1007Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced “Purse”) was born in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, to Benjamin and Sarah Hunt Mills Peirce. His father was a noted
mathematician and professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard. Like John
Stuart Mill and Søren Kierkegaard, Charles Peirce received his most significant
schooling from his father. From an early age, his father taught him mathematics
and science, encouraging Peirce in his youthful laboratory experiments. Though
Peirce did graduate from both Cambridge High School and Harvard, he did not
distinguish himself academically at either institution and had trouble adapting
socially. During his college years, he spent much of his time with his father, dis-
cussing the elder Peirce’s mathematical studies. Following graduation from
Harvard in 1859, Peirce studied chemistry at the Lawrence Scientific School.
There he met and then married his first wife, Harriet Melusina Fay. In addition to
this change in his social life, Peirce’s academic performance improved, and in
1863 he graduated from Lawrence summa cum laude.
While Peirce was still in school, his father arranged a job for him with the United
States Coast and Geodetic Survey. Peirce worked for this agency over the next thirty
years but nevertheless found time for a number of other pursuits. He worked as an
astronomer at Harvard, continued to perform scientific experiments, read and wrote
extensively in philosophy, and lectured on logic at Johns Hopkins University. Peirce
also helped form the Metaphysical Club, an informal gathering of friends to discuss
philosophical matters. The club included such well-known thinkers as William
James and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Though esteemed by his fellow philosophers,
Peirce’s difficult personality and reputation for “loose living” kept him from a
professorship. Peirce’s “inability to exercise the proper moral self-control” (James’s
description) eventually led to a divorce from Harriet Fay in 1883. The following
year Peirce married a French woman named Juliette Froisy.CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE
1839–1914