The Law of Mind

One law governs thought — ideas spread, lose force and gain generality — and making sense of it obliges Peirce to name and defend the doctrine of continuity.

by Charles Sanders Peirce39 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

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

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Overview

In his opening paragraph, before the argument has started, Peirce stops to say where he grew up. In the neighbourhood of Concord, he writes, then corrects himself to Cambridge, at the time when Emerson and Frederic Henry Hedge — the Unitarian minister whose name the Transcendental Club first carried — were circulating ideas they had taken from Schelling. Cambridge held plenty of antiseptics against Concord, Peirce says, and he is not aware of having caught the infection; some benign strain may nevertheless have been implanted in him, and may be working to the surface only now, altered by mathematics and by training in physical investigation. What follows, in The Monist for July 1892, explains why he bothered to say so. There is one law of mind, and it is that ideas spread: an idea reaches others capable of being affected by it, loses intensity and force as it goes, gains generality, and welds itself into them. Making that coherent takes the rest of the article. A past idea cannot touch a present one unless the two are joined by real infinitesimal steps, and that commits Peirce to continuity in a strict sense — a sense he has to construct, and which he names here: synechism. Before the end he raises a difficulty against himself and answers it thinly. If the doctrine obliges him to a personal God, and if one person perceives another directly, then he ought to be in direct communication with that God, and he cannot say why anyone has ever doubted there is one; the most he can offer is that the facts which stare us in the face are not always the ones most easily discerned. Then he lists what synechism brings with it. A pronounced realism about generals. An objective idealism in which matter is mind, specialised and partially deadened. And tychism, the absolute chance of the April paper, with the thoroughgoing evolutionism that follows from it. Early on, looking back at what he had published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy twenty-odd years before, he adds that nominalism had blinkered him then.

Key concepts

What is the law of mind, stated plainly?

Ideas spread. An idea affects other ideas capable of being affected by it, loses intensity and especially the power of affecting others as it travels, gains generality, and welds itself with those it reaches. Peirce claims this single principle is the whole of mental action, and the rest of the article is spent making it coherent.

Peirce coins a name for his doctrine of continuity here — what is it?

Synechism: the doctrine that continuity governs everything, named here for the first time. Peirce needs it because a past idea can affect a present one only if real infinitesimal steps join them; without continuous connection, thought could not reach across time at all. He lists what it brings with it: realism about generals, objective idealism, and real chance.

What is tychism, and why name it in a paper about continuity?

Tychism is Peirce's name for the doctrine of absolute chance, which he had argued for three months earlier without naming it. It is christened here because chance needs somewhere to happen: spontaneity is a departure within a continuum, and continuity is what lets small departures accumulate into habits. The two doctrines arrive as partners rather than rivals.

Why does Peirce prefer infinitesimals to limits?

As a mathematician he finds them far easier and less infested with snares; limits as some textbooks state them involve false propositions. He grants that Cauchy's doctrine of limits contains the same ideas in another shape, since it too involves continuity. What he needs is that continuity: we are immediately conscious of an interval of time, not a knife-edge instant, and infinitesimals give him a present that overlaps its neighbours.

How is a law of mind different from a physical law?

A physical law is conservative and runs equally well backwards; mental action does not. Ideas lose intensity as they spread and never regain it, and the whole movement runs toward generality, which is a direction and not a return. Peirce takes that irreversibility as the mark that mind is not a mechanical system.

Themes of the book

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

One Law: Ideas Spread and Generalise

Thought obeys a single principle — an idea affects others capable of being affected, loses intensity as it travels, gains generality, and welds itself into them. Association becomes something closer to a physics of feeling.

Losing force while gaining reach is what makes this a law rather than a metaphor: intensity and generality trade against each other in every act of thinking, and a personality is a coordination of ideas held together that way rather than a container they sit inside. Habit, teleology and the growth of reasonableness all follow from the one spreading. Peirce pauses first to admit what Concord and Schelling may have left in him, altered since by mathematics.

ideas
mental law
law of mind
association
habit
generality
consciousness
feeling
personality
teleology
psychology
qualia

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Continuity, Named and Defended

A past idea can reach a present one only if real infinitesimal steps join them, which obliges Peirce to hold continuity in the strictest available sense — and to construct that sense before he can use it.

Synechism receives its name in these pages, defended by way of infinitesimals, which Peirce prefers to limits as far easier and less infested with snares, though he grants that Cauchy's limits carry the same ideas in another shape. What the doctrine brings along is stated openly: a pronounced realism about generals, an objective idealism in which matter is specialised and partially deadened mind, and the absolute chance of the April paper with a thoroughgoing evolutionism behind it. Peirce raises the difficulty of a personal God against himself and admits that his answer is thin.

continuity
synechism
infinitesimals
infinity
time
limits
mathematical foundations
cardinality
countability
tychism
spontaneity
determinism

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 39
distinct concepts: 95
by passages held, corpus-wide: #684

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: “consciousness” and “time”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 21 pairings. 33 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
consciousness	time	6
continuity	infinitesimals	6
continuity	time	6
consciousness	continuity	5
infinity	logic	4
consciousness	infinitesimals	3
continuity	infinity	3
infinitesimals	time	3
consciousness	ideas	2
continuity	ideas	2
ideas	time	2
consciousness	habit	1
continuity	habit	1
continuity	logic	1
habit	ideas	1
habit	logic	1
habit	time	1
ideas	logic	1
infinitesimals	infinity	1
infinitesimals	logic	1
logic	time	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 you are here 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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