V.

MR. PEIRCE’S EVOLUTIONISM.

I have tried to find an explanation of Mr. Peirce’s position which appears to me self-contradictory and I believe I have found the key that will explain it.

I read somewhere a stray remark of Mr. Peirce’s in which he demanded that evolutionism should be thorough-going. The conception of evolution in vogue at present, he said, stops short at a certain point, and substitutes for an explanation the unknowable. Mr. Peirce says:

“Does not space call for some explanation? Is not that a half-way philosophy which in these our days does not explain, or at least hold out some promise of explaining, why space is continuous, why it has such a wonderful uniformity in all its parts, why there are neither more nor less than three dimensions everywhere, why every closed curve can, by a continuous change of position, size, and form, be brought into coincidence with every other, and why the three angles of a triangle make exactly one hundred and eighty degrees, or at least so very closely so that we cannot tell whether they make more or less?”

Mr. Peirce does not intend to halt before these problems, but to explain them and carries the principle of evolution to its ultimate conclusions, so as to explain from it not only the forms of living organisms but also the laws of nature including the laws of space. Mr. Peirce declares in his article “The Architecture of Theories” (_The Monist_, Vol. I, No. 2, p. 165):

“Uniformities are precisely the sort of facts that need to be accounted for.... Law is _par excellence_ the thing that wants a reason.”

And what he means by it is further elucidated in his article “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” (_The Monist_, Vol. II, No. 3, p. 334):

“That single events should be hard and unintelligible, logic will permit without difficulty: we do not expect to make the shock of a personally experienced earthquake appear natural and reasonable by any amount of cogitation. But logic does expect things _general_ to be understandable. To say that there is a universal law, and that it is a hard, ultimate, unintelligible fact, the why and wherefore of which can never be inquired into, at this a sound logic will revolt; and will pass over at once to a method of philosophising which does not thus barricade the road of discovery.”

It is perfectly true that “law is _par excellence_ the thing that wants a reason,” and any explanation that explains it by the assumption of an unknowable is unphilosophical. I agree with Mr. Peirce that we must not halt here; but I have no confidence in his method of explanation. Mr. Peirce’s original idea, then, and I should add, his main mistake, is that he proposes to explain the origin of natural law by evolution.

In his legitimate anxiety to explain law, Mr. Peirce declares chance to be exempt therefrom. He says:

“That a pitched coin should sometimes turn up heads and sometimes tails calls for no particular explanation.” (_The Monist_, Vol. I, No. 2, p. 165.)

But chance in our opinion needs exactly as much explanation as anything else. Mr. Peirce very improperly identifies “that which cannot be accounted for” with “that which need not be accounted for.” Absolute chance, if it existed, would _not_ so much _not_ call for a particular explanation as actually be unexplainable, and being incapable of explanation, it would have to be considered as an unintelligible fact, as inscrutable, incomprehensible, and mystical. On the assumption that chance need not be accounted for, Mr. Peirce builds the architecture of his theory. He says:

“Chance is first, law is second, the tendency of habits is third.”

The application of this general statement is set forth in the following passage:

“In psychology Feeling is First, Sense of reaction Second, General conception Third, or mediation. In biology, the idea of arbitrary sporting is first, heredity is second, the process whereby the accidental characters become fixed is third.”

How little after all we can escape the determinism of law as being a feature of the world will be seen from the fact, that the explanation for the evolution of law is presented by Mr. Peirce as being itself a law, i. e. a formula describing a regularity supposed to obtain in facts. Does not Mr. Peirce’s formula, supposing it to be true, deserve the same reproach which he casts upon natural law in general, viz., that it is “a hard, ultimate, unintelligible fact, the why and wherefore of which can never be inquired into”?