pragmatism but also limiting it so as not to jeopardize the objective truth
guaranteed by the Absolute. On his side, James found his way to pragmatism
via Royce.
Pragmatism was the product of interaction between religious Idealism and
the research sciences fostered by American university reform. Peirce emerged
from the same circle as James at Cambridge in the 1860s and early 1870s.
Both were early graduates of the Lawrence Scientific School just established at
Harvard; both grew up surrounded by the Transcendentalist elite of the earlier
generation and by the militant Darwinists of the new one. James’s family
connections were more on the religious side, Peirce’s on the side of science and
mathematics. His father, Benjamin Peirce, was the leading American astrono-
mer and mathematician of midcentury, and a prime mover in introducing
science into the Harvard curriculum (Brent, 1993: 31). Charles Peirce’s posi-
tions were primarily in research institutions, the Harvard Observatory, and
(during 1861–1891) the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, which his father had
headed. His only academic post was in the mathematics department at Johns
Hopkins (1879–1884); this was cut short by the animosity of respectably
religious academics, who also blackballed Peirce from positions at Harvard
and Chicago.
Charles Peirce must have personified every danger the academic estab-
lishment feared from reform. He was a scientist, arrogant and disrespectful of
traditional propriety. To make matters worse, Peirce was a spoiled child of the
New England elite trying to keep up with the status claims of the Gilded Age.
He lived beyond his means and was irresponsible with research funds; he cut
a figure as a dandy in Paris and New York, divorcing his Boston wife and
living with a fashionable Frenchwoman. His later life deteriorated into a series
of unsuccessful moneymaking schemes and mounting debts, which reduced
him to poverty. Why should such a man have entered philosophy at all? This
was the core discipline of the barely reformed religious colleges, where preju-
dices against Peirce would have been at their highest. He entered the lions’ den
as the protégé of his father, a mathematical Platonist at home in the older
religious-academic milieu. Peirce found in Idealism the turf on which to develop
his unique contribution, his theory of signs, situated at the overlap of mathe-
matics and the logic of the philosophical curriculum.
Both Peirces were much more pathbreaking in mathematics than in research
science. The older Peirce was known for solid but essentially derivative accom-
plishments in astronomy, following up others’ discoveries in the 1840s and
1850s of the planet Neptune and of Saturn’s rings. Charles Peirce’s years of
laboratory work made him a respected but minor scientist, best known for
improvements in instrumentation for the measurement of gravity. In pure
mathematics both Peirces were more original but still could not crack the first
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^675