we find Peirce, in sel. 6, entertaining doubts about the exact correctness of our “a priori or natural idea of space,” and of any other natural ideas, and emphasizing the need for correction “by comparison with observations.” This fallibilistic stance gives warrant to non-Euclidean approaches to geometry, of which Peirce considers two: that space is immeasurable, or infinite, but limited (hyperbolic) or that it is measurable, or finite, but unlimited (spherical or elliptic). These two alternatives, along with Euclidean geometry—that space is both immeasurable and unlimited (parabolic)—will be taken up again in “Architecture of Theories” (sels. 22 and 23) as conceptual “materials” for the construction of systematic philosophy.
Two other short working pieces included in this volume were probably composed during the first half of 1890: “Notes on the Question of the Existence of an External World” (sel. 19) and “Note on Kant’s Refutation of Idealism” (sel. 20). Both of these selections revisit Kant’s famous “refutation of idealism,”11 and sel. 20, which glosses on Kant’s claim that “his argument beats idealism at its own game,” suggests a more direct and simpler method of refutation. In sel. 19, Peirce states that if the idealists were right to assume that only the inner present can be immediately perceived, then the impossibility of perceiving the external immediately would indeed entail, “as a matter of logic,” that the existence of anything external was inadmissible.12 The problem, however, is that the idea that we can only immediately perceive what is present in the mind is “a vulgar prejudice” parallel to the idea that “a thing cannot act where it is not.” For Peirce, this idea, by appealing to a naïve view of space and time, helps underscore how misleading inductions from ordinary experience can be. In sel. 20, he adds that we can only apprehend our own ideas as flowing in time, and since neither the past nor the future are immediately present, our perception of the internal can be no more immediate than our perception of the external. If idealism is so easily beaten at its own game, then, it is because its conception of the present fails to grasp the continuity of experience.
Why Peirce took up Kant’s refutation of idealism at this time can only be guessed at, but just two years earlier Peirce had been engaged with related theories of Kant’s for his “Guess at the Riddle,” and his reflections on space and time had been invigorated by William James’s 1887 paper in Mind on “The Perception of Space” (see W6: xliv) and probably also by James’s 1886 paper in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, “The Perception of Time,” which developed E. R. Clay’s idea of “the specious present.” Perhaps also of relevance is that in 1889 Edward Caird published in Glasgow his two-volume work on The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, which included a thorough treatment of Kant’s refutation of idealism that would likely have caught Peirce’s eye. Caird’s book was reviewed by A. Seth in Mind in April 1890 with specific mention of Kant’s refutation—discussions of Kant’s refutation of idealism were not uncommon in the literature of the day. Any of the above could have rekindled Peirce’s interest in Kant’s ideas about the present and his refutation of idealism. Soon after composing these notes, Peirce would again take up his Kant-inspired cosmology project, and the nature of the present would again play an important role.
On 1 July 1890, Francis C. Russell, a Chicago judge and an admirer of Peirce, wrote to him a letter that was more consequential for the remaining course of his life than anyone could have foreseen. Russell wrote at the request of Paul Carus to invite Peirce to contribute an article on logic for Edward C. Hegeler’s new philosophy journal, The Monist: “It is the intention of the management of the journal to make it the vehicle of such utterances only as shall be competent to the topics treated and they expect to pay for their articles after a measure in some degree fitted to the dignity of the writers and the customary recognition of the value of their productions.” Hegeler was a wealthy industrialist with a zeal for reconciling religion with science. He was an evolutionist who rejected what he regarded as Spencer’s hedonism and who embraced a quasi-Platonic idea that the process of growth is a teleological movement toward the fulfillment of higher forms. He was a fervent monist who believed that “God and the universe are one … the continuous ALL of which man is a limited part and phenomenon.”13 Hegeler supported religiously radical groups, including the Free Religious Association that Francis Ellingwood Abbot had helped found in Boston in 1867, but he objected to the agnosticism of many secular freethinkers, regarding it “as a form of defeatism and an obstacle to scientific progress.”14 In 1886, Hegeler reached an agreement with Benjamin Franklin Underwood, the editor of the Free Religious Association’s periodical, The Index, to start jointly a new monthly magazine to advance his monistic philosophy; Hegeler would be the publisher and Underwood the editor. The Free Religious Association ceased publication of the Index, which Abbot had founded and edited for ten years before Underwood, and signed over its subscriber base to Hegeler and Underwood for their new monthly to be called The Open Court. The premier issue appeared on 17 February 1887, ten days before Paul Carus, an advocate of free religion and a contributor to the Index, arrived in Chicago to serve as Hegeler’s secretary and to tutor his children, but with a vague understanding that he would play some part in editing the Open Court. By the end of 1887, Underwood was gone and Carus was editor. In the fall of 1890, Hegeler and Carus launched their new quarterly journal, The Monist, to be “devoted to the establishment and illustration of the principles of monism in philosophy, exact science, religion, and sociology.”15 The Open Court Publishing Company now published the monthly magazine, The Open Court, the quarterly journal, The Monist, and a line of books.
Russell had written to Peirce the previous year (22 Jan. 1889) to tell him about Hegeler’s and Carus’s plans to launch the Monist and to let him know that he had given a bound set of Peirce’s “Illustrations of the Logic of Science” to Carus, whose intellect he admired and who he supposed could do Peirce some good. He said that after giving Carus Peirce’s papers he thought he could “discern the influence its perusal and study has had upon him.” That Carus had seen fit to ask Russell to ask Peirce to contribute to his new journal was perhaps influence enough for Peirce, especially given Russell’s intimation that Carus paid well. Russell suggested that Peirce consider contributing an article “on the lines of your introductory lecture at Johns Hopkins University” (W4: 378–82) and he complimented Peirce by noting that “Everybody is talking about scientific method and yet outside of yourself no one so far as I can see has any definite conception as to what that scientific method consists in.” The following day, Carus himself wrote to assure Peirce of the quality of his new quarterly: “I wish that … our most prominent American authors should be represented and shall be greatly indebted to you for an article from your pen on ‘Modern Logic’ or some similar topic—perhaps ‘Logic and Ethics.’ You may choose any theme with which you are engaged at present” (2 July 1890).
Peirce replied to Russell at once, thanking him and agreeing to contribute but he wrote that “[o]ne can profitably put but very little into a single article” and he said he would prefer to write “a number” of articles: “I would write in a general way about the ways in which great ideas become developed, not about verification and assurance, to which my Johns Hopkins lectures used chiefly to be directed…. A philosophy is not a thing to be compiled item by item, promiscuously. It should be constructed architectonically” (3 July 1890). Peirce told Russell that he had studied this subject out in his “minute way,” that he would like to give “some general notion of [his] results,” and that he usually was paid “$25 a thousand words.” On 19 July, Peirce replied directly to Carus agreeing to write an article of 4000 words entitled “The Architecture of Theories.”
This was the beginning of an association rivaled in importance for income only by the Peirce-Garrison connection and it would become by far the most important outlet for Peirce’s mature philosophy. Carus took a special interest in Peirce and for twenty years, notwithstanding some periods of acrimony, he did more to promote Peirce’s philosophy than anyone. Between 1891 and 1910, Carus persuaded Hegeler to publish nineteen of Peirce’s articles (thirteen in the Monist and six in the Open Court), and many of Peirce’s unpublished writings were written for Carus. The
