The present article is the first in a series of three, and will be followed by analyses of the contributions of William James and John Dewey to American pragmatic thought

_____________

The time is long past since Charles Peirce somewhat querulously complained that he was a philosopher of whom “the critics have never found anything good to say.” In fact, even as applied to his own contemporaries, Peirce’s remark must be regarded as purest hyperbole. A select few have always been aware of his originality and acumen: William James, with characteristic generosity, acknowledged him as the founder of pragmatism; and Peirce’s influence upon thinkers as diverse as Josiah Royce, John Dewey, and Morris Cohen is well known. In our own day, the philosophical cognoscenti, almost to a man, regard him as the profoundest philosophical mind yet to appear on the far side of the Atlantic. Moreover, his insistence upon the impersonal social character of all true scientific procedures, upon the relevance of public “laboratory operations” to the full meaning of an experimental scientist’s concepts and theories, and upon the continuity between scientific inquiry and common-sense methods of solving factual problems, is appreciated by many people who have never heard of Peirce.

Like another great “scientific” methodologist and metaphysician, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, with whom he is often compared, Peirce never managed to complete his farranging philosophical system. During his lifetime he published many scattered essays and reviews whose sometimes cryptic insights are not always fully developed. The remainder of his philosophical works consists mainly of fragments, sketches for unwritten books, footnotes to footnotes of earlier drafts of his ideas, and a number of letters that contain some of his most succinct theoretical statements about the nature of language, the aims of philosophical analysis, and the nature and scope of the methodology of science. However, as in the case of Leibniz, these posthumous writings are frequently more illuminating than the treatises of other philosophers. There is, inevitably, much repetition in the monumental edition of the Collected Papers, which now runs to eight large volumes.¹ But even at their most fragmentary and obscure—and though Peirce was addicted to devising recipes to make our ideas clear, his own ideas are often maddeningly obscure—the writings in this and other editions nearly always have that unmistakable stamp of intellectual and moral authority which at once commands respect, solicits disciples, and invites interpretation. One is constantly astonished by the brilliance, the variety, the curious offbeat suggestiveness, above all by the consuming intellectual passion which, despite all his miseries and disappointments, persisted in Peirce’s writing almost until the day of his death.

But it is not only because of the posthumous success of his philosophy that Peirce deserves to be known to a public which is interested neither in displays of technical philosophical virtuosity nor in the byways of American intellectual history. What makes the man himself so profoundly interesting is his haunting inability, despite his intellectual precocity and his early and immense educational advantages, to fulfill his promise or to slake his own deep thirst for self-knowledge and self-control. The “problem” of Charles Peirce, in other words, must interest every reflective person who is involved in the complex spiritual perplexities that beset our whole revolutionary era.

Peirce was justly proud of the fact that unlike academic philosophers—whose ineffectual “seminary minds” were the products of books and lectures and talk about method—he himself, from the age of six on, had acquired the truly “laboratory” mind of the disciplined experimental scientist under the tutelage of his father, a brilliant Harvard professor and the most distinguished American mathematician of his time. And there can be little question that Peirce understood science as few philosophers of any period have understood it. But what he did not, and perhaps could not, perceive is that this superb specialized knowledge was not sufficient to equip him adequately for his own vocation as a philosopher. On the contrary, it seems almost to have blocked the way to the fulfillment of his wider metaphysical and moral aspirations. For example, at his most suggestive best, Peirce treats even his metaphysics as an aspect of the pragmatic method of inquiry which, in turn, he conceives of in essentially moral terms: as a way of life. But at other times, apparently not perceiving the profound inconsistency it represents, he contends that his philosophy is “the attempt of a physicist to make such conjecture as to the constitution of the universe as the methods of science may permit. . . .” This equivocation, I am convinced, goes to the very heart of Peirce’s limitations as an analytical philosopher concerned with the clarification of forms of thought and expression. It lies too at the base of much that is most confused and obscure in his metaphysics. It clouds the very meaning of his pragmatism, and introduces a fatal limitation and ambiguity into the moral vision or way of life of which it is an expression. In a word, because he was unclear as to the nature of his thought as a metaphysician, his metaphysics itself remained at once uncertain in conception and confused in intention. And because of this it remained inevitably fragmentary and inadequate to his own deepest moral intuitions.

The story of this confusion and ineptitude is the fundamental concern of the present essay. It is, in the end, the story of the failure of an education. And by implication it contains an indictment of the whole cognition-oriented culture of which that education provides a kind of paradigm. Almost from birth, Peirce was a victim of that “normal madness” (to readapt Santayana’s phrase) which afflicts all its sufferers with the illusion that any kind of activity—religious, moral, or philosophical—is only intellectually reputable or even meaningful if it can be conceived as a form of cumulative positive science. In our time, this illusion generally goes by the name of “positivism.” But positivism, when one looks beneath the surface, is merely an up-to-date empiricist variant of an ancient rationalistic philosophical culture that is as old as Plato and as new as Bertrand Russell. And we are all its victims. For, like Peirce, all of us are subject in one way or another to the spiritual father-image of a great Knower—whether in the form of a cosmological eye or of a scientific wonder-worker—from whose exact, clarified vision of Truth there are no secrets and to whose absolute Perfection we must all do homage. It is, I am convinced, an image which must finally be excoriated if our civilization is to survive.

_____________

I

Peirce himself regarded pragmatism as “a species of prope-positivism.” Although classifying pragmatism this way, as a form of near-positivism, is not inaccurate, it raises as many questions as it answers. In several respects, it must even appear paradoxical to those whose notions of pragmatism have been formed by the writings of William James. Peirce wanted no part of James’s doctrine about “the will to believe”; he regarded it, in fact, as a piece of errant romantic irrationalism and subjectivism. Accordingly, he renamed his own philosophy “pragmaticism,” a word which, as he sourly put it, was “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.” He agreed with James that rationality is a “sentiment”; yet it was a sentiment whose authority he, unlike James, was never prepared to question, either in religion and morals or in science. Logic, as Peirce put it, was “the ethics of the Intellect,” and he identified the “law of Reason” with the “law of Love” itself. He believed that pragmaticism, properly construed, was merely a restatement of Jesus’ precept: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” But he himself would acknowledge no utterance that violated the laws of logic and no spiritual fruit whose objective quality could not be tested by the methods of experimental science.

James, for his part, fully agreed with Peirce’s formulation of the pragmatic maxim: “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.” The only question was how liberally to construe the term “practical bearings.” James was prepared to take a very broad and pluralistic view. He respected the standards of validity and truth which the “sentiment of rationality” imposed in the sphere of what he called “theoretical” or scientific investigations, but the scope of such investigations was far more limited for James than it was for Peirce.² Not every proposition posed a theoretical problem, and not every “truth” answered to a theoretical question. Hence, according to James, before we judge the cogency of a religious belief, or a moral idea, or an artistic representation, we must first ask what practices it bears upon, what human end it really serves. If the end or the practice is not “theoretical,” it is then beside the point to judge it by standards of meaning and truth proper only to theoretical discourses. For James, in short, pragmatism was, among other things, a charter of freedom from the narrow intellectualism and “cognitivism” of the whole Western philosophical tradition from Plato forward.

Now as pragmatists, both men agreed that the meaning of any expression lies in its overt use—and not in some intuitively discernible “thought” or essence, of which the classical rationalists took the expression to be a universal sign. Both also agreed that “expression and thought are one”: only in what we do with an expression may we find the operative meaning of our thought. Peirce, however, was concerned solely with the use of expressions in “intellectual” discourses; the general propositions of mathematics and empirical science he took to be paradigm cases of such discourses. And the only “operations” he was prepared to countenance, in interpreting any “sign,” were those involved in the theoretical activities essential to the work of the logician and the experimental scientist. And it is just at this point that Peirce’s own positivism begins to emerge. Most other positivists judge the propositions of morality and religion to be cognitively meaningless because they cannot be confirmed by the operations of experimental science; Peirce, on the other hand, judged them to be meaningful, and either true or false, precisely because he believed that they could be so confirmed or refuted. Peirce’s differences from other positivists consist in this conception of the range of scientific inquiry, or, conversely, in his view concerning the conformability of moral and religious thought to the procedures of natural science. In short, Peirce believed that the work of the logician and the scientist is no different, at bottom, from the work of the moralist or the man of God.

_____________

Peirce himself was impressed by certain other differences between his pragmaticism and the more standard forms of positivism. These differences are often slighted by his positivistic allies, but they are essential to an understanding of his whole philosophy. Observe, for example, the following statement from Peirce’s fine essay, “What Pragmatism Is”: “Every proposition of ontological metaphysics is either meaningless gibberish—one word being defined by other words, and they by still others, without any real conception ever being reached—or else downright absurd; so that all such rubbish being swept away, what will remain of philosophy will be a series of problems capable of investigation by the observational methods of the true sciences.” This is for all the world just what one expects to find in the positivistic manifestoes of a Carnap, an Ayer, or a Reichenbach. Wherein lies the difference?

In the first place, pragmaticism, as Peirce tells us, retains a “purified philosophy” or metaphysics. What this comes to is not immediately clear, but the point is insistently made, and we will have to reckon with it in the following sections of the essay. Secondly, pragmaticism fully accepts “the main body of our instinctive beliefs.” This point is important, both because it is an affirmation of Peirce’s “critical common-sensism” and because in principle it commits him to a respect for those ordinary forms of thought or expression through which our commonsense beliefs are articulated. Moreover, if, as Peirce insists, “expression and thought are one,” then it follows that there is no way, either in principle or practice, of going behind our everyday modes of expression to an ideally perfect language of science. In short, the developing language of common life provides the inescapable matrix of all serious thought. It cannot be supplanted by an untried but supposedly self-contained scientific language, nor can its vocabulary be exhaustively defined in terms whose self-evident “meanings” subsist eternally in some Platonic heaven of ideas patiently awaiting the day when some discerning mind perceives them.

This is not to say that either common-sense beliefs or the ordinary language in which they are expressed are to be regarded as sacred cows. Nor is it intended to identify Peirce with those Oxford anti-intellectualists who, misconstruing the lessons of their mentor, Ludwig Wittgenstein, distrust any statement which is not immediately intelligible to the proverbial man in the street or any word whose meaning he has not already learned at play-school. Common-sense beliefs are always subject to criticism, and ordinary language is always subject to refinement and supplementation according to the demands of a particular line of specialized inquiry. The point is rather that the more exact “languages” of experimental science themselves only emerge piecemeal in the context of active experimental research. And their meanings, like those of common-sense discourse, are tied ineluctably to the developing, open-ended practices of those who habitually employ them.

Nonetheless, I am convinced that in some ways Peirce would have been more sympathetic to the philosophers of ordinary language (and in particular to the later Wittgenstein himself) than to the followers of Russell, Carnap, and Popper, who currently abuse their thought. Peirce had no use for those traditional “make-believe” theories of knowledge which attempt systematically and on principle to question every proposition which does not meet some preconceived standard of truth. By the same token, he would have had little use for those philosophies of language which, analogously, question the meaningfulness of any formulation that does not conform in advance of inquiry to some standard of meaning stipulated by armchair “scientific” philosophers. In no sphere of inquiry can we proceed “from scratch,” accepting only statements from which every vestige of vagueness or ambiguity has been eliminated and for which the evidence is complete and certain. In the problems of philosophy and science, which are merely complications or extensions of those faced in ordinary life, we remain, according to Peirce, always in the middle of things, incessantly moving back and forth between belief and doubt, between relative obscurity and relative clarity, between understanding and misunderstanding, between self-correcting practice and faltering malpractice. The task of intellectual reconstruction is endless, as we face over and over again the unforeseen contingencies in which all life, including that of the scientific philosopher, is implicated.

_____________

The other side of Peirce’s critical common-sensism is thus his equally insistent “fallibilism.” If all beliefs are to be regarded as innocent until proved guilty, so any belief, however innocent-looking, may prove untrustworthy. Let us consider a particularly crucial and instructive philosophical example. So far as I know, Peirce himself never had philosophical doubts about the reality of the external world. For all his idiosyncrasies, his mind seems always to have remained fundamentally objective and even extroverted. Constantly oppressed by anxieties about his career, about finances, about the problem of completing his philosophical work, he seems never to have been shattered by these worries or to have fallen into that morbid darkness of soul that William James, who in the ordinary affairs of life was so much more competent and successful than Peirce, understood so well. Even so, there is nothing in Peirce’s robust philosophy of common sense which precludes the possibility that some individual may be afflicted seriously—and not merely in philosophical make-believe—with the doubts which lead to solipsism. On the contrary, it is precisely through Peirce’s pragmatic theory of belief—and of doubt—that we may begin to understand the true significance of those states of mind, of general belief or disbelief, of which such philosophical “ism” words as “solipsism” or, for that matter, “realism,” “common-sensism,” and “fallibilism” are all the abstract signs.

The true solipsist is not moved by your midday philosophical objectivism, your critical common-sensism, your bland assurance that his doubts are nonsensical, linguistically improper, or even logically absurd. Of course the solipsist is not thinking “objectively,” but what is the point of saying this? To adapt the suggestive language of Dewey (who in this regard merely echoes Peirce), the serious solipsist is one who, for the nonce, has entered into a total “halt of action” from which there is no exit. As Peirce says, the concepts of reality and objectivity are indissolubly tied to the idea of “a community without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.” But what if a person loses his sense of membership in any community, so that, in effect, other people no longer exist for him as comrades or as persons? What if he no longer finds it possible to participate un-selfconsciously in the institutional practices, submission to which is our controlling test of intellectual and moral objectivity? In that case, according to the terms of Peirce’s theory of belief, it follows that he will necessarily fall into doubt concerning the “reality” of everything related to those practices, including the very “world” which itself is but a projection of the principles of which such practices are the incarnation. And this, or a form of it, is precisely that dark night of the soul for which solipsism is one abstract philosophical name.

_____________

II

It is at this Point that we may begin to perceive the significance of a third respect in which, as Peirce insisted, his pragmaticism differs from other species of propepositivism—namely, “its strenuous insistence upon the truth of scholastic realism.” Scholastic realism, it will be remembered, is a medieval variant of the Platonic metaphysical thesis that, over and above the concrete individuals which (as we say) exemplify such universal characteristics as whiteness, hardness, or senility, these very traits (Peirce called them “real generals”) exist irreducibly and objectively, in rerum natura. What, one wonders, can a pragmatic “laboratory” mind like Peirce’s have to do with such a hoary doctrine of traditional metaphysics? For Peirce stoutly maintains, in season and out, that from “realism” the pragmatist extracts both a “precious essence which will serve to give light and life to cosmology and physics” and “moral applications that are positive and potent” [my italics].

Such a claim even seems paradoxical, coming as it does from one who insisted upon the absolute unity of thought and expression. The philosophers who traditionally identify the idea with the word, the proposition with the statement, the theory with its articulation—the so-called “nominalists”—are the great historical opponents of “realism.” (Indeed, Peirce’s identification of thought and expression is precisely what Bishop Berkeley, the great 18th-century nominalist, asserted against the Lockean “minute philosophers”—the realists.)

But, one immediately asks, what operative difference does it make, at least from a scientific point of view, whether “real generals” are either asserted or denied? Would “realistic” scientists, in their strictly scientific capacity, be disposed to make any positive predictions about phenomena that their “nominalistic” brethren would not also make? Would the strictly scientific calculations or laboratory operations of either diverge at all ? Would their observations differ in the slighest degree? To these vexatious questions Peirce provides no satisfactory answer. The point is, as more than one critic has observed, that Peirce never managed to outline any clear consequential differences between nominalism and realism insofar as these doctrines are viewed as scientific hypotheses purporting to give us information about what would be observed under certain specified operative conditions.

Yet it is no accident, I believe, that in his defenses of realism, Peirce nearly always treats it as an integral theorem of his pragmatism. Nor is it an accident that the only consequences of realism which he ever succeeds in specifying are not observational or perceptual in character—but rather attitudinal and volitional. How, then, can it be that Peirce, who time and again stresses the fact that pragmatism is not a factual theory but only a way of interpreting, validating, and judging theories, fails to perceive the analogous fact in the case of realism—by his own confession but a part of pragmaticism? How can he have failed to notice that while realism, as he puts it, may “give light and life to physics and cosmology,” it adds not one proposition to their substantive content? Or can it be that Peirce regards pragmatism itself, in some residual sense, as not only a method but a factual hypothesis?

_____________

Here I want to emphasize that Peirce frequently speaks of “science” itself not as a body of finished, verified doctrine, already systematized, but rather as a dynamic, ongoing form of inquiry whose methodological principles are incalculably more important for the ultimate fate of mankind than is any particular theory presumably confirmed by them. In short, from a scientific point of view, any particular hypothesis is dispensable; what alone is not dispensable is the point of view itself. And it is within this broader social and moral context that we must place the metaphysical controversies in which Peirce is so deeply implicated.

The nominalist, according to Peirce, is the archetypal individualist for whom, so to say, only differences make a difference: for whom the unlike, the discontinuous, the unique individual is more significant than the like, the continuous, the general run. “Nominalism,” then, is a word Peirce associates with that romantic tendency, particularly of modern life, to celebrate the individual at the expense of the class or the group; the exception to the rule at the expense of the rule itself; the foreground of perception and feeling as against the background of thought and belief; the vanishing impressions of immediate experience as against the enduring objects of public knowledge and concern; the immediate reflex as opposed to the developing habit or the enduring disposition. Nominalism, in short, represents the breakdown of tradition, of principles, of institutions, and hence also of science itself as an institution. And since as a doctrine nominalism is merely a tendency, the true and consistent nominalist is, ideally, a total nihilist, an anti-philosopher who no longer even affirms nominalism itself. If the true nominalist had his way, there could be no science; to the extent that he does have his way, science, as an institution, tends to break down first into a loose galaxy of special disciplines and sub-disciplines and finally into a chaotic welter of individual inquiries and speculations, each more eccentric, more irresponsible, more egoistic than its fellows. The only question is whether anyone can seriously be a nominalist.

It is from this perspective that the propepositivist himself, insofar as he defends the methodological unity of science, the inviolable reality of a public and institutional way of doing things, has a stake in “realism” as a form of pragmatic metaphysics. Furthermore, it is from this point of view that we may appreciate why James’s nominalistic, particularistic, subjectivistic version of pragmatism seems such a threat to Peirce, for it threatens not only the classical objectivity of science and objective morality and organized religion, but also any form of enduring communal life whatsoever.³ And, more generally, from the pragmatic point of view—though this was a consequence, ironically enough, to which Peirce could not adjust himself—significant metaphysics cannot be understood as a kind of overarching super-science of phenomena, but only as a super-morality, a way of life—an “ideology.”

_____________

Peirce, however, did not carefully distinguish between the question of the methodological unity of science and the question of the ideal unity (or diversity) of human practices and ends. James, for example, could very well agree, and in fact did agree, with Peirce that insofar as our knowledge of nature is concerned, public experimental methods must be unequivocally and universally upheld. But this in no way precluded James from acknowledging that in principle there were other practices whose ends were not those of science and, therefore, whose objective principles of inquiry and standards were not those which were appropriate to science. In short, he might very well have argued that although morality, religion, and art are not concerned with the description and prediction of observable phenomena, as institutions they are concerned with impersonal objectives requiring as rigorous a subordination of personal inclination, or feeling, or opinion as science itself did.

Yet James fell into exactly the opposite error from Peirce. For he evidently believed that since questions of religious belief are not answerable by the public procedures of science, they concern only the private “will to believe” and the private “satisfactions” of each individual person. And so, although he remained, in the domain of science, nearly as firm a realist as Peirce, in other spheres he fell into a romantic nominalism and subjectivism which minimized the spiritual significance of all forms of institutional activity save science itself.

But another alternative, never, so far as I know, either clearly conceived or thoroughly investigated by Peirce or James, is open to even the most hard-bitten pragmatic realist who will countenance no “realities” which cannot be wrung through the wringer of some institutional method, procedure, or ritual. This point of view remains pluralistic, open-minded, and libertarian with respect to institutions and hence to the ends they serve. It acknowledges, as fervently as did Peirce, the inescapability of continuities and uniformities in one’s dealings with the natural world; it also acknowledges the practical reality of principles, institutions, and traditions in any sphere of social activity. It refuses only to subordinate all human activities to one supreme or paradigmatic activity, whether in the name of God or goodness or truth or logic. And it denies, on principle, that every significant proposition, “intellectual” or otherwise, must necessarily be tested by precisely the same methods of objective inquiry.

This point of view may be described, pragmatically, as institutional pluralism; it is also, in practice, the instinctive view of the true man of “common sense” who, in the ordinary course of events accommodates himself with little difficulty to the plural realities which the several institutional roles of common life in a free society impose upon him. Such a person does not deny the reality of “duties” on the factitious ground that there is no positive science of morality. Nor does he gratuitously stake his communal religious faith upon the unlikely chance that its articles may be confirmed by the application of the methods of descriptive and predictive science. His only problem is to know how to reconcile the realities of roles and institutions when, for whatever reason, they themselves no longer know or keep their place.

At this point, however, realism is unfortunately of no avail, and, as James intimated, the only solution to such problems is a practical decision. What the lonely Peirce, perhaps out of his own need, tended increasingly to forget is that realism cannot provide the whole truth of metaphysics for the simple reason that, as the accursed nominalists will never let us forget, we ourselves are always more than our objective roles and methods, more than our duties, more than our faiths. To ourselves we are also particular individuals, unique, unfathomable, and free.

This does not mean that in the last analysis nominalism is “true” or at any rate that it is any truer than realism. In philosophy, as in the life it expresses and seeks to guide, there is, as Peirce himself teaches, no such thing as a last analysis. Neither realism nor nominalism suffices for wisdom. Neither is more truly or deeply pragmatic than the other, for both are irremovable aspects of our conduct and hence our lives. And if, like Peirce, we try to follow one alone, we are led only to that bench of metaphysical desolation reserved for those who see the whole bright world, themselves included, only as a magisterial galaxy of public objects and signs, of institutions and routines, of rules and general runs.

_____________

III

“Dismiss make-believe!” This was the brave motto which Peirce placed at the end of his whole philosophical program. But it was precisely this motto which he violated whenever his “laboratory mind” was obliged to cope with forms of thought that have no internal scientific issue. The inadequacy of Peirce’s metaphysics, as well as his account of metaphysical inquiry, is owing directly to that residual make-believe scientism which treats positive science as the exemplary social institution and pretends that the aims of science must be the summum bonum of human life. For it is this scientism which forced Peirce to discount, or else to misinterpret, every form of thought save alone those “intellectual concepts” “upon the structure of which arguments concerning objective fact may hinge.” Indeed, not only was Peirce unable to give a clear and realistic account of his own metaphysical ideas; he could not even consistently describe the intellectual import of pragmatism itself as a method of inquiry.

The question which remains to be considered is why Peirce was never able to perceive clearly and consistently either the ultimate drift or the full scope of his own most striking and fertile philosophical ideas. This question must be approached concurrently in biographical and philosophical terms. The answer to it, I believe, sheds a flood of light upon the strange myopia which afflicts Peirce’s metaphysical and hence his moral vision. It may even suggest why he could never finish his metaphysical projects, why, instead, he was forever revising his unsatisfactory earlier answers to the question “What is Pragmatism?”

In approaching this topic, it is worth remarking that unlike most scientific philosophers, who affect a style that would do credit to a calculating machine, “poor Peirce,” as his friends so often called him, could never resist, even in his more formal writings, a penchant for revealing autobiographical asides. There is a fascinating and touching irony in the fact that this most resolutely logical and scientific of pragmatists should also be one of the most discursive. However, we should not complain because the imaginative and curious Peirce was so susceptible to the charms of the daisies that grew along the highroad of his more manifest inquiries. For almost in spite of himself, the intuitive Peirce perceived many relevancies hidden from more orderly and more sluggish minds. I am convinced in any case that in these informal personal glimpses of the education of Charles Sanders Peirce lies a primary clue to his philosophical and his personal predicament, and I shall accordingly make full use of them in the remarks to follow. Nor do I doubt that, whatever he might think of my judgment, Peirce himself would concur in my opinion as to their relevance for an understanding and appraisal of his achievement. For it is a cardinal principle of all pragmatists, from Peirce to Dewey, that, in philosophy as elsewhere, education maketh the man.

In one of Peirce’s fullest accounts of his own intellectual upbringing, found in a letter to Lady Webly, he makes the following intriguing statement about the figures who contributed to it:

My father was universally acknowledged to be by far the strongest mathematician in the country, and was a man of great intellect and weight of character. All the leading men of science, particularly astronomers and physicists, resorted to our house; so that I was brought up in an atmosphere of science. But my father was a broad man and we were intimate with literary people too. William Story, the sculptor, Longfellow, James Lowell, Charles Norton, Wendell Holmes, and occasionally Emerson, are among the figures of my earliest memories. . . .

The implication seems to be that in addition to a scientific and mathematical training as remorseless as that inflicted by another unrelenting father upon his 19th-century child prodigy, John Stuart Mill (whose life in certain respects contains so many startling parallels to his own), Peirce had the benefit, as Mill had not, of an early humanistic and literary culture which at once served to round out and to offset the specialized limitations of his education as a scientist. But is that implication justified? As he goes on to say in the same paragraph of this letter, “I was brought up with far too loose a rein, except that I was forced to think hard and continuously. My father would sometimes make me sit up all night playing double dummy till sunrise without relaxing my attention.” He then adds, “I was educated as a chemist and as soon as I had taken my A.B. degree, after a year’s work in the Coast Survey, I took first six months under Agassiz in order to learn what I could of his methods, then went into the laboratory. I had had a laboratory of my own for many years and had every memoir of any consequence as it came out; so that at the end of two or three years, I was the first man in Harvard to take a degree in chemistry summa cum laude.” When he shortly discovered that his “only very unusual gift was for logical analysis,” it was no accident that the only philosophers who interested him were those who approached their subject primarily or exclusively from the cognitivist viewpoint of the prope-positivist.

Later Peirce overcame some of his initial “disgust” with the “inexactitude” and the “tottering logic” of the German philosophers after Kant. He even came to see that his own metaphysical categories were closely analogous to the categories of Hegel’s “stages.” This essay is not directly concerned with the technical details of the more esoteric side of Peirce’s metaphysics; for present purposes it is of more interest to note that, in contrast to John Dewey, who began as a Hegelian and ended as a pragmatist, Charles Peirce began as a pragmatist and ended, to coin a phrase, as a “prope-Hegelian.” For Peirce the fundamental human reality was the evolving system of cultural institutions or communal forms of thought and action which Hegel called “objective mind” and which Peirce (significantly) conceived as an elaborate impersonal and interpersonal sign-process. However, unlike Hegel, Peirce continued to construe “objective mind”—and hence the validating forms of all social activity—in terms of the principles exemplified in the practices of mathematical physics. Hegel was trained as a theologian and knew about science only at secondhand; for him, almost inevitably, the institutions of public morality, religion, and of the state represented higher and more complex expressions of mind or spirit than did science and mathematics. For Peirce, on the other hand, mathematical science remained throughout his life the one authoritative, paradigmatic, and exemplary manifestation of objective mind.

_____________

This is not to deny peirce’s genuine, if limited, insights into other cultural domains. He was modest about his knowledge of the “science” of aesthetics, although some critics believe that there is gold in his view that aesthetics “ought to repose on phenomenology” and in his category of “firstness” which, among other things, is the category of immediacy, feeling, quality—of “suchness” in experience. Perhaps they are right, though on this score I find nothing very original in Peirce’s remarks. Furthermore, I am convinced that when one uses them exclusively (as some do) in interpreting works of art, the result either denies the aesthetic relevance of those symbolic forms—which, so far as they have meaning for him, Peirce assigns to his category of “thirdness”—inherent in most art, all literature, and much music; or else, at the opposite extreme, they lead to the conclusion that insofar as art, literature, and music are meaningful—insofar as they express ideas—they are in effect incipient forms of scientific thought. Put another way: the moment Peirce moves, in any domain, to the level of meaning, and away from sheer feeling and suchness, he begins to think at once as a logical and scientific pragmatist for whom every symbol is above all a “sign” of something and for whom the use of every form of expression is geared to the cognitive ends of positive science.

The same points apply, similarly, to Peirce’s discussions of religion and theology. In speaking of religious experience, he begins, attractively, by stressing the importance of direct perception and feeling. “Where would such an idea, say as that of God, come from,” he asks, “if not from direct experience?” “As to God,” he goes on, “open your eyes—and your heart, which is also a perceptive organ—and you see him.” No doubt he must have meant this last remark metaphorically, but it is nonetheless perceptive for all that. Nor can there be any doubt that Pierce himself was a deeply, if perhaps not a continuously, religious person. Critics have also been struck with his statement that “. . . it is absurd to say that religion is mere belief. You might as well call society a belief, or politics a belief, or civilization a belief. Religion is a life, and can be identified with a belief only provided that belief be a living belief—a thing to be lived rather than said or thought.” But what really does this come to? If it is absurd to say that religion is a “mere” belief, it is no less absurd to say, as he does, that man himself is a mere sign or complex of signs. The word “mere” is one to which, in this connection, the author of the great essay of “The Fixation of Belief is hardly” entitled; for it is the essence of Peirce’s theory that all genuine belief is living and that all significant thought is an expression of either belief or doubt. What indeed is pragmatism if it is not a rejection of the very notion of a “mere belief” or something “said or thought” that is not also something lived and done? The question is not whether religion is a mere belief, but rather the kind of belief a religious belief really is.⁴

Occasionally, as in his discussions of metaphysics, he verges in spite of himself toward a wider pragmatic view of meaning, reason, and belief—analogous to that of James—according to which there are, to use his word, “musements” which, though they are neither strictly common-sensical nor scientific, at the same time are answerable to semi-objective and semi-realistic standards of relevance and propriety. The muser, so to say, is in search of truths that lie “beneath the phenomena” and that must be judged by standards of clarity and validity which the workaday scientist or logician could not be expected to condone. Yet, I do not get the impression that Peirce ever made a clear distinction between religious perplexity and scientific doubt or between religious aspiration and scientific inquiry. And for all his acute recognition of the social character of most active religious life—in fact I rather think that he overdoes the point—his radically ecumenical and even Catholic conception of “the true church” strongly suggests, to my own unregenerate Hebraico-Protestant mind, an attitude closely akin to the positivistic attitude toward the unity of science—if indeed it does not in the end come virtually to the same thing. It is thus not surprising to find Peirce again turning the tables to remark: “My pragmatism, having nothing to do with qualities of feeling, permits me to hold that the predication of such a quality is just what it seems, and has nothing to do with anything else.” Feeling, for Peirce, the scientific realist, could exist only as an object of inquiry, never as an operative sentiment whose ends may have nothing to do with the predications of positive science.

_____________

The primordial fault of Peirce’s education, both as a philosopher and as a man, lies in the fact that when he was not in the laboratory, actually or imaginatively, he was allowed to run wild by his distinguished parent. He had no thorough training in the practices by which non-scientific activities are to be judged. He finally overcame his early distaste for German philosophy, yet he had an inadequate preparation for a full appreciation of the one German philosopher for whom, early and late, he always retained an enormous respect, Immanuel Kant. He points out that “For several years . . . [I] studied the Kritik der reinen Vernuft, and knew it almost word for word, in both editions.” But precisely because he did not study with similar care Kant’s great second Critique of Practical Reason, from which stems so much that is deepest in the pragmatic movement itself, Peirce was never able to understand how art, morality, and religion, though not forms of scientific thought may still belong to the life of reason. Here it seems to me his insight falls below that of his younger contemporary, Santayana. But then Santayana had the benefit of a disciplined humanistic and literary education which enabled him, when he turned to philosophy, to perceive how one may be a realist and a man of reason in Peirce’s sense and yet not reduce these other symbolic forms to the terms of scientific discourse. In fact, from a point of view such as Santayana’s, it is possible to see how, by a strange irony, Peirce himself has fallen into one of the myriad forms of nominalism. For the nominalist, as Pierce described him, is one who cannot take seriously any forms of life or thought save those immediate to himself. And “poor Peirce,” for all his brillance and inventiveness, was so put upon by his life with father that he could never view with full seriousness any idea or any word which he could not reduce to the terms of his own experience as a laboratory scientist and logician.

What was the result? For Peirce, I fear, it was a life of troubled dreams, of mental cramps, and unfinishable projects, a life, in short, of isolation, of loneliness, and ineptitude. Yet the defects were, and are, mortal. And any culture which, like our own, treats its Benjamin Peirces as authoritative father figures is bound for a trouble more ghastly than it can possibly understand. Peirce tells us at the end of his piece on “The Century’s Great Men in Science” that: “To an earlier age knowledge was power, merely that and nothing more; to us it is life and the summum bonum.” This is, or ought to be, regarded as simply false. Realistically and objectively, at least in a free and pluralistic society, there is no summum bonum; there are only magna bona, of which the knowledge yielded by positive science is but one.

Peirce did not doubt that his philosophy, whatever else it might be, was a moral philosophy whose aim is self control and emancipation from “the bonds of self, of one’s own prepossessions.” This is the common bond which ties Peirce together with all the other great pragmatists, including James and Dewey. In Peirce’s case, unfortunately, he sought such control and such emancipation exclusively in a single domain of communal activity which for him, apparently, became a virtual synonym for the word “love.” But if love, however intense and however selfless, is self-destructive when limited to a single person, however dear, it is no less so when it is restricted to any single cooperative and corporate activity, however noble. Peirce’s training as a scientist liberated many of his immense spiritual energies and abilities, but it also imprisoned others. For want of a more substantial training in the “humanities,” these were permitted to atrophy or else were hypertrophied in forms that must have led Peirce to the very nominalistic verge of madness and despair. The trouble was that, unlike James, whom he both loved and deplored, Peirce could never recognize his own dark nights of the soul as anything more than failures to keep playing double dummy.

In the end it all comes back, as Peirce could have foretold, to a question of meaning, Peirce did not sufficiently respect or trust his own underlying intentions as a metaphysician and moralist, and was forced, therefore, to disguise them from himself as signs of authentic scientific and formal logical activity. He was not able, or willing, to perceive that his discourse as a philosopher was not essentially a “sign” of anything at all. Consequently, he did not see how far his own philosophical use of language is from the merely scientific signification of matters of fact. Words and propositions, despite Peirce, are not signs, or if they are, then only incidentally and by accident. The meaning of words lies in their use. And it is through the study of their plural uses that we ourselves may hope at long last to liberate ourselves from the forms of spiritual bondage to which Peirce remained enslaved.

One final comment: Unlike Santayana and James, Peirce wished to control but did not in the end sufficiently respect himself. He sought only liberation from himself through forms of institutional activity such as science. He did not ask whether such liberation is or should be a final good. And here, not Santayana, but William James, or even his brother Henry, may be the wiser philosopher. For the brothers James knew that however dear the members of a family can be to one another, each has in the end a personal, private row to hoe whose meaning or end no one else can finally judge. Perhaps, indeed, love itself is so private, so personal a thing that no institution, be it a church, a race, a people, or a science, can grasp or express its essence. Perhaps the morning, as well as the dark night, of the soul is something that “I” alone can really know.

_____________

¹ Whether this edition is now complete is a question about which opinions differ. For some, the substance of Peirce's philosophical thought is contained in the existing Papers; for others, apparently, they will remain incomplete until even his laundry bills have been included.

² A separate essay might be written at this point on our usual philosophical traduction of such words as “theoretical,” “intellectual,” “speculative,” and “rational,” and analogously, on our systematic but myopic narrowing of the significance of such terms as “practical,” “moral,” and “pragmatic.” But this is another story which would be much illuminated by Peirce's own writings.

³ It should be added in passing that it is from this standpoint we must approach Peirce's insistence upon the reality of institutions as well as of the individuals who fill their offices. The cash value of the difference between nominalistic individualists like Mill and James and realistic institutionalists and collectivists like Peirce, Hegel, and Marx is that the former attach no inescapable significance to institutions as such, regarding them at best as means to ends, whereas the latter, on the contrary, regard the institution as itself a primary, inescapable good (or evil), an end to which an irreducible loyalty (or disloyalty) is due.

⁴ Peirce's thought in such essays as “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” is, as usual on such levels, immensely obscure and equivocal.