Peirce, God, and the "Transcendentalist Virus"

In "The Law of Mind" and in several Monistrelated manuscripts from the 1890s, Peirce explicitly acknowledges a New England Transcendentalist influence in his thought along with that of Schelling. The "Concord virus" that Peirce claims to have received in a cultured, "benignant form" can be seen at work later, in the 1908 "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God." Several of Peirce's most important principles and ideas in "A Neglected Argument" have precursors in the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson, including the play of Musement, the idea of mind as the principle of continuity and growth, and the importance of attunement to the growth of the law of mind across the "Universes of Experience" for revealing the divine. Despite the fact that Peirce's and Emerson's philosophies disagree in some very significant and fundamental ways, the commonalities between the two thinkers are indicative of a distinctive approach to the relation between ourselves and the natural world.