Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

---

[242] that few have the faith to follow them and change their trails into high roads. Peirce was fortunate in that two powerful minds, Josiah Royce and William James, were able to follow some of the directions from his Pisgah heights and thus take possession of rich philosophic domains. What further gains philosophy might make by developing other of his numerous suggestive ideas, is not an affair of history. We may note, however, that in our own day the field of mathematical logic which he developed has become the ground which supports our latest philosophic movement, neo-realism.

Peirce was by antecedents, training, and occupation a scientist. A son of Benjamin Peirce, the great mathematician, he had a thorough knowledge of pure mathematics and of modern laboratory methods. He made important contributions not only to mathematical or symbolic logic but also to photometric astronomy, geodesy, and psycho-physics, as well as to philology. For many years he was engaged in the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, and one of his researches on the pendulum received unusual attention from the International Geodetic Congress to which he was the first American delegate. He was, therefore, predominantly concerned with a philosophy of science.

Science, according to Peirce, is a method of banishing doubt and arriving at stable ideas. Commonly we fix beliefs by reiterating them, by surrounding them with emotional safeguards, and by avoiding anything which casts doubt upon them—by ‘the will to believe.’ This method breaks down when the community ceases to be homogeneous. Social effort, by the method of authority, to eliminate diversity of beliefs also fails in the end to prevent reflective doubts from cropping up. Hence we must finally resort to the method of free inquiry and let science stabilize our ideas by clarifying them. How can this be done? Early in his life in Cambridge Peirce came under the personal influence of Chauncey Wright, and in a little club of which Wright was the strongest spirit he first developed the doctrine of pragmatism. The Newtonian experimental philosopher, as Wright had pointed out, always translates general propositions into prescriptions for attaining new experimental facts, and this led Peirce to formulate the general maxim of pragmatism that the meaning of any concept is to be found in ‘all the conceivable ’