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Peirce was born a Unitarian. Unitarians believe that only God the Father is God; Jesus, the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit are the ¤rst among the creatures. One of Peirce’s fellow students at Harvard,Charles Fay,had a sister,Harriet Melusina, who not only had become an Episcopalian, and consequently a Trinitarian, but was a kind of American suffragette, a feminist who had advanced a conception of the Trinity in which the Holy Spirit represented the Woman in the triune Divinity : A Divine Eternal Trinity of Father, Mother and Only Son—the “Mother” being veiled throughout the Scriptures under the terms “The Spirit,” “Wisdom,” “The Holy Ghost,” “The Comforter” and “The Woman clothed with the sun and crowned with the stars and with the moon under her feet.” (Max Fisch in W1, Introduction: xxxi) Charles S. Peirce married Melusina in the Episcopalian Church and adopted Melusina’s triune conception of God: Here, therefore, we have a divine trinity of the object, interpretant, and ground. [ . . . ] In many respects, this trinity agrees with the Christian trinity; indeed I am not aware that there are many points of disagreement. The interpretant is evidently the Divine Logos or word; and if our former guess that a Reference to an interpretant is Paternity be right, this would be also the Son of God. The ground, being that partaking of which is requisite to any communication with the Symbol, corresponds in its function to the Holy Spirit. (W1: 503) - 17 Theology : The Reality of God peirce’s triune god and the church’s trinity Peirce gave later in 1907, although he had been separated from Melusina for more than thirty years, an even more feminist conception: “A Sign mediates between its Object and its Meaning. [ . . . ] Object the father, sign the mother of meaning.” “That is,” Max Fisch comments, “he might have added, of their son, the interpretant” (w1: xxxii). DOES GOD EXIST? The question was dealt with by Peirce in a convincing paper published in the Hibbert Journal in 1908, under the title “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God.” Peirce’s positive answer has a very important consequence. It shows that answering the question is possible on the sole condition that God is Triune. Peirce’s way to God is not argumentative, nor historical; it is sheer wandering of the mind in the Universe of Firstness through “musement.” “Musement” is “Pure Play.” “Pure Play has no rules, except this very law of liberty. It bloweth where it listeth. It has no purpose, unless recreation” (6.458). It takes many forms: “aesthetic contemplation,” “castle-building,” or that form “of considering some wonder in one of the [three] Universes, or some connection between two of the three, with speculation concerning its cause,” which is, properly speaking, the “musement” which “will in time ®ower into the N.A. [Neglected Argument]” (6.458). Peirce was not only born a Unitarian, he was born an empiricist. Historically , Peirce was ¤rst, from 1851 to 1867, an out-and-out empiricist and thus a nominalist: only Seconds—concrete individual existents—were real. Reality and existence were then synonymous. In 1857, he wrote: “Reality [refers] to the existence of the object itself” (W1: 18). From 1867 onward, more precisely during the winter of 1867–1868, in an unpublished item in which he criticized positivism, Peirce distinguished between existence and reality. What is real is “that which is independently of our belief and which could be properly inferred by the most thorough discussion of the sum of all impressions of sense whatever” (W2: 127). It will be remarked that this kind of reality, although general, is not properly a Third in the sense in which Peirce will use the term in 1908. Then, a Third will not be a generalization of Seconds, that is of singular cases, but of operative rules, a priori empty, of the type “if p, then q.” It was not until about 1890 that Peirce conceded that Firsts are also real. In 1891, he wrote: “In the beginning [ . . . ] there was a chaos of impersonalized feeling, which being without connection or regularity would properly be without existence.” However, “this feeling, sporting here and there in pure arbitrariness, would have started the germ of a generalizing tendency” (6.33). How to interpret the reality of the Firsts is not easy. If we say that they are in potentia, how can they be entirely without existence? If they are not in potentia, they must be general without ground, contrary...

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