Peirce and Spinoza’s Pragmaticist Metaphysics

In the early 20th

century, moved, at least in part, by James’s popularization of

pragmatism, Peirce sought to communicate his own pragmati(ci)sm both directly via repeated

attempts to formulate the doctrine and indirectly by comparing his thought to that of such

philosophical forebears as Spinoza, Berkeley and Kant. Peirce’s debt to Berkeley and Kant are

well-documented. However, insufficient attention has been paid to his invocations of Spinoza.

In this paper, I survey Peirce’s discussions of Spinoza, and identify a shift in these

discussions in 1904 when Peirce comes to regard Spinoza as an important early pragmati(ci)st.1 I

argue that this shift corresponds with Peirce’s own late efforts to distinguish his pragmaticism

from the pragmatism of such figures as James and Schiller. While both pragmatism and

pragmaticism take as their starting point some version of the pragmatic maxim, the latter is

distinctive for its commitment to critical common-sensism and scholastic realism. I argue that,

on Peirce’s view, all three elements are present in Spinoza’s thought.

1. Peirce on Spinoza

Pre-1904

Peirce’s considerations of Spinoza spanned his career as a philosopher. He writes that he began

reading metaphysics as a teenager, and that the first metaphysicians he studied were Spinoza,

Kant and Hegel.2

Peirce’s first public mention of Spinoza occurs in an 1863 address he gave to the

Cambridge High School Association.3 He includes him several times in his unfinished 1883-84

Johns Hopkins study of great men.4 In later years, he discusses Spinoza in his reviews for The

Nation of a number of Spinozist and other early modern texts, including Fullerton’s The

Philosophy of Spinoza in 1892,5 Hale White’s translation of the Ethics in 1894,

6 and Joachim’s A

Study of the Ethics of Spinoza in 1902.7

As well, Peirce was the uncredited author of the entry on Spinozism for the Century

Dictionary (1891).8 Here it is in its entirety:

Spinozism (spi-no’ zizm), n. [< Spinoza (see def.) + -ism.] The metaphysical doctrine

of Baruch (afterward Benedict) de Spinoza (1632-1677), a Spanish Jew, born at

Amsterdam. Spinoza’s chief work, the “Ethics,” is an exposition of the idea of the

absolute, with a monistic theory of the correspondence between mind and matter, and

applications to the philosophy of living. It is an excessively abstruse doctrine, much

misunderstood, and too complicated for brief exposition. The style of the book, an

imitation of Euclid’s “Elements,” is calculated to repel the mathematician and

logician, and to carry the attention of the ordinary reader away from the real meaning,

while conveying a completely false notion of the mode of thinking. Yet, while the

form is pseudomathematical, the thought itself is truly mathematical. The main

principle is, indeed, an anticipation in a generalized form of the modern geometrical

conception of the absolute, especially as this appears in the hyperbolic geometry,

where the point and plane manifolds have a correspondence similar to that between

Spinoza’s worlds of extension and thought. Spinoza is described as a pantheist; he

identifies God and Nature, but does not mean by Nature what is ordinarily meant.

Some sayings of Spinoza are frequently quoted in literature. One of these is omnis

determinatio est negatio, “all specification involves exclusion”; another is that

matters must be considered sub specie æternitatis, “under their essential aspects.”

Spinozist (spi-no’ zist), n. [< Spinoza + -ist.] A follower of Spinoza.

Spinozistic (spi-no-zis’ tik), a. [< Spinozist + -ic.] Of, pertaining to, or

characteristic of Spinoza or his followers: as, the Spinozistic school; Spinozistic

pantheism.9

These texts reveal a number of consistent themes in Peirce’s pre-1904 account of

Spinoza. Firstly, Peirce repeatedly makes the rather banal point that Spinoza was a great thinker

who produced great works. He also repeatedly deplores the various historical attacks on Spinoza

and Spinozism.10

Peirce’s remark in the Century Dictionary that Spinozism “is an excessively abstruse

doctrine, much misunderstood, and too complicated for brief exposition” points to two further

threads that run through Peirce’s pre-1904 account of Spinoza – his frequent complaints about

the obscurity of Spinoza’s thought, and about the degree to which Spinoza has been

misunderstood by scholars. These are related to his oft-repeated complaint that the so-called

geometrical method of the Ethics is particularly responsible for philosophers’ misinterpretations

of Spinoza. However, Peirce vacillates on the question of why Spinoza chose the geometrical

method for the Ethics. In his 1894 review of Hale White’s translation of the Ethics, he writes that

Spinoza himself did not understand his own thought, but that this, far from being a fault, marks

Spinoza as a great philosopher:

Paradoxical as it may seem, it may be maintained that none of the very great

philosophers understood themselves. Crystal clearness, such as we justly require

in mathematics, in law, in economics, is in philosophy the characteristic of the

second-rates. The reason is that the strongest men are able to seize an all-

important conception long before the progress of analysis has rendered it possible

to free it from obscurities and difficulties. If Kant had waited, before he wrote the

‘Critic of the Pure Reason,’ [sic] until the ideas with which it chiefly deals had

been accurately dissected, he might, had he lived have been pottering over it to-

day. But of Spinoza this is true in a much higher degree. Not only has he not

mastered an altogether distinct apprehension of his own thought, but he has a

positively mistaken view of it. He thinks that he reasons after the style of Euclid,

and perhaps there is some truth in that; but he thinks that his reasoning has the

form which Euclid understood his own to have, and that is a complete delusion.

This appratus [sic] of Definitions, Axioms, Problems, and Theorems is in

geometry itself merely a veil over the living thought.11

By contrast, in his Spinozism entry in the Century Dictionary, Peirce seems to attribute

Spinoza’s geometric style not to a genius’s failure to understand his own work, but rather to a

conscious attempt to dissemble. In a surprising anticipation of Leo Strauss’s notorious esoteric

reading of the Ethics, Peirce here maintains that the style of the Ethics “is calculated to repel the

mathematician and logician, and to carry the attention of the ordinary reader away from the real

meaning.” By 1902, however, in his review of Joachim, Peirce abandons the esoteric account,

and argues that Spinoza’s choice of the geometrical method simply reflected the convention of

his day. However, argues Peirce, while the abridged style of exposition in geometry is

appropriate for a discipline (geometry) in which instinct is more important than argumentation, it

is inadequate for a discipline such as metaphysics, in which arguments can and must be made

explicit:

… Spinoza felt himself obliged to imitate Euclid in order to maintain his

pretensions to science. His philosophy was deep, out of the common ways of

thinking, and intelligible only from peculiar points of view so that it would have

been difficult enough to understand had it been ever so lucidly presented. Clothed,

as it is, in the garb of Euclid, the ‘Ethic’ is one of the most enigmatical books that

ever were written. The most curious circumstance about it is that a logical writing

which Spinoza left unfinished at his death, shows that the Euclidean form of the

‘Ethic’ was utterly untrue to the author’s own way of thinking. Those assumptions

which, when stated as definitions and axioms, seem to come from nowhere,

bursting upon us like bolts out of the blue, had really been subjected by Spinoza

to the critical examination of a sort of inductive logic.12

Whatever Peirce’s qualms about Spinoza’s geometrical form of presentation, he cannot

praise too highly the “real meaning” that lies beneath “the garb of Euclid.” Over and over, he

expresses his regret that the style of the Ethics conceals the “deep,”13

“weighty,”14

“living”15

thought of Spinoza. While Peirce is never explicit about what exactly is the “living thought” that

is concealed by the geometrical method, several of his discussions of Spinoza offer hints. He

argues in a number of texts that the key to a proper understanding of Spinoza resides in reading

the whole of his oeuvre, and not just the Ethics. He hints in his 1902 Joachim review that the

Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (TIE) offers a truer account of Spinoza’s thought than

the Ethics. Indeed, on Peirce’s view, the TIE shows that Spinoza arrived at the definitions and

axioms of the Ethics not a prioristically, but through a process of inductive logic. In two

reviews,16

Peirce emphasizes Hobbes’s influence upon Spinoza. The review of the Joachim book

also argues at length that, in virtue of living in the Netherlands, Spinoza was influenced not by

the medieval scholastics, as was the case for most philosophers in continental Europe, but by the

Dutch reformed peripatetics, whose doctrine was closer to Aristotle’s than the scholastics’ was.

Thus, argues Peirce “the main features of his philosophy are consistent with Aristotelianism

slightly modified, and not at all so with the other doctrines which subsequently influenced

him.”17

While Peirce deplores the Euclidean form of the Ethics as unmathematical, a further

theme recurs throughout his pre-1904 mentions of Spinoza: this is that there is something deeply

mathematical about Spinoza’s thought. Indeed, in his 1894 review of Hale White’s translation of

the Ethics, Peirce devotes two whole pages to the history and philosophy of mathematics, a

subject that he maintains is “indispensable to the comprehension” of Spinoza.18

Both in this

review, and in his “Spinozism” entry in the Century Dictionary, Peirce maintains that Spinoza’s

conception of the absolute anticipates the modern mathematical conception of the absolute:

… you must penetrate beneath [the geometrical form of the Ethics] if you would

enter the living stream of Spinoza’s thinking. You then find that he is engaged in

a somewhat mathematical style in developing a conception of the absolute,

strikingly analogous to the metrical absolute of the mathematicians. He thus

appears as a mathematical thinker, not in the really futile, formal way in which he

and his followers conceived him to be, but intrinsically, in a lofty, living, and

valuable sense.19

The Century Dictionary entry invokes the hyperbolic geometry, maintaining that “the

point and plane manifolds [of hyperbolic geometry] have a correspondence similar to that

between Spinoza’s worlds of extension and thought.”

Finally, it bears remarking that Peirce’s early discussions of Spinoza reveal his

thoroughgoing familiarity with historical and contemporary Spinoza scholarship. In his 1894

Ethics review, Peirce praises three translations of the Ethics into English – Willis’s, Drake

Smith’s and White’s. Of these, he adjudges the last the best.20

Peirce bemoans the lack of a

thorough English book about Spinoza, but praises Pollock’s and Caird’s works, which “contain

much that is valuable.” Peirce regards the Van Vloten and Land edition of Spinoza’s works to be

the best. He continues that

In regard to the relation of Spinoza to the philosophers who went before him,

much has been done in special directions, one writer urging his indebtedness to

Descartes, another that to scholasticism, a third that to the Jewish philosophy, a

fourth that to Giordano Bruno. But no really good comprehensive view has ever

been published; nor, singularly enough, has anybody remarked, as far as we are

aware, the very obvious indebtedness of Spinoza to Hobbes, to whose wooden

mechanicalism he was naturally inclined.21

The 1902 Joachim review similarly evinces Peirce’s knowledge of Spinoza scholarship:

Long before the middle of the eighteenth century it had come to be regarded as

settled that Spinoza had merely developed a few ideas that had been thrown out

by Descartes, and that his notions had been definitively exploded. This opinion

received something of a shock when, in 1780, Lessing declared himself a

Spinozist, although mistakenly; and an interesting discussion of Lessing’s

supposed Spinozism followed between F.H. Jacobi and Moses Mendelssohn.

Then, Herder confessed to a sort of Spinozism, as later did Goethe. The system

could not, after such events, well sink back into obscurity. About 1816 H.C.W.

Sigwart began that more careful and critical study of what Spinoza really did

mean to which many writers have contributed in a fuller and fuller stream of

literature to this day, until the study may now almost take rank as a special branch

of science, Spinozology. Certainly, the last word about it has not yet been said.

Perhaps the problem is insoluble. At any rate, beyond a certain point, any opinion

that can at present be put forth must rank as a merely personal one. In 1852, an

important book by Spinoza was brought to light, together with many significant

letters. Since then, the data of the problem remain unaugmented.22

Peirce continues by generally praising Joachim’s scholarship, but faulting him for

excluding a number of secondary sources “that were well worthy of attention, such as the book

of Berendt, and Friedländer, that of Höffding, and one or two extremely important papers in the

journals.”23

The handwritten index cards on which Peirce collected data for his Spinozism entry in the

Century Dictionary24

list a further ten sources with which Peirce was familiar. In sum, then, even

before Peirce came to identify Spinoza as a fellow pragmati(ci)st, he was exceptionally well-read

in Spinoza scholarship. His remarks on Spinoza were not those of a dilettante.

While Peirce’s pre-1904 reflections on Spinoza suggest potentially fruitful (and

frequently heterodox) avenues of interpretation, there is little evidence that Peirce considered

Spinoza a pragmatist during this period. There are only two hints pre-1904 that Peirce might be

coming to regard Spinoza as a pragmatist. The first occurs over the course of an 1891-1893

dispute that Peirce entered into with Monist editor Paul Carus over necessitarianism and chance.

Early on in the exchange, Carus invoked Spinoza, only to have Peirce claim Spinoza for his own

side of the debate: “Now I understand Spinoza to be a realist.”25

However, being a realist is

neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being a pragmatist. So, while Peirce’s claim that

Spinoza was a realist shows that he regarded Spinoza as, to some extent, belonging to his

(Peirce’s) own camp, there is no reason to think that the particular camp that he had in mind was

pragmatism. The second hint that Peirce might be coming to regard Spinoza as a pragmatist

occurs at the close of his review of White’s translation of the Ethics, where Peirce praises the

practical upshot of Spinozism at some length:

Spinoza’s ideas are eminently to affect human conduct. If, in accordance with the

recommendation of Jesus, we are to judge of ethical doctrines and of philosophy

in general by its practical fruits we cannot but consider Spinoza as a very weighty

authority; for probably no writer of modern times has so much determined men

towards an elevated mode of life. Although his doctrine contains many things

which are distinctly unchristian, yet they are unchristian rather intellectually than

practically. In part, at least, Spinozism is, after all, a special development of

Christianity; and the practical upshot of it is decidedly more Christian than that of

any current system of theology.26

While Peirce uses “practical” in praise of Spinoza three times in this passage, he stops short of

calling Spinoza a pragmatist.

1904 and thereafter

Prior to 1904, then, Peirce had read a great deal by and about Spinoza, had considered views

both about Spinoza’s thought and about the comparative merit of different scholarly approaches

to Spinoza, and had published several short pieces on him. However, there is scant reason to

believe that he regarded Spinoza as a pragmatist. Starting in 1904, however, Peirce began

praising Spinoza’s pragmati(ci)sm, ranking him with such (on Peirce’s view) proto-

pragmati(ci)sts as Berkeley and Kant.

The first locus of such remarks was Peirce’s 1904 review for The Nation of Robert Duff’s

Spinoza’s Political and Ethical Philosophy. This book did three important things, from the point

of view of Peirce’s understanding of Spinoza. (1) It considered Spinoza’s oeuvre as a whole,

rather than resting its entire interpretation on the Ethics; (2) it emphasized Spinoza’s practical

ethics and social epistemology over his speculative metaphysics, and (3) it de-emphasized the

geometrical form of the Ethics, arguing that the method was simply Spinoza’s “experimental”

attempt to present synthetically what he had discovered analytically – that is, empirically.27

Peirce himself had, pre-1904, repeatedly suggested the first two lines of argument for Spinoza

studies. And, while he was too sophisticated an historian of philosophy to attach the significance

Duff did to the synthetic form of the Ethics,28

the attention that Duff paid to the empirical aspects

of Spinoza’s thought comported nicely with Peirce’s view that the TIE reflects the inductive

origins of Spinoza’s main doctrines. Not surprisingly, then, Peirce was delighted with Duff’s

book.

Peirce begins the review with some of his usual pre-1904 themes. He praises Spinoza’s

greatness, sketches the history of scholarship on Spinoza, and deplores the attacks that were

historically made against him29

As usual, Peirce complains about the geometrical form of the

Ethics, this time pairing the complaint with a back-handed reference to Spinoza’s greatness,

writing that the geometrical form of the “is the only thing in his books that is ridiculous, the only

thing about the man that is not venerable.”30

Also as usual, Peirce observes that Spinoza is

widely misunderstood, but presses this point further, remarking that, while particular elements of

other philosophers’ work are sometimes misunderstood, with Spinoza, the problem is more

thoroughgoing:

…[I]n reference to Spinoza, it is the general attitude of his mind that is in

question; and the general lesson we derive from the leading discussions is that the

commentators have been apt to restrict their studies too much to the one book that

is so formal, that they consider Spinoza too exclusively as a metaphysician, and

that they have not paid sufficient attention to his extraordinary approaches toward

pragmatism. Such had been the conviction of the present reviewer before he took

up this volume of Mr. Duff’s, who presses the same opinions much further than

the reviewer had conceived them to be warranted.31

Peirce continues that Spinoza was well on the way to formulating the pragmatic maxim,

and offers Duff’s account as evidence of this:

Already, as Mr. Duff points out, Spinoza had thoroughly recognized, as a

fundamental truth, that the substance of what one believes does not consist in any

mere sensuous representation, but in how one would be disposed to behave. How

long, then, could it be before he would come to ask himself, ‘If that is what belief

is, how can a belief relate to anything but behaviour?’

Spinoza, according to Mr. Duff’s presentation of him, was the last man in

the world to care for abstract speculation. He was animated with the desire to do

his practical part in making men better. How men were practically to be made

better was his problem. In order to solve this problem, it was necessary to begin

by analyzing it, and this drove him perforce to metaphysics. His real study,

however, was ethics; and he understood by ethics an infinitely more practical

science than many writers upon the subject do in the twentieth century.32

It is difficult to understand what it was about Duff’s book that affected Peirce so strongly.

As we have already seen, by the time he reviewed Duff, Peirce had been interested in Spinoza

for some forty years. And, significantly, by 1904, Peirce had himself prescribed for interpreters

of Spinoza all of the main lines that we find in Duff’s account. It is not at all obvious that Duff

said anything that Peirce hadn’t already thought. Whatever it was about Duff’s book that so

struck Peirce, this review marks a turning-point in Peirce’s discussions of Spinoza. Afterwards,

Peirce kept coming back to the idea that Spinoza was a pragmati(ci)st, and, he included Spinoza

in all of his lists of historical pragmati(ci)sts.33

The following year, in an article on pragmati(ci)sm for the Monist, Peirce again linked

Spinoza with pragmati(ci)sm, this time by emphasizing the scientific cast of thinking that led

him (Peirce) to formulate the pragmatic maxim, and listing Spinoza, along with Berkeley and

Kant, as a metaphysician whose work similarly recalls “the ways of thinking of the laboratory.”34

Circa the same year, in a letter to the Italian pragmatist Mario Calderoni, Peirce wrote that

pragmaticism was “not a new way of thinking,” but claimed among its early adherents Berkeley,

Locke, Spinoza and Kant.35

His revisited this theme in 1906, writing that “any philosophical

doctrine that should be completely new could hardly fail to prove completely false; but the

rivulets at the head of the river of pragmatism are easily traced back to almost any desired

antiquity.”36

In the next paragraph, Peirce launched into an extended metaphor of the “river of

pragmatism,” whose waters flow through the work of such figures as Socrates, Aristotle, Locke,

Berkeley, Kant, Comte, and Spinoza: “They run, where least one would suspect them, beneath

the dry rubbish-heaps of Spinoza.”37

In 1910, Peirce again referred to Spinoza’s pragmatism,

writing that pragmatism is “an old way of thinking… practiced by Spinoza, Berkeley, and

Kant.”38

In total, Peirce makes six references each to Kant’s and Berkeley’s pragmati(ci)sm and

five to Spinoza’s. The only other figure to be mentioned more than once is Locke, whom Peirce

only twice credits with pragmatic tendencies. He only engaged in this practice of listing

pragmatic predecessors during the period spanning 1901-1910. These dates help us to understand

just why Peirce was keen to identify his philosophic progenitors. For, it was during this very

period that he was working most energetically to define his own particular brand of pragmatism,

even renaming it “pragmaticism” in order to distinguish it from the many nominalistic, and

“literary” latecomers who were describing themselves as pragmatists. I suggest that Peirce listed

the figures he did (and excluded the figures he did) precisely in order to carve out conceptual

territory for his distinctive version of pragmatism.

2. The Pragmaticist Spinoza

So, what explains this 1904 turn in Peirce’s attitude to Spinoza? Clearly, Duff’s book had

something to do with it. However, it seems unlikely that the volume was the only cause for

Peirce’s new appreciation of Spinoza. After all, Duff doesn’t say anything about Spinoza that

Peirce himself had not said several times before. Certainly, Peirce would have enjoyed reading

an account of Spinoza that so closely aligned with Peirce’s own view of him, but one would have

expected this to reconfirm Peirce’s views, not change them.

To understand the 1904 shift, we need to consider what else Peirce was up to in the

period. From 1903 onwards, following James’s popularization of pragmatism in 1898 and the

Carnegie Institution’s heartbreaking 1902 rejection of Peirce’s application for funding to write

his Memoirs on Minute Logic, Peirce set about elaborating and proving his own distinctive

version of pragmatism. In a series of lectures and articles from the period, we see Peirce at pains

to distinguish his late, importantly scientific, version of pragmatism from his earlier nominalistic

doctrine and from the pragmatisms of such figures as James and Schiller.

A recurring trope in this period of Peirce’s writing is the list of historical pragmatists.

That is, in the same texts in which he criticizes his own earlier views and the views of his

pragmatist contemporaries, Peirce repeatedly identifies canonical philosophers – typically

Spinoza, Berkeley, and Kant – as pragmati(ci)sts. Such identifications, then, must be read as part

of his larger project of elaborating and demarcating his view. In other words, Peirce’s praise of

Spinoza is not a careless one-off, but rather deeply connected to Peirce’s most mature

expressions of his pragmaticism. I propose that what made Duff’s book so influential on Peirce

was its timing. During the exact period in which Peirce was working to articulate pragmaticism

and to get clear on which philosophers subscribed to it and which didn’t, his encounter with

Duff’s book reminded him of his admiration for Spinoza and persuaded him that Spinoza

belonged on in the pragmaticist category. If this is right, then what is striking about Peirce’s late

reception of Spinoza is that it shows that Peirce must have taken Spinoza to have held the very

views that excluded James and Schiller from consideration as pragmaticists.

I have discussed elsewhere the significance of this matter for our understanding of

Peirce’s pragmaticism.39

I won’t rehearse that argument here. Instead, I will use the time that

remains to offer a sketch of what I take to be the brand of pragmaticism that Peirce discerned in

Spinoza.

Peirce is not always consistent in his account of what distinguishes his pragmaticism

from non-pragmaticist versions of pragmatism. In his “A Sketch of Logical Critics,” for instance,

he attributes his coinage of the term to James and Schiller’s having made “pragmatism” “imply

‘the will to believe,’ the mutability of truth, the soundness of Zeno’s refutation of motion, and

pluralism generally.”40

While Spinoza is pretty clearly on Peirce’s side in all of these matters,41

so are all continental rationalists, and Peirce clearly had no interest in welcoming Descartes or

Malebranche into his fold. Denying these Jamesian/Schillerian views, then, is necessary but not

sufficient for pragmaticism.

Peirce’s 1905 “What Pragmatism Is” lays out three jointly sufficient conditions for

pragmaticism:

…pragmaticism is a species of prope-positivism. But what distinguishes it from

other species is, first, its retention of a purified philosophy; secondly, its full

acceptance of the main body of our instinctive beliefs; and thirdly, its strenuous

insistence upon the truth of scholastic realism… So, instead of merely jeering at

metaphysics, like other prope-positivists, whether by long drawn-out parodies or

otherwise, the pragmaticist extracts from it a precious essence, which will serve to

give life and light to cosmology and physics.42

It is not at all clear what counts as “purified philosophy.” One plausible reading, though, is that

the application of the pragmatic maxim purifies philosophy of ontological metaphysics. If this is

right, then the three key features of pragmaticism seem to be (1) the application of the pragmatic

maxim in reasoning, (2) the acceptance of our instinctive beliefs (which acceptance Peirce

elsewhere terms “critical common sensism”),43

and (3) insistence upon the truth of scholastic

realism. I think that Peirce saw all three of these conditions as present in Spinoza’s thought.44

Spinoza’s Pragmatic Maxim

Perhaps the most obvious candidate for a pragmatic maxim in Spinoza occurs in the Theologico-

Political Treatise (TTP), where he berates those Christians who claim to believe the Bible, but

whose behaviour belies the claim. “The moral value of a man’s creed should be judged only

from his works,” writes Spinoza.45

However, “on every side we hear men saying that the Bible is

the Word of God, teaching mankind true blessedness, or the path to salvation. But the facts are

quite at variance with their words, for people in general seem to make no attempt whatsoever to

live according to the Bible’s teachings.”46

For Spinoza, the true measure of belief is behaviour.

However, Spinoza’s heuristic for identifying and avoiding hypocrisy is hardly unique. Moreover,

especially for the mature Peirce, it hews rather too closely to James’s pragmatism in emphasizing

behaviour rather than the growth of concrete reasonableness as the consequence of thought.

In fact, despite Peirce’s complaints about the Ethics, the most striking anticipation of the

pragmatic maxim in Spinoza arguably occurs in the last proposition of Part 1 of that work, where

Spinoza argues that “nothing exists from whose nature an effect does not follow.”47

In

accordance with this principle, Spinoza goes on to use the words “cause” (causa) and “thing”

(res) interchangeably, most notably in his E2P9Dem1 and E2P9Dem2 invocations of E2P7’s

parallelism. For Spinoza as for Peirce, if we cannot conceive of a thing having any effect, we

cannot even conceive of it as a thing.

E1P36 sits, as it were, on the cusp of Parts 1 and 2 of the Ethics, and thereby serves as an

important bridge between the metaphysics of the first Part and the epistemology of the second.

Ethics Part 1, “Concerning God,” is Spinoza’s account of the character of the universe qua

substance.48

It is in this part that we find all of Spinoza’s central metaphysical theses, including

his thesis of E1P33 that God does not create the universe through an act of will. For Spinoza,

God is not a transcendent creator, but is rather the immanent cause of the universe insofar as

everything in the universe is entailed by his very being. E1P36Dem lays out how this entailment

works: Whatever exists expresses God’s nature or essence in a definite and determinate way

(Cor. Pr. 25); that is (Pr. 34), whatever exists expresses God’s power, which is the cause of all

things, in a definite and determinate way, and so (Pr. 16) some effect must follow from it. So,

according to Spinoza, finite beings are expressions of God’s essence; God’s essence and his

power are the very same thing.49

Therefore, finite beings are expressions of God’s power. Any

expression of power ex hypothesi brings about an effect. Therefore, all beings are causes.

If E1P36 were itself only a consequence of Spinoza’s alleged necessitarianism, then it

might be argued that the proposition is merely a typical tenet of seventeenth century mechanistic

determinism that bears a superficial resemblance to pragmatism. Read in this light, E1P36 is just

the claim that everything exists on a chain of efficient causes – that every effect is itself a cause,

and that God is the first cause that got it all rolling. If this is right, then E1P36 is not a

distinctively Spinozist claim, nor, indeed, a particularly persuasive one. Jonathan Bennett, who

understands E1P36 is just this way, describes the argument as “notably bad…as it was bound to

be: there are no powerful reasons why every effect must be a cause.”50

It is, of course, an a priori

truth that all effects have causes – thats what makes them effects. However, it is an empirical

question whether all effects are themselves causes. Thus, if Spinoza’s position in E1P36 is just

the metaphysical one Bennett suggests, then there is no powerful reason to accept it.

However – and here is why, above, I described E1P36 as a “bridge” between Parts 1 and

2 – Spinoza’s reasons for holding that all things are causes is not only metaphysical, but also

(and perhaps, especially) epistemological and ethical. This is evidenced by the role that E1P36

plays as a key premise in four arguments in Parts 2, 3 and 5. Three of these arguments stake out a

distinctly pragmaticist epistemology,51

while the fourth introduces the Spinozist concept of

conatus – a concept that is crucial for Spinoza’s ethics and politics. If Bennett’s reading of

E1P36 is right, then there are deep philosophical difficulties at the heart of each of these

important arguments; if my reading is right, these difficulties dissolve.

If, following Peirce, we read Spinoza as a pragmaticist, and E1P36 as a forerunner of the

pragmatic maxim, then, when Spinoza says that all things are causes, he is not simply making the

banal and questionable metaphysical point attributed to him by Bennett that all effects are

themselves causes. Rather, he is making the deeply pragmaticist point that our very concept of a

thing is intimately bound up with the possibility of its generating effects. We can think of a thing

without thinking of it as having a particular determinate effect. However, the notion of a thing

without some effect – whatever it may be – is impossible.52

Moreover, throughout the remainder

of the Ethics, Spinoza uses E1P36 is the foundation for his optimism that the world is knowable,

if not right away, then in the long run. That is, the role that “Spinoza’s pragmatic maxim” plays

in underwriting empirical enquiry is of a piece with Peirce’s conviction that pragmaticism leaves

the way of scientific enquiry open.

Spinoza’s Critical Common-sensism

Among the three conditions for pragmaticism we are considering, the second is perhaps most

obviously present in Spinoza’s thought. Critical common-sensism was, for Peirce, Scottish

common sense philosophy, naturalized53

and tempered by fallibilism and an appropriately critical

attitude. Put differently, critical common-sensism entails (inter alia) rejecting Cartesian “paper

doubt” and accepting at the outset of our enquiry that we are incapable of doubting many of our

instinctual beliefs, and that many of these beliefs are correct – not, as Reid supposed because of

God’s benevolence, but because of our deep connectedness with the world around us, a world

along with which we evolved.

For Spinoza, as for Peirce, Cartesian skepticism is not only dishonest (since we say we

doubt what we really cannot), but also blocks the path of enquiry:

…although in matters relating to the usages of life and society necessity has

compelled them to suppose their existence, to seek their own good and frequently

to affirm and deny things on oath, it is quite impossible to discuss the sciences

with them. If a proof is presented to them, they do not know whether the

argumentation is valid or not. If they deny, grant or oppose, they do not know that

they deny, grant or oppose. So they must be regarded as automata, completely

lacking in mind.54

For Spinoza, as for Peirce, doubt is an irritation that we experience when our beliefs do

not cohere, and that is removed when they are brought into agreement.55

To feign a doubt or

posit a brute fact is to block the way of inquiry. Not surprisingly, then, in the TIE, Spinoza

emphasizes the situatedness and evolution of understanding in a way that the methods of, for

instance, Locke and Descartes do not:

…an idea is situated in the context of thought exactly as is its object in the context

of reality. Therefore, if there were something in Nature having no interrelation

with other things, and if there were also granted its objective essence (which must

agree entirely with its formal essence), then this idea likewise would have no

interrelation with other ideas; that is, we could make no inference regarding it. On

the other hand, those things that do have interrelation with other things – as is the

case with everything that exists in Nature – will be intelligible, and their objective

essences will also have that same interrelation; that is, other ideas will be deduced

from them, and these in turn will be interrelated with other ideas, and so the tools

for further progress will increase.56

Indeed, just before this passage, Spinoza makes explicit his view that we come by our

initial instincts legitimately and that these instincts are appropriate starting-points for enquiry. To

work iron, writes Spinoza, requires a hammer, but to make a hammer, one needs other tools, and

so on to infinity. But, no one would ever claim that this infinite regress means that human beings

cannot work iron today. Rather, we know that the first human tools were, in a sense, in-born.

Using these rustic “tools”, early humans produced slightly better tools, and, with these, slightly

better ones in turn, until they reached the point where they could make “very many complex

things with little labour.”57

Likewise, writes Spinoza, “the intellect by its inborn power makes

intellectual tools for itself by which it acquires other powers for other intellectual works, and

from these works still other tools… and thus makes steady progress until it reaches the summit of

wisdom.”58

For Spinoza, as for Peirce, the honest philosopher uses the very good tools that are

naturally at her disposal, improving them as she is able, but never simply throwing them away in

order to begin the process of tool manufacture, as it were, from scratch.

Spinoza’s Scholastic Realism

The final element of pragmaticism we are looking for in Spinoza is scholastic realism. There are

two senses in which Spinoza might count as a scholastic realist: first, by sharing certain features

with Duns Scotus, the scholastic realist Peirce most often discusses as a model; and second, by

exemplifying a version of Peirce’s own “extreme scholastic realism.” Peirce considered his

scholastic realism extreme because it admits the reality of two kinds of generals – possibilia and

laws, unlike less extreme varieties that accept the reality of laws but deny the reality of

possibilia. To be a scholastic realist in the first sense is to oppose nominalism by asserting the

reality of generals; to be a scholastic realist in the second sense is to assert that these generals are

of two types (and hence that reality has three categories: two of them general and one of them,

existent things, particular59

). I have argued elsewhere that, contra the usual understanding of

Spinoza as a necessitarian, a pragmaticist reading of Spinoza reveals his ontology as containing,

if not objective chance, then at least real possibility as well as law.60

Here, I wish instead to point

to ways in which Spinoza’s thought may be thought to resemble those aspects of Duns Scotus

Peirce ranked as most important for science.

The medieval nominalism-realism was at bottom concerned with the question of whether

our concepts of universals refer to the real world or to our thoughts about it. Scotus intervened by

rejecting the disjunction. On Scotus’s view, there are real “common natures” possessed by all

existents about which we can think first intentionally. However, we are also able to conceive of

these natures abstracted from the particular individuals in which they inhere.

The mechanism which allows Scotus to posit the common nature as a mediating third

between extra-mental objects and second-intentional concepts such as universals61

is his subtle

development of the Thomistic distinction between real and logical existence. Scotus subdivides

real existence into physical and metaphysical, then allocates common natures to the realm of the

metaphysical, thus attributing to them a greater than logical but less than physical ontological

status. That is, common natures are real, but they are not physical. For Scotus, the reality of the

common nature is inextricably bound up with its indeterminacy. It is precisely because the nature

requires determination by an individual haecceity or by an intellectual act in order to be properly

individual or universal that we can see it as ontologically prior to both physical individuals and

thoughts, and hence, real. Consequently, any science that has as its subject-matter common

natures is a first-intentional – in other words, a real – science.

This picture accords rather strikingly with both Spinoza’s and Peirce’s ontologies. For all

three philosophers, the universe is not a collection of determinate atoms, but rather a single

continuum, of which any portion is intrinsically indeterminate, and is only rendered determinate

through its relation with other portions of the continuum. There are no intrinsic individuals.

Rather, individuals exist extrinsically in virtue of relations between regions of the continuum.

Peirce held that nominalism and substantival individualism are co-extensive since, when the

nominalist denies that there are real connections between things, she fails to apprehend the

relational nature of all reality:

The heart of the dispute lies in this. The [nominalists]… recognize but one mode

of being, the being of an individual thing or fact, the being which consists in the

object’s crowding out a place for itself in the universe, so to speak, and reacting

by brute force of fact, against all other things. I call that existence.62

For what we might term “modal monists,” who recognize only existent beings as real, if

the laws of nature are real, then these laws must themselves exist as entities or individuals. Peirce

held that even Platonism (which he termed “nominalistic Platonism”63

) falls prey to this, in that

the Forms are simply another class of individuals in the Platonic ontology. Thus, the failure to

accept any mode of being outside of existence forces philosophers either to reject the idea that

there are real laws or commonalities connecting things, or to posit these laws or commonalities

as themselves entities.

Like Scotus, both Peirce and Spinoza escape this dilemma by holding that reality has a

broader scope than existence, and thereby clearing a space for real laws and commonalities that

are not themselves entities.

Casting Spinozas metaphysics in Scotus’s terms, we can see that what Spinoza terms

“common notions,” “those things that are common to all things and are equally in the part as in

the whole [and] can be conceived only adequately,” 64

are first intentional entia rationis – unlike

our abstract ideas about universals and transcendentals, which are second intentional. Scotus’s

haecceities, what Peirce termed things’ “hereness and nowness,” are, on Spinozistic terms, just

particular determinations of substance as finite modes – determinations that at once individuate

and instantiate substance as individual existents.65

For Spinoza, as for Scotus, common notions

(for Scotus, common natures) have no existence apart from individuals since commonalities are

indeterminate and only determinate things have existence. However, common notions and

individuals (in Scotus’s terms, common natures and haecceities) are not numerically identical

since numerical identity, once again, applies only to individuals – those things that are

susceptible of enumeration.

None of the foregoing is intended as an argument that Spinoza was influenced by Duns

Scotus. Spinoza himself never mentions him, nor do most of his major commentators. Wolfson,

who mounts the most extensive argument about the medieval influences upon Spinoza,

occasionally discusses Scotus in connection with him. However, he does so only in passing and

by way of illustration, and seems not to consider Scotus a significant influence on Spinoza.66

However, there are clear similarities between Scotus and Spinoza that Peirce – who knew both of

them well – might reasonably have discerned, and would have regarded as congenial.

Two pieces of circumstantial evidence further support this possibility. First, recall

Peirce’s 1891-93 exchange with Carus where, in response to Carus’s having obliquely claimed

Spinoza as a nominalist, Peirce castigates his opponent for falling into the nominalistic

“absurdity of talking of ‘single facts,’ or individual generals. Yet Dr. Carus says that natural laws

describe the facts of nature sub specie aeternitatis. Now I understand Spinoza to be a realist.”67

That Peirce here contrasts Spinoza’s realism with nominalistic Platonism makes clear that the

variety of realism Peirce is attributing to Spinoza is scholastic realism.68

Then, in a 1903 diatribe

against early modern nominalists, Peirce lists Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant

and others as nominalists.69

Spinoza is conspicuously absent from the list.

Conclusion

There are, it is clear, a great many affinities between Spinozism and pragmaticism. However, a

rather large question remains unanswered. Namely, was Peirce right to regard Spinoza as a

pragmaticist?

Kerr-Lawson, one of an extremely small group of philosophers to specialize in both

Spinoza and Peirce, held that the two men’s projects were, in fact, very different.70

While both of

them were motivated by the question of how to make our ideas clear, he argues, Peirce’s answer

to the question resides in his theory of meaning. By contrast, Spinoza held that the best way to

make our ideas clear is to control our emotions, and thereby to unite our minds with God,

understanding the universe sub specie æternitatis.

However, I think that it was just this view of Spinoza that Peirce wanted to stand on its

head. When Peirce wrote in the Duff review that Spinoza’s “commentators… consider Spinoza

too exclusively as a metaphysician,” I think that what he had in mind was that the ultimate goal

of Spinozism is not the metaphysical project of describing the character of the universe under the

form of eternity. Rather, it is blessedness itself, the union of our minds with God, that is its goal.

That is, Peirce’s Spinoza is not arguing that, by achieving blessedness, we thereby make our

ideas clear, but rather that, by making our ideas clear, we thereby achieve blessedness. Spinoza

himself says as much in the TTP: “Since our intellect forms the better part of us, it is evident

that, if we wish to seek what is definitely to our advantage, we should endeavour above all to

perfect it as far as we can, for in its perfection must consist our supreme good….This, then, is the

sum of our supreme good and blessedness, to wit, the knowledge and love of God.”71

Here, in a

passage that clearly impressed Peirce, is how Duff puts it:

“If Spinoza’s nature was purely speculative to an extent that is probably unique,”

it was only speculative in the sense that he spared no pains to know the truth

regarding human nature, and its place in the cosmos, to the end that he might

reveal wherein man’s happiness and goodness consist. And it was only because

the perfecting of the intelligence is essential to the realisation of this most

practical end, that is to say, because a man cannot love the good unless he knows

it, that he was interested in speculative problems at all….it is the recognition of

those relations toward their fellow-men, in which God has placed their happiness,

as God’s law for them, that is men’s bliss.72

I propose that it is the particular relationship between the speculative and the practical in

Spinoza’s and Peirces work that most closely ties these two men together. Many people continue

to associate pragmatism with the positivistic tenet that (in Ayer’s words) “all metaphysical

assertions are nonsensical.”73

For Peircean pragmaticism, nothing could be further from the truth.

As should be abundantly clear by now, the mature Peirce took metaphysical questions extremely

seriously. Peirce’s metaphysical writing on such topics as mind, chance, being and cosmology

were (like much of Spinoza’s work) “speculative to an extent that is probably unique.” However,

he was also the founder of a doctrine deeply concerned with practical outcomes. For Peirce, the

two went hand in hand.

Peirce regarded metaphysical doctrines to have important ethical and political

consequences. With respect to the problem of universals, he argued that

though the question of realism and nominalism has its roots in the technicalities of

logic, its branches reach about our life. The question whether the genus homo has

any existence except as individuals, is the question whether there is anything of

any more dignity, worth, and importance than individual happiness, individual

aspirations, and individual life. Whether men really have anything in common, so

that the community is to be considered as an end in itself, and if so, what the

relative value of the two factors is, is the most fundamental practical question in

regard to every public institution the constitution of which we have it in our

power to influence.74

He took a similar position in connection with synechism, maintaining that the synechist

must reject the view that

“I am altogether myself, and not at all you.” If you embrace synechism, you must

abjure this metaphysics of wickedness. In the first place, your neighbors are, in a

measure, yourself, and in far greater measure than, without deep studies in

psychology, you would believe. Really, the selfhood you like to attribute to

yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of vanity. In the second place,

all men who resemble you and are in analogous circumstances are, in a measure,

yourself, though not quite in the same way in which your neighbors are you.75

For Peirce, ideals for reasoning and ideals for conduct are so closely intertwined that they cannot

be separated.

Indeed, Spinoza’s and Peirce’s equal emphases on speculation and practice are typical of

the two philosophers’ broader willingness to straddle traditional divisions. For both Spinoza and

Peirce, when we make our ideas clear through the use of reason, we put ourselves in the best

possible position from which to explore the real connections that hold in the universe, and

indeed, that hold in us as parts of the universe. Peirce shares Spinoza’s view that two things

necessarily connected are intrinsically not two things at all but one. This is at the very heart of

pragmaticism (as distinct from pragmatism), but it is a view that owes everything to Peirce’s

application in metaphysics of the pragmatic method. It is also the most distinctive aspect of

Spinoza’s doctrine. For Peirce, rationalism (on some conception of same) just is realism. And, it

is realism/rationalism that underwrites empirical science. Thus, there can be no tension between

rationalism and (some sense of) empiricism for him. It is in this spirit that Peirce wrote in his

response to Carus that “my method has neither been in theory purely empirical, nor in practice

mere brain-spinning.”76

The same might well be said of Spinoza. In the final analysis, what is

arguably most distinctive about Spinoza and Peirce is their shared willingness to be empiricists

in theory and rationalists in practice. In a discipline that – from Plato’s account in the Sophist of

the interminable battle of the gods and the giants to Isaiah Berlin’s fox and hedgehog – is forever

sorting itself into two camps, Peirce and Spinoza are two of the very few who manage to elude

binary categorization.77

Shannon Dea

University of Waterloo

Works Cited

Ayer, A.J. Language, Truth and Logic. London: Victor Gollancz, 1960.

Bennett, J. A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1984.

The Century Dictionary, 10 vols. William D. Whitney, Ed. New York: Century, 1895.

Dea. S. Peirce and Spinoza’s Surprising Pragmaticism. Diss. Western University, 2007.

---. “Firstness, Evolution and the Absolute in Peirce's Spinoza,” Transactions of the Charles S.

Peirce Society 44.4 (2008) 603-628.

---. “The Infinite and the Indeterminate in Spinoza,” Dialogue 50.3 (2011) 603-21.

---. “The River of Pragmatism,” Peirce in His Own Words, Eds. Torkild Thellefsen and Bent

Sørensen. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Forthcoming 2014.

Duff, R.A. Spinoza’s Political and Ethical Philosophy. New York: A.M. Kelley, 1970.

Robin, Richard. Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce. Amherst: U of

Massachussetts P, 1967.

Peirce, C.S. Unpublished manuscripts housed at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. MS

numbers correspond to Robin’s (1967) catalogue of the Peirce papers.

---. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. 1-8. C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, and A. Burks,

Eds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1931-58.

---. Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to The Nation, 4 vols. Kenneth Laine Ketner and James

Cook, Eds. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 1975-87.

---. The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce, 4 vols. in 5 books. Carolyn Eisele, Ed.

The Hague: Mouton, 1976.

---. Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition. Max Fisch, Christian Kloesel, Nathan

Houser, et al, Eds. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982-.

---. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, 2 vols. Nathan Houser, Christian Kloesel,

and the Peirce Edition Project, Eds. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992-98.

Peirce, J.M. “The Character and Philosophy of Malebranche.” Ms. HUG 1680.608F. Harvard

University Archives, Cambridge, MA, 1854.

---. “The Character and Philosophy of Malebranche.” Monthly Religious Magazine 15 (1856)

375-399.

Wolfson, H.A. The Philosophy of Spinoza. Cleveland: World, 1958.

Spinoza, B. Complete Works. Michael L. Morgan, Ed. Samuel M. Shirley et al, Trans.

Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002.

1 “Pragmaticism” is the term Peirce coined in 1905 (CP 5.414.) for his own particular doctrine.

He makes clear that the pragmaticism is a species of pragmatism. Thus, all pragmaticists are

pragmatists, but not all pragmatists are pragmaticists. After 1905, he uses both terms to describe

Spinoza (and his own thought). Throughout, use both terms, as appropriate, but also (alas) the

infelicitous “pragmati(ci)sm” when it is not clear which term is more apt (or in cases where both

terms are apt). 2 MS CSP 823, qtd. NEM III/1, 129n.1. Indeed, Peirce was not the only one in his family who

was reading Spinoza at this time. In the very same period, Peirce’s elder brother, James Mills

(Jem) Peirce was himself taking an interest in Spinoza. In 1854, Jem, a student at the Harvard

Law School, won Harvard’s prestigious Bowdoin Prize for a Resident Graduate for his essay,

“The Character and Philosophy of Malebranche.” The article includes a lengthy, sophisticated

passage presenting Spinoza’s position as a foil to Malebranche. The original manuscript of this

paper is housed at the Harvard University Archives under call number MS HUG 1680.608F. The

essay was published two years later in Monthly Religious Magazine (15, 375-399); this was J.M.

Peirce’s first scholarly publication. 3 W 1.103.

4 W 5.30, 34, 37.

5 N 1.163-65.

6 N 2.83-87.

7 N 3.76-78.

8 C 5837. Peirce was the author of Century Dictionary entries concerning philosophy, mechanics,

mathematics, astronomy, astrology, weights and measures and universities, as well as a number

on psychology. See CP 1.106n.1, CP 6.482, N 1.75-78. In his personal copy of that work (now

held at Harvard’s Houghton Library), he marked the entries for which he was responsible with a

coloured pencil. This, combined with the twelve hand-written index cards concerning Spinozism

among Peirce’s research materials for the Century Dictionary (also at Houghton Library, under

call number MS CSP *1596) identify him as the author of the Spinozism entry. 9 C 5837.

10 See, for example, N 3.77.

11

N 2.84. Peirce reiterated his view that the geometrical form of the Ethics is untrue to Spinoza’s

thought in his 1901 review for The Nation of Alfred Caldecott’s The Philosophy of Religion in

England and America. Comparing Samuel Clarke’s demonstrations to Spinoza’s, Peirce writes

that “the difference between those two writers was that with Spinoza the living thought did not

pursue that erroneous method, which, in his case, was merely the garb in which it was clad after

it was full-grown – and even then only imperfectly, since it does not accurately conform to the

logical rules which it acknowledges” (N 3.42). 12

N 3.76. 13

N 3.76. 14

NEM III/2 956. 15

N 2.84. 16

N 2.87, N 3.77. 17

N 3.78. 18

N 2.86. 19

N 2.86. 20

N 2.87. 21

N 2.87. 22

N 3.77. 23

N 3.77. 24

MS CSP *1596. 25

CP 6.593. 26

N 2.86-87. 27

Duff, 4-7. 28

As Peirce well knew, early modern philosophers regarded the analytic method as the order of

discovery and the synthetic method as the order of demonstration; this was not distinctive to

Spinoza. Nor was Spinoza’s use of both methods in his writing unique to him. Descartes (among

others) did the same. 29

N 3.177. 30

N 3.177. 31

N 3.178. 32

N 3.178-79. 33

There is one possible exception to this claim. C. 1911, in his “A Sketch of Logical Critics,”

Peirce claimed that he had always “fathered [his] pragmaticism… upon Kant, Berkeley, and

Leibniz…” (EP 2. 457). However, he does not there claim that these three figures were

themselves pragmaticists. Indeed, since Peirce many times over the years discussed his

admiration for and indebtedness to Leibniz without ever describing the latter as a pragmati(ci)st,

it seems unlikely that he intended this c. 1911 list as a list of pragmaticists. 34

CP 5.412. 35

CP 8.206. 36

CP 5.11. 37

CP 5.11. It bears observing that Spinoza is not the only target of Peirce’s gentle mockery in

this passage. He also makes fun of Berkeley’s use of tar-water, and of Kant’s and Comte’s “habit

of mingling these sparkling waters [of pragmatism] with a certain mental sedative.” 38

N 3.36. 39

Dea 2014.

40

EP 2.457. 41

I discuss Spinoza on Zeno in Dea 2011. 42

CP 5.423. In “Issues of Pragmaticism,” the next article in the same Monist series as “What

Pragmatism Is,” Peirce describes Critical Common-Sensism and Scholastic Realism not as

conditions or aspects of pragmaticism, but rather as consequences of it. EP 2.346. Whether they

are jointly sufficient conditions of pragmaticism or important consequences of it is beyond the

scope of this paper. Either way, it seems that if Spinoza is a pragmaticist, he should hew to these

positions. 43

EP 2.346-53. 44

Even if I am wrong that Peirce’s remark about “purified philosophy” points to the pragmatic

maxim, it is nonetheless obvious that to count as a pragmaticist Spinoza must at least implicitly

accept some version of the pragmatic maxim. 45

TTP P/393. 46

TTP 7/456. 47

E1P36. 48

Famously, Spinoza uses the terms “God”, “Nature” and “substance” interchangeably. 49

E1P34. 50

Bennett, 134. 51

An elaboration of these arguments is beyond the scope of this paper, but see Dea 2007 (76-86).

In essence, all three of these arguments effectively deny a gap between the knower and then

known and thereby underscore Spinoza’s optimism that the world is in principle knowable to us. 52

It is appropriate that the notion of effect in E1P36 (on this reading) is “possible effect”; this

accords with the tight connection that Peirce draws between pragmaticism and scholastic

realism. 53

Christopher Hookway expressed the matter in this felicitous way at the Peirce reading group,

University of Sheffield, October 3, 2013. 54

TIE 48. Spinoza’s reference here to “automata, completely lacking in mind” is particularly

acid; this was, after all, the very description that the Cartesians used for non-human animals. 55

TIE 47-48, 77, 78. 56

TIE 41. 57

TIE 31. 58

TIE 31. 59

For convenience, I here use the term as it is commonly employed. Peirce did not use

“particular” in quite this way. However, that matter is well beyond the scope of this paper. 60

Dea 2008. 61

The scholastics distinguished between first intentional concepts, which refer to the real world,

and second intentional concepts, which refer to first intentions. I first intentionally notice that the

sun is shining outside my office window, and I second intentionally think about the proposition

“that the sun is shining outside my office window.” While both types of concepts are, as

concepts, entia rationis, the first type refers to entia reale, whereas the second merely refers to

another ens rationis. Where, therefore, biology is a first intentional science, grammar is a second

intentional science. In denying the first intentionality of any science concerned with universals,

nominalism effectively relegates metaphysics and physics to the status of the trivium. 62

CP 1.21.

63

“Nominalistic platonism” is Peirce‟s term for the metaphysical position that accepts the reality

of generals, but regards them as a variety of individuals. See CP 5.503. 64

E2P38Dem. 65

Spinoza discusses this at E2P8S using an analogy with a circle in which the very act of

drawing renders the angles contained in the circle existent and countable. 66

Wolfson, 40, 78, 223, 382. 67

CP 6.593. 68

Indeed, two paragraphs before his reference to Spinoza in his reply to Carus, Peirce remarks

that “upon the realistic theory, the fact that identity is a relation of reason does not in the least

prevent it from being real” (CP 6.593). This helps to explain how he thought that Spinoza (and

Peirce himself) avoided nominalistic platonism. For Peirce, relations are Thirds, but only

Seconds are actual individuals. So, nominalistic platonists regard generals as varieties of

Seconds, whereas scholastic realists like Peirce and Spinoza regard them as Thirds. 69

CP 1.19. 70

Kerr-Lawson raised this objection at a talk I gave at University of Waterloo in 2007. 71

TTP 4/427-28. 72

Duff, 234, 244. The quote at the beginning of the passage is from Erdmann. 73

441. 74

CP 8.38. 75

CP 7. 571. 76

CP 6.604. 77

In memory of Angus Kerr-Lawson.