Chapter 6 - Devolution of the Cosmogonic Program

Summary

Peirce’s 1890s cosmological speculations were fascinating failures. Their basic idea, that laws require explanation, which could only be by evolution from lawless chaos, was suggested by the success of statistical reasoning in thermodynamics and in Darwinian biology. But the development of that idea was supposed to predict the forms of physical laws not yet discovered, and none of its mutually incompatible developments could do that. In one version, Peirce projected a form of idealism, anti-conceptual and named ’objective’, in which feelings unfelt by any organism are supposed to constitute the material universe; this idealism disappears from later writings. In another version, he projected a ’law of mind’, fundamental to other laws, confused by some commentators with his c.1902 idea of final causation. But such a law and final causation are polar contraries; in showing this, I develop and defend Peirce’s idea of final causation, made use of in Chapter 9.