LITMIR.BIZ

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the laws of nature … to trace them to their origin & to predict new laws by the laws of the laws of nature.” Then Peirce had been at the seminal stage of what would become the systematic metaphysics of his “A Guess at the Riddle,” and not much later, his Monist metaphysical series. By October 1887, Peirce had penetrated much deeper into his “vast” undertaking, and he had been working through some of the same issues addressed by James in his article on space. After telling James how much he had learned, Peirce expressed some reservations: “I fancy that all which is present to consciousness is sensation & nothing assignable is a first sensation.” He was not ready to admit “that size is so nearly a primary sensation as red or blue.” Peirce suggested that “objective space” might be “built up” by a synthesis of fragmentary spaces and speculated that in the same way “objective time” might be built up by a synthesis of fragmentary times. Peirce concluded his letter by remarking that James had apparently not seen “Mayer’s argument against Helmholtz’s theory of audition.”

      Perhaps Peirce’s most intellectually stimulating correspondent of the time was Alfred Bray Kempe who, in November 1886, had sent him an inscribed copy of his recently published “Memoir on the Theory of Mathematical Form.”²⁸ Peirce may have first learned of Kempe in July 1879, when it had been reported in Nature that he had proved the four-color conjecture that for any map only four colors are required to avoid having a boundary separating areas of the same color. Peirce seems to have had pre-publication access to Kempe’s paper, which had been submitted to J. J. Sylvester for publication in the Johns Hopkins American Journal of Mathematics, and in 1880, before Kempe’s paper appeared, Peirce offered some improvements on Kempe’s method.²⁹ But it was Kempe’s 1886 “Memoir” that would have a profound impact on Peirce, whose expertise in the logic of relations and interest in spatial logics enabled him immediately to see the genius of Kempe’s graphical approach to relations. In order to exhibit essential forms, Kempe had introduced a graphical notation of spots and lines modeled on chemical diagrams, and this notation would play an important role in Peirce’s innovation of his Existential Graphs (EG).³⁰ On 17 January 1887, after carefully reading Kempe’s memoir and making a list of new terms that he thought might be included in the Century Dictionary, Peirce wrote to Kempe with some suggestions that led Kempe to make revisions which he credited to Peirce.³¹ In January of 1889 Peirce would return to Kempe’s “Memoir” and still find it “so difficult that I was at work on it all day every day for about three weeks” (RL 80:105). Kempe’s influence can be found in Peirce’s correspondence course exercises (sel. 9), especially those on relational graphs, and in the 1889 paper, “Mathematical Monads” (sel. 34), and in many other writings. In R 714 (1889.4), his fragmentary “Notes on Kempe’s Paper on Mathematical Forms,” Peirce even introduced lines to stand for individuals, an important move in the direction of EG.

      The year 1888 began on a positive note for Peirce. On 1 January, President Cleveland appointed him to the Assay Commission, charged with testing coins from different U.S. mints for fineness and weight. Peirce served on two committees for the Commission, the Committee on Counting and the Committee on Weighing, and was a signatory for the final reports, signed on 10 February in Philadelphia. On 13 January Peirce and Juliette went to New York to see Steele MacKaye’s new play, “Paul Kauvar,” which had opened to acclaim on Christmas Eve. Mary MacKaye had sent them tickets. The Peirce’s continued to be frequent guests of the Pinchots, mingling with their well-heeled friends, and they had successfully entered into village life in Milford.

      On 4 February, Peirce’s Aunt Lizzie died in the family home in Cambridge. Jem wrote in her obituary that she had been “a woman of remarkable character & intelligence” but that she had been “very singular, almost eccentric” and that her “greatest real fault was a certain streak of jealousy which she could not always conquer.” He said that she had been devoted to reading, “especially to German literature & above all to Goethe, whom she esteemed the paragon of geniuses and of men.” In fact she had held virtually the same opinion of her brother, Benjamin, to whom, as Jem put it, she had been “devotedly attached.” Aunt Lizzie’s funeral was held on 8 February and Peirce attended, but it is not likely that Juliette was with him. Aunt Lizzie’s estate was divided among Benjamin’s children and Peirce’s share came to about $5000.

      Peirce’s inheritance, from Aunt Lizzie and from his mother, created the possibility for a life in Milford that would otherwise have been impossible. Even though Peirce still held out hope that he could make a success of his correspondence course, it was hardly lucrative nor likely to be so any time soon, and his combined income from the Survey and from the Century Company was quite inadequate to the life he and Juliette had assumed in Milford—with its socializing in the Pinchot circle and with frequent trips back to New York. And, of course, Peirce’s income from the Coast Survey was tenuous at best. To make matters more difficult, there were few suitable homes available for rent in Milford. When at the end of their first year the lease expired on their first house, it seemed that there was no place to go and that they would have to leave Milford. On 26 April a note appeared in the Port Jervis Evening Gazette (taken from Milford News): “We fear that we are about to lose Prof. Charles A. Pierce [sic] and his excellent lady because of their inability to secure a suitable residence for the coming year.” At the last minute Peirce did find a house to rent, the Scheinmee Homestead on Broad Street, but his inheritance made it possible to consider something more permanent. On 10 May, the Peirce’s bought a farm about two miles northeast of Milford in the direction of Port Jervis. They paid $1000 for the 130 acres on the Delaware River, which included a parcel called “Wanda Farm” that had been the homestead property of John T. Quick, one of the colorful early settlers in the area, and another parcel known as the “Quick Saw Mill Property.” The property as a whole was called “Quicktown.” Altogether, there were two houses, two barns, a large ice-house, a sawmill, and some other outbuildings. The farmhouse on Wanda Farm, built in 1854, was the main house and the one the Peirce’s would begin renovating in January 1889 with the aim of turning it into a magnificent resort that could accommodate summer guests and perhaps even a residential school of philosophy. But on 10 May, when the Peirce’s bought Quicktown, there was an understanding that they would not move in immediately and that some members of the Quick family could continue living in the main house for a period of time. That understanding would lead to complications later in the year, and descendants of the Quicks would come to believe that they had lost their property to the Peirce’s by some trick.³²

      It is hard to tell how Peirce divided his time in 1888, but as the year got underway it seems certain that his intellectual work was mainly devoted to three efforts: to his Coast Survey reports, to his definitions for the Century Dictionary, and to the articulation of a system of thought founded on his categories and his evolutionary metaphysics. After Peirce submitted his report on the pendulum work at Fort Conger, he turned his attention to working up results from the considerable unreduced records of the gravity work he had carried out during the preceding five years, and some from even earlier. It was becoming more and more difficult for Peirce to sustain the mental focus and intensity required for the complex calculations that typified these reductions and he persistently tried to convince Superintendent Thorn that he needed assistance with the computations. Early in April Thorn finally agreed to assign Allan Risteen to work with Peirce on a temporary basis. Risteen and his wife moved to Milford and probably stayed with the Peirce’s until sometime in July. During those months it is likely that the reduction of data from gravity determinations was a constant in Peirce’s daily routine. But the fact that Risteen was there to help with the reductions probably allowed Peirce to work more on the related hydrodynamical theory, and it also freed him to spend more time on the Century Dictionary. Although Peirce had been working on definitions for at least five years, he was just beginning his most sustained and concentrated effort. Definitions were now being set in galleys and there was no choice but to turn considerable attention to that work. When the local newspaper had printed the notice that Milford might lose Peirce, it noted that he was engaged “in compiling a dictionary to be issued by the Century Company of N.Y.” Clearly, Peirce’s lexicographic work was a prominent part of his life at that time.

      The third undertaking that must have occupied Peirce a great deal as 1888 got underway was his philosophical system building. Sometime after moving

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