Charles Peirce: Encyclopedia II - Charles Peirce - Life

Charles Peirce - Life

Right from the beginning, the relations of America as New England with Europe were, from the philosophical point of view, ambiguous, when they were not simply difficult and, in the end, impossible. Peirce is in himself the ‘’resumé’’ of this story… from the rejection of European philosophical paradigms to the creation of new paradigms which are not only Peirce’s but America’s, and slowly but inevitably [those] of the global world of tomorrow. (Deledalle 2000: 3).

Brent (1998) is the only Peirce biography in English. Charles Sanders Peirce was the son of Sarah Hunt Mills and Benjamin Peirce, a professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard University, perhaps the first serious research mathematician in America. At 12 years of age, Charles devoured an older brother's copy of Richard Whately's Elements of Logic, then the leading English language text of its kind. Thus began his lifelong fascination with logic and reasoning. He went on to obtain the BA and MA from Harvard, and in 1863 was awarded the Lawrence Scientific School's first B.Sc. in chemistry. This last degree was awarded summa cum laude; his academic record was otherwise undistinguished. At Harvard, he began lifelong friendships with Francis Ellingwood Abbot, Chauncey Wright, and William James. One of his Harvard instructors, Charles William Eliot, formed an unfavorable opinion of him; they clashed on later occasions. This was unfortunate, because Eliot was President of Harvard 1869-1909, a period encompassing nearly all of Peirce's working life, during which he repeatedly vetoed having Harvard employ Peirce in any capacity.

Charles was employed as a scientist by the United States Coast Survey (1859–1891), where he enjoyed the protection of his highly influential father until the latter's death in 1880. This employment exempted Charles from having to take part in the Civil War, sparing him a very awkward situation, as his Boston Brahmin family sympathized with the Confederacy. At the Survey, he worked mainly in geodesy and in gravimetry, refining the use of pendulums to determine small local variations in the strength of the earth's gravity. The Survey sent him to Europe five times, the first in 1871, as part of a group dispatched to observe a solar eclipse. While in Europe, he sought out Augustus De Morgan, William Stanley Jevons, and William Kingdon Clifford, British mathematicians and logicians whose turn of mind resembled his own. During 1869-72, he was employed as an Assistant in Harvard's astronomical observatory, doing important work on determining the brightness of stars and the shape of the Milky Way. (On Peirce the astronomer, see Lenzen's chapter in Moore and Robin, 1964.) In 1878, he was the first to define the meter as so many wavelengths of light of a certain frequency, the definition employed today.

Over the 1880s, Peirce's indifference to bureaucratic detail waxed while the quality and timeliness of his Survey work waned. Peirce took years to write reports that he should have required mere months. Meanwhile, he wrote hundreds of logic, philosophy, and science entries for the Century Dictionary. In 1885, an investigation by the Allison Commission exonerated Peirce, but led to the dismissal of Superintendent Julius Hilgard and several other Coast Survey employees for misuse of public funds. In 1891, he resigned from the Coast Survey, at the request of Superintendent Thomas Corwin Mendenhall. He never again held regular employment.

In 1879, Peirce was appointed Lecturer in logic at the new Johns Hopkins University. That university was strong in a number of areas that interested Peirce, such as philosophy (Royce and John Dewey were students), psychology (taught by G. Stanley Hall and studied by Joseph Jastrow, who coauthored a landmark empirical study with Peirce), and mathematics, taught by J. J. Sylvester, who came to admire Peirce's work on mathematics and logic. This untenured position proved to be the only academic appointment Peirce ever held. It is a fact that Clark, Wisconsin, Michigan, Cornell, Stanford, and Chicago all declined to hire him, although the precise reasons for their so doing can no longer be determined. Brent documents something Peirce never suspected, namely that his efforts to obtain academic employment, grants, and scientific respectability, were repeatedly frustrated by the covert opposition of a major American scientist of the day, Simon Newcomb (1835-1909). Peirce's ability to find academic employment may also have been frustrated by a difficult personality. Brent conjectures that Peirce may have been manic-depressive, further claiming that Peirce experienced 8 nervous breakdowns between 1876 and 1911. Brent also believes that Peirce tried to alleviate his symptoms with ether, morphine, and cocaine.

Peirce's personal life also proved a grave handicap. His first wife, Harriet Melusina Fay, left him in 1875. He soon took up with a woman whose maiden name and nationality remain uncertain to this day (the best guess is that her name was Juliette Froissy and that she was French), marrying her immediately upon divorcing Harriet in 1883. That year, Newcomb pointed out to a Johns Hopkins trustee that Peirce, while a Hopkins employee, had lived and traveled with a woman to whom he was not married. The ensuing scandal led to his dismissal, and to his being deemed morally unfit for academic employment anywhere in the USA. Peirce had no children by either marriage.

In 1887, Peirce used an inheritance from his parents to purchase 2,000 rural acres near Milford, Pennsylvania, land which never yielded an economic return. On that land he built a large house which he named "Arisbe" and where he spent the rest of his life, writing prolifically, much of it unpublished to this day. He insisted on living well beyond his means, which led to grave financial and legal difficulties. Peirce spent much of the last two decades of his life so destitute that he could not afford heat in winter. His only food was bread donated by the local baker, and he wrote on the verso side of old manuscripts because he could not afford new stationery. For a while an outstanding warrant for assault and debt led to his becoming a fugitive in New York. A variety of people including his brother James Mills Peirce and his neighbors, relatives of Gifford Pinchot, paid his property taxes and mortgage, and settled other debts.

During this long final twilit phase of Peirce’s life, he did some scientific and engineering consulting, and wrote a good deal for meager pay, primarily dictionary and encyclopedia entries, and reviews for The Nation (with whose editor, Wendell Phillips Garrison he became friendly). He did translations for the Smithsonian Institution, at the instigation of its director, Samuel Langley. Peirce also did substantial mathematical calculations for Langley’s research on powered flight. Peirce tried his hand at inventing, and began but did not complete a number of books, all in the hope of making money. In 1888, President Grover Cleveland appointed him to the Assay Commission. From 1890 onwards, he had a friend and admirer in Judge Francis C. Russell of Chicago, who introduced Peirce to Paul Carus and Edward Hegeler, the editor and owner, respectively, of the pioneering American philosophy journal The Monist, which eventually published a number of his articles. He applied to the newly formed Carnegie Institution for a grant to write a book summarizing his life’s work. The application was doomed; his nemesis Newcomb served on the Institution’s executive committee, and its President had been the President of Johns Hopkins at the time of Peirce’s dismissal.

The one who did the most to help Peirce in this his hour of desperate need was his old friend William James, who helped arrange four series of lectures at or near Harvard, and dedicated his Will to Believe to Peirce. Most important, each year from 1898 until his death in 1910, James would write to his friends in the Boston intelligentsia, asking that they make a financial contribution to help support Peirce. Peirce showed his gratitude for these remarkable gestures of friendship by designating James’s eldest son as his heir should Juliette predecease him, and by adding "Santiago," "Saint James" in Spanish, to his full name (Brent 1998: 315-16, 374).

Peirce died destitute, as did his widow 20 years later. How she managed to survive that long is a puzzle.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Life", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki