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PEIRCE, SEMEIOTIC, AND PRAGMATISM

Max H. Fisch

PEIRCE, SEMEIOTIC, AND PRAGMATISM

Essays by MAX H. FISCH

Edited by Kenneth Laine Ketnerand Christian J. W. Kloesel

Indiana University Press BLOOMINGTON

© 1986 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Fisch, Max Harold, 1900 Peirce, semeiotic, and pragmatism

Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 18391914 Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. PragmatismAddresses,

essays, lectures. 3. SemioticsAddresses, essays, lectures. I. Ketner, Kenneth Laine. II. Kloesel, Christian J. W. III. Title. B945.P44F49 1986 8542525 ISBN 0253343178 1 2 3 4 5 90 89 88 87 86

Page v

Contents

Preface vii

Forms of Reference xi

1 Charles Sanders Peirce (1939) 1

2 Justice Holmes, the Prediction Theory of Law, and Pragmatism (1942) 6

3 Evolution in American Philosophy (1947) 19

4 Peirce at the Johns Hopkins University (1952) 35

5 Alexander Bain and the Genealogy of Pragmatism (1954) 79

6 Some General Characteristics of American Philosophy (1960) 110

7 A Chronicle of Pragmaticism, 18651879 (1965) 114

8 Philosophical Clubs in Cambridge and Boston (196465) 137

9 Peirce's Triadic Logic (1966) 171

10 Peirce's Progress from Nominalism toward Realism (1967) 184

11 Vico and Pragmatism (1969) 201

11 Peirce's Arisbe: The Greek Influence in His Later Philosophy (1971) 227

13 Peirce and Leibniz (1972) 249

14 Hegel and Peirce (1974) 261

15 American Pragmatism Before and After 1898 (1977) 283

16 Peirce's Place in American Thought (1977) 305

17 Peirce's General Theory of Signs (1978) 321

18 Just How General Is Peirce's General Theory of Signs? (1983) 356

19 The "Proof" of Pragmatism (1981) 362

20 Peirce as Scientist, Mathematician, Historian, Logician, and Philosopher (1976) 376

21 Peirce's Place in American Life (1982) 401

22 The Range of Peirce's Relevance (1983) 422

Bibliography 449

Index 455

Page vii

Preface

Charles Sanders Peirce (18391914) is widely regarded as the most profound native intellect to have appeared in the United States. A scientist and mathematician of international reputation, he produced many of the advances in logic (which he equated with semeiotic, the general theory of signs) that have made possible a number of further advances, ranging from computing and literary theory to history and philosophy of science. Peirce was the inventor of pragmatism, the only native American philosophical movement, which has had, and continues to have, a worldwide impact. Peirce conceived pragmatism as an aspect of his doctrine of the nature of scientific logic and method, a topic he studied both as a practicing scientist and as a philosopher throughout his long life. To distinguish the details of his doctrine from similar efforts, in later years he preferred the substitute name, 'pragmaticism'.

In more than one sense, the field of Peirce studies is just beginning. Among its leading founders is Max Fisch. He has devoted nearly his entire life to the spirit and realization of Peirce's ideal of a scholarly community. The effects of his vast scholarship, plus his profound willingness to share its fruits, will long be felt by colleagues, friends, and scholars. Because his essays are widely consulted, yet have appeared in diverse places, we have persuaded him to allow us to prepare this collection of his principal writings on Peirce, semeiotic,* and pragmatism, so that they will be more accessible and even more widely consulted.

Max Harold Fisch was born in Elma, Washington, on 21 December 1900. He graduated from James Russell Lowell High School in San Francisco in January 1919 and entered Butler College in Indianapolis a year and a half later. There he studied philosophy under Elijah Jordan, met Ruth Bales (whom he married in 1927), was ordained a minister of the Disciples of Christ, and graduated in 1924. He received his doctorate in 1930 from Cornell University's Sage School of Philosophy, two years after he had joined the Philosophy Department at Western Reserve University in Cleveland as an assistant professor. From 1942 to 1945 he was curator of the rare book collection of the Army Medical Library, and chief of its History of Medicine Division during the first half of 1946. In the fall of that year he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois as professor of philosophy. During his long tenure at Urbana, he achieved a number of distinctions, an important one being his guidance of a whole generation of younger Peirce scholars who came to pursue doctoral studies with him. After his socalled retirement in 1969, he spent several years occupying distinguished visiting professorships: at the State University of New York at Buffalo during 196970, the University of Florida 197071, and Texas Tech University as Visiting University Professor during 197375, where he made important contributions to the twoyearold Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism. Ruth Fisch died

*For the spelling and pronunciation of 'semeiotic', see the opening paragraphs of "Peirce's General Theory of Signs."

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July 9, 1974, and one year later, or fiftyone years after he had left Butler College, Max returned to Indiana as adjunct professor of philosophy and as general editor of the newly formed Peirce Edition Project at Indiana University at Indianapolis. He is now senior editor of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, whose plan he first drafted more than a decade ago and whose projected twenty volumes it is his dream to see realized.

Professor Fisch's chief other dream, and work that spans nearly half a century, concerns the Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico. That work began in earnest in 1939 when he visited Naples for the first time. In 1944 he published the standard translation of Vico's Autobiography with Thomas Bergin and contributed to it a monumental introduction. The same team produced a translation of Vico's New Science in 1948. He returned to Vico's city as a Fulbright scholar in 195051, and during that visit he presented to Croce and Santayana copies of his Classic American Philosophers. He also represented the University of Illinois in the founding conference of the International Association of Universities, serving on its administrative board until 1955. He was president of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association in 195556, and in 196061 of the Charles S. Peirce Society. During the spring of 1958, under the auspices of the U.S. Department of State, he lectured at eleven universities in India, and immediately afterward went to Tokyo where he spent the academic year 195859 as a Fulbright professor of American philosophy at Keio University, which was then celebrating its centennial year. In 1976 he was made an Official Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, and in 197879 he served as president of the Semiotic Society of America. Since 1977 he has been president of the Charles S. Peirce Foundation.

In 1959 the Philosophy Department of Harvard University invited him to undertake a biography of America's great scientist, logician, and philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce. Since then he has spent time in Cambridge nearly every year, especially in Houghton and Widener libraries and the Harvard University Archives. Until 1974 he was always accompanied by his wife who had, he later said, "a much more dependable memory than mine" and whose contributions to rearranging and ordering both the Benjamin and Charles Peirce papers have yet to be widely appreciated. While working in the Harvard libraries, they met another eminent Peirce scholar, the historian of mathematics and science, Carolyn Eisele, then and now a close friend and valued colleague.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Ruth Alice Bales Fisch. Carolyn Eisele writes:

In remembrance of dear Ruth, the happy union of scholar, wife, mother, and friend. Her devotion to the Peircean cause was an inspiration and challenge to her coworkers, and made possible much of the collaborative efforts in the recreation of this vital chapter in American intellectual history. Max Fisch's heroic efforts to complete the gigantic undertaking to which Ruth had also given so much of her life serve as testimony to the continuing influence of her dedicated partnership.

Page ix

All of Max Fisch's writings are marked by meticulous research, and they go far beyond the boundaries of a single volume. What is contained here is but a part, yet an important one, of his published scholarship. The appended bibliography will allow interested students to pursue his complete research to date. Although from the beginning we focused upon his essays on Peirce, semeiotic, and pragmatism, there were still too many to fit within the covers of a single volume. Consequently, several important essays directly related to our topics had to be excluded. Fortunately, those are still in print and are readily available.* We decided to include the first selection because we thought it noteworthy that Professor Fisch's first serious publication on Peirce should come exactly one hundred years after the latter's birth. The significance of the other selections, which together represent the bulk of his most important writings on Peirce, semeiotic, and pragmatism, will easily be recognized and appreciated. Readers in search of an essay that, perhaps better than any other, presents Fisch's own philosophic views are advised to consult "The Critic of Institutions," preferably in the volume edited by Bontempo and Odell. Perhaps the most autobiographical of his publications is "The Philosophy of History: A Dialogue," but it leaves unaccounted the last quarter of a century.

We send our thanks to Professor C. J. M. Schuyt and Arthur F. Stewart for their help at various stages of the editorial process, and to Ursula Niklas of the Peirce Edition Project for having compiled the index. Our most profound thanks go to Max Fisch, who has helped us in preparing these essays, and with other tasks and projects.

Lubbock and Indianapolis KLKCJWK

*We have excluded his Peirce bibliographies (incorporated in the Comprehensive Bibliography, see page 449), the introduction to Philosophy in America, the masterly General Introduction to Classic American Philosophers, the introductions to the first three volumes of Writings of Charles S. Peirce, "Was there a Metaphysical Club in Cambridge?" "Salomon Bochner on Charles S. Peirce," "The New Tools of Peirce Scholarship,'' and "Peirce and the Florentine Pragmatists." We thank the original publishers and editors for their permission to reprint the essays included here. Full bibliographical citations appear in the Bibliography.

Page xi

Forms of Reference

The text of the essays contained in the present volume is generally that of the original publication. We have sought to correct all factual or printing errors and have occasionally updated the text and some references. Major revisions have been made in the notes. Their number has been considerably decreased in nearly all cases, because references to the standard Peirce editions have been incorporated directly into the text according to the following scheme of abbreviation: Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 16, ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, 193135, vols. 78 ed. A. Burks, 1958 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) as CP followed by volume and paragraph number; Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, ed. M. Fisch et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982—) as W followed by volume and page numbers; The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce, ed. C. Eisele (The Hague: Mouton, 1976) as NEM followed by volume and page numbers; the pages of Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence Between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, ed. C. Hardwick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977) as SS; Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to The Nation, ed. K. Ketner and J. Cook (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1975, 78, 79) as N followed by volume and page number. Peirce's lifetime publications are identified by P followed by a number that is given in A Comprehensive Bibliography and Index of the Published Works of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. K. Ketner et al. (Greenwich, CT: Johnson Associates, 1977—a revised edition published by the Philosophy Documentation Center will appear in 1986), and his manuscripts and letters by MS or L followed by a number that is given in Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce, by R. Robin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967) and "The Peirce Papers: A Supplementary Catalogue," by R. Robin (Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 1971). In a few instances we have added notes to indicate that Professor Fisch no longer adheres to the view he may have held decades ago.

ONE—Charles Sanders Peirce

Peirce's long life was almost exclusively devoted to science and philosophy. He was America's greatest logician and one of the founders of modern mathematical or symbolic logic. His various researches in the service of the Coast and Geodetic Survey were of permanent importance. He wrote for the sixvolume Century Dictionary all the definitions of the terms used in logic, metaphysics, mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, and weights and measures. Outside the circle of mathematical and scientific specialists, however, his name was scarcely known. His philosophical speculations, which were of potential interest to a much wider public, were heralded by G. Stanley Hall as likely to be "one of the most important of American contributions to philosophy."1 James and Royce repeatedly acknowledged their indebtedness to him during his lifetime, and Dewey long thereafter. But only so much of his thinking as has been assimilated, transformed and transmitted by these men has so far reached its potential audience. Peirce himself was isolated and frustrated by the lack of academic position and of avenues of publication. He was cut off from the latter by his failure to meet the prospective reader half way, and from the former by his inability to work in harness, his irregular hours and forgetfulness of appointments, and his marital difficulties.

Peirce was not only one of the most original and versatile of America's philosophers; he was its most prolific projector and drafter of systems. But for the articulation and elucidation of his final system he needed the stimulus of successive generations of able and interested students. That condition seemed in a fair way to be realized at Johns Hopkins University in the early eighties, where he was associated with G. S. Morris and G. Stanley Hall in the conduct of courses for advanced and postgraduate students, in what promised to become the country's chief center for the serious study of philosophy. The caliber of the students is sufficiently indicated by the fact that Royce received his doctor's degree there in 1878 and Dewey in 1884. The quality of the research done under Peirce's direction is evidenced by the Studies in Logic which he edited in 1883. There was a vigorous Metaphysical Club, which attracted students and

instructors from other fields, and its roster of active contributors included the names of many who later made their mark in the intellectual life of the country. But the administration of the university decided to promote experimental psychology instead of philosophy, Morris and Peirce left, the Metaphysical Club was discontinued, and academic leadership in philosophy passed to Harvard, Michigan, Cornell, Chicago, Columbia, and California. This was the critical turn in Peirce's career, and its consequences were tragic not only for him but for American philosophy. No other university would have him, nor indeed could any other have provided an atmosphere so favorable as that of Johns Hopkins to the flourishing of his special abilities. He became a recluse, his style grew more cryptic and perverse, and he left at his death a mass of unpublished manuscripts which are only now being made accessible to students of philosophy.

Peirce's most characteristic theories—pragmatism, tychism, synechism, and agapism—may be traced to two early commitments and two early antagonisms, the combination of which in one mind is probably unique. He was committed almost from the beginning of his career to the methodology of the exact experimental sciences and to a scholastic realism derived from Duns Scotus. He was opposed to the rationalism of Descartes and to the nominalism and individualism of the British empiricists: that is, to the characteristic errors, as it seemed to him, of the two traditions from which all modern philosophy stems. He rejected the Cartesian doctrines that philosophy must begin with universal doubt, that the mind when stripped for action can intuit truth directly, and that the ultimate test of truth is to be found in the individual consciousness. We must begin, Peirce maintained, with the prejudices we actually have, and make no pretense of doubting what we have as yet no positive reason to doubt; we must depend, as the sciences do, upon the multiplicity and variety of experiments and arguments and the resultant approach to agreement in the community of minds, rather than upon the apparent conclusiveness of single arguments.

Peirce was equally opposed to the nominalism which had infected British thought from the beginning. In its extreme form in Berkeley it had asserted that only particulars exist, and that universals have no existence even as mental constructions, since what are called abstract or general ideas are only particular ideas (e.g., names), each used as a sign of an indefinite number of other particulars. Berkeley had been driven in the end to support his atomic sensations by linking them with archetypal ideas in God's mind, but this platonic pseudorealism was as inadequate for the purpose as the later Scotch realism was for escaping Hume's dissolution of mind as well as matter into mere appearances. Nominalism, with its progeny of

sensationalism, phenomenalism, individualism and materialism, was again ascendent in Peirce's day among scientists as well as philosophers. This was due, he thought, to persistent misunderstanding of the opposed doctrine of realism, and to misconceptions of the spirit and method of science on the part even of those expert in the practice of it.

According to Peirce the issue between realism and nominalism was not whether universals existed before or alongside of particular things and might be separate objects of intuition, but whether laws and general types were real. The real was the object of true opinion, i.e., that upon which opinion tended to settle in the long run; it was independent, not of thought in general, but of what any one man or any number of men might happen to think at a given time. But general conceptions entered into all opinions, and therefore into true opinions; so types or laws must be real. The only questions were, which ones were real and real in what way, and in what things they really were. No one seriously doubted, for instance, that such a general character as hardness really was in some things as a habit or disposition or mode of behavior of those things, and that there were in us certain habits of belief and action answering thereto. Not to doubt this was to be, so far, a realist.

One might, however, be in doubt whether this or that in particular was hard, and, if so, how hard, and how it got that way. Thought or inquiry was set going by such actual doubts, and its only function was the production and fixation of belief. There were three traditional ways in which beliefs might be locally and temporarily fixed. ( ) There was the method of tenacity, but it involved wearing mental blinkers, and man's social nature was against it. It could not hold its ground indefinitely in practice. The problem was to fix belief, not in the individual merely, but in the community. (2) For this purpose, the method of authority was more effective. But not all individuals could be kept indefinitely from discovering that beyond the reach of authority other beliefs flourished. Sooner or later, therefore, both the wilful adherence to belief and the arbitrary forcing of it upon others must be given up. (3) Under conditions of free trade in opinions, a certain standardization might ensue by the a priori method, or the test of agreeableness to reason. But opinions so standardized could be nothing more than intellectual fashions, and intellectual fashions seldom lasted more than a few centuries.

Each of these methods had its advantages, but after all everybody wished his opinions to coincide with the facts, and there was no reason why the results of these three methods should do so. That was the prerogative of a fourth method, the method of science. Only by the practice of it could we be assured that the ultimate conclusion of every man would be the same. What was that method? Its first

requirement was that the meaning of the opinion in doubt or dispute should be clear. But there were grades of clearness. The "clear and distinct ideas" of the rationalists were not clear enough. Beyond the grades of familiarity and abstract definition, scientific thinking exhibited a third grade of clearness, though the rule for attaining it had perhaps not as yet been adequately formulated. Peirce's formulation of it in 1878 was as follows: "Consider what effects, which 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" (W3:250; CP 5.402).

The linguistic clumsiness of the formula, with its employment five times over of derivatives of concipere, was due, he later said, to his desire to prevent such misunderstandings as that he was using meaning in any other sense than that of intellectual purport, or attempting to explain a concept by anything but concepts. In this connection it is noteworthy that his first published statement of the rule in 1871 was used in deprecation of Berkeley's denial that we have any abstract or general ideas.

A better rule for avoiding the deceits of language is this: Do things fulfil the same function practically? Then let them be signified by the same word. Do they not? Then let them be distinguished. If I have learned a formula in gibberish which in any way jogs my memory so as to enable me in each single case to act as though I had a general idea, what possible utility is there in distinguishing between such a gibberish and formula and an idea? Why use the term a general idea in such a sense as to separate things which, for all experimental purposes, are the same? (W2:483; CP 8.33)

Peirce's exposition of the principle of pragmatism in "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" laid itself open to the quite different misunderstanding of making action the ultimate end of thought. He attempted to correct this in the article "Pragmatism" in Baldwin's Dictionary. Action itself, he said, required an end, and that end must be something of a general description. Beyond the three grades of clearness already named, he now distinguished a fourth and still higher grade, which could be attained only by putting the pragmatic maxim into practice with conscientious thoroughness, but which consisted in the realization that "the only ultimate good which the practical facts to which it directs attention can subserve is to further the development of concrete reasonableness; so that the meaning of the concept does not lie in any individual reactions at all, but in the manner in which those reactions contribute to that development'' (CP 5.3).

This development of concrete reasonableness or embodied ideas was not only the end of human action; it was also the direction of growth in nature itself. Nature acquired laws as a man acquired habits. Law was not primary, absolute and invariable, but derivative and approximate. The doctrine of necessity or determinism was neither a necessary postulate nor a probable conclusion of scientific method. "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 the law" (CP 6.46). To this primary tendency toward diversification, this pure spontaneity or fortuitous variation, Peirce gave the name of tychism. But all variations and diversities were united logically by continuous scales of degrees, so that between any given two there was an infinite series of possible intermediates, and ontologically by the tendency toward order, by "the becoming continuous, the becoming instinct with general ideas." This principle of continuity, in both its logical and its ontological aspects, Peirce called synechism. Ontological synechism in the form of "evolutionary love," familiar examples of which might be found in the love of parents for their children and of thinkers for their ideas, he called agapism. Tychism and agapism were complementary phases of the synechistic law of mind, which was at the same time the law of nature.

Realism, pragmatism, tychism, synechism, agapism—these were but the germinal principles of a vast philosophical system, adumbrated in Peirce's early published papers and slowly filling itself out with precise detail and ingenious nomenclature, but difficult if not impossible to reconstruct at this late date from his alternative and partially conflicting drafts with their endless selfcorrection. It is not too much to say, however, that the assimilation and criticism of his work is likely to prove one of the most fruitful of the enterprises to which younger thinkers are now devoting themselves.

Note

1. "Philosophy in the United States," Mind 4 (1879):102.

TWO—Justice Holmes, the Prediction Theory of Law, and Pragmatism

It would be generally agreed, even by those who are most critical of it, that pragmatism is America's most distinctive contribution to philosophy. It would also be agreed that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. had the ablest philosophical mind that has been devoted to law in this country. But it has not yet been shown how close he stood to pragmatism.

John Dewey, in the last chapter of his chief work, and as a prelude to his own most eloquent paragraphs, made effective use of two pages of quotations from Holmes, gladly borrowing, as he said, "the glowing words of one of our greatest American philosophers."1 A young Chinese friend of Holmes urged him to read Dewey's book. Holmes began it sceptically; it seemed to be so badly written. But he read it twice in the winter of 19261927, and wrote his impressions in five letters over a period of a year and a half. "He seems to me," Holmes said, "to have more of our cosmos in his head than any philosopher I ever read."2 Holmes reread the book in 1929, and recommended it to Sir Frederick Pollock. The only clearly intelligible sentences Pollock professed to find in it were those which Dewey quoted from Holmes; but Holmes in letters of 1930 and 1931 to Pollock said: ''His view of the universe came home to me closer than any other that I know." "So methought God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was."3

This philosophical affinity, discovered when Dewey was in his sixties and Holmes in his eighties, might easily have been discovered thirty years before. The years 1897 and 1898 are memorable for three pronouncements, each a classic of pragmatism, but not yet brought into relation. The last of the three, James's California lecture on "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," in which pragmatism was first publicly called by that name, is better known to philosophers than the two more substantial pronouncements that preceded it. Perhaps that is because philosophers have a weakness

for what comes to focus on religion. In 1897 Dewey read at Michigan the paper on "The Significance of the Problem of Knowledge" in which we first find the program of "reconstruction in philosophy" that was carried out in the works of his maturity. It is full of the consciousness of the end of one epoch in philosophy and the dawn of another. But perhaps more epochmaking than either of these pronouncements of professional philosophers was the first of the three, Holmes's "Path of the Law,'' which has since become the gospel of "legal realism."4 Addressing the faculty and students of the Boston University School of Law at the dedication of its new hall, Holmes said:

When we study law we are not studying a mystery but a wellknown profession. We are studying what we shall want in order to appear before judges, or to advise people in such a way as to keep them out of court. The reason why it is a profession, why people will pay lawyers to argue for them or to advise them, is that in societies like ours the command of the public force is intrusted to the judges in certain cases, and the whole power of the state will be put forth, if necessary, to carry out their judgments and decrees. People want to know under what circumstances and how far they will run the risk of coming against what is so much stronger than themselves, and hence it becomes a business to find out when this danger is to be feared. The object of our study, then, is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the courts.

You can see very plainly that a bad man has as much reason as a good one for wishing to avoid an encounter with the public force.... If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.

Take the fundamental question, What constitutes the law? You will find some text writers telling you that it is something different from what is decided by the courts of Massachusetts or England, that it is a system of reason, that it is a deduction from principles of ethics or admitted axioms or what not, which may or may not coincide with the decisions. But if we take the view of our friend the bad man we shall find that he does not care two straws for the axioms or deductions, but that he does want to know what the Massachusetts or English courts are likely to do in fact. I am much of his mind. The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.

The primary rights and duties with which jurisprudence busies itself again are nothing but prophecies ....... a legal duty so called is nothing but a prediction that if a man does or omits certain things he will be made to suffer in this or that way by judgment of the court; and so of a legal right. ... The duty to keep a contract at common law means

a prediction that you must pay damages if you do not keep it—and nothing else. If you commit a tort, you are liable to pay a compensatory sum. If you commit a contract, you are liable to pay a compensatory sum unless the promised event comes to pass, and that is all the difference.... You see how the vague circumference of the notion of duty shrinks and at the same time grows more precise when we wash it with cynical acid and expel everything except the object of our study, the operations of the law. 5

Whatever may be thought of the merits of this prediction theory, it is, I believe, the only systematic application of pragmatism that has yet been made. The most striking fact about it, however, is that it clearly conceives the law not from the legislator's or judge's point of view but from that of the practising lawyer. Yet when Holmes delivered this address he was and had been for fifteen years an Associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. It is inconceivable that in his work as judge he should have thought of law as prediction except with reference to a possible appeal of cases he was considering to the United States Supreme Court. Judges are not engaged in predicting their own behavior. It is a fair inference, therefore, that Holmes's first formulation of the theory antedates his appointment to the bench. But we are not confined to inference. The theory may be traced back in his published writings, back even of his masterpiece on The Common Law (1881), so full of the spirit of pragmatism from the ringing sentences in which its theme is announced—"The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience"—on to the end, back, in fact, to the early 1870's, when Holmes was a member of "The Metaphysical Club" in which, as Peirce tells us, "the name and doctrine of pragmatism saw the light"(CP 5.12).6

In a long letter from Berlin in 1868 James had written to Holmes: "When I get home let's establish a philosophical society to have regular meetings and discuss none but the very tallest and broadest questions...."7 The society was organized in 1869.8 The most significant fact about it is that of its six most active members three were lawyers—Holmes, Nicholas St. John Green, and Joseph Warner. The other three were experimental scientists—James, Peirce, and Chauncey Wright. To the three lawyers I venture to add a fourth, John Chipman Gray, not named by Peirce, but mentioned in James's letter proposing the organization. He and Holmes often called together on James during its most active years (18691872), and James lists him with Peirce and Holmes among those with whom he gossiped most on generalities. 9 Wright and Green were the natural leaders of the group by right of philosophical maturity. They were both about forty; Peirce, Gray, Holmes, and James about thirty; Warner in his early twenties. 10 The one thing that all seven had in

common, besides a Harvard degree, was an enthusiasm for the British tradition in philosophy, and a sense of the epochmaking importance of Darwin's Origin of Species, which had appeared a decade before their first meetings. Peirce alone of their number "had come upon the threshing floor of philosophy through the doorway of Kant," and even his ideas were acquiring the British accent.

According to the usual account, the name "pragmatism" was suggested by Kant, the doctrine by reflection on the methods of the experimental sciences in the light of British empiricism. Whatever assertion you make to an experimentalist, said Peirce, "he will either understand as meaning that if a given prescription for an experiment ever can be and ever is carried out in act, an experience of a given description will result, or else he will see no sense at all in what you say" (CP 5.411 ). I suggest, however, that the methods of the practising lawyer had quite as much to do with it. Peirce in fact professed to have done no more than follow the lead of one of the lawyers in the group, "a marvelously strong intelligence," Nicholas Green.

[He] was one of the most interested fellows, a skilful lawyer and a learned one, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham. His extraordinary power of disrobing warm and breathing truth of the draperies of long worn formulas, was what attracted attention to him everywhere. In particular, he often urged the importance of applying Bain's definition of belief, as "that upon which a man is prepared to act." From this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary; so that I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism. (CP 5.12)11

The historian would like to know out of what need pragmatism grew. What were the members of the group doing that would afford material for their discussions? Wright was lecturing on psychology and working on his major essay, "The Evolution of SelfConsciousness," to which James owed so much. Peirce was lecturing on logic and philosophy of science, reviewing Fraser's edition of Berkeley, assisting in the Harvard Observatory, and working for the Coast Survey. James was nursing his health and reading Renouvier; his teaching career had not yet begun. Green, Gray, and Holmes were practising lawyers. Green was lecturing on criminal law, Gray on conflict of laws and on evidence, and Holmes on jurisprudence. Holmes had succeeded Gray as editor of the American Law Review, and was revising Kent's Commentaries on American Law, with some assistance from Warner, who was still a student at the Law School. Gray had already set himself the two tasks for whose accomplishment he is best known: a book on the Rule against Perpetuities which should be a model textbook, and a book on analytical jurisprudence. 12

Most important of all, perhaps, was the fact that Langdell's administration was just beginning at the Law School, with two innovations

about which Holmes and Gray had doubts but to which they were in time fully converted. These were the case method of instruction, and the treatment of Torts as a separate subject. The first casebook for use in teaching was Langdell's Selection of Cases on the Law of Contracts, in the preface of which he said: "Law, considered as a science, consists of certain principles or doctrines.... Each of these doctrines has arrived at its present state by slow degrees; ... it is a growth extending in many cases through centuries. This growth is to be traced in the main through a series of cases...." Holmes in reviewing it said: "Tracing the growth of a doctrine in this way not only fixes it in the mind, but shows its meaning, extent, and limits as nothing else can." It also confirmed a remark Holmes had previously made, that "judges know how to decide a good deal sooner than they know why." But he did not share Langdell's belief in the study of cases to the exclusion of textbooks. 13

Nicholas Green was given charge of the course in Torts and made an abridgment of a standard English textbook for the use of his students. Holmes in reviewing it made the famous statement: "We are inclined to think that torts is not a proper subject for a law book." But he looked for the day when the matters grouped under that head should be treated philosophically as an integral part of the entire body of the law, and wished that Green would apply his "subtle and patient intellect" to the task. 14

In the preceding year, shortly after the Metaphysical Club began its meetings, Green reviewed at length a treatise on the law of negligence, whose publisher boasted that the authors had constructed their work on a plan "at once philosophical and practical." Green said it had a sort of practicality, but was in no sense philosophical. "It is the first requisite of a philosophical treatise that its subject should be philosophically defined.... A true definition is an analysis. Negligence is a legal term. Like other legal terms, its meaning is complex. A separate statement of each of the elements which go to make up that meaning is essential to its definition." 15

As a disciple of Bentham, Green would have found a model of such definition in the Fragment on Government, where Bentham defines legal duty in terms of legal right and right in terms of punishment. "That may be said to be my duty . .. which you ... have a right to have me made to do.... What you have a right to have me made to do ... is that which I am liable, according to law, upon a requisition made on your behalf, to be punished for not doing. I say punished: for without the notion of punishment (that is of pain annexed to an act . ..) no notion can we have of either right or duty. Now the idea belonging to the word pain is a simple one...." Bentham thought this the only way of expounding legal terms such as

duty, right, power, title; he thought of it as a matter of resolving complex ideas to simple ones; but to the founders of pragmatism it must have seemed more important that this was the only kind of definition which made it empirically verifiable whether one had such and such a duty or not.

Now to the point for which all that precedes has been preparation. Pragmatism as a general doctrine was first announced (without the name) in a paper written by Peirce and read to the Club in November, 1872, but not published until six years later, when the Club had ceased to exist.16 The only application of the doctrine put into print during the Club's lifetime was Holmes's first formulation of the prediction theory of law. In April, 1871, Holmes was appointed University Lecturer on Jurisprudence for the following school year. For the first time he thus had need to define not merely the fundamental legal concepts but the concept of law itself. This, I suggest, was the need under pressure of which both the prediction theory and pragmatism took form. The inevitable text for such course was Austin's Lectures on Jurisprudence, and Holmes's views were shaped on that massive anvil. 17 In April, 1872, Pollock published in England an article arguing that Austin, by treating command as the essence of law, had confined it within an unduly narrow boundary. 18 In July, 1872, four months before Peirce read his paper, Holmes published, under the guise of a notice of Pollock's article, a brief summary of his own lectures. Taking a different tack from Pollock's, he pushed to its logical conclusion Austin's view that custom only became law by the tacit consent of the sovereign manifested by its adoption by the courts, and that before its adoption it was only a motive for decision. What more, Holmes asked, was the decision itself in relation to any future decision?

What more indeed is a statute; and in what other sense law, than that we believe that the motive which we think that it offers to the judges will prevail, and will induce them to decide a certain case in a certain way, and so shape our conduct on that anticipation? A precedent may not be followed; a statute may be emptied of its contents by construction, or may be repealed without a saving clause after we have acted on it; but we expect the reverse, and if our expectations come true, we say that we have been subject to law in the matter in hand. It must be remembered ... that in a civilized state it is not the will of the sovereign that makes lawyers' law, even when that is its source, but what a body of subjects,

namely, the judges, by whom it is enforced, say is his will. 19 The judges have other motives for decision, outside their own arbitrary will, beside the commands of their sovereign. And whether those other motives are, or are not, equally compulsory, is immaterial, if they are sufficiently likely to prevail to afford a ground

for prediction. The only question for the lawyer is, how will the judges act? Any motive for their action, be it constitution, statute, custom, or precedent, which can be relied upon as likely in the generality of cases to prevail, is worthy of consideration as one of the sources of law, in a treatise on jurisprudence. Singular motives ... are not a ground of prediction, and are therefore not considered. 20

By comparing this with a similar criticism of Austin by Holmes two years before, 21 in which, however, there is no trace of the prediction theory, we may reasonably assure ourselves that it was invented between 1870 and 1872, that is, during the most active years of the Metaphysical Club. Since the general doctrine which Peirce called pragmatism was worked out in the Club in these same years, we may safely infer either that the prediction theory was developed by applying that doctrine to the special case of law, or, as I think more likely, that pragmatism was a generalization of the prediction theory of law. 22

Though Holmes developed the theory at length and more consistently twentyfive years later in "The Path of the Law," he did not work out systematically there or elsewhere the distinction between law and its sources. This was definitively done in 1909 by Gray in his longprojected work on analytical jurisprudence, The Nature and Sources of the Law. The distinctive feature of Gray's book is the doctrine that all law is judgemade law and that legislative acts or statutes are merely sources of law, along with judicial precedents, opinions of experts, customs, and principles of morality, including public policy. 23

Though Gray's is the best book of its kind, and might be regarded as an elaboration of Holmes's essay of 1872, Holmes was not satisfied; and in three letters to Pollock in 1928 and 1932 he still dreamed of writing "a little book embodying my views on the ultimates of the law," "a first book of the law keeping to hard fact and using no images," "getting rid of all talk of duties and rights—beginning with the definition of law in the lawyer's sense as a statement of the circumstances in which the public force will be brought to bear upon a man through the Courts, and expounding rights as the hypostasis of a prophecy," 24

Thus, after ten years of further practise and teaching, and fifty years on the bench, Holmes still adhered to the theory he had first worked out in the circle in which pragmatism was born. So far as I can discover, though of course he had much else to say about the law, he never proposed another definition, or entertained another conception, of it. 25 Why, then, did he never call his prediction theory pragmatic, and why did neither James nor Peirce ever cite it as a model of pragmatic method? 26 Because, I suggest, they had no in

terest in law or in social philosophy, and because Holmes lost touch with Peirce, 27 associated pragmatism with James, thought the name pedantic, and had no sympathy with the speculations James invoked it to bless. 28

If Holmes and Dewey had met in 1897 or shortly thereafter, there might be a different story to tell. They had enough in common to learn from their differences, as Holmes and James, or Holmes and Peirce, beyond a point early reached, had not.

Notes

1. Experience and Nature (1925 ed.), pp. 41719, quoted without references from Holmes, Collected Legal Papers (1920), pp. 305, 31416.

2. Letters to John C. H. Wu in Harry C. Shriver (ed.), Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: His Book Notices and Uncollected Letters and Papers (1936), pp. 19098.

3. HolmesPollock Letters (1941), 2:242, 272, 287.

4. Harvard Law Review 10 (189697):45778; Collected Legal Papers, pp. 167202. Bibliography of legal realism in Edwin N. Garlan, Legal Realism and Justice (1941), pp. 13544; add Sabine, "The Pragmatic Approach to Politics," American Political Science Review 24 (1930):86585. Dewey's address was published in the University of Chicago Contributions to Philosophy in 1897 and reprinted in The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (1910), pp. 271304. James's address was published in the University of California Chronicle in 1898 and reprinted in Collected Essays and Reviews (1920), pp. 40637.

5. Collected Legal Papers, pp. 167, 170, 171, 17273, 168, 169, 175, 174. The last sentence is in the astringent tradition of Hobbes, Bentham, and Austin, who were Holmes's trinity. "The light of human minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definitions first snuffed and purged from ambiguity." Cf. Chauncey Wright's nihilism"an exorcism of the vague"and especially James's 1898 lecture on the "shrinkage" that follows application of the principle of pragmatism.

6. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1935), 1:53436, 2:4078.

7. Letters (1920), 1:126.

8. I think, as of 1967, that the Club was formed in 1871 rather than 1869 and that I was mistaken in including Gray as a member. For later treatments of the Club, see "Alexander Bain," "Was There a Metaphysical Club?," "Philosophical Clubs," and "American Pragmatism Before and After 1898.'' In the introduction to volume 3 of Writings of Charles S. Peirce, I argue that Peirce had a much greater and lifelong interest in law and in social philosophy than has hitherto been recognized, by myself or by anybody else.

9. Letters (1920), 1:151, 154, 16869. All three were members of a less informal and longerlived dining club which began about the same time (Perry, 1:360; Letters, 2:910). Moorfield Storey says its members "always

thought that at the Club table we got the best conversation in Boston": M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Portrait of an Independent (1932), pp. 24142. Storey says elsewhere that "while Gray enjoyed the meetings and listened with pleasure to what others said, he himself said little": [Roland Gray, ed.], John Chipman Gray (1917), P. 103. If he attended The Metaphysical Club, he may have been less reticent there; but is likely to have contributed most in private conversation with Holmes and James.

10. Peirce said Wright was "the strongest member," "our boxingmaster whom weI particularlyused to face to be severely pummeled." Sixty years later in a letter to Pollock expounding his own general philosophy, Holmes said: "Chauncey Wright, a nearly forgotten philosopher of real merit, taught me when young that I must not say necessary about the universe, that we don't know whether anything is necessary or not. So I describe myself as a bettabilitarian. I believe that we can bet on the behavior of the universe in its contact with us." See also Perry, ch. 31 and appendix III. On Warner see M. A. DeWolfe Howe (ed.), Later Years of the Saturday Club ( 1927), pp. 29599.

11. Cf. Holmes, Collected Legal Papers, p. 298, on the connection between idea or belief, act, and law. On Green, see The Centennial History of the Harvard Law School, 18171917 (1918), pp. 21415: "his weakness, if he had any, as an instructor was his contempt for the maxim stare decisis. He loved to attack adjudications." Brooks Adams, who was then a student at the Harvard Law School, says: "than Green, I never listened to a greater lecturer," and paints a picture of Green, Holmes, and Bigelow at work "in the old library in the old courthouse" (Boston University Law Review 1 [1921]: 16871). Green had previously taught philosophy and economics in Harvard College: Historical Register of Harvard University (1937), P. 232. Some notion of his philosophic attainments"his extraordinary power of disrobing warm and breathing truth of the draperies of long worn formulas"may be got from an article on "Proximate and Remote Cause'' which he published shortly after the Metaphysical Club began meeting: American Law Review 4 (186970):20116. Starting from the first of Bacon's "Maxims of the Law," "In jure non remota causa, sed proxima, spectatur," he showed that Bacon "had elsewhere taught that the neglect of the remote and the search for the proximate cause was the key to all science. Now when treating of a particular science, he reasserts it in regard to that science." He then went on to anerudite account of the various scholastic discussions of the distinction, and praised the schoolmen and especially Duns Scotus for their services in "separating and defining ideas," "making those ideas clear and distinct which had before dwelt in formless confusion in the human mind." (It may have been Green who introduced Peirce to scholasticism; except for incidental references in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2 [1868]:156, 191, 203, evidence of Peirce's serious study of it dates from his review of Fraser's edition of Berkeley in the North American Review in October 1871, nearly two years after Green's article.) For ideas about the facts with which law deals, which may have suggested the prediction theory of what law is, see especially Green's two concluding paragraphs: "We cannot add clearness to our reasoning by talking about proximate and remote causes and effects when we mean only the degree of certainty or uncertainty with which the connection between cause and effect might have been anticipated."

12. Quinquennial Catalogue of the Law School of Harvard University (1910), p. viii; Historical Register of Harvard University (1937); Centennial History of the Harvard Law School (1918), pp. 20514.

13. American Law Review 5 (187071):34041, 53940; 6 (187172):35354. The connection with embryology and evolution comes out more clearly in Holmes's later observations: cf. Shriver, pp. 8994.

14. American Law Review 5 (187071):34041; Shriver, pp. 4445. Ten years later Holmes taught the same course, used Ames's casebook, and was completely won over to the case method: Collected Legal Papers, p. 45. Holmes's own efforts "to discover whether there is any common ground at the bottom of all liability in tort" may be followed in "The Theory of Torts," American Law Review 7 (1873):65263; chs. 3 and 4 of The Common Law; Collected Legal Papers, pp. 6280, 11737, 19091, 22223; and HolmesPollock Letters, 1:3539, 54, 6263. Gradually working out the doctrine of "external standard" through a series of decisions, Holmes was quite consciously shaping the law of torts on the Massachusetts bench. ''I want to get it all on the footing of the reasonablytobe contemplated." "The general criterion of liability in tort for which I have contended ... is the tendency of an act under the circumstances known to the actoraccording to common experience. If the probability of harm is very great and manifest the act is called malicious or intentional. If less but still sufficient to impose liability it is called negligent.... the difference between intent and negligence, in a legal sense, is ordinarily nothing but the difference in the probability, under the circumstances known to the actor and according to common experience, that a certain consequence, or class of consequences, will follow from a certain act." This is an eminently pragmatic way of going at the facts with which law deals, and all of a piece with the prediction theory of what law is. (For an estimate of the importance of Holmes's work in this connection, see John H. Wigmore, "Justice Holmes and Law of Torts," Harvard Law Review 29 [191516]:60116. Wigmore thinks the scientific discussion and harmonization of our torts system will never be possible until the basic scheme of Holmes's "Privilege, Malice and Intent" is carried out into all details by some qualified person.)

15. American Law Review 4 (186970):35053.

16. Perry, 1:332: "He read us an admirable introductory chapter to his book on logic the other day," i.e., about 20 November 1872. CP 5.13: "Our metaphysical proceedings had all been in winged words ... until at length, lest the club should be dissolved, without leaving any material souvenir behind, I drew up a little paper expressing some of the opinions that I had been urging all along under the name of pragmatism. This paper was received with such unlookedfor kindness, that I was encouraged, some half dozen years later, on the invitation of the great publisher, Mr. W. H. Appleton, to insert it, somewhat expanded, in the Popular Science Monthly for November, 1877 and January, 1878 .. ." under the titles "The Fixation of Belief" and "How to Make our Ideas Clear." By that time Wright and Green were dead; Holmes, Gray, and Warner had married, and James was about to; Peirce had left Cambridge and his first wife had left him; and the Club had long ceased to meet.

17. When the study of Roman law was urged as making for philosophic grasp, Holmes said that for that purpose Bentham's Fragment and Austin's Lectures were worth the whole corpus (American Law Review 7 [187273]:579; Shriver, pp. 3435). For later estimates of Austin, see Collected Legal Papers, pp. 157, 197, 301. It is worth noting that one of Dewey's early essays was on "Austin's Theory of Sovereignty" (Political Science Quarterly 9 [1894]:3152). 18. "Law and Command," Law Magazine and Review n.s. 1 (1872): 189205. Pollock concluded by suggesting this quite unpragmatic definition: "Law in the widest sense is a condition or assemblage of conditions under which

the evolution of things proceeds; law in the special sense is a condition or assemblage of conditions under which the evolution of a society proceeds, and the determination of which is part of the collective consciousness of that society."

19. Did Holmes already know Hoadly's dictum? (Cf. note 23 below, and Hughes, Addresses and Papers [1908], p. 139: "We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.")

20. American Law Review 6 (187172):72325; Shriver, pp. 2129. Peirce's nearest approaches to the principle of pragmatism prior to this date were these: (1) In 1868 he had said that the meaning or intellectual value of a thought lies "in what this thought may be connected with in representation by subsequent thoughts; so that the meaning of a thought is altogether something virtual." (2) In 1871 he had suggested this "rule for avoiding the deceits of language": "Do things fulfil the same function practically? Then let them be signified by the same word. Do they not? Then let them be distinguished'' (CP 5.289). (When Holmes met Pollock in England in 1874 he gave him a copy of this article along with others, and their sixty years correspondence starts from Pollock's halfway agreement "that the only definition of law for a lawyer's purposes is something which the Court will enforce.")

21. American Law Review 5 (187171):45; Shriver, pp. 3638. "It is the merit of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principle afterwards." "... the rules of judgemade law are never authentically promulgated as rules, but are left to be inferred from cases."

22. The Italian philosopher Vico (16681744) has some brilliant pages in the Scienza nuova deriving the Socratic and postSocratic logic, metaphysics, and moral philosophy from the disputations of the Athenian assembly and courts: first, popular government; then laws; then philosophy (ed. Nicolini, 1928, §104043).

23. See esp. pp. 100, 124125 (in 2nd ed., 1921). "The shape in which a statute is imposed on the community as a guide for conduct is the statute as interpreted by the courts. To quote again from Bishop Hoadly: 'Whoever hath an absolute authority to interpret any written or spoken laws, it is he who is truly the Lawgiver to all intents and purposes, and not the person who first wrote or spoke them.'" This, Gray's favorite quotation, was supplied by Holmes; cf. Harvard Law Review 6 (189293):33, note 1. Holmes modestly suppressed this fact in eulogy of Gray: "I think he could have given a clear account of the Bangorian controversy ..." John Chipman Gra ( 1917), p. 48; Shriver, p. 134.

24. HolmesPollock Letters, 2:213, 307; cf. pp. 64, 200, 212, and Collected Legal Papers, p. 313: "But for legal purposes a right is only the hypostasis of a prophecythe imagination of a substance supporting the fact that the public force will be brought to bear upon those who do things said to contravene itjust as we talk of the force of gravitation accounting for the conduct of bodies in space. One phrase adds no more than the other to what we know without it."

25. Of course I do not mean that the prediction theory was the whole of Holmes's philosophy of law. Even in "The Path of the Law" it is only the first of three main points and needs to be interpreted in the light of the other two. The second point is that, "still with a view to prediction," the lawyer will be "interested in discovering some order, some rational explanation, and some principle of growth for the rules" upon which judges profess to rest their decisions. He must guard against "the notion that the only force at work in the development of law is logic." The real grounds of

decision are and must be considerations of public policy, and by leaving these considerations unexpressed and often unconscious, the judge clothes with a delusive appearance of exactness what must from the nature of the facts be inexact and uncertain. The third and last point is a statement of the ideal toward which Holmes thinks the law moves, "when the part played by history in the explanation of dogma shall be very small, and instead of ingenious research we shall spend our energy on a study of the ends sought to be attained, and the reasons for desiring them." (May not the title and theme of Dewey's Quest for Certainty have been suggested by these sentences under the second point: "The language of judicial decision is mainly the language of logic. And the logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind. But certainty generally is an illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man." Dewey quoted them first in an article on "Logical Method and Law," Philosophical Review 33 [1924]:564, and again in "Justice Holmes and the Liberal Mind,'' New Republic 53 [192728]:21 . His Gifford Lectures were delivered in 1929.)

26. Peirce's only mention of Holmes is in his account of The Metaphysical Club: "Mr. Justice Holmes, however, will not, I believe, take it ill that we are proud to remember his membership; nor will Joseph Warner, Esq." James never refers to Holmes, unless there is an anonymous reference in The Will to Believe, where he says "a learned judge" once said to him that "few cases are worth spending much time over: the great thing is to have them decided on any acceptable principle, and got out of the way."

27. There is no record of Holmes having read anything by Peirce until the summer of 1923, when he read the papers Cohen had just collected under the title Chance, Love and Logic (HolmesPollock Letters, 2:122). Yet Holmes's general outlook was closer to Peirce's than to James's, and many phrases, including his formulas for truth, read like echoes of Peirce's conversationor was it the other way around?

28. It would be hard to find in American history a man in whom, in his twenties, the ambition of philosophy was so overmastering a passion as in Holmes. It was that, of course, that drew him and James together, but it was that, in the end, that divided them. James was at heart a moralist and reformer, whose early enthusiasm for science was to work itself out in moral psychology and religious pathology. Holmes was something of an enigma to him. On the one hand, as early as 1868 he began to sense in Holmes what seemed to him a too cosmiccentered consciousness. On the other hand, he, and indeed the entire James family, was appalled by the intensity with which Holmes dug his way into the law. James began to suspect him of coldblooded, conscious egotism and conceit, to see him as "a powerful battery, formed like a planing machine to gouge a deep and selfbeneficial groove through life." In 1869 he prophesied that Holmes would not stop short of the Chief Justiceship of the United States Supreme Court. Though Holmes read James's Psychology in 1890, "every word of it," he said, "with delight and admiration," his praise thereafter was always qualified. The Will to Believe made demands on the universe which were "too nearly the Christian demands without the scheme of salvation." Parts of Pragmatism "pedantic name" seemed to be on the way to his own humbler formula for truth, "but I am more sceptical than you are." After James's death Holmes wrote to their mutual friend Pollock that it "cuts a root for me that went far into the past, but of late, indeed for many years, we had seen little of each other and had little communication except as he occasionally sent me a book. Distance, other circumstances and latterly his demispiritualism and pragmatism, were sufficient cause. His reason made him sceptical and

his wishes led him to turn down the lights so as to give miracle a chance." Santayana's Life of Reason and later his Scepticism and Animal Faith seemed closer to Holmes's own way of thinking, but "I think he improvises and obscures the foundations of his thought with too many tickling words." Finally he discovered his affinity with Dewey, but if he made any connection between Dewey and James it does not appear in his letters. (Perry, ch. 30 and 2:45762; HolmesPollock Letters, 1:78, 100, 122, 129, 167, 191, 192, 260; 2:132, 133.)

THREE—Evolution in American Philosophy

In the middle period of the century of American thought with which our symposium is concerned, there was one idea which so far overshadowed all others that we may fairly confine our attention to it. That idea was evolution. Like the ideas of earlier periods, it was imported, and imported chiefly from Britain. But the cultural lag, the interval between publication there and assimilation here, was rapidly lessening. Indeed, except for a slow start due to the Civil War, the idea of evolution spread as rapidly here as abroad. Moreover, American thinkers were from the start acknowledged though junior partners in shaping, criticizing, and confirming the idea in its biological and other applications, and they have led the way in working out the logic of evolutionary theory and the theory of evolutionary logic.

Both in preparing the Origin of Species and for defending it after its appearance, Darwin leaned heavily on his American friend Asa Gray, much as he did on Joseph Hooker in England. Other American biologists, geologists, and paleontologists, before and after 1859, discovered and adduced some of the most telling evidences of evolution. To cite but one instance, when Huxley came to America in 1876 to deliver the inaugural lecture at Johns Hopkins, he spent a week with 0. C. Marsh in New Haven studying his collection of fossil horses, which for the first time established the direct line of descent of a living animal, and his collection of fossil toothed birds, which completed the series of transitional forms between birds and reptiles. Huxley recast his New York lectures on evolution to take account of these evidences and said he knew of "no collection from any one region and series of strata comparable, for extent, or for the care with which the remains have been got together, or for their scientific importance."1 Darwin wrote to Marsh in 1880 that his work on these fossils "afforded the best support to the theory of evolution" that had come forward in the twenty years since the Origin. 2

A convenient symbol for the way in which, with respect to evolution, Britain and America formed from the start a single intellec

tual community may be found in the following fact. The famous WilberforceHuxley debate at the Oxford meeting of the British Association in 1860, just a few months after the appearance of the Origin, took place in the course of discussion of a paper by John W. Draper, the New York physiologist, "On the Intellectual Development of Europe Considered with Reference to the Views of Mr. Darwin and Others That the Progression of Organisms is Determined by Law." 3

No good cause should be without an eminent and vigorous adversary, who prevents it from being ignored. Such an adversary was Louis Agassiz. Many of the American scientists who declared for evolution in the first generation had been his pupils and were converted to it by his arguments against it. To some of them it seemed that he had laid the "whole foundation of evolution, solid and broad," and then "refused to build any scientific structure on it." 4 So it seemed to laymen also. John Fiske, for instance, says that "the immediate cause which drove me to the development theory was the mental reaction experienced in reading Agassiz's arguments against that theory in his Essay on Classification, in 1859, shortly before Darwin's book was published." 5 And Fiske became the most influential American proponent of evolution as an idea of general and even cosmic application.

The age of evolution, however, was also the great age of American enterprise, and the most distinctly American service to the cause was to provide it with an entrepreneur. The New York firm of Appleton had been cautiously edging into the hitherto unprofitable field of scientific book publishing, at the instigation of Edward L. Youmans. As a rival publisher, Henry Holt, later put it, "Youmans became the scientific adviser of the house, and brought to it so many of the important books on the great questions of that epoch, as to place the house first on those subjects, and the rest nowhere." 6 It was on Youmans' initiative that the first volume of Buckle's History of Civilization was reprinted by Appleton's in 1858, and that they got out an American edition of Darwin's Origin within two months of its publication in England. When Ticknor & Fields of Boston, who had previously published Herbert Spencer's Social Statics, declined his Education in 1860, Youmans secured it for Appleton's by writing to Spencer: "I thought ... that if our house had the management of the work I might possibly in various small ways contribute to urge it forward; for we have found on this side that the straight and narrow way that leads right up to the heaven of success is traversable by but one motor—namely, push." 7 Three years later, Youmans wrote to Spencer: "I am an ultra and thoroughgoing American. I believe there is great work to be done here for civilization. What we want

are ideas—large, organizing ideas—and I believe there is no other man whose thoughts are so valuable for our needs as yours are." 8

John Fiske describes the pushing Youmans did as follows:

As soon as [books] were ready for the market he wrote reviews of them, and by no means in the usual perfunctory way. His reviews and notices were turned out by the score, and scattered about in the magazines and newspapers where they would do the most good. Not content with this, he made numerous pithy and representative extracts for the reading columns of various daily and weekly papers. Whenever he found another writer who could be pressed into the service, he would give him Spencer's books, kindle him with a spark from his own blazing enthusiasm, and set him to writing for the press. The effects of this work were multifarious and far—reaching, and—year in and year outit was never for a moment allowed to flag. The most indefatigable vender of wares was never more ruthlessly persistent in advertising for lucre's sake than Edward Youmans in preaching in a spirit of the purest disinterestedness the gospel of evolution. 9

When Appleton's sent Youmans to visit Spencer and other British scientists in 1862, he learned that only five hundred copies of Spencer's Psychology had been printed, and that three hundred remained unsold; that five hundred of his Education had been printed, and only two hundred were sold; that the Social Statics had been more popular, but that eleven years had not sufficed to exhaust the seven hundred and fifty copies printed.10 By the time Youmans' Spencer boom subsided, Appleton's alone had sold five hundred thousand copies of his twentyfive works.11 Of the First Principles alone, 162,000 copies were sold in less than thirty years.12

One of the best essays on the derivations of American thought, but an essay not yet as widely known as it should be, is Merle Curti's "The Great Mr. Locke: America's Philosopher 17831861."13 The period with which we are concerned deserves a similar essay: "Herbert Spencer: America's Philosopher 18611916." The difference is that whereas Locke had long been dead before his American vogue began, Spencer was adopted, subsidized, and promoted by America during his lifetime, and owed the completion and success of his Synthetic Philosophy in large part to that fact. His thus becoming American intellectual property did not, however, increase his honor in his own country. Justice Holmes could write to Sir Frederick Pollock in 1895: "H[erbert] Spencer you English never quite do justice to.... He is dull. He writes an ugly uncharming style, his ideals are those of a lower middle class British Philistine. And yet after all abatements I doubt if any writer of English except Darwin has done so much to affect our whole way of thinking about the universe."14

As a promotional medium for the scientific books brought out under his editorship, Youmans founded the Popular Science Monthly in 1872 and continued as editor until his death in 1887. The early numbers carried installments of Spencer's Study of Sociology, written at Youmans' suggestion to prepare the public for the Descriptive Sociology which appeared in later years. Within a year and a half the Monthly reached a circulation of twelve thousand. Students of American philosophy remember with amusement but with a strange lack of curiosity that Peirce's "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" were published in it as a series of six articles. Even as unacademic a philosopher as James spoke with a certain condescension of "those hardheaded readers who subscribe to the Popular Science Monthly and Nature, and whose sole philosopher Mr. Spencer is";15 but the fact is that the Monthly was then the chief medium of periodical publication for so much of American philosophy as was in touch with science.

Not content with reprinting here the works of overseas scientists, Youmans conceived and launched in 1873 the International Scientific Series of books published simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. Within Youmans's lifetime the Series ran to fiftyseven volumes, and eventually to nearly a hundred. The first was Tyndall's Forms of Water, the second Bagehot's Physics and Politics, the classic of social Darwinism. Among other early volumes were Bain's Mind and Body, Spencer's Study of Sociology, Cooke's The New Chemistry, Stewart's Conservation of Energy, Whitney's Life and Growth of Language, Huxley's The Crayfish, Darwin's Formation of Vegetable Mould, Stallo's Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics, Romanes's Animal Intelligence, and Clifford's Common Sense of the Exact Sciences. The best seller was Draper's History of the Conflict Between Science and Religion, which ran through fifty printings and was translated into nearly every language of commercial publication.

While Youmans was enthusiastic in propagating, both through the International Scientific Series and through the Popular Science Monthly, modern views in physics, chemistry, geology, and biology generally, everything was tributary to the philosophy of evolution. As Fiske puts it: "As presenting the supreme organizing idea of modern thought, his chief effort at all times lay in directing inquirers to Mr. Spencer's works, in explaining their doctrines, defending them from misquotation and misunderstanding—in being, in short, the American apostle of evolution, fervid, instant in season and out of season, making opportunities where he did not find them."16

A symbol for the relationship between the intellectual and the industrial entrepreneur in the age of enterprise may be found in the fact that when Spencer was about to board ship for home after his visit to America in 1882, he seized the hands of Edward Youmans

and Andrew Carnegie and cried to the reporters: "Here are my two best American friends."17

A complete sketch of the fortunes of the idea of evolution in America would include the early opposition from the side of religion, the irenic work of religiousminded biologists like Gray, the reconciliations of evolution and religion,�

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