Page:Chance, love, and logic - philosophical essays (IA chancelovelogicp00peir 0).pdf/21

 All that is necessary to visualize this is to suppose that there is an infinitesimal tendency in things to acquire habits, a tendency which is itself an accidental variation grown habitual. We shall then be on the road to explain the evolution and existence of the limited uniformities actually prevailing in the physical world.

A good deal of the foregoing may sound somewhat mythologic. But even if it were so it would have the merit of offering a rational alternative to the mechanical mythology according to which all the atoms in the universe are to-day precisely in the same condition in which they were on the day of creation, a mythology which is forced to regard all the empirical facts of spontaneity and novelty as illusory, or devoid of substantial truth.

The doctrine of the primacy of chance naturally suggests the primacy of mind. Just as law is a chance habit so is matter inert mind. The principal law of mind is that ideas literally spread themselves continuously and become more and more general or inclusive, so that people who form communities of any sort develop general ideas in common. When this continuous reaching-out of feeling becomes nurturing love, such, e.g., which parents have for their offspring or thinkers for their ideas, we have creative evolution.

James and Royce have called attention to the similarity between Peirce's doctrine of tychistic-agapism (chance and love) and the creative evolution of Bergson. But while both philosophies aim to restore life and growth in their account of the nature of things, Peirce's approach seems to me to have marked advantages, owing to its being in closer