Chance, Love, and Logic · Charles S. Peirce
_HI_ + _HI_ = _HH_ + _II_;
The consciousness of a habit involves a general idea. In each action of that habit certain atoms get thrown out of their orbit, and replaced by others. Upon all the different occasions it is different atoms that are thrown off, but they are analogous from a physical point of view, and there is an inward sense of their being analogous. Every time one of the associated feelings recurs, there is a more or less vague sense that there are others, that it has a general character, and of about what this general character is. We ought not, I think, to hold that in protoplasm habit never acts in any other than the particular way suggested above. On the contrary, if habit be a primary property of mind, it must be equally so of matter, as a kind of mind. We can hardly refuse to admit that wherever chance motions have general characters, there is a tendency for this generality to spread and to perfect itself. In that case, a general idea is a certain modification of consciousness which accompanies any regularity or general relation between chance actions. The consciousness of a general idea has a certain “unity of the ego,” in it, which is identical when it passes from one mind to another. It is, therefore, quite analogous to a person; and, indeed, a person is only a particular kind of general idea. Long age, in the _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_ (Vol. II, p. 156), I pointed out that a person is nothing but a symbol involving a general idea; but my views were, then, too nominalistic to enable me to see that every general idea has the unified living feeling of a person.
All that is necessary, upon this theory, to the existence of a person is that the feelings out of which he is constructed should be in close enough connection to influence one another. Here we can draw a consequence which it may be possible to submit to experimental test. Namely, if this be the case, there should be something like personal consciousness in bodies of men who are in intimate and intensely sympathetic communion. It is true that when the generalization of feeling has been carried so far as to include all within a person, a stopping-place, in a certain sense, has been attained; and further generalization will have a less lively character. But we must not think it will cease. _Esprit de corps_, national sentiment, sympathy, are no mere metaphors. None of us can fully realize what the minds of corporations are, any more than one of my brain-cells can know what the whole brain is thinking. But the law of mind clearly points to the existence of such personalities, and there are many ordinary observations which, if they were critically examined and supplemented by special experiments, might, as first appearances promise, give evidence of the influence of such greater persons upon individuals.
It is often remarked that on one day half a dozen people, strangers to one another, will take it into their heads to do one and the same strange deed, whether it be a physical experiment, a crime, or an act of virtue. When the thirty thousand young people of the society for Christian Endeavor were in New York, there seemed to me to be some mysterious diffusion of sweetness and light. If such a fact is capable of being made out anywhere, it should be in the church. The Christians have always been ready to risk their lives for the sake of having prayers in common, of getting together and praying simultaneously with great energy, and especially for their common body, for “the whole state of Christ’s church militant here in earth,” as one of the missals has it. This practice they have been keeping up everywhere, weekly, for many centuries. Surely, a personality ought to have developed in that church, in that “bride of Christ,” as they call it, or else there is a strange break in the action of mind, and I shall have to acknowledge my views are much mistaken. Would not the societies for psychical research be more likely to break through the clouds, in seeking evidences of such corporate personality, than in seeking evidences of telepathy, which, upon the same theory, should be a far weaker phenomenon?
Footnote 63: _The Monist_, October, 1892. Footnote 64: I am rejoiced to find, since my last paper was printed, that a philosopher as subtle and profound as Dr. Edmund Montgomery has long been arguing for the same element in the universe. Other world-renowned thinkers, as M. Renouvier and M. Delbœuf, appear to share this opinion. Footnote 65: By a _vera causa_, in the logic of science, is meant a state of things known to exist in some cases and supposed to exist in other cases, because it would account for observed phenomena. Footnote 66: Wiedemann, _Annalen_, 1887-1889. Footnote 67: See Maxwell on Spherical Harmonics, in his _Electricity and Magnetism_. Footnote 68: The word _system_ has three peculiar meanings in mathematics. (_A._) It means an orderly exposition of the truths of astronomy, and hence a theory of the motions of the stars; as the Ptolemaic _system_, the Copernican _system_. This is much like the sense in which we speak of the Calvinistic _system_ of theology, the Kantian _system_ of philosophy, etc. (_B._) It means the aggregate of the planets considered as all moving in somewhat the same way, as the solar _system_; and hence any aggregate of particles moving under mutual forces. (_C._) It means a number of forces acting simultaneously upon a number of particles. Footnote 69: But, in fact, an inspection of these curves is sufficient to show that they are of a higher degree than the third. For they have the line _V_ = O, or some line _V_ a constant for an asymptote, while for small values of _P_, the values of _d_^2_p_/(_dV_)^2 are positive. Footnote 70: Anticipated by Clausius as long ago as 1857; and by Williamson in 1851. Footnote 71: “Physiologically, ... accommodation means the breaking up of a habit.... Psychologically, it means reviving consciousness.” Baldwin, _Psychology_, Part III, ch. i., § 5.
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