Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 6. Charles S. Peirce
attainments in science and might speak with some authority upon the questions he raises.” But it may be that Peirce’s use of a pseudonym was not so much to set himself apart from his respondents as it was a prudent decision based on his understanding that he could no longer pretend not to be standing apart and that his own name might keep some interested parties from participating. That he chose the pseudonym “Outsider” may have been Peirce’s wry way of stating an unpleasant truth.
Around the same time Peirce took up the cause against Spencer, perhaps a few weeks before, he arranged with Lorettus Sutton Metcalf to contribute to a series of articles on spiritualism Metcalf was organizing for his journal, The Forum. Peirce was known to be a skeptic concerning such matters, especially because of his recent dispute with Gurney, and Metcalf had engaged him to present a case against spiritualism. It is not known whether Peirce sought out Metcalf to offer his services, or whether Metcalf had become aware that Peirce was looking for magazine work, but it is likely that it was not until after the first article in the series had appeared that Peirce struck his deal with Metcalf. The first in the series was a piece by Mary J. Savage entitled “Experiences with Spiritualism,” which appeared in the December 1889 issue. The second, “Truth and Fraud in Spiritualism,” by Richard Hodgson, appeared in April 1890. Peirce’s article was to follow. It was never given a title by Peirce, but for the present volume the editors have entitled it “Logic and Spiritualism” (sel. 44). It could also have been called “The Case against Spiritualism.”
Initially Peirce must have thought he would make an easy go of this assignment, for he had worked through the arguments quite thoroughly during the Gurney controversy. But by the end of March he had run into a snag. His first draft ran to 6700 words and Metcalf had set a limit of 5000. Metcalf would not budge and Peirce was equally determined to say everything he wanted to say, so there ensued a curious battle of wills. Peirce finally conceded to Metcalf’s word limit, probably because he was in such great need of the remuneration, but Metcalf had to agree to Peirce’s peculiar way of cutting his article down to size. Peirce simply struck out hundreds of articles and pronouns transforming his paper into something not quite a poem but not really prose either. Peirce’s paper was set in galleys on 7 April, but he continued making revisions. He could not make it work and asked if he could start over. Metcalf agreed but asked Peirce to hurry it up and “please remember not to exceed 5000 words” (21 June 1890). Peirce never rewrote the paper.57 Back in Quicktown, after Juliette’s return from Europe, other priorities had taken center stage.
Peirce began his essay by admitting that he was a man of science—a scientific specialist—and made it plain that he believed that “no mind with which man can communicate can act or feel otherwise than through its residential nerve-matter.” But he did not doubt that “unrecognized avenues of sense may exist” and he believed that telepathy was not an impossibility. Nevertheless, he thought that science had to reject spiritualism and telepathy as viable hypotheses to explain unusual and unexpected phenomena. His argument against spiritualism is complex and cryptically stated because of the many revisions and cuts his manuscript had suffered. Important for his argument are three assumptions which he believed psychology had sufficiently established: 1. The obscure part of the mind is the principal part. 2. It acts with far more unerring accuracy than the rest. 3. It is almost infinitely more delicate in its sensibilities. It is this vast “unconscious or semiconscious” part of the mind, which evolves through generations of interaction with external forces into instinct and common sense, which must be trusted to guide us in situations where reason does not know which way to turn. This is our “mother-wit” which, for all we know, may have access to the “unrecognized avenues of sense.” The secret of mother-wit is that over the course of her education, her evolution, she has “learned” to follow nature’s laws—natures reason. Now the general conclusions of mother-wit, our common sense, should not be dismissed in the face of some “special experience.” It is barely possible, of course, that any given strange occurrence might be an exception to law, a rebuff to common sense. But, generally, where there is a strange occurrence, the probability of a trick is greater than the likelihood that it is an exception to law.
After further development of his argument, Peirce looked back to Gurney’s attempt to prove telepathy by amassing favorable cases and proclaimed that “the myriad strange stories prove nothing.” Such supposed evidence for telepathy or spiritualism loses its force when we consider four simple facts: 1. “the fact that all men are liars”; 2. “the fact of deranged imagination, hypnotism, hysteria”; 3. “the fact that we may receive and act upon indications of which we are quite unconscious”; and 4. “the fact that a certain number of coincidences will occur by chance.” Taken together, these facts serve as a basis for explaining unusual and surprising perceptions without resort to ghosts or spirits. In an earlier draft Peirce wrote: “why should we draw upon such an extreme rarity as telepathy, so long as we have such ordinary elements of human experience as superstition, lying and self-lying (from vanity, mischief, hysteria, mental derangement, and perverse love of untruth), exaggeration, inaccuracy, tricks of memory and imagination, intoxication (alcohol, opiate, and other), deception, and mistake, out of which to shape our hypotheses?”
In his final paragraph, Peirce made it clear that he was not dismissing the importance of psychical research; on the contrary, it “should receive every encouragement.” But properly conducted, it would become a branch of experimental psychology—the branch of science “destined to be the most important experimental research of the twentieth century.” Even though this paper remained unpublished, some of the ideas would make their way into the fourth article of Peirce’s Monist metaphysical series, “Man’s Glassy Essence”; that series would, in fact, reverberate with ideas from this period, especially ideas from “A Guess at the Riddle” and the Outsider pieces.
Working out definitively how the writings in this volume contributed to the overall development of Peirce’s thought is a task for the community of scholars who will study them for that purpose, but a few additional thoughts might be helpful. Following again the method used in the introduction to W5, it may be revealing to consider how the W6 writings fit into Peirce’s general intellectual development as traced by Murphey and Fisch.58 According to Murphey, the most telling demarcations in Peirce’s intellectual development are revisions to his system of categories necessitated by discoveries in logic. For Fisch, the single most important gauge of the growth of Peirce’s thought was its movement toward the robust three-category realism of his later years.
Murphey divides Peirce’s intellectual life into four phases dominated in turn by Kant’s system of philosophy, by syllogistic logic, by the logic of relations, and by the logic of quantification. According to Murphey, the fourth and final phase began about 1885 after Peirce, with his student O. H. Mitchell, discovered the quantifier. Only then could Peirce add pure indexical signs to his logic, signs that refer to individuals per se and not to conceptions. The individual, the non-general, quickly took on a special importance for Peirce as he came to realize that a non-conceptual acquaintance with individuals can provide a direct and immediate link to reality. According to Murphey, this allowed Peirce to retreat from the conceptualism of his “end of inquiry” theory of reality without having to resort to “first impressions of sense.”59 Although Murphey makes the long final period of Peirce’s intellectual development range over the last three decades of Peirce’s life, he does notice that around 1896 Peirce formed a new conception of the continuum after discovering that continua must involve unactualized possibilities: “Whatever is continuous therefore involves real possibility and is accordingly of a general nature.”60 Murphey notes that Peirce announced this discovery to William James in March of 1897 and that it led to a strengthening of Peirce’s realism. It is surprising that Murphey did not count the period following this important logical insight, the period of Peirce’s synechism—“the new Scholastic realism”61—as a new and final phase of Peirce’s development, one dominated by modal logic (and by Peirce’s Existential Graphs).
In Fisch’s account, Peirce’s thought is shown to have developed gradually from an early nominalism that attributed generality only to cognitions and that held all realities to be “nominal, significative, cognitive” (W2:181), to a robust form of realism that gave ontological place to each of the three categories. Fisch marks the major stages