The Metaphysical Club is a remarkable history book. Subtitled A History of Ideas in America, it is the story of four prescient and inspiring men: Charles [eventually S. for “Santiago” or St. James in honor of William James] Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., John Dewey, and William James.

Peirce is probably the most underrated of these men, in historical reflection as he was during his lifetime. A mathematician and son of a famous mathematician, Benjamin Peirce, Charles Peirce not only served to demonstrate the “law of errors” in statistics—essentially that all phenomena vary, but they vary within certain ascertainable limits and that a central limitation demonstrates their most probable result—likely “accuracy.” (p. 183). I first came across Peirce when playing an online version of “The Glass Bead Game” (made famous by Hermann Hesse). Another “player” suggested that my argument sounded a lot like C.S. Peirce. Since I had never heard of Peirce, I immediately ordered a book of essays by the man and found that the alleged founder of “Pragmatism” in the U.S. had plenty to say that resonated with me. Not least, for me, was his suspicion of scientific explanation at the same time as his reliance upon scientific method and logic. The Metaphysical Club describes it as such: “Scientific laws rely on the assumption that like causes always produce like effects, but … this assumption is a ‘metaphysical doctrine…not of much use in a world like this,, in which the same antecedents never again concur and nothing ever happens twice.’” (p. 222)

I suppose I should have been aware of Peirce since William James thought so much of him. James is an interesting character, not simply because he is so different from his father (Henry James, Sr.) but because he is (unlike his younger brother, expatriate and novelist Henry James, Jr.) torn between two approaches to understanding life. A chapter on James in The Metaphysical Club describes him as “The Man of Two Minds.” (p. 73) but Oliver Wendell Holmes was less generous when he said that James “…made scientific uncertainty an excuse for believing in the existence of an unseen world. ‘His wishes made him turn down the lights so as to give miracle a chance, …’” (p. 436).

Yet, it is precisely James’ willingness to apply scientific methodology to his understanding but leave room for that which empirical experimentation cannot explain that appealed to me when I read both his Principles of Psychology and Varieties of Religious Experience. I also resonate with James’ idea of the “pluriverse,” (p. 88) an antecedent to the idea of the “multiverse” as it is handled in some science fiction/fantasy, eastern philosophy, and multi-dimensional science of today. [Those who know me will recognize that I perceive extra-dimensionality as an interesting analogy for the heavenly dimension, my understanding of the Christian heaven.]

The Metaphysical Club did change my understanding of both Holmes and Dewey, however. Having read some accounts of Holmes’ legal decisions, I had perceived him as a champion of civil liberties. Now, it appears that his record was extremely uneven on this score. Though he did decide in favor of Jacob Abrams (a Russian Jewish immigrant who had printed some anti-war leaflets) in a dissenting (ie. losing) opinion (p. 428), he had decided against Eugene V. Debs and others in similar decisions prior to this (p. 424). Ironically, even though he decided in favor of the government and against the speakers/printers in those cases, he did set out a “contextual” argument as to whether said free speech constituted a clear and present danger that is still cited today (p. 424). It turns out that Holmes was a believer in that statistical anomaly known as the “reasonable man” and decided liability cases on the basis of whether that “reasonable man” would have considered something to be risky and negligent (p. 345). Since this “reasonable man” is a statistical fiction, it really undermines my previous admiration of Holmes, but there is no denying its impact on U.S. jurisprudence.

What I really didn’t know about Holmes was the fact that he was nearly killed in a lesser-known American Civil War (War Between the States, War of Northern Aggression) battle called Ball’s Bluff (p. 35), but that he recovered and returned to active duty to be wounded again at Antietam (p. 41). These experiences probably solidified his perspective on war—that organized violence (ie. war) is merely another form of oppression and that it is not only the “brother” of slavery, but its parent and sustainer, as well. (p. 45) Later, he extended his feelings to include people who are so sure of themselves that they incite violence to advance their cause, “…resistance to it will be met, sooner or later, by force.” (p. 61) It is no wonder that his opinion later would be voice in favor of a pluralism within the U.S.

To be honest, I read this book to read about Holmes, James, and Peirce. I’ve never been a huge fan of John Dewey. Like that of so many brilliant men, his work has been interpreted by strident disciples who distorted certain truths to what would have been (to the original thinker) heresy. For example, Dewey believed in empirical methodology and fought the philosophical fight against determinism on many levels.

I always thought he was forcing Darwinism in order to posit a godless, chaotic world. Rather, Dewey’s background was such that he believed the “New Psychology” would help us understand the religious experience for the first time (p. 272). When Dewey posited his famous perspective that “…knowledge is experience itself,” (p. 372) he was trying to say that perception and sensory experience are not separate. Whether he knew it or not, he was advocating a biblical perspective in which the three aspects of humanity, body, mind, and spirit are not separable. Soul is a unity of the three and separating them wouldn’t have made sense to the biblical writers (at least, to most of them—some would debate that many of the NT epistle writers were contaminated by Neo-Platonic perspectives).

Being a Chicago resident and occasionally passing by the site of the former Pullman, IL, I was fascinated to read another perspective of the famous Pullman strike (pp. 290-1). Sometimes, you “hear” history instead of studying it and I had always assumed that race was somehow involved in the strike. After all, most or all Pullman porters were African-American. So, I had (erroneously) in my mind that there was some noble sentiments of solidarity with those porters that had led to the American Railway Union going on strike. To the contrary, I found out that African-Americans weren’t allowed in the ARU and that while the porters lost income during the strike, they weren’t allowed to participate lest the inherent racism among the upper class write the strike off to racial causes. It was interesting to read about Pullman’s mixture of benevolence and intransigence. I was really surprised to read Richard Ely’s diatribe that “…the idea of Pullman is un-American….It is benevolent, well-wishing feudalism.” (p. 303)

The book is laced with marvelous contemporary quotations, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s slam against Sen. Daniel Webster, “…liberty in Mr. Webster’s mouth is like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.” (p. 21) I’m going to remember that one to adapt for the next time I need a good argumentum ad hominem because I’m out of evidence and losing my audience. My tongue is firmly embedded in my cheek on that.

Finally, I think the author got it right when he explained the result of the pragmatism brought into being in the U.S. as having the result of a society more interested in procedures than premises (p. 432). If there is one thing that is incredibly frustrating to me, it is the tendency in certain large companies to prefer process over substance. It’s interesting to look at that frustration in the light of these philosophical precedents.