One Law, Not Many
Where the psychologist catalogues associations, Peirce performs a logical analysis and finds a single principle underneath them all. The law of mind is not mechanical, because it is irreversible: once an idea has spread and been generalized, the process cannot run backward, any more than a person can unlearn a language. Time itself, for Peirce, has the structure of this law.
there is but one law of mind, namely, that ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain others which stand to them in a peculiar relation of affectibility. In this spreading they lose intensity, and especially the power of affecting others, but gain generality and become welded with other ideas.
Synechism
For one idea to affect another, the two must be continuous — feeling cannot leap across an absolute gap. Peirce therefore takes continuity (synecheia) as the master conception of philosophy. Personality is a coordination of ideas living in continuity, not an instantaneous thing; it reaches into the future, which is why a person can make promises and pursue purposes.
Matter as Effete Mind
The essay ends at a striking metaphysical destination: if mind is the primal stuff, then matter is mind whose habits have become so fixed that spontaneity has all but died out of it — “effete mind,” hidebound with habit. Physical law is thus a limiting case of the law of mind, and the old dualism of mechanism and spirit dissolves into a single story of habit-taking.
From “The Law of Mind,” The Monist, July 1892 — the central paper of Peirce’s cosmological series.
Related Concepts
