ABSTRACT
Readers of Josiah Royce’s later works are familiar with the frequent allusions to his debt for some of their more original features to suggestions derived from Charles S. Peirce’s writings. To the last with Peirce the decisive factor in the condemnation of all forms of nominalism, including pragmatism, was the denial which they seemed to him to involve of infinitesimals and therewith of the reality of the whole modern science of mathematics. As if further to mark the independence of Peirce’s starting-point, he took his bearings from a criticism of Descartes, the real “father”, as he called him, “of modern philosophy”, rather than from a criticism of Kant. The doctrine, sketched on the basis of a criticism of Descartes, is further developed in a careful article of about the same date in review of Campbell Fraser’s edition of Bishop Berkeley, which appeared in the NorthAmerican Review of 1871.
