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The Metaphysical Club The second law of thermodynamics is the law of the dissipation of energy. It has been dramatically invoked by the British physicist William Thomson in 1852 to explain why, since energy cannot be created without the expenditure of energy the universe will eventually reach a stage of maximum entropy (a term coined by Clausius to describe the same process) and suffer a heat death. "Within a finite period of time to come," Thomson proclaimed, "the earth must be unfit for the habitation of men." many people considered the second law of thermodynamics some sort of ultimate judgement on the meaning of human history. The second law became a deep obsession of Henry Adams's. Maxwell's demon was invented to refute this version of the doctrine of necessity. The obvious objection to this hypothetical is that the demon is expending energy in opening and shutting the door (never mind picking out the right molecules); but that was not the point. what Maxwell was trying to show was that the second law of thermodynamics is only probabilistic. If the molecules inside a container are all moving at different velocities, we can only say that they will maintain a uniform temperature most of the time. There is always the infinitesimal chance that the molecules will sort themselves out spontaneously in such a way that the faster ones will all end up on one side of the container, thus raising the temperature and producing energy spontaneously. The moral, as Maxwell put it in a letter to a friend, is that "[t]he 2nd law of thermodynamics has the same degree of truth as the statement that if you throw a tumblerful of water out again." Physical laws are not absolutely precise. An analogy with Darwin's theory of natural selection is not hard to see. Most finches will be born with beaks inside the normal range of beak-size distributions - around the crest of the bell-shaped curve- but every once in a while a finch with an exceptionally long (or exceptionally broad, or exceptionally short) beak will appear, and if the environment (operating like Maxwell's demon) "selects" that characteristic by making it requisite for survival, an evolutionary development will Have occurred. The appears of the lucky bird is, for all intents and purposes, a matter of chance, "spontaneous", like drawing the card you want from a shuffled deck. Darwin was not a statistician; his mathematical aptitude was, in fact, quite small ("irrational angles produce a corresponding effect on my mind," he once confessed to an American follower). And the notion that nature "selects" in the self-consciously creative manner of Maxwell's gas demon probably reflects a slightly wishful interpretation of the theory of natural selection by chance variation but that theory was in many ways both the most profound and the most representative product of what, in 1904, John Theodore Metz, in his massive intellectual history of nineteenth-century Europe, named "the statistical century." Darwinism was a scandal to many Laplaceans. In the Laplacean worldview, randomness is only appearance; in the Darwinian, it's closer to a fact of nature - in some respects, it is the fact of nature. Herschel, the man who had helped introduce the Quetelet to British readers, wrote in 1850 that if all the literature of Europe were to perish and only Laplace's Systeme du monde and Essai sur les probabilities remained, "they would suffice to convey to the latest posterity an impression of the intellectual greatness of the age which could produce them, surpassing that afforded by all monuments antiquity has left us. " But when On the Origin of Species appeared, in 1859, he ridiculed Darwin's theory as "the law of higgeldy-piggelty." Which, in a sense, it is. What does it mean to say we "know" something in a world in which things happen higgeldy-piggelty? Virtually all of Charles Pierce's work - an enormous body of writing on logic, semiotics, mathematics, astronomy, metrology, physics, psychology, and philosophy, large portions of it unpublished or unfinished - was devoted to this question. His answer had many parts, and fitting them all together - in a form consistent with his belief in the existence of a personal God - became the burden of his life. But one part of his answer was that in a universe in which events are uncertain and perception is fallible, knowing cannot be a matter of an individual mind "mirroring" reality. Each mind reflects differently - even the same mind reflects differently at different moments - and in any cased reality doesn't stand still long enough to be accurately mirrored. Pierce's conclusion was that knowledge must therefore be social. It was his most important contribution to American thought, and when he recalled, late in life, how he came to formulate it, he described it - fittingly - as the product of a group. This was the conversation society he formed with William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and a few others in Cambridge in 1872, the group known as the Metaphysical Club. I only wish that I had more time to read The Metaphysical Club with a finer comb. I really found this book fascinating and thought that the writer's language was beautiful.

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