in Milford—with its socializing in the Pinchot circle and with frequent trips back to New York. And, of course, Peirce’s income from the Coast Survey was tenuous at best. To make matters more difficult, there were few suitable homes available for rent in Milford. When at the end of their first year the lease expired on their first house, it seemed that there was no place to go and that they would have to leave Milford. On 26 April a note appeared in the Port Jervis Evening Gazette (taken from Milford News): “We fear that we are about to lose Prof. Charles A. Pierce [sic] and his excellent lady because of their inability to secure a suitable residence for the coming year.” At the last minute Peirce did find a house to rent, the Scheinmee Homestead on Broad Street, but his inheritance made it possible to consider something more permanent. On 10 May, the Peirce’s bought a farm about two miles northeast of Milford in the direction of Port Jervis. They paid $1000 for the 130 acres on the Delaware River, which included a parcel called “Wanda Farm” that had been the homestead property of John T. Quick, one of the colorful early settlers in the area, and another parcel known as the “Quick Saw Mill Property.” The property as a whole was called “Quicktown.” Altogether, there were two houses, two barns, a large ice-house, a sawmill, and some other outbuildings. The farmhouse on Wanda Farm, built in 1854, was the main house and the one the Peirce’s would begin renovating in January 1889 with the aim of turning it into a magnificent resort that could accommodate summer guests and perhaps even a residential school of philosophy. But on 10 May, when the Peirce’s bought Quicktown, there was an understanding that they would not move in immediately and that some members of the Quick family could continue living in the main house for a period of time. That understanding would lead to complications later in the year, and descendants of the Quicks would come to believe that they had lost their property to the Peirce’s by some trick.32
It is hard to tell how Peirce divided his time in 1888, but as the year got underway it seems certain that his intellectual work was mainly devoted to three efforts: to his Coast Survey reports, to his definitions for the Century Dictionary, and to the articulation of a system of thought founded on his categories and his evolutionary metaphysics. After Peirce submitted his report on the pendulum work at Fort Conger, he turned his attention to working up results from the considerable unreduced records of the gravity work he had carried out during the preceding five years, and some from even earlier. It was becoming more and more difficult for Peirce to sustain the mental focus and intensity required for the complex calculations that typified these reductions and he persistently tried to convince Superintendent Thorn that he needed assistance with the computations. Early in April Thorn finally agreed to assign Allan Risteen to work with Peirce on a temporary basis. Risteen and his wife moved to Milford and probably stayed with the Peirce’s until sometime in July. During those months it is likely that the reduction of data from gravity determinations was a constant in Peirce’s daily routine. But the fact that Risteen was there to help with the reductions probably allowed Peirce to work more on the related hydrodynamical theory, and it also freed him to spend more time on the Century Dictionary. Although Peirce had been working on definitions for at least five years, he was just beginning his most sustained and concentrated effort. Definitions were now being set in galleys and there was no choice but to turn considerable attention to that work. When the local newspaper had printed the notice that Milford might lose Peirce, it noted that he was engaged “in compiling a dictionary to be issued by the Century Company of N.Y.” Clearly, Peirce’s lexicographic work was a prominent part of his life at that time.
The third undertaking that must have occupied Peirce a great deal as 1888 got underway was his philosophical system building. Sometime after moving to Milford, probably after his mother died, Peirce resumed work on his book, “One, Two, Three” (W5: sels. 47–50, but see also 35 and 36), rechristened as “A Guess at the Riddle” (sels. 22–28). It had been over three years since he had begun articulating his “evolutionary speculation” which by 20 August 1886, as he wrote Holden, had become “a great working hypothesis of science” (W5:xxxix). Peirce’s “speculation,” his “guess,” was that because of an “original, elemental, tendency of things to acquire determinate properties, to take habits” the universe itself has evolved from a state of “all but pure chance” to “the present almost exact conformity to law.” Peirce had come to conceive of the grand cosmic history of the universe as of a kind with the evolutionary growth of biological systems.
What led Peirce to these cosmological speculations at that time can only be surmised. Although it is clear that many of the roots of Peirce’s grand idea ran deep into the earliest layers of his thought, it does seem that after his marriage to Juliette in 1883, and after he found out that his career at Johns Hopkins had been lost, he became decidedly focused on the riddle of the universe.33 In his outline of how the argument of his book had developed (sel. 23, pp. 175–176), he noted that after he had turned his illuminating categories to “the domain of natural selection,” he had been “irresistibly carried on to speculations concerning physics”: “One bold saltus landed me in a garden of fruitful and beautiful suggestions….” That “bold saltus” may have been the “guess” itself, perhaps as expressed in his January 1884 “Design and Chance” lecture to the Johns Hopkins Metaphysical Club: “Now I will suppose that all known laws are due to chance and repose upon others far less rigid themselves due to chance and so on in an infinite regress … and in this way we see the possibility of an indefinite approximation toward a complete explanation of nature…. May not the laws of physics be habits gradually acquired by systems.” For three or four years following his Metaphysical Club lecture, Peirce roamed in his Epicurean “garden of fruitful and beautiful suggestions”:—his “One, Two, Three” writings of 1885–86 were part of that exploration. By the fall of 1887, as he began writing “A Guess at the Riddle,” Peirce’s initial exploration had worked itself out and he had started looking for further implications or illuminations of his guess for sociology and theology.34 The final two chapters, projected but probably never written, were to be expositions of the triad in those two subjects.
Another possibility is that the “bold saltus” was the “leap” he took, probably in the summer of 1885, from his growing understanding of the usefulness of his categories for logic to the speculation that they provided the key to a rich and unified system of science. By fall 1885 at the latest, he could show how “the whole organism of logic may be mentally evolved from the three conceptions of first, second, and third.” He would conclude that “if these three conceptions enter as we find they do as elements of all conceptions connected with reasoning, they must be virtually in the mind when reasoning first commences” and he would add that “in that sense, they must be innate ideas” and “there must be in consciousness three faculties corresponding to these three categories” (W5:245) which, in turn, “must be capable of a physiological explanation from three fundamental properties of the nervous system” (W5:247). It was Peirce’s conjecture that his categories, firstness, secondness, and thirdness, or perhaps even the underlying conceptions “one,” “two,” and “three,” were the building blocks for a vast, integrated system of knowledge, that led him by mid-1886 to turn the evolutionary speculation of his “Design and Chance” lecture into his guess at the riddle of the universe, namely, that the universe may be understood as a process in which chance brings forth first, or original, events, which, because of an inherent tendency “to acquire determinate properties, to take habits,” become more and more systematic and law governed. The evolving law produces seconds and the tendency to take habits, which generates law, is the third “or mediating element” between firsts and seconds (W5:293). By early 1888, when he sketched chapter seven for “A Guess at the Riddle” (sel. 28), he had refined his guess to this succinct statement: “three elements are active in the world, first, chance; second, law; and third, habit-taking.”
The main thrust of “A Guess at the Riddle” was an exploration of the fecundity of Peirce’s categories for different sciences and the construction of a unifying structure of fundamental conceptions. In each of the extant chapter sketches Peirce used his categories as a device for rethinking and refining old ideas. For example, in chapter 1, “Trichotomy” (sel. 23), he showed how ubiquitous
