Charles Sanders Peirce was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in September 1839. His father, Benjamin Peirce, was a famous astronomer and mathematician at Harvard University. His mother was Sarah Hunt Mills whose father, Senator Elijah Hunt Mills, was succeeded in office by Daniel Webster, a family friend. Charles was the second of five children, he was considered a precocious child, and his father entertained high hopes for him. His older brother James Mills Peirce became a professor of mathematics at Harvard and, ultimately, dean of the graduate faculty. The Peirce family descended from John Pers of Norwich, England, a weaver, who emigrated to Massachusetts in 1637.
Benjamin Peirce was instrumental in securing the creation of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard (endowed by Abbot Lawrence in 1847). In 1853-4 he was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and he joined Louis Agassiz (the famous paleontologist) and others, in 1863, in founding the National Academy of Sciences. He served as superintendent of the United States Coast (and Geodetic) Survey from 1867 until his retirement in 1874. He died in 1880.
Charles was clearly his father's favorite and Benjamin Peirce used his influence throughout the remainder of his life to support Charles in academic and scientific positions. Unfortunately, Charles was never able to engage his life in a consistent and appropriate path and developed little friendly support from anyone outside the family. After his father's death, his life moved slowly into ruin and, by his own death in 1914, he was destitute. The few lectureships that he was offered during his late years were all arranged by his life-long friend William James who, by that time, had appropriated Peirce's ideas and popularized them under the name Pragmatism. Peirce's life-long passion was logic and a term that he applied to his own version of logic from early on was "pedestrianism." Later on he used the term "pragmaticism."
Some of Charles' problem was ill health. From college years onward he suffered from painful attacks of "facial neuralgia" now called "trigeminal neuralgia." He was also rather susceptible to a wide variety of common ailments --- bronchitis, rheumatism, fever, etc. In addition, according to his biographer, Joseph Brent, he may very well have been clinically manic-depressive (long before psychology had invented this term). As a result, while his genius was accepted, he was also seen as arrogant and a dandy --- by no means desirable or admirable traits in Cambridge society of the time.
Peirce's performance in Cambridge High School was sufficiently bad that his father sent him to Dixwell's (college preparatory) School for a semester. Peirce entered Harvard in 1855, at the age of 16, graduating with a BA in 1859; but he did not distinguish himself as an undergraduate, ranking 71st in a class of 91. He had studied science to please his father, but more importantly he had also delved into the philosophical writings of Immanuel Kant and the literature and aesthetics of Friedrich von Schiller.
In the summer of 1858, Peirce, like many other bright scientifically inclined Harvard students, went on a field study sent by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey to Maine. It is noteworthy that his father had long been a consulting geometer with the Survey. While Peirce remained at Harvard as what they called a "resident graduate" from 1859 through 1867, he began regular employment in the Survey in 1861. In 1867 he became assistant to his father, the new superintendent; Peirce remained with the Survey for a total of thirty years.
Meanwhile, he received an M.A. in 1862 (by residence alone). More importantly, he entered the new Lawrence Scientific School in the same year and received a B.S. in chemistry (Summa Cum Laude) in 1863. This was clearly his first (and only) academic success. His scientific reputation had taken off. His work in the US Coast Survey, especially in the '70s, put him in the position of participating in several important international scientific studies.
Peirce's extracurricular studies were all in philosophy and logic, in particular. Throughout the 1860s, he studied the whole range of modern philosophers and logicians. Under his father's influence at Harvard, he was invited to give a series of fifteen invited lectures in philosophy; later, he gave the prestigious Lowell Lectures on logic and scientific method, 1869-70. In America, at least, Peirce had acquired a kind of reputation and respect similar to the stature of the famous European logician, Frege. Throughout this period, Peirce had high hopes of winning a Harvard professorship; however, a reputation in logic alone was not sufficient and Peirce had alienated too many important people, including Harvard's new president. As the decade ended, he was even being edged out of his position in the Harvard Observatory.
In the fall of 1864, Charles married Harriet Melusina Fay, the daughter of an episcopal minister and tracing family roots well back into the 17th Century. The Peirce family had viewed their engagement in January 1861 with warm approval, but were offended by the "early marriage" in 1864, which seemed rushed. This was by no means the last of Charles' impulsive acts where women were involved. Almost a decade later, after Charles had spent several years living and working in Washington, D.C., doing gravimetric experiments for the Survey, Zina, as his wife was called, complained that Peirce had been pursuing an intimate affair with a married woman in Washington. However, in 1875, Peirce was sent to Europe to cooperate with various scientists in comparing and calibrating gravimetric equipment. Zina accompanied him and they traveled throughout Europe for several months, settling ultimately in Paris. Zina's continuing unhappiness with the marriage was not reduced, though, and she sailed back to Cambridge late in the year, leaving Peirce in Paris. Peirce responded by embracing French Bohemian culture warmly, reading French novels, appreciating French wine, and attending the theater. He met a French woman, Julliette, who moved to New York several years later. There, Peirce pursued an open scandalous affair with her, living unwed together until Zina divorced him and they married in 1883.
Peirce met publisher W. H. Appleton on the steamer bound for Europe, in 1875, and Appleton invited him to write a series of essays for his magazine, Popular Science Monthly. The result was a series called "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" and the essay "The Fixation of Belief" was the introductory essay, followed by "How to Make Our Ideas Clear." It was in this series that Peirce developed the fundamental concepts of pragmatism, a philosophical method that captured the minds of many Americans and produced several of America's greatest philosophers.
1877 through 1884 marked the height of Peirce's career. In the spring of 1877, he visited Cambridge University and was invited to attend the Royal Society. He met James Clerk Maxwell, W. K. Clifford, and Herbert Spencer, among others. And, from 1879 to 1884, he taught at the newly founded Johns Hopkins University. Unfortunately, woven intimately into the same fabric of scientific and philosophical success was a growing pattern of personality conflicts and Peirce was beginning to be held as a "difficult person" with whom to work. Along with the other difficulties, the affair and divorce was a convenient excuse to fire Peirce from his teaching position (not an uncommon treatment for divorce or other forms of infidelity at the time). Peirce never sought another teaching position and the experience seems to have nudged him toward an early retirement from his career and public reputation.
Peirce had continued in his position with the U. S. Coastal and Geodetic Survey throughout this time, and in 1875 he had represented the United States in the worldwide International Geodetic Conference. He had also worked at the Harvard Observatory for many years; and this lead to the publication of his only book, Photometric Researches. From 1884-85, he was in charge of weights and measures for the U. S. Coastal and Measures Survey. By 1887, however, Peirce had largely retired from public life. He wrote articles for Nation, Century Dictionary, and Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology in later years, but these were largely motivated by providing some income.
Peirce was destitute in his declining years and only a few friends, William James being faithful to the end, protected him from starvation and secured occasional speaking engagements for him. He died in 1914.
[This biographical essay has been written on the basis of materials in Brent, Joseph. Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1998) and Weiss, Paul. Charles Sanders Peirce ().]
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