Three Modes of Evolution
Darwinian evolution by fortuitous variation Peirce calls tychastic; mechanical, necessitated development is anancastic; evolution by creative love is agapastic. He does not deny the first two — his own tychism requires chance — but he denies they are the whole story. Chance scatters and necessity grinds; neither explains why anything should grow toward harmony.
The movement of love is circular, at one and the same impulse projecting creations into independency and drawing them into harmony.
Against the Gospel of Greed
The essay opens with a polemic that still startles: the political economy of his century, Peirce says, has elevated self-interest into a cosmic principle, reading Darwin’s struggle for existence back into the universe as its deepest law. He answers with the Golden Rule understood exactly — not utilitarian benevolence toward the greatest number, but sacrifice of one’s own perfection to the perfecting of one’s neighbor. Love is directed at persons, not abstractions.
Growth by Cherishing
The gardener’s love does not create the shoot, but it is why the shoot flourishes. So, Peirce suggests, with ideas: thought grows when an intelligence cherishes an idea, dwells in it sympathetically, and lets it develop — which is how he reads the history of science and of every renaissance. Agapism completes the system of Chance, Love, and Logic: chance supplies novelty, continuity binds it into mind, and love is the engine by which the universe becomes more reasonable.
From “Evolutionary Love,” The Monist, January 1893 — the closing essay of the volume and of Peirce’s metaphysical series.
Related Concepts
