Did Peirce Have a Cosmology?

Peirce had no cosmology. What he had was a scientific program that he never got very far with and eventually dropped. That program was to explain the laws of nature as having evolved from chaos, so as to be able to predict forms of laws remaining to be discovered. The hypotheses proposed, and twice or thrice modified, were never brought to the point of being able to ground such predictions and therefore they remained untestable. The reason the program in its first form failed was that it could not succeed: the hypothesis of an original chaos does not permit the statistical argument Peirce had hoped to use to explain the evolution of law. The 'law of mind' that replaced statistical explanation yielded no better results. In either version, there were inconsistencies with the phaneroscopic categories, later developed. Many have identified the 'law of mind' with Peirce's later idea of final causation, concluding that he had a cosmology and retained it to the last. But the idea of final causation is antithetical to that 'law', which it replaced as an account of how the mind works and did not replace as a cosmogonic principle. The cosmological program faded away.