Introduction to Volume 2

The Decisive Year and Its Early Consequences

MAX H. FISCH

The most decisive year of Peirce's professional life, and one of the most eventful, was 1867.

Superintendent Bache of the Coast Survey had been incapacitated by a stroke in the summer of 1864. He died on 17 February 1867. Benjamin Peirce became the third Superintendent on 26 February and continued in that position into 1874. He retained his professorship at Harvard and, except for short stays in Washington, he conducted the business of Superintendent from Cambridge. Julius E. Hilgard served as Assistant in Charge of the Survey's Washington office. On 1 July 1867 Charles was promoted from Aide to Assistant, the rank next under that of Superintendent. He continued in that rank for twenty-four and a half years, through 31 December 1891.

National and international awareness of the Survey was extended by two related episodes beginning in 1867. A treaty with Russia for the purchase of Alaska, negotiated by Secretary of State William Henry Seward, was approved by the Senate on 9 April, but the House delayed action on the appropriation necessary to complete the transaction. Superintendent Peirce was asked to have a reconnaissance made of the coast of Alaska, and a compilation of the most reliable information obtainable concerning its natural resources. A party led by Assistant George Davidson sailed from San Francisco on 21 July 1867 and returned 18 November 1867. Davidson's report of 30 November was received by Superintendent Peirce in January, reached President Johnson early in February, and was a principal document in his message of 17 February to the House of Representatives, recommending the appropriation. The bill was finally enacted and signed by the President in July.

Charles's younger brother, Benjamin Mills Peirce, returned in the summer of 1867 from two years at the School of Mines in Paris. Seward wished to explore the possibility of purchasing Iceland and Greenland from Denmark. His expansionist supporter Robert J. Walker consulted Superintendent Peirce, who had his son Ben compile A Report on the Resources of Iceland and Greenland which he submitted on 14 December 1867, and which his father submitted to Seward on the 16th. With a foreword by Walker, it was published in book form next year by the Department of State. But congressional interest in acquiring the islands was insufficient and no action was taken. 1

Joseph Winlock had become the third Director of the Harvard College Observatory in 1866, and working relations between the Survey and the Observatory became closer than they had previously been. (Winlock had been associated with the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac from its beginning in 1852, and for the last several years had been its Superintendent, residing in Cambridge. Benjamin Peirce had been its Consulting Astronomer from the beginning. Charles had done some work for it in recent years. Assistant William Ferrel and he had observed the annular eclipse of the sun at St. Joseph, Missouri, 19 October 1865, and both had submitted written reports to Winlock which are still preserved.) By arrangement with Winlock, Charles began in 1867 to make observations at the Observatory that were reported in subsequent volumes of its Annals. In 1869 he was appointed an Assistant in the Observatory, where, as in the Survey, the rank of Assistant was next to that of Director.

In 1867 the Observatory received its first spectroscope. Among the most immediately interesting of the observations it made possible were those of the auroral light. In volume 8 of the Annals it was reported that "On April 15, 1869, the positions of seven bright lines were measured in the spectrum of the remarkable aurora seen that evening; the observer being Mr. C. S. Peirce."

By that time, Peirce had begun reviewing scientific, mathematical and philosophical books for the Nation. His second review was of Roscoe's Spectrum Analysis, on 22 July 1869, and it was both as chemist and as astronomer that he reviewed it. With Winlock's permission, he reported that

"In addition to the green line usually seen in the aurora, six others were discovered and measured at the Harvard College Observatory during the brilliant display of last spring, and four of these lines were seen again on another occasion. On the 29th of June last, a single narrow band of auroral light extended from east to west, clear over the heavens, at Cambridge, moving from north to south. This was found to have a continuous spectrum; while the fainter auroral light in the north showed the usual green line."2

Peirce was a contributor to the Atlantic Almanac for several years, beginning with the volume for 1868. In that for 1870 he had, among other things, an article on "The Spectroscope," the last paragraph of which was devoted to the spectrum of the aurora borealis and the newly discovered lines.

As an Assistant both in the Survey and in the Observatory, Peirce was an observer of two total eclipses of the sun, at Bardstown, Kentucky, 7 August 1869, and near Catania, Sicily, 22 December 1870. And as late as 1894 he would write: "Of all the phenomena of nature, a total solar eclipse is incomparably the most sublime. The greatest ocean storm is as nothing to it; and as for an annular eclipse, however close it may come to totality, it approaches a complete eclipse not half so near as a hurdy-gurdy a cathedral organ."

In 1871 the Observatory acquired a Zšllner astrophotometer and Winlock made Peirce responsible for planning its use. More of that in our next volume. And in 1871 Peirce's father obtained authorization from Congress for a transcontinental geodetic survey along the 39th parallel, to connect the Atlantic and Pacific coastal surveys. This led to Charles's becoming a professional geodesist and metrologist; but that too is matter for the third and later volumes. Back now to 1867.

One of the most famous cases that ever came to trial was the Sylvia Ann Howland will case, and the most famous of the many famous things about it was the testimony of the Peirces, 5 and 6 June 1867. The questions at issue were (1) whether Miss Howland's signatures to the two copies of the "second page" codicil of an earlier will were genuine, or were forged by tracing her signature to the will itself, and (2) whether, supposing them genuine, the codicil invalidated a later will much less favorable to her niece, Hetty H. Robinson. The Peirces addressed themselves to the first of these questions. Under his father's direction, Charles examined photographic enlargements of forty-two genuine signatures for coincidences of position in their thirty downstrokes. In 25,830 different comparisons of downstrokes, he found 5,325 coincidences, so that the relative frequency of coincidence was about a fifth. Applying the theory of probabilities, his father calculated that a coincidence of genuine signatures as complete as that between the signatures to the codicil, or between either of them and that to the will in question, would occur only once in five-to-the-thirtieth-power times. The judge was not prepared to base his decision on the theory of probabilities, but he decided against Miss Robinson on the second issue.3 In the Nation for 19 September 1867, under the title "Mathematics in Court," there appeared a letter to the editor criticizing Benjamin Peirce's testimony, and a long reply signed "Ed. Nation" but written by Chauncey Wright, concluding that "The value of the present testimony depends wholly on the judgment of his son in estimating coincidences, and does not depend on the judgment of either father or son as mathematical experts." In a long article on "The Howland Will Case" in the American Law Review for July 1870 it was said that: "Hereafter, the curious stories of Poe will be thought the paltriest imitations."

Through 1867 (and on beyond) Peirce made frequent additions to his library in the history of logic. In March and April he acquired early editions of Duns Scotus. On 1 January 1868 he compiled a "Catalogue of Books on Mediaeval Logic which are available in Cambndge"—more of them in his own library than at Harvard's or anywhere else.

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, inasmuch 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 productivity for Zina as well as for Charles. Her major concerns were three: (1) reducing the burden of housekeeping drudgery for married women, (2) creating institutions to give women a voice in public affairs without their having to compete with men, and (3) higher education for women. For the first she advocated "Co-operative Housekeeping" in a series of five articles in the Atlantic Monthly from November 1868 through March 1869, when Charles's Journal of Speculative Philosophy series was appearing. Her articles reappeared in book form in Edinburgh and London in 1870. She also took a leading part in the organization of the short-lived Cambridge Co-operative Housekeeping Society, which rented the old Meacham House on Bow Street for its meetings as well as for its laundry, store, and kitchen. For her second concern, she was active in the movement for a "Woman's Parliament" and was elected president of its first convention in New York City, on 21 October 1860. That movement was still active under the name of "The Women's Congress" at least as late as 1877. For her third concern, she was one of the organizers of the Woman's Education Association of Boston, and her work in it was part of the pre-history of Radcliffe College.

Though Charles never became active in politics, he was an advocate of proportional representation. Zina made notes of his conversations with her about it, and published his views in two of her later books.

Though Zina was not a scientist, she did become a member of the international scientific community by serving, like Charles, as an observer near Catania in Sicily of the total eclipse of the sun on 22 December 1870 and by the inclusion of her excellent account of it in the annual report of the Coast Survey for that year.

Zina's younger sister Amy Fay was a gifted pianist who, after the best training that could be had in New England, studied in Germany from 1869 to 1875 under several of its best teachers, including Tausig, Kullak, and Deppe in Berlin and Liszt in Weimar. By visiting her in Germany and by reading her long and frequent letters home, Zina and Charles became vicarious members of the international community of musicians. Zina published selections from the letters in the Atlantic Monthly for April and October 1874, and later a more comprehensive collection in book form, in a single chronological order, under the title Music-Study in Germany. It went through more than twenty editions, was translated into French and German, and is still in print. The first twelve chapters come within the period of the present volume. One of them contains a vivid account of the five days that Amy and Charles spent in Dresden in August 1870.

Within the period of the present volume Peirce became acquainted with modern German experimental psychology, as represented by Weber, Fechner, Wundt, and Helmholtz. By 1869 he was already contemplating experiments of the kind he carried out with Jastrow in 1884, which made him the first modern experimental psychologist on the American continent. He sent Wundt copies of his Journal of Speculative Philosophy papers and asked permission to translate Wundt's Vorlesungen jiber die Menschen- und Thierseele,to which he refers in appreciative terms on page 307 below. Wundt's reply thanking him for the papers and granting the permission was dated at Heidelberg 2 May 1869. No translation by Peirce was published, and no drafts have been found. A translation of the much revised edition of 1892 was published by J. E. Creighton and E. B. Titchener in 1894 and reviewed by Peirce in the Nation. When Helmholtz visited New York City in 1893, Peirce had a visit with him, and his long obituary of Helmholtz in 1894 was reprinted in Pollak's 1915 anthology of the Nation's first fifty years.

Back now to logic. In his Harvard University Lectures on the logic of science in the spring of 1865, a few months after the death of George Boole, Peirce had said that Boole's 1854 Investigation of the Laws of Thought "is destined to mark a great epoch in logic; for it contains a conception which in point of fruitfulness will rival that of Aristotle's Organon (W1:224). In the first of his fifteen Harvard University Lectures of 1869-70 on "British Logicians," before turning to medieval nominalism and realism, Peirce said, according to the notes of one of his students, that there was enough in Boole to "take the whole time" of the course. By 1877 the British mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford was ready to say that "Charles Peirce. . . is the greatest living logician, and the second man since Aristotle who has added to the subject something material, the other man being George Boole, author of The Laws of Thought." 10

What was the "something material" that Peirce had added? That takes us back once more to 1867, for it certainly included "On an Improvement in Boole's Calculus of Logic." What else? At the very least, and above everything else, the most difficult and, at least for logicians and for historians of logic, the most important paper in the present volume: "Description of a Notation for the Logic of Relatives, resulting from an Amplification of the Conceptions of Boole's Calculus of Logic" (DNLR). 11 But is it not the case that, though the logic of relations can be traced back at least to Aristotle, De Morgan was the first logician to invent a notation for it? And was not that in 1860, a decade before Peirce's memoir? Yes, but as soon as Peirce's memoir began to circulate, there was room for the question whether De Morgan's notation might be a dead end. In his obituary of De Morgan, Peirce said (p. 450 below) "it may at least be confidently predicted that the logic of relatives, which he was the first to investigate extensively, will eventually be recognized as a part of logic." He did not predict, however, that it would be in De Morgan's notation that it would achieve that recognition. But was not the Boole-Peirce-Schršder line in logic superseded by the Frege-Peano-Russell-Whitehead line? No; it was only eclipsed.

Even more intimately than with Boole and De Morgan, Peirce associated his DNLR with his father's Linear Associative Algebra. The two appeared at almost the same time, midway between two total eclipses of the sun, but the connections between them did not become fully apparent until, after his father's death in 1880, Peirce prepared a second edition of the LAA, with an addendum by his father and two addenda by himself, and with well over a hundred footnotes to the original text, in over sixty of which he supplied translations from the LAA formulas into DNLR formulas.

Peirce's father had been one of the founding members of the National Academy of Sciences in 1863. Beginning in 1867, he presented instalments of the LAA at meetings of the Academy.12 Charles's focus on the logic of relations went back to his earliest work on his categories. A logician who had only three central categories—Quality, Relation, and Representation—was bound to return again and again to the logic of relations. Recall, for example, his remarks about equiparant and disquiparant relations in volume 1, and note what he says about mathematical syllogisms on 42 f. below. But his earliest published mention of De Morgan's paper of 1860 was written late in 1868 (p. 245n2), and he may not have seen that paper more than a few weeks earlier. So the actual composing of the DNLR may have begun in 1869.

Then, on 7 August 1869, came the first of the two eclipses. It was observed by several teams at several points along the line of totality. Peirce and Shaler were stationed at Bardstown, Kentucky. Their report, one of the most vivid as well as detailed, was submitted by Peirce to Winlock, included in Winlock's report to Superintendent Peirce, and published by him in the Survey's Annual Report. It reappears on pages 290-93 below. A quarter of a century later, in an unpublished paper entitled "Argon, Helium, and Helium's Partner," Peirce gave an equally vivid retrospective account (Robin MS 1036).

"I remember, as if it were yesterday, the first time I saw helium. It was in 1869. Astronomical spectroscopy was then in its earliest infancy. . . . It was impossible in those early days, for the same observer to point his telescope and to use the spectroscope; so I had brought along with me the Kentuckian geologist Shaler, a man of nerve and proved in war, to bring successively the different protuberances of the sun upon the slit of my spectroscope, while I examined the spectrum and recognized what I could."

The observations of the sun's corona and protuberances by the Peirce-Shaler and other teams prompted new theories as to the composition of the sun, but there was some skepticism about these theories among European astronomers. The earliest opportunity for a test of them would be the eclipse of 22 December 1870, whose path of totality was to pass through the Mediterranean. It was desirable that as many as possible of the American observers of the 1869 eclipse should be observers of the 1870 one also, and Peirce's father began making plans to bring that about. One of these plans was to have Charles follow the path of totality from east to west several months in advance, inspecting possible sites for observation parties, reporting to his father and to Winlock, and making tentative preliminary arrangements. But if Charles was to be in Europe for six or more months and his father for two or more, those interruptions might be detrimental to the major works they had in progress. It would be advantageous to finish them before leaving, and even more advantageous to take published copies with them, each of the other's work as well as his own, and get them that much sooner into the hands of the mathematicians and logicians they hoped to be meeting.

At the 616th meeting of the American Academy, on 26 January 1870, as reported by Chauncey Wright, its Recording Secretary, "The President . . . communicated by title . . . a paper 'On the Extension of Boole's System to the Logic of Relations by C. S. Peirce'." Late in the spring, Peirce supplied final copy; it was set in type and he was given fifty copies in paperback quarto book form, dated Cambridge 1870, "Extracted from the Memoirs of the American Academy, Vol. IX," though that volume did not appear until three years later.

Also late in the spring, since the National Academy, only seven years old, had as yet no funds for printing the papers or books its members presented, Julius E. Hilgard, a fellow member of the Academy, took Superintendent Peirce's manuscript, had it copied in a more ornate and legible hand, and then had fifty copies lithographed from it.

When Charles sailed from New York on 18 June 1870, he took with him copies of the lithographed book and the printed memoir. In London on 11 July he delivered one of each, with a covering letter from his father, to De Morgan's residence. On a later day he had a visit with De Morgan, who, unfortunately, was already in the final decline that ended in his death in the following March, eleven days after Charles's return to Cambridge.

Charles presented another copy of the DNLR to W. S. Jevons, from whom he received a letter about it farther along on his eastward journey, to which he replied from Pest on 25 August (pp. 445-47 below).

Directly or indirectly, Robert Harley too received a copy. At the Liverpool meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in September, Harley first presented "Observations on Boole's 'Laws of Thought' by the late R. Leslie Ellis," and then a paper by himself "On Boole's 'Laws of Thought'" (continuing one he had presented four years earlier), in which, after reviewing recent works by Jevons, Tait, and Brodie, he said: "But the most remarkable amplification of Boole's conceptions which the author has hitherto met with is contained in a recent paper by Mr. C. S. Peirce, on the 'Logic of Relatives'." He proceeds to quote the passage on "the three grand classes" of logical terms that appears on pages 364-65 below, and then the sentence that appears on page 359: "Boole's logical algebra has such singular beauty, so far as it goes, that it is interesting to inquire whether it cannot be extended over the whole realm of formal logic, instead of being restricted to that simplest and least useful part of the subject, the logic of absolute terms, which, when he wrote, was the only formal logic known." "The object of Mr. Peirce's paper," he went on, "is to show that this extension is possible," and he gave some account of the notation and processes employed.

So Clifford was not alone in thinking that Peirce was "the second man since Aristotle." He was present at the meeting and spoke "On an Unexplained Contradiction in Geometry." He and Peirce may have met in London in July, and he too may then have received a copy of DNLR. If not, they almost certainly met as eclipse observers near Catania in December. In any case, they became well acquainted not later than 1875.

Two brief examples now of Benjamin Peirce's distribution of copies of LAA. In Berlin, on his way to Sicily in November, he gave two copies to our ambassador, his old friend and former colleague, the historian George Bancroft; one for himself and one to present to the Berlin Academy, of which he was a member. And in January, after the eclipse, he addressed the London Mathematical Society on the methods he had used in his LAA, and presented a copy to the Society. Clifford was present and proposed the name "quadrates" for the class of the algebras that includes quaternions, and the Peirces adopted the proposal.

From London in the last week of July 1870, shortly after the Vatican Council had declared the conditions of papal infallibility, and just as the Franco-Prussian War began, Charles journeyed eastward by way of Rotterdam, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, Pest, the Danube, and the Black Sea, to Constantinople. Then he began moving westward along the path of totality in search of eligible sites. (He recommended sites in Sicily and southern Spain, and became himself a member of one of the Sicilian teams.) In Berlin he visited Amy Fay, and she accompanied him to Dresden, chiefly for visits to the great art museum there. In Vienna, the director of the Observatory was hospitable and helpful. From Pest, he wrote the letter to Jevons. In Constantinople he enjoyed the guidance of Edward H. Palmer, "the most charming man" he had so far known, and of Palmer's friend Charles Drake; and he began the study of Arabic. In Thessaly he found the English consul most helpful, and the impressions he formed there he later worked up into "A Tale of Thessaly" of which he gave several readings. From Chambery in Savoy, after his visit to Spain, he wrote to his mother on 16 November 1870, five weeks before the eclipse, that he had heard eighteen distinct languages spoken, seventeen of them (including Basque) in places where they were the languages of everyday speech.

On the whole, the American observations and inferences of the preceding year were vindicated. This was Peirce's first experience of large-scale international scientific cooperation. He had already committed himself to the social theory of logic, but this experience and those of his four later European sojourns confirmed him in that commitment.

Julius E. Hilgard, the Assistant in Charge of the Survey's Washington Office, which included the Office of Weights and Measures until the creation of the National Bureau of Standards in 1901, was to spend several months in Europe in mid-1872. Among other duties, he was to represent the United States at a Paris conference looking toward the international bureau of weights and measures which was finally established there in 1875. Peirce was to substitute for Hilgard in his absence, and that called for several weeks of previous training under Hilgard's supervision. He spent most of December 1871 and part of January 1872 at the new quarters of the Survey in the elegant Richards Building on Capitol Hill, where the Longworth House Office Building now stands. Hilgard gave good reports of his progress.

Hilgard's European sojourn would of course enhance his qualifications for succeeding Peirce's father as Superintendent of the Survey. Peirce's training and experience would qualify him to succeed Hilgard in case of Hilgard's death or resignation or promotion to Superintendent. It would even qualify him, under conceivable future circumstances, to be considered for the superintendency.

The Philosophical Society of Washington (in whose name, as in that of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, "philosophical" meant scientific) had held its first meeting on 13 March 1871. At its 17th meeting, on 16 December 1871, Charles presented the first of the six wide-ranging papers he presented to that Society. It was "On the Appearance of Encke's Comet as Seen at Harvard College Observatory.''

Charles's father was to address the Cambridge Scientific Club on 28 December 1871 on the application of mathematics to certain questions in political economy, such as price and amount of sale, and the conditions of a maximum. Charles undertook to prepare diagrams for his father to exhibit at that meeting, and these were mailed to Cambridge on or about the 19th.

Simon Newcomb, then at the Naval Observatory, called on Charles on the 17th and they conversed about these matters. (Fifteen years later Newcomb published a book entitled Principles of Political Economy on which Charles commented adversely.) In the evening after the visit Charles wrote Newcomb a letter explaining what he had meant by saying that the law of supply and demand holds only for unlimited competition, and concluded: "P.S. This is all in Cournot." (On the strength of this letter, Baumol and Goldfeld recently included Peirce among their Precursors in Mathematical Economics.) In the same evening, Charles wrote to his wife Zina, who had remained in Cambridge, that he had been spending his evenings on political economy, and gave her some account of the questions he had been pursuing. On the 19th, he wrote a letter to his father, beginning: "There is one point on which I get a different result from Cournot, and it makes me suspect the truth of the proposition that the seller puts his price so as to make his profits a maximum." 13

Charles's own principal contribution to economics, his 1877 "Note on the Theory of the Economy of Research," will be included in our next volume, but these three letters are evidence that he brought to that particular topic a more general competence in economic theory.

But what, finally, of the Metaphysical Club at Cambridge, in which pragmatism was born? According to the best evidence we now have, it was founded not later than January 1872, after Peirce's return from Washington. The introduction to volume 3 will resume the story at that point. But from a consecutive and careful reading of the present volume it will already be evident that pragmatism was the natural and logical next step.

II

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy Papers