7 - Peirce's Common Sense Marriage of Religion and Science

Summary

In 1905 in a letter to F. C. S. Schiller, Charles Peirce responded to Schiller's attempt to define “pragmatism”: “I would let it grow and then say it is what a certain group of thinkers who seem to understand one another think, and thus make it the name of a natural class in the Natural History fashion” (MS L390 p. 3). We might follow Peirce's suggestion in giving an account of pragmatic philosophy of religion. If we do so, we find Peirce's work marking out a middle position among the work of the other American pragmatists. At one extreme we find John Dewey who, in A Common Faith, defended a minimal notion of religiosity in which “God” stood for the power of actualizing human ideals. Dewey explicitly rejected both supernaturalism and the church. Next on the spectrum we find William James who likewise downplayed the importance of the church. However, in The Varieties of Religious Experience and elsewhere, James described and defended the importance of traditional kinds of individual religious experience. At the other extreme position stands Josiah Royce, whom both Schiller and Peirce included among the pragmatists (MS L390 p. 2). Royce's “absolute pragmatism” initially provided philosophical argumentation in defense of a religious outlook; later, in The Problem of Christianity, Royce, working under the influence of Peirce, developed the importance of the church as a “beloved community.” In this “natural class” Peirce's philosophy of religion stands somewhere between those of James and Royce. In this essay, I would like to mark out some of the defining features of this mediating position and to show that it is a fitting piece of Peirce's philosophical architectonic.