Chance, Love, and Logic · Charles S. Peirce
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The personal relations between Peirce and Wright were thus described by Peirce in a letter to Mrs. Ladd-Franklin (_Journal of Philosophy_, Vol. 13, p. 719): “It must have been about 1857 when I first made the acquaintance of Chauncey Wright, a mind about on the level of J. S. Mill. He was a thorough mathematician. He had a most penetrating intellect.—He and I used to have long and very lively and close disputations lasting two or three hours daily for many years. In the sixties I started a little club called ‘The Metaphysical Club.’—Wright was the strongest member and probably I was next.—Then there were Frank Abbott, William James and others.” “It was there that the name and the doctrine of pragmatism saw the light.” It might be added that Peirce’s tychism is indebted to Wright’s doctrine of accidents and “cosmic weather,” a doctrine which maintained against LaPlace that a mind knowing nature from moment to moment is bound to encounter genuine novelty in phenomena, which no amount of knowledge would enable us to foresee. See Wright’s _Philosophical Discussions_—1876, also Cambridge _Hist. of American Literature_, Vol. 3, p. 234. Footnote 12: _Monist_, Vol. 15, p. 180. Footnote 13: This volume, pp. 43-45. Footnote 14: “To say that we live for the sake of action would be to say that there is no such thing as a rational purport.” _Monist_, Vol. XV, p. 175.
Footnote 15: The letter to Mrs. Ladd-Franklin quoted before, explains why James, though always loyal to Peirce and anxious to give him credit whenever possible, could not understand the latter’s lectures on pragmatism. Peirce’s incidental judgments on others is worth quoting here: “Modern psychologists are so soaked with sensationalism that they cannot understand anything that does not mean that. How can I, to whom nothing seems so thoroughly real as generals, and who regards Truth and Justice as _literally_ the most powerful powers in the world, expect to be understood by the thoroughgoing Wundtian? But the curious thing is to see absolute idealists tainted with this disease,—or men who, like John Dewey, hover between Absolute Idealism and Sensationalism. Royce’s opinions as developed in his _World and Individualism_ are extremely near to mine. His insistence on the elements of purpose in intellectual concepts is essentially the pragmatic position.” Footnote 16: Baldwin’s _Dictionary_, art. Method. Footnote 17: “Peirce anticipated the most important procedures of his successors even when he did not work them out himself. Again and again one finds the clue to the most recent developments in the writings of Peirce,” Lewis’ _Survey of Symbolic Logic_, p. 79. Footnote 18: Hans Breitmann is symbolic of those who “solved the infinite as one eternal sphere.” Footnote 19: See _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, Vol. 2, pp. 155-157, article on A New List of Categories in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 7, 287-298 and article on _Sign_, in Baldwin’s _Dictionary_.
Footnote 20: _Studies in Logic_, p. 181. Footnote 21: _Monist_, Vol. 7, p. 27. _Cf._ _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, Vol. 2, p. 207; _Popular Science Monthly_, Vol. 58, pp. 305-306. Footnote 22: This vol., p. 15. Footnote 23: Suggestive for a theory of the metaphysics of fictions is the suggestion (p. 46) “that the question of what would occur under circumstances which do not actually arise, is not a question of fact, but only of the most perspicuous arrangement of them.” This arrangement is, of course, not merely subjective. Footnote 24: Pp. 128-129, _cf._ _Monist_, Vol. 7, p. 206, and _Logical Studies_, pp. 175 ff.
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