Returning to the Unformed: Emerson and Peirce on the “Law of Mind”

Abstract

Many importante figures gave the University Lecture Series of 1870 at Harvard, two of which were an aging Ralph Waldo Emerson and a young C.S. Peirce. This paper will examine the relationship between Emerson’s 1870 lecture, “The Law of Mind” and the several drafts that Peirce develops previous to his publishing of the “Lawof Mind” in the Monist series in the early 1890s. The similarities are remarkable and highlight the unique metaphysical positions that drew Peirce’s interest in his later life. Since the transcript of Emerson’s lecture is only partial, I will use The Natural History of the Intellect (organized by James Elliott Cabot and published by Emerson in his final years) as supplemental materials for this study. This analysis yields important results concerning the way that classical American pragmatism inherits Emerson’s intellectual legacy but also the interest in the “abyss” of Schelling.