Page:Chance, love, and logic - philosophical essays (IA chancelovelogicp00peir 0).pdf/16

Few nowadays question the great value of these pioneer minds; and it is often claimed that universities are established to facilitate their work, and to prevent it from being lost. But universities, like other well-managed institutions, can find place only for those who work well in harness. The restless, impatient minds, like the socially or conventionally unacceptable, are thus kept out, no matter how fruitful their originality. Charles S. Peirce was certainly one of these restless pioneer souls with the fatal gift of genuine originality. In his early papers, in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and later, in the Monist papers reprinted as Part II of this volume, we get glimpses of a vast philosophic system on which he was working with an unusual wealth of material and apparatus. To a rich imagination and extraordinary learning he added one of the most essential gifts of successful system builders, the power to coin an apt and striking terminology. But the admitted incompleteness of these preliminary sketches of his philosophic system is not altogether due to the inherent difficulty of the task and to external causes such as neglect and poverty. A certain inner instability or lack of self-mastery is reflected in the outer moral or conventional waywardness which, except for a few years at Johns Hopkins, caused him to be excluded from a university career, and thus deprived him of much needed stimulus to ordinary consistency and intelligibility. As the years advanced, bringing little general interest in, or recognition of, the brilliant logical studies of his early years, Peirce became more and more fragmentary, cryptic, and involved; so that James, the intellectual companion of his youth, later found