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Despite these limitations, however, Peirce stands out as one of the great founders of modern scientific logic; and in the realm of general philosophy the development of some of his pregnant ideas has led to the pragmatism and radical empiricism of James, as well as to the mathematical idealism of Royce, and to the anti-nominalism which characterizes the philosophic movement known as Neo-Realism. At any rate, the work of James, Royce, and Russell, as well as that of logicians like Schroeder, brings us of the present generation into a better position to appreciate the significance of Peirce’s work, than were his contemporaries.

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Peirce was by antecedents, training, and occupation a scientist. He was a son of Benjamin Peirce, the great Harvard mathematician, and his early environment, together with his training in the Lawrence Scientific School, justified his favorite claim that he was brought up in a laboratory. He made important contributions not only in mathematical logic but also in photometric astronomy, geodesy, and psychophysics, as well as in philology. For many years Peirce worked on the problems of geodesy, and his contribution to the subject, his researches on the pendulum, was at once recognized by European investigators in this field. The International Geodetic Congress, to which he was the first American representative, gave unusual attention to his paper, and men like Cellerier and Plantamour acknowledged their obligations to him.^[1]