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Peirce: CP 1.50 Cross-Ref:††
50. Yet in more ways than one an exaggerated regard for morality is unfavorable to scientific progress. I shall present only one of those ways. It will no doubt shock some persons that I should speak of morality as involving an element which can become bad. To them good conduct and moral conduct are one and the same -- and they will accuse me of hostility to morality. I regard morality as highly necessary; but it is a means to good life, not necessarily coextensive with good conduct. Morality consists in the folklore of right conduct. A man is brought up to think he ought to behave in certain ways. If he behaves otherwise, he is uncomfortable. His conscience pricks him. That system of morals is the traditional wisdom of ages of experience. If a man cuts loose from it, he will become the victim of his passions. It is not safe for him even to reason about it, except in a purely speculative way. Hence, morality is essentially conservative. Good morals and good manners are identical, except that tradition attaches less importance to the latter. The gentleman is imbued with conservatism. This conservatism is a habit, and it is the law of habit that it tends to spread and extend itself over more and more of the life. In this way, conservatism about morals leads to conservatism about manners and finally conservatism about opinions of a speculative kind. Besides, to distinguish between speculative and practical opinions is the mark of the most cultivated intellects. Go down below this level and you come across reformers and rationalists at every turn -- people who propose to remodel the ten commandments on modern science. Hence it is that morality leads to a conservatism which any new view, or even any free inquiry, no matter how purely speculative, shocks. The whole moral weight of such a community will be cast against science. To inquire into nature is for a Turk very unbecoming to a good Moslem; just as the family of Tycho Brahe regarded his pursuit of astronomy as unbecoming to a nobleman. (See Thomas Nash in Pierce Pennilesse for the character of a Danish nobleman.)
Peirce: CP 1.51 Cross-Ref:††
51. This tendency is necessarily greatly exaggerated in a country when the "gentleman," or recognized exponent of good manners, is appointed to that place as the most learned man. For then the inquiring spirit cannot say the gentlemen are a lot of ignorant fools. To the moral weight cast against progress in science is added the weight of superior learning. Wherever there is a large class of academic professors who are provided with good incomes and looked up to as gentlemen, scientific inquiry must languish. Wherever the bureaucrats are the more learned class, the case will be still worse.
52. The first questions which men ask about the universe are naturally the most general and abstract ones. Nor is it true, as has so often been asserted, that these are the most difficult questions to answer. Francis Bacon is largely responsible for this error, he having represented -- having nothing but his imagination and no acquaintance with actual science to draw upon -- that the most general inductions must be reached by successive steps. History does not at all bear out that theory. The errors about very general questions have been due to a circumstance which I proceed to set forth.
Peirce: CP 1.53 Cross-Ref:††
53. The most abstract of all the sciences is mathematics. That this is so, has been made manifest in our day; because all mathematicians now see clearly that mathematics is only busied about purely hypothetical questions. As for what the truth of existence may be the mathematician does not (qua mathematician) care a straw. It is true that early mathematicians could not clearly see that this was so. But for all their not seeing it, it was just as true of the mathematics of early days as of our own. The early mathematician might perhaps be more inclined to assert roundly that two straight lines in a plane cut by a third so as to make the sum of the internal angles on one side less than two right angles would meet at some finite distance on that side if sufficiently produced; although, as a matter of fact, we observe no such tendency in Euclid. But however that may have been, the early mathematician had certainly no more tendency than the modern to inquire into the truth of that postulate; but quite the reverse. What he really did, therefore, was merely to deduce consequences of unsupported assumptions, whether he recognized that this was the nature of his business or not. Mathematics, then, really was, for him as for us, the most abstract of the sciences, cut off from all inquiry into existential truth. Consequently, the tendency to attack the most abstract problems first, not because they were recognized as such, but because such they were, led to mathematics being the earliest field of inquiry.
Peirce: CP 1.54 Cross-Ref:††
Peirce tends correctly to infer that we have conscience and morality and that it is conservative. Tolerance is certainly such as we would not survive at all without it. Helpfulness is the essence of brother and sister feeling cradle to grave. Democracy in the sense of rights and root equality has had an evolutionary history but its direction has always been plain. Peirce is odd in being an inveterate complexifier of his own original ideas to the point of needing to explain them over and over creating much exegetical confusion. At the same time he creates a broad prohibition by scoring the notion that we need many steps to arrive at things like goodness and truth and other ontological realities.
50. Yet in more ways than one an exaggerated regard for morality is unfavorable to scientific progress. I shall present only one of those ways. It will no doubt shock some persons that I should speak of morality as involving an element which can become bad. To them good conduct and moral conduct are one and the same -- and they will accuse me of hostility to morality. I regard morality as highly necessary; but it is a means to good life, not necessarily coextensive with good conduct. Morality consists in the folklore of right conduct. A man is brought up to think he ought to behave in certain ways. If he behaves otherwise, he is uncomfortable. His conscience pricks him. That system of morals is the traditional wisdom of ages of experience. If a man cuts loose from it, he will become the victim of his passions. It is not safe for him even to reason about it, except in a purely speculative way. Hence, morality is essentially conservative. Good morals and good manners are identical, except that tradition attaches less importance to the latter. The gentleman is imbued with conservatism. This conservatism is a habit, and it is the law of habit that it tends to spread and extend itself over more and more of the life. In this way, conservatism about morals leads to conservatism about manners and finally conservatism about opinions of a speculative kind. Besides, to distinguish between speculative and practical opinions is the mark of the most cultivated intellects. Go down below this level and you come across reformers and rationalists at every turn -- people who propose to remodel the ten commandments on modern science. Hence it is that morality leads to a conservatism which any new view, or even any free inquiry, no matter how purely speculative, shocks. The whole moral weight of such a community will be cast against science. To inquire into nature is for a Turk very unbecoming to a good Moslem; just as the family of Tycho Brahe regarded his pursuit of astronomy as unbecoming to a nobleman. (See Thomas Nash in Pierce Pennilesse for the character of a Danish nobleman.)
Peirce: CP 1.51 Cross-Ref:††
51. This tendency is necessarily greatly exaggerated in a country when the "gentleman," or recognized exponent of good manners, is appointed to that place as the most learned man. For then the inquiring spirit cannot say the gentlemen are a lot of ignorant fools. To the moral weight cast against progress in science is added the weight of superior learning. Wherever there is a large class of academic professors who are provided with good incomes and looked up to as gentlemen, scientific inquiry must languish. Wherever the bureaucrats are the more learned class, the case will be still worse.
52. The first questions which men ask about the universe are naturally the most general and abstract ones. Nor is it true, as has so often been asserted, that these are the most difficult questions to answer. Francis Bacon is largely responsible for this error, he having represented -- having nothing but his imagination and no acquaintance with actual science to draw upon -- that the most general inductions must be reached by successive steps. History does not at all bear out that theory. The errors about very general questions have been due to a circumstance which I proceed to set forth.
Peirce: CP 1.53 Cross-Ref:††
53. The most abstract of all the sciences is mathematics. That this is so, has been made manifest in our day; because all mathematicians now see clearly that mathematics is only busied about purely hypothetical questions. As for what the truth of existence may be the mathematician does not (qua mathematician) care a straw. It is true that early mathematicians could not clearly see that this was so. But for all their not seeing it, it was just as true of the mathematics of early days as of our own. The early mathematician might perhaps be more inclined to assert roundly that two straight lines in a plane cut by a third so as to make the sum of the internal angles on one side less than two right angles would meet at some finite distance on that side if sufficiently produced; although, as a matter of fact, we observe no such tendency in Euclid. But however that may have been, the early mathematician had certainly no more tendency than the modern to inquire into the truth of that postulate; but quite the reverse. What he really did, therefore, was merely to deduce consequences of unsupported assumptions, whether he recognized that this was the nature of his business or not. Mathematics, then, really was, for him as for us, the most abstract of the sciences, cut off from all inquiry into existential truth. Consequently, the tendency to attack the most abstract problems first, not because they were recognized as such, but because such they were, led to mathematics being the earliest field of inquiry.
Peirce: CP 1.54 Cross-Ref:††
Peirce tends correctly to infer that we have conscience and morality and that it is conservative. Tolerance is certainly such as we would not survive at all without it. Helpfulness is the essence of brother and sister feeling cradle to grave. Democracy in the sense of rights and root equality has had an evolutionary history but its direction has always been plain. Peirce is odd in being an inveterate complexifier of his own original ideas to the point of needing to explain them over and over creating much exegetical confusion. At the same time he creates a broad prohibition by scoring the notion that we need many steps to arrive at things like goodness and truth and other ontological realities.
