List: While searching through the *Collected Papers* for all instances of the word "habit," which I anticipate will be the next concept for me to explore in working out my "logic of ingenuity" thesis, I came across 6.490-491. This passage is presented as the conclusion of "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," which puzzled me because it was unfamiliar, despite the fact that I had read that paper several times in volume 2 of *The Essential Peirce*.
As it turns out, this is precisely the text that the editors of the latter deliberately chose to omit from page 447; it is the second half of the "first additament," which was not included at all in the original published version. As explained in note 14, they retained the first half of it because that is where Peirce most clearly presented the image of "a nest of three arguments" that he also discussed in the "second additament," which actually accompanied the article itself in *The Hibbert Journal* of October 1908. CP 6.490 includes some very interesting stuff, perhaps most notably what may have been Peirce's last attempt at outlining his cosmology. This seems to refute the claim of Thomas Short and others that he abandoned all such speculation after the final lecture of the Cambridge Conferences series in 1898, as published in *Reasoning and the Logic of Things*. I may have more to say about that subject at another time; for now, I am more intrigued by the first few sentences of CP 6.491. CSP: Among the many pertinent considerations which have been crowded out of this article, I may just mention that it could have been shown that the hypothesis of God's Reality is logically not so isolated a conclusion as it may seem. On the contrary, it is connected so with a theory of the nature of thinking that if this be proved so is that. Now there is no such difficulty in tracing experiential consequences of this theory of thinking as there are in attempting directly to trace out other consequences of God's reality. As Bowman L. Clarke pointed out in a 1977 *Transactions* article, "Peirce's Neglected Argument," Peirce here attempted to address an important way in which he acknowledged that the retroductive conjecture of the Reality of God is unlike a typical *scientific *hypothesis--it is not amenable to deductive explication and inductive corroboration. Peirce proposed the alternative of going through those steps with his "theory of the nature of thinking" instead, because "the hypothesis of God's Reality is logically ... connected so with" this theory that "proving" the latter would suffice to "prove" the former. This raises a few interesting questions. 1. To what specifically was Peirce referring here as "a theory of the nature of thinking"--the three stages of a "complete inquiry" and their "logical validity," as laid out in sections III and IV of the paper, or something else? 2. How exactly is "this theory of thinking" *logically *connected with "the hypothesis of God's reality"? 3. What would be some "experiential consequences of this theory of thinking" that we could, with comparatively little difficulty, deductively trace and inductively test? 4. What exactly would it mean to "prove" Peirce's "theory of the nature of thinking," such that "the hypothesis of God's reality" would thereby also be "proved"? I have some tentative thoughts about these matters, including a couple of ideas that I found in the secondary literature, but would appreciate seeing what others have to say initially. Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt
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