Man's Glassy Essence

Molecular physics, a theory of protoplasm, and then the proposal that a church or a crowd can have a mind of its own in the same sense a person does.

by Charles Sanders Peirce31 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1892(aged 53)
Original language: English

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Overview

Two words of Shakespeare give the title, and Peirce had used the passage before: the lines about proud man, most ignorant of what he is most assured, his glassy essence, close an article he published in 1868. This one, in The Monist for October 1892, sets out to earn them, and most of it is physics. Peirce runs through the evidence for molecules, argues that atoms cannot be absolutely impenetrable and must be distributions of potential energy instead, works through the virial law of the physicist Rudolf Clausius, and builds a molecular theory of protoplasm — the one substance in which, as far as anyone could tell, feeling actually lives. At one point he sends the reader to his own definition of solid in the Century Dictionary, whose philosophical entries he had charge of. Then the turn. If protoplasm feels, and if there is no absolute break between the physical and the psychical aspects of a thing, then matter is mind that has grown habit-bound; habit is generalisation; generalisation is the spreading of feeling; and a general idea carries the unified living feeling of a person — a person being only a particular kind of general idea. Peirce takes the consequence seriously enough to propose a test. If a person is nothing but feelings in close enough connection to influence one another, then bodies of people in intense sympathy should have something like a consciousness of their own, and esprit de corps and national sentiment are not figures of speech. If such a personality has formed anywhere, he says, it should be in the church, where Christians have prayed together weekly for centuries. The evidence he can actually offer is a crowd. Thirty thousand young people of the Society for Christian Endeavor had lately gathered in New York, and among them, he says, there seemed to be a diffusion of sweetness and light.

Key concepts

Where does the title come from?

Shakespeare — proud man, most ignorant of what he is most assured, his glassy essence. Peirce had already used the passage once, to close an article of 1868, and took two of its words for this title twenty-four years later. The essay sets out to earn them by saying what a man's essence actually consists in.

What is protoplasm, and why does Peirce build a theory of it?

The living substance of cells — the one material in which, as far as anyone could tell, feeling actually resides. Peirce wants an account of mind that starts from physics rather than introspection, so he works out how a molecular arrangement could contract, grow, assimilate and take habits, then asks what follows for everything else made of molecules.

What is the virial, and why is it in a philosophy essay?

A quantity from the physicist Rudolf Clausius relating the pressure and motion of molecules to the forces between them. Peirce uses it to argue that atoms cannot be absolutely impenetrable and are better treated as distributions of potential energy. The physics is not decoration: the argument depends on matter being loose enough to acquire habits.

What does it mean to say a molecule has habits?

Habit here is simply the tendency to do again what was done before, and Peirce argues that protoplasm has it to a degree ordinary matter barely does. Habit-taking is generalisation, and generalisation, on his account, is the spreading of feeling. That chain is what lets him say matter differs from mind by stiffness rather than in kind.

What does Peirce mean by a 'general idea'?

Not a faint copy of particulars, but something carrying a unified living feeling of its own. This is what lets Peirce call a person one kind of general idea — feelings in close enough connection to influence one another. Nothing in that description confines the arrangement to a single body, which is the consequence he goes on to press.

Themes of the book

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

Matter as Mind Grown Habit-Bound

Protoplasm is the one substance in which feeling, as far as anyone could tell, lives, so its physics comes first and the consequences for everything else made of molecules come afterwards.

Atoms cannot be absolutely impenetrable and are better treated as distributions of potential energy; the virial law of Clausius and the chemistry of living tissue carry the argument as far as physics will take it. Then the turn. If feeling is there, and no absolute break divides the physical aspect of a thing from the psychical, matter is mind that has acquired habits — habit being generalisation, and generalisation the spreading of feeling.

protoplasm
molecular theory
thermodynamics
kinetic theory
virial theorem
equations of state
matter
habit
idealism
panpsychism
philosophy of physics
philosophy of biology
consciousness

Enter a dialogue

Whether a Crowd Can Have a Mind

If a person is nothing but feelings in close enough connection to influence one another, nothing confines the arrangement to one body — and Peirce takes that consequence as a claim to be tested rather than a figure of speech.

Esprit de corps and national sentiment are offered as literal descriptions, since a general idea carries the unified living feeling of a person, a person being one particular kind of general idea. The church, where Christians have prayed together weekly for centuries, is named as the place such a personality ought to have formed. The evidence actually produced is a crowd of thirty thousand young people gathered in New York and, among them, a diffusion of sweetness and light.

personhood
generality
emergence
collective consciousness
philosophy of mind
continuity

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 31
distinct concepts: 82
by passages held, corpus-wide: #721

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: “kinetic theory” and “thermodynamics”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 6 concepts, joined by 8 pairings. 37 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
kinetic theory	thermodynamics	3
habit	molecular theory	2
habit	philosophy of mind	2
kinetic theory	molecular theory	2
molecular theory	protoplasm	2
habit	protoplasm	1
molecular theory	thermodynamics	1
protoplasm	thermodynamics	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 you are here 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
Thirty years after the logic papers and fifteen after the cosmology, Peirce turns the machinery of hypothesis on the question the 1878 series had left open.
EN

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