Peirce attempted vainly to revive his correspondence course on the art of reasoning. It had had a promising start five years earlier but then petered out after the Peirces moved to Milford.66 In November 1891, Carus agreed to run a weekly advertisement for the course in the Open Court for a full year:
Mr. C. S. Peirce has resumed his lessons by correspondence in the Art of Reasoning, taught in progressive exercises. A special course in logic has been prepared for correspondents interested in philosophy. Terms, $30, for twenty-four lessons. Address: Mr. C. S. Peirce, “Arisbe” Milford
Ten months later, on 25 August 1892, Peirce wrote that he had “never got a reply” and asked that the advertisement be discontinued. Selection 42, and several other manuscripts composed around this time were probably intended for the correspondence course.67
While in New York, Peirce renewed his acquaintance with Albert Stickney, another Harvard classmate who had become an attorney. Stickney was glad to reconnect with Peirce, “one of the few men who reason—and think” (30 Sept. 1891). Peirce had invited Stickney to visit Milford, ostensibly to “shoot,” but he may already have been thinking that it might become necessary to rent out their main house on a seasonal basis and that Stickney might be useful for finding wealthy New Yorkers interested in vacationing in the Poconos near the famed Delaware Water Gap. With their relations reestablished, Stickney would serve as Peirce’s legal counsel for several years to come.
Mid-way through December, with the date for his resignation from the Coast Survey drawing close, Peirce became increasingly anxious over its dire portent for him and Juliette. He made a final attempt to postpone the inevitable. On 18 December, he wrote to Mendenhall to request a furlough without pay and he asked Henry Cabot Lodge, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, for support. Lodge wrote to Mendenhall but failed to persuade him.68 In his reflective letter to Mendenhall, Peirce acknowledged that his computing proficiency had declined in recent years and that the lack of an aid to help with calculations explained the slow productivity. But he still had strengths and had been counting on Mendenhall to call him back into the field. Though now more accepting of being let go, Peirce pleaded with Mendenhall to grant him more time to finish his reports.
Now if you insist on these papers being ready before December 31, I fear I shall be so crazed by it that it will be the end of me. Yet even that would be less cruel than making me return them as they are. Let their return be postponed. About the report I sent you, you have treated me unjustly. Nothing could be more carefully done. The separation of the treatment of relative from absolute gravity is logical. To insert in that paper the value of g I earnestly protest against as illogical. The expression g in dynes I hope you see yourself is a total violation of the C. G. S. system to which the word dyne belongs. The expression by means of logarithmic seconds is in my opinion a great convenience. And I think considering Mr. Thorn’s formal promise to that effect, the paper should be printed as I wish it. But I cannot complain at your wanting my resignation. I say to myself that I am the victim of a malady the result of excessively hard work in the Survey.69
Mendenhall wrote back the day before Christmas denying Peirce’s request for a furlough but offering again to keep him on as an occasional paid consultant. Mendenhall allowed Peirce to retain his work in order to “put it into shape as you feel able to do so,” or, if Peirce couldn’t, to “put the material in such condition that something might be made of it by others.” Mendenhall then asked him to return promptly the books and other property of the Coast Survey. On 26 December, Mendenhall forwarded Peirce’s letter of resignation to the Secretary of the Treasury. On 8 January 1892, the following notice appeared in Science:70
Mr. Charles S. Peirce has tendered his resignation as Assistant in the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, to take effect Dec. 31. Mr. Peirce was first attached to the Survey about thirty years ago. During the greater part of the time he has had charge of its operations relating to the determination of the force of gravity. Some of the results of his investigations have been published as appendices to the Annual Reports and have embodied contributions of great importance to science. It is understood that Mr. Peirce will continue to furnish the Survey from time to time special discussions of topics related to the subject to which he has devoted so many years.
When, two years later, Mendenhall was questioned about Peirce’s dismissal by a Congressional Committee, he said that Peirce’s work, though of the highest character, “lacked the practical quality” that was essential, and that he had not published Peirce’s gravity report because Newcomb and other experts had found them to be “not valuable.”71
Looking back on these events seventy-five years later, Victor Lenzen, professor of physics and the man who, as a philosophy student at Harvard in 1914, had been sent by Josiah Royce to Milford to help Juliette pack up Peirce’s manuscripts and books for shipment to the Harvard Philosophy Department, considered the justification for some of the key decisions that had led to Peirce’s dismissal. With respect to Mendenhall’s decision to replace Peirce’s gravity program with one that employed half-seconds pendulums, Lenzen wrote to Max Fisch that Etienne Gilbert Defforges, “the foremost French pendulum swinger” who was in Washington in 1891, agreed with Peirce’s criticism of half-seconds pendulums and considered the work of Von Sterneck to be of no value (7 July 1965). Later, in his study of Peirce’s disputed “Report on Gravity,” Lenzen concluded that “the experimental and theoretical work … was the best work of its kind in the nineteenth century.”72 Finally, in 1988, the late historian Thomas G. Manning examined this transitional period in the long history of the Coast Survey and gave this concluding assessment: “The departure of Peirce meant the end of world renown for the Coast Survey in gravity studies.”73
It is ironic that Peirce spent the final days of 1891 in epistolary debate with Simon Newcomb, the very man who, unbeknownst to Peirce, had cemented Mendenhall’s resolve to let him go. But Newcomb was, after all, the Superintendent of the Office of the Nautical Almanac and was one of the most influential scientists in the United States. Peirce wrote to Newcomb on 17 and 21 December about the possibility of getting a grant in order to continue investigating the curvature of space: “The discovery that space has a curvature would be more than a striking one: it would be epoch-making. It would do more than anything to break up the belief in the immutable character of mechanical law, and would thus lead to a conception of the universe in which mechanical law should not be the head and centre of the whole.” Newcomb wrote back on 24 December pointing out several experimental problems that in his mind precluded the possibility of any positive conclusion regarding space curvature, and advised Peirce not to seek any grant given the futility of his pursuit in the eyes of the scientific world, and given that it would be wrong to use funds allocated to the advancement of science to help an independent investigator. Clearly, Peirce would get no help from Newcomb, and he felt compelled to reply on Christmas Day that he had “for the present given up the idea that anything can be concluded with considerable probability concerning the curvature of space.” The results he had already obtained favored a negative curvature, but he had to admit that they were seriously affected “by intrinsic brightness and absolute motion,” so much so that he could “only say that excessively doubtful indications favor a negative curvature. In point of fact, we remain in ignorance.”
On Friday, 1 January 1892, at 12:05 A.M., Peirce penned a note: “I have a hard year, a year of effort before me; and I think it will help me to keep a diary. My greatest trial is my inertness of mind. I think I shall very soon be completely ruined; it seems inevitable. What I have to do is to peg away and try to do my duty, and starve if necessary. One thing I must make up my mind to clearly. I must earn some money every day.” New Year’s day was the beginning of a life of financial instability such as Charles and Juliette had never known.
In the morning he packed up Coast Survey instruments, books, and records that Mendenhall had asked him to return and sent them by express to Washington. But Peirce was not ready to sever all ties with the Survey; he still hoped to finish his report and see his results in print. On the 9th he wrote to Mendenhall to ask for some materials to help him complete his work and on the 20th Mendenhall sent what was needed.