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”?