Chance, Love, and Logic: Philosophical Essays

Many and diverse are the minds that form the philosophic community. There are, first and foremost, the great masters, the system builders who rear their stately palaces towering to the moon. These architectonic minds are served by a varied host of followers and auxiliaries. Some provide the furnishings to make these mystic mansions of the mind more commodious, while others are engaged in making their façades more imposing. Some are busy strengthening weak places or building much-needed additions, while many more are engaged in defending these structures against the impetuous army of critics who are ever eager and ready to pounce down upon and destroy all that is new or bears the mortal mark of human imperfection. There are also the philologists, those who are in a more narrow sense scholars, who dig not only for facts or roots, but also for the stones which may serve either for building or as weapons of destruction. Remote from all these, however, are the intellectual rovers who, in their search for new fields, venture into the thick jungle that surrounds the little patch of cultivated science. They are not gregarious creatures, these lonely pioneers; and in their wanderings they often completely lose touch with those who tread the beaten paths. Those that return to the community often speak strangely of strange things; and it is not always that they arouse sufficient faith for others to follow them and change their trails into high roads.

Few nowadays question the great value of these pioneer minds; and it is often claimed that universities are established to facilitate their work, and to prevent it from being lost. But universities, like other well-managed institutions, can find place only for those who work well in harness. The restless, impatient minds, like the socially or conventionally unacceptable, are thus kept out, no matter how fruitful their originality. Charles S. Peirce was certainly one of these restless pioneer souls with the fatal gift of genuine originality. In his early papers, in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and later, in theMonist papers reprinted as Part II of this volume, we get glimpses of a vast philosophic system on which he was working with an unusual wealth of material and apparatus. To a rich imagination and extraordinary learning he added one of the most essential gifts of successful system builders, the power to coin an apt and striking terminology. But the admitted incompleteness of these preliminary sketches of his philosophic system is not altogether due to the inherent difficulty of the task and to external causes such as neglect and poverty. A certain inner instability or lack of self-mastery is reflected in the outer moral or conventional waywardness which, except for a few years at Johns Hopkins, caused him to be excluded from a university career, and thus deprived him of much needed stimulus to ordinary consistency and intelligibility. As the years advanced, bringing little general interest in, or recognition of, the brilliant logical studies of his early years, Peirce became more and more fragmentary, cryptic, and involved; so that James, the intellectual companion of his youth, later found his lectures on pragmatism, “flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness”—a statement not to be entirely discounted by the fact that James had no interest in or aptitude for formal logical or mathematical considerations.