For thirty-two years the founder of American pragmatism drew a government salary for measuring the earth. From 1859 until the last day of 1891 the United States Coast Survey employed Charles Sanders Peirce in geodesy and gravimetry, swinging pendulums in America and Europe to map small local variations in gravity. In 1879 he made the first attempt to measure the metre against a wavelength of light — the method by which the metre would be defined from 1960 to 1983. The one full-length book he saw into print was a monograph on the brightness of stars, published at Leipzig in 1878. The philosophy went into magazines.
Benjamin Peirce, his father, held Harvard's chair in mathematics for nearly fifty years and directed the Coast Survey himself from 1867 to 1874. He taught his son by setting him problems and checking his solutions instead of supplying them. In 1863 the Lawrence Scientific School gave Charles the first summa cum laude in chemistry it had awarded. So he came to philosophy from a laboratory bench, at a moment when the lively alternative in American thought was at Concord, where Ralph Waldo Emerson and his circle were circulating ideas taken from the German idealist Schelling. Cambridge, Peirce remarked in 1892, had kept a good supply of antiseptics against Concord. The trouble, for a man who measured things, was that philosophy settled its questions by what was agreeable to reason — a pendulum swinging between material and spiritual views without ever stopping.
What the bench taught him came out in six articles for Popular Science Monthly between November 1877 and August 1878. Stop asking what makes a belief true, the first of them proposes, and ask what makes one stick. Doubt is an irritation and belief a habit; inquiry is the struggle from doubt into belief, and it ends when the irritation ends, true or not. The second article turns that into a rule for meaning: whatever effects an object could conceivably have on practice, your idea of those effects is the whole of your idea of the object. Truth, on the same rule, is the opinion investigation is fated to settle on, and the real is whatever that opinion is about. That definition puts a community inside the notion of reality, and it makes being wrong the ordinary condition of inquiry rather than a failure of it.
Johns Hopkins made him lecturer in logic in 1879, the only academic post he ever held. In 1883 he edited Studies in Logic by Members of the Johns Hopkins University, a volume of his students' work and his own. That same year, on his biographer Joseph Brent's account, Simon Newcomb — an astronomer his father had taught — told a Hopkins trustee that Peirce had lived and travelled with a woman he was not married to. Peirce had married Juliette Froissy days after his divorce from Harriet Melusina Fay became final. The university dismissed him in January 1884, and he never held a teaching post again. Charles William Eliot, who had taught him at Harvard, was president there from 1869 to 1909; proposals to employ Peirce came up repeatedly, and Eliot vetoed them. In 1902 Peirce asked the new Carnegie Institution for money to write the systematic book he had never managed. Newcomb sat on its executive committee, and its president, Daniel Coit Gilman, had run Johns Hopkins when Peirce was dismissed. The grant went elsewhere.
In 1887 he spent part of his inheritance on two thousand acres near Milford, Pennsylvania, and had an 1854 farmhouse remodelled to his design. Arisbe, the Peirces called it. The evolutionary cosmology belongs to those years — five articles for The Monist, arguing that absolute chance is real and that the laws of nature are habits the universe fell into. The poverty belongs to them too: he could not heat the house in winter, wrote on the backs of old manuscripts because he could not buy paper, and depended on his brother and his neighbours to settle his debts. His old friend William James, by then the most famous philosopher in America, arranged paid lecture series for him near Harvard in 1898 and 1903. James wrote to his Boston friends each year from 1907 until his own death in 1910, raising a subscription for Peirce.
It was James who put the word into print. At Berkeley on 26 August 1898 he told an audience that a principle he had heard Peirce state in Cambridge in the early 1870s deserved a name: he called it pragmatism, credited the coinage to Peirce, and sent his listeners to the article of 1878. Peirce disliked what the pragmatists built with it enough that in April 1905 he renamed his own version pragmaticism. He died at Milford in 1914, leaving roughly 1,650 manuscripts — eighty thousand pages at the lowest estimate — which Juliette passed to Harvard's philosophy department. The first volumes of his Collected Papers appeared in 1931. Readers who arrived that way found a notation for quantifiers worked out in 1885, independently of the German logician Gottlob Frege; the sorting of signs into likenesses, indices and symbols on which modern semiotics is built; and the argument that guessing at an explanation, which he called retroduction, is a form of inference with rules of its own. The chronological edition of his writings, begun in 1982, is not finished.