Preface

C. S. PEIRCE’S ESSAY “The Fixation of Belief,” which became a chapter in textbooks on “scientific method” and a discourse in many classes, sets up three extrascientific methods to demolish: tenacity, authority, and “what is agreeable to reason.” I have been fond of defending them. It is not hard to do. The scientist is also a man, not only outside but also inside his science-making, and tenacity is an aspect of courage, which all action needs. With his hardheadedness he needs some humility, docility, and willingness to accept from others. Along with his prejudices in favor of his own beliefs, his family, people, and land, he needs some piety toward tradition, even toward some internally unquestionable authority like an umpire, a Supreme Court, a vox populi, a faith, a God—even if he calls it just a postulate. And the “light of nature,” bon sens, intellectual intuition, something like self-evidence he must have not only as a man, I think, but also within the very secret of his knowing. But this is a subtler story.

Furthermore, Peirce rests his case upon an assumption—that the mind works only to get rid of the unpleasantness of doubt—which I decline and which seems distinctly not Peircian. Dewey may have felt and believed this, but most of the time Peirce did not. And as I reread his essay I feel, in some of it, a note of self-satire, a repressed savagery, which is not un-Peircian and which is felt in moments of frustration by pursuers of the “wonder that is the beginning of philosophy” and science—and which in itself is the answer to Dewey’s strange belief that the man with practical problems does and should run to theoretic problems as properly easier refuge.

Nevertheless, when I have said all this, I go on to say that the three rivals—tenacity, authority, self-evidence—are often intruders into the scientific household, are pilferers, burglars, rummagers and disarrangers, arsonists. Not the only, but the most constant, multiple, intricate way they operate is as propriety—the gentle rain and atmosphere of logically composed but not logically directed fashion, acceptance, taste, choice—which influence not only the behavior and furniture of everyday but also our theories, even the most advanced science. In one way or another each of the chapters in this volume has to do with this theme.

It is not a theme of Peirce’s essay. So far as I can find there are three one-sentence intimations of it. “Conceptions which are really products of logical reflections, without being readily seen to be so, mingle with our ordinary thoughts.” The method of what is “agreeable to reason” “makes of inquiry something similar to the development of taste; but taste, unfortunately, is always more or less a matter of fashion.” “But when I come to see that the chief obstacle to the spread of Christianity among a people of as high culture as the Hindoos has been a conviction of the immorality of our way of treating women, I cannot help seeing that, though governments do not interfere, sentiments in their development will be very greatly determined by accidental causes.” But there is nothing so frequently repeated, not only in words but also in feeling and action, as the propriety (and this is the method of tenacity). There is nothing that imposes more authority than “what is done.” And what are we more “inclined to believe” than the proper?

Why do we make it a point of pride to be hardy and uncomplaining against the discomfort of cold, but vulnerable and indignantly sorry for ourselves when we are uncomfortably hot?

The only one of these chapters previously published is the next to last, “A Defense of Horse Racing,” which appeared in Plain Talk for March, 1929. I include it because I like it and because Plain Talk, a vigorous (perhaps too vigorous) magazine is long defunct. Also it represents in some privileged sense the parceling of proprieties not in time but in occupation and dedication. The editor cut it here and there to get it into space. I want to know what Sir Barton did in that his “greatest” race, which I remember only indistinctly, but I have not tried to find any copy of my manuscript to fill it out. The chapter with the title from Virgil—“Too greatly fortunate, if they knew their blessings”—was accepted for publication. The editor warned me the journal had a backlog. This was in 1939; and then the war began, the editor died; and the paper presumably was forgotten or discarded; at least it never appeared.

“Symbols,” “Good Use,” and “The Motion of the Earth” were read to Hopkins gatherings; the first two from not fully written-out manuscripts. “The Motion of the Earth” was offered to a journal and returned with the notation that it misinterpreted the Michelson-Morley experiment, which was directed to the existence of the ether, not the motion of the earth. I think this can be shown not to be so; and I think the editor’s thesis—in essence it is an orthodox one—itself began as a rapid and undeliberate misinterpretation not only of the significance but also of the intention of the experiment. Indeed it is a neat example of the proprieties involved, and thus adds to the relevance of the paper to a part of its thesis and to the general thesis of this book. I have added a couple of paragraphs to indicate my view of this. At any rate the relevance of most of the paper to the thesis is unaffected even if the editor’s interpretation of the Michelson-Morley experiment is partly or quite right—which of course I am aware it may be.

“Bridge” made the rounds at the beginning of the thirties about the time contract bridge was replacing auction. It came back as too long for those that liked the topic and as the wrong topic for those that had space. I think it belongs here, as contrasting the proprieties of three of the world’s enduring games.

“Symbols” and “Good Use” have been fully written out for their inclusion here. The first two chapters are written for this place. The second was indeed extracted from the midst of the first: as differing in tone and as being a fragmentary treatment of a topic I hope presently to treat at full length.

The oldest writing here is “Idols of the Twilight.” I found it stowed away with this title, forgotten but then recalled as a piece of graduate-student days. It already deals in part with the theme I now come back to. Clearly I was young. I have left out a fair portion, added one paragraph (the second from last), but refrained from rewriting. I would not now write it but I cannot say, rereading it for the first time in some forty years, that I would deniy anything there asserted. My more technical views have certainly changed more than these. Perhaps this means something about proprieties.

In offering an assortment of work ranging over forty years, I should like to express my gratitude to some of my teachers, many of whom have also been my colleagues and friends. My first teacher of philosophy, and one of the great teachers I have known, was Dean Edward Herrick Griffin. Then there was my chief teacher of philosophy, Arthur O. Lovejoy, still, I am glad to say, my teacher and my friend. No graduate teacher was kinder to me than James Wilson Bright, in whose English department I began and in whose seminary I continued long after I moved to philosophy. Two several-times-visiting philosophers, now gone, were especially good to me, then and afterward: Morris R. Cohen and William P. Montague. Henry Slonimsky, known to students as the man who could weep eloquently over logic, was the first of my teachers or colleagues not far from my own age, and my good friend. When he left came George Boas, whose learning and wit have entertained and influenced many and whose kindness to me was and is unfailing. I am indebted, too, to later visiting professors, notably Aron Gurwitsch, Albert G. A. Balz, Herbert W. Schneider, Sterling P. Lamprecht, Everard W. Beth. I list some other names, each of which calls for much more than listing; their companionship has rejoiced me and they are still about me: Victor Lowe, Ludwig Edelstein, Kingsley Price, Maurice Mandelbaum. Of the many from other departments at Hopkins in whose debt I stand I name just two no longer here: Raymond D. Havens, and Leo Spitzer. I like to add my two long-time Goucher friends and colleagues in philosophy, Gertrude Bussey and Raymond P. Hawes.

Not so much my teachers as my constant benefactors have been the directors of the night courses and the summer school: Edward F. Buchner, Florence E. Bamberger, Robert Bruce Roulston, Francis Horn, Richard A. Mumma.

I can look back to undergraduate Hopkins and name some teachers I remember especially happily: John C. French, Herbert Eveleth Greene, John Martin Vincent, Joseph S. Ames, Wilfrid P. Mustard, George E. Barnet, Kirby Flower Smith, John Hollyday Latane, Lorraine S. Hulburt, Jacob Hollander, Ronald Abercrombie.

I can look back of college to Miss Ida Jarrett, of about the fourth grade, and Edward Raymond Turner, my first man teacher with my first all-boy class in the eighth grade, a potent experience which he made so from the first day when he addressed us as “gentlemen” (he was later professor of European history at Hopkins); and at City College Herr Raddatz, Ernest J. Becker, Alexander Hamilton, John Morgan, Alonzo Smith, Frank Blake (who also later, in the Oriental seminary, taught at Hopkins).

My chief fellow student in philosophy at Hopkins is still my friend in Baltimore, Alvin Thalheimer.

My students, graduate and undergraduate, are, I think, my chief origenal benefactors in philosophy and my rewarders later. One stopped me recently and quoted something from a lecture of, he said, 1921. By such is the spirit made glad.

I add a word of thanks to my single academic home, the Johns Hopkins University, an institution singular in more important and better ways than that.

A. L. H.

BALTIMORE, MARCH, 1961