Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

His son Charles was equally impressive. A prodigy who wrote a history of chemistry when he was eleven and had his own laboratory at twelve, he could write with both hands at the same time. No wonder, perhaps, that he was bored at Harvard, drank too much, and graduated seventy-ninth in his class of ninety.⁴⁵ That was the low point. Later, he built on his father’s work and, between them, they conceived the philosophy of pragmatism, which was grounded in mathematics. ‘It is not easy to define pragmatism: the Italian Papini observed that pragmatism was less a philosophy than a method of doing without one.’⁴⁶ In the first place, Benjamin Peirce became fascinated by the theories and calculations of Pierre-Simon Laplace and Karl Friedrich Gauss (covered in Chapter 32), in particular their ideas about probability.⁴⁷

Probability, or the laws of error, had a profound impact on the nineteenth century because of the apparent paradox that the accidental fluctuations that make phenomena deviate from their ‘normal’ laws, are themselves bound by a (statistical) law. The fact that this law applied even to human beings pointed many towards determinism.⁴⁸

Charles Peirce was not one of them. He believed that he could see spontaneous life around him at every turn. (And he attacked Laplace in print.) He argued that, by definition, the laws of nature themselves must have evolved.⁴⁹ He was Darwinian enough to believe in contingency, indeterminacy, and his ultimate philosophy was designed to steer a way through the confusion.⁵⁰

In 1812, in his Théorie analytique des probabilités, Laplace had said ‘We must . . . imagine the present state of the universe as the effect of its prior state and as the cause of the state that will follow.’ This is Newton’s billiard-ball theory of matter, applied generally, even to human beings, and where chance has no part.⁵¹ Against this, in his Theory of Heat

, published in 1871, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell had argued that the behaviour of molecules in a gas could be understood probabilistically. (Peirce met Maxwell on a visit to Cambridge in 1875.)⁵² The temperature of a gas in a sealed container is a function of the velocity of the molecules – the faster they move, the more they collide and the higher the temperature. But, and most importantly from a theoretical point of view, the temperature is related to the average velocity of the molecules, which vary in their individual speeds. How was this average to be arrived at, how was it to be understood? Maxwell argued that ‘the velocities are distributed among the particles according to the same law as the errors are distributed among the observations in the theory of the “method of least squares”’. (This had first been observed among astronomers: see here.)⁵³

Maxwell’s point, the deep significance of his arguments, for the nineteenth century, was that physical laws are not Newtonian, not absolutely precise. Peirce grasped the significance of this in the biological, Darwinian realm. In effect, it created the circumstances where natural selection could operate. Menand asks us to consider birds as an example. In any particular species, of finch say, most individuals will have beaks within the ‘normal distribution’, but every so often, a bird with a beak outside the range will be born, and if this confers an evolutionary advantage it will be ‘selected’. To this extent, evolution proceeds by chance, not on an entirely random basis but according to statistical laws.⁵⁴

Peirce was very impressed by such thinking. If even physical events, the smallest and in a sense the most fundamental occurrences, are uncertain, and if even the perception of simple things, like the location of stars, is fallible, how can any single mind ‘mirror’ reality? The awkward truth was: ‘reality doesn’t stand still long enough to be accurately mirrored’. Peirce therefore agreed with Wendell Holmes and William James: experience was what counted and even in science juries were needed. Knowledge was social.⁵⁵

All this may be regarded as ‘deep background’ to pragmatism (a word that, for some strange reason, Peirce hardly ever used; he said it was ‘ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers’).⁵⁶ This was, and remains, far more important than it seems at first sight, and more substantial than the everyday use of the word ‘pragmatic’ makes it appear. It was partly the natural corollary of the thinking that had helped create America in the first place, and is discussed in Chapter 28 above. It was partly the effect of the beginnings of indeterminacy in science, which was to be such a feature of twentieth-century thought, and it was partly – even mainly – a further evolution of thought, yet another twist, on the road to individualism.