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Abstract
In this paper, I elaborate affinities between Peirce, Spinoza and Royce, in order to illuminate the division between Peirce's and James's expressions of idealism. James contrasted Spinoza's and Royce's absolute idealism with his and Peirce's pluralistic idealism. I triangulate among Peirce, Spinoza and Royce to show that, contra James's view, Peirce himself was more at home in the absolutistic camp. In Section 2, I survey Peirce's discussions of Spinoza's pragmatism and of the divide within pragmatism Peirce perceived to obtain. In Section 3, I elaborate two early twentieth-century accounts (one of them by James) of the idealistic division within pragmatism, and James's criticisms of absolute idealism in Spinoza and Royce. In Section 4, we turn our attention to Peirce's discussions of the absolute, and to the role of the absolute and the infinite in the thought of Spinoza, Royce and James. In the classification of pragmatist idealisms, I argue, James stands on one side; Peirce stands on the other with Royce and Spinoza.
Notes
My thanks to Robert Stern, Christopher Hookway, David Dilworth, Kathleen Okruhlik, members of the University of Sheffield Department of Philosophy, and two anonymous referees for this journal for their advice and suggestions on various drafts of this article. This research was funded by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I gratefully acknowledge this support.
2Over the years, Peirce devised various formulations of the pragmatic maxim. The classic formulation of it reads: ‘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’ (Peirce CP 5.402). Throughout, I use the standard abbreviations in Peirce citations: C plus page number for The Century Dictionary, CP followed by volume and paragraph number for Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, EP followed by volume and page number for The Essential Peirce, N followed by volume and page number for Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to The Nation, NEM followed by volume and page number for The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce.
3Spinoza is not the only target of Peirce's gentle mockery in this passage. Peirce also makes fun of Berkeley's use of tar-water, and of Kant's and Comte's ‘habit of mingling these sparkling waters [of pragmatism] with a certain mental sedative’.
4Peirce's nachlass, housed at Harvard's Houghton Library, includes many lists, including lists of books in the Peirce family home, lists of great men, lists of schools of philosophic thought, and so on.
5Christopher Hookway prefers to speak of Peirce's arguments for pragmatism rather than his proofs of pragmatism, a sensible approach given that Peirce does not seem to have completed any of his intended proofs of the doctrine. Hookway, Pragmatic Maxim, 197–234.
6Like Peirce, Driscoll regarded Schiller as lying between the pragmatist extremes. Driscoll, Pragmatism and the Problem, 4.
7On this basis, David Paulsen argues that James's theism more closely resembles early Judaic conceptions of an anthropomorphic deity than ‘the God of the philosophers’. Paulsen, ‘God of Abraham’.
8On James's account, pluralistic pantheism, unlike monistic pantheism, takes seriously empirical data:
It surely is a merit in a philosophy to make the very life we lead seem real and earnest. Pluralism, in exorcising the absolute, exorcises the great de-realizer of the only life we are at home in, and thus redeems the nature of reality from essential foreignness. Every end, reason, motive, object of desire or aversion, ground of sorrow or joy that we feel is in the world of finite multifariousness, for only in that world does anything really happen, only there do events come to pass.
9Italics in the original.
10The lectures are reproduced in Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things. See Misak, ‘C.S. Peirce on Vital Matters’ for a classic discussion of the lecture series, and the surrounding circumstances.
11Indeed, Peirce was one of those who confounded the two doctrines. See Peirce CP 5.414.
12This is an especially surprising omission since, earlier in the same chapter, James credits Peirce with coining the term ‘pragmatism’.
13Perry's intellectual biography of James conveniently reproduces in one section the correspondence between James and Peirce concerning James's Hibbert Lectures.
14James replied that he did not ‘fully deserve [Peirce's] censure’ because ‘I expressly do believe with you that in the universe of possibles, of merely mental truth, as Locke calls it, relations are exact’ (Perry 440). However, this reply continues to get Peirce wrong. Possibilia are not ‘merely mental’ for Peirce, nor is the realm of possibilia the locus of relations. In Peircean terms, relations are Thirds, but possibilia are Firsts. See below for an explication of Firstness and Thirdness in Peirce.
15Peirce suggests elsewhere that Kant's ‘Refutation of Idealism’ does not accord with the first edition of the first Critique (See Peirce N 3.178), further evidence that Peirce regarded Kant as an idealist.
16Peirce discusses Cayley's metrics at CP 4.142, CP 4.145nP1, CP 5.490 and N 1.138.
17See Peirce's discussion in ‘The Architecture of Theories’ (Peirce CP 6.27) for a similar account of the absolute.
18Notice that, since Thirdness always concerns relations, the points on the yardstick (unlike the origin and terminus) are not absolute, but relative.
19The problem of Achilles and the tortoise was one Peirce considered often, and a matter that he often discussed with James, who on Peirce's account was never able to grasp the solution to the problem. It is interesting to note that James discusses Achilles and the tortoise at some length in his Hibbert Lectures, but in connection with Bergson, not Peirce.
20Nor, indeed, do I wish to suggest that Peirce regarded Spinoza as a pragmatist because of the latter's absolutistic pantheism. Since Peirce was also convinced of Berkeley's and Kant's pragmatism, it should be clear that neither absolutism nor pantheism are necessary or sufficient conditions for pragmatism, according to Peirce.