was one of total chaos out of which uniformities evolved by habit, was a true milestone for both science and philosophy. Ilya Prigogine has recognized Peirce’s introduction of absolute chance into his cosmology as “a pioneering step”118 and Ian Hacking has noted Peirce’s success in his Monist papers in putting “emergentism together with ideas of statistical mechanics, to form a new and vigorous indeterminism.”119 By bringing together his absolute chance with the law of mind, Peirce could comprehend an indeterminate and irreversible course of events through time, a process of real growth. If, that is, we also admit his law of love, which has received too little attention to this day. Peirce’s tychism and his synechism have been for a long time topics of research for students of philosophy; agapism much less so but perhaps that is beginning to change. It may be that Peirce’s law of love will one day be understood to be the greatest contribution of Peirce’s first Monist series.
The reaction to Peirce’s Monist papers varied greatly when they first appeared. William James, as noted above, thought Peirce’s “Doctrine of Necessity Examined” was “a blessed piece of radicalism.” Much attention was given to Peirce’s papers in the pages of the Monist, and some in many other publications that treated philosophical or theoretical subjects. In his presidential address to the American Medico-Psychological Association in 1919, Elmer E. Southard, Director of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, introduced Peirce to his audience as “perhaps the most original of American philosophers.” After summarizing Peirce’s cosmology, with a surprising reference to “Peirce’s celebrated paper on Evolutionary Love,” Southard concluded:
“Somehow Peirce has always seemed to me the most American of all philosophers. He was, as you might say, with his Tychism, just the sort of thoroughgoing sport that the Yankee prides himself on being, whereas, with his agapistic doctrines, he worked into the world just that degree of bonhomie that the Yankee never quite can succeed in concealing. If it were possible to combine most intimately some of the elements of the chance doctrine of the universe, namely Tychism, with some of the elements of the love doctrine, namely Agapism, then we should perhaps find that Charles S. Peirce stood for being not merely a sport, but a good sport, and this is perhaps a sufficient description of the American end and aim.”120
Of course Peirce’s Monist articles were not universally celebrated. Peirce expected this when he exclaimed:121 “[A]s long as I have only begun to explain my position, people have no disposition to wait to hear me state my meaning in full; … and these may have a public interest if they prevent me, as they threaten to do, from completing the exposition of a philosophy which might lead science into the way of truth.” E. B. Wilson reported that Peirce’s former student, Christine Ladd-Franklin, believed that “Man’s Glassy Essence” showed “very definitely” that he “was losing his mind as early as the first half of the nineties.” Wilson added: “And I must say that it has always seemed to me that his writings after 1890 gave much evidence of this when compared with those before 1885.”122 If any of Peirce’s principal papers prior to 1885 is compared with “Man’s Glassy Essence” or “Evolutionary Love,” one can see why Ladd-Franklin thought Peirce was losing his mind—if she meant no longer being of one mind with one’s former self. She believed Peirce’s transformation to be pathological, but that is not the only explanation.
Peirce’s 24 April 1892 letter to the Rector of St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church represented a pivotal moment in Peirce’s life. If his experience was one of true conversion, it was in the sense of “becoming a new man.” Peirce’s letter shows that he was thinking of himself and his life in a new way. Many of his friends and colleagues also saw him differently. When Peirce started working on “Man’s Glassy Essence,” he took up a project which in a sense he had put on hold twenty-four years earlier when he finished “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.” In that paper he had argued that man was an external sign and that as a sign, what a man was depended on “the ultimate decision of the community.” If both Peirce and his community were interpreting the sign that he was in a new way, then by the logic of it he was a new man, and he had now accepted it.
It may be argued in the end that what the transformation described above led Peirce to was to become a contrite fallibilist. As a lifelong practicing scientist, Peirce had always known that the path toward knowledge demanded acceptance of the facts of the matter regardless of one’s wishes and expectations. The humbling experiences Peirce had endured in recent years, together with the cold truth that he could no longer achieve his best, for want of opportunity and means—for want of a cooperating community—had intensified his realization that we must approach our quest for knowledge with humility. None of us alone can make progress or ever know if we have reached the truth. Our greatest contribution is our dedicated participation in the quest for truth along with our fellow searchers. Peirce’s deliberate turn toward contrite fallibilism may well be his most significant advance during the period covered by this volume. It is the path Peirce would continue on for the remainder of his days.
Nathan Houser
1. This introduction was abridged by André De Tienne because of space limitations. The unabridged final draft is available electronically in the Companion to W8 on the PEP website (www.iupui.edu/~peirce). In writing this introduction, I have made heavy use of the Max H. Fisch files and data collections at the Peirce Edition Project. Footnote references are not given for items that can be easily located by keeping the following in mind: all references to manuscripts and Peirce’s letters, unless otherwise indicated, are to the Peirce papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard University or in the Open Court collection; correspondence with members of the Open Court is in the Open Court collection in the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University; letters used are also from these collections or from the Coast Survey collection in the National Archives. Readers should consult the annotations and the textual notes at the back of the volume for additional information about circumstances related to the composition of the volume’s selections. This introduction continues those to the previous volumes and assumes their acquaintance in order to minimize repetitions.
2. These episodes are described in the introduction to W6. See W6, sel. 44 for the article rejected by Metcalf.
3. See the Introduction to W6 for a more detailed account of Peirce’s life in New York during the winter and spring 1889–90.
4. The library’s annual report for 1891 records that “The most notable accession has been a large number of mathematical works kindly suggested by Professor Charles S. Peirce after a careful examination of our collection.” Forty-third Annual Report of the Astor Library for the year 1891, p. 18. Also see “A Year at the Astor Library; Additions to the Collections—Visitors and Their Work,” NYT, 11 February 1893, p. 9.
5. Quoted by H. W. Henshaw, book notice, American Anthropologist 5.2 (Apr. 1892): 184–85.
6. Science 13.314 (8 Feb. 1889): 103.
7. See the introduction to W6, pp. lvii–lix, for a fuller treatment of Peirce’s Century Dictionary work. W7, a special volume featuring Peirce’s contributions to the Century Dictionary, is in preparation at the University of Quebec at Montreal (PEP UQAM) under the direction of François Latraverse. Professor Latraverse will write the historical introduction for that special volume.
8. See W6: lix–lxix for an extensive account of this.
9. See NEM 1: xxix; W6: lxxii.
10. See the textual commentary for sels. 17 and 18, pp. 553–56. Sometime in 1890, Peirce had decided to turn his correspondence course lessons into a textbook entitled “Light of Logic.”
11. See annotations p. 380.
12. While arguing this point in sel. 19, Peirce makes the passing remark that “there is a world of difference between fallible knowledge and no knowledge,” thus implicitly contrasting fallibilism and skepticism.
13. Hegeler, “The Basis of Ethics,” Open Court 1: 18–22; quoted in Harold Henderson, Paul Carus of Open Court; Catalyst for Controversy (Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), from which other biographical information in this paragraph was taken.
14. Henderson,