101. Royce’s “attack” did not appear in the Philosophical Review. He pronounced against Peirce’s tychism in a paper read to the Philosophical Club at Brown University on 23 May 1895. The paper was later expanded into chapter 8 of his Studies of Good and Evil (Appleton, 1898), where Royce says on p. 237: “I do not myself accept this notion that the laws of phenomenal nature, where they are genuinely objective laws, and not relatively superficial human generalizations, are the evolutionary product of any such cosmical process of acquiring habits, as Mr. Peirce has so ingeniously supposed in his hypothesis of ‘Tychism’.”
102. From notes typed up by Max H. Fisch after an interview with Miller on 6 May 1960. Miller could not remember anything about the conversation except that Royce was making “continuous utterances,” suggesting that he had the lion’s share of that conversation, and that Peirce would interrupt from time to time beginning with a polite “Pardon me.” Still, the thrill of the experience may have made Miller speak about it in high terms to James, his favorite professor.
103. Darnell Rucker, The Chicago Pragmatists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 10.
104. What the second invention was is unclear. It might have been a process for distilling wood-alcohol or a process for preventing scaling in locomotive boilers.
105. See various related manuscripts listed in the Chronological Catalog: 1892.78–80, 89, 96, 110–11.
106. See annotation 188.39, pp. 411–12.
107. A lengthy summary extraction from Peirce’s “The Law of Mind” was published in the Philosophical Review in September 1892, pp. 583–85.
108. See Henry C. Johnson’s paper referred to in note 96 above.
109. See the general headnote for sels. 28 and 29, pp. 594–96, for a detailed account of the genesis of “Man’s Glassy Essence” and its relation to earlier writings. Peirce’s title, especially his use of the word “glassy,” is discussed in the first annotation for sel. 29, pp. 400–401.
110. In 1890, in “Logic and Spiritualism” (W6, sel. 44, pp. 391–93), Peirce sketched out the solution to the mind-body problem—which he referred to as “a rational account of the connection of body and soul—that he would elaborate in “The Law of Mind” and “Man’s Glassy Essence.”
111. See note 84 above. The theory of atomicules was also treated by Ira Remsen in his Principles of Theoretical Chemistry with Special Reference to the Constitution of Chemical Compounds (Philadelphia: Lea Brothers & Co., 1892). Remsen was a professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins when Peirce and Sylvester were there; he attended Peirce’s 1884 lecture on “Design and Chance.”
112. See annotation 183.7–8, p. 409.
113. “Man’s Glassy Essence” was published and “Evolutionary Love” was submitted several weeks into the period covered by W9. “Evolutionary Love” would not appear in print until January 1893. The introduction to W9, whose chronological span starts in August 1892, will provide more biographical and historical context for these selections.
114. See annotation 185.7–13, p. 411.
115. See James Wible’s article “Complexity in Peirce’s Economics and Philosophy: An Exploration of His Critique of Simon Newcomb.” Chapter 5 in David Colander, ed., Complexity and the History of Economic Thought: Perspectives on the History of Economic Thought (London & New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 74–103.
116. Weismann strictly ruled out the inheritance of acquired characteristics in opposition to the views of Lamarck and also Darwin.
117. See annotation 110.7–9, p. 386.
118. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984), pp. 302–303.
119. Ian Hacking, “Nineteenth Century Cracks in the Concept of Determinism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983): 455–75.
120. Elmer E. Southard, “Cross-Sections of Mental Hygiene, 1844, 1869, 1894,” American Journal of Insanity 76.2 (1919): 91–111, esp. 95–96.
121. See annotation 126.3–12, pp. 389–90.
122. E. B. Wilson to Paul Weiss, 22 November 1946.
Writings of Charles S. Peirce
1
Familiar Letters about the Art of Reasoning
| 15 May 1890 | Houghton Library |
Stagira, May 15, 1890.
My dear Barbara:
The University of Cracow once conferred upon a very good fellow a degree for having taught the philosophical faculty to play cards. I cannot tell you in what year this happened,—perhaps it was 1499. The graduate was Thomas Murner, of whose writings Lessing said that they illustrated all the qualities of the German language; and so they do if those qualities are energy, rudeness, indecency, and a wealth of words suited to unbridled satire and unmannered invective. The diploma of the university is given in his book called Chartiludium, one of the numerous illustrations to which is copied to form the title page of the second book of a renowned encyclopaedia, the Margarita Philosophica.1 Murner’s pack contained 51 cards. There were seven unequal suits; 3 hearts, 4 clubs (or acorns), 8 diamonds (or bells), 8 crowns, 7 scorpions, 8 fish, 6 crabs. The remaining seven cards were jokers, or unattached to suits; for such cards formed a feature of all old packs. The object of Murner’s cards was to teach the art of reasoning, and a very successful pedagogical instrument they no doubt proved.
If you will provide yourself, my dear Barbara, with a complete pack of cards with a joker, 53 in all, I will make a little lesson in mathematics go down like castor-oil in milk. Take, if you will be so kind, the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 of spades, and arrange these ten cards in their proper order. I mean by this that the ace, or 1, is to be at the back of the pack, the 2 next, and so on, the 10 alone showing its face. I call this the “proper order,” because I propose always to begin the count of cards in a pack at the back, so that, in the pack of ten cards you have just been so obliging as to arrange, every card is in its proper place, that is the number it bears on its face is equal to the number of its place from the back of the pack. The face-value of the 2nd card is 2, that of the 3rd card, 3, and so on.
Now let us add 3 to the face-value of each card in the pack. How shall we do that without a printing-press? Why, by simply taking 3 cards from the back of the pack of ten and carrying them to the face. The face-value of card number 1 is now 3 + 1, or 4; that of card 2 is 5, and so on up to card 7 which is 10. Card 8 is 1; but 1 and 11 are the same for us. Since we have only ten cards to distinguish, ten different numbers are enough. We, therefore, treat 1, 11, 21, 31, as equal, because we count round and round the 10, thus:
We say 13 and 23 are equal, meaning their remainders after division by 10 are equal. This sort of equality of remainders after division is called congruence by mathematicians and they write it with three lines, thus
13 ≡ 23 (mod. 10).
The number 10 is said to be the modulus, that is, the divisor, or the smallest number congruent to zero, or the number of numbers in the cycle.
Instead of ten cards you may take the whole suit of thirteen, and then, imagining a system of numeration in which the base is thirteen and in which we count
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Jack Queen King
we have a similar result. Fourteen, or king-ace, is congruent with 1; fifteen, or king-two, with 2, etc.
It