Joe and list,
Your impression of Peirce's character is probably right, but I still insist
on I what I was trying to say:
In 1905, in "What Pragmatism Is", when Peirce distinguishes pragmaticism
from other species of prope-positivism, he writes (and this was published in
The Monist) the following:
"first, its retention of a purified philosophy; secondly, its full
acceptance of the main body of our instinctive beliefs; and thirdly, its
strenuous insistence upon the truth of scholastic realism (or a close
approximation to that, well-stated by the late Dr. Francis Ellingwood Abbot
in the Introduction to his Scientific Theism)." (EP2, p. 339; CP 5.423).
In this paper, after saying that he had awaited in vain, "for a good many
years, some particularly opportune conjuncture of circumstances that might
serve to recommend his notions of the ethics of terminology", Peirce tells
us that "finding his bantling "pragmatism" so promoted", he "feels it is
time to kiss his child good-bye and relinquish it to its higher destiny,
while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he
begs to announce the birth of the word "pragmaticism", which is ugly enough
to be safe from kidnappers" (EP2, pp. 334-335; CP 5. 414) - Royce is not
once mentioned in this paper.
In "The First Rule of Logic" (the fourth Cambridge College Lecture,
delivered on 21 February 1898), where Peirce puts forward the rule that "in
order to learn you must desire to learn" and, at least implicitly, contrasts
his "Will to Learn" with the "Will to Believe" of James, just after having
recalled ,"one of the most wonderful features of reasoning and one of the
most important philosophemes in the doctrine of science, (...) namely, that
reasoning tends to correct itself, and the more so the more wisely its plan
is laid", and said that "it appears that this marvellous self-correcting
property of Reason, which Hegel made so much of, belongs to every sort of
science, although it appears as essential, intrinsic, and inevitable only in
the highest type of reasoning which is induction. But the logic of relatives
shows that the other types of reasoning, deduction and retroduction are not
so thoroughly unlike induction as they might be thought (...). Namely, in
the logic of relatives, treated let us say, in order to fix our ideas, by
means of those existential graphs of which I gave a slight sketch in the
last lecture, [we] begin a deduction by writing down all the premises. Those
different premises are then brought into one field of assertion, that is,
are colligated, as Whewell would say, or joined into one copulative
proposition. Thereupon, we proceed attentively to observe the graph. It is
as
much an operation of observation as is the observation of bees",
the following bracketing material was struck out : "(I am happy to find
this points receives valuable confirmation of an entirely independent
thinker, whose care and thoroughness gives weight to all he says, Dr.
Francis Ellingwood Abbot)" (EP2, p. 45)
Royce is mentioned in MS 908 "The Basis of Pragmaticism" ("fifth attempt,
probably written in December 1905"):
"I have already given the reasons which convince me that if philosophy is to
be made a science, the very first price we must pay for it must be to
abandon all endeavor to make it literary. We must have a vocabulary in which
every word has a single meaning, whether definite or vague; and to this end
we must not shrink from inventing new words whenever they are really needed.
(...) It was in seeking to fulfill that condition that I invented the word
pragmaticism to denote precisely what I had formerly invented pragmatism to
mean (...). (...) I ventured to recommend that this word should be used to
denote that general opinion about the nature of the clear apprehension of
thought which is shared by those whom all the world calls pragmatists, and
who so call themselves, no matter how one or other of us might state the
substance of that accord. After a good deal of reflection and careful
rereading, I have come to think that the common pragmatistic opinion
aforesaid is that every thought (...) has a meaning beyond the immediate
content of the thought itself, so that it is as absurd to speak of a thought
in itself as it would be to say of a man that he was a husband in himself or
a son in himself, and this not only because thought always refers to a real
or fictitious object, but also because it supposes itself to be
interpretable.
If this analysis of the pragmatistic opinion be correct, the logical breath
of the term pragmatist is hereby enormously enlarged. For it will become
predicable not only of Mr. Royce (who, apart from this analysis, impresses
me quite decidedly as a pragmatist), but also of a large section of the
logical world, -perhaps the majority-, since ancient times" (EP2, pp.
360-361).
I will not recall here what James, on March 31 (1903), five days after
Peirce's first lecture, on pragmatism and the normative sciences, what James
wrote in a letter he sent to Dickinson S. Miller (then a Harvard instructor
in philosophy and psychology, and someone who had sent a letter in support
of Peirce's application to the Carnegie Institution" - one can read that in
Patricia Ann Turrisi (ed.), Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right
Thinking. The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism, pp. 10-11 (read also what
James wrote to Mrs. Jacobi in a letter on May 15, 1903, in Patricia Ann
Turrisi's "Introduction", p. 15).
But I will copy here part of the letter that Peirce wrote, in October 1904,
to Christine Ladd-Franklin (then a lecturer in logic and psychology at Johns
Hopkins and one of his former students), also in this "Introduction" (p.17):
"In the spring of 1903 I was invited, by the influence of James, Royce and
Munsterberg to give a course of lectures in Harvard University on
Pragmatism. I had intended to print them; but James said he could not
understand them himself and could not recommend their being printed. I do
not
myself think there is any difficulty in understanding them, but all modern
psychologists are so soaked in sensationalism that they can not understand
anything that does not mean that, and mistranslate into the ideas of
[Wilhelm]
Wundt whatever one says about logic. (...) How can I, to whom nothing seems
so thoroughly real as generals, and who regard Truth and Justice as
literally the most powerful powers in the world,expect to be understood by
the thoroughgoing Wundtian?" (Christine Ladd-Franklin, "Charles S. Peirce at
the Johns Hopkins", The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific
Matters, 13 (1916), pp. 719-720).
What I do not agree is with your suggestion that Peirce "decided
subsequently to accommodate himself to Royce's sensibility as much as
possible" (why not the other way round? that Royce, particularly after
Peirce's Lectures of 1898 (the Cambridge Conferences), was influenced by
Peirce?
Theresa
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