The Ontological Triad in James and Peirce

Eugene Taylor
Dans Revue internationale de philosophie 2012/2 (n° 260), pages 177 à 186
Éditions De Boeck Supérieur
ISSN 0048-8143
ISBN 9782930560113
DOI 10.3917/rip.260.0177
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 The Ontological Triad in James and Peirce

EUGENE TAYLOR

Western analytic philosophers who interpret William James tend to ignore

his tripartite metaphysics of pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism
and to focus instead on just his pragmatism.1 In a recent review of James on a
“Science of Religions,” the late Richard Rorty proclaimed, for instance, that
James’s pragmatism was sufficient to consider, but his noetic pluralism and his
radical empiricism made no sense, and could therefore safely be ignored.2 Rorty,
at least, appeared to have read James’s Pragmatism (1907). Still, his penchant
was to interpret James through the pragmatism of Peirce and Dewey instead
of dealing with James solely in his own context before taking up the other two
philosophers. We see this trend carried over into the philosophy of religion, such
as in the work of Wayne Proudfoot, who gives a fine philosophical analysis of
James on religion, but based on only a partial reading of James’s work.3 Menand
would be another example of ignoring James in his own right and interpreting
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him instead through Dewey, Peirce, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.4
The first question to address then, is, what is James’s tripartite metaphysics?
Let me state in abbreviated form my suspicion that James’s tripartite formula
was a statement of his own unique philosophy but couched in the manner of
Peirce’s three categories. Aristotle had proposed a list of the basic and irreduc-
ible categories of existence; Kant, whom Peirce had studied intensely in the
1860s, had produced his own list. In 1867, Peirce himself delivered “On a new
list of categories,” as one of the papers celebrating his election to the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences at the young age of 26.5 Peirce’s categories6 have

1 Taylor, E.I (2005). Review of Proudfoot’s William James and the Science of Religions. Religious
Studies. 41, 484-488.
2 Proudfoot, W. (ed). (2004). William James and a science of religions: Reexperiencing The varieties
of religious experience. New York: Columbia University Press.
3 Ibid.
4 Menand, L. (2001). The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
5 Peirce, C.S. (1868). On a new list of categories. Presented 14 May 1867 to the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences. Published 1868 in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, 7.
6 Ibid., § 11. The five conceptions thus obtained, for reasons which will be sufficiently obvious,
may be termed categories. That is, BEING, Quality (Reference to a Ground), Relation (Reference
to a Correlate), Representation (Reference to an Interpretant), SUBSTANCE.
 178 EUGENE TAYLOR

been described by philosophers as Firstness, a stage in which a sign is realized as

something in itself, self-existent, a pure irreducible psychic state; Secondness,
a stage in which two signs can be related through opposition or through acting
and reacting, a condition where the original undifferentiated state is separated
into the perceiver and the object known; and Thirdness, a stage in which the
betweeness or mediation of a dyadic relationship becomes apparent, the object
is given a name, and the name then comes to stand for the original thing it relates
to. These are the irreducible ontological categories of reality.7
Peirce, however, was dealing with ideas, logic, and language. His central focus
was on semiotics--the manner in which language evolves from raw perception
to signs and symbols.8 He achieved this through the method of logic, and so
considered the evolution of signs free of introspection, or any interpretation from
that vantage point.9 James, on the other hand, was talking in terms of experi-
ence, its internal noetic quality for the person, and the relation of one’s internal
beliefs to one’s outward environment insofar as one’s ideals were a living reality.
Both Peirce and James, however, had in mind the essential relationship between
subject and object. For Peirce, it was expressed in terms of the logic of signs,
for James in terms of experience as a whole.
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7 So Peirce says as his first proposition: § 1. “This paper is based upon the theory already established,
that the function of conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sensuous impressions to unity, and
that the validity of a conception consists in the impossibility of reducing the content of conscious-
ness to unity without the introduction of it.” And also § 13. “Since no one of the categories can
be prescinded from those above it, the list of supposable objects which they afford is, What is.
Quale — that which refers to a ground, Relate — that which refers to ground and correlate,
Representamen — that which refers to ground, correlate, and interpretant.
8 § 6. The facts now collected afford the basis for a systematic method of searching out whatever
universal elementary conceptions there may be intermediate between the manifold of substance and
the unity of being. It has been shown that the occasion of the introduction of a universal elementary
conception is either the reduction of the manifold of substance to unity, or else the conjunction
to substance of another conception. And it has further been shown that the elements conjoined
cannot be supposed without the conception, whereas the conception can generally be supposed
without these elements. Now, empirical psychology discovers the occasion of the introduction
of a conception, and we have only to ascertain what conception already lies in the data which is
united to that of substance by the first conception, but which cannot be supposed without this first
conception, to have the next conception in order in passing from being to substance.
9 Also in § 6, he says: “It may be noticed that, throughout this process, introspection is not resorted
to. Nothing is assumed respecting the subjective elements of consciousness which cannot be
securely inferred from the objective elements.”
 THE ONTOLOGICAL TRIAD IN JAMES AND PEIRCE 179

James’s tripartite metaphysics was made up of pragmatism, pluralism, and

radical empiricism, if we take them in the approximate order of their unveiling.10
Radical empiricism, the core of his metaphysics, was pure experience in the
immediate moment before the differentiation of subject and object. It is that
precise moment when an object comes into our field of perception but before we
have paid any attention to it.11 It comes from the “blooming buzzing confusion”
of events in our immediate milieu but it has not become fully differentiated as
a distinct object of perception. Naming it automatically establishes a relation
between ourselves as the subject and the thing cognized as the object. From
then on, the name we have given it calls it forth.
But perception, James said in The Principles of Psychology (1890), is always
based on interest. In this recognition of things known before, we give the present
thing a name, and it becomes associated with all the impressions, cognitions,
and memories, bound up in our belief systems about the nature of ourselves and
the world. The original state remains the very ground of consciousness within
which objects remain undifferentiated. Its end product, which is where most of
us keep our awareness most of the time, is the application of our beliefs held
within that guide our thoughts and actions in the world.
The most important evidence we have of the relation between Peirce’s catego-
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ries to James’s tripartite metaphysics comes from the well known account of
James’s appropriation of Peirce’s pragmatism. It was historic, and generated
some monumental influences, though as cofounders of a movement their inter-
pretations of the pragmatic maxim were radically different, creating totally
different lines of effect.
“Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we
conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these
effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”12 That was Peirce.

10 Strictly an arbitrary chronology: I was thinking of “Philosophical conceptions and practical results”
(1898), James’s preface to Lutoslawski’s World of Souls (1924), and “Does consciousness exist?”
(1904). Though James had first named radical empiricism in the Preface to his Will to Believe
(1897), he did not develop it there. The Preface to The World of Souls was perhaps minor, but
Lutoslawski’s text itself was a full blown exposition of noetic pluralism. Written in the late 1890s,
it was not published until after James’s death.
11 On the microgenesis of perception from the standpoint of neuroscience, see Ogmen, H & Breit-
meyer, B.G. (Eds). (2005). The first half-second: The microgenesis and temporal dynamics of the
unconscious and conscious visual processes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
12 Peirce, C. S. (1878). How to make our ideas clear, Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878),
286-302.
 180 EUGENE TAYLOR

Now: “Consider what effect of a conceivably practical kind the object may
involve—what sensation we are to expect from it, and what reaction we must
prepare. Our conception of these effects, then, is for us the whole of our concep-
tion of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all.”13
That was James.
Peirce says, if you want to be completely logical about a thought, you should
consider the effects of that thought as far as its outcome is concerned. You do
not necessarily have to see the actual outcome, you only have to consider its
effects. James, meanwhile, interjects what the practical effect is, in terms of
expectation and reaction. This is our entire conception of the object insofar as
it means something to us, in other words, insofar as it leads somewhere. There
is a payoff. So he uses the image of the “cash value” of an idea.
This was a big difference between the two. Nevertheless, both appeared to be
focused on the same thing, the relation between the subject and the object. For
Peirce it became the differentiation of phenomena into subject and object and
the way in which we call upon words to represent various classes of ideas; for
James it became a doctrine of intersubjectivity; that is, the manner in which the
subject and object operate equally within the same larger theater of experience,
and thus the inference that can be made between internal beliefs and external
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actions.

The Chronology
To understand the influence of Peirce on James with regard to James’s meta-
physics, one must hark back to the beginning of their relationship and see it
brought forward. In essence, we see Peirce, the precocious logician and philoso-
pher of science, befriended by James as a result of which Peirce draws James
into the literature and ideas around, among other subjects, the German experi-
mental Laboratory tradition, excoriates him for his lack of logical thinking, and
proceeds to lay out his theories for James’s edification, though James ends up
appropriating these in his own way, much to Peirce’s feigned consternation, in
my opinion.14
Peirce, meanwhile, was drawn ever closer into the James family circle, when
William goes off to the Amazon with Agassiz in 1865, during which time Peirce
frequently wandered over to the Jameses’ house after spending the morning

13 From James, W.1907). “What pragmatism means.” Lecture 2, Pragmatism.

14 Taylor, E. I. (1986).William James and C. S. Peirce, Chrysalis (Journal of the Swedenborg Foun-
dation), 1:3, 207-212.
 THE ONTOLOGICAL TRIAD IN JAMES AND PEIRCE 181

studying Kant, only to spend afternoons with the eccentric Swedenborgian

philosopher, Henry James Sr., father to William and Henry.15 The contrasting
philosophies could not have been more strikingly different. It was James Sr.’s
position, for instance, that Kant had reduced philosophy “to nothing more than
a pious hiccup.” So the teachings of the morning and the afternoon were quite
different. They had long conversations about Swedenborg’s science, the appli-
cation of love and wisdom to useful purposes, the opening of Reason to the
intuitive, Henry James Sr.’s conception of the Divine Natural Humanity, and
the idea that the natural word is derived from the spiritual world, and not the
other way around. Peirce went out of his way to embrace the loving atmosphere,
which he so lacked at home, and was moved to write reviews of Henry James
Sr.’s self published books in the philosophical literature of the time.
It is somewhat of a complicated story that I have recounted in detail else-
where.16 Briefly, William James had befriended Peirce in the 1860s and as their
friendship developed, Henry James Sr. brought Peirce more into the James
family orbit. The essence of the father’s legacy was what he variously called
“The Physics of Creation,” and “The Divine Natural Humanity.” The essential
question was, ‘What could God have had in mind, to create a science so devoid
of himself?’ His answer was that science was not the point of God’s creation
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but a tool to understand it. The real purpose of it all was the union of Love
and Wisdom through the Doctrine of Use. We develop a self, for the purpose
of achieving a state of its utter abnigation, leaving us with the only reason to
live, and that is in a life of service to others, what he called the Divine Natural
Humanity, being the love of God through human relationships.
Henry James Sr. could handle the metaphysical parts, but he needed William
to actualize the scientific portion of the legacy. Conflicted, William abandoned
painting and enrolled in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard through his
father’s connections to the Saturday Club and committed himself to the study of
first chemistry and then medicine. But the psychological effect of Henry James
Sr’s religious metaphysics on the young William James became excruciating,
and William used his relation to Charles Peirce and to Chauncey Wright to
escape into the epistemology of reductionistic positivism, which rejected all
iconography of the transcendent.

15 And Wilkenson, Robertson, and Alice. The connection with Henry James, Sr. is developed in
Taylor, E. I.(1986) Peirce and Swedenborg, Studia Swedenborgiana, 6:1, 25-5l.
16 Taylor, E.I. (2001-2) William James and the Spiritual Roots of American Pragmatism. Centenary
Lectures honoring James’s publication of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), for the
Swedenborg Society at Harvard University. Swedenborg Chapel, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
2001-2002. Forthcoming.
 182 EUGENE TAYLOR

James hid there for a half dozen years, pathetically embracing an epistemology
that was not really his, but viewing science from that vantage point nonetheless.
In those years he trained to become a scientist. Finally, he succumbed to a crisis
of personal belief and around 1867 or 1868 went through a near suicidal episode.
Retreating to his father’s house he remained a half-broken man for several
years, until he began to pull out of a deep depression by reading Renouvier on
the will, by which James was empowered to exercise his own, and by devotion
to the poems of Coleridge, uplifting in their beauty as they lashed out against
reductionistic materialism. He began to believe that it is possible to believe in
free will.
He graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1869 and his mother, by
working on President Eliot, secured him a job teaching anatomy and physiology
to Harvard undergraduates. James went on from there with his good friends and
classmates at Harvard Medical School, Henry Pickering Bowditch and James
Jackson Putnam, to help found the laboratories devoted to mental science at
Harvard. They began in Bowditch’s laboratory of experimental physiology at
the medical school, and from there branched out. Putnam founded the laboratory
of neuropathology at Harvard, at first in his own home, and James launched the
first laboratory in the world devoted to experimental psychology, for purposes
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of student instruction in rooms over in Harvard College associated with Agas-
siz’s Lawrence Scientific School.
Meanwhile, James had begun meetings of the so-called Metaphysical Club
in Cambridge with Peirce, Wright, and others, out of which would later come
the American philosophical movement of pragmatism.
James’s new strength was that his escape into positivism and his eventual
rejection of it as a personal philosophy had allowed him to reconcile himself both
with Wright’s ultra orthodox position and also the Christian monism of Henry
James Sr.’s religious metaphysics. James would be a pluralist because monism
could always be one of his options, and his understanding of positivism he was
able to accept as provisional rather than absolute, until a better epistemology
presented itself. The rest of his career was a search for this new epistemology,
which we have said became his tripartite doctrine of pragmatism, pluralism,
and radical empiricism.17
Peirce, meanwhile, continued the construction of his great archetechtonic
theories about reason, ontology, cosmology, and epistemology. Personally,

17 This was essentially the literary and philosophical legacy that James inherited from his Father,
Henry James Sr. and his God-Father, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
 THE ONTOLOGICAL TRIAD IN JAMES AND PEIRCE 183

however, he had been converted to Henry James Sr’s, wildcat brand of Sweden-
borgianism.18 He became convinced that James Sr. had found the everlasting
solution to the problem of evil. Peirce fused James, Sr.’s conception of the Divine
Natural Humanity with Royce’s hope of the great community to formulate his
own scientific conception of the relation between individual thought, truth, and
communities of interpretation made up of other human beings.19
We know that at many points in his own career, William James’s ideas were
a retailed version, often in slight but important variation, of Peirce’s more
cryptic philosophy. Peirce probably introduced James to the logic and litera-
ture of German experimental psychology in the 1860s. During that period, he
and James and Wright had all responded to Darwin’s invitation to write on the
application of natural selection to language. Each created their own statement.
Peirce participated with James in the meetings of the Metaphysical Club in the
1870s. In the 1880s, Peirce was working on the biographies of geniuses in science
while at Johns Hopkins, while James was writing about the consciousness of
the Genius in the context of the Darwinian hypothesis of natural selection in
Cambridge. In the late 1890s it was James who launched Peirce’s Pragmatism
as an international movement in philosophy and also became his patron there-
after. Peirce reviewed James’s major books, and when James’s article “Does
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Consciousness Exist?” came out in 1904, one of the seminal papers on radical
empiricism left to us, in their correspondence, James and Peirce argued over the
meaning of phenomenology. James claimed it was foundational to psychology,
which Peirce denied. The two at least agreed that it was foundational to science
in general, however. Also, toward the end of his career James aspired but did
not complete a fully detailed elaboration of his metaphysics. As a result, his
tripartite system remained his unfinished arch. Nevertheless, we see in their
initial articulation the outlines of a Peircean triad.

18 The great Pierce scholar, Max Fisch, remarked that he was too busy and too advanced into old
age to help me, but that I was on the right track regarding this interpretation. He enjoined me to
resist all naysayers and to forge ahead and make my point. (Personal communication, October,
14, 1984).
19 “For Charles Peirce, the project of inquiry is a social one. Through inquiry, the passage from
genuine doubt to settled belief, can be described on the individual level, its significance as a
human activity is manifested in collective action. Peirce carefully described the proper method of
inquiry as the “scientific method” in the 1877-8 Popular Science Monthly article series [Referring
to “How to make Our Ideas Clear”]. Carried out by a community of investigators, the conclusion
to be attained, given a sufficient amount of time, is what philosophers have generally referred to
as Truth, its object, Reality. For any individual, Truth transcends experience and inquiry. But it
does not transcend experience and inquiry altogether: is a fixed limit, an ideal, towards which a
properly functioning community converges.” David L. Hildebrand (1996). Genuine doubt and
the community in Peirce’s Theory of Inquiry. Southwest Philosophy Review 12:1, pp. 33-43.
 184 EUGENE TAYLOR

To understand any one of James’s constructs, then, one has to view them in
their dynamic relation to each other. One cannot study just one and then presume
to be in possession of the whole of James’s philosophy.

The Varieties and James’s Tripartite Metaphysics

As we have said, James did not live long enough to make a complete state-
ment about the foundations of his philosophical system. But when we look back
over his attempts to finish that arch, it is clear that The Varieties of Religious
Experience (1902) was written at a time when each one of the three constructs
was well enough developed in his mind to find a significant place in the under-
lying epistemology of that work.
We see the idea of noetic pluralism in his introduction in two important ways.
First, he told his audience that he would be approaching his subject as a psycholo-
gist of religion. He did not say as a philosopher of religion, or as a scholar of
religious traditions. His approach was to be psychological. He then declared
that his data base would be experiential [read ‘phenomenological’]. By this he
meant he would be focusing on the different ways in which individuals have
reported on their experiences within different religious traditions across different
cultures. These reports he referred to as “the documents humains,” that is, living
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human documents—first-person accounts of what each person said had actually
happened to them.
Second, he made sure the focus remained on the individual in his defini-
tion of religion. Religion, he said, was what went on inside the person. It was
not the history of the churches or the denominations, or the priesthood, or the
scriptural teachings, or even a focus on the different traditions themselves or
the personalities of their respective Gods. It was on the immediate experience
of the individual. In this, he was equating the concept of religion with the idea
of a generic dimension of spirituality within each person. This was the capacity
to experience the transcendent, whether someone had ever actually experienced
such a state or not.
James’s conception of pure experience within the context of noetic pluralism
can be found most cogently in his chapter on “Mysticism.” He opened by
describing the four characteristics of mystical experiences: they are ineffable,
noetic, transient, and come unbidden. How can we describe a symphony to one
who has never heard one? Mystical awakening is like that. We do not usually
spend a lifetime in the mystical state, however (though there are examples of
permanent theopathic absorption, possibly rare in the too analytically oriented
 THE ONTOLOGICAL TRIAD IN JAMES AND PEIRCE 185

traditions of the West, though quite common in Asian cultures).20 Rather, they
occur in an instant or they may last just minutes, even hours, or sometimes days.
Finally, they come unbidden. There is nothing that can be done to guarantee
that they will come. One might engage in ascetic practices, do yoga, penance,
or prayer, or meditate in the desert. But none of these will definitely bring a
mystical awakening, though they may alter the conditions for their coming.
Rather, mystical states come unbidden, and when they arrive they demand an
immediate surrender, a complete giving up of any control, because we feel we
are swept up in a force so much more powerful than the individual alone.
From the standpoint of noetic pluralism, each individual is capable of experi-
encing such states the majority of which may even be described as a universal
sense of one-ness. The only problem for those who are theological monists,
however, is that such states of one-ness may actually be different from person
to person. They are noetic because they impart visionary knowledge, yet they
may remain idiosyncratic to the person who has them, which the person might
interpret in no communal or denominational context.
At the same time, regarding pure experience, religious scholars are fond of
superimposing the categories of apophatic or cataphatic onto such transcendent
experiences, apophatic in the present discussion meaning full of content and
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cataphatic referring to states of complete emptiness of content. James himself did
not adopt these categories, but elsewhere he did give the example of the highest
state of consciousness, pure consciousness (purusha) as opposed to lifeless inert
matter (prakrti), in the Samkhya yoga tradition of Hindu philosophy.21 Thus, he
equated the experience of a transcendent state of consciousness as identical to
his own conception of pure experience in his metaphysic of radical empiricism.
Pure experience then is the summum bonum, the beginning, the experience of
consciousness before the differentiation of subject and object, and the end, in
the sense of the highest state of pure consciousness (asamprajnatasamadhi in
the Yoga texts) that is possible for human beings to experience.
So far as his pragmatism was concerned, James made it clear in The Varieties
that the strength and power to transform personality by way of mystical states
is measured, not by their roots, but by their fruits; that is, by their visible effects

20 See Jeffry Kripal’s biography of Ramakrishna, for instance. Kripal, Jeffrey John (1998). Kali’s
child: the mystical and the erotic in the life and teachings of Ramakrishna; with a foreword by
Wendy Doniger. 2nd ed. Chicago, Ill: The University of Chicago Press.
21 Taylor, E.I. (2008). William James on Pure Experience and Samadhi in Samkhya Yoga. In Rao,
R., Pranjpe, A., et al. (2009). Handbook of Indian Psychology. New Delhi: Cambridge Univ.
Press/India Ltd.
 186 EUGENE TAYLOR

on enhancing the moral and aesthetic qualities of daily living. Here, beliefs are
based on the depth, breadth, and height of the transcendent mystical states one
has experienced, not solely on the rational internalization of outward laws of
conformity. The self-actualizing type of person, Abraham Maslow once also
said regarding this same issue, conforms generally to the prevailing mores and
folkways of the culture in which that person finds themselves, but is quite capable
of opposing the status quo in an instant when issues of evil and injustice arise.22
Thus, James and Peirce were joined at the hip with regard to certain general
principles throughout the course of their respective lifetimes. Pragmatism was
the most cogent example of the parallelism between Peirce’s categories and
James’s tripartite metaphysics, though they differed so radically on the meaning
of that term. Peirce had laid out the blueprint for his categories early in his career.
James, for his part, was very late. He progressed but slowly, being constantly
distracted by illness, his family concerns, his teaching duties, his international
network of friends and colleagues, voluminous writing projects that only grew
in international scope after he was fifty and were all crammed into the last
21 years of his life, alas only to be partly undone at the end because he had not
finished. The insight mentioned earlier in this paper still holds with regard to
contemporary authors, however: James had a tripartite metaphysics and if any
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given author does not acknowledge that fact and then continues to write on just
one or the other construct without regard to the others, and then proceeds to
overgeneralizes their conclusions to James’s life, work, and influence, then that
author’s ideas must be counted as but remnants of the past.
Saybrook University

22 Maslow, A.H. (1954). Motivation and Personality. New York, Harper.