Russell had written to Peirce the previous year (22 Jan. 1889) to tell him about Hegeler’s and Carus’s plans to launch the Monist and to let him know that he had given a bound set of Peirce’s “Illustrations of the Logic of Science” to Carus, whose intellect he admired and who he supposed could do Peirce some good. He said that after giving Carus Peirce’s papers he thought he could “discern the influence its perusal and study has had upon him.” That Carus had seen fit to ask Russell to ask Peirce to contribute to his new journal was perhaps influence enough for Peirce, especially given Russell’s intimation that Carus paid well. Russell suggested that Peirce consider contributing an article “on the lines of your introductory lecture at Johns Hopkins University” (W4: 378–82) and he complimented Peirce by noting that “Everybody is talking about scientific method and yet outside of yourself no one so far as I can see has any definite conception as to what that scientific method consists in.” The following day, Carus himself wrote to assure Peirce of the quality of his new quarterly: “I wish that … our most prominent American authors should be represented and shall be greatly indebted to you for an article from your pen on ‘Modern Logic’ or some similar topic—perhaps ‘Logic and Ethics.’ You may choose any theme with which you are engaged at present” (2 July 1890).
Peirce replied to Russell at once, thanking him and agreeing to contribute but he wrote that “[o]ne can profitably put but very little into a single article” and he said he would prefer to write “a number” of articles: “I would write in a general way about the ways in which great ideas become developed, not about verification and assurance, to which my Johns Hopkins lectures used chiefly to be directed…. A philosophy is not a thing to be compiled item by item, promiscuously. It should be constructed architectonically” (3 July 1890). Peirce told Russell that he had studied this subject out in his “minute way,” that he would like to give “some general notion of [his] results,” and that he usually was paid “$25 a thousand words.” On 19 July, Peirce replied directly to Carus agreeing to write an article of 4000 words entitled “The Architecture of Theories.”
This was the beginning of an association rivaled in importance for income only by the Peirce-Garrison connection and it would become by far the most important outlet for Peirce’s mature philosophy. Carus took a special interest in Peirce and for twenty years, notwithstanding some periods of acrimony, he did more to promote Peirce’s philosophy than anyone. Between 1891 and 1910, Carus persuaded Hegeler to publish nineteen of Peirce’s articles (thirteen in the Monist and six in the Open Court), and many of Peirce’s unpublished writings were written for Carus. The important role played by Carus in Peirce’s later life, in particular the fact that after 1890 Peirce wrote most of his best work for the Monist, is what led Max Fisch to call that time Peirce’s Monist period.
Peirce was hoping to turn Carus’s offer into an opportunity to publish the general substance of his unfinished “Guess at the Riddle” (W6, sels. 22–28). Chapter 1 of that work had begun with a discussion of how to “erect a philosophical edifice” that would “outlast the vicissitudes of time,” and to achieve that goal Peirce posited his three categories as the core conceptions to follow out “in a sort of game of follow my leader from one field of thought into another” (W6: 168, 174–75). In like manner, “The Architecture of Theories” would explain how one should go about the business of constructing a philosophy and would rearticulate in summary form much of the cosmological project Peirce had sketched in his “Guess.” As he wrote to Christine Ladd-Franklin in August 1891, “my chief avocation in the last ten years has been to develop my cosmology.”16 This was the intellectual work that continued to excite him and it provided the conceptual link for many seemingly detached writings.
Three selections included in this volume help link Peirce’s “Guess at the Riddle” with his Monist papers. “Six Lectures of Hints toward a Theory of the Universe” (sel. 3) outlines a set of lectures that incorporate the vision of Peirce’s “Guess” and pick up themes from “Logic and Spiritualism.” On 12 July, G. Stanley Hall wrote in response to Peirce’s request to give a paid course of lectures at Clark University to say that no decision could be made until September but that a positive answer was unlikely. Nevertheless, Hall wrote, “Such a course as you outline … would interest & stimulate every man on the ground in a most admirable way.” That the course of lectures Peirce wanted to deliver was that outlined in selection 3 is plausible though not demonstrable, and since the time of Peirce’s request to Hall coincided with the Monist invitation, the “Six Lectures” on cosmology could be viewed as prefiguring Peirce’s plan for his Monist series.
Another closely related selection is Peirce’s “Sketch of a New Philosophy” (sel. 4). It may be that this “Sketch” was intended as a reformulation of the ideas of the “Guess” for a lecture, or perhaps for a series of articles or for a book, but given the many conceptual overlaps with the Monist papers, it may have been drawn up to help organize the Monist project. Or, since Peirce had recently reviewed a book by Ribot, who was a major proponent of what had been dubbed the “new psychology” (alluded to in topics 10 and 11 of the “Sketch”), Peirce may have decided to follow the trend and sketch the kind of “method” it would take to launch a “new philosophy.” In his 3 July acceptance letter to Russell, Peirce summarized what he would include in his first article and pointed out what would be necessary “even in so much as drawing the general sketch of the structure to be erected.” Again, selection 4 may well be the “sketch” Peirce had in mind. One interesting difference between the outline of Peirce’s “Six Lectures” and his “Sketch” is that in “Six Lectures” Peirce included the topic of “the development of Consciousness, individual, social, macrocosmic.” In his “Sketch” this topic became “Consciousness. Development of God,” perhaps giving a clue as to Peirce’s conception of God at that time. It is also interesting that in the ninth topic in his “Sketch,” Peirce refers to the “Darwinian hypothesis” as a “skeleton key to philosophy” that can also open “a theory of evolution applicable to the inorganic world.” Although the “Darwinian hypothesis” plays a key role in Peirce’s Monist papers, its limitations will be made there more prominent.
The third selection clearly related to “The Architecture of Theories,” either as an independent study or as a preliminary attempt to work out part of his argument, is “On Framing Philosophical Theories” (sel. 5). Here Peirce discusses the logic of philosophical theorizing and the nature of the conceptions to be used in a theory of the universe, a central concern of his “Architecture of Theories.” Peirce’s brief but eloquent treatment of logic is of considerable interest. He begins by asking if there are not two kinds of logic, an “unphilosophical logic” which, like mathematics, has not “the least need of philosophy in doing its work” and a more developed logic remodeled “in the light of philosophy.” The question anticipates Peirce’s later struggles to disentangle logic from mathematics and, to some extent, his distinction between logica utens and logica docens. Another key distinction Peirce introduces is that between logic as λογος, which “embodies the Greek notion that reasoning cannot be done without language,” and as ratio, which embodies