thing is not to allow the pupil to fall into trifling subtleties,—and to teach him to unite scientific profundity and even a philosophical insight with thoroughly practical aims. The practical must never be lost sight of, or the reasoning becomes dry and worthless. Practical exercises form the only instrument by which anything can be taught. If you want to teach a man to box, you must set him to boxing. But you must carefully analyze each motion for him. In other words, the exercises must be analytic. The analytical gymnastics of the mind is what this instruction consists in.
“The entire course, which will occupy two or three years, costs $180.” Peirce divided his correspondence course in “The Art of Reasoning” into quarterly terms of thirty lessons each. The admission tickets allowed students to enroll through Peirce’s field agents for $2, then pay either $8 for ten lessons (top) or $28 for an entire quarter of instruction (bottom). Peirce also provided other installment options when students wrote directly to him. (By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.)
SUCCESS IN LIFE DEPENDS LARGELY ON REASONING WELL. It is a fact that the average American can see well enough, that to succeed better than your neighbors, you must be a little smarter than they are. This is felt keenly in Wall Street, where the elements which make the successful man are brought out into vivid distinctness by the contrast in the fate of the successful and the unsuccessful man. Tell the story of Cornelius Vanderbilt and his grandfather.
It is true we see plenty of men who can tell so well exactly how anything should be done; and yet when it comes to doing it they are not there. We also see men who can reason soundly enough, and yet want tact, grace, and subtlety of perception in dealing with men. But it is one of the points of Mr. Peirce’s method that it dwells upon the regions where reasoning shades off into vigor of action, and into observation.
It may be thought that success depends more upon good morals than upon right reason. But the truth is that the best way to teach people morals is to teach them to think.
PEOPLE CAN BE TAUGHT TO THINK. Ignorant and uncultivated people have a strange idea that men cannot be taught to think. The foundation of this is no doubt in part that they observe that educated men often reason no better or not so well as they do themselves. This is because education generally is so ill designed to fulfill its chief purpose. Every function of the body is strengthened by exercise, and if every tissue of the body can learn, how can it be thought that the mind should want the faculty of learning? The truth is, that exercise is immensely more telling on the mind than on the body. Any ordinary man not too old can in three months learn to lift twice the weight he could at the outset. This is an understatement. But in three months mental gymnastics, he can triple or even quintuple his mental energy. Mr. Peirce [ ]
[Letter to New Students]
| January 1887 | Houghton Library |
36 W 15th St, New York City
My dear Pupil:
The first thing that you and I have to do is to form one another’s acquaintance. You have hitherto probably been taught in a class, but my instruction is to be fitted to your individual mind. It is a custom-made and not a ready-made education. Very likely you are of opinion that ready-made things pay the best for the purchaser. But you will agree, I think, that if every day-laborer knew how to work with wood, the carpenter trade would be worse than it is; if every man could conduct a law suit as well as a lawyer, the lawyers would not get large fees; if all the world had foreseen the success of the Atlantic cable as clearly as Cyrus Field did, he would not be today many times a millionaire. Thus, every man’s success in life depends upon his being a little smarter than his neighbor. Very well; now that you have become my pupil, I will declare to you what I do not proclaim to the general public, because I do not wish to make boasts that I may not have the opportunity to make good; but I declare to you privately that I intend to make you smarter than your neighbors. No, no; what am I saying? It is beyond human power for one man to add to the mental vigor of another. That I cannot do; but I will guide you in the way of making yourself smarter than your neighbors. Plainly, a wholesale education which is extended to all the children in the country can raise nobody above the general level.
Few men can excel in all their powers of mind. My experience has shown me that men’s minds are as various as their faces. Having minutely studied multitudes, I find that each is naturally strong in one kind of thinking and naturally feeble in another. I have then a two-fold task. I must train the pupil up to respectable strength where he is weak and up to remarkable strength where he is strong. I have to arrange his exercises so that the work done is more serviceable than the same amount otherwise distributed could be. I am a sort of physician for the mind; and to know what to prescribe I must study my patient’s symptoms. Then I may be able to make him a better man than I myself am. That is why the first thing I have to do is to make your acquaintance.
I want you to begin by writing me a letter. This will not count as one of your 30 exercises, and yet it will be more important than most of them, and will give more work both to you and to me. I wish you to select some subject upon which you have thought a good deal, and write me an account of what you think. No matter what subject you select. Perhaps it had better not be so purely personal, local, or technical, that I could not possibly know anything about it, although even such matters are not positively ruled out. The main point is not to think out something for the occasion, for that would, I know, not do you justice, but to take a subject upon which you have already thought. I ask you to set forth your reflections in an orderly manner, plainly, fully, and yet as briefly as may be. I will give you no further directions. Do the thing in your own way; and let the letter be a favorable exhibit of what your mental factory can turn out now. It will thus serve two purposes. It will show me to what my first efforts must be directed. I shall not, if I can avoid it, recur to the subject of this letter during the whole period of our correspondence; but at the end of each quarter, I wish you to write me a new letter on the same subject, and these successive letters will be evidence, both to you and to me, of the increment of your mental strength.
Yours truly,
C. S. Peirce
[Orientation Letter to Marie Noble]
| 11 May 1887 | Houghton Library |
Milford, Pa., 1887 May 11.
MISS MARIE B. D. NOBLE,
Care Messrs. Gorham, Turner, & Co., Mills Building, New York City.
My dear pupil:
I am glad that you have applied to me; for I am entirely confident of being able to be of service to you. Your letter is a very clear one, and shows good intellectual powers. You have had a long period of ill-health, which has impaired the vigor of your will-power. Your difficulty of seeing two sides of every practical question is a familiar fact to me, though I have never experienced it myself. It is no symptom of intellectual weakness, but rather the contrary. Almost every question has two sides, and it is only the thoughtless and the passionate who can fail to see it. But what we have to do, after we have considered the question as long as it is convenient to do, is somewhat arbitrarily to make a choice between the two sides, and having once made our choice to stick to it. Your difficulty lies, no doubt, in making a vigorous choice, in the absence of the vis a tergo of demonstrative reasons. Will is also needed for the act of concentrating the mind, although this is a less willful