Early in the new year, Peirce returned to the study of great men that he had conducted with his students at Johns Hopkins in 1883–84 (W5: xxiii–xxiv). Several circumstances had converged to renew his interest in comparative biography,74 beginning with his recent review of Fraser’s Locke (sel. 10)— Locke had been the subject of one of his detailed great men questionnaires (W5: 68–70). When in December he had offered as one option for the Lowell Institute course to lecture on “the comparative biography of great men,” Peirce evidently planned to develop his earlier study, explaining how he wanted to examine, not Galton’s “eminent men,” but “the phenomena of the history of mankind.” Peirce would form a list of 300 such men, develop a method for their comparative study and apply it to the lives of a few of them, and conduct an inductive examination “of a large number of general questions relating to the nature, kinds, causes, and characters of greatness.” And then the Nation asked Peirce to review two books that had immediate relevance for his project: Harrison’s New Calendar of Great Men and Lombroso’s Man of Genius.
Peirce undertook to revise the provisional list of 287 great men he had stopped with in 1884 (W5, sel. 3). His intention from the beginning had been to compile a list of 300 names, but his departure from Baltimore had ended the great men project prematurely. Now he took up his old list again, renamed it “The Great Men of History,” and brought it to 300 names as originally planned (sel. 43). He added twenty new names to his list,75 removed five,76 and bracketed two, Paul Morphy and Lavater, including them with nineteen other bracketed names of persons thought to be “very extraordinary” but not “exactly great.” All but five of the added names had come from Peirce’s early “Materials for an Impressionist List of 300 Great Men” (W5, sel. 2); the five new names were Claude Lorraine, Alexandre Dumas, W. L. Garrison, Madame Roland, and Daniel Webster.
On 10 January, Peirce sent Garrison his review of Harrison’s New Calendar of Great Men which appeared in the Nation on 21 January under the title “The Comtist Calendar” (sel. 44). Peirce focused on Comte’s method and choice of “worthies” and severely took him to task for misranking or excluding a large number of indisputably great persons (including Berkeley, Calvin, Epicurus, Fresnel, Gauss, Herschel, Jesus, Laplace, James Mill, Napoléon, Ockham, Rousseau, Duns Scotus, Vesalius, and William the Conqueror, to name but a few in Peirce’s list). No study of truly great persons can be valuable if it is beholden to an agenda that turns heroes into biased abstractions that neglect their “living reality and passion” or their “concrete souls.” Comte’s selections were “plainly animated by some ulterior purpose,” not by the genuine “admiration and sympathy for great men,” Peirce lamented. Incensed by Comte’s unfair treatment of Fermat, Peirce deplored the general incomprehension in which reasoners are held in a utilitarian world: reasoners are of use only to posterity, and that makes them perpetually irrelevant since “ordinary men have not imagination enough to be interested in posterity”—an indirect answer to an acid remark Newcomb had made to Peirce in his Christmas eve letter: “you could have no other satisfaction than that of doing a work for posterity.” As Peirce went on reflecting on the conditions favorable to greatness, he must have been, in part, thinking of his own circumstances. Kepler’s great work, “the most marvellous piece of ampliative reasoning ever executed,” was made possible “only by his wife’s riches and the bounty of the Emperor,” and it was “only a sinecure professorship … that enabled Newton to do his work.” Peirce’s favorite example of the dependence of greatness on opportunity and material support was Aristotle and Alexander. Without Alexander, Aristotle “would scarcely … be heard of today…. [T]he greatest man of thought of all time was beloved by the greatest man of action. It needed an Alexander to appreciate an Aristotle.” Men of thought faced the most difficulty in America: “There is no civilized country where a great work of reasoning is less feasible than in ours.” And yet, Peirce suggested, a civilization cannot advance quickly without the reasoners’ path-breaking work.
Peirce next took up Lombroso’s Man of Genius. A founder of criminal anthropology, Lombroso was much discussed in the psychological literature of the day, as in G. Stanley Hall’s American Journal of Psychology, whose April 1890 issue had carried Hall’s notice of the French edition of Lombroso’s book. Lombroso was a biological determinist whose work contributed to the theoretical framework supporting the eugenics movement. In his dismissive Nation review published on 25 February (sel. 47), Peirce examined in some detail Lombroso’s inductive argument that genius is a mental defect or disease, with its unintended corollary that “the whole of civilization is due to insanity,” and demonstrated that Lombroso’s inductive method was seriously flawed. Peirce used his own list of “Great Men of History” (sel. 43) to expose the unsoundness of Lombroso’s conclusion that geniuses tend to be “of smaller stature than ordinary men” and rendered his verdict: “the main argument of the book proves nothing and renders nothing probable.” Peirce did not dispute the obvious fact that genius is abnormal, but if genius is a disease, then “we had better try to propagate it” rather than committing “our Napoleons, our Pythagorases, our Newtons, and our Dantes” to “Genius Asylums.” Trying to gauge the importance of abnormality for genius, Peirce speculated that how a normal brain is structured, with its abundance of commissures, tends to determine how we shall naturally act and behave. It is true that, over time, we can control our actions “a great deal” by forcing ourselves to “take habits, certain commissures becoming partially atrophied, while others are brought into activity under exercise.” Primarily, though, we behave according to our nature just like wild animals do, and our sense of rationality is mostly an illusion stemming from our nature being well adapted to our circumstances. Peirce hypothesized that “an excess of medial commissures, or those between the two halves of the brain,” might cause stupidity, “deliberation becoming impossible,” and that in such cases a “disease of the brain may cause an improvement in the general intelligence.” But if the brains of the greatest geniuses are significantly different from ordinary brains, perhaps by being more complicated or by unusual connectivity, it will likely be “less adapted to the ordinary purposes of life” making its owner “the victim of his own higher organization.” Peirce supposed that such brains could benefit mankind in ways “ordinary heads” could not but that the genius would “have to pay for it … vainly trying to make [his brain] do things for which it is entirely unadapted, though other brains do them with ease.” It is difficult to read the final paragraphs of Peirce’s review of Lombroso without thinking that he, again, had himself in mind.
Peirce’s interest in the geometry of space did not lessen with his decision to suspend his experimental investigation regarding its possible negative curvature. On 15 January, Halsted wrote to express interest in a suggestion of Peirce’s for “a modern-synthetic-geometry treatment of non-Euclidean geometry.” Halsted enclosed a copy of the fourth edition of his translation of Lobachewski and promised to soon send his translation of Bolyai. Halsted’s translation of Lobachewski had not yet been reviewed in the Nation, and Peirce set out to remedy that neglect. Peirce’s review, “The Non-Euclidean Geometry” (sel. 45), appeared in the Nation on 11 February, and Peirce took the opportunity to promote non-Euclidean geometry. He began by announcing that Lobachewski’s “little book” marked “an epoch in the history of thought, that of the overthrow of the axioms of geometry,” and that the “philosophical consequences” of this revolution “are undoubtedly momentous.” He told