ABSTRACT
Mechanism has spawned many philosophical reactions to it, from romanticism to Dadaism to surrealism to dialogical thinking to existentialism to deconstructionism, and in each one we may find love's presence. Charles Sanders Peirce is probably America's greatest philosopher of the nineteenth and earliest twentieth century. He was a great logician, metaphysician, and he remains a towering figure in the field of semiotics. According to Peirce there are three alternative evolutionary principles, what he calls the tychastic, the anancastic, and the agapastic. The astuteness of Peirce's refutation rests upon the problem of origin and tracing origin back to the farthest point. In all three evolutionary principles examined by Peirce, there is an unshakable faith in the universe being law-governed. Peirce himself is sympathetic to the emphasis upon contingency and spontaneity that is so fundamental to tychastic evolution. Peirce's sharp words about modern economics reinforce his opposition to the alchemical character of modernity.
