Peirce believed he had succeeded in finding a way out of his financial hardship. But near the end of July, when Montgomery gave Peirce a check for $500, it was returned for inadequate funds. Peirce’s brother, Herbert, who was somehow involved in this scheme and was more familiar with the business world, intervened to help resolve what he assumed was an inadvertent mix-up. If the problem could not be resolved, however, Herbert was sure they could find someone who would pay more for Peirce’s report: “In fact it is a pity to see so much sold for so little” (31 July). But Peirce became impatient and made some unwise remarks in correspondence that turned Montgomery and others in the investment group against him, forcing Herbert to abandon his efforts. Regrettably for Peirce, he had not held back his report as Herbert had recommended, and he never received a penny for his work or his ideas. This unfortunate episode would be alluded to in Peirce’s fifth Monist paper, “Evolutionary Love,” where Montgomery made an appearance as Peirce’s “Master in glomery.”106
Not long before the promise of the bleaching enterprise evaporated, Peirce had written a note to Juliette listing his rather exaggerated expectations for earnings from his 1892 ventures: Vanderbilt contract, $57,216.35; Montgomery, $5,500.00; Woolf’s business, $106,018.14; Carus, $1,721.18; Interest, $4, 567.75; for a total of $165,023.42. “Pretty well for hard times,” Peirce concluded exuberantly. With the collapse of the bleaching scheme, his hopes dissolved; it would be only his work for Carus that would pay, and his Lowell lectures and work for the Nation, neither on his list. Financial hardship again loomed before him.
“The Law of Mind” appeared as planned on the first of July.107 Peirce must have been pleased that a crucial part of his argument against mechanical philosophy was now before the intellectual public, and that he was on track with the Monist for a continuation of his series in consecutive issues. The appearance of his article would not yield much-needed income, though, since he had already been paid. Peirce turned to the ever dependable Garrison and picked up two more books to review.
He first took up Karl Pearson’s Grammar of Science (sel. 55, published on 7 July), a widely influential book whose second edition greatly inspired the young Einstein ten years later. As Peirce saw him, Pearson was a compelling archetype of the scientific nominalist carrying forth the Kantian agenda with originality and gusto by applying it to contemporary scientific problems while relying on an obsolete psychology, an uncritical logic, and an exploded metaphysics. Peirce could not but object to Pearson’s conceptualist account of science that entailed that laws of nature were the products of the perceptive faculty, that Newton had not discovered the law of gravitation but had created it, and that motion was “wholly relative.” Pearson saw concepts where he should have seen percepts. Peirce’s criticism of Pearson’s nominalistic account of reality as dependent on immediate sense-impressions (and thus on an outdated theory of perception) was aimed at showing how any attempt at denying the reality of generality ends up refuting itself. But Peirce acknowledged that Pearson’s book was “one of considerable power” and contained “matter for salutary reflection for anybody who cares to think deeply.”
Peirce had cultivated an interest in elocution since his youth, even gaining an early reputation for his mastery of oratory. His competence was such that, toward the end of 1892 or a bit later, he would apply for a position to teach elocution at the Episcopal Church’s General Theological Seminary in New York.108 So it is not surprising that he agreed to review Samuel Silas Curry’s Province of Expression (sel. 56, published on 14 July). Though admitting that the work was “thoughtful and refined,” he was disappointed that Curry had “degraded” the art of eloquent delivery known as “elocution” to “an offensive display of technique without soul or real art” that he called “expression.” Curry’s criticisms of the methods of the four main “schools of delivery”—the imitative, the mechanical, the impulsive, and the speculative—were not entirely convincing, and Curry did not offer a clear substitute. In evaluating rules of delivery, it was important to discuss their “truth and utility” independently of their “stupid, unrefined, and tasteless application.” Peirce observed that an expert in elocution theory need not be a great orator. Indeed, “excessive devotion to the theory of any art is somewhat unfavorable to its practice,” he said, adding perhaps self-reflectively that this was true even in the principal art, that of thinking.
Meanwhile, Peirce had been working on his Lowell lectures in his rare spare time. By mid-year he was losing hope that he could finish by December, when the course was scheduled. On 5 July, Peirce wrote to Augustus Lowell to tell him he was in a great quandary; he did not want to cause any serious inconvenience for Lowell but was afraid his lectures could not “be as good as they ought to be.” Describing his impecunious state despite sustained efforts, Peirce dramatically suggested that, since “no man can do good work on the brink of starvation,” it might be in the “interest of the Lowell Institute and of its audiences” to cancel his December engagement—but “I will go ahead and execute my contract, if desired, or ‘perish in the attempt’.” Lowell replied on the 8th that he would be glad to advance part of the payment for the lectures: “let me know how much you would require to secure the proper leisure for their preparation.” Lowell assured Peirce that his lectures on the history of science would be a credit to him and to the Institute, and that they “might afterwards be published upon favorable terms.” Surely “it would be a mistake & misfortune if it were to be given up.” Peirce was much relieved and asked for half his payment in advance, “one fourth soon, and one fourth about October 1st,” and he promised to be ready in December. On 12 July, Lowell mailed Peirce a check for $450, one fourth of what the Lowell Institute paid for a course of twelve lectures.
On 15 July, Peirce finally sent Carus the fourth article of his Monist series, at first entitled “Our Glassy Essence” but soon renamed, by an alteration to the galley, “Man’s Glassy Essence.”109 This was the second of the two papers on mind Peirce had begun working on in April—the companion to “The Law of Mind.” He told Carus that the article was not as good as it should have been “owing to preoccupations and anxieties” but that it still had “some value.” In his “Notes” (sel. 28) for this second paper, Peirce had written that the “problem is to elucidate the relation between the physical aspect of a substance and its psychical aspect.” In effect, he was aiming to contribute to the solution of the mind-body problem,110 the crux of which, in his view, had to do with the nature of habits and habit formation. “The Law of Mind” had concluded that the growth of mind was a process of generalization, infinitesimal feelings welding together to become general ideas; yet the spreading and coordination of feelings that results in a general idea works, somehow, through molecular transformations and the dissipation of energy in a process that is essentially mechanical. “Man’s Glassy Essence” was to explain the process of habit formation in physical organisms: how general ideas formed under the law of mind can gain “the power of exciting reactions.”
Peirce’s first step was to frame a general molecular theory of matter as a basis for a molecular theory of protoplasm. He then reviewed the properties of protoplasm that had to be accounted for (reaction to disturbances, nutrition and growth, reproduction, and so on) and constructed a molecular theory of protoplasm accordingly. Assuming matter to be composed of molecules in swift motion exerting significant mutual attractions and repulsions, he hypothesized that critical molecular changes occur because of dissociation or decomposition, when molecules “throw off” atoms or when they are “broken up” into atoms or sub-atomic atomicules.111 Two especially important properties of protoplasm are the capacity to take habits and to feel (in sum, to exercise all the functions of mind). Peirce gave a complicated account of how repeated disturbances to complex molecules of protoplasm that result in derangements of its atomic and sub-atomic parts and repeated restorations of equilibrium by the exchange or replacement of similar but not necessarily exactly equivalent parts (from nutrients or from neighboring molecules) can account for “the law of habit.” This explanation of habit is “purely mechanical,” Peirce noted, so it might be thought “unnecessary to suppose that habit-taking is a primordial principle of the universe.” But this account of habit (as well as all cases of actions apparently violating the law of energy) depends on “aggregations of trillions