included works by John La Farge, an acquaintance of Peirce’s.
96. The letter is in RL 482: 12–13. See Joseph Brent’s discussion of this episode in the second (1998) edition of his Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, pp. 209–212. Also Henry C. Johnson, Jr., “Charles Sanders Peirce and the Book of Common Prayer: Elocution and the Feigning of Piety” in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42.4 (2006): 552–73, esp. 562–64.
97. This letter draft is undated but is thought to have been written around the end of April. It is not known if a finished letter was sent.
98. See the textual headnote for sel. 52, pp. 670–72, for a more complete account of the Fales case. Peirce’s views on punishing criminals were developed further in “Dmesis,” an article he published in the Open Court in September 1892. It will be published in W9.
99. Peirce worked closely with Open Court translator Thomas J. McCormack. Writing to the latter on 5 July, Peirce made clear his views on translating: “Now let us not treat Dr Mach’s book as if it were a Bible; but just find out what he means to say & express that.” Work on the translation continued into May 1893 and The Science of Mechanics was published a few weeks later. The section on “Mechanical Units in Use in the United States and Great Britain” will be published in W9, the introduction to which will discuss Peirce’s work on the translation more fully.
100. The University of Chicago was established in 1891 with the support of John D. Rockefeller. William Rainey Harper was appointed as its first president on 1 July 1891.
101. Royce’s “attack” did not appear in the Philosophical Review. He pronounced against Peirce’s tychism in a paper read to the Philosophical Club at Brown University on 23 May 1895. The paper was later expanded into chapter 8 of his Studies of Good and Evil (Appleton, 1898), where Royce says on p. 237: “I do not myself accept this notion that the laws of phenomenal nature, where they are genuinely objective laws, and not relatively superficial human generalizations, are the evolutionary product of any such cosmical process of acquiring habits, as Mr. Peirce has so ingeniously supposed in his hypothesis of ‘Tychism’.”
102. From notes typed up by Max H. Fisch after an interview with Miller on 6 May 1960. Miller could not remember anything about the conversation except that Royce was making “continuous utterances,” suggesting that he had the lion’s share of that conversation, and that Peirce would interrupt from time to time beginning with a polite “Pardon me.” Still, the thrill of the experience may have made Miller speak about it in high terms to James, his favorite professor.
103. Darnell Rucker, The Chicago Pragmatists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 10.
104. What the second invention was is unclear. It might have been a process for distilling wood-alcohol or a process for preventing scaling in locomotive boilers.
105. See various related manuscripts listed in the Chronological Catalog: 1892.78–80, 89, 96, 110–11.
106. See annotation 188.39, pp. 411–12.
107. A lengthy summary extraction from Peirce’s “The Law of Mind” was published in the Philosophical Review in September 1892, pp. 583–85.
108. See Henry C. Johnson’s paper referred to in note 96 above.
109. See the general headnote for sels. 28 and 29, pp. 594–96, for a detailed account of the genesis of “Man’s Glassy Essence” and its relation to earlier writings. Peirce’s title, especially his use of the word “glassy,” is discussed in the first annotation for sel. 29, pp. 400–401.
110. In 1890, in “Logic and Spiritualism” (W6, sel. 44, pp. 391–93), Peirce sketched out the solution to the mind-body problem—which he referred to as “a rational account of the connection of body and soul—that he would elaborate in “The Law of Mind” and “Man’s Glassy Essence.”
111. See note 84 above. The theory of atomicules was also treated by Ira Remsen in his Principles of Theoretical Chemistry with Special Reference to the Constitution of Chemical Compounds (Philadelphia: Lea Brothers & Co., 1892). Remsen was a professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins when Peirce and Sylvester were there; he attended Peirce’s 1884 lecture on “Design and Chance.”
112. See annotation 183.7–8, p. 409.
113. “Man’s Glassy Essence” was published and “Evolutionary Love” was submitted several weeks into the period covered by W9. “Evolutionary Love” would not appear in print until January 1893. The introduction to W9, whose chronological span starts in August 1892, will provide more biographical and historical context for these selections.
114. See annotation 185.7–13, p. 411.
115. See James Wible’s article “Complexity in Peirce’s Economics and Philosophy: An Exploration of His Critique of Simon Newcomb.” Chapter 5 in David Colander, ed., Complexity and the History of Economic Thought: Perspectives on the History of Economic Thought (London & New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 74–103.
116. Weismann strictly ruled out the inheritance of acquired characteristics in opposition to the views of Lamarck and also Darwin.
117. See annotation 110.7–9, p. 386.
118. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984), pp. 302–303.
119. Ian Hacking, “Nineteenth Century Cracks in the Concept of Determinism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983): 455–75.
120. Elmer E. Southard, “Cross-Sections of Mental Hygiene, 1844, 1869, 1894,” American Journal of Insanity 76.2 (1919): 91–111, esp. 95–96.
121. See annotation 126.3–12, pp. 389–90.
122. E. B. Wilson to Paul Weiss, 22 November 1946.
Writings of Charles S. Peirce
1
Familiar Letters about the Art of Reasoning
| 15 May 1890 | Houghton Library |
Stagira, May 15, 1890.
My dear Barbara:
The University of Cracow once conferred upon a very good fellow a degree for having taught the philosophical faculty to play cards. I cannot tell you in what year this happened,—perhaps it was 1499. The graduate was Thomas Murner, of whose writings Lessing said that they illustrated all the qualities of the German language; and so they do if those qualities are energy, rudeness, indecency, and a wealth of words suited to unbridled satire and unmannered invective. The diploma of the university is given in his book called Chartiludium, one of the numerous illustrations to which is copied to form the title page of the second book of a renowned encyclopaedia, the Margarita Philosophica.1 Murner’s pack contained 51 cards. There were seven unequal suits; 3 hearts, 4 clubs (or acorns), 8 diamonds (or bells), 8 crowns, 7 scorpions, 8 fish, 6 crabs. The remaining seven cards were jokers, or unattached to suits; for such cards formed a feature of all old packs. The object of Murner’s cards was to teach the art of reasoning, and a very successful pedagogical instrument they no doubt proved.
If
