Charles W. Eliot became President of the University on 19 May 1869. Two days later he wrote to George Brush of Yale: “what to build on top of the American college.… This is what we have all got to think about.” His first thought was to try turning the University Lectures into sequences running through the academic year, with optional comprehensive examinations on each sequence at the end of the year. He arranged two such sequences for 1869–70; one in philosophy, the other in modern literature. For philosophy he enlisted Francis Bowen, John Fiske, Peirce, F. H. Hedge, J. Elliott Cabot, Emerson, and G. P. Fisher, in that order. Peirce’s fifteen lectures, from 14 December to 15 January, were on the history of logic in Great Britain from Duns Scotus to Mill. William James attended at least his seventh, on nominalism from Ockham to Mill, and wrote next day to his friend Henry P. Bowditch that “It was delivered without notes, and was admirable in matter, manner and clearness of statement. … I never saw a man go into things so intensely and thoroughly.” The Graduate School was not established until 1890, with James Mills (“Jem”) Peirce, Charles’s older brother, as Dean; but the experiment of 1869–70 was later called “The Germ of the Graduate School.”4
Back again to 1867. On 30 January Peirce was elected a Resident Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He presented three papers to the Academy at its meetings of 12 March, 9 April, and 14 May, and two further papers at those of 10 September (read by title only) and 13 November. The volume of the Academy’s Proceedings which included all five of these papers did not appear until the following year, but by November 1867 Peirce had obtained collective offprints of the first three under the title “Three Papers on Logic” and had begun distributing them. He began receiving responses early in December.5
The first philosophical journal in the United States—indeed the first in English anywhere—was the quarterly Journal of Speculative Philosophy, published in St. Louis and edited by William Torrey Harris. It began with the issue for January 1867. Peirce subscribed at first anonymously through a bookseller. But as soon as the collective offprints of “Three Papers on Logic” were ready, he sent Harris a copy. Harris responded with a letter dated 10 December 1867. He was especially interested in Peirce’s third paper, “On a New List of Categories.” (Peirce himself as late as 1905 called it “my one contribution to philosophy.”) In response to Harris, Peirce wrote a long letter on Hegel which he did not mail and a short letter dated 1 January 1868 which he did mail. Thus began the correspondence that led to five contributions by Peirce to the second volume of the Journal: two anonymous exchanges with the editor, and three articles under his own name in response to the editor’s challenge to show how on his nominalistic principles “the validity of the laws of logic can be other than inexplicable.” (These five contributions are examined in detail by C. F. Delaney in part II of the present introduction.)
In giving the title “Nominalism versus Realism” to the first exchange, Harris obviously meant to call Peirce a nominalist and Hegel and himself (and other followers of Hegel) realists. Peirce did not disclaim the nominalism. But was he a professing nominalist, and did Harris know that he was? And, if so, how did he know it?
That question takes us back again to 1867. At the end of the first of his “Three Papers on Logic” Peirce advocated a theory of probability for a fuller account of which he referred to his review of Venn’s Logic of Chance. In that review he called it the nominalistic theory, as opposed to the realistic and conceptualistic theories. But Venn, though he used the latter two terms, nowhere used the terms nominalism, nominalistic, or nominalist. (The terms he did use are “material” and “phenomenalist.”) Evidently, therefore, Peirce wished to make his own commitment to nominalism unmistakable.
When did Peirce become a professing nominalist? Probably in 1851, about the time of his twelfth birthday, when he read Whately’s Elements of Logic.
Where is the evidence in volume 1 of the present edition that he was a professing nominalist during the period of that volume? In what he says about the falsity of scholastic realism on pages 307 and 312 and in other relevant passages on pages 287, 306, and 360.6 And that he was still a professing nominalist when he began drafting his Journal of Speculative Philosophy articles, commonly called his “cognition series,” appears from what he says on pages 175, 180 and 181 of the present volume: “Thus, we obtain a theory of reality which, while it is nominalistic, in as much as it bases universals upon signs, is yet quite opposed to that individualism which is often supposed to be coextensive with nominalism.” “Now the nominalistic element of my theory is certainly an admission that nothing out of cognition and signification generally, has any generality. …” “If this seems a monstrous doctrine, remember that my nominalism saves me from all absurdity.”
But in the published form of the second article, in the paragraph on page 239 of the present volume, Peirce unobtrusively takes his first step from nominalism toward realism.7 “But it follows that since no cognition of ours is absolutely determinate, generals must have a real existence. Now this scholastic realism is usually set down as a belief in metaphysical fictions”—as Peirce himself had set it down on pages 287, 307, 311 and 312 of our first volume. It is the realism of Scotus to which he now commits himself. He takes a second and much more emphatic step in his Berkeley review three years later. He says there (on page 467 below) that Scotus “was separated from nominalism only by the division of a hair.” What was the hair that Scotus split, we might ask, and how did he split it? Instead, going back once more to 1867 and taking the “New List of Categories” together with the three articles of the cognition series (1868–1869) and the Berkeley review (1871), let us ask what hairs Peirce split and how he split them.
As we remarked on page xxvi of the introduction to volume 1, Peirce’s “is the first list of categories that opens the way to making the general theory of signs fundamental in logic, epistemology, and metaphysics.” We may add here that the “New List” together with the cognition series and the Berkeley review—five papers in all, and all five contained in the present volume—are now recognized as constituting the modern founding of semeiotic, the general theory of signs, for all the purposes of such a theory.8
Now for the hairsplitting. The Berkeley review is much more emphatic than the cognition series on the distinction between the forward and the backward reference of the term “reality” and the identification of nominalism with the backward and of realism with the forward reference. Which amounts to a semeiotic resolution of the controversy. Of the three central categories, quality is monadic, relation dyadic, and representation irreducibly triadic. The sign represents an object to or for an interpretant. But we may focus on the sign-object or on the sign-interpretant. If the question is whether there are real universals, the nominalists turn backward to the sign-object and do not find them; the realists turn forward to the sign-interpretant and find them (pp. 467 ff. below). That is primarily because the backward reference to the object is more individualistic, and the forward reference to the interpretant is more social. So realism goes with what has been called the social theory of logic, or “logical socialism.”9 If we were selecting key sentences from the Peirce texts in the present volume, they might well include these two: (1) “Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of an indefinite increase of knowledge” (p. 239). (2) “Whether men really have anything in common, so that the community is to be considered as an end in itself, and if so, what the relative value of the two factors is, is the most fundamental practical question in regard to every public institution the constitution of which we have it in our power to influence” (p. 487).
The forward reference and the community emphasis owed something to Charles’s wife Zina. By 1865 they were settled in a home of their own at 2 Arrow Street in Cambridge, and it remained their home throughout the period of the present volume. Arrow Street shot eastward from Bow Street into what was then Main Street but is now Massachusetts Avenue. The Arrow Street years were a period of experimentation and