offer into an opportunity to publish the general substance of his unfinished “Guess at the Riddle” (W6, sels. 22–28). Chapter 1 of that work had begun with a discussion of how to “erect a philosophical edifice” that would “outlast the vicissitudes of time,” and to achieve that goal Peirce posited his three categories as the core conceptions to follow out “in a sort of game of follow my leader from one field of thought into another” (W6: 168, 174–75). In like manner, “The Architecture of Theories” would explain how one should go about the business of constructing a philosophy and would rearticulate in summary form much of the cosmological project Peirce had sketched in his “Guess.” As he wrote to Christine Ladd-Franklin in August 1891, “my chief avocation in the last ten years has been to develop my cosmology.”16 This was the intellectual work that continued to excite him and it provided the conceptual link for many seemingly detached writings.
Three selections included in this volume help link Peirce’s “Guess at the Riddle” with his Monist papers. “Six Lectures of Hints toward a Theory of the Universe” (sel. 3) outlines a set of lectures that incorporate the vision of Peirce’s “Guess” and pick up themes from “Logic and Spiritualism.” On 12 July, G. Stanley Hall wrote in response to Peirce’s request to give a paid course of lectures at Clark University to say that no decision could be made until September but that a positive answer was unlikely. Nevertheless, Hall wrote, “Such a course as you outline … would interest & stimulate every man on the ground in a most admirable way.” That the course of lectures Peirce wanted to deliver was that outlined in selection 3 is plausible though not demonstrable, and since the time of Peirce’s request to Hall coincided with the Monist invitation, the “Six Lectures” on cosmology could be viewed as prefiguring Peirce’s plan for his Monist series.
Another closely related selection is Peirce’s “Sketch of a New Philosophy” (sel. 4). It may be that this “Sketch” was intended as a reformulation of the ideas of the “Guess” for a lecture, or perhaps for a series of articles or for a book, but given the many conceptual overlaps with the Monist papers, it may have been drawn up to help organize the Monist project. Or, since Peirce had recently reviewed a book by Ribot, who was a major proponent of what had been dubbed the “new psychology” (alluded to in topics 10 and 11 of the “Sketch”), Peirce may have decided to follow the trend and sketch the kind of “method” it would take to launch a “new philosophy.” In his 3 July acceptance letter to Russell, Peirce summarized what he would include in his first article and pointed out what would be necessary “even in so much as drawing the general sketch of the structure to be erected.” Again, selection 4 may well be the “sketch” Peirce had in mind. One interesting difference between the outline of Peirce’s “Six Lectures” and his “Sketch” is that in “Six Lectures” Peirce included the topic of “the development of Consciousness, individual, social, macrocosmic.” In his “Sketch” this topic became “Consciousness. Development of God,” perhaps giving a clue as to Peirce’s conception of God at that time. It is also interesting that in the ninth topic in his “Sketch,” Peirce refers to the “Darwinian hypothesis” as a “skeleton key to philosophy” that can also open “a theory of evolution applicable to the inorganic world.” Although the “Darwinian hypothesis” plays a key role in Peirce’s Monist papers, its limitations will be made there more prominent.
The third selection clearly related to “The Architecture of Theories,” either as an independent study or as a preliminary attempt to work out part of his argument, is “On Framing Philosophical Theories” (sel. 5). Here Peirce discusses the logic of philosophical theorizing and the nature of the conceptions to be used in a theory of the universe, a central concern of his “Architecture of Theories.” Peirce’s brief but eloquent treatment of logic is of considerable interest. He begins by asking if there are not two kinds of logic, an “unphilosophical logic” which, like mathematics, has not “the least need of philosophy in doing its work” and a more developed logic remodeled “in the light of philosophy.” The question anticipates Peirce’s later struggles to disentangle logic from mathematics and, to some extent, his distinction between logica utens and logica docens. Another key distinction Peirce introduces is that between logic as λογος, which “embodies the Greek notion that reasoning cannot be done without language,” and as ratio, which embodies the Latin idea that “reasoning is an affair of computation, requiring, not words, but some kind of diagram.”17 Peirce claims that “modern formal logic” takes the Latin view and holds that words, though necessary, “play but a secondary role in the process; while the diagram, or icon, capable of being manipulated and experimented upon, is all-important.”
A fourth selection, Peirce’s working “Notes on Consciousness” (sel. 21), might also have been jotted down to help Peirce organize some of the thoughts on consciousness from his “Guess” for “Architecture of Theories” and other Monist papers, including “The Law of Mind.” Many of the ideas listed—that consciousness is not a property of a mere mechanism but is a state of nerve matter, that “ultimate facts” are illogical, that feelings spread, and so on—are certainly key ideas Peirce will develop in the metaphysical series. It is interesting that many of Peirce’s notes also relate to topics discussed by William James in the first volume of his Principles of Psychology, in particular the chapter on “The Stream of Thought,” almost as though they could have been drawn up while reading his book—but James’s Psychology wouldn’t appear until sometime in September.18
Peirce spent many hours in July working on his opening article for the Monist. He finished an initial version of “The Architecture of Theories” (sel. 22) toward the end of that month, and he spent the month of August, as time permitted, revising and expanding it. Peirce’s plan at this stage was to begin much like he had in his “Guess,” with an account of his categories, and then to consider other “maxims of logic” that “require attention in the prolegomena of philosophy.” Then he took up mathematics, “the science which, next after logic, may be expected to throw the most light upon philosophy.” Among the mathematical conceptions Peirce examined were imaginary quantities, the absolute, and space—much from the context of non-Euclidean geometry. He then took up dynamics, remarking that “the natural ideas of the human mind tend to approximate to the truth of nature, because the mind has been formed under the influence of dynamical laws” and that “logical considerations show that if there is no tendency for natural ideas to be true, there can be no hope of ever reaching true inductions and hypotheses.” Finally Peirce moved to psychology, where he identified three “elementary phenomena of mind” as feeling (which does not essentially involve consciousness proper), the sensations of reaction, and general conceptions. To have a general conception is to be “conscious that a connection between feelings is determined by a general rule” or, from another point of view, to be “aware of being governed by a habit.” Peirce concluded this initial version of his first paper with a brief discussion of the law of mind. Sections of the manuscript for this selection are missing so it isn’t known if Peirce considered all of the sciences he would take up in the finished version of “The Architecture of Theories”—where he reversed their order of consideration, treating dynamics first and the categories last.
In his reply to Russell on 3 July, Peirce had mentioned that he had “just written a little notice” of Carus’s Fundamental Problems (Open Court, 1889). He was referring to his review for the Nation (sel. 8) which, perhaps fortunately for Peirce, did not appear until 7 August, well after his agreement with Carus had been settled.19 Peirce opened his review rather condescendingly by claiming that “The questions touched upon are all those which a young person should have turned over in his mind before beginning the serious study of philosophy” and that the “views adopted” are “average opinions of thoughtful men.” He then criticized Carus’s denial that there has ever been a chaos and he challenged Carus’s claim that the highest laws of nature are identical with the formal laws of thought. Peirce even disapproved of Carus’s and Hegeler’s mission of reconciling religion with science: “to search out [some possible reconciliation, by] dragging religion before the tribunal of free thought,
