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.

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[244] everything happens absolutely in accordance with certain simple eternal laws. He was too well acquainted with laboratory methods and the theory of probability to share the common belief that the existence of such universal laws is demonstrated by science. ‘Try to verify any law of nature and you will find that the more precise your observations, the more certain they will be to show irregular departures from law.’ The Platonic faith that nature is created on simple geometric lines has undoubtedly been a powerful weapon against those who would have supernatural interferences interrupt the work of science. But there is no empirical evidence to prevent us from saying that all the so-called constants of nature are merely instances of variation between limits so near each other that their difference can be neglected for practical purposes. Impressed by the modern theory of gases and the statistical view of nature as developed by Willard Gibbs and Maxwell, and perhaps also influenced by Wright's doctrine as to ‘cosmic weather,’ Peirce came to believe in the primacy of chance. What we call law is habit, and what we call matter is inert mind. The universe develops from a chaos of feeling, and the tendency to law is itself the result of an accidental variation which has grown habitual with things. The limiting ratios which we call laws of nature are thus themselves slowly changing in time. This conception of the universe growing in its very constitution may sound mythologic. But it has at least the merit of an empirically supported rational alternative to the mechanical mythology. In many respects it anticipated the philosophy of Bergson. In the hands of James this tychism becomes a gospel of wonderful power in releasing men from the oppression of a fixed or ‘block’ universe, but in the hands of Peirce it was a philosophic support for the application of the fruitful theorems of scientific probability to all walks of life.

Unlike most of America's distinguished philosophers, Josiah Royce (1855-1916) was not brought up in New England. He was born in a mining town in California and received his philosophic education in the university of his own state, at Johns Hopkins, and at Gottingen, where he studied under Lotze. Many diverse elements stimulated his subtle and acquisitive mind to philosophic reflection; the theistic evolutionism of the geologist Le Conte, the fine literary spirit of E. R.