ASK THE average college graduate who Charles Sanders Peirce was
and, if he can answer at all, he will say: "the father of pragmatism."
Peirce profoundly influenced William James, Josiah Royce, and John
Dewey. Professional philosophers are more apt to remember his
technical excellence, calling him "America's greatest logician." He
was "the most original and versatile" of American philosophers, and
the possessor of a "seminal mind."¹--All these kings are true. But
an important aspect of Peirce's thought has been overlooked. He
continued and developed the old ideas of transcendentalism. Before
being a pragmatist, Peirce was an ardent idealist.

Often the break between transcendental idealism and pragmatic
naturalism has seemed absolute. William James emphasized the prac-
tical aspect of thought so persuasively that pragmatism even came
to be interpreted as the gospel of material success. Although this was
a mistaken interpretation, there was some reason for it. But Peirce's
thought could never have been called materialistic by any stretch of
the imagination. As he said, Kant's terms "praktisch and pragmatisch
were as far apart as the two poles."² Completely opposed to practical
materialism, Peirce developed a pragmatic or experimental idealism.

Technically and consciously, Peirce developed this philosophy
from Kant and Hegel. But naturally and often unconsciously, he
developed it from the native transcendentalism of Emerson and
Thoreau. In a preface to one of his most important papers, he wrote
half-humorously:

I was born and reared in the neighborhood of Concord--I mean in Cam-
bridge--at the time when Emerson, Hedge, and their friends were dis-
seminating ideas. . . . The atmosphere of Cambridge held many an anti-
septic against Concord transcendentalism; and I am not conscious of hav-
ing contracted any of that virus. Nevertheless, it is probable that some
cultured bacilli, some benignant form of the disease was implanted in my
soul, unawares, and that now, after long incubation, it comes to the sur-
face, modified by mathematical conceptions and by training in physical
investigations.³

Without attempting to differentiate sharply between the philosophic
transcendentalism of Kant and the literary variety of Emerson, I
would emphasize Peirce's debt to his American predecessors.

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