Note 11 — INTRODUCTION

The personal relations between Peirce and Wright were thus described by Peirce in a letter to Mrs. Ladd-Franklin (Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 13, p. 719): “It must have been about 1857 when I first made the acquaintance of Chauncey Wright, a mind about on the level of J. S. Mill. He was a thorough mathematician. He had a most penetrating intellect.—He and I used to have long and very lively and close disputations lasting two or three hours daily for many years. In the sixties I started a little club called ‘The Metaphysical Club.’—Wright was the strongest member and probably I was next.—Then there were Frank Abbott, William James and others.” “It was there that the name and the doctrine of pragmatism saw the light.” It might be added that Peirce’s tychism is indebted to Wright’s doctrine of accidents and “cosmic weather,” a doctrine which maintained against LaPlace that a mind knowing nature from moment to moment is bound to encounter genuine novelty in phenomena, which no amount of knowledge would enable us to foresee. See Wright’s Philosophical Discussions—1876, also Cambridge Hist. of American Literature, Vol. 3, p. 234.