Dear Sir:
I think I could write an acceptable article or even two for the Open Court on the following materials[:]
1. Personal experience has a positive value always. This is greater the more unusual the experience. That which I have to report seems worth mention.
(A) Of late years I have suffered extreme adversity & affliction, being
(B) In the somewhat unusual situation of a student of philosophy, laboratorybred, who holds on essentially to the creed & communion of the church.
(C) Now, the facts which seem worth reporting are 1st, what kind of reflections I have found really consoling, 2nd, how the different literary works addressed to those in such circumstances sound.
2. Of course, it is nothing but the experience of a single individual; still, it is out of individual experiences that general experience is built. But I wish to say clearly that a single case can have, until verified & supported by others, no importance at all. Still, I write as a means of collecting other testimony.
Under the 1st head, my experience would, if generally borne out by others, go to support the law of continuity. For first, I find, ideas about heaven of very little or no support, evidently because that life is completely cut off from this. Myself in a life the whole aim, motives, means, problems, of which radically differ from those of this life, does not seem to come within my special interests.
Second, I have found immense help from certain other reflections. Such as this. “If,” I would say to myself, “by voluntarily enduring what I am forced to bear I could further certain objects I had at heart, would I not do so and more? And if I could comprehend the purposes of God, would I not give an absolute preference to these purposes over the objects I actually have at heart,—which indeed I only now prefer as being as near as I can make out the objects it is God’s will I should pursue? Since then God is doubtless using me, so far as I can be of use, to promote his own purposes[, why] should I not be content?
Why should I not feel particularly honored that I have been selected to undergo all this agony?
Peirce’s reflections on the agony and aim of his life seem to have instilled in him a new point of view, one that would receive clearer expression in his forthcoming articles for the Monist, especially the final two (sels. 29 and 30). And one cannot but sense that his conception that general experience is built out of individual experiences is attuned to his notion that it is by spreading that ideas get generalized.
As April drew to a close, Peirce’s inward focus seemed to yield to the need to more quickly alleviate the dire straits he and Juliette were suffering. He resumed his writing for the Nation and his efforts to place articles in other publications. But he did not devote his time exclusively to writing for pay. The leading story in the New York Evening World on 4 May was about a murder committed by a sixteen-year old boy, Robert Alden Fales. The murder was gruesome and the Fales boy was unrepentant, but Peirce was struck by the fact that though criminal behavior seemed to run in the boy’s family, he had a loving mother who had done all she could to protect him from “the danger of contamination.” Pressure was building to execute the boy and Peirce did not see the point of it and especially felt sympathy for the boy’s mother. He wrote a letter to the editor of the Independent questioning why we punish criminals and outlining a case against it based on Christian, scientific, and economic principles (sel. 52). Peirce urged that “the facts of science” should be recognized, “disagreeable as they may be to [the] blood-thirsty and politico-economical heart,” and that society should accept that “the criminal is a man of diseased mind.” Criminals should be put in asylums, treated respectfully, and rehabilitated if possible, but they should not be allowed to breed. “I do not believe in punishments, unless it be in summary inflictions of bodily pain springing from natural indignation. But as for the slow tortures we inflict upon criminals, if that be the outcome of ideas of right and wrong, I think ideas of right and wrong were better given up. I notice those ideas have might[y] little influence in deterring men from evil; they serve chiefly to steel our hearts against other offenders.” Peirce signed his letter “Outsider,” the pseudonym he had used in 1890 when he was feeling ostracized, and urged the editor to publish his letter: “I beg you will take it.” Peirce’s letter was not published.98
On 8 May, Peirce received a letter from Carus asking if he would assist with a translation of Ernst Mach’s Der Geschichte der Mechanik that was underway at the Open Court: “Although the translation is made with great care I should nevertheless like someone who is an authority in this province or as learned in similar fields of investigation to look over the proof sheets before they go to press.” Peirce accepted Carus’s offer at once and in the ensuing months he would devote a great deal of effort to helping with the translation, even rewriting an entire section in the chapter on units and measures because Mach’s original was not applicable to the United States and, besides, was “slightly out of date.”99 Peirce assured Carus that he was working on his next two articles for the Monist and expected them to be “the most valuable things I have done,” and he took the opportunity to offer to come to Chicago for a reading of his Thessalian story if he could be assured of an audience large enough to pay expenses: “I should like to go and read it there, and so have an opportunity of meeting you.”
Carus also wanted to meet Peirce so he asked Francis Russell to arrange for a reading in Chicago. But when Russell wrote to Peirce on 10 May asking for details, he concluded his letter with the question: “Why don’t you come here and be a Professor in our new Chicago University where they are paying $7000 per year?”100 Peirce was instantly interested and he replied on the 14th that “The idea of a professorship in Chicago is new to me, but I confess rather pleasing. I have always felt that Chicago was the real American city.” This was an opportunity Peirce was anxious to pursue. He wrote to Russell again on the 17th:
I have been reflecting upon your suggestion that I should go to Chicago and become professor there. It seems to be the thing for me to do, provided they call me. During many years, I felt that for my peculiar powers the world had no use. Hence, I only threw off pieces here and there, and my deeper studies in logic remain today unpublished, and nobody dreams of the things I have found out. But during the last year or two, I have been getting more and more impressed with a prevision of the miserable consequences which must ensue from the prevalent necessitarian conception of the universe. It makes God a limited monarch or roi fainéant, acting under law so blind and inexorable as to leave no room for any acts of paternal love, or any listening & answering of prayer. Now whoever will follow out with me the higher logic of relations will see as clearly and as evidently as can be the baselessness of the materialistic-necessitarian fabric. Nor can his eyes fail to be opened to the fearful abyss into which that machine-made doctrine is precipitating society. A return to christian principles, to which a knowledge of my discoveries would lead, is the sole way of salvation. Accordingly, I now feel that if a way is shown to me to teach logic, it is my sacred duty to pursue it.
Peirce decided to cancel plans for the Chicago reading of his “Tale”: “I fear the telling of emotional stories is hardly compatible with the self-abnegation and exclusive devotion to the cause of sound learning and education to which a man who proposes to become a professor must surrender himself.” Peirce noted that he was about to leave for Cambridge and would be there until further notice. Russell replied on the 19th with information about the Chicago position and with some suggestions for pursuing it. Cambridge, Russell thought, was a good place to find the support Peirce would need. George Herbert Palmer, from Harvard’s philosophy department, had been recruited by President William R. Harper for the Chicago position but eventually declined: “so he ought to know about the avenues towards such a place.” President Harper was, of course, “the Great Mogul in all the appointments,” so Russell advised Peirce to arrange for influential friends to write to Harper on his behalf.
Meanwhile, as he told Carus around 11 May, Peirce was “suffering torments” with his two articles “on the nature of mind,” in part probably because he had not fully figured out how to disentangle them. He was busy developing the molecular