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CHARLES
SANDERS PEIRCE
 Peirce and his wife Juliette in front of their home, 1908 |
In the early 1870s, a small group of young men formed a Harvard Square
circle for philosophical discussion. Meeting sometimes in the study of
Charles Sanders Peirce and sometimes in the study of William James, they
half-ironically, half-defiantly called themselves The Metaphysical Club.
In those youthful Harvard Square philosophical discussions, the doctrine
of pragmatism saw the light in 1873. The meaning of an idea could be known
only considering its consequences for practical experience, for actual
or possible action. In writing later to Peirce, William James exclaimed,
"There is no more original thinker than yourself in our generation."
The two had become acquainted when both of them were studying chemistry
in the Lawrence Scientific School. Charles’s father, Benjamin Peirce,
the Perkins Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Harvard, has been
described as America's most eminent scientist in the nineteenth contury.
He was one of the incorporators of the National Academy of Sciences, one
of the founders of the Harvard Observatory, and author of The History
of Harvard University 1636-1775. His students included two future
presidents of the university, Charles William Eliot and A. Lawrence Lowell.
Among the familiar figures in the home in which Charles grew up were not
only leading men of science such as Louis Agassiz (his father's closest
friend) but Margaret Fuller, Judge Story, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
James Russell Lowell, Daniel Webster, James Freeman Clarke, William Henry
Channing, and sometimes Ralph Waldo Emerson. In The Developmont of
Peirce’s Philosophy, Murray G. Murphey says of Charles's father:
"The elder Peirce was a deeply religious man of the Unitarian school.
He regarded nature as the exemplar of the wisdom of the Divine Geometer,
and science as a means to understanding that wisdom.” He affirmed,
There is but one God, and science is the knowledge of God. This
spirit went forth in the son.
Charles Peirce was born in Cambridge in 1839. He learned to read and write
without the usual instruction. At the age of eight he fell hopelessly
in love. To drown his sorrow, he studied chemistry. His father used to
play a card game—double rummy—with him from 10 in the evening
until dawn, teaching the child concentration by correcting each mistaken
play. While still in high school, the youngster was reading no less a
work than Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
When Charles was a student at the Cambridge High and Latin School, however,
he played hooky and managed to get himself expelled several times. Nevertheless,
he did graduate and went to Harvard College, where he was the first person
to receive a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry summa cum laude.
Then assisting at the Harvard Observatory, he was given the honor of being
asked to deliver a series of Harvard lectures on philosophy. It became
clear to him in the Metaphysical Club discussions that, What a man
really believes is what he would be ready to act upon, and to risk much
upon.
In 1877, when Charles was sailing to Europe to attend a scientific conference,
he wrote "How to Make Our Ideas Clear"—the classic Popular
Science paper which to this day marks the origin of a continuing series
of publications in which he delineated the philosophy of pragmatism. This
article was the foundation work of a theological revolution whose end
is nowhere in sight, and whose premise is, I think, possibly second to
none within the past century. It is a philosophy of freedom, chance, evolution
with respect to personality as well as God. As his frame of thought developed,
Charles Sanders Peirce spoke of "firstness," "secondness,"
and "thirdness."
Let it suffice now to note that here is an evolutionary philosopher who
took growth seriously. Here is a man who in the very foundations of his
thought put potentiality first as an aspect of reality. His is truly a
philosophy of freedom since, even for God, the future is not wholly determined.
Here now we have an early inkling of the contribution made by the first
of several persons who have helped give us an understanding of the Harvard
Square God, who is also the God of our ever open Universe. For a glimpse
of the Harvard Square God—a science oriented, world-affirming vision—note
the power of these words of Charles Sanders Peirce:
Reference to the future is an essential element of personality. Were
the ends of a person already explicit, there would be no room for development,
for growth, for life; and consequently there would be no personality.
The mere carrying out of predetermined purposes is mechanical. This remark
has an application to the philosophy of religion. It is that a genuine
evolutionary philosophy, one that makes the principle of growth a primordial
element of the universe, is so far from being antagonistic to the idea
of a personal creator that it is really inseparable from that idea.
According to that logical doctrine which the present writer first formulated
in 1873 and named Pragmatism, the true meaning of any product of the intellect
lies in whatever unitary determination it would impart to practical conduct
under any and every conceivable circumstance, supposing such conduct to
be guided by reflexion carried to an ultimate limit.
We can know nothing except what we directly experience. So all that we
can anyway know relates to experience. Where would such an idea, say as
that of God, come from, if not from direct experience? Open your eyes—and
your heart, which is also a perceptive organ—and you see God.
Everybody can see that the statement of St. John (God is Love) is the
forumula of an evolutionary philosophy, which teaches that growth comes
only from love, from the ardent impulse to fulfill another’s highest
impulse. The philosophy we draw from John’s gospel is that this is
the way mind develops; and as for the cosmos, only so far as it yet is
mind, and so has life, is it capable of further evolution. Love, recognizing
germs of loveliness in the hateful, gradually warms it to life, and makes
it lovely.