on his definitions than on anything else.
Peirce’s relations with his family deteriorated further after the move to Milford. Aunt Lizzie became even more vitriolic about Juliette. She wrote to Peirce’s sister: “I think that your mother blames me for the stand I take about Charles & Juliette…. We can not have them here at all. In fact I know Juliette enough from my own observation, that she would be a dreadful creature to have in the house. She is a liar & very artful, & she cares for nobody but herself, & she wd be worse than a rattle-snake in the house” (8 August 1887). She wrote of Juliette’s alleged genius for acting that “she always has been on the stage & ought to be an adept by this time” but that “if she is a genius I fear it is a cracked one,” and that “I utterly distrust her & hope I never see her again” (5 May and 9 June 1887). Even Peirce’s mother, who had alone seemed always to maintain a genuine concern in Juliette, seemed to turn against her. In August, Mrs. Peirce traveled to Newport with Jem after vaguely inviting Charles and Juliette to meet them, but Jem waited until it was too late—nine days into their visit—to write that they could come. When Charles learned of this, he was furious and wrote a scathing letter draft that he never sent:
It is best I should say once for all a few plain words which I shall not repeat concerning an expression in your last. You say you hope Juliette will let me come on to Cambridge. I wish Juliette would not urge me to go but would resent as I think she ought your insufferable and vulgar insolence. You insult me deeply in supposing or pretending to suppose I ever would go into that house. Whatever your object may have been in driving me to this decision, you have succeeded in that.
Your inviting us to meet you and mother in Newport and then not letting us know till you had been there 9 days when mother writes that I can put any construction I like on her silence, confirms me in [the] decision self-respect ought to have brought me to long ago.
I was deeply attached to you all, but you have all behaved ignobly & contemptibly, & I will pay up what I owe & be done with you. (22 Aug. 1887)
He did send a telegram that he immediately regretted sending and wrote to Jem to express his “sorrow and shame at having used an insulting expression.” He promised that “As long as mother lives, at least, I want to have the best relations possible with those she loves” (21 Sept. 1887).
Peirce’s mother would not live for much longer. On 4 October, Peirce was called to her bedside and she died six days later. Unfortunately, the tensions toward Juliette, who accompanied Peirce to the funeral and stayed on with him as he helped settle affairs, did not let up during the period of mourning. On the 15th, Aunt Lizzie wrote to Helen: “I hope I shall hear today when Charles & Dulcinea are going. I hope today but this I cannot expect. I wish she was at the South Pole, the North being too much in the neighborhood….” She wrote again on the 21st: “I do not hear any thing yet of Charles’ going—I hope & trust they will go this week & never return.” A few days later she could finally write: “Charles is going tomorrow & then I shall breathe freely. I am always afraid she will make an invasion. I feel quite sure that she has got Charles into her power—& she would like to get us all if she could…. However we need not be afraid of her if we can only keep her at a distance.” When Peirce’s mother’s estate was eventually settled about a year later, his share came to about $2000, including $1000 he had borrowed in 1885. He also got back some books he had given his mother, in particular a Leopold Shakespeare which had been dear to her.17
The move from New York and his family troubles did not prevent Peirce from making some progress on the intellectual front. By mid-May 1887, he had finished his review of Phantasms of the Living, his first paper after arriving in Milford. Although Peirce did not believe that the postulation of telepathy and apparitions, Gurney’s “ghosts,” formed a good hypothesis for explaining the unusual phenomena recounted in Phantasms, that conviction was not why he devoted so much attention to that gigantic book. Gurney, Myers, and Podmore had put forward their results as a serious scientific study and had presumed to build their argument on the basis of probabilities, hoping to show that in an earlier investigation by Charles Richet the probability in favor of telepathic phenomena had been found to be too low.18 The critical use of probability theory in the design of scientific experiments and the analysis of results was relatively new, although not for Peirce, who was an expert in two sciences that were exceptions, astronomy and geodesy. In the preceding decade Peirce had devoted much thought to extending the use of statistical reasoning to new sciences, and in the 1883–84 experiments with Jastrow, he had introduced the first modern randomized experimental design for psychology.19 Peirce saw at once that the method of Gurney and his associates was inadequate to their task and that they had seriously misapplied the logic of probability. However well-intentioned, their work amounted to an attack on the logic of science, and Peirce could not let it go unanswered. It only made matters worse that William James had been impressed by the absurd claim made in Phantasms that the odds in favor of “ghosts” was about “a thousand billion trillion trillion trillions to one.”20 In the first paragraph of his “Criticism” (sel. 16), Peirce alluded to this claim—“I shall not cite these numbers, which captivate the ignorant….”—and pointed out that “no human certitude reaches such figures as trillions, or even billions to one.” Gurney, Myers, and Podmore had presented thirty-one cases21 which they claimed established their hypothesis to this remarkable degree of certitude and Peirce’s aim was to show how their results were vitiated by inadequate sampling and control procedures; specifically, that in each of the thirty-one cases they had failed to meet one or more of sixteen conditions of an adequately designed experiment.
Peirce’s review was forwarded to Gurney for a reply to be published along with it. These papers, together with a rejoinder by Peirce probably written in the late summer or fall, appeared in the December 1887 issue of the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research. In his review (sel. 16) Peirce’s criticism of the thirty-one cases was somewhat casual and perhaps slightly derisive, containing a number of inaccuracies and exaggerations that Gurney, in his lengthy “Remarks” (sel. 17), pounced on. He answered Peirce point for point, often with an impatience that matched Peirce’s swagger. He did admit that perhaps he and his colleagues fell “far short of Mr. Peirce’s standard in respect of caution, shrewdness of observation, and severity of logic,” but he supposed that his deficiencies were not so great as to override the weight of the evidence. Peirce, stung a bit by some of Gurney’s rebuttals, wrote a “Rejoinder” (sel. 18) almost as long as Gurney’s “Remarks” and more technical and precise than his original criticism. He reiterated why he had felt the need to take a stand against Gurney, namely, that “to admit the existence of a principle, of which we certainly only meet with manifestations in very exceptional observations, is to rashly set the prosperity of scientific progress at hazard.” He then answered all of Gurney’s rebuttals and attempted to show that once the suspicious or problematic cases were weeded out there really was no “weight of evidence” at all. Peirce praised Gurney for adopting a statistical method “with a view of putting this question to rest,” but his badly designed study “leaves the question where he found it.” In response to Gurney’s claim that any bias he might have in favor of the supernatural was no greater than Peirce’s bias against it, Peirce agreed, but he added that “a bias against a new and confounding theory is no more than conservative caution; while a bias in favor of such a theory is destructive of sound judgment.” Gurney set about answering Peirce’s “Rejoinder,” but had not finished his remarks when, in 1888, he apparently took his own life. It is thought that the impetus for his apparent suicide was the revelation that his assistant, George Albert Smith, had manufactured evidence (annotation 61.23). Gurney’s final but unfinished answer to Peirce appeared posthumously in 1889 as “Remarks on Mr. Peirce’s Rejoinder,” with a concluding “Postscript” by Myers (sel. 19). In his final “Remarks” Gurney wanted to make it clear that he was really not an advocate for the supernatural and that, in fact, he agreed with Peirce “in professing ‘a legitimate and well-founded prejudice against the supernatural.’” The entire controversy had been acrimonious, with both parties sometimes
