Reverence for the Relations of Life: Re-imagining Pragmatism via Josiah Royce's Interactions with Peirce, James, and Dewey

By Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J.

Josiah Royce and William James lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Irving Street, just two doors apart, and Charles Peirce grew up only blocks away. John Dewey was born and educated in nearby Vermont. These four great thinkers shared more than geographic space; they engaged in a series of formative philosophical discussions. By tracing the interactions of Royce (1855–1916) with James, Peirce, and Dewey, Oppenheim "re-imagines pragmatism" in a way that highlights the late Royce's role as mediator and favors the "seed-plant" image of O. W. Holmes, Jr., over the corridor image of Papini.

Josiah Royce emphasized that communities of all sizes—ranging from families to towns—needed "reverence for the relations of life" not only to thrive but to survive. This theme permeates the dialectic of Royce’s interactions with Peirce, James, and Dewey. Oppenheim analyzes the agreement and disagreement of these thinkers on the method and content of philosophy, skepticism and intelligibility, and nominalism and intentionality, as he uncovers their varied stances toward transcendent Reality.

Oppenheim repudiates Ralph Barton Perry’s tactic of using Royce as a foil to display James positively, by offering a richer portrait of Royce. Oppenheim calls attention to Royce’s "doctrine of two levels" and its effects on the distinction of human and super-human, by showing the contrast of Royce’s "third attitude of will" against two primarily self-centered attitudes of will, and by examining the roles of Spirit, Community, and semiotic process in Royce’s late thought.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780268159870

Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J.

Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J., is professor of philosophy at Xavier University. He is widely regarded as an expert on Josiah Royce, brings more than 40 years of study to bear on this magnum opus. Reverence for the Relations of Life will be essential reading for those interested in American philosophy and theology.

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Introduction:

Reverence for the Relations of Life

Josiah Royce concluded his history of California by studying the different conditions found in both California’s early mining communities and the hustling, bustling, earliest days of booming San Francisco. Royce summarized his findings on why some of these early communities boomed and bust through greed and corruption while others gradually took root and grew into orderly, life-supporting, healthy communities—admittedly, through continuous struggle. He detected that decay came to those which sought what he called just fullness of life—more money for more drink, sex, gambling, shows, and power plays. However, those communities that sensed and respected the common good burgeoning in their midst—that is, appreciated the State in any of it forms—took root, developed strength, and increased their healthy, orderly procedures to enrich all their member citizens (Calif. 500). Those communities whose members experienced and fostered a reverence for the relations of life passed the test of a developing community which enduringly supported the growth of its members.

Social anthropologists have found that families gathered round a Thanksgiving table frequently experience how precious family bonds are for members who have not cultivated them for many months. They also document the symbolic meaning created when spouses, exchanging rings at a marriage, often grasp the significance of the We they are creating. In cases where a mother places a U.S. flag on her soldier-son’s grave on Memorial Day, such scientists have not determined whether the mother’s patient sacrificial love for her country costs her more over the long haul than her soldier-son’s deed of heroic patriotism cost him.

When the signers of the Declaration of Independence staked their lives, energies, and possessions because of their deep dedication to the life of a new free nation, they revealed their reverence for the relations of life. General Washington kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge, the boy Lincoln educating himself by reading a book in the firelight of a log cabin’s hearth, and firemen risking their lives in the toppling buildings of the World Trade Center—all symbolize true reverence for the relations of life, the same theme Royce kept emphasizing throughout his life.

Genuine reverence stands out more clearly when seen by contrast. People with pietistic bows often ooze a phoney reverence, as do those who practice their rituals merely routinely. So, too, do those who suavely disdain embarrassing facts or coolly override others by not listening to them. Phoney reverence, wearing many masks, radiates irresponsibility, just as irreverence does in its more obvious forms. In these irreverence taunts, mocks, and sneers, tends to yell loudly, to rush rashly into affairs, and to stick out the tongue. Reckless of others, it turns a blind eye to bereavements, betrayals, and other tragedies, grabs at the first opportunity, and overpowers the weak: the children, elderly, and many of the world’s women. In its more sophisticated guises irreverence grows haughtily skeptical, raises cynical looks, focuses on what most successful people do. In sum, it does almost anything to pull attention away from the vital, from the genuinely nourishing, from the authentically needed, from the sacred and the holy.

A person who has what Royce calls the true sense of life, who reveres life and its relations, somehow senses within live relationships what the Psalmist felt—such a presence of the Author of Life that a reverential fear of the Lord stirs as the most appropriate response. In the genuine communion of spouses a call to awe before emergent life can be and often is felt and appreciated. So, too, when authentic union is felt in a family, or between true friends, or in authentic educational experiences, in deep interpersonal communications, in the genuine mutual trust of compacting business partners as together they face a risky future, in a scientific group’s authentic searching for further findings, and in an artist’s creative in-touch-ness with his or her inmost genius.

Clearly, such reverence needs to be moderated by simplicity and strengthened by depth. Only in this way can it be preserved from the excesses of patent cant or latent hypocrisy and from the defects of a calloused insensitivity to others and a sophisticated suppression of this awe. Millennia before Royce, the prophet Isaiah portrayed how reverently the Servant of Yahweh neither broke a bruised reed nor extinguished a smoldering stalk (Is 42:2–3). More recently, Rabbi Abraham Heschel described a tendency full of danger for authentic American life, We teach children how to measure, how to weigh; we fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe.¹ So, the book at hand highlights the presence or absence of this vital reverence in the lives and works of Royce, Peirce, James, and Dewey.

What springs from this reverence for life? In response, Royce pointed to a radical choice for a genuine community and a constant self-dedication to it—something he called the third attitude of will. This basic orientation is alone salvific while the attractive first and second attitudes of will (i.e., uncontextualized self-assertiveness or detached self-withdrawal from the lives and interests of others) call a person to be continually en garde since both of these attitudes lead to or further immerse a person in the lost state of the individual. Equipped with this basic third attitude of will, one can achieve and maintain the necessary balance between genuine individualism and authentic Loyalty.

The ultimate root of this reverence for life and this third attitude of will lies in the problem and mystery of the Absolute. William James, fearful of a dominating Absolute, rejected almost every Absolute. John Dewey apodictically excluded all Absolutes. In contrast, Charles Peirce recognized the Absolute as a teleological ideal. Meanwhile, Royce’s religious insight about the truth of the Absolute deepened through the decades. It so transformed itself from being interpreted simply as the philosophical Absolute of an All-knower into his late period’s universal Interpreter Spirit. The latter, according to the late Royce, needed further to be interpreted through the lenses of both a Self and a Community if a person wanted an adequately fair view of It.

Significantly, the late Royce held on tenaciously to his famous Fourth Conception of Being, his Absolute or Individual of Individuals, proposed in the middle period Gifford Lectures. There his interpretation moved beyond the external object’s total independence of the knowing subject, beyond mysticism’s full identification of finite knower and the Absolute, and beyond the sum of merely valid possibility to that socially networked processing world of uniquely individual fact. Without this interpretation of Being, a thinker lacked contact with Reality as judged. Yet one scarcely reached this fourth interpretation of Being without both Royce’s intelligently guided voluntarism of the third attitude of will and the life of lovingly loyal decisiveness which springs from this attitude.²

Some other significant themes lie in the way our four thinkers addressed the relationship between the human and superhuman, between the natural and the supernatural. Linked to these distinctions is Royce’s fundamental doctrine of the two levels of human existence and consciousness. Logically Peirce’s thirdness may have foreshadowed this doctrine which factually distinguished Royce from James and Dewey. Royce’s claims to a few absolute truths rest securely on the logical foundation of his Reflective Method. Finally, the late Royce’s kind of social realism, quite distinct from the extreme realism which the middle Royce opposed, was based on the unending process of interpretive social action which through community process brings contrasting selves into growing individuation and contrasting parts of truth into growing coherence. This doctrine of community realism stands out as indissolubly linked to Royce’s late views of the individual and its identification. Alerted to such themes, the reader can more easily detect them as they emerge in the following chapters.

PARTI

Royce and Peirce

CHAPTER1

We and Royce Meet Charles Peirce

In his review of The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, Robert Burch states that its author, John Clendenning, succeeds in emphasizing Royce’s relation to Charles Sanders Peirce. Burch goes on to say that this relationship is one of such tremendous import for the study of Royce that it is almost impossible to trumpet it enough.¹ Clearly, the more one studies the late Royce, the more one detects the increasing Peirceanization and uniqueness of Royce’s mind. Although historians of classical American philosophy rightly avoid going to the extreme of claiming that Peirce’s mind also became Royceanized, they often lose sight of the interaction and increasing nexus of these two thinkers. Since Peirce was sixteen years older than Royce, first he and then the pragmatism he fathered deserve an introduction.

CHARLES PEIRCE

Amid that cultural and intellectual ferment which Van Wyck Brooks called the flowering of New England, Charles Sanders Peirce was born of Benjamin and Sarah Mills Peirce on 10 September 1839, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.² His father was Harvard’s outstanding mathematician and astronomer, acute both scientifically and religiously. He detected Charles’s precocity early on and personally supervised his education. Charles’s mother, Sarah, daughter of a U.S. Senator, was the heart of the family, lovingly serving her husband, daughter, and three sons. In this family, she especially indulged her eminent husband and her idiosyncratic son, Charles.

When eight years old Charles began his chemistry studies. To foster creativity and instill intellectual discipline, his father sometimes forced young Charles to play double dummy with him. Throughout the night, he corrected every logical mistake the lad made and required increased attention. His father tutored fifteen-year-old Charles in mathematics and challenged him to compete with him as the teenager developed. In 1855, as a Harvard freshman, Charles immersed himself in Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters and soon studied Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason so thoroughly that he had many of its passages memorized. The fact that in 1859 he graduated from Harvard in the lowest third of his class showed how little many of the traditional courses interested him. Yet it concealed Charles’s inner fire for science, logic, and mathematics which would soon flare up and blaze.

Almost throughout his life, Charles suffered from myalgia of the cheeks (trigeminal neuralgia). Its attacks occurred irregularly but caused intense pain. Charles regularly used ether and opium as a palliative and near the end of his life perhaps added cocaine. This affliction may have contributed to his two-sided behavior—pleasant, cheerful, and charming at times, but when hit by the neuralgia attacks, aloof, cold, impatient, with occasional outbursts of violent temper.³

Something of his sensitivity toward religion expressed itself when he, as a Harvard senior, identified three religious events to start the record of his life. After a youthful period of atheism, he joined the Episcopal Church, without believing anything but the general essence and spirit of it, yet always wanting communion with it.⁴ Later he felt disdain for the dogmatic tone of Christianity’s basic claims and for the theologians who propounded them. As for religious actions, he generally abandoned going to church, except for a notable experience in 1892,⁵ and avoided denominational practices until nearly the end of his life when he sometimes used his Episcopal prayer book. Perhaps his aesthetic appreciation of the Mystery supremely admirable flowered most strongly in his famous 1908 article, A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God.⁶

From 1861 until 1891 Peirce served as a research scientist in the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. Doing so meant that at first he carried out scientific investigations in the swamps of Louisiana and on the mountains of Maine. Meanwhile he also pioneered in studying the measurements of the pendulum movements and stellar spectometry. In 1878 he published his astronomical studies in a work entitled Photometric Researches. Such investigations soon made scientific colleagues in Stuttgart, Paris, and London aware of his trailblazing work in astronomy, geodesy, and logic. In these ways he made an international name for himself among scientists and logicians.

In 1861, Charles entered the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. In 1872, he was a founding member of the Cambridge Metaphysical Club. There he fathered his idea of pragmatism—an idea that would seed a philosophical revolution. From 1879 to 1884, Peirce taught logic at The Johns Hopkins University and there created with his students a groundbreaking work, entitled Studies in Logic.

In 1862 he married Harriet Melusina Fay, familiarly known as Zina. This granddaughter of an Episcopal bishop reputedly calmed Charles’s unpredictable and flamboyant character. Yet by calling errant Charles to righteousness and conformity to the church doctrines she held, Zina took steps that hardly rendered their married life agreeable to him. Nor agreeable to her, once reports reached her of Charles’s apparent infidelity. They separated in 1876, and in 1883, only a few days after completing the formality of their divorce, Charles married Juliette Froissy. Hereupon upper-class New Englanders visited such a stigma upon Charles that it led to the termination of his five-year teaching position at Johns Hopkins as Lecturer in Logic. At Harvard, President Eliot’s aversion to Peirce led repeatedly to his being rejected from a possible teaching position there. Yet his friend, William James, often supported by Josiah Royce, occasionally succeeded in bringing Charlie into the Cambridge area to lecture on logic and pragmatism. Thus were born Peirce’s now-famous 1898 lectures, Reasoning and the Logic of Things, and his 1903 twofold lecture series, entitled Pragmatism, and Some Topics on Logic. Meanwhile Peirce was eking out partial support for himself and Juliette by drafting contributions to dictionaries and writing book reviews for the Nation until around 1906.

After being excluded from a teaching career and terminated from the Coastal Survey, Peirce descended into the nadir of his life. During his final twenty-six years (1888–1914), he lived with Juliette in an increasingly refurbished home which they called Arisbe, near Milford, Pennsylvania. Here he suffered extreme penury and lack of heat as he kept toiling upon the screeds of his works on logic and semiotics.

Of his years around 1897, Peirce wrote that they have been very miserable and unsuccessful years,—terrible beyond anything that the man of ordinary experience can possibly understand or conceive.⁷ After this existential low point and the moral renaissance that followed, his emphasis on human life’s summum bonum and the role of community in achieving it revealed his passionate commitment to becoming a more mature human person by exercising his imperative, "vir esto! Be a man!" Through the decades of destitution at Arisbe, his care for his second and often sickly wife radiated a compassion and tenderness that one might not readily expect from an acute logician like Peirce. Beside his physical affliction, he probably endured a manic-depressive personality, yet his labors toiled on relentlessly and precisely. Near the end, one of William James’s students discovered Charles in a rooming house in Cambridge, lying near death from malnutrition, so far had he fallen into abject poverty. And on several occasions Peirce threatened to take his life.

In this way a person can begin to tally up some of Peirce’s griefs—physical, economic, social, and psychological. Charles railed against the gospel of greed, which he saw animating America’s capitalistic system, especially its robber barons. For his unpaid debts he was so hounded by the New Jersey police that during several years he had to disguise himself in order to return to Arisbe. His final years amounted to a slow losing battle with a disease, probably cancer, which eventually caused his death. Thus no one acquainted with the life of Charles Sanders Peirce can avoid recognizing in him a man acquainted with sorrow. Still on the positive side, most of his encounters with so many sufferings seem to have made his mind more attentive, accurate, and perspicacious.

A century later, as his largely unpublished writings become published in chronological order, scholars are discovering the depth and brilliance of his work in the logic of relatives and the theory of signs. Today more and more scholars around the world recognize in Charles Peirce the greatest thinker America has produced.

PRAGMATISM

Charles Peirce regarded himself as the father of pragmatism. To trace accurately who fathered an idea can at times be more difficult than sometimes tracing physical fatherhood. Peirce himself traced pragmatism’s ancestry in modern times back to Berkeley, Kant, and Comte among others and identified Alexander Bain as its grandfather because of the latter’s definition of belief as that upon which a man is prepared to act.⁸ Yet of pragmatism as a clearly conceived and articulated method of ascertaining the meanings of hard words and abstract concepts Peirce claimed to be the principal initiator or father, though credit for first popularizing the term pragmatism needed to go to William James. From his reading of Peirce’s articles of 1878, the young Royce already caught something of pragmatism’s spirit and gradually developed a philosophy which in his late years he called absolute pragmatism. From the start, then, it seems fitting to grow familiar with the term pragmatism and some of its meanings, not least of all because this book calls the reader to re-imagine pragmatism.

Through the decades the term pragmatism has acquired a rainbow of meanings. In popular and business usages, pragmatism and pragmatic often mean just get the job done with amoral efficiency. This sense may not be identified fairly with the two mainly logical meanings of pragmatism that follow, since both of these require an ethical nerve, at least implicitly.

Peirce drew his inspiration from the hypothetical imperatives embedded in the Kantian means-end relationship—e.g., "If you want Z (as an end), do X and Y (as means). Yet Peirce was also influenced by British thinkers Alexander Bain and J. S. Mill, by evolutionists Charles Darwin and Chauncey Wright, by lawyers Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Nicholas St. John Green, and by physiologist William James. These latter four members of the Cambridge Metaphysical Club concurred with Peirce around 1872 that if an idea is meaningful, it tends to be acted upon; that is, it is a plan of action" with an inner purpose. The faithful logical working out of a plan of action requires that human reason grasp the connection between a definite human purpose and all its consequences, that is, all the feasibly conceivable and experientially verifiable consequences of the idea. Interacting with Peirce, these four club members also concurred with him when he summarized his pragmatism into what he called a maxim.

Peirce’s pragmatic maxim aimed at further clarifying our ideas. In Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1901), Peirce put his maxim as follows: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object (CP 5.2).

When interpreting this maxim, William James construed the effects (or consequences) of an idea or belief to lie in what can be experienced internally or externally in the now or near future. James’s followers interpreted the maxim to consist basically in a forward-looking bet about the practical outcome of a plan of action. For example, when one wagers that a particular law (= plan of action) will make a judge decide a case in a particular way (= future consequences), then one is using the pragmatic maxim in James’s way.

Peirce counteracted this Jamesian interpretation by refining his maxim through the years. He insisted instead on the long-range conceivable consequences of an idea or belief. Although he was positivist enough to avoid extreme ontological statements which talk about beings-in-themselves, Peirce became increasingly aware of the opposite danger of nominalism. Since nominalists acknowledge individuals as the only realities, they excluded nature’s general laws, habits, and tendencies from the reality which scientists investigate.

By emphasizing the effects or consequences that can be experienced in the short range, James led to a split in the history of pragmatism. Instead, Peirce focused intently on being led by general ideas, as the true interpreters of our thought, that is, by those ideas which lead ultimately to further the development of concrete reasonableness (CP 5.3). Using the neologism, pragmaticism to identify his own version of pragmatism, he felt sure it would be ugly enough not to be picked up by kidnappers.⁹

Thus there arose what can be called Cambridge Pragmatism, with its emphasis on the working out of an idea’s consequences in formal logic (Peirce, Royce, Clarence I. Lewis, Willard Quine, Hillary Putnam) and Instrumentalist Pragmatism, with its emphasis on a logic for solving practical human problems, urban, educational, social, governmental (John Dewey, Jane Addams, George Herbert Mead, John Hermann Randall, Sidney Hook).

Beyond this basic two-pronged way of viewing pragmatism logically, several of its other significant varieties deserve attention. For pragmatists may also be: 1) nominalistic or realistic, 2) naturalist and relativist or idealist and absolutist, 3) prophetic or less than prophetic, and finally, if they are Christian pragmatists, they may be 4) inclusive or exclusive.¹⁰

On 1), the question arises: Is the living idea at the heart of pragmatism at least partly receptive of the real Other as both individual and general? Because Peirce detected that nominalism systematically perverts science, ethics, economics, and religion, he designed his pragmaticism to overthrow it.¹¹ Nominalists hold that sense-data and individuals are the only realities. Yet people use terms like nature, power, and matter, which nominalists hold as in themselves meaningless except as simply convenient descriptions of particular phenomena. John Dewey treats the felt qualities of an experienced situation as individual particulars, naked of real generals, yet useful for reinterpreting the situation into a problem that calls for a solution. For him generals are ideas constructed by human thinkers, not realities bleating their being to conscious humans, as Heidegger put it. Hence, Dewey represents a nominalistic form of pragmatism. James does too to some extent, despite his efforts to free himself of nominalism. Since Peirce and the late Royce rejected nominalism, they thought as realists in logic. Yet in their largely idealistic metaphysics they transcended any realism and idealism which operated below the level of triadic relations and the theory of signs.¹² In his final decade Royce held his own unique absolute voluntaristic pragmatism which he connected to the absolute objective idealism of his metaphysics.

On 2), the relativistic naturalist interprets pragmatism by adopting "enhancing the human" as his or her ultimate norm even as he or she rejects any transcendent divine source of the human. Ultimately, then, the ethic and esthetic of such a pragmatist become as relativistic as is any human person consciously detached from his or her humanly transcendent divine reality. By contrast, the pragmaticism of Peirce and the late Royce also stresses the probable and fallible at the proximate level. Yet it gets its ultimate and absolute norm through its union in present experience with a divine Interpreter Spirit who guides and corrects human sign sending and the human quest for reasonableness in logic, ethics, and esthetics.

On 3), in the sense here employed, pragmatism is prophetic, if through its logical armature it animates three dynamisms: a) It witnesses to a transcendent divine Other. b) It transmits a message concurrent with the human family’s religious traditions as found in the central themes of the Scriptures.¹³ c) It rightfully challenges hearers by summoning them to more responsible human living. Pragmatism is less than prophetic when it does not promote all three of these dynamisms.

On 4), pragmatism is Christian when it lives symbiotically with the individual pragmatist’s Faith in the now-living Christ as the risen glorified Person, who still bears his wounds yet breathes his healing reconciling Spirit both to her Community members and to all people. Christian pragmatism, while deeply imbued with Christian Faith and inspiration, becomes inclusive when it reaches out in its religious openness to all people and identifies in them sprouts of genuine religious life. It becomes exclusive when it claims that non-Christians do not live by Royce’s absolute religion of genuine loyalty toward the whole human family.¹⁴ When Christian pragmatism becomes exclusive or specifically Christian, it has become so directly linked with the dogmatic traditions of historical Christianity that its attachment to the risen Christ leads its advocates to underestimate the workings of the Logos-Spirit in non-Christian peoples. Peirce suggested that what is essential in Christianity can be found in other world religions. This paralleled Royce’s basic historical postulate that through the ages the human race has been subject to some more or less coherent process of education (PC 63). That is, the Logos-Spirit has been teaching to peoples of all civilized religions what Royce called the ‘Christian’ doctrine of life because its essential ideas form the verifiable results of the higher social religious experience of mankind (PC 42). This doctrine’s three essential ‘Christian’ ideas comprise the ideal of a universal community, the fallen state of humankind, and a saving or delivering Spirit—all synthesized by the idea of Grace.

For his very largely Christian audience in 1912–1913, Royce’s term Christian functioned ambiguously. It functions even more so in our own current multicultural world. When Royce chose to speak of the ‘Christian’ Doctrine of Life or of his three essential ‘Christian’ ideas, his term Christian operated as a historically tagged sign whose true bearing meant "genuine loyalist. Royce tagged these ideas as Christian because historically early Christian communities first happened to articulate these ideas explicitly. (Hence, the reader may find it usually helpful to read genuine loyalist where Royce wrote Christian.)¹⁵ Because of its reliance on the Logos-Spirit, Roycean pragmatism resembles Peirce’s by being religiously open to non-Christians and Christians alike without sinking into the exclusiveness of being exclusively or specifically Christian."

THE PEIRCE-ROYCE RELATIONSHIP: HIGH POINTS, MUTUAL INFLUENCES, AND SENSITIVITIES

As an instructor at Berkeley (1878–1882), Royce read philosophical articles voraciously, took notes on Peirce’s articles, and mentioned him in letters to William James. When the young Royce examined Peirce’s series of articles, Illustrations of the Logic of Science, he recognized with Peirce that to communicate effectively one needs concrete images and cases. This recognition operated throughout the lives of both thinkers. For example, Peirce employed his existential graphs and sketches while Royce used illustrations to render his writings concrete. In 1914 Royce paid tribute to the recently deceased Peirce by entitling his opening address at Berkeley Illustrations of the Philosophy of Loyalty.¹⁶

Concerning philosophy of religion, Royce concurred with the Peirce of 1878 that the aspiration toward the perfect . . . constitutes the essence of religion.¹⁷ Moreover, Peirce’s article of 1878, The Order of Nature, may well have stimulated Royce to hold eventually and explicitly that cultural evolution had birthed into all the higher religions those ideas of graced community, lost state, and atonement, which Royce would later call the three essential ‘Christian’ ideas (PC 215, 366).

At the meeting of the Johns Hopkins Metaphysical Club on 20 May 1880, which that day elected Charles S. Peirce as its president, members heard Royce’s paper On Purpose in Thought. By means of this paper Peirce recognized that the center of Royce’s thought lay in its purposive element. Subsequently, Peirce repeatedly highlighted in Royce’s thought this element of purpose (or voluntaristic teleology) and compared it favorably with the purposive element in his own thought.¹⁸ That same year, eighteen years before William James bruited the term pragmatism from a Berkeley podium, Royce told the Fortnightly Club there how to apply Peirce’s pragmatic maxim to ethical choices:

[T]o pay full and equal attention to all possible results [of conduct to be chosen] signifies choosing the act so that all its conceived future consequences, near or remote, shall form the most desirable aggregate. Or again, conceive all the expected consequences of an act, near and remote, as now and here present and given. Choose the act so that these consequences should form the most satisfactory present experience that is possible. This is the first rule of conduct, simply stated: In thy acts treat all the future as if it were present.¹⁹

A year later, on 30 October 1881, he completed his first published book, A Primer of Logical Analysis. Although already familiar with Peirce’s How to Make Our Ideas Clear, Royce here proposed a comparison-contrast procedure as his own way to clarify the meanings of terms people use. He was living out his earlier commitment to philosophize independently as well as earnestly and reverently (FE 7).

In a letter written to William James on 28 December 1881, Royce passionately opposed Peirce’s independent real and exclaimed against both him and James, "There is needed or known or conceivable above these facts of consciousness absolutely no transcendent reality" (LettersJR 108). This outburst signaled Royce’s sensitivity to a deep challenge uttered by a mind which deserved attention, even though it countered the idealistic position he had taken in his dissertation at Johns Hopkins.

After his dismissal from Johns Hopkins, Peirce found Royce’s The Religious Aspect of Philosophy²⁰ rekindling his philosophical interests.²¹ He discovered that for Royce the philosophical endeavor began with the dissatisfaction of doubt, moved through postulation or active faith, and arrived at some valued insight. Here Peirce could recognize strong parallels with his own view of the mind’s truth-seeking movement from doubt to belief.²² Again, when Royce said, Thinking is for us just the clarifying of our minds and not to do so is to sin against what is best in us, and is also to sin against humanity, Peirce could find parallels with his own understanding of pragmatism as a method for clarifying our ideas.²³ In The Possibility of Error, the pivotal eleventh chapter of Religious Aspect, Royce rejected Descartes’s way of chain-like deduction and favored Peirce’s inductive weaving of strands of evidence into a strong cable of reliable belief (392).

Overall, then, Peirce in his general appraisal determined that Royce’s dialectical method differed decidedly from Hegel’s and in its simplicity and general tone reminds us rather of the reasoning of Plato (CP 8.39). During the twentieth century, many historians of classical American philosophy seem to have forgotten this linkage of Royce with Plato. Yet Peirce hardly appears an injudicious appraiser of thought. Moreover, he reasserted this linkage fifteen years later when he described Royce as our American Plato (CP 8.109).

Nevertheless, something in Religious Aspect irritated Peirce. He found that Royce had put into the mouth of some impatient Thrasymachus the position that a merely possible judge sufficed to make a judgment erroneous or true. Peirce wrote in his unpublished review, If I understand what the opinion of this poor, Royce-forsaken Thrasymachus is, I coincide with it exactly (CP 5.222). Peirce seems to have interpreted this passage as a disguised attack on his own carefully wrought view that Reality draws a multitude of diverse truth-seekers into eventual consensus. He concluded, accordingly, that Royce had exceeded bounds when he claimed that a true or erroneous human judgment required an actually real All-knowing Judge.

Thus around 1886 Peirce began to modify his high esteem of Royce. In addition Peirce had favorably reviewed Scientific Theism, the work of his friend, Francis Ellingwood Abbot, which Royce criticized quite sharply. Four years later, when Royce very severely reviewed Abbot’s The Way Out of Agnosticism, it irritated Peirce far more. At the time, Peirce judged that Royce certainly held no higher intellectual rank than his classmate Frank Abbot.²⁴ The strained feelings between Peirce and Royce reached a point of explosion in late 1891 when the quarrel between Abbot and Royce broke into the public forum. Peirce jumped into print in the Nation in defense of Abbot while William James soon responded by publicly defending Royce in the same journal. The spiraling publicity only further ignited the unfortunate fracas that pitted two exiles from academia (Abbot and Peirce) against two Harvard professors (Royce and James). Coolly commenting from his office in distant Ann Arbor, Michigan, young John Dewey spotted a moral inconsistency between the high aims of idealism and the bad ethics of reviewers such as Royce (LifeJR 167). Meanwhile, responding to William James’s pacifying plea for greater reasonableness during this quarrel, Peirce offered a strange concession. Starved for philosophical recognition, Peirce conceded with some reluctance that as of late 1891 Royce was about the only person who ever paid me a compliment in print.²⁵

This remark sparked Peircean scholar, Max H. Fisch, to try to identify that compliment and to enlist my efforts in the hunt. Although Royce’s private notes and letters contain repeated references to Peirce, we could locate no printed compliment to Peirce in any of Royce’s works published prior to November 1891. Possibly Peirce was referring sarcastically to Royce’s printed passage about our Thrasymachus (RAP 426–27; W 5:222–29).²⁶

Peirce’s 1891–1893 series of articles in the Monist, especially his Doctrine of Necessity Examined, impressed Royce profoundly. As a result, Royce, now in his late thirties, grew more sensitive to the mind of Peirce. Reporting to members of the Institute on 19 October 1892, Royce stated publicly, Mr. Charles Peirce is one . . . whose thinking flashes with the light of genuine originality and genius. There is, in fact, something of the fire and also of the reflective waywardness of the young Schelling in the philosophical writings of this now so mature, learned, and experienced student.²⁷ In this he followed the appraisals formed years earlier by Peirce’s father, Benjamin, and by such members of the Cambridge Metaphysical Club of the early 1870s as Chauncey Wright, William James, and the future Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Royce went on to say, however, that if Peirce could only harness this potential into such masterly self-possession as would enable him to write systematically, then he would actually be our long desired leader in an original movement in American thought.²⁸

About a year later, Royce acknowledged to Peirce, you and I have . . . always taken a certain natural delight in expressing our disagreements. In this way Royce rendered explicit his recognition of the two of them standing as a pair of sparring intellectual Titans. Still, the junior partner added, Where I can I want to learn from you (LettersJR 317).

In 1895, Royce acknowledged his indebtedness to Peirce and called public attention to his originality and importance.²⁹ Although Royce, William James, and Benjamin Peirce strove to secure a teaching position for Peirce at Harvard, they failed to overcome President Eliot’s opposition.³⁰ Two years later, when reviewer Peirce analyzed the second edition of Royce’s Conception of God,³¹ he saw that Royce’s introduction of will in its individual character seemed to function as a seed of death . . . implanted in the Hegelian system. He also found in Royce’s Supplementary Essay to this work a highly important . . . line of reasoning in logic and logico-metaphysical matters. At the same time, Peirce criticized Royce for not conveying Scotus’s real individual, but instead purveying a pseudo-individual of Royce’s own devising.

Shortly after Peirce delivered his Cambridge Lectures in 1898, Royce acknowledged to James, Those lectures of poor C. S. Peirce that you devised will always remain quite epoch-marking in meaning for me. They started me on such new tracks (LettersJR 422). One can hardly exaggerate the significance of this remark for Royce’s creation of his Gifford Lectures of 1899 and 1900.³² Royce prefaced both volumes of that work with acknowledgments of his indebtedness to the influence of Mr. Charles Peirce . . . remote as my views often are from his (WI 1:xiii; 2:vi).

In his preparation for these Gifford Lectures, soon published as The World and the Individual, Royce found that, following the lead of Dedekind in formal logic, his reflective method lay in developing an infinite Many out of the One, in contrast to Peirce’s method of developing a One out of an infinite Many (WI 1:512n2).

In this work Royce argued against the British idealist, Francis H. Bradley,

The intellect has been studying itself, and . . . the intellect finds precisely the Number System,—not, indeed, primarily the cardinal numbers, but the ordinal numbers. Their formal order of first, second, and, in general, of next is an image of the life of sustained, or, in the last analysis, of complete Reflection. Therefore, this order is the natural expression of any recurrent process of thinking, and, above all, is due to the essential nature of the Self when viewed as a totality. (WI 1:538)³³

As for reality, Royce estimated that Peirce’s view of the real as the object of the final consensus of opinion was less fundamental in character since "one can refuse to accept effectiveness or activity as synonyms of existence, or of real being."³⁴ Royce held that to define being as completely independent of our ideas involves a vicious circle logically, for it proposes the logical contradiction of an exclusively one-sided dependence of idea on being without any kind of dependence of being on idea. Unfortunately, terminology here seems to have muddied the waters between Royce and Peirce. First, they used the terms being and reality differently. In addition, what in theory of knowledge Royce called realism, Peirce called nominalism—that is, the position that terms and thought lack intentional reference to reals.

More than thirty years earlier, in his article of 1867, On a New List of Categories, Peirce had stated, while working within a context of the logic of predication, the conception of being, therefore, plainly has no content (CP 1.548). Yet for the middle Royce, the concept of Being . . . is precisely the richest and most inclusive of all conceptions (WI 1:393). Further, for Peirce, individuals exist but are not reals because, unlike reals, individuals do not hold their character, despite what a person may do or think. Contrariwise, the middle Royce held that individuals exist and are real since he claimed to make no systematic difference in usage between Reality and Existence, or the adjectives real and existent (WI 1:52n).³⁵

Until his death Royce maintained that this logical relation of the mutual dependence of being and idea gave rise to his metaphysical strategy for criticizing the extreme realists, including the early Peirce. According to that strategy, Royce would start by highlighting the logically self-contradictory position in extreme realism and then reveal the opposite equally self-contradictory position in mysticism: the total identification of idea and being. Thereupon, Royce could critique the seemingly mediating position of the virtual realists who held for the reality of possibility with its could-be’s and would-be’s but failed to push on to the actual existence of the individual. In this way Royce would arrive at his fourth and final interpretation of Being as the actually unique individual, whether found in the form of a self or a community, whether finite or infinite.

Because Peirce viewed the relation of being to idea as causal and dynamic (CP 8.129), he tended to miss both the focus and stress which Royce put on the logical relation between being and idea. Nonetheless, Peirce certainly grasped purpose in thought as the central theme of the first volume of The World and the Individual. While excepting himself and his reader, Peirce estimated that he did not know that there lives a second metaphysician as strong as Prof. Royce . . . [that he] has not only read all the great systems [in the history of philosophy] but he shows a truly admirable power of throwing himself into the mind of each philosopher and of appreciating with great nicety just how each thinker has thought (CP 8.108).

Peirce complimented Royce as a careful historian of philosophy, yet seems to have overlooked Royce’s instances of the extreme realist position which the Hindu Sânkhya system and the doctrines of Leibniz and Herbart actually embodied. Royce regarded this extreme realism as the needed starting point for his strategy of questing dialectically for Being’s genuinely sound meaning. Thus, when Peirce interpreted such a view of realism as exaggerated, he evidently focused on the American philosophical scene rather than on Royce’s more global view in which certain thinkers proposed this First Conception of Being, not as a strawman’s position, but seriously. Interestingly, even in 1916, Royce kept reaffirming both his basic strategy and his critique of the non-exaggerated extreme realism which the Sânkhya system and others advocated (Metaph. 218–32).³⁶

Apprehensive that Royce might be leaning to James’s view of pragmatism, Peirce wrote, "By the internal meaning or purpose of an idea Prof. Royce, if we rightly gather his intention, understands all the experiments which would verify it" (CP 8.115).³⁷ This Peircean construal hardly fit Royce’s position which focused on an idea’s purpose and its possible embodiments. Thus Royce’s pragmatism differed significantly from that extreme of James’s instrumentalist pragmatism which Peirce saw as centered on doing. Accordingly, Peirce called Royce to further improve his position through a fuller analysis of the idea of continuity. Yet he viewed Royce as America’s outstanding metaphysician, who in The World and the Individual, had created a "very notable contribution to the prima philosophia and moved metaphysics far closer to becoming scientific. Despite this contribution, Peirce judged that Royce lay entrapped in the Hegelian method because he had proceeded a priori according to his method of reflection." Instead of being experientially open to the brute impact of chancy reality, Royce had employed a reductio ad absurdum procedure. Hence, Peirce thought that in this work Royce’s logic needed a far deeper analysis.

Factually, however, both in the first volume of The World and the Individual and later on, Royce pioneered on the boundaries of a yet undefined area of logic, which he called The Logic of Reflection. As he foresaw, this logic ought to deal formally with the problem as to what structures of the reflective type are, and what are not, true or false, contradictory or certainly valid, significant or meaningless. Such a Logic of Reflection is a science of the future.³⁸

Against F. H. Bradley’s claim that any consistent account of the Absolute’s experience remained impossible, Royce sought a more adequate model for Absolute experience. Helped in part by Peirce, he found it in the theory of transfinite numbers.³⁹ The Absolute’s knowing of itself involved an infinite Self-representative series. Yet, since the Absolute also knows the infinite self-representative series of each finite minded being and since every infinite series contains an infinite number of infinite subseries, only transfinite numbers can adequately indicate the boundless scope of the Absolute’s knowing. Such was Royce’s reply.

The second volume of The World and the Individual impressed Peirce even more. He mailed his gift copy of this volume back to Royce to secure his signature and wrote that the whole work will stand [as] a permanent milestone upon the highway of philosophy (CP 8.118).⁴⁰ In this volume Royce applied his fourth interpretation of Being to human knowledge, nature, man, and the moral order. Here Peirce found Royce blind to the fact "that it is one thing to be and another to be represented" (CP 8.129). Peirce also discovered that Royce’s treatment of evolution depended heavily, and explicitly on Peirce’s own Monist papers on cosmology.⁴¹ As a theoretician of communication through signs, he valued Royce’s comparison of mind to a dynamo of ideas—for Peirce it stood out as perhaps the most suggestive idea Royce had offered in that volume (CP 8.22n19). In addition, Royce’s doctrine of the time span of consciousness and his analogy of a self-representative series to a map of England so impressed Peirce that he drafted lengthy comments on them in his review (CP 8.122–25).

Here he also found Royce making his own interpretation of Peirce’s doctrine of habit as applied to human nature, consciousness, and ethics. Yet Royce abstained from consenting to the analogy Peirce drew between habits and laws of nature. Bruce Kuklick explains this resistance, There appears to be greater regularity in nature than we are able to observe in human conduct. . . . But the laws of nature display great regularities only if we ignore large differences in time: if we made our time span great enough, we should observe irregularities in natural behavior just as we do in human behavior.⁴² Royce refrained from applying Peirce’s law of habit directly to the laws of cosmic nature because our limited time span inserted its own limits to our knowledge.

Deeply impressed by Royce’s Gifford Lectures, Peirce claimed that Royce beyond any other now living seems to be the man fit for the undertaking [of rendering metaphysics scientific] (CP 8.118). After citing his own pragmatic maxim, Peirce immediately united Royce to his own kind of pragmatism by stating, In the same pragmatistic spirit, Prof. Royce holds that the internal meaning of an idea is a Purpose, obscurely recognized in consciousness, partially fulfilled in being recognized but mainly unfulfilled and ill-understood in itself (CP 8.119).

Peirce found the ideas in The World and the Individual very beautiful and Royce among the most accurate metaphysical reasoners of today. Yet after four or five month’s silence, Peirce irritably vented forth that in this work Royce’s logic was so execrable that its supposedly tight and vital arguments left room enough through which to drive a coach and four commodiously (CP 2.9).⁴³ Soon Peirce wrote two letters to James and his wife not only to retract the exaggerated terms with which he had characterized William’s style as slap-dash, but also to add, I have spoken of Royce . . . in language still further from my real opinion. Peirce concluded, Forgive the garrulity that comes of my eremitical life (TCWJ 2:422–25).

By June 1902, Peirce had completed his examination of both volumes of The World and the Individual. Having by then grasped the full development of Royce’s endeavor, Peirce noticed that Royce needed to undergird his analysis of meaning by a still-deeper analysis of the nature of sign in general. He wrote to Royce, My entreaty is that you study logic (CP 8.117n10). Royce responded by studying logic under Peirce’s tutelage for about a dozen years until he carried out this deeper analysis in his Principles of Logic (1910), dozens of logicalia notebooks, and the second volume of his Problem of Christianity (1913). Such an analysis led Royce in the Problem to discover his need to move beyond a dyadic appraisal of internal and external meanings into a triadic one. In this way, he fulfilled Peirce’s suggestion, that while preserving these two meanings, Royce’s new analysis would find a third and principal meaning in that of Purpose (CP 8.119).

Reporting to William James about his study of The World and the Individual, Peirce closed by crediting Royce with having inaugurated a vast reform, affecting every department of metaphysics (CP 8.131). Meanwhile, in response to Peirce’s review of this work in the Nation, Royce acknowledged, I know that it still needs much improvement (LettersJR 438).

In mid-1902 Peirce wanted Royce to join him at Arisbe, his home near Milford, Pennsylvania, to learn more logic while Peirce might learn more about Hegel from Royce (LifeJR 301). Much as he wanted to, Royce could not accept this invitation because he had agreed to offer a summer course at Berkeley. In the following spring, when Peirce offered six lectures at Cambridge entitled Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking, Royce needed to use his semester sabbatical to recuperate his strength and then offer a summer course at Berkeley (LettersJR 448).

Although at this time circumstances prevented Peirce and Royce from face-to-face contact, evidence suggests that upon his return from California Royce studied reports of Peirce’s 1903 Lectures on Pragmatism.⁴⁴ Royce’s Columbia University lectures on Some Characteristics of the Thinking Process, delivered in early 1904, reveal that he was then working much the same field as Peirce had just done. Admittedly, Royce was moving along a different path and with different aim, yet in both sets of lectures, these two thinkers cultivated mathematics as the basis for logic and highlighted the importance of series, projective geometry, probability, and statistics. Moreover, they both explicitly preferred to move beyond dyadic to triadic relations.⁴⁵

Peirce’s and Royce’s correspondence and logical papers from 1902 to 1905 show an increasingly intense exchange on logical matters.⁴⁶ They exchanged frank, blunt, and strong remarks. For instance, Peirce wrote to Royce: If you find a fallacy, jot it down. After Peirce had misinterpreted one of Royce’s logical papers, Royce eventually wrote back, "find out what it is that I have said" (LettersJR 488–92).

Through these many interchanges in logic, Royce received a direction, almost certainly from Peirce, to the British logician A. B. Kempe and his wonderful, but too much neglected papers of 1890.⁴⁷ In his later years, however, as Elizabeth Flower and Murray Murphey assert, Peirce had lost touch with the new developments in Europe whereas Royce followed the work of Frege, Russell, and Whitehead very closely.⁴⁸ This Peirce-Royce exchange in logic came to a climax in Royce’s 1905 Memoir (in which he referred frequently to Peirce) and in Peirce’s late 1905 commentary-response to this Memoir in his address to the National Academy of Sciences, The Relation of Betweenness and Royce’s O-Collections.⁴⁹

By April 1905, Peirce had written to Christine Ladd-Franklin of the most essential difference between his [Wm. James’s] pragmatism and mine, caused by James’s ultra-sensationalist psychology. In the same letter, Peirce stated that Royce’s opinions as developed in his ‘World and Individual’ are extremely near to mine. His insistence on the element of purpose in intellectual concepts is essentially the pragmatistic position.⁵⁰

In 1906 Peirce listed Royce first among five thinkers he specified as having aided him to guess that "by the indefinite replication of self-control upon self-control . . . the vir is begotten, and by action through thought, he grows an esthetic ideal" (CP 5.402n3). Peirce credited Royce repeatedly for leading him to see that logic is founded on ethics and that implicitly the ethically based esthetic ideal points to the religious (CP 8.117).

In 1908, when Royce’s The Philosophy of Loyalty appeared, Peirce was no longer the reviewer for the Nation due to declining health. I have found no response to this work from Peirce.⁵¹ In early September 1908, Royce delivered his pivotal address, The Problem of Truth in the Light of Recent Discussion, to the International Congress of Philosophy at Heidelberg. In it he drew upon Peirce’s idea of the love of objectivity as the third motive needed for any adequate theory of truth (RLE 73–74).

Two months later, Peirce’s important article, A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God, appeared. Some of its sections closely echoed notes sounded by Royce in the fourth and fifth lectures of the second volume of The World and the Individual.⁵² Both James and Royce found Peirce’s Neglected Argument article extremely interesting (PC 390n1). William James recognized that this article would doubtless be a ‘Quarry’ for the next generation, even though he confessed frankly to Peirce, I myself can’t yet get hold of, or use, your ‘first,’ ‘second,’ and ‘third’ distinction, but no matter.⁵³ By contrast, Royce eventually came to an in-depth grasp of Peirce’s basic categories of being and thought. His use of Peirce’s 1908 article in The Problem of Christianity and his references to it make it clear how much Royce appreciated its logical and religious significance (PC 390–92).

When creating The Principles of Logic in 1910, Royce referred frequently to Peirce. In its third section Royce called logic a Science of Order whereas Peirce had equivalently called it significs (CP 8.342). Yet both logicians were intent on the fitting order of semeiosis, the correctness of any sign-mediated process of communication.

In the spring of 1912, Royce reached a third maximal intellectual deepening, his insight into the roots of Peirce’s thought, especially into his three categories (PC 276).⁵⁴ Peirce had earlier acknowledged to William James how puzzled he was that others, especially certain pragmatists, failed to understand his categories in depth:

There is, however, nothing more wholesome for us than to find problems that quite transcend our powers, and I must say, too, that it imparts a delicious sense of being cradled in the waters of the deep,—a feeling I always have at sea. It is for example, entirely inscrutable to me why my three categories have been made so luminous to me without my being given the power to make them understood by those who alone are in a condition to see their meaning,—i.e., my fellow-pragmatists. It seems to me that you all must have a strange blind spot on your mental retina not to see what others see and what pragmatism ought to make so much plainer.⁵⁵

If James had this blind spot until his death, by 1913 Royce was healed of it. For by then an illumined Royce had at last grasped how suggestive Peirce’s three categories and theory of signs were for his own philosophies of science and of loyalty. Then in May 1913, the enfeebled Peirce received the two volumes of The Problem of Christianity sent him by Royce. On 30 June, Peirce replied in a letter highly prized by Royce,⁵⁶ in which he saw, perhaps out of wishful thinking, Peirce’s general approval of Royce’s application of Peirce’s doctrines of signs and of interpretation to the problem of Christianity. In this letter Peirce also revealed his keen desire to study The Problem of Christianity more carefully.

In the Problem, Royce had mused over the mysteries of synthetic insight, of the superhuman personhood of communities, and of our knowledge of other minds. He responded to these paradoxes by relying heavily on Peirce’s theories of community and interpretation, even if he employed Peirce’s ideas in a way distinctively his own.⁵⁷ For instance, concerning Royce’s grasp of Peirce’s idea of community, Flower and Murphey assert:

Actually, by the community, Peirce meant more than simply the collection of human minds—he also meant the universal mind in which human minds exist only as developing signs. This idealistic meaning of the term community is not spelled out in detail in those early papers [of Peirce], but it is strongly implied by the closing section of Consequences of Four Incapacities, and in view of Royce’s detailed knowledge of Peirce’s work, there is little doubt that he knew what Peirce meant. Royce’s own development of the concept of community is very similar to Peirce’s, but more detailed and more extensive.⁵⁸

Yet Royce did not distinguish, as Peirce did, between meaning and the interpretant sign because Royce used interpretant and interpretation interchangeably. Flower and Murphey suggest Royce’s reason for this:

For Royce the internal meaning of an idea is the purpose to create a perfectly coherent order out of certain experiences, and the combinatorial character of interpretation makes it possible to identify that process of synthesis with interpretation. The interpretation is the interpretant which brings other ideas to unity. The world is the interpretation of the problems which it presents (PC 361), and the world is the community (PC 339). For as human individuals are only ideas of the Absolute, so the Absolute is the perfectly ordered system which is the interpretation of those ideas. The concept of the community, so considered, is Royce’s equivalent of the concrete universal, for like the organism, the community has no existence apart from its members, yet it is an ordered system in which those members participate, not as instances, but as contributing parts to a whole.⁵⁹

In late 1913, Royce published Some Relations between Philosophy and Science in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century in Germany.⁶⁰ In its fourth section Royce relied heavily on Peirce’s views on induction. There Royce picked up Peirce’s doctrine of fair sampling in inductive reasoning and applied it even more to mental sampling than to physical. He then added his original witness about leading ideas, those logical dynamisms which cannot be empirically tested and which operate at a higher level than hypotheses (which can be tested empirically by a fair sampling of their consequences). Leading ideas, however, as regulative principles still more general than hypotheses, powerfully guide or discourage certain kinds of research in science. Royce held that philosophy has as one of its tasks, the systematic scrutiny of leading ideas (RLE 260–67).

In the four years left to Royce his maximal Peircean insight continuously deepened in him. It empowered him in 1914 to grasp Peirce’s doctrine of statistical reasoning,⁶¹ in 1915 to discern basic themes and links in the unpublished papers of Peirce transferred to his desk, and in 1915–1916 to create his pregnant articles, Mind, Negation, and Order for James Hastings’s Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics.

On 4 March 1914, six weeks before Peirce’s death, Royce sent him a copy of his recently published article, The Mechanical, the Historical and the Statistical, an article studded with references to Peirce.⁶² I do not know whether Royce added to these gifts a copy of his Principles of Logic, published in German in 1912 and in English in 1913.

After Peirce’s death on 19 April 1914, Royce endeavored to assemble Peirce’s papers and books at Harvard. As the first person to sift through Peirce’s papers, Royce came to hold a unique position in Peirce scholarship. He soon published the first post-mortem appraisal, both of the significance of Peirce’s papers and of his philosophical thought in general—an initial survey that still merits close attention.⁶³

When in early 1915 Peirce’s unpublished papers were deposited in Royce’s Emerson Hall office and piles of them lay in heaps on his desk, Royce was first to have the privilege of scrutinizing them. This allowed him to detect some of the most worthwhile ideas in these so treasured but hitherto unexamined papers.⁶⁴

I have in this chapter simply reviewed some of the high points, mutual sensitivities, and reciprocal influences in the Peirce-Royce relationship. It has opened the door for a more careful examination of the doctrinal similarities and differences of these two philosophers.

CHAPTER2

The Thought of the Late Peirce and Royce: Different? Alike? Both?

The interactions of Peirce and Royce just summarized reveal Peirce’s decisive impact on Royce. It started well before 1870. Peirce’s profound articles of 1868–1869 and his more popular articles on pragmatism (1877–1878) affected Royce immensely.¹ Royce’s 1880 essays, On Purpose in Thought and Tests of Right and Wrong, reflected much of Peirce’s now-famous series in Popular Science Monthly. In philosophy of religion Royce concurred with Peirce that the aspiration toward the perfect . . . constitutes the essence of religion (W 3:322). Peirce’s The Order of Nature of 1878 may also have stimulated Royce to hold eventually that cultural evolution had birthed into all the higher religions the three essential ‘Christian’ ideas of the graced community, lost state, and atonement (PC 215, 366).

More than a decade later, Peirce’s articles in the Monist (1891–1893) began influencing Royce continually. For instance, Peirce’s The Doctrine of Necessity Examined countered any latent deterministic bacilli in Royce’s mind. Peirce’s The Law of Mind (CP 1.12–26) led to Royce’s focus on infinity in his Gifford Lectures and later paved the way for the final portion of Royce’s 1916 encyclopedia article, Mind (RLE 174–75). Peirce’s article on evolutionary love rested on his theory of agapism (CP 6.311), the idea that love, or sympathy, has real influence in the world and, in fact, is ‘the great evolutionary agency of the universe’ (EP 1:xxii). This doctrine led Royce both to emphasize that loyalty cannot be genuine unless it opens to universality while any exclusive partiality renders loyalties inauthentic and also to stress later in the Problem the need to fall in love with the universe (PC 269–70). Even as Royce neared completing his reediting of the second volume of The World and the Individual, he recognized how powerfully the logical ideas of Peirce’s Cambridge Lectures of 1898 had been reshaping his thinking (LettersJR 422).

From 1902 to 1905 and thereafter, with Peirce as mentor, Royce engaged with him in a quasi-correspondence course in logic. Through it Royce deepened his grasp both of the logic of relatives (an indispensable ingredient in pragmatism) and of System Sigma’s logic (the basis for Royce’s later Principles of Logic) (RLE 429–41). He found extremely interesting Peirce’s article, A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God (1908), not least of all because of its brief passage on the logical structure of the inductive sciences (PC 390n1).

Especially after 1912, Peirce’s influence on Royce was profound. Yet in his own ways Royce also showed himself independent, creative, and original. Hence, it seems fitting here briefly to introduce Royce, although the approaches of several later chapters will be needed to provide an adequate acquaintance with him.

Josiah Royce was born on 20 November 1855, in Grass Valley, California, of Josiah Royce, Senior (1812–1888), and Sarah Eleanor Bayliss Royce (1819–1891).² Josiah, Senior, and Sarah