A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God

An argument for God that starts as a recreation — aimless wondering on a walk, which Peirce says flowers into belief because nobody is trying to reach it.

by Charles Sanders Peirce33 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1908(aged 69)
Original language: English

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Overview

The title promises a proof; the essay begins by recommending a pastime. It came out in 1908 in The Hibbert Journal, a London quarterly of religion, theology and philosophy, signed from Westfall, Pennsylvania. Peirce asks the reader to give some five or six per cent of his waking time, perhaps on a stroll, to what he calls Musement: pure play, with no purpose but recreation and no rule but liberty. The mind takes in some corner of one of the three Universes of Experience — of mere ideas, of brute fact, of everything whose being lies in connecting things — and drifts from observation into wondering how it came about. Musement, he says, will in time flower into the hypothesis of a creator of the three, and it does so precisely because the Muser was not setting out to be convinced; a man who sits down meaning to become persuaded of religion is not inquiring in scientific singleness of heart and will always suspect himself. That is the Humble Argument, the innermost of a nest of three, and it is what the title calls neglected. Peirce suspects that most of those who have reasoned their own way to belief owe it to this; theologians have assiduously scraped together every proof they could find and barely mention it, because the logic they learned recognises no argument that is not a formal argumentation. The second of the nest is the defence they never wrote. The third and largest claim is that the Humble Argument is the opening stage of a scientific inquiry, a hypothesis to be tested afterwards by what it does to the conduct of a life. Along the way he gives the history of a word: he preached the principle in a Metaphysical Club in Cambridge — he says 1871, the usual accounts say the club formed in January 1872 — and called it pragmatism in conversation; he never printed the name until Baldwin asked him to define it for his Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology; and in April 1905 he renamed it pragmaticism. No record of a club of that name survives in the writings of any member but him.

Key concepts

What are the three Universes of Experience?

The three kinds of thing the Muser's mind wanders over: mere Ideas, which are possibilities; brute Actuality, things and facts that react against one another; and whatever has its being in connecting things — signs, laws, habits. They are Peirce's categories in their last dress, and the argument concludes to a creator of all three.

What actually is the 'neglected argument' — is it the Musement?

No: it is the Humble Argument itself. Peirce says outright that the course of meditation which gives birth to belief in a creator is what he has called the N.A. throughout, and that this is the innermost of a nest of three. What was neglected is that theologians never described or defended it. The second of the nest is the defence they never wrote; the third encloses both.

Why does Peirce speak of God's Reality rather than God's existence?

Because of the terms he defines at the outset. To be Real is to have characters that belong to a thing whether or not any person or group attributes them to it: what a dream contains is not Real, but the fact that it was dreamed is. The Actual is narrower, whatever is met with in past, present or future. Calling God Real claims the wider thing, not a place among the things one meets.

What does Peirce call the guessing stage of inquiry in this essay?

Retroduction. It is the same move his 1878 papers called hypothesis: a surprising fact suggests something that would account for it, and the suggestion is adopted for testing only. Here it is the first of three stages — retroduction proposes, deduction draws out what would follow, induction tests — and no stage claims certainty for itself.

What is pragmaticism, and why the new word?

Peirce's 1905 renaming of his own principle, recounted in this essay. He had used pragmatism in conversation at a Cambridge club in the early 1870s and left others to print it; when James remodelled it into a doctrine parts of which Peirce thought opposed to sound logic, and Papini declared it incapable of definition, he concluded that his poor little maxim should be called by another name.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Musement, and Where Wandering Leads

Give some five or six per cent of your waking hours to pure play of thought, with no purpose but recreation and no rule but liberty, and belief in a creator arrives on its own — because nobody was reaching for it.

The mind drifts over the three Universes of Experience — mere ideas, brute fact, and whatever has its being in connecting things — and passes from noticing something to wondering how it came about. The absence of intent is doing the work: a man who sits down meaning to be convinced of religion is not inquiring in singleness of heart and will always suspect himself. Theologians scraped together every formal proof available and barely mentioned this one.

musement
instinct
aesthetics
reason
natural theology
philosophy of religion
theology
belief
cosmology

Enter a dialogue

God as a Hypothesis to Be Lived

Taken seriously, the Muser's arrival at a creator of the three Universes is a retroduction — which makes it the opening move of an inquiry rather than its conclusion, and what tests it is a life.

The machinery is the one the 1878 papers built: hypothesis proposes, deduction draws out what would follow, induction tests it, and no stage claims certainty for itself. Applied here it leaves belief provisional in form and binding in practice, since the consequences to be examined are what the hypothesis does to a man's conduct. Along the way Peirce dates the pragmatic principle to a Cambridge club of the early 1870s and explains, again, what he meant by the name.

abduction
hypothesis
inquiry
pragmatism
scientific method
methodology
conduct
deduction
induction
truth
logic

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 33
distinct concepts: 90
by passages held, corpus-wide: #714

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “abduction” and “epistemology”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 6 concepts, joined by 11 pairings. 29 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
abduction	epistemology	4
inquiry	musement	4
abduction	inquiry	2
epistemology	inquiry	2
inquiry	logic	2
inquiry	pragmatism	2
logic	pragmatism	2
musement	pragmatism	2
abduction	logic	1
abduction	musement	1
logic	musement	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1867 On a New List of Categories
The earliest item on this shelf, and the root of everything after it: the three-part scheme of quality, relation and representation reappears in the logic papers of 1877–78 and again in the evolutionary cosmology of the 1890s.
EN
1868 Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man
Where Peirce clears the ground. The four denials reached here — no intuition, no introspection, no thought without signs, no conception of the incognizable — are restated as premisses at the head of the sequel.
EN
1868 Some Consequences of Four Incapacities
The sequel, and where the argument arrives. The preceding article asked whether we have certain faculties; this one takes its four denials as premisses and follows them out to a theory of reality and of the self.
EN
1877 The Fixation of Belief
Written for readers with no philosophy behind them: the first instalment of a six-part course in the logic of science, serialised in a general-interest monthly. Everything the other 1877–78 papers do rests on the account of doubt, belief and inquiry set out here.
EN
1878 Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis
The paper that ends the series. Its central idea — guessing, treated as an inference with rules of its own rather than as a lack of them — is what Peirce kept working at for the rest of his life.
EN
1878 How to Make Our Ideas Clear
The second instalment of the 1877–78 series, nominally about a dead distinction in the logic textbooks. Two decades after it was printed, the American pragmatists took it as their charter.
EN
1878 The Doctrine of Chances
Third in the series, and the point where the account of inquiry acquires a price. Half of it is arithmetic — card packs, whist hands, insurance offices — and the other half asks whether a creature who never lives to complete a run of trials may reason from probabilities at all.
EN
1878 The Order of Nature
The religious instalment of the 1877–78 series. It reaches forward to the essay Peirce published at the end of his life: both ask what a scientific habit of mind is entitled to say about God, and they give different answers.
EN
1878 The Probability of Induction
A general magazine's readers are asked here to check a table of black and white balls for themselves. It is the most technical stretch of the 1877–78 series, and the one that takes on the probability textbooks directly.
EN
1891 The Architecture of Theories
A prospectus rather than a treatise, and the first of the five articles of Peirce's metaphysical series in Paul Carus's Monist, 1891–93 — the run in which the cosmology it sketches was built.
EN
1892 Man's Glassy Essence
Three things that do not obviously belong together — the constitution of matter, the chemistry of living tissue, and the question whether a church or a crowd can think — joined by the argument that mind and matter differ only in which side you look from.
EN
1892 The Doctrine of Necessity Examined
It stands second in the series, and it is the one that started a quarrel: Carus attacked it twice in his own journal and Peirce defended it once, so that the argument about chance occupied The Monist for fifteen months.
EN
1892 The Law of Mind
Where tychism acquires its partner. The chance of the April paper needed continuity to work in, and continuity gets its name and its defence here — the idea Peirce came to regard as the one his philosophy could least do without.
EN
1893 Evolutionary Love
Here the cosmology turns into an argument about how people ought to live: chance, necessity and love applied to the history of ideas, and to the ethics of a commercial century. It closed the Monist series.
EN
1893 What is Christian Faith?
Addressed past the theologians to two audiences at once — churchmen keeping their membership narrow, and the scientifically educated, shut out of the churches, who were talking about founding one of their own.
EN
1899 Leibniz Rewritten
The one book review on this shelf, from the years after the Coast Survey when Peirce lived partly by notices and dictionary work. It is the only piece here in which he is weighing someone else's system rather than building his own.
EN
1908 A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God you are here EN

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