which were the ingredients of Peirce’s system; he was a figure of the transition,
who guessed wrong as to the future base for omni-comprehensive systems of
his sort. Nor is it just a matter of Peirce’s having come too soon. He was
intrinsically a thinker of the late Idealist generation, and he would have been
disappointed by the merely naturalistic specialty of semiotics in which his work
finally found a niche. The trajectory of academic change explains Peirce’s
failure in his own lifetime, and the wavering and unfocused quality of his
intellectual energies.^57
Even in Europe mathematical logic existed precariously at the margins of
recognized disciplines; in America, where the bases for scientific research and
teaching were just being created, Peirce’s best work went largely unperceived
by his colleagues. Peirce was arrogant because he saw himself as a genius (a
role for which his father had groomed him); he could see the ramifications of
his new science of signs early on, but the whole project was invisible to most
others. In light of his modest achievements in conventional fields, his claims
sounded like those of a pretender and a charlatan. Peirce’s neuralgia and
personal irresponsibility may have multiplied his structural disadvantages, but
a soberer and healthier person probably would still have failed to achieve
recognition. The examples of Frege and, in an earlier generation, Bolzano show
that the path to institutionalizing the field of mathematical logic was extremely
rocky; both of these trailblazers were honored only retrospectively by a later
generation of philosophers. Georg Cantor, who was Peirce’s closest counterpart
in developing (from 1874) the extreme implications of transfinite set theory,
and who also argued that the continuum justifies the existence of God, was
the object of controversy and even contempt in the German mathematical
community. The strain caused Cantor a series of breakdowns from 1884 until
his death in a mental hospital in 1918 (Dauben, 1979; Collins and Restivo,
1983). We will consider the social development of mathematical logic in
Chapter 13.Experimental Psychology and the Pragmatist Movement
A cleaner transition from religious Idealism to pragmatism is exemplified in
the career of Dewey. Unlike the scientist-hybrids James and Peirce, Dewey was
an offshoot of theological connections and the core curriculum of the old
religious colleges. He began with the intention of becoming a Congregationalist
minister, and taught Bible classes until well into his 30s (Kuklick, 1985:
230–241). His teachers, liberal theologians from Andover and Union seminar-
ies, were receptive to popular Hegelianism as a way of reconciling religion with
Darwinian evolutionism. At Johns Hopkins in the early 1880s, Morris intro-
duced Dewey to the technical philosophy of T. H. Green.^58 From the point of680 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths