In 1884, after his dismissal from Johns Hopkins, Peirce moved to Washington D.C. to refocus his career on his scientific work for the Coast and Geodetic Survey. In July he had begun an intensive program of field operations which he expected to continue until a vast expanse of the continental United States was linked through gravity determinations and added to the international geodetic network that would serve to calculate the figure of the Earth. This was a principal concern of mathematical geodesy and Peirce had already contributed to its solution (W4: sel. 76). At some point he knew he would have to turn a growing mass of data into a publishable report on gravity, but he kept putting it off in favor of continued field work. He assumed that when the time came to prepare reports he would have whatever computing help he needed, as he always had before. Then in March 1885, Grover Cleveland was inaugurated as the twenty-second President of the United States and Peirce's plans were dashed. Cleveland came to power intent on reforming government service and by July had targeted the Coast Survey as the agency he would make an example of. 3 Superintendent Julius Hilgard was fired and all administrators and field officers, including Peirce, were subjected to intense scrutiny. Frank Manly Thorn, a lawyer and friend of Cleveland, was installed as acting superintendent to carry out the President's reform agenda. Greatly discouraged by what was happening, Peirce left Washington in March 1886 and moved with Juliette to New York City. He supposed that New York would be a better place to start a new life in case his Survey job should be lost. He carried out pendulum field operations at the Stevens Institute station in Hoboken until August when Thorn relieved him of further field duty and ordered him to prepare for publication the backlog of results already obtained. Funding for field operations had been slashed and Peirce's gravity work, among the most costly, could no longer be supported. If pendulum operations were to continue they would have to be scaled back to meet only the demands of practical science, not those of pure science that guided Peirce. On 20 August Peirce wrote to University of Wisconsin astronomer, Edward S. Holden: "The president seems to have decided to keep Thorn in as Superintendent as long as he can, and under the influence of these men of Red Tape all the life and energy has gone from the Survey. . . . I am utterly discouraged and disgusted, and want to get out. . . ." In October, trying to cheer him up, Peirce's mother wrote: "Cleveland is a Dolt."

Somehow Peirce managed to hang on to his Survey job for another five years, although it seems certain that he would have given it up many times over had he not needed the income so desperately. Peirce was clearly disaffected and frequently spoke of resigning, but then always reconsidered. His relations with Survey headquarters became increasingly strained, sometimes quite bitter, and except for brief periods of respite, the remainder of his tenure was marked by a suspicion in Washington that Peirce was not doing enough work and by a concern on Peirce's part that there was a cabal conspiring to get him dismissed. One period of promise came just after July 1889 when Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, a trained scientist, succeeded Thorn as Superintendent. But it soon became evident that Mendenhall's plans for gravity determinations left no room for pendulum operations of the sort Peirce practiced. By the close of the period covered in the present volume, Peirce's second major gravity report, representing years of labor, was at risk of being rejected for publication, and Mendenhall's patience with Peirce was rapidly reaching its limit.

Amidst the turmoil of a life in constant transition and a career that was falling apart, Peirce managed to carry on at least a thread of philosophical inquiry, inspired in part by his late work at Johns Hopkins and his reading of the 1885 books by Royce and Abbot, and fueled by his continuing lexicographic research for the Century Dictionary . 4 In the August 1886 letter to Holden quoted above, Peirce added: "You remember that I told you something of a sort of evolutionist speculation of mine. This has grown much. . . ." When he wrote to Holden, he had already begun to write a book entitled One, Two, Three in which he would make a guess about the constitution of the universe and use his categories as the key to an all-encompassing system of philosophy (W5: sels. 47-50). After his move to Milford in 1887 this work would grow into his "A Guess at the Riddle" (sels. 22-28) and, although never finished, it would set the course for much of his subsequent thought. But as 1886 drew to a close, it was logic that was uppermost on Peirce's mind. For a while he resumed work on a book on general logic (W5: sel. 54) which would evolve into his "How to Reason" of 1894. But as his insecurity with his career increased, his interest turned from the advancement of the science of logic to how he could use his specialty to make a living adequate to the demands of the lifestyle he and Juliette had set for themselves in Baltimore in the first months of their marriage. Peirce's income had taken a serious hit with the loss of his lectureship at Johns Hopkins, and now that his Coast Survey salary was in danger, he had to find a substantial new source of income. He began writing elementary accounts of his logic of relatives (W5: sels. 55-56) and Boolean algebra (sel. 1), perhaps initially for a course of lectures he hoped to deliver at the University of Wisconsin, but at least in the latter case it is likely he had paying students in mind.

Peirce entered 1887 with some confidence that he had found a way to survive his anticipated separation from the Survey. Were there not hundreds, nay, thousands of citizens abroad in the land in the greatest need of improving their reasoning skills? Would not a good course in reasoning, customized for individual capabilities and taught by a master logician, increase opportunities and, in general, better the lives of students—and thereby serve well the country as a whole? Could not one expect to attract large numbers of occasional students to sign up for a course of study that virtually guaranteed a high degree of self-improvement? Peirce was convinced that he had found a niche and that with clever marketing and efficient operations he could make good money with a correspondence course on the art of reasoning. He wrote to Cyrus W. Field, financier for the first transatlantic cable, that for years he had carried in his pocketbook a clipping quoting Field on the value of right reason: "My fortune was made by working a gold-mine, and that gold-mine is the power of right reason." Peirce might not make a fortune, but surely he would make a good living.

To set this promising plan into motion, Peirce needed capital. Brochures would have to be printed, lessons duplicated, typewriters purchased, assistants hired, and field-agents engaged. Peirce wanted fifteen hundred students and imagined that once things got rolling he would send out around five hundred letters a day. He would begin by advertising in popular magazines and would send out a hundred thousand circulars. He wrote to his cousin, Henry Cabot Lodge, and asked for a loan to get his scheme off the ground. Lodge declined and apparently with no other prospects Peirce decided to start up piecemeal. In May an advertisement for his course circular (reproduced on p. 14) ran in the Century Magazine and he sent circulars (sel. 2) to seven hundred people. He wrote to his brother James Mills (Jem) that he doubted he would attract "a single pupil from so small a number," but letters of interest began to come in. Records for the course are very incomplete, so it is difficult to tell how many responded or exactly what the content of the course was, but it is clear that by the end of March Peirce had received more than fifteen inquiries and at least eight students had begun lessons. While far from what Peirce needed to make a living, and certainly not enough to let him resign from the Survey, the response was promising and indicated that a major promotional effort could succeed. Peirce imagined an army of agents dispersed throughout the country, all soliciting students to sign up for his course. He drew up directions for agents (sel. 5) which bring to mind the hucksterism of turn-of-the-century medicine peddlers or of modern telephone solicitors: "The levers upon which you have to rely are first, cupidity, second, shame, and third, fatigue." Still, there is no doubt that Peirce believed he could deliver good value for the price of his course, and from what can be reconstructed from the fragments that remain (see sels. 3 -13), that belief seems justified.

Peirce's plan for the correspondence course was set out in his circular (sel. 2) and his follow-up letter (sel. 3). The course would be divided into three parts—traditional logic, mathematical reasoning, and scientific reasoning—and the full course would require a minimum of one hundred and eighty letters. From the exercise sets that have survived—only a small part of the series Peirce had prepared—and from surviving student letters, it is possible to get a sense of what Peirce taught and how he interacted with his students. He seems to have gone to some lengths to address his students' individual interests and capabilities, but it is likely that he was aiming too high. Certainly the reasoning exercises (sel. 9) and the three lessons in Boolean algebra with additional exercises (sels. 10 and 13) involved rather high-level logical content; there is a one-page fragment (in RL 100) that indicates that Peirce even hoped to convey some of his favorite philosophical ideas through his reasoning exercises. For example, the second exercise from the fragment gives a brief lesson in Peirce's theory of signs:

Let us use the word "sign" to mean anything which on being perceived carries to a mind some cognition or thought which is applicable to some object. Thus, I would call a portrait a sign. I would call a pointing finger a sign. I would call a spoken sentence a sign. I now ask you to make a list of a good many different kinds of signs, and to attempt to classify them according to their different modes of standing for their objects. To do this will require a good deal of thought.

Such questions might well serve the purpose of evaluating student preparedness but they seem aimed at minds more elastic and capable than might be expected to turn out in the large numbers Peirce expected. Still, a letter he wrote at the end of March to J. M. Hantz of Northwestern University indicates continuing enthusiasm for his course and reveals no dissatisfaction with his initial students:

It is my fate to be supposed an extreme partisan of formal logic, and so I began. But the study of the logic of relations has converted me from that error. Formal logic centers its whole attention on the least important part of reasoning, a part so mechanical that it may be performed by a machine, and fancies that that is all there is in the mental process. For my part, I hold that reasoning is the observation of relations, mainly by means of diagrams and the like. It is a living process. This is the point of view from which I am conducting my instruction in the art of reasoning. I find out and correct all the pupil's bad habits in thinking; I teach him that reasoning is not done by the unaided brain, but needs the cooperation of the eyes and hands. Reasoning, as I make him see, is a kind of experimentation, in which, instead of relying on the intelligible laws of outward nature to bring out the result, we depend on the equally hidden laws of inward association. I initiate him into the art of this experimentation. I familiarize him with the use of all kinds of diagrams and devices for aiding the imagination. I show him just what part abstract thought has in the process—a quite subsidiary one.

Peirce added that he assigns his students "a large number and great variety of exercises in dealing with real facts" and that "the invention of these exercises is the thing for which I hope to be remembered, for I believe they are destined to exert no little influence in the future." In the years that followed, as Peirce used his exercise sets for other purposes, the package of exercises was broken up and dispersed. The small set that has been reassembled (sels. 9, 10, 13) is at best an indication of what Peirce was so proud of, as many of the exercises derive from other authors. Had Peirce's students successfully worked their way through all of his lessons, they would likely have become the proficient reasoners he promised, but in the end no one ever finished the course. Peirce did carry on with a few students for a year or two, and later even tried to revive the course, but his lack of capital from the outset and his move to Milford in April thwarted any real chance for success.

Still, in the spring of 1887, prospects seemed good, though Peirce's circumstances were becoming more and more difficult. New York was an expensive place to live and Peirce's salary from the Survey was barely enough to maintain a satisfactory lifestyle. With enough paying students he would have welcomed separation from the Survey, but with only a handful he could not afford to resign. Unfortunately, his Survey work, now confined to the reduction of observation data—which in better times would have been handled by computing assistants—was extremely time-consuming, and severely limited the time he could spend answering letters and promoting his logic course. More disturbing, starting in September of 1886 a crisis had been brewing over the report on pendulum operations from the ill-fated Greely Expedition to Lady Franklin Bay in the Arctic, and Peirce was caught in the middle of it. 5 In 1881, then Lieutenant Adolphus Greely led an Army expedition of twenty-five men to the northeastern part of Ellesmere Island to establish a scientific station above the 81st parallel at Fort Conger off Lady Franklin Bay. Greely's party had been organized to participate in the first International Polar Year, an eleven-nation effort to advance earth science in the Arctic and Antarctic during 1882-83. The astronomer for Greely's party, Sergeant Edward Israel, had been specially trained by Peirce in the use of pendulums for gravity determinations, and for sixteen days in January 1882 he diligently swung Peirce Pendulum No. 1 in a specially constructed ice shelter. Greely's party met with disaster when supply ships failed to reach Fort Conger in 1882 and 1883, and when a navy vessel finally reached the retreating expedition about two hundred miles south of Lady Franklin Bay at Cape Sabine in June 1884, only seven men had survived and only six would make it home. Throughout the agonizing final winter, with starvation threatening his men, Greely took great pains to preserve the scientific data obtained at such a high price. Knowing that the heavy pendulum was a dangerous burden as his party retreated from Fort Conger to Cape Sabine, Greely had given his men the option of abandoning it, but they had declined. Fearing that his party's camp might be missed by the much hoped-for relief expedition, he sent a party on 23 October 1883 to a prominent point on an island a few miles south of Cape Sabine in Payer Harbor to cache the records. Peirce's pendulum, sealed in its case, was erected as a towering marker over the cache (see woodcut on p. 219).

The rescue of the expedition made international headlines, and Greely became an instant celebrity. There was some initial concern that the tragedy might have resulted from poor judgment on his part, and it was rumored that the survivors had resorted to cannibalism, but Greely was quickly exonerated. However, discord over the cost of the expedition and rescue troubled President Arthur and Secretary of War Lincoln, and they remained cool to Greely and even used his disaster as an opportunity to argue against future federal support for dangerous scientific missions. Not until Cleveland was elected President would Greely be duly recognized for his achievement and promoted first to Captain in 1886 and then to Brigadier General in 1887. The initial controversy over his leadership and the attempt to use his misfortune as an argument against federal support for science made Greely very sensitive to any criticism of his party's achievements.

In his first dispatch following the rescue, Greely had stated with much satisfaction that his party had saved and brought back the records of the meteorological, tidal, astronomical, magnetic, and pendulum observations, and he mentioned proudly that he had brought back the pendulum. In the 19 September 1884 issue of Science, the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science proclaimed that "nothing in the annals of scientific heroism exceeded the devotion of those hungry men in sticking to that ponderous piece of metal." In consequence of the criticism of his expedition, and the considerable attention given to the pendulum, Greely was determined to include Peirce's account of the Ft. Conger pendulum observations in his official report. Yet by September 1886, over two years after Peirce had been given the pendulum records, and with everything else in hand, Greely was still waiting for the gravity results. Knowing that Superintendent Thorn feared bad publicity, Greely threatened to go to press without Peirce's report: "It is needless for me to point out the comments which will be called forth in America and Europe, if these observations are wanting when the final report appears." 6 Responding as Greely hoped, Thorn put tremendous pressure on Peirce to turn in his report at once.

Thorn knew that Peirce had delayed his report because of some remaining uncertainties over the expansion coefficient for Pendulum No. 1 which he believed could not be resolved without taking No. 1 to a northern station, preferably St. Paul or Minneapolis, where it could be swung in the summer and again in the winter under extreme conditions as similar as possible to those at Ft. Conger. Peirce felt it his duty to turn Greely's hard-won data into the most significant results possible and he knew what that required. As early as April 1886, he had informed the Assistant in Charge of the Survey's Washington office, Benjamin A. Colonna, of his concerns and of his plan to swing the pendulum at a suitable northern location, and by September he had informed Superintendent Thorn directly. As the Coast Survey authority on pendulum operations, and given the importance of the Greely observations, Peirce probably expected his recommendation to be accepted without opposition, but he did not count on, nor perhaps even fully comprehend, the political pressures on Thorn. Peirce's stubbornness, however justified from the standpoint of pure science, rankled Thorn, who threatened to take the matter entirely out of Peirce's hands. Finally seeing the urgency of issuing the report, even if not fully adequate, Peirce reluctantly conceded: "You are aware that my judgment is averse to the publication of the Greely matter; but as you were plainly determined upon it, I thought it my duty to do all I possibly could to try to render that publication useful . . ." When Peirce wrote this on 22 March 1887 he added: "I have wasted more time upon this than I should have thought it worth while to do, except for my desire to make the best of this Greely publication. . . . I perceive you are becoming very impatient, and I will give up trying to perform the impossible, and send on the work as soon as I can."

Three weeks later Peirce submitted his report, but instead of settling things down it made matters worse. Although in muted terms, Peirce had included all of his criticisms and concerns. In accordance with Peirce's instructions, after the pendulum at Ft. Conger had been swung for eight days, the knives had been removed and interchanged. But after that interchange, the periods of oscillation were noticeably different, too different to be accounted for, Peirce believed, by the contraction of the pendulum due to colder temperatures or by slippage of a knife, as suggested by one of Peirce's past assistants, Henry Farquhar (see annotation 220.4), who, in the past, had frequently been assigned to assist Peirce. There was a remote possibility, Peirce suggested, that the change was the result of frost accumulation on the knives during the interchange, but he thought it really could not be satisfactorily explained and would detract from the usefulness of the results until further experiments could be made at a northern station. To make matters worse, he pointed out that the pendulum appeared to have lost between 10 and 15 grams of mass, 7 probably as a result of an accident during the difficult retreat from Ft. Conger to Cape Sabine. Such a loss of mass would explain a variation in the pendulum's period of oscillation after its return. In raising these concerns, it is clear that Peirce's purpose was to present the Ft. Conger results in a way that made sense, and being fully aware of how often damage occurs to scientific equipment, especially in rough conditions, he had no idea his report would give offense. But Greely's high sensitivity to criticism blinded him to Peirce's good intentions and he became furious. Thorn set the Survey office to work to diffuse the tension. Farquhar was asked to write a supplementary report to mitigate Peirce's account and Greely added a memorandum (pp. 243-44) in which he fervently denied that any accident had happened to the pendulum. He went so far as to accuse Peirce of having given Sergeant Israel inadequate training and of failure to supply any written instructions, even though he had earlier praised Peirce for the care with which he had instructed Israel—care documented by Peirce's detailed written instructions, which have survived and can be found with the papers that Greely brought back from Ft. Conger (see annotation 216.19).

When he saw Greely's memorandum, Peirce was dismayed that such offense had been taken, and he immediately submitted a conciliatory note to be printed with Greely's memorandum (pp. 244-45). In this note, Peirce stressed that he had no intention whatsoever of imputing any blame for what he considered to be normal occurrences under the circumstances, and he emphasized that Greely and Israel deserved nothing less than the highest honor for their "signally successful" gravity determination. He did refer, though, to "the only doubt which affects the result, namely, that which relates to the temperature-correction," but added that this doubt was destined to be resolved when further experiments could be made in the North. Greely's two-volume report, including Peirce's Ft. Conger "Pendulum Observations" (sel. 30), finally appeared in the fall of 1888, and Peirce's "Explanatory Note" was inserted to appear with Greely's "Memorandum." Greely was satisfied and wrote to Peirce on 30 November 1888 that he understood that no blame had been intended. He added: "I beg to assure you that I have always been impressed with your earnestness and zeal in connection with these observations, and I know that you were very decided in insisting upon the conditions under which the work should be done. I cannot well believe that any one should consider you as desirous of pulling down a house which has been substantially built with your hands; for to your assiduity, skill, and knowledge must be credited, as I have always understood, the latest and most important advances in the methods of application of pendulum observations." That brought to an end an unfortunate episode largely fueled by misunderstanding; but while Peirce's relations with Greely seemed to have been mended, his relations with the Survey had suffered further damage.

As he grappled with the Ft. Conger pendulum results, Peirce continued working on his definitions for the Century Dictionary —before long his main concern. And, typically, from time to time other topics would catch his attention. In 1886, three members of the English Psychical Research Society, Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers, and Frank Podmore, published a book which recounted hundreds of cases of the hallucination of the appearance of a person who would die or had died within twelve hours of their "appearance" and a scientific case was made for the authenticity of telepathic and apparitional phenomena. William James, a close friend of Gurney and a member of the English Psychical Research Society as well as of its American counterpart, gave the book, Phantasms of the Living, a very positive review in the January 1887 issue of Science. Peirce, who would have known of the book in any case because of his many acquaintances in the American branch of the Society (to which he never belonged), including his own brother Jem, must have been struck by James's praise for the book. Only two years earlier, Peirce had speculated (W5: sel. 24) that presumed telepathic phenomena were the result of faint sensations, and he had endorsed the field as worthy of further scientific study. So in early 1887, Peirce was working his way through the main argument of this huge book with his own review in mind—it would appear later in the year in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research (sel. 16) and trigger a controversy with Gurney that would continue for two years.

Probably in March, Peirce and a few other prominent American scientists were asked to contribute short articles to The Christian Register for a series on how science viewed belief in a future life. Peirce agreed to participate and drew material from his ongoing examination of Phantasms for his contribution (sel. 14). He wrote to his mother on 3 April 1887 that his work for his correspondence course was improving his writing style and that he hoped in a year or two to be "as good a writer as these men who write the editorials in the New York papers, who turn out so much good English and good sense." The little piece for the Register, published on 7 April, gave Peirce an opportunity not only to try out his developing style, but also to "announce" a few ideas that were growing more and more important for him and that would become signature doctrines. Among these were his ideas that the variety in the universe could not have come about by strict adherence to mechanical law and that there are no definite limits to human knowledge. According to Max Fisch, it is here that Peirce first made his case in print against the doctrine of necessity. 8 Peirce thought that although the evidence in favor of afterlife was not strong, it might be expected to become stronger. As to the "shades" who supposedly survive physical death, existing evidence could only bring Peirce to conclude that they were mere ghosts of their former selves—and so painfully solemn. Perhaps revealing more of his own circumstances than he intended, he wrote that were he suddenly to find himself "liberated from all the trials and responsibilities of this life, my probation over, and my destiny put beyond marring or making, I should . . . regard the situation as a stupendous frolic, should be at the summit of gayety, and should only be too glad to leave the vale of tears behind." He certainly would not "come mooning back . . . to cry over spilled milk."

Probably while he was working on his contribution for the "Science and Immortality" series, possibly slightly later, Peirce wrote a paper entitled "Logical Machines" (sel. 15) for the November inaugural issue of G. Stanley Hall's American Journal of Psychology. Peirce argued for the superiority of Allan Marquand's logic machine over that of Jevons, but he offered some improvements and suggested that it should be possible to construct a machine "which should work the logic of relations with a large number of terms." Peirce believed that the study of such machines was a good way to improve logic. In this paper Peirce did not mention his recent recommendation to Marquand to use electrical switching circuits for logical operations (W5:421-22), 9 but he did, in passing, make some interesting remarks about "the secret of all reasoning machines" and the appropriateness of calling such machines "reasoning machines," and then suggested that to some extent every machine is a reasoning machine—to the extent that they depend on "the objective reason embodied in the laws of nature." Peirce claimed that "reasoning machines" are destitute of originality and initiative: "it cannot find its own problems; . . . it cannot direct itself between different possible procedures." The absence of originality, however, is no defect for a machine: "we no more want an original machine, than a house-builder would want an original journeyman, or an American board of college trustees would hire an original professor"—a clear reference to himself.

It is not surprising that what we see of Peirce's life mirrored in his writings from this period appears as troubled and somewhat embittered. He had been forced to leave Johns Hopkins and, though not without hope, saw no good prospect of an appointment at another university. The Coast Survey was in disarray and he knew that it was just a matter of time until his career there would come to an end. His one hope was his correspondence course. He felt sure it could succeed—but without the capital to begin his scheme at full strength it would have to grow to a critical mass before he could devote himself to it fully, and reaching that point would take time. Could he and Juliette survive in New York while they waited? On 3 April, Peirce wrote to his mother:

It seems to be pretty certain that there is going to be enough to live on from my lessons any way, even in New York. But I shall go into the country the first of May and economize a little; and can stay there next winter if necessary. The expenses have so far eaten largely into the profits, but I have made arrangements to reduce the cost of my advertising, and at the same time make it more effective. My clerks will get trained and will make the letters less costly, and the purchases of type-writers, etc. will cease, or nearly so, as I reach my maximum. For the next few months, this will be a heavy expense, but then I expect to retain the Coast Survey two, and perhaps three, months more. That gives me more than enough to pay for type-writers. I think I shall eventually make a handsome thing of this. At any rate, I shall make a living, and earn the everlasting gratitude of the country, when the effects of the training come to be seen. I have had an enormous quantity of extremely interesting letters from teachers, professors, lawyers, business men, etc. I am also getting numerous suggestions to invest money. But I have not yet been obliged to purchase a steam coupon-cutting machine.

Peirce's spirits sound high but he must have been putting his best face on for his mother—in fact, during most of this period he was in emotional turmoil. He was under constant, often extreme, pressure from Thorn to submit reports, yet congressional budget cuts made it virtually impossible for him to receive sustained computing assistance, especially since he had moved out of Washington. There were some exceptions, but Peirce was left to his own devices most of the time. He thus confronted a mountain of data at the very time he found his powers as a mathematical computer to be weakening. A few years later, in December 1891, as he was about to resign, Peirce wrote to then Superintendent T. C. Mendenhall what amounted to a confession about his hidden struggle with his loss of computing proficiency.

My mind, as it seems to me, is generally sound and decidedly strong. But of late years, in a certain direction a singular weakness has been growing upon me; though I cannot but believe that with a good rest I should recover. When Thorn had been in about a year I think it was that I found I got all mixed up about my computations, and at first complained of it openly. Then, I began to see that it would injure me and kept quiet about it. We were constantly expecting that Mr. Thorn would go, and I was determined that when he did I would ask to be sent into the field. Then I came into the country and found myself better at first. Besides, I got upon hydrodynamics which did not affect me the same way. I worked very hard, and could find nobody who could give me much help. But my tendency to become confused about complicated computations increased, and was aggravated by having no aid. I became almost incapable of reading certain kinds of mathematics, though other kinds, much more difficult to most minds, afford me little difficulty. The more trouble I had, the less I liked to acknowledge it. So I temporized and got along as well as I could . . . (18 December 91)

It is easy to imagine Peirce's frustration when Thorn pushed him beyond limits he was prepared to acknowledge. Peirce's relations with Thorn grew acrimonious and they became impatient and sarcastic with each other. To make matters worse, Peirce imagined that there was some kind of conspiracy to get him out of the Survey. While this may have been a paranoid response, there is evidence that B. A. Colonna (who during Thorn's tenure 10 was officially in charge of the Survey's Washington office but unofficially acted as the de facto superintendent) was working behind the scenes to turn Thorn against Peirce. It was Colonna who had created a stir in the scientific community during the 1885 investigation of the Survey by describing Peirce's gravity work as of "meager value" (see W5:xxix) and Peirce's letters to Thorn frequently contain marginal notes added by Colonna, seemingly intended to dispose Thorn against him. For example, in the margin of a 30 September 1886 letter to Thorn in which Peirce outlined some of his concerns with the Greely data and asked for help with the computations, Colonna wrote: "It is plainly evident that if we depend on Peirce we get nothing. I would suggest a letter to him directing that he turn over to the office all the Greely records and any others that he may already have made bearing on them & that he do so at once." And when on 9 July 1887 Peirce sent in a few unpaid vouchers from his pendulum operations at Hoboken the previous year, Colonna sent this exasperated note to Thorn: "Mr. Peirce extended time and time again his allotment and still left these bills unpaid. Open with him again and where will you stop?" The simple fact is, there was bad blood between Peirce and Colonna, 11 and whatever his motives, Colonna did want Peirce out of the Survey: "Charles Peirce about crazes me. He has no system, no idea of order or business & with all his talent is a deadweight. I wish he could get a larger salary somewhere else and leave us. We could spare his talent for the sake of a better order." 12

More stressful than his career instability were his increasingly bad relations with his family and friends over his marriage to Juliette. Established society wanted no part of Juliette and even old friends, including Samuel P. Langley, withdrew from Peirce. Peirce's Aunt Elisabeth (Lizzie), who owned the house his mother and brother Jem lived in, despised Juliette, and made it plain that she was not welcome in her home. Aunt Lizzie wrote to Peirce's sister Helen after the death of Herbert's (Berts's) baby girl: "I had a little talk with Berts about Juliette & he feels about her just as I do. . . . It seems she is studying for the theater to learn how to act; it will be an easy lesson for her—though I don't see that there is much left for her to learn" (22 April 1886). She wrote later (4 July 1886): "I have many sad hours thinking of Charles. He did wrong to marry Zina—& he suffered for it—but he was young then. Now there is no excuse for him in tying himself to that miserable Juliette—whom we ought not & cannot receive. There is no question about it. She is, I feel sure, a very dangerous person—& our only course is to keep her at a distance." In January 1887, Peirce had a flare-up with Jem over Juliette. Peirce had written to Jem pleading with him to warm up to her:

If you had any discernment of human nature you would see that the worst thing you could do for me and the worst thing all round is to treat Juliette with any want of love & confidence. We have bad things to face in the near future, all of us; and you may be sure we had best stick together. That we can't do if you are going to be distrustful of Juliette. She burns under a sense of your injustice to her. Half our misery comes from that. (c. 20 January 1887)

Jem's reply was not conciliatory. He wrote that he had "no wish to enter on a disagreeable discussion," but he went on to say that he could not permit himself "to be called to account for sentiments & conduct to which I am driven by the hard stress of facts" (21 January 1887). He insinuated pointedly that Juliette had acted disloyally to Peirce during that very week. Peirce responded sharply: "As you insist on putting me into the position of choosing between you and my wife,—quite unnecessarily—of course I choose my wife. You thus get rid of a troublesome relative very neatly, & at a time when he is more troublesome than ever" (c. 22 January 1887). The fact was, however, that Peirce's own feelings for Juliette were mixed. Though he had become completely committed to her, he was aware that she had already caused him much harm and he did not fully trust her. When he had written to Jem earlier in January about the plans for his correspondence course, he said plainly that he was afraid Juliette would somehow interfere: "She may intercept letters from pupils & break up correspondence. . . ." He added that Juliette would not permit him to have a clerk at their flat, nor have any woman work for him at all, and he revealed that he even suspected that Juliette was somehow to blame for his troubles with the Coast Survey. "Uncle Sam and Juliet [sic] are enough to drive me out of my wits." But his feelings for Juliette fluctuated wildly. He ended by asking Jem to burn the letter, "which is imprudent, because I love her devotedly."

As Peirce's old social and family ties unraveled, he and Juliette began to associate with a more bohemian crowd—people like New York playwright and director Steele MacKaye and his wife Mary, writer and editor Titus Munson Coan, poet and stockbroker—and editor of the works of Edgar Allan Poe—Edmund Clarence Stedman, geologist and chemist Persifor Frazer, known for his atheism, and artists Albert Bierstadt, Alfred L. Brennen, and George B. Butler. 13 One of Juliette's New York friends, Mary Eno Pinchot, had a country estate in the Pocono Mountains just outside of Milford, Pennsylvania. Peirce and Juliette had visited Milford and were much attracted to the beauty of the surrounding countryside and, in particular, to the French community that had gathered there. The Peirces found that they were most easily accepted by people of French heritage. The need to economize, together with the attraction of an accepting community, convinced them to pull up stakes and move to Milford. It did not detract from this decision, as Joseph Brent has pointed out, 14 that the Pinchot family had great wealth and that they regularly entertained the likes of the Vanderbilts, Stuyvesants, Harrimans, and Belmonts. Here seemed to be an opportunity for Peirce and Juliette to enter a rich society even if not the society of Peirce's heritage. In later years, Peirce remembered the time differently. In a draft of his 1908 paper, "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," (R 842), Peirce reminisced: "In 1887, when I had attained a standing among American scientific men sufficiently to satisfy a man of very little ambition, I retired to the wildest country of the Northern States, south of the Adirondacks and east of the Alleghanies, where I might have the least distraction from the study of logic." But though this may be what he came to value most highly about his retreat from city life, it is far from certain that this motive had anything to do with his decision to move to Pennsylvania.

The Peirces arrived in Milford on Thursday, 28 April 1887, and checked into the Hotel Fauchère. Within two weeks the Peirces had leased a house in Milford, characterized by Peirce's mother as "luxurious quarters" (3 June 87), and proceeded to enter into the village life. Peirce joined the Episcopalian church and became friendly with the local clergy. 15 He and Juliette became frequent guests of the Pinchots at their Norman-style mansion they called "Grey Towers." Brent has described how they spent many afternoons and evenings at Grey Towers playing charades, capped with Peirce reading and reciting, and in September the Peirces "wrote, produced, directed, and acted" in a play given in the Pinchot's private theatre. 16

Although the move disrupted Peirce's correspondence course and the preparation of his reports for the Coast Survey, it did not take him long to resume those efforts. The correspondence course would never achieve a critical mass and would gradually expire, but his Survey work would continue for another four and a half years. His official assignment at that time was to reduce the data from his post-1881 pendulum observations and produce publishable results, but his main interest would soon become the theory of the hydrodynamical effect of air on pendulum movement. Peirce also went back to work on his definitions for the Century Dictionary, and would spend the following three years working more intensively on his definitions than on anything else.

Peirce's relations with his family deteriorated further after the move to Milford. Aunt Lizzie became even more vitriolic about Juliette. She wrote to Peirce's sister: "I think that your mother blames me for the stand I take about Charles & Juliette. . . . We can not have them here at all. In fact I know Juliette enough from my own observation, that she would be a dreadful creature to have in the house. She is a liar & very artful, & she cares for nobody but herself, & she wd be worse than a rattle-snake in the house" (8 August 1887). She wrote of Juliette's alleged genius for acting that "she always has been on the stage & ought to be an adept by this time" but that "if she is a genius I fear it is a cracked one," and that "I utterly distrust her & hope I never see her again" (5 May and 9 June 1887). Even Peirce's mother, who had alone seemed always to maintain a genuine concern in Juliette, seemed to turn against her. In August, Mrs. Peirce traveled to Newport with Jem after vaguely inviting Charles and Juliette to meet them, but Jem waited until it was too late—nine days into their visit—to write that they could come. When Charles learned of this, he was furious and wrote a scathing letter draft that he never sent:

It is best I should say once for all a few plain words which I shall not repeat concerning an expression in your last. You say you hope Juliette will let me come on to Cambridge. I wish Juliette would not urge me to go but would resent as I think she ought your insufferable and vulgar insolence. You insult me deeply in supposing or pretending to suppose I ever would go into that house. Whatever your object may have been in driving me to this decision, you have succeeded in that.Your inviting us to meet you and mother in Newport and then not letting us know till you had been there 9 days when mother writes that I can put any construction I like on her silence, confirms me in [the] decision self-respect ought to have brought me to long ago.I was deeply attached to you all, but you have all behaved ignobly & contemptibly, & I will pay up what I owe & be done with you. (22 Aug. 1887)

He did send a telegram that he immediately regretted sending and wrote to Jem to express his "sorrow and shame at having used an insulting expression." He promised that "As long as mother lives, at least, I want to have the best relations possible with those she loves" (21 Sept. 1887).

Peirce's mother would not live for much longer. On 4 October, Peirce was called to her bedside and she died six days later. Unfortunately, the tensions toward Juliette, who accompanied Peirce to the funeral and stayed on with him as he helped settle affairs, did not let up during the period of mourning. On the 15th, Aunt Lizzie wrote to Helen: "I hope I shall hear today when Charles & Dulcinea are going. I hope today but this I cannot expect. I wish she was at the South Pole, the North being too much in the neighborhood. . . ." She wrote again on the 21st: "I do not hear any thing yet of Charles' going—I hope & trust they will go this week & never return." A few days later she could finally write: "Charles is going tomorrow & then I shall breathe freely. I am always afraid she will make an invasion. I feel quite sure that she has got Charles into her power—& she would like to get us all if she could. . . . However we need not be afraid of her if we can only keep her at a distance." When Peirce's mother's estate was eventually settled about a year later, his share came to about $2000, including $1000 he had borrowed in 1885. He also got back some books he had given his mother, in particular a Leopold Shakespeare which had been dear to her. 17

The move from New York and his family troubles did not prevent Peirce from making some progress on the intellectual front. By mid-May 1887, he had finished his review of Phantasms of the Living, his first paper after arriving in Milford. Although Peirce did not believe that the postulation of telepathy and apparitions, Gurney's "ghosts," formed a good hypothesis for explaining the unusual phenomena recounted in Phantasms, that conviction was not why he devoted so much attention to that gigantic book. Gurney, Myers, and Podmore had put forward their results as a serious scientific study and had presumed to build their argument on the basis of probabilities, hoping to show that in an earlier investigation by Charles Richet the probability in favor of telepathic phenomena had been found to be too low. 18 The critical use of probability theory in the design of scientific experiments and the analysis of results was relatively new, although not for Peirce, who was an expert in two sciences that were exceptions, astronomy and geodesy. In the preceding decade Peirce had devoted much thought to extending the use of statistical reasoning to new sciences, and in the 1883-84 experiments with Jastrow, he had introduced the first modern randomized experimental design for psychology. 19 Peirce saw at once that the method of Gurney and his associates was inadequate to their task and that they had seriously misapplied the logic of probability. However well-intentioned, their work amounted to an attack on the logic of science, and Peirce could not let it go unanswered. It only made matters worse that William James had been impressed by the absurd claim made in Phantasms that the odds in favor of "ghosts" was about "a thousand billion trillion trillion trillions to one." 20 In the first paragraph of his "Criticism" (sel. 16), Peirce alluded to this claim— "I shall not cite these numbers, which captivate the ignorant. . . ."—and pointed out that "no human certitude reaches such figures as trillions, or even billions to one." Gurney, Myers, and Podmore had presented thirty-one cases 21 which they claimed established their hypothesis to this remarkable degree of certitude and Peirce's aim was to show how their results were vitiated by inadequate sampling and control procedures; specifically, that in each of the thirty-one cases they had failed to meet one or more of sixteen conditions of an adequately designed experiment.

Peirce's review was forwarded to Gurney for a reply to be published along with it. These papers, together with a rejoinder by Peirce probably written in the late summer or fall, appeared in the December 1887 issue of the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research. In his review (sel. 16) Peirce's criticism of the thirty-one cases was somewhat casual and perhaps slightly derisive, containing a number of inaccuracies and exaggerations that Gurney, in his lengthy "Remarks" (sel. 17), pounced on. He answered Peirce point for point, often with an impatience that matched Peirce's swagger. He did admit that perhaps he and his colleagues fell "far short of Mr. Peirce's standard in respect of caution, shrewdness of observation, and severity of logic," but he supposed that his deficiencies were not so great as to override the weight of the evidence. Peirce, stung a bit by some of Gurney's rebuttals, wrote a "Rejoinder" (sel. 18) almost as long as Gurney's "Remarks" and more technical and precise than his original criticism. He reiterated why he had felt the need to take a stand against Gurney, namely, that "to admit the existence of a principle, of which we certainly only meet with manifestations in very exceptional observations, is to rashly set the prosperity of scientific progress at hazard." He then answered all of Gurney's rebuttals and attempted to show that once the suspicious or problematic cases were weeded out there really was no "weight of evidence" at all. Peirce praised Gurney for adopting a statistical method "with a view of putting this question to rest," but his badly designed study "leaves the question where he found it." In response to Gurney's claim that any bias he might have in favor of the supernatural was no greater than Peirce's bias against it, Peirce agreed, but he added that "a bias against a new and confounding theory is no more than conservative caution; while a bias in favor of such a theory is destructive of sound judgment." Gurney set about answering Peirce's "Rejoinder," but had not finished his remarks when, in 1888, he apparently took his own life. It is thought that the impetus for his apparent suicide was the revelation that his assistant, George Albert Smith, had manufactured evidence (annotation 61.23). Gurney's final but unfinished answer to Peirce appeared posthumously in 1889 as "Remarks on Mr. Peirce's Rejoinder," with a concluding "Postscript" by Myers (sel. 19). In his final "Remarks" Gurney wanted to make it clear that he was really not an advocate for the supernatural and that, in fact, he agreed with Peirce "in professing `a legitimate and well-founded prejudice against the supernatural.'" The entire controversy had been acrimonious, with both parties sometimes verging on the scornful. Ian Hacking says "It is Peirce at his crankiest (but none the less sound for that)," and he suspects "that many of the Boston skeptics were egging him on." 22 On his side, Gurney had the resources and encouragement of the Psychical Research Society behind him, along with his co-editors and assistants. But, all in all, one senses that the disputants did not lose respect for each other and even understood that they were in a curious way working together in an effort to advance human knowledge. About a dozen years later, when Peirce revisited this subject for a paper he was writing on "Telepathy and Perception," he reminisced: "I had a somewhat prolonged controversy with Edmund Gurney which was only interrupted by his death; and this brought me into fine touch with the spirit of the man. I was most strongly impressed with the purity of his devotion to truth" (CP 7.612).

After returning to Milford in October, following his mother's funeral, Peirce finished the year working on the theory of hydrodynamics, concerned with the effects on pendulums of the viscosity of air, and he worked on other matters related to his Coast Survey investigations, including his postponed report on the construction of a practical standard of length calibrated against a specified wave length of sodium light (W4:269-98). Peirce was probably stimulated to resume that work by three papers on wavelengths that appeared in 1887, one of them a study by Michelson and Morley precisely on the point of Peirce's own research. Michelson and Morley's paper, and the others by Louis Bell and Henry Rowland, made reference to Peirce's work. 23 Peirce also resumed work on his "Guess" and continued to write his definitions for the Century Dictionary. Possibly in connection with his dictionary work or his study of hydrodynamics, or his interest in mathematical pedagogy, and stimulated by an 1887 article in the Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik, 24 Peirce began a systematic study of curves that he would carry on for at least two more years (see sel. 42; also see c.1888.4 and 1889.3, 20-22 in the Chronological Catalog). Apparently in response to an invitation from Peirce to join in this study, Survey computer and occasional aid to Peirce, Allan Risteen, replied on 4 August: "It has often occurred to me that a collection ought to be made of these properties that are common to all curves of given kinds—say, closed curves—and that perhaps the close examination of such a set of general propositions might lead to others equally general, so that after a time we should have a general geometry in the truest sense." Sometime during the year Peirce also returned to his work on the theory of number and applied quantification theory to his 1881 axiomatization (sels. 20 and 21). 25 It is noteworthy that in "Logic of Number" (sel. 21), Peirce gives a technical definition of the "hereditary character" for number that brings to mind Frege's "hereditary property" (see annotation 156.11), but Peirce's regrettable inattention to Frege, probably because of Schröder's dismissal of him, 26 argues that Peirce's innovations arose from an independent course of thought. It is not definite when or how Peirce's interest in number theory was rekindled; perhaps it was in connection with his study of number for his Century definition. A few years later, in 1896, he would present a lecture on number to the mathematics department at Bryn Mawr College (probably R 25), and number theory would periodically occupy him for the rest of his days.

In the latter months of 1887, Peirce began a correspondence with Francis C. Russell, a Chicago attorney who had taken a sudden interest in Peirce's logic. Russell soon became something of a disciple of Peirce and, after he became associated with the Open Court Press, was instrumental in paving the way for Peirce to publish in The Monist. Peirce also resumed correspondence with William James, writing to him in October about his "admirable work on Space." 27 This was Peirce's first letter to James after moving to Milford, and it may have been the first in two years—since his letter of October 1885 in which he had mentioned to James that he was working on "something very vast . . . an attempt to explain the laws of nature . . . to trace them to their origin & to predict new laws by the laws of the laws of nature." Then Peirce had been at the seminal stage of what would become the systematic metaphysics of his "A Guess at the Riddle," and not much later, his Monist metaphysical series. By October 1887, Peirce had penetrated much deeper into his "vast" undertaking, and he had been working through some of the same issues addressed by James in his article on space. After telling James how much he had learned, Peirce expressed some reservations: "I fancy that all which is present to consciousness is sensation & nothing assignable is a first sensation." He was not ready to admit "that size is so nearly a primary sensation as red or blue." Peirce suggested that "objective space" might be "built up" by a synthesis of fragmentary spaces and speculated that in the same way "objective time" might be built up by a synthesis of fragmentary times. Peirce concluded his letter by remarking that James had apparently not seen "Mayer's argument against Helmholtz's theory of audition."

Perhaps Peirce's most intellectually stimulating correspondent of the time was Alfred Bray Kempe who, in November 1886, had sent him an inscribed copy of his recently published "Memoir on the Theory of Mathematical Form." 28 Peirce may have first learned of Kempe in July 1879, when it had been reported in Nature that he had proved the four-color conjecture that for any map only four colors are required to avoid having a boundary separating areas of the same color. Peirce seems to have had pre-publication access to Kempe's paper, which had been submitted to J. J. Sylvester for publication in the Johns Hopkins American Journal of Mathematics, and in 1880, before Kempe's paper appeared, Peirce offered some improvements on Kempe's method. 29 But it was Kempe's 1886 "Memoir" that would have a profound impact on Peirce, whose expertise in the logic of relations and interest in spatial logics enabled him immediately to see the genius of Kempe's graphical approach to relations. In order to exhibit essential forms, Kempe had introduced a graphical notation of spots and lines modeled on chemical diagrams, and this notation would play an important role in Peirce's innovation of his Existential Graphs (EG). 30 On 17 January 1887, after carefully reading Kempe's memoir and making a list of new terms that he thought might be included in the Century Dictionary, Peirce wrote to Kempe with some suggestions that led Kempe to make revisions which he credited to Peirce. 31 In January of 1889 Peirce would return to Kempe's "Memoir" and still find it "so difficult that I was at work on it all day every day for about three weeks" (RL 80:105). Kempe's influence can be found in Peirce's correspondence course exercises (sel. 9), especially those on relational graphs, and in the 1889 paper, "Mathematical Monads" (sel. 34), and in many other writings. In R 714 (1889.4), his fragmentary "Notes on Kempe's Paper on Mathematical Forms," Peirce even introduced lines to stand for individuals, an important move in the direction of EG.

The year 1888 began on a positive note for Peirce. On 1 January, President Cleveland appointed him to the Assay Commission, charged with testing coins from different U.S. mints for fineness and weight. Peirce served on two committees for the Commission, the Committee on Counting and the Committee on Weighing, and was a signatory for the final reports, signed on 10 February in Philadelphia. On 13 January Peirce and Juliette went to New York to see Steele MacKaye's new play, "Paul Kauvar," which had opened to acclaim on Christmas Eve. Mary MacKaye had sent them tickets. The Peirces continued to be frequent guests of the Pinchots, mingling with their well-heeled friends, and they had successfully entered into village life in Milford.

On 4 February, Peirce's Aunt Lizzie died in the family home in Cambridge. Jem wrote in her obituary that she had been "a woman of remarkable character & intelligence" but that she had been "very singular, almost eccentric" and that her "greatest real fault was a certain streak of jealousy which she could not always conquer." He said that she had been devoted to reading, "especially to German literature & above all to Goethe, whom she esteemed the paragon of geniuses and of men." In fact she had held virtually the same opinion of her brother, Benjamin, to whom, as Jem put it, she had been "devotedly attached." Aunt Lizzie's funeral was held on 8 February and Peirce attended, but it is not likely that Juliette was with him. Aunt Lizzie's estate was divided among Benjamin's children and Peirce's share came to about $5000.

Peirce's inheritance, from Aunt Lizzie and from his mother, created the possibility for a life in Milford that would otherwise have been impossible. Even though Peirce still held out hope that he could make a success of his correspondence course, it was hardly lucrative nor likely to be so any time soon, and his combined income from the Survey and from the Century Company was quite inadequate to the life he and Juliette had assumed in Milford—with its socializing in the Pinchot circle and with frequent trips back to New York. And, of course, Peirce's income from the Coast Survey was tenuous at best. To make matters more difficult, there were few suitable homes available for rent in Milford. When at the end of their first year the lease expired on their first house, it seemed that there was no place to go and that they would have to leave Milford. On 26 April a note appeared in the Port Jervis Evening Gazette (taken from Milford News ): "We fear that we are about to lose Prof. Charles A. Pierce [sic] and his excellent lady because of their inability to secure a suitable residence for the coming year." At the last minute Peirce did find a house to rent, the Scheinmee Homestead on Broad Street, but his inheritance made it possible to consider something more permanent. On 10 May, the Peirces bought a farm about two miles northeast of Milford in the direction of Port Jervis. They paid $1000 for the 130 acres on the Delaware River, which included a parcel called "Wanda Farm" that had been the homestead property of John T. Quick, one of the colorful early settlers in the area, and another parcel known as the "Quick Saw Mill Property." The property as a whole was called "Quicktown." Altogether, there were two houses, two barns, a large ice-house, a sawmill, and some other outbuildings. The farmhouse on Wanda Farm, built in 1854, was the main house and the one the Peirces would begin renovating in January 1889 with the aim of turning it into a magnificent resort that could accommodate summer guests and perhaps even a residential school of philosophy. But on 10 May, when the Peirces bought Quicktown, there was an understanding that they would not move in immediately and that some members of the Quick family could continue living in the main house for a period of time. That understanding would lead to complications later in the year, and descendants of the Quicks would come to believe that they had lost their property to the Peirces by some trick. 32

It is hard to tell how Peirce divided his time in 1888, but as the year got underway it seems certain that his intellectual work was mainly devoted to three efforts: to his Coast Survey reports, to his definitions for the Century Dictionary, and to the articulation of a system of thought founded on his categories and his evolutionary metaphysics. After Peirce submitted his report on the pendulum work at Fort Conger, he turned his attention to working up results from the considerable unreduced records of the gravity work he had carried out during the preceding five years, and some from even earlier. It was becoming more and more difficult for Peirce to sustain the mental focus and intensity required for the complex calculations that typified these reductions and he persistently tried to convince Superintendent Thorn that he needed assistance with the computations. Early in April Thorn finally agreed to assign Allan Risteen to work with Peirce on a temporary basis. Risteen and his wife moved to Milford and probably stayed with the Peirces until sometime in July. During those months it is likely that the reduction of data from gravity determinations was a constant in Peirce's daily routine. But the fact that Risteen was there to help with the reductions probably allowed Peirce to work more on the related hydrodynamical theory, and it also freed him to spend more time on the Century Dictionary. Although Peirce had been working on definitions for at least five years, he was just beginning his most sustained and concentrated effort. Definitions were now being set in galleys and there was no choice but to turn considerable attention to that work. When the local newspaper had printed the notice that Milford might lose Peirce, it noted that he was engaged "in compiling a dictionary to be issued by the Century Company of N.Y." Clearly, Peirce's lexicographic work was a prominent part of his life at that time.

The third undertaking that must have occupied Peirce a great deal as 1888 got underway was his philosophical system building. Sometime after moving to Milford, probably after his mother died, Peirce resumed work on his book, "One, Two, Three" (W5: sels. 47-50, but see also 35 and 36), rechristened as "A Guess at the Riddle" (sels. 22-28). It had been over three years since he had begun articulating his "evolutionary speculation" which by 20 August 1886, as he wrote Holden, had become "a great working hypothesis of science" (W5:xxxix). Peirce's "speculation," his "guess," was that because of an "original, elemental, tendency of things to acquire determinate properties, to take habits" the universe itself has evolved from a state of "all but pure chance" to "the present almost exact conformity to law." Peirce had come to conceive of the grand cosmic history of the universe as of a kind with the evolutionary growth of biological systems.

What led Peirce to these cosmological speculations at that time can only be surmised. Although it is clear that many of the roots of Peirce's grand idea ran deep into the earliest layers of his thought, it does seem that after his marriage to Juliette in 1883, and after he found out that his career at Johns Hopkins had been lost, he became decidedly focused on the riddle of the universe. 33 In his outline of how the argument of his book had developed (sel. 23, pp.175-176), he noted that after he had turned his illuminating categories to "the domain of natural selection," he had been "irresistibly carried on to speculations concerning physics": "One bold saltus landed me in a garden of fruitful and beautiful suggestions. . . ." That "bold saltus" may have been the "guess" itself, perhaps as expressed in his January 1884 "Design and Chance" lecture to the Johns Hopkins Metaphysical Club: "Now I will suppose that all known laws are due to chance and repose upon others far less rigid themselves due to chance and so on in an infinite regress . . . and in this way we see the possibility of an indefinite approximation toward a complete explanation of nature. . . . May not the laws of physics be habits gradually acquired by systems." For three or four years following his Metaphysical Club lecture, Peirce roamed in his Epicurean "garden of fruitful and beautiful suggestions":—his "One, Two, Three" writings of 1885-86 were part of that exploration. By the fall of 1887, as he began writing "A Guess at the Riddle," Peirce's initial exploration had worked itself out and he had started looking for further implications or illuminations of his guess for sociology and theology. 34 The final two chapters, projected but probably never written, were to be expositions of the triad in those two subjects.

Another possibility is that the "bold saltus" was the "leap" he took, probably in the summer of 1885, from his growing understanding of the usefulness of his categories for logic to the speculation that they provided the key to a rich and unified system of science. By fall 1885 at the latest, he could show how "the whole organism of logic may be mentally evolved from the three conceptions of first, second, and third." He would conclude that "if these three conceptions enter as we find they do as elements of all conceptions connected with reasoning, they must be virtually in the mind when reasoning first commences" and he would add that "in that sense, they must be innate ideas" and "there must be in consciousness three faculties corresponding to these three categories" (W5:245) which, in turn, "must be capable of a physiological explanation from three fundamental properties of the nervous system" (W5:247). It was Peirce's conjecture that his categories, firstness, secondness, and thirdness, or perhaps even the underlying conceptions "one," "two," and "three," were the building blocks for a vast, integrated system of knowledge, that led him by mid-1886 to turn the evolutionary speculation of his "Design and Chance" lecture into his guess at the riddle of the universe, namely, that the universe may be understood as a process in which chance brings forth first, or original, events, which, because of an inherent tendency "to acquire determinate properties, to take habits," become more and more systematic and law governed. The evolving law produces seconds and the tendency to take habits, which generates law, is the third "or mediating element" between firsts and seconds (W5:293). By early 1888, when he sketched chapter seven for "A Guess at the Riddle" (sel. 28), he had refined his guess to this succinct statement: "three elements are active in the world, first, chance; second, law; and third, habit-taking."

The main thrust of "A Guess at the Riddle" was an exploration of the fecundity of Peirce's categories for different sciences and the construction of a unifying structure of fundamental conceptions. In each of the extant chapter sketches Peirce used his categories as a device for rethinking and refining old ideas. For example, in chapter 1, "Trichotomy" (sel. 23), he showed how ubiquitous firstness, secondness, and thirdness are by connecting them with common conceptions such as spontaneity, result, and bridge, or beginning, end, and process. But why stop with one, two, three, he asked. Because, he said, "any number, however large, can be built out of triads; and consequently no idea can be involved in such a number radically different from the idea of three." He used a model of a road with three-way forkings to demonstrate his point. Peirce's analysis of degenerate categories revealed that there are two distinct varieties of secondness, one internal and one external. It may have been Hegel's failure to understand this, Peirce suggested, that led him to commit "the trifling oversight of forgetting that there is a real world with real actions and reactions."

Chapter 2, "The Triad in Reasoning," was probably never written, unless Peirce intended "One, Two, Three: Fundamental Categories of Thought and of Nature" (W5: sel. 35) to be a preliminary draft, or at least a precursor of it. However, it is very suggestively outlined in the "Contents" (sel. 22) with particular reference to Peirce's 1885 paper in the American Journal of Mathematics (W5: sel. 30) where it was stressed that for "a perfect system of logical notation" it is necessary to employ three kinds of signs: icons, indices, and tokens (what would later be called "symbols"). Immediately following "A Guess at the Riddle" is a short selection on Steele MacKaye's theory of dramatic expression entitled "Trichotomic" (sel. 29). This paper, probably written for oral presentation during the early part of 1888 while "Guess" was in progress, effectively though very briefly summarizes four of its chapters (1, 2, 4, and 5). The discussion of signs complements the outline given in the "Contents" (sel. 22), and, together, they give a good idea of what Peirce had in mind for Chapter 2.

Chapter 3, "The Triad in Metaphysics," (sel. 24) is only a fragment of a sketch of what Peirce planned to write, but it strongly indicates that Peirce viewed his cosmology in relation to Greek thought, particularly pre-Socratic philosophy. His plan was to "run over all the conceptions that played an important part in the pre-Socratic philosophy and see how far they can be expressed in terms of one, two, three." He did not get far, but he pointed out that the Greek arche, the "primal matter out of which the world [was] made," was quintessentially his first. A fragmentary list of pre-Socratic doctrines (annotation 181.4-5), probably to be used as a source-list for Chapter 3, indicates further some of what Peirce might have included had he completed that chapter. For example, the thirtieth item on this list is a quotation of Parmenides taken from Plato's Symposium (178b): "He devised Love the very first of all the gods." Peirce then remarked: "But this doctrine was of course infinitely more ancient. Hesiod, quoted by Plato in the same place in the Symposium, puts Chaos first, earth second, and love third."

In Chapter 4, "The Triad in Psychology" (sel. 25), the application of his categories revealed to Peirce that there are "three radically different elements of consciousness": immediate feeling (consciousness of the first), polar sense (consciousness of the second), and synthetical consciousness (consciousness of a third or medium). In Chapter 5, "The Triad in Physiology" (sel. 26), Peirce used his categories to find a threefold division in the physiology of the nervous system that would account for the three kinds of consciousness. As though anticipating that he might be accused of reductionism, Peirce wrote: "No materialism is implied in this, further than that intimate dependence of the action of the mind upon the body, which every student of the subject must and does now acknowledge" (p. 188). Peirce concluded that three fundamental functions of the nervous system were, "1st, the excitation of cells, 2nd, the transfer of excitation over fibers, 3rd, the fixing of definite tendencies under the influence of habit," and he considered further whether these functions were "due to three properties of the protoplasm or life-slime itself " (p. 193).

In Chapter 6, "The Triad in Biological Development" (sel. 27), Peirce's examination led him to three principle factors in the process of natural selection: "1st, the principle of individual variation or sporting; 2nd, the principle of hereditary transmission, which wars with the first principle; and 3rd, the principle of the elimination of unfavorable characters." Peirce concluded that the principle of sporting is a principle of chance corresponding to his category of first, the principle of heredity is a principle of compulsion corresponding to his category of second, and the principle of the elimination of unfavorable characters is a principle of generalization corresponding to some extent to his category of third. But he acknowledged that the correspondence of the main principles of natural selection with his categories was not perfect and he speculated that "its imperfection may be the imperfection of the theory of development" (p. 202).

In Chapter 7, "The Triad in Physics" (sel. 28), the last extant chapter sketch for the book, Peirce delivered his guess that there are three active elements in the universe: "first, chance; second, law; and third, habit-taking." Finally, we know from the "Contents" that Peirce intended to finish with chapters on sociology and theology, but there is not much indication of what fundamental triads he expected to find. He does note under "The triad in sociology" that "consciousness is a sort of public spirit among the nerve-cells" and under "The triad in theology," that "faith requires us to be materialists without flinching," but this only gives a little of the flavor of what Peirce might have written. It is true, though, that in his first chapter, "Trichotomy," when he was discussing "absolutes" in cosmology, he alluded to the theological triad: "The starting-point of the universe, God the Creator, is the Absolute First; the terminus of the universe, God completely revealed, is the Absolute Second; every state of the universe at a measurable point of time is the Third" (sel. 23, pp. 173-174). Although Peirce tended to identify the third with representation, here we find, that in leading from first to last (second), third is process. Insofar as Christian theology holds that the universe is developing from "God the Creator" toward "God completely revealed," Peirce regarded it as an evolutionary doctrine. Perhaps this is the approach he wanted to develop in Chapter 9.

Peirce had a remarkable confidence in the importance of "A Guess at the Riddle." He was convinced that not only was it "destined to play a great part in the future," as he wrote to Holden (W4:xxxix), but that he was inaugurating a new philosophy which, like the earlier system of Aristotle, was so comprehensive that "for a long time to come, the entire work of human reason . . . shall appear as the filling up of its details" (sel. 23, pp. 168-169). He envisioned his new system as a "philosophical edifice," constructed on a deep and massive foundation, which unlike the Schelling-Hegel mansion—found to be uninhabitable almost immediately upon opening its doors—would be the principal habitat of philosophers long into the future. But Peirce's book was never published, nor even completed, and even though he managed to get some of his architectonic ideas into print in his 1891-93 Monist series, he remained virtually the only inhabitant of the "Peirce mansion" during his own lifetime. After May 1888, when Peirce and Juliette purchased the house that would become Arisbe, Peirce would become preoccupied with architectural renovations. Chapter 1 of Peirce's "Guess" (sel. 23), which was written out of order, may have been composed about the time Peirce began planning the renovation of his country house—when sound architectural structures became a matter of immediate practical importance for him. It is lamentable that Peirce would never finish either of his mansions and that, in their different ways, they would trammel him.

The evidence for when the Peirces moved to Wanda Farm and into their new house is inconclusive as it stands. By early June Peirce was using "Westfall Township," where his new estate was located, as his return address, and by July he was using the name "Quicktown." In an 8 June letter to Thorn, Peirce remarked that "on leaving Milford" he had lost his local clerk and on 2 July he said that his "movings" had taken five days. Yet as late as November he and Juliette stayed for a few weeks in a hotel in Milford while they dealt with legal issues pertaining to the eviction of the Quicks, which finally took place on 18 December. Probably the Peirces had moved to Quicktown shortly after they purchased it and occupied the secondary house, or some portion of the Quick house until the difficulties with the Quick's continuing occupancy became acute, but so far nothing conclusive has come to light. In any case, it was not until January 1889 that the Peirces finally moved fully into the main house and began rebuilding it to suit their purposes.

Wherever Peirce was residing during the second half of 1888, it is certain that his new estate was much on his mind. Except for the legal difficulties that arose concerning the Quick family, Quicktown was a place of promise for Peirce, a chance to make a good life for Juliette and himself. Together they must have spent many hours making plans and thinking about the hopeful future that now seemed within their grasp. Peirce tried to keep his Coast Survey work on track but without much success. He did manage on 10 August to send in a new paper on the mean figure of the earth, expanding on his previous paper of 1881 (W4:529-34), but Thorn, suspecting that it was somehow a ploy to ease the pressure he had been exerting on Peirce to complete his major gravity report, had it evaluated by Schott who returned an indecisive verdict. Schott made a vague insinuation that Peirce may have made some unattributed use of similar results of F. R. Helmert— "whose work came under the author's notice while writing his report"—and recommended that work on the earth's shape should be kept separate from "regular pendulum matter" in any case. Of course, for Peirce, determining the shape of the earth was the principal goal of his geodetic labors, and it was hardly beside the point to keep his gravity researches integrated with their ultimate purpose. But Peirce's paper (which has not been located) was not published, although it was probably the source for the results that Peirce used in his definition of "Earth" for the Century Dictionary. Peirce's work on the earth's figure and on its compression would continue to be mentioned in his monthly reports.

The texture of Peirce's life can only be painted in pale outline in an introduction such as this one in which the aim is to provide a context for and a sketch of the intellectual development that gave birth to the writings in this volume. A more complete account of 1888 would describe more fully Peirce's family relations, especially concerning the settlement of his mother's and aunt's estates, and would say more about his and Juliette's social and domestic lives. It would also say more about some of the correspondents who have been passed over in silence, and about some unmentioned incidents and flare-ups with the Survey's Washington office and scientific activities that have been left out—and, of course, there would be more about Peirce's friends and colleagues and external matters that affected his life and thought. Chapter three of Joseph Brent's Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life should be consulted for a more complete account of these matters. Perhaps the main thing still to be said about the last half of 1888 is that Juliette's health took a turn for the worse and she would sometimes stay in New York, perhaps to be near New York physicians or because of the unsettled living conditions in Quicktown. Her health had always been worrisome for Peirce, but beginning in the spring of 1889 it would become a major concern.

On Thanksgiving Day, 29 November, Peirce wrote a newsy letter to his brother Jem. He thanked Jem for a remittance toward his inheritance and for the explanation of "fleflexnode" which "went straight into the dictionary." He said he had been "much occupied with small but pressing matters," and mentioned in particular the lawsuit concerning the eviction of the Quicks. He told Jem he was taking Juliette to New York on the following day and would return to the farm by himself. He reported that "Mrs. Pinchot wants us to change the name Quicktown, but I dont know that I agree with her. It is the name we found & `Tom Quick' is rather a romantic figure in the history of the valley"—the following year a monument to Tom Quick was erected in Milford to mark the one hundred and fifty-sixth anniversary of its settlement. Peirce told Jem that if he was reading novels he should get Le Capitaine Fracasse by Gautier. "For my part I read little literature & I find serious novels dull. I am loitering through Pepys again, & have been reading Sidney's Arcadia, Dr. Dee's preface to Euclid, Thirion's History of Arithmetic, Browning, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Montaigne (of which I have an old French copy), Mémoires de Casanova, Our Mutual Friend, some old Arithmetic & other old books." He finished by remarking that the dictionary was coming along quickly. This letter gives a nice sense of the tone of Peirce's life as the year was winding down. The final weeks of 1888 were dominated by the prospect of finally having full occupancy of the Quick house and plans for its renovation.

Peirce woke up at about 7:30 a.m. on New Year's Day, 1889, at Quinn's Halfway House, near Quicktown, from which he and Juliette would direct preparations for their move into their new house. He divided his day in a way that modeled how he would spend his time during the coming year. He devoted the morning to philosophy, in particular, to starting a new book, "Reflections on the Logic of Science" (sel. 31). After lunch he and Juliette drove to Port Jervis in their carriage to see a carpenter about an addition to the house. In later years, when Henry S. Leonard traveled from Harvard to interview elderly Milford residents about Peirces life, Mrs. Robert G. Barkley recalled that Peirce "drove a Phaeton with a white horse and gently waved a whip as he drove along." 35 Upon leaving Port Jervis, the Peirces crossed back into Pennsylvania to the village of Metamoras where they saw a second carpenter. After dinner that evening, Peirce and Juliette worked on accounts—Peirce noted in his diary that "there was some disagreement." Later he turned to galley proofs for the Century Dictionary, which he noted had reached "game," and to his overdue Coast Survey reports—at least he recorded these tasks in his diary for 1 January.

A few days later the reconstruction of the Quick house was underway and, although more or less completed stages would be reached, remodeling would continue with varying degrees of intensity and disruption for the rest of Peirce's life, and even afterwards under Juliette's direction. Their home would become their prison in the way that Peirce's philosophical mansion would imprison him, catching him up in a vision he could not resist but causing him much suffering as he steadfastly struggled against insurmountable odds to achieve it. But as 1889 lay before him, there was good reason to suppose that his hopes for his estate, as well as for his philosophy, would be realized. He could not then know what a great struggle he would endure trying to build these parallel edifices. Leonard recorded some anecdotes that give an idea of how this process appeared from the outside. Miss May Westbrook remembered: "When the Peirces built their house they built around an original house on the property. Mr. and Mrs. Peirce sometimes quarreled. Once when I was at their house for dinner the quarrel was violent. I don't know what it was about because they talked in French. Mrs. Peirce was an unreasonable person." Miss Westbrook noted that whenever she visited, Peirce was always in his study except for meals, but she added that when Juliette was in Europe, Peirce "took one meal a day here with mother. He was very pleasant. Mrs. Peirce sometimes spoke well of him and sometimes not." Gifford Pinchot also talked with Leonard about the Peirces' reconstruction project: "The alterations were of an absurd character. The attempt was to make the house irresistible as an Inn or a Gentleman's Estate. Mrs. Peirce had two passions: devotion to Peirce and interest in land. In the latter respect she showed a characteristic common among French peasants. Peirce was extremely impractical. He submitted to her plans for alterations in the house loyally and cheerfully, living in one room while all the others were in a turmoil with carpenters." Pinchot remembered how in 1887 and 1888 he had discussed forestry with Peirce and that those discussions had been instrumental in his decision to study forestry in Germany. Pinchot went on to become Theodore Roosevelt's Chief Forester and would play a large role in establishing the National Park System in the United States. He also recalled that it was Peirce who had calculated the settings for a sundial built into the stone front of Grey Towers, "so that it gave exact normal time for the longitude and latitude" and that he "calculated the true North and South that were marked in the sidewalk in front of the house." These markings are still visible today.

The book Peirce started writing on 1 January (sel. 31), might have been an outgrowth of Chapter VII of Peirce's "A Guess at the Riddle," where he had made a number of the same observations he now planned to examine in detail—for example, that in order to have any hope of making progress in physics, we cannot simply work through one hypothesis after another without some hint to guide our initial choices. Peirce wanted to set out in detail the logic of science that supported his guess and that would recommend it as the hypothesis to guide physics. It may be that Peirce intended "Reflections" to be his "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" (W3:242-74) brought up to date. It is interesting that on the following day, 2 January, Francis Russell wrote to Peirce that "when your `Illustrations of the Logic of Science' came out the papers initiated in me a new era in my mental history and I am one of a necessary many who recognize in you a master to be followed." Russell then asked Peirce if he had changed his views since the "Illustrations." Peirce replied on the 8th, "Suffice it to say that I have not given up any of the more fundamental of my younger opinions so far as I recollect them, but am perhaps more sceptical & materialistic."

Peirce did not get very far with "Reflections." He began the second chapter with a discussion of the doctrine of chances but soon decided that a prior discussion of mathematics was needed. On 9 January he wrote a few paragraphs of a new draft of Chapter 2 and continued it on the 17th, but that was the end of it. On that day he began working on a mathematical paper, "Note on the Analytical Representation of Space as a Section of Higher Dimensional Space" (sel. 32), elaborating on a proof he had just sent to Simon Newcomb with the hope, soon dashed by Newcomb, that it would be published in the American Journal of Mathematics. It may have been Peirce's interest in the mathematical foundations of the logic of science that caught him up in new mathematical investigations, or it may have been his work on hydrodynamics, but he continued working on mathematical topics throughout January and there are a number of other 1889 selections that may have been composed around that time. These include "Ordinal Geometry" (sel. 33), "Mathematical Monads" (sel. 34), "On a Geometrical Notation" (sel. 38), "On the Number of Forms of Sets" (sel. 39), "The Formal Classification of Relations" (sel. 40), "Dual Relatives" (sel. 41), and "Notes on Geometry of Plane Curves without Imaginaries" (sel. 42). Some of these papers, perhaps especially selection 34, and also the mathematical chapter of selection 31, may have been inspired by Peirce's January study of Kempe's paper on mathematical forms, and others may have been outgrowths of his work on mathematical definitions for the Century or his correspondence with mathematicians such as Alfred Mayer and his own brother Jem.

Peirce's enthusiasm for what was coming to pass in Quicktown was dampened by a continuing decline in Juliette's health. His diary reveals his growing concern. On 3 January he noted that "Juliette weighs 104 with thick clothes & heavy shawl" and on the 6th he wrote: "Much alarmed about Juliette's health. She spits so much blood. Juliette getting quite ill. If I should lose her, I would not survive her. Therefore, I must turn my whole energy to saving her." Peirce suspected tuberculosis and knew that living in a house under construction in the winter time was putting Juliette at serious risk, so he arranged for her to travel to the South. She left sometime in February, staying for a time in Brunswick, a resort town on the Atlantic coast of Southern Georgia, and then offshore at the very exclusive and expensive Jeckyl Island Club, where, at the request of Mr. Henry E. Howland, she had been extended privileges for two weeks. From Jeckyl Island, Juliette traveled to the new Hotel Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine where, Peirce wrote to Jem, "she found the greatest benefit" (30 March 89). She telegraphed Peirce from Jacksonville, Florida, on 30 March to say that she was much improved and would like to return, but Peirce tried to discourage her: "You must not think of coming back here so soon. This house is very unwholesome. I have not had a single well day since you left. The spring air would also be the death of you. You cannot come back till after the carpenter work is done. . . . We are rushing the work all we can, but I don't expect it will be ready for you to move into the front part before May 1 & not into the new part for another month at the very least. To move into a new house with the plaster not thoroughly dry would be madness." It must have added to his worry about Juliette to learn that on 29 March his friend and former student, O. H. Mitchell, had died of pneumonia at thirty-seven years of age.

As the days grew warmer Peirce's own health improved and he became excited at the prospect of farming Quicktown. He purchased two farm horses for harvesting hay, decided to raise a calf that had been born to his Guernsey cow, had five hundred Palmetto asparagus plants set out, and was probably as content as he had been for many years. He missed his young wife and considered renaming Quicktown "Sunbeams" in her honor. When Juliette returned she had not improved and in May Peirce asked for a two-week leave from his Coast Survey duties to take her to New York for medical tests. The diagnosis was tuberculosis, as Peirce had feared. They returned to Milford for the summer and fall knowing that Juliette could not spend the next winter in Milford. That realization was perhaps less worrisome than it would have been had Peirce not recently received fairly substantial payments from the estates of his mother and aunt—$1450 in April alone.

Certainly given the demands of the farm and the renovations to the house, and his preoccupation with Juliette's health, along with the pressure from his continuing responsibilities to the Century Company and the Coast Survey, Peirce had little time for anything else. But occasionally something would happen to turn his thought from its main course. Perhaps this happened most frequently as a result of the great variety of subjects he had to look into for his definitions, but there were other sources of intellectual stimulation and diversion. At the beginning of the year, Kempe's paper on mathematical form had played that role. In March, Wolcott Gibbs had written to Peirce to ask if he had published any results from his color experiments that had been funded fourteen years earlier by the National Academy of Sciences with a grant from its Bache Fund. Gibbs's request seemed to reawaken Peirce's interest in color studies and for several days beginning 4 April, he recorded results of a new series of color experiments in a notebook labeled "Hue" (1889.12). Peirce traveled to Washington D.C. during the third week of April to present a paper "On Sensations of Color" (1889.14) to the National Academy. He presented a second paper, "On Determinations of Gravity" (1889.15), in which he discussed his work with the invariable reversible pendulums he had designed. The spring issue of the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research carried Gurney's final reply to Peirce (sel. 19) which must have caught his attention, but with Gurney by then deceased, Peirce probably had no thought of any further response. Within a few months, however, he would take up the subject again for The Forum. And in June at Harvard's commencement, Percival Lowell delivered the annual Phi Beta Kappa poem and took the occasion to commemorate Peirce's father, Benjamin, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Lowell's Peirce stanza ended: "Though but an echo find itself in verse, The Cosmos answers to the name of Peirce." 36 Charles would surely have heard of this and it could not but have reminded him that he was expected to wear his father's mantle. No doubt he felt the irony that while such grand things were being said about his father, he was, largely by his own doing, living in exile from his father's social world. The promise of a new life may have made things easier for Peirce, but that would not last long.

During the years covered in this volume, the one continuous focus of Peirce's intellectual energy was his lexicographic work for the Century Dictionary, which in its first edition ran to 7046 quarto pages. He had begun writing definitions as early as 1883 and he continued with varying degrees of concentration from then on, but his most sustained and intensive effort came between 1888 and 1891. Peirce's contribution to the Century Dictionary was massive. He was responsible for six major subject areas—logic, metaphysics, mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, and weights and measures—but he contributed to many other areas including color terms, general philosophy, geodesy, psychology, and education (in particular, the words related to universities). Altogether he probably contributed or approved over 15,000 definitions, with many of them taking many hours of thought and research. 37

From the beginning, Peirce's lexicographic work had a decided impact on his intellectual development. At Johns Hopkins, where Peirce began working for the Century Company, he developed a course in philosophical terminology structured around his dictionary work. His desire to express usefully but as fully and accurately as possible the meanings of words such as "classification," "color," "continuity," "formal," "law," "logic," "nominalism," "predicate," "probability," "real," "relation," "science," "sign," "theorem," "truth," and "university," among many others, often led to significant developments in his ideas or in the direction of his thought. Max Fisch believed it was Peirce's return to the Greek philosophers for his dictionary work that led him to his evolutionary metaphysics, and it is likely that some of the mathematical selections in the present volume were stimulated by his lexicographic work (e.g. sel. 40). Certainly Peirce's increasing interest in classification, in the history of language, in the ethics of terminology, and in such matters as spelling reform, grew directly out of his work for the Century Dictionary.

It is unclear in what order Peirce took up his dictionary work, but he appears to have begun in 1883 by working his way through the Imperial Dictionary (the basis for the Century ) letter by letter, pronouncing judgment on the Imperial's treatment of his words, emending what could be saved and supplying what more was needed—often a great deal. By 1886 he had reached "Words in E" (W5: sel. 57). But Peirce also worked on his definitions by subject areas, beginning in 1883 with definitions for selected mathematical terms, followed in the intervening years by similar efforts for color terms, metrological terms, university terms, and so on. The Century was an etymological dictionary and included carefully chosen quotations to illustrate the history of the use of its words, so during these years Peirce's intellectual purview was profoundly expansive, covering the wide range of subject areas he was responsible for and the full history of the words from those areas, from their baptisms, if that could be found out, to their most current uses. He was always on the look-out for illustrative quotations to send in to the Century Company's New York office.

Sometime near the beginning of 1888, but perhaps not until the spring, Peirce started to receive galley proofs for his definitions. The Century began appearing in print the following year in bound fascicles of about three hundred pages. This process of working over the galleys incrementally, while publication was proceeding with earlier fascicles, would continue until the final fascicle, the twenty-fourth, was published early in 1891. By the end of November 1888, Peirce was through the first galley proofs for the F's and on 7 January he wrote Jem that he had received a second galley for "function." By the spring of 1890, the end of the period covered in this volume, about half of the Century was in print. Because of this piecemeal production process, from 1888 to 1891 Peirce had to revisit all of the definitions he had written during the previous five years and compose for each fascicle, as a continuing matter of priority, any definitions he had put off along the way. There is nothing that occupied Peirce more completely during these years than his dictionary work, neither his work for the Coast Survey nor his philosophical system building. It was likely this concentration that led him to set aside his "A Guess at the Riddle" manuscript, just as he seemed to have the book well in hand.

It did not take long after the first of the twenty-four slim volumes of the Century Dictionary appeared in print for reviews to follow. One lone voice of dissent was heard—the voice of Simon Newcomb. In a letter to the editor of the Nation, published on 13 June 1889, Newcomb complained of certain Century definitions that were "insufficient, inaccurate, and confused to a degree which is really remarkable." The examples he gave were for "Almagest," "albedo," "eccentric anomaly," "absorption lines," "law of action and reaction," "apochromatic," "alidade," and "achromatic lens," five of which, it turned out, were Peirce's. Peirce replied in the 27 June issue of the Nation, admitting that his definition of "anomaly," "perhaps the first I wrote in astronomy," was flawed, but defending the rest. Newcomb confessed to great surprise when he found out it was Peirce he had taken to task, but privately, in a letter to William D. Whitney, Editor in Chief for the Century, he wrote: "I may say to you confidentially that several years ago I should have regarded Peirce as the ablest man in the country for such work but I fear he has since deteriorated to an extent which is truly lamentable." 38 A few days earlier, Whitney had written to his brother that he did not understand why Newcomb felt "called upon to strain the truth and misjudge things in order to find fault" with the dictionary. "It seems," he went on, "as if he must have some private grudge to satisfy." 39 But Newcomb's criticism quickly faded out against the countervailing tide of acclaim. Overall Peirce was quite satisfied with the results of his work, even though he would often remark, as he did to Paul Carus on 25 September 1890, "God forbid I should approve of above ª of what I insert."

The second major preoccupation of Peirce in 1889 was the preparation of scientific reports for the Coast Survey. For years he had accumulated gravity data with painstaking effort and at great expense, and beginning about 1887 had been trying to prepare results for publication. He had not published a major report since 1884, and that was a report on gravity determinations made in Pennsylvania in 1879 and 1880 (W5: sel. 1). Since then he had published some smaller reports, mainly on theory (e.g. W5: sels. 42, 43, 51-53) and, of course, his report on pendulum operations at Ft. Conger, but his principal gravity findings since 1880 remained unpublished. Most importantly, with the exception of the Greely report, these included all of the gravity work carried out with the Peirce invariable reversible pendulums. These unpublished results involved ten stations, six running along a north-south line between Montreal and Key West (including Albany, Hoboken, Ft. Monroe, and St. Augustine), three along an east-west line between Ithaca and Madison (including Ann Arbor), and the base station at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., which provided the constants for all the Peirce pendulum operations.

In addition to reports on gravity work involving the Peirce pendulums, results still had to be worked up for earlier operations with Repsold or Kater pendulums at Hoboken, Cambridge, and Baltimore and for some of Peirce's early gravity work with less refined pendulums in Massachusetts (at the Hoosac Tunnel, Northampton, and Cambridge). Also, there were at least three volumes of unreduced data from observations made at Paris, Geneva, and Kew during Peirce's final trip to Europe in 1883. All of these records together, in their raw data form, filled more than one hundred volumes of pendulum transit records and scores of chronograph sheets recording time observations.

Finally, in conjunction with his principal work of determining gravity, Peirce had applied his results to the problem of determining the shape of the earth and had made many studies and investigations of such issues as the flexure of the pendulum staff and the effect of air resistance (involving hydrodynamical theory). For that, too, he needed to prepare reports.

Peirce had begun in earnest reducing data and writing a report on operations with the Peirce pendulums in the fall of 1886, after being relieved of field duty, but his attention had soon turned to the Greely report. Upon settling in Milford, Peirce turned again to the preparation of the report he believed would carry forward the U.S. contribution to geodesy he had initiated with his 1876 "Report on Gravity at Initial Stations" (W4: sel. 13) and his "Determinations of Gravity at Allegheny, Ebensburgh, and York, Pa., in 1879 and 1880" (W5: sel. 1). His plan in June 1887 was to write first a report on what he thought was the best work done with the Peirce pendulums, the results from Ithaca, Madison, Ann Arbor, Key West, and perhaps Fort Monroe, and to give "a full account" of the pendulums, including a discussion of their theory and of the work that had been done at the Smithsonian, the base station, to determine their constants. Then, for a separate report, he planned to prepare the results from Hoboken, Albany, Montreal, and St. Augustine, also done with Peirce pendulums, but not "in the last approved way" (9 June 1887). 40 But by the end of the year, Peirce had decided to organize the work into two series of stations grouped by their approximate location on either the same east-west or north-south meridian. After he finished his reports on work with the Peirce pendulums, he planned to clean up the remaining backlog.

Peirce went to work on the report for the east-west series of stations and wrote to Thorn on 28 June 1887 that it was "shaping up" and that he would soon have a draft ready, but he added: "it is a larger job than I fully realized." Two months later Peirce still had not finished his draft and he was forced to admit that he had run into a serious difficulty: he had found an error in the mathematical theory used to calculate the effects of the viscosity of air on the period of the pendulum. "This is one of the most difficult mathematical problems conceivable," Peirce wrote to Thorn (29 Aug. 1887), but he expected that his work would lead to an improvement in Stokes' hydrodynamical theory which would justify the delay; by the end of September Peirce decided that he should put off further treatment of hydrodynamics for a separate memoir. The final illness and death of Peirce's mother kept him in Cambridge for most of the month of October 1887, but by the end of November he wrote Thorn that his "long report" was almost ready, "requiring only final touches." Two months later, on 30 January 1888, Peirce sent in what he had ready "for the sake of suggestions of which I may avail myself in making the copy of it." He acknowledged that a lot of work, mostly clerical, remained unfinished and asked if he could have some assistance. Thorn declined and returned the draft unreviewed to be finished and copied.

Weeks passed by and Thorn's displeasure increased. On 30 March Peirce felt the need to explain the continuing delay. Pendulum work, he pointed out, is much more complicated than other geodetic work such as triangulation, longitude work, and leveling, because there are so many more sources of error that have to be studied and corrected for. "If these difficulties are only slightly increased, there results an enormous increase, first in the precautions which have to be taken in the field, and second in the puzzle of interpreting the observations." Defects in the construction of the Peirce pendulums, which Peirce attributed to poor American craftsmanship, made it all the more difficult to reach useful results, and the problem of hydrodynamics, now to be treated separately, had taken considerable time. "Now anybody who has ever done such a Work in such a way,—ask such men as Langley or Newcomb,—will tell you that it is impossible to make any reliable estimate of how much time it will take." Peirce's emotions were at a high pitch and he could not resist an allusion to Colonna's obstructionism: "In addition to this, I was subjected to false accusations of the most disgraceful kind, and the newspapers were filled with unbounded lies about me readily traceable to important personages. All of these things, and others which I omit to mention, distracted the equanimity of my mind considerably." In the margin of Peirce's letter, Colonna added the sarcastic remark: "What about other people's distractions of mind[?] Also what distracted his mind at all except the last 3 stations?" This was a clear reference to Peirce's relations with Juliette, and the fact that she had accompanied Peirce on many of his field assignments. Even though Peirce would not have seen Colonna's remark, Thorn and others in the Washington office would have; it indicates that rumors of scandal had infected Peirce's Coast Survey relations with the poison that had driven him from Johns Hopkins and had virtually sent him into exile. Peirce felt compelled to respond to the irritation and displeasure Thorn had been exhibiting:

The tone of your letters would seem to betray the opinion that I am myself completely insensible to the disparity between the time I estimated for the work and the time it has occupied. But can you suppose that I do not look upon the labor of my life seriously? Or that anything that you or the Hon. Secretary could say or do about it could possibly be as grievous to me as the want of my own self-commendation? When I agreed to do this work by myself my intention was to hire a computer; for I do not believe that anybody in the world could do such work advantageously without aid. The papers amount to at least a hundredweight and the mere picking out of such as are wanted in one day will all together often occupy hours.

Peirce took time in July to work on the method for calculating the figure of the earth from gravity determinations and on 10 August submitted his results for publication. For the rest of the year, again without an assistant, Peirce continued to work on reductions of data and on flexure and time calculations. On 31 December 1888, following a recommendation from C. A. Schott, he wrote to Thorn suggesting that both series of stations be included in one comprehensive report: "The amount of additional computation required is considerable, although not so great by any means as if the constants & behaviour of the instruments had not been studied." Peirce added, with some obvious bitterness: "The labour of writing the report,—of composing it, writing it, copying, verifying copies,—which is in part mechanical and in part requires all the ability I can bring to the task,—but in every part the utmost care and consideration, has mostly to be done over."

You will remember that about a year ago, I sent you my report in a substantially complete state (though then only embracing 4 stations) with the request that it be submitted to such critical examination as might be practicable and the result communicated to me for my aid in revision. The request was refused; and your letter embodying the refusal, conveyed to me the conviction that any flaws however trifling which might be detected would be husbanded to form material for an attack after the report was printed. Under these circumstances, my caution about parting my MS. out of my hands is naturally increased. . . . I am unable to say more definitely at what time my report will be ready, than that it will be during next spring.

On 11 January 1889, Peirce reassured Thorn that "the full report on the meridional line from Montreal to Key West inclusive & from Albany to Madison inclusive will be completed during the Spring," but Thorn, at Colonna's instigation, had lost faith in Peirce and decided that it was time to see exactly where things stood. He ordered Peirce to package up all of his work on the report and ship it to Washington for examination. Peirce complied, and two days later had packed and shipped twenty large books of reduced data and 2037 carefully inventoried and numbered manuscript pages and draft materials (see p. 636). Peirce could not let pass unaddressed the distrust that Thorn's order so clearly revealed. He told Thorn that he was glad to send all of his working documents because, for one thing, it would rebut the insinuation that the draft report he had sent the previous year had represented little effort on his part. But Thorn would also see that a great deal had been accomplished since then "and that the principal cause of the delay in completing the work has been the great amount of time spent upon the general method of pendulum observations and reductions,—which lay directly in my way." Peirce estimated that he needed at least three more months to complete the report and he asked again if he could submit it in draft to be looked at by specialists before making his official submission. Taking Thorn to task for a previous refusal, he added presciently:

You say your object was to prevent my shifting the blame for the report to other shoulders. Now, for my part, I really do not think the report will sink below the zero of merit; but anyway, you overlook the fact that I never asked for binding directions but only for suggestions which I might be free to adopt or not. My main, not to say my only, motive was that I had reversed the usual order of presentation in a scientific memoir by stating the conclusions before the premises; and I wished to know how this would strike another mind competent to judge of it. (30 January 1889)

Peirce's relations with Thorn were at a very low point, yet, having unburdened himself, Peirce put his rancor aside and tried to resume normal relations. He wrote to Thorn on 4 February to say that, while the Peirce pendulum records were in Washington, he had gone to work on the Kater pendulum records from his Hoboken observations. He asked if he might go into the field again in the South—without mentioning that he was about to send Juliette to Southern Georgia for her health. Thorn declined. A few days later, Thorn returned all of Peirce's records "precisely as received from you—with the exception of Ms. report of pendulum work, which is in your handwriting and is retained for safe keeping in the archives here . . ." (13 Feb. 1889). 41 Peirce resumed his work on the long report and by the end of April had finished the reductions for the Montreal and Albany stations.

Whether Peirce knew on 30 January, when he wrote his spirited letter, that Thorn was about to resign is uncertain, but by mid-February it was common knowledge that Thorn would tender his resignation in March to be effective when a new superintendent was appointed. Peirce had hoped for this for a long time; he thought that a new superintendent, if a scientist were chosen and not another lawyer, would want him back playing a more active role in Survey operations. This may have had something to do with Peirce's request to go back into the field and was surely on his mind in May when he wrote to Thorn about a plan he had conceived "by which pendulum stations may be occupied perhaps at the rate of one a day, with good result, and not at an extravagant expense" (28 May 1889). He asked Thorn again to send him back into the field to institute his new plan as soon as he finished his pendulum report, which he said would be forwarded soon. Thorn replied on 14 June with a reminder of Peirce's "repeated promises during the past winter" that he would soon forward the report, "and now the Spring has passed." He advised Peirce "that no other enterprise or scheme be permitted to interfere with the prompt completion of that long delayed report, upon receipt of which your plan of daily pendulum stations will be in order for submission and consideration."

On 10 July 1889, Thorn was succeeded by Thomas Corwin Mendenhall as Superintendent of the Coast Survey. Mendenhall, who had been a student of Simon Newcomb, 42 was a physicist who had taught at universities in Ohio and Tokyo before joining the U.S. signal-service in