A fourth selection, Peirce’s working “Notes on Consciousness” (sel. 21), might also have been jotted down to help Peirce organize some of the thoughts on consciousness from his “Guess” for “Architecture of Theories” and other Monist papers, including “The Law of Mind.” Many of the ideas listed—that consciousness is not a property of a mere mechanism but is a state of nerve matter, that “ultimate facts” are illogical, that feelings spread, and so on—are certainly key ideas Peirce will develop in the metaphysical series. It is interesting that many of Peirce’s notes also relate to topics discussed by William James in the first volume of his Principles of Psychology, in particular the chapter on “The Stream of Thought,” almost as though they could have been drawn up while reading his book—but James’s Psychology wouldn’t appear until sometime in September.18
Peirce spent many hours in July working on his opening article for the Monist. He finished an initial version of “The Architecture of Theories” (sel. 22) toward the end of that month, and he spent the month of August, as time permitted, revising and expanding it. Peirce’s plan at this stage was to begin much like he had in his “Guess,” with an account of his categories, and then to consider other “maxims of logic” that “require attention in the prolegomena of philosophy.” Then he took up mathematics, “the science which, next after logic, may be expected to throw the most light upon philosophy.” Among the mathematical conceptions Peirce examined were imaginary quantities, the absolute, and space—much from the context of non-Euclidean geometry. He then took up dynamics, remarking that “the natural ideas of the human mind tend to approximate to the truth of nature, because the mind has been formed under the influence of dynamical laws” and that “logical considerations show that if there is no tendency for natural ideas to be true, there can be no hope of ever reaching true inductions and hypotheses.” Finally Peirce moved to psychology, where he identified three “elementary phenomena of mind” as feeling (which does not essentially involve consciousness proper), the sensations of reaction, and general conceptions. To have a general conception is to be “conscious that a connection between feelings is determined by a general rule” or, from another point of view, to be “aware of being governed by a habit.” Peirce concluded this initial version of his first paper with a brief discussion of the law of mind. Sections of the manuscript for this selection are missing so it isn’t known if Peirce considered all of the sciences he would take up in the finished version of “The Architecture of Theories”—where he reversed their order of consideration, treating dynamics first and the categories last.
In his reply to Russell on 3 July, Peirce had mentioned that he had “just written a little notice” of Carus’s Fundamental Problems (Open Court, 1889). He was referring to his review for the Nation (sel. 8) which, perhaps fortunately for Peirce, did not appear until 7 August, well after his agreement with Carus had been settled.19 Peirce opened his review rather condescendingly by claiming that “The questions touched upon are all those which a young person should have turned over in his mind before beginning the serious study of philosophy” and that the “views adopted” are “average opinions of thoughtful men.” He then criticized Carus’s denial that there has ever been a chaos and he challenged Carus’s claim that the highest laws of nature are identical with the formal laws of thought. Peirce even disapproved of Carus’s and Hegeler’s mission of reconciling religion with science: “to search out [some possible reconciliation, by] dragging religion before the tribunal of free thought, and committing philosophy to finding a given proposition true—is this a wise or necessary proceeding?” Peirce did note with approval that Carus had “correctly rendered” the “views of modern geometers” in holding that “space is not a non-entity, but a real property of things,” but, overall, Peirce’s review was not favorable. According to Kee Soo Shin, Peirce’s review raised doubts about “several important aspects of Carus’s monistic philosophy” and it marked the beginning of a famous controversy between Peirce and Carus that would start in earnest with Carus’s reply to Peirce’s second Monist paper, “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” (sel. 24), and would run throughout 1893.20
Peirce published several other reviews in the Nation throughout this period. His review of the posthumous edition of William S. Jevons’s Pure Logic, and Other Minor Works appeared on 3 July 1890 (sel. 7). Peirce had long been familiar with Jevons’s contributions to logic, even having called on Jevons while in England in 1870 to present him with a copy of his memoir, “Description of a Notation for the Logic of Relatives” (W2, sel. 39), but Peirce had always held mixed views about Jevons’s work. In 1872, in one of his early reviews for the Nation, Peirce expressed respect for Jevons’s originality while voicing a general disappointment with his work (W3, sel. 1). Now again, Peirce gave a mixed review, praising Jevons’s clearness of thought but questioning its power. Peirce praised Jevons for being the first to employ the inclusive form of logical addition but criticized him for not seeing that the copula of inclusion was logically simpler than the copula of identity, and he challenged Jevons’s critique of Mill. Peirce further claimed that Jevons’s logical machine was “in every respect inferior to that of Prof. Allan Marquand,” Peirce’s former student, and went on record with the claim that “the higher kinds of reasoning concerning relative terms cannot (as far as we can yet see) be performed mechanically.”21
Peirce’s short review of the first volume of Thomas Muir’s chronological history of The Theory of Determinants (sel. 9) appeared in the 28 August issue of the Nation. Rather than discussing the substance of the book Peirce used about half of his space to comment on history as a genre of scholarship. Only histories of “the human mind,” of “the general development of man and his creations” are of much interest. Biography is too focused on individual achievements and still too “prescientific” to be historically interesting. Histories of mathematics, on the other hand, are attractive, largely because the historical record is continuous, the subject-matter definite, and its development invariably triumphant. Peirce appreciated the way Muir organized his volume around his “ingenious table show[ing] the history of forty-four theorems,” perhaps because Peirce had just been himself amassing a large catalogue of theorems for the Century Dictionary’s corresponding entry. Peirce tellingly regretted, however, that Muir attached more importance to theorems than to methods and ideas.
On 30 August, Peirce sent Carus his finished manuscript, “The Architecture of Theories” (sel. 23). Peirce had finally managed to work out the speculative vision he had been cultivating since 1878, when he published “The Order of Nature” (W3, sel. 64). In a way, “Architecture of Theories” was an outline of, or a prolegomenon to, what Peirce conceived to be the philosophy of the future, a systematic philosophy reconciling metaphysics with the most up-todate science and rejecting, at least implicitly, armchair philosophy. In this opening paper for his Monist series, Peirce undertook to find conceptions that “ought to form the brick and mortar of a philosophical system.” He began with a survey of several successful sciences, including dynamics (physics), biology, psychology, cosmology, and mathematics, looking for basic conceptions important for philosophy. His survey recapitulated, to some extent, his review in his “Initial Version” (sel. 22), though in reverse order.
Among the key conceptions Peirce considered were the law of the conservation of energy, the linked conceptions of force and law that had given rise to “the mechanical philosophy,” three conceptions of evolution (Darwinian, Lamarckian, and Kingian), three conceptions of space (that it is unlimited and immeasurable, immeasurable but limited, or unlimited but finite), mathematical conceptions of the infinite, the absolute, and continuity, and the fundamental conceptions of one, two, three. Peirce’s examination of these and other conceptions, especially the metaphysical conceptions of chance, law, and the tendency to take habits, led him to some of his signature ideas: that “the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and for uniformity in general is to suppose them results of evolution,” that intellectual power is “facility in taking habits,” that “the one primary and fundamental law of mental action [the growth of mind] consists in a tendency to generalization,” or the spreading of feeling, and, finally, that of the three