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It is well to note, however, that after writing the papers included in this volume Peirce continued to be occupied with the issues here raised. This he most significantly indicated in the articles on logical topics contributed to Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy.[7]

In these articles it is naturally the logical bearing of the principles of tychism (chance), synechism (continuity), and agapism (love) that is stressed. To use the Kantian terminology, almost native to Peirce, the regulative rather than the constitutive aspect of these principles is emphasized. Thus the doctrine of chance is not only what it was for James’ radical empiricism, a release from the blind necessity of a “block universe,” but also a method of keeping open a possible explanation of the genesis of the laws of nature and an interpretation of them in accordance with the theorems of probability, so fruitful in physical science as well as in practical life. So the doctrine of love is not only a cosmologic one, showing how chance feeling generates order or rational diversity through the habit of generality or continuity, but it also gives us the meaning of truth in social terms, in showing that the test as to whether any proposition is true postulates an indefinite number of co-operating investigators. On its logical side the doctrine of love (agapism) also recognized the important fact that general ideas have a certain attraction which makes us divine their nature even though we cannot clearly determine their precise meaning before developing their possible consequences.

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