LITMIR.BIZ

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      The period from 1887 through the spring of 1890, though not without hope and accomplishment, was a time of disillusionment and defeat for Peirce.¹ Only a few years earlier, Peirce’s father, Benjamin, the great mathematician and astronomer, had proudly proclaimed to the Boston Radical Club that his son Charles would carry on his life’s work and would develop and fertilize vistas he had only glimpsed. No one doubted it. Charles’s star was rising. During the first half of the 1880s, he was one of America’s elite scientists and the only American logician known the world over. Peirce had just begun teaching at Johns Hopkins and had every reason to expect that he would spend his life there as Professor of Logic. But in April 1883, Peirce divorced his first wife, Melusina Fay, and married his reputed mistress, Juliette Froissy Pourtalais, a woman of unknown, or at least of unspoken, origin.² Nothing for Peirce would ever be the same again. Within a year he had been forced out of Johns Hopkins and by 1886 his scientific career with the Coast and Geodetic Survey was falling apart. By 1887 Peirce had come to be spurned by the society that had nurtured him—he was no longer welcome even in his family home. A sense of defeat grew in Peirce as he struggled with the realization that all the paths he had chosen were blocked and that he could neither have the life he wanted nor provide for Juliette the life her extravagant tastes demanded. In April 1887, Peirce and Juliette packed up and moved to Milford, Pennsylvania, a mountain village with a small but thriving French community, where they hoped to make a new start and where they imagined they could afford to live well. At first Peirce expected his exile to be temporary but he soon came to understand that he would be a man apart. When in the spring of 1890, mainly for the income, he helped organize a journalistic attack on Herbert Spencer, Peirce signed his contributions “Outsider.” That is what he had become.

      In 1884, after his dismissal from Johns Hopkins, Peirce moved to Washington D.C. to refocus his career on his scientific work for the Coast and Geodetic Survey. In July he had begun an intensive program of field operations which he expected to continue until a vast expanse of the continental United States was linked through gravity determinations and added to the international geodetic network that would serve to calculate the figure of the Earth. This was a principal concern of mathematical geodesy and Peirce had already contributed to its solution (W4: sel. 76). At some point he knew he would have to turn a growing mass of data into a publishable report on gravity, but he kept putting it off in favor of continued field work. He assumed that when the time came to prepare reports he would have whatever computing help he needed, as he always had before. Then in March 1885, Grover Cleveland was inaugurated as the twenty-second President of the United States and Peirce’s plans were dashed. Cleveland came to power intent on reforming government service and by July had targeted the Coast Survey as the agency he would make an example of.³ Superintendent Julius Hilgard was fired and all administrators and field officers, including Peirce, were subjected to intense scrutiny. Frank Manly Thorn, a lawyer and friend of Cleveland, was installed as acting superintendent to carry out the President’s reform agenda. Greatly discouraged by what was happening, Peirce left Washington in March 1886 and moved with Juliette to New York City. He supposed that New York would be a better place to start a new life in case his Survey job should be lost. He carried out pendulum field operations at the Stevens Institute station in Hoboken until August when Thorn relieved him of further field duty and ordered him to prepare for publication the backlog of results already obtained. Funding for field operations had been slashed and Peirce’s gravity work, among the most costly, could no longer be supported. If pendulum operations were to continue they would have to be scaled back to meet only the demands of practical science, not those of pure science that guided Peirce. On 20 August Peirce wrote to University of Wisconsin astronomer, Edward S. Holden: “The president seems to have decided to keep Thorn in as Superintendent as long as he can, and under the influence of these men of Red Tape all the life and energy has gone from the Survey…. I am utterly discouraged and disgusted, and want to get out….” In October, trying to cheer him up, Peirce’s mother wrote: “Cleveland is a Dolt.”

      Somehow Peirce managed to hang on to his Survey job for another five years, although it seems certain that he would have given it up many times over had he not needed the income so desperately. Peirce was clearly disaffected and frequently spoke of resigning, but then always reconsidered. His relations with Survey headquarters became increasingly strained, sometimes quite bitter, and except for brief periods of respite, the remainder of his tenure was marked by a suspicion in Washington that Peirce was not doing enough work and by a concern on Peirce’s part that there was a cabal conspiring to get him dismissed. One period of promise came just after July 1889 when Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, a trained scientist, succeeded Thorn as Superintendent. But it soon became evident that Mendenhall’s plans for gravity determinations left no room for pendulum operations of the sort Peirce practiced. By the close of the period covered in the present volume, Peirce’s second major gravity report, representing years of labor, was at risk of being rejected for publication, and Mendenhall’s patience with Peirce was rapidly reaching its limit.

      Amidst the turmoil of a life in constant transition and a career that was falling apart, Peirce managed to carry on at least a thread of philosophical inquiry, inspired in part by his late work at Johns Hopkins and his reading of the 1885 books by Royce and Abbot, and fueled by his continuing lexicographic research for the Century Dictionary.⁴ In the August 1886 letter to Holden quoted above, Peirce added: “You remember that I told you something of a sort of evolutionist speculation of mine. This has grown much….” When he wrote to Holden, he had already begun to write a book entitled One, Two, Three in which he would make a guess about the constitution of the universe and use his categories as the key to an all-encompassing system of philosophy (W5: sels. 47–50). After his move to Milford in 1887 this work would grow into his “A Guess at the Riddle” (sels. 22–28) and, although never finished, it would set the course for much of his subsequent thought. But as 1886 drew to a close, it was logic that was uppermost on Peirce’s mind. For a while he resumed work on a book on general logic (W5: sel. 54) which would evolve into his “How to Reason” of 1894. But as his insecurity with his career increased, his interest turned from the advancement of the science of logic to how he could use his specialty to make a living adequate to the demands of the lifestyle he and Juliette had set for themselves in Baltimore in the first months of their marriage. Peirce’s income had taken a serious hit with the loss of his lectureship at Johns Hopkins, and now that his Coast Survey salary was in danger, he had to find a substantial new source of income. He began writing elementary accounts of his logic of relatives (W5: sels. 55–56) and Boolean algebra (sel. 1), perhaps initially for a course of lectures he hoped to deliver at the University of Wisconsin, but at least in the latter case it is likely he had paying students in mind.

      Peirce entered 1887 with some confidence that he had found a way to survive his anticipated separation from the Survey. Were there not hundreds, nay, thousands of citizens abroad in the land in the greatest need of improving their reasoning skills? Would not a good course in reasoning, customized for individual capabilities and taught by a master logician, increase opportunities and, in general, better the lives of students—and thereby serve well the country as a whole? Could not one expect to attract large numbers of occasional students to sign up for a course of study that virtually guaranteed a high degree of self-improvement? Peirce was convinced that he had found a niche and that with clever marketing and efficient operations he could make good money with a correspondence course on the art of reasoning. He wrote to Cyrus W. Field, financier for the first transatlantic cable, that for years he had carried in his pocketbook a clipping quoting Field on the value of right reason: “My fortune was made by working a gold-mine, and that gold-mine is the power of right reason.” Peirce might not make a fortune, but surely he would make a good living.

      To set this promising plan into motion, Peirce needed capital. Brochures would have to be printed, lessons duplicated, typewriters purchased, assistants hired, and field-agents engaged. Peirce wanted fifteen hundred students and imagined that once things got rolling he would send out around five hundred letters a day. He would begin by advertising in popular magazines and would send out a hundred thousand circulars. He wrote to his cousin, Henry Cabot Lodge, and asked for a loan to get his scheme off the ground. Lodge declined and apparently with no other prospects Peirce decided to start up piecemeal. In May an advertisement for his course circular (reproduced on p. 14)

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