.

26. Ibid., 492–93.

27. System of Positive Polity (Paris: L. Mathias, 1851), 1:421–22.

28. Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony, in Eight Fits) (London: Macmillan, 1876), Fit II, “The Bellman’s Speech,” stanza 16 (the first line in Peirce’s quotation blends the last line of st. 15 and the first line of st. 16).

29. Critique of Pure Reason, A7, 303–5; B11, 360–61.

30. The primary example of the reform of mathematical reasoning at this time for Peirce is probably the work of Ernst Schröder who in his Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik, vol. 3 (1895), §23 and §31, used a form of Peirce’s logical algebra to recast Richard Dedekind’s work in the foundations of mathematics (see note 32 below).

31. At this point in the typescript Peirce inserted a very long handwritten text titled “Note on Collections” which, in spite of its great interest, cannot be reproduced here for lack of space. Most of it has been printed in HP 2:737–42.

32. C. S. Peirce, “On the Logic of Number,” in American Journal of Mathematics 4 (1881):85–95, W4:299–309. Richard Dedekind, Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen? (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg, 1888). See also selection 12, note 1.

33. Peirce gave this “definition” of convergence in his manuscript; it is equivalent to the Cauchy criterion for convergence of a sequence. In his typescript, instead of the last inequality Peirce had “(x_n − x) < ε ,” which would be the more “common definition” of convergence provided it is changed into (x_n − x)² < ε² or |x_n − x| < ε.

34. The manuscript and the typescript provide two different figures: in the TS, the figure is 281/2, while in the MS it is 27, followed by an illegible fraction which might be either 1/2, 1/3, or 1/8. Here we follow the MS and take the figure to be 271/2. It is interesting to note that Peirce used the same illustration two years later, in the seventh Lowell lecture of 1903, where the number appears to be a round 27 (CP 7.122). Peirce identifies in neither place the probability function he has used.

35. Lambert Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874), Belgian mathematician and sociologist; Lettres sur la théorie des probabilités, third letter.

36. See Peirce and Joseph Jastrow’s 1884 paper “On Small Differences of Sensation” in W5:122–35. The word “Differenzschwelle,” or “Unterschiedsschwelle,” means “differential threshold,” and Peirce’s denial that there is any such threshold is a criticism of G. T. Fechner’s theory.

37. Ole Römer (1644–1710), Danish astronomer noted for the discovery of the finite speed of light, which he estimated, in 1676, at 140,000 miles per second.

38. Boyle’s law is that the pressure of a gas, at constant temperature, is inversely proportional to its volume. See EPl:196–97.

39. In the table, “O – C” means “Observation minus Calculation.” Peirce starts with Potassium (K), leaving out the first eighteen elements (from Hydrogen to Argon). Most of the atomic weights listed in the “Obs” rows are wrong by today’s standards, and the difference O – C is often a little larger than shown in the table. The notion of atomic number, which is more fundamental than that of atomic weight, as well as the notion of isotopes of elements, were not yet known.

40. It has since been discovered that instead of “sixteen consecutive elements” there are just twelve, eleven of which belong to the Lanthanide series (the first three, Ce, Pr, and Nd, are in the table; those missing are Pm, Sm, Eu, Gd, Tb, Dy, Ho, Er, Tm, Yb, and Lu), and the last, coming before Ta, is Hf (Hafnium). The missing element between Mo and Ru is Tc (Technetium), and between W and Os is Re (Rhenium). The three elements after Bi are Po (Polonium), At (Astatine), and Rn (Radon).

41. Peirce’s figures are very close to today’s figures: he has 127.5 for Te (today: 127.6), and 137.4 for Ba (today: 137.33).

9. ON SCIENCE AND NATURAL CLASSES

1. This first paragraph is the second one in the manuscript; the opening paragraph has been skipped in this volume because it relates to matters not printed here.

2. Ernest Cushing Richardson, Classification, Theoretical and Practical (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901). Part I of the book is titled “The Order of the Sciences,” and part II “The Classification of Books.” Peirce reviewed the book for The Nation, 27 February 1902 (CN 3:61–62).

3. Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), An Essay on Classification (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1859). The essay appeared for the first time in 1857 as an introduction to a larger work, Contributions to the Natural History of the United States.

4. Carl Auer, Freiherr von Welsbach (1858–1929), Austrian chemist and engineer who invented the gas mande, a device consisting of a fabric impregnated with a mixture of thorium nitrate and cerium nitrate which glowed brightly when heated by a gas flame.

5. William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942), English egyptologist. The title of Petrie’s work is Naukratis, part I, 1884–85, Third Memoir of the Egypt Exploration Fund (London: Trübner & Co., 1886). Chapter 9 is titled “The Weights of Naukratis.”

6. Not printed here is a long statistical and historical discussion of the distribution of weights among the kets (or kats) supporting Peirce’s last statement.

7. The “long digression” refers to the omitted text. Peirce apparently did not fulfill his intention of studying the theory of errors: no such discussion has been found in this or surrounding documents. It was, however, a subject of importance to Peirce, especially in his work for the U. S. Coast Survey; he gave a general account, making use of his logic of relations, in his paper, “On the Theory of Errors of Observations,” Report of the Superintendent of the United States Coast Survey, 1870 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1873), 200–24; W3:114–60.

8. De partibus animalium, 639b12–15.

9. The year 1860 is probably meant to mark the year following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. August Weismann and Francis Galton are two other scientists mentioned by Peirce in this volume who have shaped the notion of heredity. Peirce was evidently not acquainted with the genetic theory that Gregor Mendel developed earlier in the nineteenth century and that did not become known before 1900. An appraisal of Peirce’s treatment of evolutionary theory can be found in Arthur W. Burks, “Logic, Learning, and Creativity in Evolution,” Studies in the Logic of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Nathan Houser et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 497–534.

10. William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878), The Battle-Field (1839), stanza 9.

11. Volapük is an artificial international language constructed in 1880 by johann Martin Schleyer, a German cleric. It was popular until Esperanto supplanted it.

12. In the Century Dictionary Peirce defined “vortex” as “a portion of fluid in rotational motion inclosed in an annular surface which is a locus of vortex-lines. . . . In a perfect fluid, which can sustain no distorting stress even for an instant, the velocity of a rotating particle cannot be retarded any more than if it were a frictionless sphere; and, in like manner, no such velocity can be increased. Consequently, a vortex, unlike a wave, continues to be composed of the same identical matter.” A “wave,” Peirce defined as a “form assumed by parts of a body which are out of equilibrium, such that as fast as the particles return they are replaced by others moving into neighboring positions of stress, so that the whole disturbance is continually propagated into new parts of the body while preserving more or less perfectly the same shape and other characters.”

13. The conception of vortices as a fundamental component of the world can be found most prominently in Rene Descartes. Peirce, in his Century Dictionary definition, makes a distinction between the discredited Cartesian theory and the modern physical theory of vortex-rings which were posited as a foundation for a new atomic theory.

14. Shakespeare’s characterization of the rebel “Hotspur” Henry Percy (1366–1403) in Henry IV, part 1, lines 1597–98, remains the epitome of a rash, impetuous, hot-headed man.

15. The manganate should be K₂ Mn O₄ (obtained when a manganese compound is fused with potassium nitrate (KN O₃)). The rutheniate should be K₂ Ru O₄.

16. These are the names Peirce gives to the Listing numbers. See selection 4, note 41, and selection 5, note 24.

17. Peirce attached the following page numbers to the sentences quoted from Agassiz’s book (referenced in note 3 above): p. 145 for the quotation after Classes; p. 151 after Orders; and pp. 159 and 160 after Families.

18. Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665), French mathematician, whose famous last theorem (that the equation xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ where x, y, and z are positive integers, has no solution if n is an integer greater than 2) has only been proved in 1996. John Wilson (1741–1793), English mathematician. Wilson’s theorem is that, if p is a prime number, then 1 + (p – 1)! is divisible by p.

19. See selection 5, note 17.

20. Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer (1836–1920), English astronomer, whose book The Dawn of Astronomy Peirce reviewed in The Nation in 1894 (CN 2:48–53).

21. Peirce’s text continues in the manuscript for 120 pages (two-thirds of the document) and provides a very detailed classification of the sciences.

10. THE MAXIM OF PRAGMATISM

1. Peirce may be referring to any number of pragmatists, but certainly to both William James and F. C. S. Schiller.

2. “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Popular Science Monthly 12 Jan. 1878):286–302; EP1:124–41; W3:257–76.

3. Peirce introduced the term “pragmatism” in its modern use in conversations held with the members of the Metaphysical Club in the early 1870s (see selection 28, note 5), and kept using it informally thereafter. It was William James who both officialized the word and recognized Peirce’s paternity of it in his 26 August 1898 address on “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” delivered before the Philosophical Union at Berkeley. Praising Peirce, James wrote: “The principle of practicalism—or pragmatism, as [Peirce] called it, when I first heard him enunciate it at Cambridge in the early ‘70’s—is the clue or compass by following which I find myself more and more confirmed in believing we may keep our feet upon the proper trail” (in Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), Appendix 1, p. 258).

4. Revue Philosophique 7 Jan. 1879):47; W3:363–64. English version in EP1:131 and W3:265. Peirce fails to cite the last important sentence of the French paragraph: “II n’y a pas de nuance de signification assez fine pour ne pouvoir produire une différence dans la pratique” (“there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice”).

5. Revue Philosophique 7 (Jan. 1879):48; W3:365.

6. See above, pp. 135–36.

7. “Entities [or beings] must not be multiplied beyond necessity.”

8. Simon Newcomb (1835–1909), American astronomer and mathematician. No trace of the particular discussion Peirce refers to has been found in their correspondence. Peirce often noticed that Newcomb did not keep himself well informed of the latest advances in mathematics, and could not see any sense in the mathematics of infinities.

9. On the difference between commensurability and incommensurability, see “Reason’s Rules” (MS 596, c.1902), in CP 5.539 and 541. See also selection 8, p. 86, selection 11, p. 146, and selection 16, pp. 237–38.

10. Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science, Introduction, pp. 26–27. See selection 6, p. 57.

11. Henry Rutgers Marshall (1852–1927), architect, psychologist and novelist, interested mainly in aesthetics. The quotation is from Instinct and Reason; An Essay Concerning the Relation of Instinct to Reason, with Some Special Study of the Nature of Religion (New York and London: Macmillan and Co., 1898), 569.

12. Peirce owned a copy of the second enlarged edition of G. W. F. Hegel’s Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (Heidelberg: August Osswald, 1827).

13. Hegel’s “three stages of thought” consist of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

11. ON PHENOMENOLOGY

1. Five documents related to the second lecture are extant: the first two treat of mathematics (see note 3 below), and the last three discuss phenomenology. Of the latter Peirce rejected the first one (MS 304, published in HL 139–50) with the self-injunction “to be rewritten and compressed.” This leaves MS 305, the second draft, with which Peirce was also dissatisfied—he wrote “This won’t do; it will have to be rewritten”—and MS 306, labeled “3rd Draught” and titled “On Phenomenology, or the Categories.” MS 306 is incomplete: it is only twelve pages long, and despite Peirce’s intention to begin with a discussion of the third category (see note 2 3 below), it barely touches on the matter. Since MS 305 discusses only the first two categories, the practical solution is to conjoin the two documents. MS 306 begins with the header section “III,” but there is no such header in MS 305. In order to distinguish the two documents clearly, the header “I” has been inserted at the beginning of the lecture, and the number “II” has been substituted for “III” to indicate the start of the second document. It is likely that Peirce composed yet another text for the second lecture, similar in content but more polished and complete, which has unfortunately disappeared. Supporting evidence consists of remarks made in the third lecture about points made in the second lecture that cannot be found there, and also of the fact that Peirce made the text of the lecture available to people who had misssed its presentation, and that he sent it later to William James. The surviving drafts are textually so confused that it is difficult to imagine Peirce lending them to anyone.

2. See EP1:132, and the previous lecture in this volume, p. 135.

3. Peirce’s first plan for the second lecture had been to discuss mathematics and to show how an analysis of mathematical reasoning could lend support to pragmatism. He wrote the first two versions of the lecture toward that end (MSS 302–3, published in HL 123–38), but then realized he could not afford the time needed to do justice to such a formidable subject. Although Peirce says here that he is restricted to six lectures, arrangements were soon made so he could give a seventh lecture. The eighth lecture he gave on “Multitude and Continuity” the day after the seventh is sometimes counted as part of the series, but Peirce would later refer to his “seven lectures.”

4. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), Chrestomathia; Part II (London: Payne and Foss, 1817), 177–79. Bentham preferred the spelling “coenoscopic.”

5. Peirce owned Edward William Lane’s 1840 translation of the collection of Arabic tales entitled Thousand and One Nights or Arabian Nights which are strung together by Scheherazade, the reputed story-teller who hopes to save her life by entertaining her husband, the king of Samarkand.

6. Peirce’s derivation of the universal categories occurs in his 1867 paper “On a New List of Categories” (EP1:1–10). In many manuscripts composed between 1859 and 1864 Peirce strove to generate long lists of particular categories systematically, mostly founded on Kant’s categories, with additional ones of Peirce’s own, to which he applied different rules of combination and recurrence.

7. The predicaments are Aristotle’s well-known ten categories. The predicables are the five classes of predicates (quinque voces or modi praedicandi) distinguished by Porphyry in his Isagoge: genus, species, difference, proprium, and accident. They come from Aristotle’s older distinction of four classes: proprium, definition, genus, and accident (Topics, I, ch. 4, 101b17–25). Peirce is suggesting that the predicables would be Aristotle’s universal categories.

8. Critique of Pure Reason, A80, B106.

9. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, part 1, “The Science of Logic,” ch. VI, section 79.

10. Peirce returns to the seven systems of metaphysics in the third and fourth Harvard lectures, pp. 164–65 and 179–81.

11. Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687), bk. 1, def. 4.

12. This first party is identified in the next lecture as that of Condillac and the Associationalists. The second party is that of the Hegelianists.

13. is the Greek word for spirit, mind, intelligence.

14. The first five sentences of this paragraph, from “In the course” to “Exact Logician,” were written by Peirce to replace three sentences, only the last two of which he crossed out:

I shall have to content myself with giving some hints as to how I would meet this second double-headed objection, leaving the first to your own reflexions. I will only say that in order to refute that first objection it is by no means necessary to oppose any psychological theory that the adversaries of the category may find reason to entertain. Let it be true, if you will, that the sense of effort and resistance is a sort of instinctive hypothesis which arises within us in the attempt to comprehend certain feelings connected with contractions of the muscles.

The editors chose to omit the first of these three sentences since Peirce immediately addresses the first objection.

15. Paul Carus, “Mr. Charles S. Peirce’s Onslaught on the Doctrine of Necessity,” The Monist 2 (July 1892). Carus titled the first section of his paper “David Hume Redivivus” (pp. 561–65).

16. Peirce had made studies of psychical research since at least 1887 and in a manuscript of 1903, titled “Telepathy and Perception,” Peirce addressed the scientific standing of telepathy (CP 7.597–688).

17. The passage from “I would not have anybody accept” to “about the truth” was not read by Peirce when he delivered his lecture. The beginning of it replaces a deleted passage that followed “Exact Logician”:

You may depend upon it that I am not in the habit of adopting logical doctrines without the most searching and impartial criticism. I would not have anybody accept any doctrine of logic because I hold to it. But I do say that when I have given my very closest examination to a logical question and have become entirely confident as to what the true answer to it is, a mere pooh-poohing of my opinion on the part of a person who has never studied the question in a minute and thorough manner, ought not to be sufficient.

18. The Latin means “lightning striking blindly.”

19. Aristotle, De anima, bk. 3, ch. 4, 430a1; Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de anima VIII, ad Resp.; Summa theologica I, 89, 1, 3°; John Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding II, 1.

20. See especially the seventh Harvard lecture, pp. 226–33, for Peirce’s theory of perception.

21. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1618–1682), a popular Spanish painter of religious subjects.

22. Peirce probably refers to “occasionalism,” a theory of causation held by a number of seventeenth-century Cartesian philosophers, including Nicolas Malebranche. In its extreme version it states that God is the only true causal agent, directly responsible for bringing about all phenomena.

23. This paragraph ends MS 305, and the next one begins a new notebook, MS 306, which opens with the following red-inked note: “I begin by making a first draught of what I intend to say about the third category; and what I say of the first two will have to be compressed into so much of the hour as this leaves unoccupied.” This is followed by a quotation from Shakespeare, revealing Peirce’s frustration: “Tis true ‘tis pity I And pity ‘tis ‘tis true” (Hamlet, act 2, scene 2, lines 97–98). The roman section number “III” that precedes the text has been changed to “II”. See note 1 above.

24. Peirce is referring to Georg Cantor (1845–1918) because of the pioneer work this German mathematician accomplished on continuity, which characterizes a fundamental form of Thirdness.

25. Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834–1919), German zoologist and monistic philosopher, author of Die Welträtsel: Gemeinverstandliche Studien über monistische Philosophie (Stuttgart: A. Kroner, 1899).

26. The words “as objects” stem from an incomplete authorial alteration: Peirce interlined at first the words “as real objects,” then he wrote “as” over the end of “real” but failed to cross out “as real,” here interpreted as having been implicitly deleted by the overwriting.

27. One year earlier, Peirce had written the following in the second chapter of his “Minute Logic” (CP 7.380; MS 427:246–47, 29 March 1902):

Still, it would seem that Progressive minds must have, in some mysterious way, probably by arrested development, grown from Instinctive minds; and they are certainly enormously higher. The Deity of the Théodicée of Leibniz is as high an Instinctive mind as can well be imagined; but it impresses a scientific reader as distinctly inferior to the human mind. It reminds one of the view of the Greeks that Infinitude is a defect; for although Leibniz imagines that he is making the Divine Mind infinite, by making its knowledge Perfect and Complete, he fails to see that in thus refusing it the powers of thought and the possibility of improvement he is in fact taking away something far higher than knowledge. It is the human mind that is infinite.

28. Robert Boyle (1627–1691), The Origin of Forms and Qualities According to the Corpuscular Philosophy (1666).

29. The conservation of energy principle, or the first law of thermodynamics, was established through the works of James Joule, Julius Robert von Mayer, and Hermann von Helmholtz.

30. J. M. Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (New York: Macmillan Co., 1901–2) defines psychophysical parallelism as “the affirmation that conscious process varies concomitantly with synchronous process in the nervous system, whether the two processes have a direct causal relation or not.” Psychophysics is the branch of psychology concerned with the measurement of the psychological effects of sensory stimulation; it is the oldest branch of experimental psychology, said to have begun with the publication of Gustav Fechner’s Elemente der Psychophysik (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1860). In MS 329 (1904), Peirce views Wilhelm Wundt as the chief propagator of psychophysical parallelism, “roughly, the doctrine that mind and matter are the two sides of one shield.”

31. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared in 1859, thus when Peirce was twenty years old.

32. Chauncey Wright (1830–1875) was a mathematician, zoologist, and philosopher, and a member of the Metaphysical Club to which Peirce belonged in the early 1870s (see selection 28, note 5).

33. Asa Gray (1810–1888), American botanist, professor of natural history at Harvard. Gray corresponded with Darwin and brought his evolutionary theories to the attention of Americans.

34. Associationism is the psychological theory, initiated by David Hartley (1705–1757) and defended by James Mill and others, that makes mental development consist mainly in the combination of simple constituents of consciousness according to certain laws of association.

35. Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), English philosopher whose major work, First Principles (half-titled in vol. 1 as A System, of Synthetic Philosophy), was heavily criticized by Peirce. Edward L. Youmans (1821–1887), editor of the journal Popular Science Monthly.

36. Matthew 13:57. Peirce left a blank on the page, which has here been filled with the usual continuation of the phrase. Jesus said more, however, adding “in his own country and in his own house.”

37. From Mark Twain’s story “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” (1865), also published as “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1867), in which someone tells Jim Smiley “Well, I don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.”

12. THE CATEGORIES DEFENDED

1. Cf. the article “Multitude” by Peirce and H. B. Fine in Baldwin’s Dictionary:

The multitude of all the different finite multitudes is the smallest infinite multitude. It is called the denumeral multitude. (Cantor uses a word equivalent to denumerable; but the other form has the advantage of being differentiated from words like enumerable, abnumerable, which denote classes of multitudes, not, like denumeral, a single multitude.) Following upon this is a denumeral series of multitudes called by C. S. Peirce the first, second, etc. abnumerable multitudes. Each is the multitude of possible collections formed from the members of a collection of the next preceding multitude. They seem to be the same multitudes that are denoted by Cantor as Alephs.

One of Peirce’s most important treatments of this subject is in MS 25, “Multitude and Number” (c.1897; CP 4.170–226); see also selection 8, pp. 99–100. The last clause of the paragraph, “than which no conception yet discovered is higher,” alludes to the formulation of St. Anselm’s proof of the existence of God.

2. This point about singulars and individuals is implicit rather than explicit in the second lecture, but it may be that Peirce emphasized it more explicitly during the actual talk.

3. The American philosopher George Santayana (1863–1952) attended this lecture and was influenced by its ideas. He later recalled that Peirce had just been dining with William James and his family “and his evening shirt kept coming out of his evening waistcoat. He looked red-nosed and disheveled, and a part of his lecture seemed to be ex-tempore and whimsical” (letter to Justus Buchler, 15 Oct. 1937, quoted in Buchler, “One Santayana or Two?” The Journal of Philosophy 51 (1954):54).

4. The word between “speck” and “any” reads “on” in the manuscript, a reading here retained. But Peirce may have meant the conjunction “or” instead: “no speck or any grain of sand”; the parallel passage in the draft (MS 307) does not mention the speck: “a representation of every grain of sand on the soil of the country.”

5. In the earlier draft Peirce explains: “Those of you who have read Prof. Royce’s Supplementary Essay will have remarked that he avoids this result, which does not suit his philosophy, by not allowing his map to be continuous. But to exclude continuity is to exclude what is best and most living in Hegel” (MS 307:13). Royce’s “Supplementary Essay,” which is titled “The One, the Many, and the Infinite,” is found at the end of the first volume of The World and the Individual (see selection 6, note 7). Royce discusses the example of the map in the essay’s third section, pp. 502–7. Royce imagines a perfect map drawn upon a part of the surface of the very region that is to be mapped; such a map must contain as a part of itself a representation of its own contour and contents, which latter representation must also contain its own representation, and so on ad infinitum. “We should now, indeed, have to suppose the space occupied by our perfect map to be infinitely divisible, even if not a continuum” (p. 505). A note attached to the latter statement says: “Continuity implies infinite divisibility. The converse does not hold true” (p. 505n). See also Peirce’s Nation review of the second volume of The World and the Individual, in CN 3:83 (31 July 1902), and CP 8.122, 125.

6. What 1873 paper Peirce might be referring to is unclear. The analogy of the map is used, though not in the same connection, in Peirce’s 1869 “Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic” (EP1:62, W2:249). Or Peirce might be referring to some Metaphysical Club conversation.

7. To illustrate the stemmas of thirdness, Peirce drew three alternate figures on the facing verso leaf in the notebook; the topmost version is the one used here.

8. Horatio Greenough (1805–1852) designed the tall obelisk constructed in 1842 at the Bunker Hill Revolutionary War site in Boston, Massachusetts. He wrote: “The obelisk has to my eye a singular aptitude, in its form and character; to call attention to a spot memorable in history. It says but one word, but it speaks loud. If I understand its voice, it says, Here! It says no more. For this reason it was that I designed an obelisk for Bunker Hill” (“Aesthetics in Washington,” in A Memorial of Horatio Greenough, ed. by Henry T. Tuckerman (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1853), 82).

9. Peirce skipped this second section when he gave the lecture. It reappears with some modifications in the next lecture.

10. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–1780), French philosopher, author of Traité des sensations (Treatise on Sense Perception, 1754).

11. The law of Parsimony is equivalent to Ockham’s razor. In Baldwin’s Dictionary, Peirce explains the law by saying that “it is bad scientific method to introduce, at once, independent hypotheses to explain the same facts of observation.”

12. Ernst Schroder had died one year earlier, on 16 June 1902. The first volume of his Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik: Exakte Logik (Leipzig: Teubner, 1890) contained much praise of Peirce and numerous references to his work. The first part of the second volume appeared in 1891, the first part of the third volume in 1895, and the second part of the second volume posthumously in 1905.

13. See selection 8, note 7 on Sigwart.

14. Charles Rollin (1661–1741), French historian, known especially for his Histoire ancienne (1730–38). Comte George Louis Leclerq de Buffon (1707–1788), French naturalist, co-author of Histoire naturelle (1749–89). Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), English theologian, philosopher, and scientist, who discovered oxygen in 1771, and founded associational psychology with David Hartley. Jean Baptiste Biot (1774–1862), French physicist and astronomer, whose most important work was in optics (chromatic polarization and corpuscular theory of light).

15. De interpretatione, ch. 7, 17a.

16. Since this point is not one made in writing in the extant manuscripts of the second lecture, we assume Peirce made it only during his presentation.

17. Alfred Bray Kempe (1849–1922), English barrister and mathematician. “A Memoir on the Theory of Mathematical Forms,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 177 (1886): 1–70.

18. “Optical geometry” is Peirce’s term for projective geometry and the “ten-ray theorem” is known also as the theorem of Desargues: If the lines joining corresponding vertices of two triangles pass through a point, then the points of intersection of corresponding sides lie on a line. Karl Georg Christian von Staudt’s proof is given in his Geometrie der Lage (Nürnberg: Korn, 1847), theorem 90, p. 41. Kempe drew a figure similar to Peirce’s rendition of the ten-ray theorem in his 1886 memoir, p. 63, para. 357, theorem 1 and fig. 67.

19. Peirce drew this same graph and two others in his personal copy of Kempe’s memoir, around Kempe’s own graph (his “fig. 13”), with the comment “the same in more obvious shape.” Kempe explained: “The graphical units may be taken to represent either the ten straight lines of the theorem, or the ten points of intersection; the form is the same in either case. Taking the former case, the pairs of graphical units which are joined by links correspond to pairs of lines whose points of intersection are points other than the ten considered in the theorem” (p. 11).

20. At this point in the lecture Peirce wrote out, on pp. 40–45 in the notebook, his second and third responses to Kempe; afterward, however, he decided to skip this part of the text (“Skip to Page 46. I must pass by my other two answers, although one of them is extremely interesting”), but replaced it with a summary that follows directly in the text (“My other two answers . . .”). We have followed Peirce’s instruction. Interested readers will find the skipped passage in HL 183–85.

21. Kempe drew a similar geometrical figure, as a rendition of the nine-ray theorem, in his 1886 memoir, p. 63, para. 357, theorem 2 and fig. 68. The three-triangle graph is found in Kempe’s memoir p. 40, para. 249, fig. 48. But an important difference is that the letters Kempe associates with the vertex points each correspond to an intersection of three lines, while the numbers in Peirce’s graph represent the lines.

22. “Symbolic logic” in Baldwin’s Dictionary 2:645–50; also in CP 4.372–93.

23. Peirce’s definition of “hyperboloid” in the Century Dictionary reads:

a quadric surface having a center not at infinity, and some of its plane sections hyperbolas. There are two kinds of hyperboloid, those of one and of two sheets. The hyperboloid of one sheet has a real intersection with every plane in space; that of two sheets has only imaginary intersections with some planes. In either case all the plane sections perpendicular to one of the axes are ellipses, and those perpendicular to either of the others are hyperbolas.

13. THE SEVEN SYSTEMS OF METAPHYSICS

1. Pages 1 to 11 of Peirce’s notebook contain the draft of two sections, numbered I and II, which Peirce replaced on facing pages with the present much shorter single section (numbered I by the editors). Page 12 in the notebook begins a new second section numbered II, the one printed here.

2. Wincenty Lutoslawski (1863–1954), Polish philosopher, author of The Origin and Growth of Plato’s Logic (a book Peirce studied very carefully); his “unpronounceable master” is Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), Poland’s greatest romantic poet and advocate of Polish national freedom. The doctrine referred to may be that of Polish messianism combined with some brand of mysticism.

3. Peirce first wrote “except my own” and then replaced it with “or very little.”

4. Peirce originally inserted “except perhaps Schelling’s & mine” after “modern philosophy”; he then apparently changed his mind, crossed out the insertion, and added instead the word “substantially” earlier in the sentence.

5. Aristotle’s two grades of being are (potentiality) and (actuality). As regards the two kinds of actualities, see for instance Metaphysics, bk. 9, ch. 8, 1050a22–23: “For activity is the end, and the actuality [energy]) is the activity; hence the term ‘actuality’ is derived from ‘activity’, and tends to have the meaning of ‘complete reality’ [entelechy]).” The distinction is thus between the action being accomplished (the process of actualization) and the accomplished result of this action.

6. Hegel’s “doctrine of Wesen” (of essence) forms a chapter of his Science of Logic, itself a part of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences.

7. “A general is that whose expression naturally suits many things.” Petrus Hispanus wrote similarly: “Praedicabile est quod aptum natum est praedicari de pluribus.” See Aristotle, De interpretatione, ch. 7, 17a38.

8. Patrick Henry (1736–1799); the quotation comes from his famous Virginia Convention speech of 23 March 1775 in which he said “Give me liberty or give me death.”

9. From Peirce’s Century Dictionary definition: Individuation is “the determination or contraction of a general nature to an individual mode of existence,” and “the principle of individuation is the (supposed) general cause of such transformation of the general into the individual.”

10. The text beginning here and ending ten paragraphs later (at “the reverse.”) is found on facing verso pages in the notebook and forms a complete rewriting of an earlier and quite different presentation of the same argument made on the recto pages. The length of this earlier version prevents its publication here, and in lieu of it the following summary is provided. Peirce wants to show that reasoning with mathematical accuracy about infinity is no longer difficult. The idea of an enumerable collection of discrete objects, where each object is in a unique relation r to any other object, is easy to admit. Since such a collection can always be enlarged by adding a new object to it, it follows that for every enumerable multitude there is always another one greater by one. Thus there is an endless series of enumerable multitudes, which series is a collection whose grade of multitude is called a denumeral. Peirce explains that a collection of denumeral multitude is not increased either by the addition of, or the multiplication by, a collection of any multitude not larger than itself. He then attempts a demonstration that 2^x > x where, for a collection of multitude x, 2^x is the multitude of all pos6sible collections that can be formed from that collection.

11. Peirce’s offer was heard, and he was invited to give a special lecture on “multitude and continuity” the day that followed the seventh lecture on pragmatism, on 15 May 1903. Sketchy notes for that supplementary lecture survive in MS 316a. See selection 11, note 3.

12. Peirce’s example of this spiral recurs many times in his writings. It is the third of three spirals described in MS 427:125–27 (“Minute Logic”: ch. 2, sect. 1, “Classification of the Sciences,” February-March 1902; also CP 1.276 ; the three spirals were drawn by Peirce on graph paper and are located in MS S13). We find it again in a letter to William James of 12 June 1902 (CP 8.274), and elsewhere. The equations that accompany them are never fully identical, but all produce similar results.

13. Peirce drew a very rough diagram of the spiral in his manuscript. The one given here was generated from his equation using P = 8 and Q = 2. The limiting circle of radius 5 is also indicated. Peirce was aware that the spiral does not cross the circle. The circle corresponds to the precise point where the value of θ may be said to pass through infinity.

14. The next three paragraphs (from “As for Hertz’s” to “fundamental character”) were skipped by Peirce at reading time, but are here restored. They replaced the following shorter passage:

The Physicist prides himself on being a Specialist. He would not have it supposed that he busies himself with a Weltanschauung, not even a general conception of the physical universe. He is experimenting upon a certain phenomenon and confines himself to making out the relation of that phenomenon to phenomena that are well known. The consequence of this is that when time comes to enunciate any very general principle,—such as that of the Conservation of Energy,—you find there are a dozen physicists who have been long convinced of it, but probably thought it derogatory to say so,—or their Academy or Poggendorff refused to publish their memoir,—and very likely it will turn out that the earliest discoverable enunciation of it belonged to some obscure person outside the ranks of the professional physicists. That is probably less true today than it was fifty years ago. At any rate, it certainly ought to be the duty of some class of physicists to study the general question.

What has led me to this remark is the phenomenon of right and left. It is only when a third dimension enters into the phenomenon,—as in the case of a screw,—that there is any difference of right and left.

15. Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857–1894), in The Principles of Mechanics (1894, transl. 1899), put forward a “fundamental law” that summarized the connection between the three basic concepts of time, space, and mass, without using the concepts of either force or energy: “Every natural motion of an independent material system consists herein, that the system follows with uniform velocity one of its straightest paths.”

16. Ludwig Boltzmann (Austrian physicist, 1844–1906) thought we could not entirely eliminate metaphysical assumptions from theories in favor of bare equations: physics ought to build a coherent picture of reality, and not simply discover equations. Jules Henri Poincaré (French mathematician, 1854–1912), on the other hand, thought that competing theories are each true only to the extent to which their equations agree, because these represent the real relations between things in the world. Both Poincaré and Boltzmann, however, held similar views about conventionalism in the sciences.

17. Cours de philosophie positive (Paris, 1835), 2:8, 19th lesson.

18. In contrast with logica docens, which stands for scientific or theoretical logic, Peirce writes elsewhere (MS 428, “Minute Logic,” ch. 2, sect. 2, “Why Study Logic,” April 1902; CP 2.186):

Now a person cannot perform the least reasoning without some general ideal of good reasoning; for reasoning involves deliberate approval of one’s reasoning; and approval cannot be deliberate unless it is based upon the comparison of the thing approved with some idea of how such a thing ought to appear. Every reasoner, then, has some general idea of what good reasoning is. This constitutes a theory of logic: the scholastics called it the reasoner’s logica utens.

19. At this point, which corresponds to a transition between two notebooks, Peirce made significant changes to his text, one result of which was that he dropped the remainder of this paragraph. Originally it continued, after “Wickedness” and a semicolon, as follows:

just as this distinction of Righteousness and Wickedness amounts, in the last analysis, to nothing but a particular application of the most general distinction of Esthetic Goodness and Badness. To say this is not to pronounce for hedonism; for the hedonist, on the contrary, instead of admitting that Goodness and Badness is founded on Qualities of Feeling in their multitudinous variety,—admits only one, Discomfort and its absence; and to admit but one quality of feeling is at bottom not to admit any Quality at all. The Hedonist makes the mistake of supposing Gratification to be a mere Quality of Feeling; but the truth is that gratification is at bottom an affair of reaction having a quality of feeling dependent on it just as all sorts of conscious operations have their indescribable feelings. Since therefore the Hedonist bases Morality on Gratification alone, he bases it on that which is really and principally Reaction and not on Quality of Feeling, the inseparable nature of which it is to be multitudinous.

20. Théodore Simon Jouffroy (1796–1842), French philosopher, translator of Dugald Stewart and Thomas Reid. Peirce may be referring to Jouffroy’s Introduction to Ethics. Dr. James Walker (1794–1874), president of Harvard University and professor of moral and intellectual philosophy. Peirce probably refers to William Whewell’s The Elements of Morality, Including Polity (London, 1845).

21. This was in connection with his research for the Century Dictionary, for which Peirce wrote hundreds of philosophical definitions, including the entries for “ethics” and “moral.”

22. Peirce circled the last two sentences of this paragraph in red ink, presumably as a reminder to give them special emphasis at reading time.

23. Peirce instructed himself to skip the text that follows “Oh, yes;” and to resume the reading in the middle of the first sentence of the next paragraph, which he altered to ease the transition. The skipped passage has been here restored, and Peirce’s alterations to the transitional sentence have been ignored. Had Peirce’s instructions been followed, the passage would have read as follows: “Oh yes. Among artists I have known more than one case of downright hallucinatory imaginations at the beck and call of these

24. Peirce may be referring to one of two painters who were his close friends: either Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), German-born painter of the American West, or Francis A. Lathrop (1849–1909).

25. Peirce skipped this sentence at reading time. It is here restored.

26. Peirce inserted here a remark indicating that he skipped the rest of this long paragraph, as well as the two paragraphs that come next (down to “conceptions of the Universe”), at reading time. The text has been restored. His note reads: “Well I will skip this. Suffice it to say that there is no reason for suspecting the veracity of the senses; and the presumption is that the physics of the future will find out that they are more real than the present state of scientific theory admits of their being represented as being.”

27. Peirce may have had a painting by Claude Monet in mind (cf. CP 5.508).

28. This may have been the original ending of the lecture text, and it is possible that Peirce decided in fine to add a new section titled “The Reality of Secondness” because lack of time had prevented him from presenting the matter in the second lecture (which has a parallel discussion); he may have hoped that enough time would remain to let him read this supplementary section.

14. THE THREE NORMATIVE SCIENCES

1. The text that begins here corresponds to the second section of Peirce’s lecture. The first section, which Peirce decided not to read, consists of the following fascinating description of his exacting research methodology. Since a condensed version of it appears at the end of the lecture, the section has not been restored in the main text.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

You may perhaps gain some useful hints if I describe to you how I go to work in studying philosophy. I shall merely sketch the outline of the proceeding without going into details. I mostly work pen in hand and although important steps are taken while I am away from my writing-table, they are recorded at once. A given question in philosophy comes up for discussion, never mind how. I begin by writing out a Collation upon it. That is, I begin by setting down briefly yet sufficiently and as formally as possible all the arguments which I have seen used on the one side or which seem to me likely to be used on that side; and then I do the same for the other side. Such of the arguments as admit of ready refutation, I at once set down the refutations of. Next, without going into the merits of the case, I draw up a list of the general methods in which a solution of the problem might be sought. If some of them appear to be quite futile, I draw up brief formal statements of the reasons of this futility. One of the methods will appear to me to be the one which ought to be decisive, and I carefully set down the reason why, keeping a good look out for special circumstances which might annul this reason. Other methods may appear to me to have a secondary utility and I further set down the reasons for this and for my estimate of just how far and where those methods are valuable. Search is made for objections to all these reasons, and any that seem considerable are formally set down and refuted. But if, in this course of this part of the discussion or at a later stage, it appears that the question in hand depends upon another which I have never submitted to any systematic examination or concerning which, since my last examination of it, any considerable grounds of doubt have been found, I put aside the first examination until this other question shall have been at least provisionally settled in my mind. If no such interruption takes place, I take up first the principal method and afterwards the subsidiary or secondary methods and apply them with the severest critical scrutiny of which I am master, setting down always brief and formal but sufficient statements of all the steps of the argumentation, and disposing of all objections either by assent or refutation. I also dispose, in the same way, of all the arguments which have not already been disposed of. Having this brief drawn up I study it with the minutest care to detect any loopholes, and sometimes amend it more or less radically, even giving the question itself a new and broader turn, and this is sometimes done three or four times over, before I am satisfied with the discussion. I then put the paper away and dismiss the matter from my mind. Sometimes I do so in despair of being able at the time to obtain any clear light on the subject; for when such light is not at hand my experience is that hard thinking is of very little use. There is nothing to be done but wait until the light comes from some other source. But even when my discussion does seem satisfactory at first, yet my experience of my own stupidity is such that I always mutter to my intellect, “Very well, you have only to possess yourself in patience and the inadequacy of your present ideas will appear plainly enough in due time.” In fact, after a long time, something or other flashes a new light on the old question, and only too often I find that strenuous as was my scrutiny of the previous arguments, I have committed some horrible stupidity. At last, my ideas seem ripe for a new setting of them in order; and I make a second collation of the question without looking at the first but endeavoring to proceed quite as if the question were a new one. This second collation is drawn up just as the first one was; only, when it is complete, I get out the first and compare the two with minute criticism, both where they differ and where they agree. It may seem to me best to allow the matter to go over for a third collation; but commonly I consider that I am now well started upon the right track; or at any rate all that can be done in this way has been done. I impress the cardinal considerations on my mind, and perhaps draw up a note of anything difficult to bear in mind exactly; and I then look upon all the labor so far performed as a mere exercise of no value except in the parts which have impressed me. It now remains to treat my conception of the problem like a seedling tree, which must have water, nutriment, sunlight, shade, and air and frequent breaking of the ground about it, in order that it may grow up into something worthy of respect. These operations I also carry out, pen in hand, with intervals of digestion; and by drawing up new statements at irregular intervals according to the state of my reflections, but probably averaging a year in length, after I have made from half a dozen to a dozen of these, I begin to feel that I have carried the discussion about as far as I am likely ever to do. There is no single logical point in the present lectures, for example, however small, which has not undergone at least four such digestions, and most of them a dozen or more.

That, gentlemen, is my way of philosophizing in which I have learned to place much confidence. The expression “swift as thought” ought to gain for you a new meaning as applied to my thought. It becomes equivalent to “agile as a slime-mould.” Anybody who knows how I think as I myself do must be impressed by my awful stupidity. But I am fortunately capable of a vast amount of drudgery, and I never lose confidence that I shall ultimately accomplish any intellectual task that I set myself provided I live long enough. In that particular I will pose as a model to young philosophers.

But what I particularly wanted to come to in speaking of my way of philosophizing was to point out to you that it is nothing if not minute. I certainly endeavor to generalize as far as I can find support for generalization; but I depend on the sedulous care with which I scrutinize every point. What is commonly called “breadth of treatment” of philosophical questions is my soul’s abhorrence. My analysis is so detailed and minute, that it would be impossible in these lectures to give you any specimen of it. I can really do nothing more than to state some of the chief conclusions to which I have been led, with the merest hints of the nature of the arguments by which I have been led to them, especially since I cannot assume that you have any acquaintance with the real logic of modern thought as I conceive it. While I have the warmest admiration for the great metaphysicians and psychologists of this university who are among the world’s leaders in their departments, I cannot but think it deeply lamentable that true, modern, exact, non-psychological logic, which ought to form the background of a liberal education, does not receive sufficient attention here to be at all in evidence. As time goes on the consequences of this neglect will be deeply graven.

To return to my necessarily superficial treatment of my subject in this course of lectures, you will not, I am sure, so utterly misunderstand me as to suppose that I would have you accept any proposition in logic because I say so. Indeed, that would be impossible; for one does not know what the proposition in logic means until one fully comprehends the arguments for it. But my object in describing my way of philosophizing has been chiefly to show you that if I seem to be treating these questions in what is called a “broad way,” that is merely the effect of the extreme compression which is necessary, and to warn you that the propositions to which I am able to bring little support, if they be not as true as I hold them, at least are matters worthy of careful study, and are not to be assumed to be so superficially adopted as they must seem to be from the manner in which I am here forced to treat them.

2. The explanation is found in the second Harvard lecture, selection 11, p. 146.

3. Gaspard Coriolis (1792–1843), French mathematician and physicist, author of Théorie mathématique des effets du jeu de billard (Paris: Carilian-Gœury, 1835).

4. In Descartes’s treatise on the Passions of the Soul.

5. In the first 1898 Cambridge lecture in this volume (“Philosophy and the Conduct of Life”), Peirce stated explicitly that ethics was not one of the normative sciences. He seems to imply here that he changed his mind about this matter as early as 1899.

6. Between 1855 and 1857 Peirce made an independent study of Friedrich von Schiller’s Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1794–95), which was his first real philosophical reading, one that made an indelible impression upon him.

7. Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), second section.

8. Euripides, Fragments, 1024; Menander, 218.

9. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, bk. 1, ch. 2, §5.

10. “On the Natural Classification of Arguments,” in W2:23–48 and CP 2.461–514.

11. See selection 8, note 1. The matter of the “illegibility of a single word” in Prior Analytics (bk. 2, ch. 25, 69a30–36) is treated by Peirce in the first of three illustrations discussed in MS 690 (but not published in this volume). Peirce suggests that a passage where Aristotle illustrates a case of abduction contains a corrupt reading. The passage in question reads as follows: “Let Δ be capable of being squared E, rectilinear; Z, the circle. If there is only one middle to EZ, that the circle is equal to a rectilinear figure, then the circles being equal by lunes to a rectilinear figure, is near to being known” (69a31–34). Peirce argues:

The reference plainly is to the discovery of Hippocrates of Chios that certain lunes, or figures bounded by two arcs of circles, were equal to rectilinear figures and capable of being squared; and Aristotle plainly meant that this fact justified the hope, which we know was entertained on this ground, that the circle could be squared. There was “only one middle,” or remove from knowledge, concerning the circle’s being equal to a constructible rectilinear figure, since it is evidently equal to some square. . . . It is likely, however, that [Aristotle] understood the argument to be the inference of the minor premiss of the following syllogism from its other two propositions:

Whatever is equal to a constructible rectilinear figure is equal to a sum of lunes;

The circle is equal to a constructible rectilinear figure;

∴ The circle is equal to a sum of lunes.

To make this out, we have to change just one word of the text. In place of saying that the major term is we have to put This change of a single word of the text, not only renders the whole chapter intelligible; but gives it the very meaning which it ought to have in the development of Aristotle’s doctrine. Such a singular corruption of the text as I suppose could hardly have taken place without an Apellicon; but with him, it was easy enough. (CP 7.250–51)

Apellicon (d. c.84 B.C.), an Athenian bibliophile, acquired the libraries of Aristotle and Theophrastus from Neleus and brought them back to Athens. The papers had much suffered from a century and a half of neglect, and were in places illegible. Apellicon published them with many corrections.

12. The remaining paragraphs were written on verso pages in the notebook, replacing four paragraphs in which Peirce discusses the wavering history of his work on the three categories and the three kinds of inference. He explains that the division of the three inferences is better supported by evidence than that of the three categories, and that the connection between the two triads remains obscure. Peirce believed early on that there was a link between Firstness, Icon, and Abduction, between Secondness, Index, and Induction, and between Thirdness, Symbol, and Deduction, and that, following the logic of categorial subdivisibility, there was one kind of Abduction, two of Induction, and three syllogistic figures. In ensuing years, however, Peirce began to hesitate about such conclusions; at one time he confounded Abduction with the second kind of Induction, at another he stated the rationale of Induction in terms more suitable to Abduction, and later on he represented a connection between Deduction and Secondness and between Induction and Thirdness. But now Peirce thinks his original opinion may be sounder, though he will leave the question undecided. He adds that such hesitations show how unusually free he is from favoring his own opinions. But one idea he still strongly holds to is that, although Abduction and Induction are not reducible to Deduction, their rationale must be Deductive, so that the ultimate ground of any reasoning is that in which the validity of mathematical (deductive) reasoning consists.

13. For a detailed description of Peirce’s research methodology, see note 1 above.

14. In “Prolegomena for an Apology to Pragmaticism,” The Monist 16 (1906):492–546 (CP 4.571ff.), Peirce gives such an analysis, using existential graphs.

15. See selection 5, note 5.

15. THE NATURE OF MEANING

1. Aristotle, De interpretatione, ch. 7, 17a38. Peirce first provided the Latin form, “quod aptum natum est praedicari de pluribus” (traceable to Abelard and others), but then replaced it with the Greek form.

2. See selection 11, note 5.

3. Jeremy Bentham in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) made “the greatest good for the greatest number” the highest goal of human commerce.

4. Peirce refers mainly to Christoph Sigwart (see selection 8, note 7).

5. See selection 5, “The First Rule of Logic”: “Precisely those three things are all that enter into the experiment of any deduction—colligation, iteration, erasure.”

6. See selection 12, note 22.

7. Julius Adolph Stöckhardt (1809–1886), Die Schule der Chemie, oder erster Unterricht in der Chemie, versinnlicht durch einfache Experimente (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg, 1850), part I, §6. Peirce’s uncle, Charles Henry Peirce (1814–1855), translated Stöckhardt’s book, The Principles of Chemistry, Illustrated by Simple Experiments (Cambridge: Bartlett, 1851), which became a very popular textbook at Harvard. Peirce studied it in his undergraduate years, if not before since it was his uncle who introduced him to chemistry at an early age.

8. See selection 8, note 35.

9. Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (1845–1926), British economist and logician.

10. Poincaré thought that all physical theories, besides having a mathematical, experimental, and hypothetical dimension, were also partly conventional, since any number of hypotheses can be selected, and their selection often rests on economical conventions. Since we do not know a priori whether our selected hypotheses will fit reality, it is unreasonable to think that they are true.

11. Perceptive judgment or perceptual judgment: Peirce uses these two phrases interchangeably (see especially the next lecture, where both are found together).

12. Critique of Pure Reason, A7, B10–11.

13. Christian Wolff (1679–1754), influential German rationalist philosopher. Among Wolffians are such names as L. O. Thümmig, G. B. Bilfinger, A. G. Baumgarten, H. F. Meier, Martin Knutzen, and J. H. Lambert.

14. Critique of Pure Reason, A656, B684.

15. Kant thought that all syllogisms were reducible to syllogisms in Barbara (the first figure), a point he made in his 1762 memoir On the False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures. Peirce’s first major logical discovery was that every such reduction takes the logical form of an argument in the figure from which the reduction is made. See his 1866 Memoranda Concerning the Aristotelean Syllogism (W1:505–14).

16. Adrien Legendre (1752–1833), French mathematician, author of Théorie des nombres (1830). Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), German mathematician and astronomer, author of Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (1801), a work that had a profound impact on Peirce and his father. Peirce said of Gauss that he was the greatest geometer.

17. Gottfried Ploucquet (1716–1790), German philosopher and logician, author of a symbolic logic that made use of diagrams. Peirce owned his Commentationes philosophicae (1781).

18. Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) illustrated syllogisms by means of embedded circles in the second volume of his Lettres à une Princesse d’Allemagne (1772).

19. Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777), Neues Organon (1764) pt. I, pp. 111ff. In a document dated c.1903 (MS 479:12–13, “On Logical Graphs”), Peirce wrote, touching the history of graphical logic (CP 4.353):

Eight years before Euler’s publication appeared the Neues Organon of John Henry Lambert. . . in which the author made the same use of the stretches of parallel lines essentially as Euler did of the areas of circles, with an additional feature of dotted lines and extensions of lines. Lambert, however, does not seem to aim at any mathematical accuracy of thought in using his lines. He certainly does not attain it; nor could he do so as long as he failed to perceive that the only purpose such diagrams could subserve is that of representing the necessity with which the conclusion follows from the premisses of a necessary reasoning, and that that necessity is not a compulsion in thinking (although there is such a compulsion) but is a relation between the facts represented in the premisses and the facts represented in the conclusion.

20. Ernst Schroder, Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik (Exakte Logik), vol. 3, lesson 12, §31 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1895). Richard Dedekind, Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen? (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg, 1888).

21. “On the Logic of Number,” in American Journal of Mathematics 4 (1881):85–95; W4:299–309.

22. Karl Prantl finds the name “copula” first in Abelard, though with traces of earlier usage (Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, II, 196). From Psellus and Petrus Hispanus, the name passed into the technical vocabulary of logic.

23. The Greek word means “nothing”; hence the word “medad,” indicating that there is “no” blank left in the proposition.

24. Peirce wrote the word “indicative” above the deleted “indexical.”

25. Theodore Roosevelt knew enough of Peirce’s abilities to have been one of those who recommended him to the Carnegie Institution. The “club” is probably the New York-based Century Club, of which Peirce was a member from 1877 to the early 1890s.

26. Claude Bernard (1813–1878), one of the leading physiologists of the century, Leçons de pathologie expérimentale, second lesson (Paris: Baillière, 1872).

27. Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), French chemist, in the mid-century discovered the basic characteristics of bacteria, while the German scientist Robert Koch (1843–1910) established in the 1880s that bacteria were the cause of many infectious diseases. August Weismann (1834–1914), German biologist, author of the theory of “germ plasm” (hereditary elements carried by sex cells, as opposed to “somatoplasm”—the rest of the body). He published in 1892 Das Keimplasma, eine Theorie der Vererbung (translated as The Germ-Plasm; a Theory of Heredity, 1893).

28. These three truths are the three “cotary propositions” Peirce discusses at greater length in the final lecture (the next selection).

29. Peirce is using the word “quodlibetical” in its literal meaning: “any individual you please,” without restriction of any sort. The quodlibetical subject is called the hypothetical subject earlier in the lecture (pp. 209–10), while the indesignate is called the indesignative.

30. Cours de philosophie positive, 28th lesson.

31. Peirce wrote “probimetric” in the notebook, but the better form “probametric” occurs in the draft of this lecture (MS 313:16–17), where it is explained as follows:

If, however, in place of a deductive argument we are dealing with an inductive argument, by which I mean a course of experimentation and reflection designed to put a theory to the test, the case is different because we have [a] different end in view. We are now no longer considering hypothetical states of things. We want to know how nearly a given theory represents the facts, and the answer to this question, from the nature of things, must have the well-known character which I have hitherto expressed by calling it “probable and approximate.” This, however, is a clumsy and inexact expression. A single word is wanted. Suppose we call it probametric, meaning that the answer will be a quantity whose value has been so chosen that the probability of its having an error not exceeding a variable magnitude will vary, according to the doctrine of chances, in a convenient manner. The inductive procedure will be sound or otherwise according as it is or is not calculated according to the principles of probability, to reduce the probable error indefinitely as the experimentation is carried further and further.

16. PRAGMATISM AS THE LOGIC OF ABDUCTION

1. Peirce knew Horace’s work well, and may be alluding to verses 304–5 of his Ars poetica: “ergo fungar vice cotis, acutum I reddere quae ferrum valet exsors ipsa secandi” (“I will thus perform the function of a whetstone, which is able to restore sharpness to iron, though itself unable to cut”). Peirce at first coined the adjective “cossal” from the Latin nominative and used it throughout the lecture. Upon revision, he substituted the word “cotary” (from the genitive) everywhere, missing only two that have been here corrected.

2. “Nothing is in the intellect which was not previously in the senses.” This is a scholastic idea derived from Aristotle (Posterior Analytics, bk. 2, ch. 19, 100a, b); see Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, qu. 26, art. 6, 2nd answer to contrary difficulties, and Summa theologica, bk. 1, qu. 84, art. 6. For a modern perspective, see Descartes’s “Sixth Meditation.”

3. De anima, bk. 3, ch. 8, 432a3–8.

4. George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, §13 (where Berkeley disagrees with Locke on this very point). See EP1:48 and 97.

5. The passage from this sentence to the end of the first section was added later by Peirce.

6. Peirce may here be recalling his father’s third Smithsonian lecture on “Potential Algebra” (from a series of six, titled “Potential Physics”), delivered on Friday, 23 January 1857, and of which a review appeared in the National Intelligencer the following Monday. The following excerpt from the fourth paragraph of the unsigned review alludes to the drawing:

The learned lecturer [i.e., Benjamin Peirce] next showed, by tracing a continuous line in such a way as to look anything but linear, but exactly similar to a batch of loaves of bread or a heap of stones, how apt we are to be deceived by our months and years and centuries about the idea of continuity, properly considered. This illustration was very obvious and striking, and drew down the acknowledgments of the audience. The error in human thought here arises from the prevalence of the law of discontinuity over continuity.

7. Peirce sketched eight examples of his father’s serpentine line. A slightly stylized version of the more finely drawn one is used here. The reader can be confident that the entire drawing consists of just one continuous line. Compare with the figure in selection 2, p. 6.

8. This optical illusion is the equivocal figure known as Schröder’s Stair, originally noticed in Annalen der Physik und Chemie 105 (1858):298–311. The “two or three dozen” visual illusions mentioned in the next paragraph may be those that are illustrated under “Optical Illusions” in Baldwin’s Dictionary (vol. 2, plates I-IV, after p. 208).

9. John Stuart Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (London: Longmans, etc., 1865). See chapters IV, V, and especially VI, on “The Philosophy of the Conditioned.” Peirce bought Mill’s Examination as soon as it was published and read it with great care. Although he rejected Mill’s psychologism entirely, the book much contributed to clarify his own opinions. See selection 30, p. 457, and Max Fisch’s “A Chronicle of Pragmaticism, 1865–1879” in Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 115–16, 124–25.

10. Peirce made a note to himself to skip the rest of this paragraph (beginning with “At the same time”) and the first four sentences of the next paragraph (ending with “a logical fallacy.”). He replaced them with the following remark: “I should easily show you that this difficulty, however formidable theoretically, amounts practically to little or nothing for a person skilled in shaping such inquiries. But this is unnecessary, since the objection founded upon it has no logical force whatever.”

11. When Peirce first wrote this paragraph, he stated only the first two objections. He added the third objection later, and made a number of textual alterations to accommodate the change, including the addition of a long two-paragraph response to it, inserted at the end of the second section of this lecture.

12. The next two large paragraphs (beginning with “I have argued” and ending with “so excluded.”) were written on facing verso pages, replacing a longer text Peirce decided to skip, but of which a few significant excerpts are reproduced below.

The maxim of Pragmatism, if it is sound, or whatever ought to replace it, if it is not sound, is nothing else than the logic of abduction.

A mass of facts is before us. We go through them. We examine them. We find them a confused snarl, an impenetrable jungle. We are unable to hold them in our minds. We endeavor to set them down upon paper; but they seem to be so multiplex intricate that we can neither satisfy ourselves that what we have set down represents the facts, nor can we get any clear idea of what it is that we have set down. But suddenly, while we are poring over our digest of the facts and are endeavoring to set them into order, it occurs to us that if we were to assume something to be true that we do not know to be true, these facts would arrange themselves luminously. That is abduction. . . .

Now, as I remarked in a former lecture, anything is good in so far, and only in so far, as it conforms to its end.

The question is, then, what can come of an abductive theory. Someone may say that it is a grand and adorable idea just as it is. That may be. Its contemplation may fill the soul with a sort of music. But that is esthetic goodness. Our inquiry relates, however, to cognitive goodness. What can the theory teach us. I should make the same reply if anybody said that there was some sort of mysterious result to be expected from certain theories. It is not necessary to deny that there are mysterious agencies in ideas. It is sufficient to say that it is not rational cognitive goodness. To have that goodness the theory must lead to some further knowledge. It must be the basis of some advance in reasoning.

If it embody clear and definite ideas of relationship, it may be the foundation of a lofty edifice of mathematical developments, which may be good in various ways, esthetically (for the esthetic element in mathematics is intense), educationally in training the mind to deal with analogous ideas, and cognitively in teaching us its lesson of the world of ideas.

But those modes of goodness of the theory it would possess just the same if there were no anticipation of its proving actually true of the real world, and therefore independently of its having the character of an abduction. If it is to be good as an abduction it must subserve the end of abduction. Now the end of abduction is that the deductive consequences of it may be tested by induction. So alone is any application made of its essential anticipatory character. Consequently the good of abduction, as such, that is, its adaptation to its end, will consist of its being of such a character that its deductive consequences may be experimentally tested. . . .

It is plain that a man cannot consistently engage in this discussion or in any discussion unless he admits that there is a distinction between truth and falsity. It is also plain that to admit this distinction is to admit that there is something whose characters are what they are independently of what he may think that they are; and further the words “truth” and “falsity” are not appropriate unless he wishes to make his opinions conform to that object and thinks that in some measure he can do so. Neither is it what we mean to wish to satisfy some man, or body of men, or other being or beings with his opinions. We must mean by the real that which has such characters as it has independently of what any particular mind or minds may think those characters may be. At the same time, these characters of the real must be of the nature of thoughts or sufficiently so to impart some sense to our talking of thoughts conforming to those characters. But this thought or quasi-thought in which the characters of the real consist cannot be any existential happening or being. Thus suppose we were to say that the real is what men will ultimately come to think. Then the real fact that they will so come to think would have to consist in their coming to think that they would come so to think and this again would consist in their coming to think that they would come to think that so they would come to think, and so on ad infinitum, and it is plain that this would not be making the reality consist in the existential coming to pass of anything. I am forced to say that that which thought conforms to has a representational mode of being which does not consist in any reactional existence. At the same time, it will be too manifestly false for me to say that the redness of a red thing consists in anything but the immediate positive quality itself. Neither can I deny that when I make an effort it is then and there that the event takes place, however it is represented. I must thus acknowledge the distinctness of the three categories, and at the same time that Thirdness is continuous up to the other two as limits before I can have any clear notion of truth and falsity; and without such clear notion I have no basis for any discussion of the maxim of abduction.

13. “On the Natural Classification of Arguments” in W2:23–48, and “On a New List of Categories” in EP1:1–10 and W2:49–59.

14. Cours de philosophie positive, 28th lesson.

15. See previous selection, p. 216.

16. This is the lecture on “Multitude and Continuity” Peirce delivered the next evening, on Friday, May 15, 1903. Preparatory notes for this lecture are in MS 316a. See selection 11, note 3.

17. Peirce deleted the following sentence at the end of this paragraph: “I will mention tomorrow a way in which these logicians might conceivably be able to escape this difficulty.”

18. See selection 10, note 9, and p. 141.

19. Peirce gave one of his more extensive treatments of continuity in his 1898 Cambridge Conferences lecture series, which is published in RLT with explanatory comments by Hilary Putnam.

20. “Thirty years ago,” taken literally, brings us back to 1873 and possibly alludes to informal conversations held at the Metaphysical Club rather than to a specific writing (the sentence first read, before Peirce altered it, “I went about among philosophers telling them . . .”). See selection 28, note 5.

21. This idea is already implicit in the “New List of Categories” (1867) and becomes most explicit in the “Description of a Notation for the Logic of Relatives” (1870).

22. Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (1824–1887), German physicist, takes the view in his Vorlesungen über mathematische Physik: Mechanik (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1876) that it is the task of mechanics to describe the motions that take place in nature and not their causes. Hence he does not find it useful to try to fully define force and energy.

23. Peirce wrote “abduction” instead of “induction,” an apparent error that has been here corrected. The second attitude or position defined two paragraphs earlier holds that thirdness is inferable by induction and is not directly perceived, which means that it is not apprehended by way of a perceptual judgment (abduction). The editors of the Collected Papers have suggested alternatively that the word “induction” in the earlier statement of the second position be replaced with “abduction” (CP 5.209), but the accompanying assertion that thirdness is “experimentally verifiable” works against that reading.

17. WHAT MAKES A REASONING SOUND?

1. The “thorough and formal refutation of the fallacy” has not been identified. Peirce makes the same claim of having written it out in one of the drafts (MS 453). One remote possibility is that the second notebook containing the present lecture text, MS 449 (see note 5 below), was attached, not to MS 448 as here surmised, but to yet another no longer extant notebook, and that the combination of that missing notebook and of MS 449 would have constituted the formal refutation.

2. The “more obvious” objection, which Peirce did not enunciate in previous drafts either, is probably that the argument would easily allow contrary propositions to be true simultaneously. For instance, one person could have the “logical feeling” that the proposition “there is no distinction between good and bad reasoning” was true, and another that it was false, and they would equally be right.

3. The 324-foot (99-metre) Campanile in St. Mark’s Square, constructed from the tenth through the sixteenth centuries, collapsed on 14 October 1902, its structure having been eroded by the sirocco winds. It was rebuilt in 1912.

4. Elements of Philosophy (1655), part I, “Computation or Logic,” ch. 1, sect. 2: “By ratiocination, I mean computation.” In The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, translated by Sir William Molesworth (London: John Bohn, 1839), 1:3.

5. The end of this paragraph corresponds to the point on p. 37 in the first notebook (MS 448) where Peirce appears to have decided to skip the remaining pages (38–48) and to resume with the text found in the next notebook (MS 449), whose first page is also numbered 37. The transition appears to be solid, since the “great fallacy” mentioned at the beginning of the next paragraph is the belief that there is no factual distinction between good and bad reasoning.

6. Four days after this lecture, an anonymous listener sent Peirce the following question: “If not inconvenient for you, will you be kind enough to give tonight a summary—however brief—of your answer to the question ‘What makes a Reasoning Sound?’” Peirce prepared a response that he read at the beginning of the third lecture. This response, found in MS 465, is as follows:

My first duty this evening is to reply to a note which asks me to give an explanation at my last lecture. The letter did not come to hand until the following morning. The question asked is what my answer in the first lecture was to the question “What makes a Reasoning to be sound?” I had no intention of answering that question in my first lecture, because I dislike to put forth opinions until I am ready to prove them; and I had enough to do in the first lecture to show what does not make reasoning to be sound. Besides in this short course it seems better to skip such purely theoretical questions. Yet since I am asked, I have no objection to saying that in my opinion what makes a reasoning sound is the real law that the general method which that reasoning more or less consciously pursues does tend toward the truth. The very essence of an argument,—that which distinguishes it from all other kinds of signs,—is that it professes to be the representative of a general method of procedure tending toward the truth. To say that this method tends toward the true is to say that it is a real law that existences will follow. Now if that profession is true, and the conclusions of that method really will be true, to the extent and in the manner in which the argument pretends that they will, the argument is sound; if not, it is a false pretension and is unsound. I thus make the soundness of argument to consist in the facts of the case and not at all in whether the reasoner feels confidence in the argument or not. I may further say that there are three great classes of argument, Deductions, Inductions, and Abductions; and these profess to tend toward the truth in very different senses, as we shall see. I suppose this answers the question intended. However, it is possible that my correspondent did not intend to ask in what I think the soundness of reasoning consists, but by the question “What makes reasoning sound?” he may mean “What causes men to reason right?” That question I did substantially answer in my first lecture. Namely, to begin with, when a boy or girl first begins to criticize his inferences, and until he does that he does not reason, he finds that he has already strong prejudices in favor of certain ways of arguing. Those prejudices, whether they be inherited or acquired, were first formed under the influence of the environing world, so that it is not surprising that they are largely right or nearly right. He, thus, has a basis to go upon. But if he has the habit of calling himself to account for his reasonings, as all of us do more or less, he will gradually come to reason much better; and this comes about through his criticism, in the light of experience, of all the factors that have entered into reasonings that were performed shortly before the criticism. Occasionally, he goes back to the criticism of habits of reasoning which have governed him for many years. That is my answer to the second question.

7. Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (c.1168–1253), initiator of the English scientific tradition and commentator of the newly recovered works of Aristotle. He believed that our discovery of the cause of what experiment reveals is the basis of sense knowledge, which itself is the basis of all knowledge.

8. Peirce reviewed Lady Welby’s What is Meaning? (London and NewYork: Macmillan, 1903) in the Nation 77 (15 Oct. 1903):308–9; CN 3:143–45.

9. See selection 3, note 6.

10. The last paragraph of this lecture has been omitted since it refers to a text not published here. It reads: “In the next lecture I shall introduce you to a system of signs which I have invented as an aid in the study of logic.” Much of this system of signs is found in selections 20 and 21, two sections of the “Syllabus.”

18. AN OUTLINE CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES

1. Cours de philosophie positive, 2nd lesson.

2. Peirce constructed a detailed classification of the sciences in a large section of his projected book “Minute Logic.” See MS 427, “Chapter II. Prelogical Notions. Section I. Classification of the Sciences” (1902; CP 1.203–83).

3. In the original document, the majority of the letters and numbers here found between parentheses were instead between commas. The style has been modified and modernized for the sake of greater legibility. Peirce’s capitalization and italicization of names of sciences have also been made more consistent. Names of sciences are capitalized only when they are either defined or placed precisely within the classification. They are italicized only when they are within the classification and at a level higher than that indicated by arabic numbers, with the only exception of the three branches under Logic.

4. Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) popularized science with his Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung (Stuttgart and Tübingen: Cotta, 1845–62). Herbert Spencer published an essay titled The Classification of the Sciences: To Which are Added Reasons for Dissenting from the Philosophy of M. Comte (London: Williams and Norgate, 1864; New York: Appleton, 1870). His First Principles, also known as A System of Synthetic Philosophy, appeared in several revised editions between 1862 and 1896.

5. Elaterics is the theory of elasticity.

6. Peirce’s elaborate classification of the practical sciences is in MS 1343, “Of the Classification of the Sciences. Second Paper. Of the Practical Sciences” (1902).

19. THE ETHICS OF TERMINOLOGY

1. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, see for instance Axvii, B139–40, 142.

2. On this matter, see the closely related document titled “A Proposed Logical Notation” (MS 530, 1904).

3. Quincy Hall is a private dormitory for Harvard students built in 1891.

20. SUNDRY LOGICAL CONCEPTIONS

1. In Hermann Diels’s Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vol. 1, p. 171, fragment 91; cited from Plutarchus. See also fragments 12 (p. 154) and 49a (p. 161).

2. Peirce prepared the definition of “precision” in Baldwin’s Dictionary 2:323–24; see also selection 25, “Issues of Pragmaticism,” p. 351–52.

3. “On a New List of Categories,” EPl:2–3; W2:50–51.

4. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Dublin, 1710), §88.

5. The text here was much altered by the editors of the Collected Papers. Peirce’s original statement has been restored. In the next section of the Syllabus (selection 21), Peirce adds a third trichotomy to the two described here, that of Qualisign, Sinsign, and Legisign, and makes it the first of the three. Peirce’s semiotic theory is thus here at an important point of development.

6. Peirce will use the word “seme” in a very different sense in his 1906 Monist paper “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism,” where it becomes the first term of the trichotomy “Seme, Pheme, Delome,” a generalization of the third trichotomy “Rheme (Term), Proposition, Argument.” See CP 4.538–540.

7. This second trichotomy will become the third one in the next selection.

8. If “one of them” refers to either individual in the pair, then Peirce means presumably that if the interpreter singles out either the father or the mother from the unit “two parents,” the predicate “son of” remains true of the dyad.

9. In the Century Dictionary, Peirce defines “exponible proposition” as follows: “an obscure proposition, or one containing a sign not included in the regular forms of propositions recognized by logic. Such are, Man alone cooks his food; Every man but Enoch and Elijah is mortal.” The word “exponible” can be defined as “admitting, or requiring, an exposition or explanation.”

10. Karl Prantl, Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, 1:580–81. “Thus there are two species of propositions, just as there are of the conclusions themselves: one is predicative, which is also a simple proposition; as when we say, He who reigns is happy; the other is substitutive, or conditional, which is also a compound proposition; as when you say: he who reigns, if he is wise, is happy. You are indeed laying down a condition, which is that unless he is wise, he will not be happy.”

11. John of Salisbury, bishop of Chartres (d. 1180), spoke of “that which is well known to nearly everyone, namely that what common names [i.e. adjectives] signify is one thing, and what they name is another. They name particulars [i.e. existent individual things and facts], but they signify universals [i.e. Firstnesses].” Ioannes Saresberiensis Metalogicus, e codice ms. academiae Cantabrigiensis (Parisiis: Apud Hadrianum Beys, 1610).

12. “Upon Logical Comprehension and Extension,” W2:70–86.

13. Fulget: “it’s lightning”; lucet: “it is light.”

14. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A70, 74–75; B95, 100. See the large entry that Peirce wrote for “modality” in Baldwin’s Dictionary, 2:89–93 (CP 2.382–90).

15. “Billingsgate”: the word derives from, and is here used by Peirce to indicate, the coarse vituperative language for which the old London fish market known as Billingsgate was famous.

16. Lucius Apuleius of Madaura (fl. c.150), Platonist philosopher and rhetorician.

17. On the difference between negative and infinite, see MS 921:65–66 (July 1859), and also Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, A72, B97. Also relevant are Peirce’s definitions of “quality,” “negation,” and “limitative” in Baldwin’s Dictionary (CP 2.374–81).

18. Dionysius Thrax (fl. 100 B.C.), Greek grammarian whose Art of Grammar defined the field (Leipzig: G. Uhlig, 1883) 638.3–4. “A verb is a word without cases, admitting tenses, persons, and numbers, displaying either activity or passivity.”

19. Karl Prantl, Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, 1:696.

20. Prior Analytics, bk. 1, ch. 1, 24b16. “I call a term that into which the premiss is resolved, i.e. both the predicate and that of which it is predicated.”

21. The term “syncathegreuma,” so spelled, is found at the beginning of Petrus Hispanus’s Summulae logicales, but this may have been a fifteenth-century printer’s error, since the word “sincathegoreumatic” occurs at the end of the treatise (the fourth letter being alternately a “c” or a “k”). Peirce added at the end of this sentence a footnote which is not reproduced here: a Latin quotation from Ockham distinguishing two kinds of terms, the “cathegreumata” and the “sincathegreumata.” The quotation is followed by a remark about the nominalists’s peculiar use of the Latin language.

22. Three long paragraphs, amounting to eleven manuscript pages, have been omitted at this point. They discuss the origin of the three terms “deduction,” “induction,” and “abduction.”

23. Oscar Howard Mitchell, “On a New Algebra of Logic,” in Studies in Logic (Boston, 1883), 72–106. The “master” is of course Peirce himself, who taught Mitchell at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1880s.

21. NOMENCLATURE AND DIVISIONS OF TRIADIC RELATIONS

1. This trichotomy is here formulated for the very first time by Peirce. The word “Sinsign” is interlined above the deleted word “Sesign,” which was Peirce’s first coin-age for the second type of sign (it is found in several drafts).

2. The word “Dicent” is only used as an adjective; an earlier variant was “Dicisignal” (MS 799:4). The word “Dictor” is also found in one place (MS S104:92).

3. Henry Peter Brougham, first Baron Brougham and Vaux (1778–1868), British statesman, orator, jurist, and scientist.

4. Richard Whately (1787–1863), English logician and theologian. Whately’s Elements of Logic was the book that introduced Peirce to logic when he was twelve (see W1:xviii–xix). Isaac Watts (1674–1748), English theologian and hymn writer, author of Logic, or The Right Use of Reason in the Inquiry after Truth (London: J. Buckland et al., 1790; J. Haddon, 1813).

5. A short paragraph that followed this sentence has been omitted because Peirce repeated its content two paragraphs down (beginning with “In the course of”).

22. NEW ELEMENTS

1. The Greek title is Peirce’s, and the English title is supplied by the editors. Peirce added the subtitle “Preface” under his title, indicating that the entire manuscript was to serve as a preface to a book that he never finished writing. The subtitle has here been omitted. Research shows that Peirce intended to write a book that would have revisited the epistemic grounds of mathematics, following a rigorous methodology in the manner of Euclid.

2. The book referred to here survives in MSS 164–66, most of which was composed in 1895.

3. The only publisher Peirce is known to have submitted his “New Elements of Mathematics” to is Edwin Ginn, of Ginn & Co., with whom he had extensive correspondence in the first half of 1895. No evidence has been found that Peirce submitted his manuscript to Macmillan, even though it was Macmillan that published the “treatise on geometry” Peirce refers to three sentences later. The treatise is J. Humphrey Spanton’s Science and Art Drawing: Complete Geometrical Course. . . (New York: Macmillan, 1895), which Peirce reviewed negatively in The Nation (CN 2:126–27) in January 1896.

4. Maybe Peirce misplaced the manuscript and thought he had lost it. Carolyn Eisele published MS 165 in her well-known New Elements of Mathematics.

5. Here begins the description of the second of the “three distinct ways” in which the sign is connected with the “Truth.”

6. The Port-Royalists are Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694) and Pierre Nicole (1625–1695). Though Peirce recognized the major importance of the Port-Royalists in modern logic, in a draft version of the third Harvard Lecture he stated: “Arnauld, for example, was a thinker of considerable force, and yet L’Art de penser, or the Port-Royal Logic, is a shameful exhibit of what the two and a half centuries of man’s greatest achievements could consider as a good account of how to think” (CP 5.84).

7. In “Upon Logical Comprehension and Extension,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 7 (published 1868; presented 13 November 1867); W2:83–84.

8. De interpretatione, 17a, 19b.

9. The difference between the two Latin clauses is that the first is in direct, and the second in indirect discourse: it is an infinitive clause, implicitly assuming an utterer: “Someone says that Socrates is wise.”

10. James Stanley Grimes (1807–1903), Bostonian phrenologist and speculative amateur scientist. Peirce seems to refer to Grimes’s Etherology, and the Phreno-Philosophy of Mesmerism and Magic Eloquence (New York, Boston: Saxton and Miles, Saxton, Peirce, & Co., etc., 1845; second edition revised, Boston: J. Munroe & Co., 1853). Grimes uses “credenciveness” to designate a specific mental organ located in the brain, whose function is to make people act out what is asserted about them (the matter is discussed in his book, pp. 142–54). In a 1898 Nation review of Boris Sidis’s Psychology of Suggestion, Peirce wrote (CN 2:166):

This faculty [of suggestibility], or state of mind, was first assigned as the main secret of the ordinary phenomena of hypnotism as long ago as 1845 by the American itinerant lecturer Grimes. But he was not an academic person, and was naturally ignored. . . . We may add that, by reducing Consciousness to the rank of a special faculty, Grimes paved the way to the modern doctrine of the subconscious mind. . . . The word “credenciveness” is not particularly apt, because it does not obviously imply a tendency to action, although it was so understood by Grimes.

11. “The Fixation of Belief,” in EP1:109–23, and W3:242–57.

12. Paul Carus has been cited by Peirce as one who appears to base chance on ignorance (“Reply to the Necessitarians,” The Monist 3 (1893):543; CP 6.602). Elsewhere Peirce refers to John Venn as having refuted in his Logic of Chance many logic texts that hold that view (CP 6.74). One of the early writers Peirce may have been thinking of is Laplace, who claims that probabilities arise from ignorance.

13. For some reason, Peirce did not identify the “distinguished writer” whom he refers to several times. One good hypothesis points to Karl Pearson. The last two paragraphs of Peirce’s review of Pearson’s Grammar of Science (selection 6) address precisely the nominalistic (“Pearsonist”) view that the formula is a human device that conforms to the facts.

14. System of Logic, vol. 1, bk. 3, ch. 5, §§ 2–3.

15. See Critique of Pure Reason, A652, B 680.

16. The word “spondesime” is not found in the Oxford English Dictionary or any other dictionary consulted by the editors. The closest word is “spondulics,” defined in the Century Dictionary as an American slang word meaning “originally, paper money; now, any money; funds.”

17. The manuscript reading for “a symbol” is “an icon,” which appears to be an accidental repetition of the final words of the previous sentence. Subsequent context (“A symbol, on the other hand”) makes it clear that Peirce is distinguishing between an index and a symbol.

18. The atomic weight of gold is 196.9665. The Century Dictionary says 196.7.

19. This statement brings to mind Peirce’s favorite Evangelist: “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1).

20. Mathematically not every endless series need have a limit, but it is a tenet of Peirce’s mathematical-logical reasoning that they do have a limit. Judging from examples of series he gives elsewhere, Peirce evidently means by series a succession of distinct entities that are ordered by some relation. By limit Peirce means “an object which comes after all the objects of that series, but so that every other object which comes after all those objects comes after the limit also” (1898, CP 6.185). “Thus, the series of whole numbers is an increasing endless series. Its limit is the denumerable multitude” (1897, CP 4.213).

23. IDEAS, STRAY OR STOLEN, ABOUT SCIENTIFIC WRITING

1. See selection 6, note 12.

2. See selection 3, note 7.

3. It is unclear in which journal Peirce wanted to publish this essay; it could have been the Popular Science Monthly, whose editor asked Peirce in September 1904 to contribute an article—which Peirce decided to forgo when he realized the journal could not afford to pay him.

24. WHAT PRAGMATISM IS

1. Arthur James Balfour, Earl of Balfour (1848–1930), Reflections Suggested by the New Theory of Matter, Presidential Address, British Association for the Advancement of Science, 17 August 1904 (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1904).

2. For William James’s first use of “pragmatism,” see selection 10, note 3. James defined “radical empiricism” at the beginning of his preface to The Will to Believe (Dec. 1896) as a philosophical attitude that regards its most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact, including monism, as hypotheses liable to modification in the course of future experience. He defined it further in his 1904 essay “A World of Pure Experience” (see the 1976 Harvard edition of Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 22–23). At the end of his preface to Pragmatism (the Lowell Lectures of 1906–7), James warned: “To avoid one misunderstanding at least, let me say that there is no logical connexion between pragmatism, as I understand it, and a doctrine which I have recently set forth as ‘radical empiricism.’ The latter stands on its feet. One may entirely reject it and still be a pragmatist.”

3. F. C. S. Schiller (1864–1937), Riddles of the Sphinx: a Study in the Philosophy of Evolution, by a Troglodyte (London: S. Sonnenschein, 1891). Schiller’s paper “Axioms as Postulates” is the second essay in Personal Idealism: Philosophical Essays by Eight Members of the University of Oxford, ed. by Henry Cecil Sturt (New York: Macmillan, 1902), especially p. 63.

4. See Schiller’s Humanism: Philosophical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1903, 1912; second edition reprinted by Greenwood Press, 1970). In the preface to the first edition (p. xxv), Schiller wrote: “Pragmatism itself is in the same case with Personal Idealism, Radical Empiricism and Pluralism. It is in reality only the application of Humanism to the theory of knowledge. . . . Great, therefore, as will be the value we must claim for Pragmatism as a method, we must yet concede that man is greater than any method he has made, and that our Humanism must interpret it.” Schiller also published, at the same time as Peirce’s own paper appeared, a short article, “The Definition of ‘Pragmatism’ and ‘Humanism,’” in Mind 14 (April 1905):235–40, a copy of which he sent to Peirce.

5. The second article here referred to is not “Issues of Pragmaticism” (which Peirce did not have in mind yet), but “The Consequences of Pragmaticism” (MSS 288–89); it may also include MS 326, “Some Applications of Pragmaticism.”

6. Peirce did not write the third paper mentioned here, which he had planned to title “The Evidences for Pragmaticism,” as he told William James in a letter dated 28 September 1904.

7. On synechism, see “The Law of Mind” in EP1:312—33, and selection 1.

8. Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3, scene 2 (Hamlet beseeches Guildenstern to play the recorder: “’Tis as easy as lying.”)

9. See selection 5, note 2.

10. Richmal Mangnall (1769–1820), an English schoolmistress, wrote Historical and Miscellaneous Questions, For the Use of Young People. Known as “Mangnall’s Questions,” it appeared first in 1800 and was much used in the education of English girls in the first half of the nineteenth century.

11. See EP1:109–41 (quotation p. 132), or W3:242–76 (quotation p. 266) and 338–74 (French text).

12. F. E. Abbot (1836–1903), Organic Scientific Philosophy: Scientific Theism (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1885). Abbot defines his “Relationism” or “Scientific Realism” in the introduction (pp. 11–12, 23, and 25–29).

13. The Hall effect (after American physicist Edwin Hall) is the development of an electric field in a solid placed in a magnetic field. The Zeeman effect (after Dutch physicist Pieter Zeeman) is the splitting of spectral lines of elements into two or more components of different frequency when the light source is placed in a strong magnetic field. By the Michelson phenomenon, Peirce probably means an effect that occurs in the Michelson-Morley experiment (see selection 31, note 11). The chessboard phenomenon may possibly refer to one of the checkerboard optical illusions depicted in Baldwin’s Dictionary (see selection 16, note 8).

14. Paul Carus, “The Foundations of Geometry,” in The Monist 13 (1903):370.

15. Here ends the conversation between the Questioner and the Pragmaticist.

16. Prior Analytics, bk. 1, ch. 1, 24b27–30.

17. The paragraph that begins here was added at the end of September 1904, about two weeks after the article was finished.

18. This is the Monist metaphysical series of 1891–93, the first five articles of which are published in EP1:285–371, and the sixth one, “Reply to the Necessitarians,” is in CP 6.588–618. The sentence here was rewritten by Peirce who had originally phrased it in a way that offended Paul Carus, for it suggested unfairly that Carus had discouraged Peirce from writing the “purposed article” on continuity.

19. This postscript was added in February 1905.

25. ISSUES OF PRAGMATICISM

1. See the Journal of Speculative Philosophy “cognition series” of 1868–69 (EP1:11–82; W2:193–272).

2. “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2 (1868):140–57. See especially EP1:41–44, or W2:226–29.

3. Several manuscripts titled “The Basis of Pragmaticism” survive (MSS 279–84, 908), two of which are published in this volume (selections 26 and 27). None of them became the “third paper,” however: they were replaced by “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism,” in The Monist 16 (Oct. 1906):492–546.

4. Jean Buridan (1300–1358), Aristotelian philosopher and logician. “Buridan’s ass” refers to the dilemma of having to decide between two equally attractive choices: how will an ass choose between two identical bales of hay placed at equal distance before him? One solution holds that he must choose at random, another that he will die of starvation. The dilemma, similar to Aristotle’s hungry man in De Caelo 295b32, is not found in Buridan’s works, but was probably used to refute his idea that choice is always delayed until reason decides in favor of one course of action against another.

5. Peirce indicated “p. 290 at the top,” referring to the original publication of “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (EP1:128, lines 16–29; W3:262, lines 5–19).

6. De trinitate, XV, 12, 21; De civitate Dei, XI, 26; the latter has “Si enim fallor sum.”

7. Peirce refers to the Scottish common sense philosophy, developed by Thomas Reid (1710–1796), James Beattie (1735–1803), James Oswald (d. 1793), and Dugald Stewart (1753–1828).

8. Which documents the “preparatory studies” and “provisional inquiry” might refer to have not been determined.

9. The first seventeen pages of Peirce’s manuscript, which served as printer’s copy for the Monist compositors, are lost. The surviving portion starts here at mid-word (“concern-ling”) and continues to the end of the article. Thus from this point on, the manuscript serves as copy-text.

10. In a draft of a letter to Mario Calderoni (c. July 1905), Peirce wrote (L 67:4; CP 8.208):

In an article which should have appeared in the July Monist but which seems to have been crowded out by matters of superior importance, magic squares and the like, I specify six errors which I find in the Scotch doctrine of common sense, of which the most important is that those philosophers failed to remark the extreme vagueness of our indubitable beliefs. For example, everybody’s actions show that it is impossible to doubt that there is an element of order in the world; but the moment we attempt to define that orderliness we find room for doubt.

11. Peirce inserted an asterisk after the word “thought” in the manuscript, intending to add a footnote he had attached in the draft (MS 290) to the following asterisked words: “To say with Kant that Time is but the form of human thought*...” Peirce eventually dropped the footnote, but forgot to delete the asterisk. The relevant portion from the footnote in the draft follows here:

This expression slips from my pen, and I think as well expresses in English terminology Kant’s theory as any equally brief expression can. . . . Yet the use in philosophical English of the word “thought” to express the absolute irrevocable imposition of an intuitive form upon the matter of inward experience, and thus upon all intelligence, seems to me correct enough. It is not Kantian terminology, of course, but I believe it to be good English terminology.

12. The O.E.D. has definitions for the words Prescission, Prescind, and Prescindent. Prescissive has no entry but is mentioned under Precisive. Under the verb to Prescind, three definitions are offered: 1. trans. To cut off beforehand, prematurely, or abruptly; to cut away or remove at once. 2. To cut off, detach, or separate from; to abstract. 3. intr. (for refl.) with from: a. To withdraw the attention from; to leave out of consideration. b. To separate itself, withdraw from (obs.).

13. Isaac Watts (1674–1748), English theologian and hymn writer. Peirce refers to Watts’s Logick: or, The Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry After Truth, with a Variety of Rules to Guard Against Error in the Affairs of Religion and Human Life, as well as in the Sciences (London, 1724): I, vi, 9 ad fin. “This Act of Abstraction is . . . either Precisive or Negative. Precisive Abstraction is when we consider those Things apart which cannot really exist apart; as when we consider a Mode without considering its Substance and Subject” (this quotation, already found in the Imperial Dictionary, was chosen by Peirce for the Century Dictionary, and from there it made its way into the O.E.D. under “Precisive”—with the added remark “apparently for prescissive”).

14. The Greek means “winged word.”

15. In “The Logic of Relatives,” The Monist 7 (January 1897):208–9, Peirce wrote: “In former publications I have given the appellation of universal or particular to a proposition according as its first quantifier is Π or Σ. But the study of substantive logical possibility has led me to substitute the appellations negative and affirmative in this sense, and to call a proposition universal or particular according as its last quantifier is Π or Σ” (CP 3.532).

16. “The Logic of Relatives,” ibid., 205–17. These pages correspond to the thirteenth section of the paper, subtitled “Introduction to the Logic of Quantity” (CP 3.526–52).

17. Peirce indicated “p. 155 ad fin.” in the original publication of “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities”; EP1:53–55 and W2:240–42. The second paper is Peirce’s 1871 review of A. C. Fraser’s edition of The Works of George Berkeley, in North American Review 113 (1871):449–72; EP1:83–105 and W2:462–87.

18. Peirce had first written “(in his own mind, in 1873).”

19. At EP1:132 and W3:267.

20. Orpiment is a yellow compound of two equivalents of arsenic and three of sulphur (arsenic trisulphid). Realgar is red orpiment, and combines an equal number of sulphur and arsenic atoms (arsenic disulphid).

21. See EP1:22–23 and W2:205–7.

26. THE BASIS OF PRAGMATICISM IN PHANEROSCOPY

1. Summa totius logicae, part I, ch. 1. William of Ockham became known as the “venerable inceptor” not because he was the founder of nominalism but because his academic career at Oxford was interrupted while he was an inceptor, i.e., a scholar who has completed the requirements for the degree of master of theology and has yet to receive a teaching chair.

2. Peirce inserted here a footnote which has been omitted, because it refers to a long technical note (“a defense of the strict doctrine of valency in chemistry”) found at the end of the document but not published here.

3. Peirce’s “planar” representation of methane has been retained, although today’s representation would either be a variation of his planar form, or more often the three-dimensional stereoscopic form that gives the true tetrahedral shape of the molecule. His notational representation of lithium compounds is also left untouched.

4. Peirce inserted here another footnote which is omitted for the same reason as above. One interesting part of it says that “there is a denumerable multitude of compounds of triads of any given valency, so that a complete enumeration of them singly is not possible.”

5. Peirce intended to publish this manuscript (the fifth in a long series of variant drafts) as the third article in his “Pragmaticism series,” but decided against it. It was first replaced by the next selection, which was itself superseded by “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism,” published in The Monist.

6. Peirce did not insert a comma here, but one seems necessary, and it can be placed either before or after “so”—which yields two different readings. This edition chose to insert the comma before “so” on account of Peirce’s insistence (shown in the next three sentences) on the manner in which one needs to contemplate anything. Another possibility, one that does not call for a comma, is that, instead of “contemplate it,” Peirce could have meant “contemplated.”

7. Chorisy, cyclosy, periphraxy, and apeiry are the names Peirce assigns to the four Listing or census numbers. See selection 4, note 41, and selection 5, note 24.

8. Alfred B. Kempe (see selection 12, note 17) discusses geometrical betweenness in “On the Relation between the Logical Theory of Classes and the Geometrical Theory of Points,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 21 (1891):147–182, especially 176–79.

27. THE BASIS OF PRAGMATICISM IN THE NORMATIVE SCIENCES

1. The seven Harvard lectures of 1903: see selections 10 to 16.

2. The friend is William James, but James’s negative recommendation was more nuanced than here acknowledged. On 5 June 1903, he wrote to Peirce: “You spoke of publishing these lectures, but not, I hope, tels quels. They need too much mediation by more illustrations, at which you are excellent (non-mathematical ones if possible) and by a good deal of interstitial expansion and comparison with other modes of thought. What I wish myself is that you might revise these lectures for your Lowell course, possibly confining yourself to fewer points. . . . As things stand, it is only highly skilled technicians and professionals who will sniff the rare perfume of your thought, and after you are dead, trace things back to your genius. You ought to gain a bigger audience when living.”

3. The bracketed ellipsis indicates a gap of four missing manuscript leaves, numbered 3 to 6, equivalent to thirty-two handwritten lines. A remark in §5 of the text suggests that Peirce may have discussed, among other things, the proper “way to read” his article.

4. Hermann Bonitz (1814–1888), Index Aristotelicus (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1870; Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstatt, 1955), 278–80.

5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote the general introduction, entitled “A Preliminary Treatise on Method,” to this influential British encyclopedia which was first published in 1818.

6. See selection 11, note 4.

7. The Greek words mean, respectively, potentiality, act or activity, matter, and form. The passage that begins here appears to draw its inspiration from the beginning of the second book of Aristotle’s De anima.

8. See note 3 above.

9. “A voice, and nothing beyond that” (a phrase attributed to Seneca).

10. Peirce dropped a word here as he moved to a new manuscript sheet. The immediate context suggests that “experience” is the missing word.

11. See previous selection, note 7.

12. See selection 3, note 10.

13. This Spieltrieb (or play instinct) refers to Friedrich Schiller’s theory of the three instincts (the other two being those of matter and form) as explained in his Aesthetische Briefe. See selection 14, note 6, and Peirce’s early essay on the Aesthetic Letters in W1:10–12.

14. The precise location of this remark of F. C. S. Schiller has not been identified. Peirce might be referring to a no longer extant letter from the English philosopher. The connection between truth and satisfaction is made by Schiller in different places. James, too, makes the same connection: “Truth in science is what gives us the maximum possible sum of satisfactions, taste included, but consistency both with previous truth and with novel fact is always the most imperious claimant” (pragmatism, Lecture VI, “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth” (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1907), 217). James also ascribes such a view to both Schiller and Dewey: “[Truth] means, they say, nothing but this that ideas (which themselves are but part of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience” (Ibid., Lecture II, “What Pragmatism Means,” p. 58). Peirce criticizes such a view pointedly in CP 5.555–64 (a c.1906 manuscript entitled “Reflexions upon Pluralistic Pragmatism and upon Cenopythagorean Pragmaticism,” which seems to have disappeared from the Harvard collection of Peirce’s papers).

15. Critique of Pure Reason, A58, B82.

16. On Schröder, see selection 12, note 12. The symbol of aggregation used by Peirce in the formula is not one found in his 1870 paper (see W2:418–19), where he uses +, for the operation of logical addition. The present symbol stems from Peirce’s modification of an aggregation sign devised by Stanley Jevons in 1869, which was two dots separated by a vertical stroke. Peirce added a curved line to connect the two dots and started to use this new aggregation sign around 1894. It appears frequently in his 1897 Monist paper “The Logic of Relatives,” a review of Schroder’s work.

17. Peirce in his 1903 paper “Nomenclature and Divisions of Dyadic Relations” (the fourth section of the “Syllabus,” MS 539:2–29, CP 3.571–608) defines “juxtambilation” and explains his terminology; see especially CP 3.575, 584–85.

18. See selection 11, note 30, on Fechner.

19. See selection 8, note 7, on Sigwart.

20. Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), Lehrbuch zur Einleitung in die Philosophie (Königsberg: August Wilhelm Unger, 1813). Reprinted in Herbart’s Sämmtliche Werke, ed. by G. Hartenstein (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1850), vol. 1, part 1, sect. 2, ch. 1, §34.

21. “On a New List of Categories,” EP1:8 and W2:57.

22. The conception of a sign as a medium of communication becomes very prominent in Peirce’s 1906 writings. It appears for instance in his Logic Notebook (MS 339:526, 30 Jan. 1906) and in a spring 1906 letter to Lady Welby (see selection 32 in the Appendix). In MS 793, which appears to be a draft of the present selection, Peirce writes:

For the purpose of this inquiry a Sign may be defined as a Medium for the communication of a Form. It is not logically necessary that anything possessing consciousness, that is, feeling of the peculiar common quality of all our feeling, should be concerned. But it is necessary that there should be two, if not three, quasi-minds, meaning things capable of varied determination as to forms of the kind communicated.

As a medium, the Sign is essentially in a triadic relation, to its Object which determines it, and to its Interpretant which it determines. In its relation to the Object, the Sign is passive; that is to say, its correspondence to the Object is brought about by an effect upon the Sign, the Object remaining unaffected. On the other hand, in its relation to the Interpretant the Sign is active, determining the Interpretant without being itself thereby affected.

But at this point certain distinctions are called for. That which is communicated from the Object through the Sign to the Interpretant is a Form. It is not a singular thing; for if a singular thing were first in the Object and afterward in the Interpretant outside the Object, it must thereby cease to be in the Object. The Form that is communicated does not necessarily cease to be in one thing when it comes to be in a different thing, because its being is a being of the predicate. The Being of a Form consists in the truth of a conditional proposition. Under given circumstances, something would be true. The Form is in the Object, entitatively we may say, meaning that that conditional relation, or following of consequent upon reason, which constitutes the Form, is literally true of the Object. In the Sign the Form may or may not be embodied entitatively, but it must be embodied representatively, that is, in respect to the Form communicated, the Sign produces upon the Interpretant an effect similar to that which the Object itself would under favorable circumstances.

23. Peirce often translates Umfang by “sphere” (logical breadth or extension), or even “circuit.”

24. Peirce’s Century Dictionary definition of “conic section” is helpful:

a curve formed by the intersection of a plane with a right circular cone. If the plane is more inclined to the axis of the cone than is the side of the cone (fig. 3), the intersection is oval and is called an ellipse. The circle is one limit of the ellipse—that, namely, in which the plane becomes perpendicular to the axis of the cone (fig. 2). If the plane is less inclined to the axis of the cone than is the side of the cone, it will also cut the second sheet of the cone on the other side of the vertex (fig. 5), and the twofold curve thus generated is a hyperbola. A particular case of the hyperbola, produced when the plane becomes tangent to the surface of the cone, is that of two intersecting straight lines, called a degenerate conic (fig. 1). Intermediate between the ellipse and the hyperbola is the case where the plane is parallel to the side of the cone (fig. 4), and the curve thus produced is a parabola. The degenerate form of the ellipse is a point, that of the parabola a straight line. The degenerate forms are not true conics, because they are of the first class, the conics being of the second class.

25. The notion of “perfect sign” is explained in the draft as follows (MS 283:279–83):

Consider then the aggregate formed by a sign and all the signs which its occurrence carries with it. This aggregate will itself be a sign; and we may call it a perfect sign, in the sense that it involves the present existence of no other sign except such as are ingredients of itself. Now no perfect sign is in a statical condition: you might as well suppose a portion of matter to remain at rest during a thousandth of a second, or any other long interval of time. The only signs which are tolerably fixed are non-existent abstractions. We cannot deny that such a sign is real; only its mode of reality is not that active kind which we call existence. The existent acts, and whatsoever acts changes....

Every real ingredient of the perfect sign is aging, its energy of action upon the interpretant is running low, its sharp edges are wearing down, its outlines becoming more indefinite.

On the other hand, the perfect sign is perpetually being acted upon by its object, from which it is perpetually receiving the accretions of new signs, which bring it fresh energy, and also kindle energy that it already had, but which had lain dormant.

In addition, the perfect sign never ceases to undergo changes of the kind we rather drolly call spontaneous, that is, they happen sua sponte but not by its will. They are phenomena of growth.

Such perfect sign is a quasi-mind. It is the sheet of assertion of Existential Graphs....

This quasi-mind is an object which from whatever standpoint it be examined, must evidently have, like anything else, its special qualities of susceptibility to determination. Moreover, the determinations come as events each one once for all and never again. Furthermore, it must have its rules or laws, the more special ones variable, others invariable.

26. “Issues of Pragmaticism,” The Monist 15 (Oct. 1905):487–90; selection 25, pp. 350–53.

27. See selection 25, p. 351.

28. Ibid.

29. Molière died on 17 February 1673, while performing the leading role in his play Le malade imaginaire. In the third intermède at the end of the play, a young doctor about to be admitted to the profession answered the question “quare opium facit dormire?” with the ridiculed “quia est in eo vertus dormitiva, cujus est natura sensus assoupire.” See Peirce’s related comments in CP 5.534.

30. “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28).

31. On Louis Agassiz, see selection 9, note 3.

32. A book by Josiah Royce; see selection 6, note 7.

28. PRAGMATISM

1. The Italian philosopher Giovanni Papini (1881–1956) founded the Florentine pragmatist journal Leonardo which was issued from 1903 to 1907 (its contributors included Mario Calderoni, G. Vailati, Giuseppe Prezzolini, and F. C. S. Schiller). Peirce is referring to Papini’s article “Introduzione al Pragmatismo” which appeared in February 1907 in Leonardo and was translated by Katharine Royce under the title “What Pragmatism Is Like,” Popular Science Monthly 71 (1907):351–68. On 10 April 1907 Peirce sent Papini a description of the contents of his Atlantic Monthly article, which had been submitted to the editor Bliss Perry two days earlier.

2. Peirce received a letter from Frederick William Frankland (1854–1916) on 25 February 1907. In one of the preliminary drafts Peirce wrote (MS 320:38):

There lives in New Zealand a gentleman of very exact and interesting thought, Frederick William Frankland, who is just about publishing two volumes of Collected Essays and Citations [(Foxton, N.Z.: G. T. Beale, 1907)]. He does not profess to be a pragmatist; but his opinion upon one point that concerns pragmatism is so clear and definite, that it will furnish an instance of a possible variety of pragmatism. . . . Mr. Frankland holds that there is only one infinite collection. He thinks there is no such thing as continuity, and that time consists of discrete instants of which a fixed number goes to a second.

3. This is John Locke’s work of 1689.

4. George Berkeley (1685–1753), An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709) and A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). The medicinal use of a cold infusion of tar was once quite popular. Berkeley’s last major philosophical writing was entitled Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Questions and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water, and Divers Other Subjects Connected Together and Arising One from Another (1744). Berkeley’s Principles can be regarded as incomplete since he designated it as “Part I” and elsewhere indicated the intention of producing a second part.

5. About the evidence attesting the existence of the Metaphysical Club, see Max Fisch’s “Was There a Metaphysical Club?” in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, second series, ed. Edward C. Moore and Richard S. Robin (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1964), 3–23. Fisch concluded that Peirce founded the Club some time in the spring or fall of 1871; that it counted among its members, besides Peirce and the six others mentioned below, William James and Francis G. Peabody, that the meetings were held fortnightly during the most active period (1871–72); and that the Club lasted at least until the winter of 1874–75, before it was reorganized into a new form. Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935), United States Supreme Court justice, collaborated with the lawyer Joseph Bangs Warner (1848–1923) on a commentary upon common law. Nicholas St. John Green (1830–1876) taught law at Harvard University. John Fiske (1842–1901), historian and philosopher, was a graduate of Harvard Law School. On Wright see selection 11, note 32, and on Abbot see selection 24, note 12.

6. Alexander Bain (1818–1903), Scottish philosopher and psychologist; The Emotions and the Will (London: J. W. Parker and son, 1859; 3d ed. London: Longmans & Green, 1875; New York: Appleton, 1876), ch. 11, p. 505.

7. The “little paper” has not survived, unless it is buried in the notes Peirce left for a projected book on logic: see W3:14–60, especially the chapters on belief and reality (1872). It is probably the paper Peirce read at a November 1872 meeting of the Metaphysical Club, and which Thomas Sergeant Perry hoped to publish in the North American Review.

8. “The Fixation of Belief” in Popular Science Monthly 12 (Nov. 1877):1–15, Revue Philosophique 6 (Dec. 1878):553–69, EP1:109–23, and W3:242–57, 338–55. “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” in Popular Science Monthly 12 (Jan. 1878):286–302, Revue Philosophique 7 (Jan. 1879):553–69, EP1:124–41 and W3:257–76, 355–74.

9. George Campbell (1719–1796), principal of Marischal College in Aberdeen, Scotland, was the author of The Philosophy of Rhetoric which appeared in many editions through the nineteenth century and was used as a textbook at Harvard College.

10. Matthew 7:20.

11. This comes from a paragraph James wrote for the entry “Pragmatic and Pragmatism” in Baldwin’s Dictionary (1902), 2:321–22:

The doctrine that the whole “meaning” of a conception expresses itself in practical consequences, consequences either in the shape of conduct to be recommended, or in that of experiences to be expected, if the conception be true; which consequences would be different if it were untrue, and must be different from the consequences by which the meaning of other conceptions is in turn expressed. If a second conception should not appear to have other consequences, then it must really be only the first conception under a different name. In methodology it is certain that to trace and compare their respective consequences is an admirable way of establishing the differing meanings of different conceptions.

12. Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924), Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (London: S. Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan, 1893).

13. Launcelot Gobbo is the clown servant to Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, act 2, scene 2.

14. Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776–88).

15. A device developed in 1804–5 in France by Joseph-Marie Jacquard, which used punched cards to control the weaving of the cloth so that intricate patterns could be obtained automatically.

16. Henri Stephanus (or Estienne, or Stephens; 1528–1598) published the 1578 edition of Plato’s works, Platonis opera quae extant omnis.

17. The Piazza di Spagna in Rome, here viewed from the direction of the Pincian Hill, has been a popular stop for tourists since the sixteenth century, especially for students, artists, and young aristocrats making the Grand Tour of Europe.

18. The fire occurred in 1666.

19. Categories, ch. 5, 3a34–35: “It is the mark of substances and of differentiae that, in all propositions of which they form the predicate, they are predicated univocally. For all such propositions have for their subject either the individual or the species.” Prior Analytics, bk. 1, ch. 27, 43a25–28: “Of all the things which exist some are such that they cannot be predicated of anything else truly and universally, e.g. Cleon and Callias, i.e. the individual and sensible but other things may be predicated of them (for each of these is both man and animal).”

20. The saying “Truth lies at the bottom of a well” has been attributed to a number of ancient authors, including Heraclitus, Cleanthes, and Democritus.

21. Henry IV, part I, act 2, scene 4, Falstaff: “Give you a reason on compulsion! If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion, I.”

22. Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon lists the following meanings under indication, notice (Plutarch), inference from a sign (Philodemus), observing of symptoms (Galen), and visible sign or token (Psalms).

23. Peirce apparently had in mind the scene in the last chapter of the novel Kenilworth (1821) by Sir Walter Scott in which Countess Amy falls to her death through a trap-door whose supports had been deliberately removed.

24. Christiania was the name given to Norway’s capital Oslo from the seventeenth century to 1925. After the separation of Norway from Sweden Peirce’s younger brother, Herbert Henry Davis Peirce (1849–1916), was appointed on 22 June 1906, as the first envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of the United States to Norway.

25. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s second wife died in 1861 after she accidentally set her dress on fire.

26. F. C. S. Schiller, Studies in Humanism (London and New York: Macmillan, 1907), especially part III: “The Relations of Logic and Psychology.”

27. Alfred B. Kempe, “On the Geographical Problem of the Four Colors,” American Journal of Mathematics 2 (1879):193—200 and “How to Colour a Map with Four Colours,” Nature 21 (1880):399–400. The Four Color Conjecture, that a plane map needs no more than four colors to distinguish the regions, was not proven correct until 1977. The flaw in Kempe’s work was revealed by P.J. Heawood in 1890 (“Map Colour Theorem,” Quarterly Journal of Mathematics 24 (1890):332—38). Peirce’s bored globular body is topologically equivalent to a sphere with two handles or a teacup with two handles: each of these surfaces can be smoothly deformed into the other (assuming that the second “wide” hole does not pass through the first). Peirce was apparently unaware of Heawood’s paper, which also presented a general formula for the minimum number of colors for surfaces of this type with any number of handles (the number is eight for Peirce’s example). Though his formula was correct, Heawood’s argument was shown to be inadequate in 1891 and an acceptable proof was not given until 1968.

28. Arthur Cayley, “A Sixth Memoir upon Quantics,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 149 (1860):61–90, esp. §230.

29. See selection 4, note 41, and selection 5, note 24.

30. Charles-Edouard Brown-Sequard (1817–1894), Experimental and Clinical Researches on the Physiology and Pathology of the Spinal Cord and Some Other Parts of the Nervous Centres (Richmond: Colin & Nowlan, 1855).

31. James’s most succinct definition of pragmatism appears in Baldwin’s Dictionary 2:321 (printed after Peirce’s own definition). See note 11 above.

32. Schiller gives the seven definitions in his paper “The Definition of ‘Pragmatism’ and ‘Humanism,’” in Mind 14 (April 1905):235–40; republished in Studies in Humanism (London: Macmillan and Co., 1912), 1–21. The definitions are found on pp. 7–12.

33. See note 8 above.

34. In the introduction to the first part of his Électricité et optique: cours de physique mathématique (Paris: G. Carré, 1890–91), Poincaré states some of the tenets of his conventionalism. See selection 13, note 16, and selection 15, note 10.

35. Captain Bunsby is Captain Cuttle’s friend in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848): “‘If so be,’ returned Bunsby, with unusual promptitude, ‘as he’s dead, my opinion is he won’t come back no more. If so be as he’s alive, my opinion is he will. Do I say he will? No. Why not? Because the bearings of this observation lays in the application on it’” (ch. 39). Schiller remarks that Alfred Sidgwick has “justly laid stress” on the second formulation of pragmatism in his The Application of Logic (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 272 and ch. 9, §43.

36. Schiller writes that Sidgwick regarded this third definition as “the essence of the pragmatic method” (Studies in Humanism, p. 9).

37. Critical common-sensism is discussed in selection 25, “Issues of Pragmaticism.”

38. “What Pragmatism is Like,” Popular Science Monthly 71 (1907):351.

39. This sentence follows directly after the last sentence of the “Introduction” above. The definition referred to is that of William James (see note 11).

40. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), bk. 2, ch. 23, §11, Locke argues that secondary qualities would disappear if we could perceive primary qualities.

41. Like Bradley (see note 12 above), Alfred Edward Taylor (1869–1945) was a British neo-Hegelian philosopher. Peirce may have read F. C. S. Schiller’s extensive critique of Bradley, “Truth and Mr. Bradley,” in Mind 13 (Oct. 1904), reprinted in Studies in Humanism, pp. 114–40. Schiller also reviewed A. E. Taylor’s Elements of Metaphysics in “Empiricism and the Absolute,” Mind 14 (July 1905), reprinted in Studies pp. 224–57.

42. On Haeckel see selection 11, note 25, and on Pearson see selection 6, note 1.

43. Peirce may have been referring to his “Reply to the Necessitarians” (The Monist 3 (July 1893):526–70), a long response to Paul Carus’s “Mr. Charles S. Peirce’s Onslaught on the Doctrine of Necessity” (ibid., 2 (1892):560–82).

44. The “several months” refer to a period following April 1907, when Peirce had finished writing the first three versions of the present “letter to the editor” (all signed “Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce”).

45. “On the Syllogism, No. IV, and on the Logic of Relations,” Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 10 (1864):331—58. The three categories, Qualities, Relations, and Representations, were so named by Peirce in the “New List of Categories” (EP1:6) in 1867 and in several texts written the previous year (W1:476 and 520, for instance).

46. Peirce confuses two stories from The Arabian Nights: “Aladdin; Or, the Wonderful Lamp” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” It was Ali Baba who discovered by chance the thieves’ cave full of treasure. Aladdin, on the other hand, found a magic lamp that contained a genie which granted him wishes.

47. Louis Pasteur, Oeuvres de Pasteur: Dissymétrie Moléculaire (Paris: Masson, 1922), 1:83.

48. See selection 20, note 11.

49. Peirce scribbled an interesting but rough note on habit in MS 318:183–84. It is reproduced below with some punctuation corrections.

Habit. Involuntary habits are not meant, but voluntary habits, i.e., such as are subject in some measure to self-control. Now under what conditions is a habit subject to self-control? Only if what has been done in one instance with the character, its consequents, and other circumstances, can have a triadic influence in strengthening or weakening the disposition to do the like on a new occasion. This is as much as to say that voluntary habit is conscious habit. For what is consciousness? In the first place feeling is conscious. But what is a feeling, such as blue, whistling, sour, rose-scented? It is nothing but a quality, character, or predicate, which involves no reference to any other predicate or other thing than the subject in which it inheres, but yet positively is. We may suppose a crystal to have such a quality, and if we suppose it to be no otherwise different from a crystal as ordinarily conceived, this quality will be forever unknown to itself, to the crystal, and to every other thing or mind. In what then will it differ from another crystal that does not possess that quality? Is it not a quality of pure moonshine and empty verbiage? Our own feelings, if there were no memory of them for any fraction of a second, however small, if there were no triadic time-sense to testify with such assurance to their existence and varieties, would be equally unknown to us. Therefore, such a quality may be utterly unlike any feeling we are acquainted with; but it would have all that distinguish all our feelings from everything else. In the second place, effort is conscious. It is at once a sense of effort on the part of the being who wills and is a sense of resistance on the part of the object upon which the effort is exerted. But these two are one and the same consciousness. Otherwise, all that has been said of the feeling consciousness is true of the effort consciousness. It, like the feeling consciousness, is guaranteed by a triadic consciousness; and to say that this is veracious means less if possible than to say that a thing is whatever it may be.

There is, then, a triadic consciousness which does not supersede the lower order, but goes bail for them and enters bonds for their veracity.

Experiment upon inner world must teach inner nature of concepts as experiment on outer world must teach nature of outer things.

Meaning of a general physical predicate consists in the conception of the habit of its subject that it implies. And such must be the meaning of a psychical predicate.

The habits must be known by experience which however exhibits singulars only.

Our minds must generalize these. How is this to be done?

The intellectual part of the lessons of experimentation consists in the consciousness or purpose to act in certain ways (including motive) on certain conditions.

50. See selection 6, note 7.

29. A NEGLECTED ARGUMENT FOR THE REALITY OF GOD

1. James Mark Baldwin, Thought and Things: a Study of the Development and Meaning of Thought or Genetic Logic (London: Sonnenschein, 1906), 1:261.

2. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 5, scene 1: “And as imagination bodies forth | The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen | Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing | A local habitation and a name.”

3. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8).

4. Edgar Allen Poe (1809–1849) has his detective, Monsieur Dupin, say “It appears to me that this mystery is considered insoluble for the very reason which should cause it to be regarded as easy of solution. I mean the outré character of its features.” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (first published in 1841), The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. by James A. Harrison (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Co., 1902), vol. 4.

5. “But oars alone can ne’er prevail | To reach the distant coast, | The breath of heaven must swell the sail, | Or all the toil is lost.” William Cowper (1731–1800), “Human Frailty,” in The Works of William Cowper: Comprising His Poems, Correspondence, and Translations. With a Life of the Author, by the Editor, Robert Southey (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1835–37).

6. Current estimates of the maximum number of elements are closer to 200 than to Peirce’s figures.

7. Francis Bacon contrasts “that induction which proceeds by simple enumeration” with “scientific induction” in his Novum Organum (see especially book I, aphorism 105).

8. Critique of Pure Reason, A7, 303–5; B11, 360–61.

9. Jacques Babinet (1794–1872), French physicist known for his work in meteorology, optics, and hydrodynamics; author of Résumé complet de la physique des corps impondérables (Paris, 1825).

10. See selection 11, note 30.

11. See “Dialogues Concerning the Two Great Systems of the World,” in Mathematical Collections and Translations of Thomas Salisbury (London, 1661), 1:301.

12. It is evident that this book was not written.

13. In the original, Peirce added the following explanation after this sentence: “It is strictly pertinent. I am exceeding the limits of my article.”

14. The manuscript ends here at the end of the fifth section. At the end of July 1908, the Hibbert editor, L. P. Jacks, let Peirce know (through their common friend Cassius J. Keyser) that he found Peirce’s contribution to be of “permanent value,” but that, because of the paper’s complexity, he wanted Peirce “to summarize the article in a concluding page or two, to be added to the article, in order to forestall careless cavillers who might say, ‘what, then, precisely, is your neglected argument?’” Peirce wrote two versions of his addendum, wich he called “Additament.” Jacks published the second one without title, a mere blank line serving to separate it from the end of the article. Peirce was surprised that the addendum was printed entirely, because, as he told William James later, he thought it was somewhat distasteful and he had asked Jacks to pick out “a small passage that was neither egotistical nor offensive to anybody,” thinking that such an injunction would ensure “the rejection of the whole.” The “Additament” published in the present edition combines the first five paragraphs of Peirce’s first version of the text (found in MS 844) with the full text of the second version. The reason for this amalgamation is that only in the first version did Peirce clearly identify “a nest of three arguments” that is then referred to in the second version.

15. The full text of the second “Additament” begins here with this paragraph. The bracketed ellipsis at the end of the previous paragraph indicates that the text of the first “Additament” continues beyond that sentence (for three pages and a half) but has not been included here to avoid both a rough transition and an overlap. The first omitted sentence reads as follows: “According to that logical doctrine which the present writer first formulated in 1873 and named Pragmatism, the true meaning of any product of the intellect lies in whatever unitary determination it would impart to practical conduct under any and every conceivable circumstance, supposing such conduct to be guided by reflection carried to an ultimate limit.” The reader will notice that when Peirce rewrote the “Additament,” he pushed back the year of his fathering of pragmatism from 1873 to 1871.

16. See selection 28, note 5.

17. See selection 28, note 8.

18. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979; first edition 1897).

19. See selection 28, notes 1 and 38.

20. In his Monist paper “What Pragmatism Is” (selection 24).

21. See the entry “Pragmatic and Pragmatism” in Baldwin’s Dictionary (1902), 2:321–22; also in CP 5.1–4.

22. The hunch-backed Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) was known for his scholarship as well as his lyric verses. Peirce’s misanthropes are: the unconventional Greek cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (c.410–c.320 B.C.); the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), who lived most of his life in Germany in retirement; the British man of letters Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881); and Timon, known as the Misanthrope of Athens (5th century B.C.), on whom Shakespeare based his play Timon of Athens.

23. Allusion to William James’s book The Will to Believe (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1897) and its first chapter by the same title (an address published in 1896). On the mutability of truth, see for instance James’s lecture “What Pragmatism Means” in his book Pragmatism.

30. A SKETCH OF LOGICAL CRITICS

1. In several places in the first half of the manuscript, and beginning just above this first line, Peirce interlined outline subheadings in brown ink. The first one reads “Discussion of the term ‘critics.’” These subheadings have not been incorporated into the text, in accordance with Peirce’s instruction found in a variant text (MS 674:2): “I shall write all directions to the printer in green and everything else that is not to appear in print in other colors.”

2. John Bull is the name traditionally used to epitomize or caricature the typical Englishman.

3. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), A Dictionary of the English Language (London: W. Strahan, 1755).

4. See for example John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (London: Thomas Bassett, 1690), bk. 4, ch. 21, para. 4.

5. Thomas Hobbes, Stigmai ageometrias. . . (first published in 1657), in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (London: J. Bohn, 1839–45), 7:389.

6. Statesman 260c: “And now, in which of these divisions shall we place the king? Is he a judge and kind of spectator ?”

7. Nicolas Boileau Despréaux (1636–1711), French poet and literary critic, famous for his Art poétique (1674), which strongly influenced Samuel Johnson.

8. Peirce interlined the subheading “The Budding of Reason” above this paragraph.

9. Peirce interlined the subheading “Sense in which ‘reasoning’ is here used” above this paragraph.

10. Peirce inserted the subheading “Syllogistic Recollection” above this line.

11. This footnote is preceded by the interlined subheading “The word ‘suggestion.’”

12. The English philosopher and psychologist David Hartley (1705–1757) gives credit to his fellow Englishman John Gay (1699–1745) for asserting the importance of psychological association. In MS 318:37 Peirce wrote:

The great founders of associationalism and of scientific psychology (after Aristotle), the Rev. Mr. Gay and Dr. David Hartley, usefully limited the term “association” to the process whereby one idea acquires the power to attract another from the depths of memory to the surface of consciousness, and to the habit resulting from this process. An association having once been established, that act by which, in accordance with it, one idea calls up another, they called suggestion.

13. Peirce inserted the subheading “Unthought thought” above this line.

14. See selection 28, notes 7 and 8.

15. Peirce inserted the subheading “Belief essentially a satisfaction, but not necessarily pleasant” above this line.

16. EP1:114; W3:247.

17. EP1:138–39; W3:273.

18. “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, | And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” stanza 14. See W2:104, and EP1:139 or W3:274. The “single sentence” in which Peirce did not make it questionable whether any real flower was born to blush unseen may be the following (EP1:139–40):

To this I reply that, though in no possible state of knowledge can any number be great enough to express the relation between the amount of what rests unknown to the amount of the known, yet it is unphilosophical to suppose that, with regard to any given question (which has any clear meaning), investigation would not bring forth a solution of it, if it were carried far enough.

19. See selection 28, note 5.

20. Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821–1894), German physicist, anatomist, and physiologist. Über die Erhaltung der Kraft (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1847) is his classic paper in which he formulated the philosophical and physical basis of the principle of the conservation of energy.

21. Concerning Darwin, see selection 11, note 31. Peirce in his photometric work at Harvard beginning in 1875 was one of the first scientists in the United States to make extensive use of the spectroscope.

22. See selection 16, note 9.

23. See selection 29, note 23.

24. See selection 11, note 4.

25. The English playwright Thomas Morton first created the off-stage character of Mrs. Grundy in Speed the Plough (produced in 1798). Concern for “What would Mrs. Grundy think?” came to represent the tyranny of social convention.

26. Henry James, Sr. (1811–1882), Substance and Shadow: or, Morality and Religion in Their Relation to Life: An Essay on the Physics of Creation (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863); The Secret of Swedenborg: Being an Elucidation of His Doctrine of the Divine Natural Humanity (Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co., 1869); Spiritual Creation (unfinished) included in The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James, ed. William James (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1884).

27. For Peirce’s review of Pearson’s Grammar of Science, see selection 6.

28. The manuscript continues here for another five pages before coming to an unfinished end; this last portion is not included because of its incompleteness.

31. AN ESSAY TOWARD REASONING IN SECURITY AND UBERTY

1. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Le opere di Galileo Galilei. Prima edizione completa, condotta sugli autentici manoscritti palatini, edited by Eugenio Alberi (Firenze, Italy: Societa Editrice Fiorentina, 1842–56), 15 v. in 16.

2. Francis Bacon served as Lord Chancellor of England from 1618 to 1621 in the reign of James I.

3. This passage was originally part of the main text, but Peirce later instructed the typesetter to turn it into a new paragraph in smaller type. Given its notational nature, it has here been transformed into a footnote.

4. One example Peirce may have in mind is William Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, edited by H. L. Mansel and J. Veitch (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1860), 2:350, where Hamilton uses the word dianoetic “to denote the operations of the discursive, elaborative, or comparative faculty” (quoted by Peirce in the Century Dictionary).

5. Peirce apparently coined this adverb himself, from the rare dialectal word “glibber” meaning either “worn smooth” or “slippery”—so that the adverb may be read “with all edges worn smooth” or “in slippery fashion.”

6. See selection 1, note 3, selection 16, note 20, and selection 29, note 15.

7. In a letter to Frederic Adams Woods, written in the fall of 1913, Peirce wrote: “I think logicians should have two principal aims: first, to bring out the amount and kind of security (approach to certainty) of each kind of reasoning, and second, to bring out the possible and esperable uberty, or value in productiveness, of each kind” (CP 8.384).

8. Around 1893 Peirce attempted, unsuccessfully, to publish a proposed translation of a work by the thirteenth-century French scholar, The Treatise of Petrus Peregrinus on the Lodestone. Peirce claims to have been the first person to completely decipher and transcribe the manuscript (MS 1310 and HP 1:39–95). The English scholastic Roger Bacon (c.1220–1292) was a student of Peregrinus.

9. This is reported by John Aubrey (1626–1697) in his chapter on William Harvey (1578–1657), in Brief Lives, chiefly of contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, between the years 1669 & 1696, ed. by Andrew Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), 1:299. Aubrey reports that Harvey “had been physician to the Lord Chancellor Bacon, whom he esteemed very much for his wit and style, but would not allow him to be a great Philosopher. Said he to me, He writes Philosophy like a Lord Chancellor, speaking in derision; I have cured him.”

10. Francis Bacon’s tenth aphorism says: “The subtilty of nature far exceeds the subtitly of the senses and understanding; so that the specious meditations, speculations, and theories of mankind are but a kind of insanity, only there is no one to stand by and observe it.”

11. In their experiments beginning in 1887, A. A. Michelson and E. W. Morley were unable to detect expected variations in the speed of light. Peirce was acquainted with the explanation of the Nobel laureate in physics, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853–1928), namely that the speed of light appeared to be constant in vacuum because the measuring instruments contract in the direction of their motion. Peirce seems not to have taken note of the then less well-known Albert Einstein who posited the universal constancy of the speed of light in his 1905 paper that established the special theory of relativity.

12. Evangelinos Apostolides Sophocles (1807–1883) was professor of Greek at Harvard.

13. In the Dreyfus Affair the French novelist Émile Zola (1840–1902) published his “J’accuse” against the anti-Dreyfus contingent in 1898.

14. Allusion to a phrase commonly used in Protestant wedding ceremonies: “If any man can show just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace” (The Book of Common Prayer, “Solemnization of Matrimony,” p. 300).

15. On 7 January 1913 Peirce wrote to Alice H. James the following description, which might be related:

We had a little outing the other day, when a friend came in his auto and took us over a famous road called the “Hawk’s Nest Road” which I had never been over before, though Juliette had the year we first came to Milford. It goes up 1000 feet above the Delaware river which is vertically below the parapet of the drive. When we got up we went to a place where nine millionaires have houses of gorgeous magnificence. Mr. Chapin formerly of Springfield Mass. is one of them.

The Peirces also often visited the Norman-style mansion, called “Grey Towers,” of James W. Pinchot and his son Gifford; their wives were good friends of Peirce’s wife, Juliette. The chateau, now a National Historic Landmark building, overlooks the Delaware River and Milford.

16. See selection 8, note 36, and selection 11, note 30.

17. Wilhelm Max Wundt (1832–1920), Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung (Leipzig: C. F. Winter, 1862); Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele (Leipzig: L. Voss, 1863); Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1874).

18. William Hamilton, Lectures on Logic, edited by Henry L. Mansel and John Veitch (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1859), Lecture viii, §24. See also his Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education and University Reform (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853), 699.

19. “This one has an extended, though not very deep, knowledge; that other one is very much of his village, but of the few things he has learned on his own, he knows the bottom and the deeper bedrock.”

20. Augustus De Morgan, Syllabus of a Proposed System of Logic (London: Walton and Maberly, 1860), §212.

21. See selection 14, note 9.

22. Presumably Peirce is picturing the complex number in the standard fashion in a plane coordinate system where a and b are represented as distances along the two perpendicular x and y axes respectively. William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865) in his futile attempt to find the three-dimensional, spatial equivalent to the complex numbers (which was later shown not to exist) discovered the quaternions, a four-unit generalization of the complex number. Lorentz made use of time as, in effect, a fourth dimension in his “Electromagnetic Phenomena in a System Moving with Velocity Smaller Than That of Light,” Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of Amsterdam 6 (1904):809–31.

23. The last sentence in the manuscript, which follows the last sentence here, has been omitted, since it alludes to a continuation Peirce never wrote. That sentence reads:

Nevertheless, considering how much more numerous the others will be, to whom I have considerable hope of not being entirely useless, I will endeavor, even in this introductory part of my essay, not to be insufferably prolix about words; and perhaps they, on their side, may find some advantage in considering the merits and defects of my method of ascertaining the meanings of words.

32. EXCERPTS FROM LETTERS TO LADY WELBY

1. See selection 27, note 22.

2. In the Logic Notebook (MS 339:531, 533, 541–44), the Intentional Interpretant is also called the Intended, Impressional, or Initial Interpretant; the Effectual Interpretant is also called the Factual, Middle, or Dynamic Interpretant; and the Communicational Interpretant is also called the Normal, Habitual, or Eventual Interpretant.

3. The three universes are explained in selection 29. See also Peirce’s definition of “universe” in Baldwin’s Dictionary 2:742, and “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism,” The Monist 16 (Oct. 1906):514–17 (CP 4.546–47).

4. The text of this footnote comes from a remark Peirce wrote in the margin. Plato’s use of the Greek word appears in Phaedrus 250b and Sophist 266d; Aristotle’s is in Rhetoric, 13 56a31. Lutoslawski dates the Phaedrus 379 B.C. in his Origin and Growth of Plato’s Logic, p. 358 (see selection 4, note 26), but on p. 176 of his copy of the book Peirce wrote the date 373 B.C. (as opposed to that of 371 B.C. suggested in the footnote).

5. “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism,” The Monist 16 (Oct. 1906):506–7 (CP 4.538).

6. “On a New List of Categories,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 7 (1868):295; EP1:8 and W2:57.

7. The Greek words mean “clear, manifest” “obscure” “moderately” “approximately, more or less” and “hardly, with difficulty”

8. Pascal’s Theorem states that if six points of a conic are regarded as vertices of a hexagon, then the three points of intersection of opposite sides lie on a line.

9. Much of this work is recorded in the Logic Notebook, MS 339:489–550.

33. EXCERPTS FROM LETTERS TO WILLIAM JAMES

1. In his letter to James of 17 December 1909 Peirce defined “molition” as “volition minus all desire and purpose, the mere consciousness of exertion of any kind” (CP 8.303).

2. The Carnegie Institution, founded in 1902 in Washington, D.C., rejected Peirce’s grant application in May 1903.

3. The American astronomer, flight pioneer, and friend of Peirce, Samuel Pierpont Langley (1834–1906), made fundamental discoveries concerning the nature of the sun’s radiation. See “The Solar and the Lunar Spectrum,” in Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences 4 (1888):159–70, and The New Spectrum (New Haven, 1901). As Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Langley engaged Peirce for a number of writing assignments, including many translations of scientific articles.

4. See selection 29, note 22.

5. While Peirce refers here to his first two papers of 1877 and 1878 (see selection 28, note 8), it is the second one, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” that contains the distinction between the three grades of clearness. The first grade (familiarity) is described in EP1:124–25 and 136; the second grade (logical analysis), in EP1:125–26, 136; and the third grade is the pragmatic maxim itself, enunciated in EP1:132. See also Peirce’s 1897 Monist paper on “The Logic of Relatives,” which has the following passage (CP 3.457):

Now there are three grades of clearness in our apprehensions of the meanings of words. The first consists in the connection of the word with familiar experience. In that sense, we all have a clear idea of what reality is and what force is—even those who talk so glibly of mental force being correlated with the physical forces. The second grade consists in the abstract definition, depending upon an analysis of just what it is that makes the word applicable. . . . The third grade of clearness consists in such a representation of the idea that fruitful reasoning can be made to turn upon it, and that it can be applied to the resolution of difficult practical problems.

6. Metalogicus, bk. 2, ch. 20. See selection 20, note 11.

7. Lady Welby made this triple distinction in her article “Signifies” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), 25:78–81, reproduced in Semiotics and Signifies pp. 167–75. She sent a copy of it to Peirce at the end of January 1909. Welby had also published a two-part paper, “Sense, Meaning and Interpretation” in Mind 5 (Jan. 1896):24–27 and (Apr. 1896): 186–202.

8. Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1841–1906) was an American geologist and naturalist, and a professor of paleontology at Harvard. He was the head of the Atlantic Coast division of the U. S. Geological Survey (1884–1900). Peirce and Shaler observed the solar eclipse of 7 August 1869 together in Kentucky (W2:291–92).

* Bibliographic abbreviations used in these notes are identified in the Preface on page xv.