LITMIR.BIZ

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I find serious novels dull. I am loitering through Pepys again, & have been reading Sidney’s Arcadia, Dr. Dee’s preface to Euclid, Thirion’s History of Arithmetic, Browning, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Montaigne (of which I have an old French copy), Mémoires de Casanova, Our Mutual Friend, some old Arithmetic & other old books.” He finished by remarking that the dictionary was coming along quickly. This letter gives a nice sense of the tone of Peirce’s life as the year was winding down. The final weeks of 1888 were dominated by the prospect of finally having full occupancy of the Quick house and plans for its renovation.

      Peirce woke up at about 7:30 a.m. on New Year’s Day, 1889, at Quinn’s Halfway House, near Quicktown, from which he and Juliette would direct preparations for their move into their new house. He divided his day in a way that modeled how he would spend his time during the coming year. He devoted the morning to philosophy, in particular, to starting a new book, “Reflections on the Logic of Science” (sel. 31). After lunch he and Juliette drove to Port Jervis in their carriage to see a carpenter about an addition to the house. In later years, when Henry S. Leonard traveled from Harvard to interview elderly Milford residents about Peirce’s life, Mrs. Robert G. Barkley recalled that Peirce “drove a Phaeton with a white horse and gently waved a whip as he drove along.”³⁵ Upon leaving Port Jervis, the Peirce’s crossed back into Pennsylvania to the village of Metamoras where they saw a second carpenter. After dinner that evening, Peirce and Juliette worked on accounts—Peirce noted in his diary that “there was some disagreement.” Later he turned to galley proofs for the Century Dictionary, which he noted had reached “game,” and to his overdue Coast Survey reports—at least he recorded these tasks in his diary for 1 January.

      A few days later the reconstruction of the Quick house was underway and, although more or less completed stages would be reached, remodeling would continue with varying degrees of intensity and disruption for the rest of Peirce’s life, and even afterwards under Juliette’s direction. Their home would become their prison in the way that Peirce’s philosophical mansion would imprison him, catching him up in a vision he could not resist but causing him much suffering as he steadfastly struggled against insurmountable odds to achieve it. But as 1889 lay before him, there was good reason to suppose that his hopes for his estate, as well as for his philosophy, would be realized. He could not then know what a great struggle he would endure trying to build these parallel edifices. Leonard recorded some anecdotes that give an idea of how this process appeared from the outside. Miss May Westbrook remembered: “When the Peirce’s built their house they built around an original house on the property. Mr. and Mrs. Peirce sometimes quarreled. Once when I was at their house for dinner the quarrel was violent. I don’t know what it was about because they talked in French. Mrs. Peirce was an unreasonable person.” Miss Westbrook noted that whenever she visited, Peirce was always in his study except for meals, but she added that when Juliette was in Europe, Peirce “took one meal a day here with mother. He was very pleasant. Mrs. Peirce sometimes spoke well of him and sometimes not.” Gifford Pinchot also talked with Leonard about the Peirce’s’ reconstruction project: “The alterations were of an absurd character. The attempt was to make the house irresistible as an Inn or a Gentleman’s Estate. Mrs. Peirce had two passions: devotion to Peirce and interest in land. In the latter respect she showed a characteristic common among French peasants. Peirce was extremely impractical. He submitted to her plans for alterations in the house loyally and cheerfully, living in one room while all the others were in a turmoil with carpenters.” Pinchot remembered how in 1887 and 1888 he had discussed forestry with Peirce and that those discussions had been instrumental in his decision to study forestry in Germany. Pinchot went on to become Theodore Roosevelt’s Chief Forester and would play a large role in establishing the National Park System in the United States. He also recalled that it was Peirce who had calculated the settings for a sundial built into the stone front of Grey Towers, “so that it gave exact normal time for the longitude and latitude” and that he “calculated the true North and South that were marked in the sidewalk in front of the house.” These markings are still visible today.

      The book Peirce started writing on 1 January (sel. 31), might have been an outgrowth of Chapter VII of Peirce’s “A Guess at the Riddle,” where he had made a number of the same observations he now planned to examine in detail—for example, that in order to have any hope of making progress in physics, we cannot simply work through one hypothesis after another without some hint to guide our initial choices. Peirce wanted to set out in detail the logic of science that supported his guess and that would recommend it as the hypothesis to guide physics. It may be that Peirce intended “Reflections” to be his “Illustrations of the Logic of Science” (W3:242–74) brought up to date. It is interesting that on the following day, 2 January, Francis Russell wrote to Peirce that “when your ‘Illustrations of the Logic of Science’ came out the papers initiated in me a new era in my mental history and I am one of a necessary many who recognize in you a master to be followed.” Russell then asked Peirce if he had changed his views since the “Illustrations.” Peirce replied on the 8th, “Suffice it to say that I have not given up any of the more fundamental of my younger opinions so far as I recollect them, but am perhaps more sceptical & materialistic.”

      Peirce did not get very far with “Reflections.” He began the second chapter with a discussion of the doctrine of chances but soon decided that a prior discussion of mathematics was needed. On 9 January he wrote a few paragraphs of a new draft of Chapter 2 and continued it on the 17th, but that was the end of it. On that day he began working on a mathematical paper, “Note on the Analytical Representation of Space as a Section of Higher Dimensional Space” (sel. 32), elaborating on a proof he had just sent to Simon Newcomb with the hope, soon dashed by Newcomb, that it would be published in the American Journal of Mathematics. It may have been Peirce’s interest in the mathematical foundations of the logic of science that caught him up in new mathematical investigations, or it may have been his work on hydrodynamics, but he continued working on mathematical topics throughout January and there are a number of other 1889 selections that may have been composed around that time. These include “Ordinal Geometry” (sel. 33), “Mathematical Monads” (sel. 34), “On a Geometrical Notation” (sel. 38), “On the Number of Forms of Sets” (sel. 39), “The Formal Classification of Relations” (sel. 40), “Dual Relatives” (sel. 41), and “Notes on Geometry of Plane Curves without Imaginaries” (sel. 42). Some of these papers, perhaps especially selection 34, and also the mathematical chapter of selection 31, may have been inspired by Peirce’s January study of Kempe’s paper on mathematical forms, and others may have been outgrowths of his work on mathematical definitions for the Century or his correspondence with mathematicians such as Alfred Mayer and his own brother Jem.

      Peirce’s enthusiasm for what was coming to pass in Quicktown was dampened by a continuing decline in Juliette’s health. His diaiy reveals his growing concern. On 3 January he noted that “Juliette weighs 104 with thick clothes & heavy shawl” and on the 6th he wrote: “Much alarmed about Juliette’s health. She spits so much blood. Juliette getting quite ill. If I should lose her, I would not survive her. Therefore, I must turn my whole energy to saving her.” Peirce suspected tuberculosis and knew that living in a house under construction in the winter time was putting Juliette at serious risk, so he arranged for her to travel to the South. She left sometime in February, staying for a time in Brunswick, a resort town on the Atlantic coast of Southern Georgia, and then offshore at the very exclusive and expensive Jeckyl Island Club, where, at the request of Mr. Henry E. Howland, she had been extended privileges for two weeks. From Jeckyl Island, Juliette traveled to the new Hotel Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine where, Peirce wrote to Jem, “she found the greatest benefit” (30 March 89). She telegraphed Peirce from Jacksonville, Florida, on 30 March to say that she was much improved and would like to return, but Peirce tried to discourage her: “You must not think of coming back here so soon. This house is very unwholesome. I have not had a single well day since you left. The spring air would also be the death of you. You cannot come back till after the carpenter work is done…. We are rushing the work all we can, but I don’t expect it will be ready for you to move into the front part before May 1 & not into the new part for another month at the very least. To

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