In an article published in _The Monist_ for January 1891, I endeavored
to show what ideas ought to form the warp of a system of philosophy, and
particularly emphasised that of absolute chance. In the number of April
1892, I argued further in favor of that way of thinking, which it will be
convenient to christen _tychism_ (from τύχη, chance). A serious student
of philosophy will be in no haste to accept or reject this doctrine; but
he will see in it one of the chief attitudes which speculative thought
may take, feeling that it is not for an individual, nor for an age, to
pronounce upon a fundamental question of philosophy. That is a task for
a whole era to work out. I have begun by showing that _tychism_ must
give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities
of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth, and to a
Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialised
and partially deadened mind. 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. But the atmosphere of Cambridge held many an antiseptic against
Concord transcendentalism; and I am not conscious of having contracted
any of that virus. Nevertheless, it is probable that some cultured
bacilli, some benignant form of the disease was implanted in my soul,
unawares, and that now, after long incubation, it comes to the surface,
modified by mathematical conceptions and by training in physical
investigations.
The next step in the study of cosmology must be to examine the general
law of mental action. In doing this, I shall for the time drop my tychism
out of view, in order to allow a free and independent expansion to
another conception signalised in my first _Monist_-paper as one of the
most indispensable to philosophy, though it was not there dwelt upon;
I mean the idea of continuity. The tendency to regard continuity, in
the sense in which I shall define it, as an idea of prime importance in
philosophy may conveniently be termed _synechism_. The present paper
is intended chiefly to show what synechism is, and what it leads to.
I attempted, a good many years ago, to develop this doctrine in the
_Journal of Speculative Philosophy_ (Vol. III.); but I am able now
to improve upon that exposition, in which I was a little blinded by
nominalistic prepossessions. I refer to it, because students may possibly
find that some points not sufficiently explained in the present paper are
cleared up in those earlier ones.