ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture

In the 1890s, while living a life of relative isolation in the rural Pennsylvania woods, pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce engaged in a prolonged reflection on “the significance of his past while attempting to systematically present his mature metaphysical views.”¹ According to Peirce’s own recollections, earlier seminal influences encompassed “the presence of his erudite father [the Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce] and the eminent scientific, philosophic, and literary persons who visited his childhood home in Cambridge”—persons such as “Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Theodore Parker, Francis Bowen, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Margaret Fuller, and, one whom he distinctly remembers, ‘Mr. Emerson’” (“C,” 217). Peirce’s father knew Emerson well. As cofounder with Emerson of the Saturday Club, Benjamin regularly hosted Emerson for dinner at the Peirce family home, and Charles even recalled “hearing Emerson deliver an address on nature” as one of his earliest and most formative childhood memories (“C,” 221–22). Emerson’s intellectual as well as literal proximity to Peirce extended well beyond childhood, however. As David Dilworth notes, in the early 1870s Emerson delivered a series of sixteen Harvard lectures [End Page 680] posthumously published under the title Natural History of Intellect (1893). One of his co-lecturers was “an upstart of a logician, mathematician, scientist, and philosopher, Charles S. Peirce, 30 or 31 years old at the time!”²

Peirce’s most direct (yet wry) allusion to Emerson’s influence comes in his 1892 essay, “The Law of Mind,” penned for the July edition of the Monist: “I may mention, for the benefit of those who are curious in studying mental biographies, that I was born and reared in the neighborhood of Concord,—I mean in Cambridge,—at the time when Emerson, Hedge, and their friends were disseminating the ideas that they had caught from Schelling, and Schelling from Plotinus, from Boehm, or from God knows what minds stricken with the monstrous mysticism of the East.” Peirce then notes that such thinkers have “implanted in my soul, unawares,” and that now, “after long incubation, [they have] come to the surface, modified by mathematical conceptions and by training in physical investigations.”³ As Peirce’s passage suggests, many of his own philosophical ideas then appeared to him as the belated—if logically more precise—inheritance of Emerson’s gnomic formulations. Peirce’s remark echoes Emerson’s proto-Darwinian image of the phylogenetic continuity of Mind in “The Poet”: “when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs … a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings … which carry them fast and far, and infix them irrevocably into the hearts of men” (EL, 459).⁴

As David O’Hara astutely observes, Peirce’s “repeated emphasis on influence through proximity [his being ‘reared in the neighborhood of Concord’] rather than through identity underscores Peirce’s belief that ideas are not discrete but spread continuously and organically.”⁵ According to Peirce’s mental law—what he calls synechism—“ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain others which stand to them in a peculiar relation of affectability. In this spreading they [End Page 681] lose intensity … but gain generality and become welded with other ideas” (EP, 1:23). Peirce’s law entails an antinominalist metaphysics, for it rejects the notion that general ideas exist in name only. As Nicholas L. Guardiano puts it, nominalist conceptions of mind presuppose that ideas are “separate detached entities interacting in mechanistic fashion” (“C,” 220). For Emerson and Peirce, Mind—with a capital M—is diffuse, nondiscrete, and transcends embodiment in any one individual mind; “we are,” as Peirce puts it, “in a thought” more than “thoughts are in us” (G, 237).⁶

Subtending Peirce’s law of mind is his objective idealism or panpsychism, which posits Mind as primordial substance and matter as a degraded form of Mind—that is, Mind crystalized into physical law through habit. As Peirce claims, “it would be a mistake to conceive of the psychical and the physical aspects of matter as two aspects absolutely distinct...