“until the world becomes an absolutely perfect, rational and symmetrical sys-
tem, in which mind is at last crystallized in the infinitely distant future.”^54
Peirce’s evolutionist cosmology had a good deal in common with others of the
time, especially Spencer’s, which Peirce criticized for its materialism and lack
of logical sophistication. Royce recognized the affinity between Peirce’s sys-
tem and his own, and was one of the few motivated to master Peirce’s semi-
otic, which he incorporated into his late system, The Problem of Christianity
(1913).
Peirce’s blend of higher mathematics with Idealism and his totally new
semiotics made his position extremely difficult for his contemporaries to grasp.
His technical logic was obscured by popular philosophy, his semiotics by
psychology, cutting him off from recognition by the practitioners of the spe-
cialized disciplines who alone were capable of following him. Peirce’s recogni-
tion came late in life, in connection not with his Idealist system but with
pragmatism. James had announced the doctrine in 1898, and by 1907 it had
taken on the proportions of a popular movement (Myers, 1986: 299; Brent,
1993: 297). Peirce’s generous supporter during these days of poverty, James
made a point of giving Peirce credit for originating the doctrine. In 1905 Peirce
entered the public eye by writing explicitly about his own version, which he
now called pragmaticism.
Peirce’s papers of 1877–78 had described the meaning of a concept as its
observable consequences under various conditions of experiment. Truth is
that which the larger community of scientists settles on in the long run, those
items of belief which work so well that they become habitually fixed in the
chain of signs. But Peirce had not used any term like “pragmatism,” nor placed
much emphasis on this as an epistemology; indeed, he was aware that his
argument did not guarantee that the scientific community would always con-
verge. Peirce’s pragmatism was a retrospective construct, a strand selected from
the tangled skein of his earlier projects. When James made pragmatism famous
in the late 1890s, it was as a defense of religious belief. Peirce, who was always
a deep-rooted Idealist, needed no pragmatism for this purpose. What James
was doing was an entirely different project; he was pulling himself free from
his Idealist allies such as Royce, and developing an alternative philosophy
which could make Christianity compatible with science without embracing an
Idealist system. If Idealism was a halfway house between secularism and
religion, pragmatism was a halfway house to the halfway house.^55
The context in which Peirce developed his own pragmatist strands was
entirely different. His main tool was importing cutting-edge mathematical
methods into logic. Following De Morgan’s logic of relations, Peirce was
developing the view that an object is defined not by its qualities but by its
relations with other objects—its “behavior,” so to speak, under various experi-678 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths