There is one thing needful for learning the truth, and that is a hearty and active desire to learn what is true.

—C. S. Peirce¹

The eight lectures Charles Peirce delivered in Cambridge during February 1898 have a peculiarly interesting provenance. There was a misunderstanding that William James was once more attempting to secure a position for his friend, which was not true. Rather, James engineered the financial backing for a series of lectures he hoped would enable Peirce to get some material in a publishable form. Peirce seized on the opportunity to demonstrate the technical mathematical ground for his logic, and this worried James. In the end the lectures combined technical and speculative elements, tying metaphysics to science in a unique way among the classical pragmatists. Logic, Peirce argues, is the key to the transformation of reason that binds together novel discovery in metaphysics and scientific knowledge so that both are able to develop fully. Metaphysics must be incorporated into harmony with science, "obeying its logic, and serving its turn" (RLT, 117).

James hoped his friend would prepare topical lectures that would appeal to a general audience, and Peirce complied by downplaying the mathematical demonstrations and his rapier wit. But even so the lectures present a connected argument. "As for getting myself expressed in a systematic way," he wrote in a letter to James, "it is the great object of my life" (RLT, 24). In fact, the lectures develop Peirce's early desire to know Law scientifically, which in 1863 he claims is a work of the providence of God.² A similar desire informs his 1903 lectures on pragmatism that expand his description of realism.³ Interestingly enough, agapism, the term prominent in his earlier Monist essays, is not mentioned in the 1898 lectures. Rather, in this context Peirce focuses on the way truths of science and metaphysics are approached through abstract reasoning. Cornelius De Waal attributes this to Peirce's desire to counter James's focus on the will to believe with the desire to know the truth.⁴ The mode of logical advancement toward greater generality here is also significantly different than inquiry based on a suggestion of instinct such as the reality of God. In these lectures Peirce explores [End Page 142] the transformation of inquiry (and hence, of the inquirer) that is possible from a scientific point of view, which is essential for Peirce's philosophical account of knowledge acquisition and expansion.

In this essay I present the transformation of inquiry as an organizing theme in Peirce's 1898 lectures. Peirce demonstrates the advancements in science and mathematics that ground his logic and indicates the attitude and training necessary for a philosophy of knowledge expansion. Peirce shifts from a general inquiry into logic in the first five lectures to metaphysical topics in the last three. Rather than representing a break in focus, I argue that these metaphysical lectures instantiate the reasoning possible from a platform of inquiry that Peirce articulates. I focus on lecture six and Peirce's argument that time is the continuum of reason because it demonstrates the need for a transformation of inquiry to stabilize his metaphysical system. In the concluding section I raise two criticisms about Peirce's notion of time that are crucial to the project of knowledge expansion.

I. The 1898 Lectures

The lectures Peirce delivered in Cambridge were an apparent success, and the event is now a part of pragmatism's lore. Six months after these lectures, James introduced the term "pragmatism" in his famous lecture at Berkeley. Josiah Royce was so impressed with the event that he wrote in appreciation to James, "Those lectures of poor C. S. Peirce that you devised will always remain quite epoche-marking in meaning for me. They started me on such new tracks."⁵ The profound effect these lectures had on...