Mendenhall replied with a friendly letter, assuring Peirce that he appreciated his “rare abilities and long service” and he promised to occasionally use Peirce for “discussion of observations” and the like. But he asked Peirce to forward his resignation “at once to take effect on Dec. 31st.” On 1 October 1891, Peirce tendered his resignation to take effect on the last day of the year. That would end thirty years of service and would eliminate Peirce’s principal source of income, a frightening prospect now that his regular work for the Century Company had concluded.
It was clear that making ends meet was fast becoming a truly vital concern. Peirce wrote to Garrison asking for more books to review for the Nation. His review of Herbert Spencer’s Essays, Scientific, Political, and Speculative (sel. 39) appeared in the 8 October issue. It opened with a remark on work being done in ethical theory, which Peirce appreciated for its supplying “a worthy motive to conservative morals at a time when all is confused and endangered by the storm of new thought, the disintegration of creeds, and the failure of all evidences of an exalted future life.” Eager to criticize Spencer once more for the latter’s stubborn attachment to indubitable first principles, absolute exactitude, and the belief in the supreme explanatory power of the law of the conservation of energy, Peirce previewed some of the key ideas he was developing for his second Monist paper: there “cannot be the slightest warrant” for holding that the three laws of motion are exactly true, the law of vis viva is “plainly violated in the phenomena of growth, since this is not a reversible process,” methods of inquiry must be self-corrective, and intelligibility requires more than a recourse to the Unknowable for its comprehension.44
After finishing his definitions for the Century Dictionary, Peirce had been able to return to his Monist project and on 5 November he was able to send Carus the manuscript for his second article, “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” (sel. 24). In his letter accompanying the manuscript, Peirce wrote that he considered it “the strongest piece of argumentation” he had ever done. He enclosed his bill for $160 and asked Carus if he would consent to printing weekly advertisements in the Open Court for his “Instruction in the Art of Reasoning by Correspondence.”
In the first paper of his Monist series (sel. 23), Peirce had stressed that chance should be an essential element in “our view of the universe” and that it ought to play a key conceptual role in any scientific philosophy. He had reached this conclusion perhaps as early as 1883 (W4, sel. 79), and had been developing its consequences since then, but now he would test it by examining the contrary doctrine, “the common belief that every single fact in the universe is precisely determined by law.” Peirce, as a man of science, was looking for a cosmology that explained the world in its fullness and, like Epicurus before him, and Aristotle too, he was convinced that some things could not be explained without appeal to real chance. Peirce was also motivated by his belief that strict determinism left no room for freedom of the will, something he believed there was good reason to admit.
According to Fisch, Peirce had first stated his case against the “doctrine of necessity” in 1887 in “Science and Immortality” (W6, sel. 14), where he took a strong stand against Spencer’s “mechanical notion of the universe.” In “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined,” Peirce constructed a more substantial argumentation by systematically considering and rejecting the main arguments for determinism and then building a positive case for the claim that an element of absolute chance prevails in the world. Within the massive philosophical literature that discusses determinism, Peirce’s article deserves to attain classical status in view of the singular insightfulness of his counter-arguments at a time when the vogue of determinism was at its historical apex. Peirce named his anti-necessitarian doctrine “tychism” (from τυχη, the Greek word for chance) and claimed that “tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and mind are regarded as products of growth.” Basic to Peirce’s case against determinism were several key ideas, among them, that the prevalence of growth in the universe is inconsistent with the conservation of energy; that the great variety within the universe is inexplicable unless due to chance; that law, also prevalent in the universe, must be explained by something other than law, which can only be chance; and that the reality of feeling is “a patent fact enough, but a very inconvenient one to the mechanical philosopher.” The connection between chance, spontaneity, variety, life, growth, and increased complexity is at the center of Peirce’s tychism, the consequences of which, he claims, can be “traced out with mathematical precision into considerable detail” and can be tested as scientific predictions. The line of his argumentation adduces severe criticisms of the belief in the power of scientific postulates, in the exactitude of measurements, and in the inconceivability of certain explanations, while it clarifies the rationale of induction, the purport of probabilities, and the limits of regularity. It is noteworthy that Peirce recommended tychism because it did not barricade “the road of inquiry” as determinism did by insisting on “the regularity of the universe.” This marks a step in Peirce’s progress toward fallibilism.45
Peirce’s article would appear five months later in April 1892, accompanied with a note in which Carus remarked on the philosophical depth of Peirce’s analysis and announced his intention to issue a reply.46 Carus indeed published an “editorial treatment” in July 1892,47 and a second response in the October number,48 attacking tychism at great length in defense of determinism; Peirce would then compose a long “Reply to the Necessitarians” in the winter that appeared in the July 1893 issue of the Monist, followed immediately by Carus’s extensive rejoinder, “The Founder of Tychism, His Methods, Philosophy, and Criticisms.”49 The latter, if anything, demonstrated the inability of a deterministic point of view to grasp the gist of Peirce’s sophisticated logic of inquiry and synechistic metaphysics. The entire exchange between Peirce and Carus is well worth studying, for it conveniently consolidates a large number of forceful philosophical arguments on a classical issue between two spirited and fully engaged opponents.50
Near the end of October 1891, Peirce traveled to New York City for the early November meetings of the New York Mathematical Society and the National Academy of Sciences. Why he went early to New York is unclear, but it was probably to drum up more income-producing projects. He went to visit his friend and Harvard classmate James Harrison Fay, a lawyer who had recently become Vice President of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad Company. Peirce noticed in Fay’s office a pamphlet written by another Harvard classmate of theirs, an occasional participant in the old Metaphysical Club and the chief American founder and leader of the radical movement for Free Religion and secularism, Francis Ellingwood Abbot. Titled Professor Royce’s Libel: A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University,51 the pamphlet was an appeal to Harvard to redress “the wrong” perpetrated against Abbot by Josiah Royce, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, who Abbot alleged, had, in his “‘professional’ position as one of [Harvard’s] agents and appointees,” publicly attacked his reputation “with no imaginable motive other than mere professional jealousy or rivalry” and who had “gone to the unheard-of length of ‘professionally warning the public’ against a peaceable and inoffensive private scholar.” Abbot had been aggrieved by Royce’s stinging review of his book, The Way Out of Agnosticism, which had appeared in the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Ethics (of which Royce was a founding editor).52 Ironically, Abbot had based his book on a course of lectures he had given at Harvard when, with Royce’s approval, he had filled in while Royce was on leave to recover from a period of serious depression.53 According to Bruce Kuklick, Abbot had high hopes for his book, thinking it might finally win him an academic post and the respect he thought he had earned, so when Royce’s devastating review