It remained for Peirce to account for the property of feeling, for he believed that all protoplasm is conscious to some degree. Could feeling also be accounted for by a mechanical explanation of constituent molecular processes? Peirce speculated that if protoplasm were synthesized in a laboratory out of its component chemical elements, which he assumed to be possible, it would be “puerile and ultra-puerile” to refuse to admit that it would feel. Nevertheless, it would be futile to try to account for its feeling by the three laws of mechanics: “It can never be explained, unless we admit that physical events are but degraded or undeveloped forms of psychical events.” Once this is granted, Peirce could explain how the “breaking up of habit” in nerve-protoplasm, given the considerable instability of protoplasm in general, leads to “fortuitous departures from regularity … accompanied by an intensification of feeling.” Thus, Peirce said, the idealist “has no need to dread a mechanical theory of life.” Chance-spontaneity, which engenders diversity, is always accompanied by feeling, in fact “chance is but the outward aspect of that which within itself is feeling.” The tendency to take habits, which strengthens by its own operation, increases uniformity, which reduces the intensity of feeling but doesn’t eliminate it: “wherever actions take place under an established uniformity, there so much feeling as there may be takes the mode of a sense of reaction.” With this, Peirce concluded his account of “the relation between the psychical and physical aspects of a substance,” the principal aim of “Man’s Glassy Essence.”
Peirce finished his paper by remarking that “it would be a mistake to conceive of the psychical and the physical aspects of matter as two aspects absolutely distinct…. [M]echanical laws are nothing but acquired habits, like all the regularities of mind” and the “action of habit is nothing but generalization, and generalization is nothing but the spreading of feelings.” A general idea, according to Peirce, is “a certain modification of consciousness which accompanies any regularity or general relation between chance actions.” There is a “unity of the ego” in the consciousness of a general idea that is “quite analogous to a person.” Peirce pointed out that as early as 1868, in his Journal of Speculative Philosophy paper, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” (W2, sel. 22), he had claimed “that a person is nothing but a symbol involving a general idea,” but he had been too nominalistic then to “see that every general idea has the unified living feeling of a person.” Peirce now believed that what was necessary for personhood is a congeries of feelings—feelings that are “in close enough connection to influence one another.” Based on this conception of personhood, Peirce put forward a theory of “corporate personality,” the view that esprit de corps, national sentiment, and sympathy “are no mere metaphors” and that churches and even corporations can have real personalities. This idea could be put to the test, he believed, by observing whether there is “something like personal consciousness in bodies of men who are in intimate and intensely sympathetic communion.” Peirce noted that when some “thirty thousand young people of the society for Christian Endeavor” gathered in Madison Square Garden on 7 July 1892, “there seemed to me to be some mysterious diffusion of sweetness and light.”112 Peirce added that “if such a fact is capable of being made out anywhere, it should be in the church.”
“Man’s Glassy Essence” appeared at the beginning of October in the third volume of the Monist. On 7 October, Peirce sent in the fifth and last article of his cosmological series, “Evolutionary Love” (sel. 30).113 It was composed while the U.S. was rapidly descending into a severe economic depression and when labor unrest was escalating. Peirce’s personal finances were in terrible shape and his career prospects were dismal. The bleaching project he had hoped would solve his financial problems was falling apart and he would soon find out that he had been swindled and would never see a penny of return for his considerable efforts. He had been turned down for every university position he had sought and the chance of university life seemed to have slipped from his grasp. He had the Lowell lectures ahead of him and they would bring him an additional $1350, certainly a great relief, but he would have to devote most of his time in the coming weeks to their preparation and that would stop other initiatives. Peirce was working as diligently and intensely as he ever had but for much less return, and on a job-by-job basis with no security for the future. And yet, instead of simply losing faith in the institutions that were failing him or of becoming cynical and dejected, Peirce had been undergoing a personal transformation all along that is reflected in “Evolutionary Love.”
This article, one of the most metaphorical in the Peirce corpus, adds a new law to his account of the legal canon of the Universe. The law of love will take its place alongside the mechanical laws and the law of mind. The love that plays a role in the development of the cosmos is not the “exuberance-love” of Eros, nor the “passionate-love” of Empedocles, but something closer to the “cherishing-love” that John, the Ontological Gospeller, attributed to the Supreme Being. From the message of 1 John 1:5, “that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all,” together with the assurance of 1 John 4:8, that “God is love,” Peirce concluded that just as darkness is the defect of light, so evil must be the defect of love, and that God’s love must be great enough to embrace its opposite. Henry James, Sr., a Swedenborgian, had expressed a similar position: “It is no doubt very tolerable finite or creaturely love to love one’s own in another, to love another for his conformity to one’s self: but nothing can be in more flagrant contrast with the creative Love, all whose tenderness ex vi termini must be reserved only for what intrinsically is most bitterly hostile and negative to itself.”114 This is true Christian love whose law is expressed in the Golden Rule, which, on Peirce’s reading, is “Sacrifice your own perfection to the perfectionment of your neighbor.” It is this Christian love, in some primeval form, that somehow permeates the universe as the agent of development and growth. “Everybody can see that the statement of St. John is the formula of an evolutionary philosophy, which teaches that growth comes only from love, from—I will not say self-sacrifice, but from the ardent impulse to fulfill another’s highest impulse…. Love, recognizing germs of loveliness in the hateful, gradually warms it into life, and makes it lovely. That is the sort of evolution which every careful student of my essay ‘The Law of Mind,’ must see that synechism calls for.”
Fundamental as the law of love may be cosmically, Peirce saw that it was but rarely expressed in his age, especially as he had just been the victim of a swindle. Historians of the future, Peirce supposed, would come to think of the nineteenth century as the economical century “for political economy has more direct relations with all the branches of its activity than has any other science,” and Peirce expressed its “formula of redemption” in bitter terms: “It is this: Intelligence in the service of greed ensures the justest prices, the fairest contracts, the most enlightened conduct of all the dealings between men, and leads to the summum bonum, food in plenty and perfect comfort. Food for whom? Why, for the greedy master of intelligence.” Peirce made it clear that he was not impugning political economy as a science,115 yet just as physics “has encouraged necessitarianism,” a false and dangerous doctrine in Peirce’s opinion, so political economy “has induced an exaggeration of the beneficial effects of greed and of the unfortunate results of sentiment, until there has resulted a philosophy which comes unwittingly to this, that greed is the great agent in the elevation of the human race and in the evolution of the universe.” Peirce believed that utilitarianism, a great force in the nineteenth century which regarded persons only as abstractions, was a natural ally of the political economists who openly endorsed the gospel of greed.
So in “Evolutionary Love” Peirce depicted two opposing gospels, “the gospel of Christ” and “the gospel of greed.” According to the gospel of Christ, “progress comes from every individual merging his individuality in sympathy with his neighbors.” According to the gospel of greed, “progress takes place by virtue of every individual’s striving for himself with all his might and trampling his neighbor under foot whenever he gets a chance to do so.” The gospel of Christ was an expression of the law of love. The gospel of greed was