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 PRAGMATIC
INQUIRY
AND
RELIGIOUS
COMMUNITIES
Charles
Peirce,
Signs,
and
Inhabited
Experiments

Brandon
Daniel-
Hughes
Pragmatic Inquiry and Religious Communities
 Brandon Daniel-Hughes

Pragmatic Inquiry
and Religious
Communities
Charles Peirce, Signs, and Inhabited Experiments
Brandon Daniel-Hughes
John Abbott College
Sainte-Anne-De-Bellevue, QC, Canada

ISBN 978-3-319-94192-9    ISBN 978-3-319-94193-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94193-6

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For Suzanne and Wes
 Preface

This is not primarily a book about Charles Peirce but rather an extended
philosophical and theological hypothesis about the inquisitive character of
religious communities. However, many of the arguments that I make and
the ideas that I develop are Peircean, including those arguments that read
Peirce against Peirce or engage topics that Peirce himself did not treat in
depth. Additionally, many of my interlocutors are influenced by Peirce or
work in the pragmatic tradition that he inspired. It will come as no sur-
prise to readers familiar with Peirce, therefore, that both fallibilism and a
semiotic theory of religion are prominent themes in what follows. I do
not, however, claim to offer an orthodox reading of Peirce or to contrib-
ute to the growing body of literature on the development of his thought.
His troubled academic career and idiosyncratic publication record—to say
nothing of his enigmatic personality—do not readily yield a definitive pic-
ture. Thankfully, in the century since his death, an impressive array of
scholars has dedicated itself to interpreting, clarifying, and organizing his
scattered publications. Recent decades have also yielded a notable body of
work in multiple disciplines that has appropriated many of Peirce’s insights
in logic, metaphysics, and semiotics. Philosophers, theologians, sociolo-
gists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and theologians have all found
in Peirce’s corpus powerful tools for analysis, and my arguments are deeply
indebted to the work of these careful and creative scholars. I count this
book as a contribution to the growing body of literature that attempts to
do something with Peirce even as I expect that he would find much to
disapprove of in the pages that follow. Nevertheless, I am emboldened by

vii
viii PREFACE

his professed commitment to open-ended experimentation and his

­communitarian ethos to include Peirce’s name in the subtitle.
Charles Peirce was a prodigious thinker and, as with any great philoso-
pher, the force of his thought exerts a dangerous, almost gravitational pull
on those who study him. It has taken me years to loosen his grip on my
thought even as much of my thinking remains in close orbit. Peirce was
right about many things, but, as I argue, he was also quite often simultane-
ously vague, nowhere more so than when writing about religion. Vagueness
of the logical sort is often a positive good as it allows one to speak broadly
of a topic while allowing for contradictory specifications, which in turn
enables sensitivity to particularity and context. Peirce has several interesting
things to say about God, none of which is more suggestive than his claim
that “[t]he hypothesis of God is a peculiar one, in that it supposes an infi-
nitely incomprehensible object, although every hypothesis, as such, sup-
poses its object to be truly conceived in the hypothesis. This leaves the
hypothesis but one way of understanding itself; namely, as vague yet as true
so far as it is definite, and as continually tending to define itself more and
more, and without limit” (CP 6.466). As a sign available for interpretation,
“God” must be vague in many respects if it is to be true. However, I do not
deal much with God, at least in the first half of the book. Readers who are
unfamiliar with the available scholarship on Peirce and want to know more
about his theological ideas are advised to consult Michael L. Raposa’s
Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion, a text that has helped to shape my own think-
ing on Peirce for years (1989).
In the following pages, I focus my attention primarily on the constitu-
tion, sustenance, and criticism of communities of inquiry, religious com-
munities in particular. Peirce wrote extensively on communities of inquiry
but did not focus much on religious communities. His prescriptive writ-
ings on church communities have received some attention, but his exten-
sive and careful analysis of the logic of scientific inquiry and the critical
role of the community of scientists has rarely been mined to see if it might
yield insights into the unique character of religious communities (for
notable exceptions, see Anderson 2004 and 2012). When Peirce did com-
pare scientific and religious communities of inquiry he contrasted the fal-
libilism of science with the dysfunction and tenacity of theology (CP
6.428–451). His rhetorical point is well taken, despite his dismissive treat-
ment of theology as a discipline dominated by intractable institutions.
However, I am not interested in the historical failings of church theolo-
gians. My larger argument is that religious communities are—despite their
 PREFACE
   ix

occasional protests to the contrary—communities of inquiry and anyone

interested in the development and criticism of such communities is well
advised to pay attention to Peirce’s philosophy of inquiry.
The title of the book includes the three themes that will dominate my
arguments: inquiry, community, and religion. Peirce wrote extensively on
inquiry and community, and those discussions are intimately linked. His
writings on religion, however, are more enigmatic and difficult to connect
with his theory of an overarching community of inquiry. Peirce may not
have seen much point in trying to associate the habits and signs of the
world’s numerous religious traditions with his much vaguer religious
inquiries, but he is not alone in this frustration. Philosophy of Religion is
disappearing from the academy in part because it has struggled to speak
about religious themes broadly without ignoring the determinate qualities
of religious traditions that make them so interesting to other scholars of
religion. Thus, accusations of reductionism leveled at philosophers of reli-
gion have often been well-founded. What is frequently lacking is a logic of
vertical integration, an appreciation of how broad but vague conceptions
may help to explain less vague conceptions and phenomena without ignor-
ing or devaluing their unique qualitative depths. A vertically integrated
theory of religion needs both and it needs to consider all its conceptions,
those that are minimally and maximally vague and those that are minimally
and maximally broad, as fallible hypotheses that contribute to the larger
fallible theory. The present project aims toward vertical integration, hon-
oring the depths of various determinate religious communities of inquiry
even as it conceives of religious inquiry as a broader, vaguer shared under-
taking. In broad strokes, my argument begins with an analysis of Peirce’s
theory of inquiry, proceeds to a consideration of communities, their con-
tinuity and their necessary role in shaping inquiry, and ends with a consid-
eration of religious orientation and the ways in which it shapes communal
inquiries. Below, I touch briefly on each theme.

Inquiry
Inquiry is ubiquitous. By this I mean that life—interpretive engagement
with the world—is coextensive with inquiry. But as a vague category,
inquiry can be specified in multiple contradictory ways. It can be scientific
and non-scientific, as Peirce argued famously in The Fixation of Belief. It
can be conscious or unconscious, dormant or active, playful or controlled,
human or non-human, communal or individual, religious or non-reli-
x PREFACE

gious, and, most importantly for my argument, inquiry can operate on

many nested and parallel levels at once. As a scientist who worked for the
US Coastal and Geodetic Survey for almost thirty years, Peirce was par-
ticularly appreciative of the rigor and power of empirical scientific inquiry
even as he fought to explode naïve understandings of the logic of abduc-
tion (hypothesis generation) and induction. It is therefore understandable
that he, at times, focuses almost exclusively on the practice and logic of
“laboratory men.” When John Dewey characterized the movement begun
by Peirce, he described pragmatism as representing “what Mr. Peirce has
happily termed the ‘laboratory habit of mind’ extended into every area
where inquiry may fruitfully be carried on” (Dewey 1977, p. 100).
Peirce’s 1898 Cambridge lectures evince a much subtler understanding
of the breadth of inquiry. In these lectures he contrasts the almost stoic
attitude of scientific inquiry with the invested inquiry of those delving into
matters of vital importance. The peculiar circumstances and sarcasm of
these lectures make them difficult to interpret with respect to Peirce’s
exact sentiments, but the texts clearly demonstrate an understanding of
inquiry that extends far beyond the confines of the laboratory (Peirce
1992).1 To be clear, I follow Peirce in his assertion that most inquiry into
matters of existential and religious import is not scientific in a strict sense.
It may even be the case that religious inquiry may never be able to rise to
the levels of rigor, disinterestedness, and clarity required by the logic of
science. Scientific inquiry is an ideal, pursued aspirationally and rarely
attained even in the laboratory. This ideal is a recent discovery, a novelty,
so far as we know, in our universe. It is a heady brew, practiced by crea-
tures unaccustomed, unprepared, and perhaps unfitted for its demands
(see McCauley 2011). It is a new wine, often threatening to burst the old
wineskins into which it must be poured. Most inquiry, however, is not
scientific in the strictest sense. It is an ad hoc affair. We make due using
and revising the problematic brains, institutions, signs, and communities
that we have inherited through genetic and cultural transmission. Science
is the thin film that floats atop the much deeper, more ancient sea of
emotion-driven, inefficient, tenacious, and authoritative inquiry. It is from
this tangled and confused mass of living inquiry that science has slowly
and halting begun to emerge. In this sense, Peirce’s notion of science is
profoundly context sensitive. It is an endeavor undertaken by Homo sapi-
ens with all our failings and fortes.
However, while Peirce provides a nuanced understanding of science as
an emergent phenomenon, one must be careful not to take the late m ­ odern
 PREFACE
   xi

bait that would construe science as just another form of human discourse.
Science is a normative method of discovery, neither because it rests on firm
foundations nor because it offers first or final principles, nor even because
it has proven useful in the past, but because it points away from itself and
toward reality as a normative measure. In the words of James Hoopes, sci-
ence is genuinely authoritative not because the community itself is expert
but rather because “reality, not some expert, is the final arbiter of com-
munity opinion” (1998). At its finest, science is a form of inquiry that aims
to encounter the ragged edges of reality with minimal mediation and in
turn to signify reality with minimal distortion. This characterization of sci-
ence is likely to elicit at least two broad objections. First, one may object
to the notion that reality may be directly encountered by arguing, not
incorrectly, that all of our transactions with reality are interpretive and thus
mediated by bodies, cultures, brains, languages, and purposes. Second,
one may object, again not incorrectly, that reality cannot be innocently
presented and that all presentation is via mediating signs. Rather than
argue directly against either of these objections, I argue with Peirce that
neither objection necessarily leads away from a robust form of realism.
Brute encounters with reality (dyadic) must be interpreted (triadic) if they
are to yield meaningful engagements, and reality cannot be innocently
mirrored (dyadic) if a real engagement is to be significant (triadic). Clifford
Geertz characterized commonsense as deriving its authority from its claim
“that it presents reality neat” (1975, p. 8). Normative science works in the
opposite direction, earning trust through transparency, admitting its inter-
pretive function, exposing itself to repeated corrective encounters, and
consciously constructing its claims as fallible hypotheses. Peirce was well
schooled in the Kantian critical tradition and he anticipated Rorty’s criti-
cisms of naïve representation. Nevertheless, as a fallibilist and a realist he
was emboldened to write the following:

Such is the method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis, restated in more

familiar language, is this: There are Real things, whose characters are entirely
independent of our opinions about them […] and any man, if he have suf-
ficient experience and he reason enough about it, will be led to the one True
conclusion. The new conception here involved is that of Reality. (CP 5.384)

The practice of inquiry, especially scientific inquiry, and a strong notion of

realism mutually reinforce one another.
While the scientific ideal represents the pinnacle of controlled inquiry,
it does not exhaust the category. Too little has been made of other forms
xii PREFACE

of inquiry that, while not as disciplined, transparent, or efficient as science,

still contribute to bettering our habitual engagements with the world. In
arguing that inquiry is ubiquitous, I argue that all manner of living engage-
ments are at least minimally inquisitive. This includes even our most con-
servative habits and institutions. It may seem farfetched to conceive of
religious participation as a form of inquiry, though I make the case for
taking that claim literally. If, however, readers find the hypothesis too
problematic to entertain seriously, then they should feel free to begin
reading while taking it only as a guiding metaphor. What insights might be
gained by imagining religious communities as communities of inquiry?
How might we better come to appreciate the dynamic interactions of
doubt, belief, and habitual action by analyzing them through the lens of
living inquiry? Put simply, it is too easy and too common to conceive of
religious participation and religious communities as retrograde phenom-
ena, habitual ways of organizing and being in the world that stymie genu-
ine inquiry and progress through the promotion of conservative habits
and the preservation of privileged social forms and ideas. Religion cer-
tainly can, and often does, retard social experimentation and progress. But
is also can, and often has, contributed to the overthrow of narrow interests
and outworn habitual forms. Modern secular narratives of our species
often portray religious participation and communities as hurdles that gen-
uine inquiry must overcome. My argument is that religion has a vital role
to play in the story of human inquiry, but that story can only be told if we
widen the conception of inquiry to include, not just empirical science, but
other forms of inquisitive engagement. William James explored a similar
expansion in his work on radical empiricism (James 1976). Peirce’s phi-
losophy of inquiry, I argue, offers an even more promising point of depar-
ture for a pragmatic exploration of the contributions of religion.2

Community
My central hypothesis is that religious communities can be profitably
explored as communities of inquiry, and as such, we do well to pay close
attention to the ways in which these communities organize themselves to
court and manage corrective encounters with reality. Like scientific com-
munities, religious communities are always involved in interpretive engage-
ments with and representations of the real world. But religion is not science.
Following Peirce, I argue that religion and science are significantly differ-
ent not because religion has privileged access to supernatural revelation,
 PREFACE
   xiii

nor because religion and science treat mutually exclusive s­ubject matter.
I hope that my argument has been purged of any vestiges of the “non-
overlapping magisteria” model of understanding the relationship between
religion and science. Rather, religious and scientific communities of inquiry
occupy opposite ends of two separate but related continua: a continuum of
risk and a continuum of control. I explore these continua in some depth,
but at the outset it is important to recognize that as phenomena continu-
ous with one another, religion and science overlap considerably in their
methods, concerns, and subject matter. I am not interested in carving out
territories or defining boundaries except where necessary for clarity’s sake.
Instead I aim better to understand, first, the ways in which religious com-
munities inquire; second, the unique aims and limitations of explicitly reli-
gious communities of inquiry; third, the ways in which venerable religious
traditions exploit those limitations; and, fourth, the indispensability of reli-
gious communities for truly interpreting and better engaging the world.
Peirce’s conceptions of inquiry, community, and “the community of
inquiry” are all vague, meaning that they allow for further contradictory
determinate specifications. His notions of scientific inquiry and the scien-
tific community are both determinate specifications that do not exhaust the
vaguer conceptions. Religious inquiry and religious communities are also
determinate specifications of these same vague concepts. One of the most
important differences between the scientific community and religious com-
munities involves the different ways in which their forms of communal
organization reciprocally effect their different attitudes toward existential
risk and their capacity for self-control. Different inquisitive communities,
like different academic fields, evolve diverse forms of communal organiza-
tion to better exploit varying kinds of corrective feedback (see Wildman
2010). It would be naïve to suggest that content dictates form or that form
dictates content. Rather, communal form and content are interdependent.
Inquiry is always a communal undertaking and communities are constantly
evolving as they interpretively engage their subject matter. Much of what I
argue about the constitution of religious communities, therefore, pertains
to a religious communal ideal, just as much of Peirce’s work on the scien-
tific community trades in ideal forms of communal organization. I aim
throughout to note the differences between actual religious communities
and the communal ideals that provide an important normative measure.
One of the pressing questions that drives communal inquiry is how best to
inquire. This leads the most self-aware communities of inquiry restlessly to
seek self-improvement. However, ­religious communities of inquiry may be
xiv PREFACE

unique insofar as they have r­ eason to hide their own inquisitive character,
even from themselves. Arguing for my thesis is complicated by the self-
presentation of the communities I aim to describe. Regardless, religious
communities inquire and we should not be put off from analyzing their
inquisitive character by the fact that they may present their organizational
forms and beliefs as final and fixed.
My argument regarding communities is made more complex because it
includes the hypothesis that communities are not discrete phenomena. They
are continuous with larger enveloping communities, with neighboring com-
munities, and with their constituent components. Any community complex
enough to be interesting is apt to be vague and to belong to even vaguer
communities. The same may, and will, be argued regarding individual reli-
gious participants. No individual person is a discrete unit. She is, rather, a
relatively tightly coordinated community of habits and signs. The same is
true of the communities to which she belongs and contributes. Communities
of inquiry are, therefore, always engaged in a multitude inquiries, only some
of which are tightly organized and shared by the community at large. It is
the shared habits of inquisitive engagement, historically and semiotically
mediated, that mark the difference between mere collectives and genuine
communities, while differences between genuine communities are a prod-
uct of their diverse habitual beliefs, actions, and signs.

Religion
The central transition in my argument occurs when it moves from devel-
oping theories of inquiry and community to considering religious com-
munities of inquiry. Religious inquiry is unique in that its primary referent
or object is nothing and cannot be engaged. It offers no corrective feed-
back. Put crassly, religion cannot “get it right” because there is no-thing
to get. It can only “get it wrong.” Thankfully, as the entire history of
human inquiry has demonstrated, there is great merit in “getting it wrong”
so long as inquisitive failures are self-consciously acknowledged and work-
ing solutions and signs are not confused with the reality they aim to sig-
nify. Therefore, while I explore Peirce’s work on signs throughout the
text, I delve most deeply into an examination of semiotics as I explore the
dynamics of religious inquiry and engagement.
Perhaps no other area of Peirce’s work has captured the interest of both
philosophers and the broader academy more than his classification of signs
and his triadic theory of interpretation. Peirce identifies three categories of
 PREFACE
   xv

signs: icons (picturing signs), indices (orienting signs), and symbols

­(conventional signs). Additionally, whereas many theories of interpretation
wrestle with the relationships between signs and the objects signified (dyadic
analysis), Peirce offers a more nuanced triadic theory of interpretation that
explores the relationships between signs, objects signified, and interpretants.
Interpretation is a dynamic process that involves a determinate change in
relations between these three components so that an object has a real effect
on an interpretant by way of a sign. Peirce’s theory of semiotic interpreta-
tion is remarkably complex and the scholarly literature dealing with its com-
plexities continues to grow at a prodigious rate. Nevertheless, I will risk an
abbreviated hypothesis here with a promise to flesh out the claim in later
chapters. By calling attention to the neglected role of the interpretant,
Peirce clarifies the manner in which reality may be truly engaged through
signs and helps to clarify many frustrating theological debates about lan-
guage and iconoclasm. Such clarity, however, comes at a significant price.
Religious communities claim to signify Ultimacy even as, at their most
sophisticated levels, they admit the limitations of their own signs. They
promise to facilitate engagements with Ultimacy that are endlessly rich
and productive. This promise is a useful fiction that involves a subtle form
of misdirection that is intimately tied to the logic of indexical signification.
Ultimacy cannot be engaged, only encountered, but the most profound
religious signs trade on interpreting these encounters as opportunities for
further inquisitive engagement. The best networks of religious signs do
not lie, but they do allow themselves to be didactically misinterpreted so
that religious participants may adopt and inhabit the sign networks even as
the networks themselves are constantly evolving. Successful religious signs
yield richer engagements, not with Ultimacy but with the real values of the
determinate universe. Thus, the recurrent impulse to signify Ultimacy, a
semiotic gambit destined to fail, may occasion unanticipated fruits.
It would be a mistake, however, to interpret religious communities as
singly engaged in the attempt to describe Ultimacy. Religious participa-
tion, as the social-scientific study of religions reminds us, is always a way of
constructing, engaging, and inhabiting the world. Pragmatism, however,
reminds us of the close connection between habitual action and belief.
The interruption of our habits sometimes leads us to doubt certain propo-
sitions that we formerly believed, but more often it leads to the reconsid-
eration and reform of habits of action, including seemingly profane habits
that have no obvious religious significance. Inquiry, for pragmatists, is less
often about describing the world well and more often about living better
xvi PREFACE

within it. It aims at sustainable harmonious habitual interaction. Accurate

description is an occasional side effect. A vertically integrated theory of
religious communities of inquiry must, therefore, make sense of both the
conservative and the progressive impulses, the concomitant drives to pre-
serve and to improve our habits of action. Communities strive to conserve
their valuable habits of action. They become actively inquisitive when they
seek to improve those habits in response to problematic encounters or
potential rewards. Religious communities of inquiry are characterized
both by their conservative tendency to preserve signs and habits that have
proven valuable in the past and by their persistent cultivation of signs that
threaten to upend and relativize those same habitual signs and actions.
This is not a contradiction. A religious community of inquiry becomes a
venerable tradition when it recognizes that its most important habits,
those most worthy of conservation, are its habits of cultivating doubt and,
thereby, sustaining inquiry in the face of apparent success, stability, and
certainty.
There are religious communities that minimally inquire. There are com-
munities of inquiry that are minimally religious. I argue that religious com-
munities of inquiry are most religious when they inquire with maximal
self-awareness and that they are most inquisitive when they maximally exploit
religion’s potential perpetually to generate doubt. Encounters with Ultimacy
have the utmost potential to generate doubt and shock us out of our habitual
beliefs and actions. Insofar as religious traditions act as repositories of signs
with the potential to foster such encounters, they have an invaluable role to
play in advancing inquiry’s search for harmony. Therefore, while my argu-
ment turns in later chapters to Peirce’s Pragmaticism, it remains deeply tied
to pragmatic concerns with living well and living better.
The short opening chapter presents a Peircean theory of inquiry that,
while deeply indebted to formulations of belief, doubt, and inquiry that
Peirce developed throughout his career, expands on these in important
ways. After reviewing Peirce’s germinal conceptions in Sect. 1.1, the sec-
ond section engages his portrayal of the scientific fixation of belief.
However, as a practicing scientist Peirce knew not to confuse the scien-
tific ideal with the actual behavior of working scientists. This key distinc-
tion has important implications for the analysis of non-scientific forms of
inquiry. Section 1.3 proposes and examines a novel implication of
Peirce’s theory of inquiry, the notion that many of the most significant
hypotheses cannot merely be entertained intellectually or experimentally
within the confines of controlled settings. Rather, they must be embodied
 PREFACE
   xvii

or ­inhabited as living experiments. Here a Peircean theory of inquiry has

much to learn from and contribute to the sociology of knowledge.
Section 1.4 concludes the chapter with a provocative hypothesis that
shapes the rest of the book, the claim that inquiry is a ubiquitous phe-
nomenon. Pursuing this hypothesis, I argue that even extremely com-
plex forms of human communal behavior, including participation in
traditional religious communities, might be profitably understood as
large-scale extended experimental inquiries.
Chapter 2 expands on the Peircean theory of inquiry but focuses on the
dynamics of hypothesis correction. It begins with a close look at Peirce’s
famous first rule of reason, “do not block the way of inquiry.” If, pursuant
to the central claim of Chap. 1, inquiry is truly ubiquitous, then following
this rule will have surprising implications for both self-consciously inquisi-
tive academics and scientists and inquisitive agents engaged in mundane
habitual activities. If all activities are experimental to some degree then the
scientific pursuit of corrective feedback will have important analogues in
less controlled forms of inquiry that take place outside of laboratory con-
texts. In “vital matters,” Peirce’s terminology for experiments that existen-
tially involve entire communities of inquiry, the very feedback potential
that scientific experimentation seeks to exploit may loom as a threatening
specter. Thus, managing a community’s exposure to corrective feedback
becomes more than a question of proper method. It is a matter of self-
preservation. Here I analyze different forms of inquisitive engagement
along a continuum of risk. Section 2.3 explores the conservative implica-
tions of a theory of inquiry in vital matters and argues for regarding self-
control as a relevant variable alongside existential risk. Considering risk and
self-control together yields four different strategies for maximally exploit-
ing potentially corrective feedback while protecting communities of inquiry.
Religious, political, and ethical experiments are all relatively risky endeavors
that may be undertaken with varying levels of self-control. Peirce explored
similar questions as he developed a theory of Critical Commonsense, and I
expand this conception to include living communal religious experiments.3
The fourth section explores the continuum of experimental self-control
and entertains the possibility of both minimally and maximally controlled
ethical and religious experiments. I examine the inherent dangers of rash
experimentation in existentially vital matters, not only to the experimenters
but more importantly to the continuation of inquiry. At the heart of
Peirce’s recommendation of conservative caution in vital matters is a deep
concern for the progressive project of sustaining a flourishing community
xviii PREFACE

of inquiry. Thus, the first rule of reason is often best realized through
experimental deference to instinct and tradition. This conservative com-
mendation has surprising implications that reach into the constitution and
self-maintenance of religious communities.
While the first two chapters develop aspects of a Peircean theory of
inquiry, the third chapter turns to consider the character of communities
of inquiry. The entire chapter engages Peirce’s work on questions upon
which there is much less scholarly consensus and, therefore, engages more
broadly with other scholars who have developed Peirce’s thought in cre-
ative directions. The chapter’s central hypothesis is that neither selves nor
communities are simple, discrete entities. Rather, following Peirce’s the-
ory of synechism (continuity), the first section examines selves as commu-
nities of relatively tightly coordinated habits, while the second section
explores a personal conception of communities. Put simply, selves and
communities are continua that include component continua and are com-
ponents of still others. Thus, the first two sections develop a communal
conception of the selves and a personal conception of communities that
characterize both selves and communities as loci of interpretive, inquisitive
engagement. Neither selves nor communities of selves are simple collec-
tions of habits, however, and I introduce Peirce’s theory of signs to explain
how communities achieve different levels of integrative coordination. The
third section argues that inquiry is best understood as a process of adapt-
ing, coordinating, and harmonizing one’s components, one’s communi-
ties and oneself to other selves, communities, and components. This
section is pivotal, for the remainder of the book hangs on whether one
may plausibly conceive of inquiry as a process of habit coordination.
Section 3.4 delves more deeply into a Peircean triadic theory of signs and
wrestles with the question of how habits may be coordinated when they
are not already adequately signified or known. Turning again to the notion
of corrective feedback, this time with an emphasis on semiotic correction,
I explore the unique potential of indexical signs to orient communities of
inquiry toward the unknown and unhabituated.
Chapter 4 briefly interrupts the argumentative cadence of the book to
consolidate the working conceptions of continuity, inquiry, and community
into a sketched philosophical anthropology. The first three sections charac-
terize inquisitive engagement as the simultaneous pursuit of three ends,
personal integration, communal coordination, and cosmic harmony. At
each level, inquiry is characterized both broadly and vaguely with the aim of
capturing much of what is important without overdetermining the relevant
 PREFACE
   xix

conceptions. The presentation may imply a hierarchical o ­ rganization of

inquiry, but no such hierarchy is intended. Rather, the chapter stresses the
simultaneity and reciprocity of inquiry at all three levels. The fourth section,
however, introduces a new religious theme, ultimate orientation, and argues
for including ultimate orientation among the relevant aims of inquisitive
engagement. Far from arguing that ultimate orientation is a necessary com-
ponent of inquisitive engagement, the religious hypothesis contends only
that ultimate orientation is a genuine possibility and that cultivating habits
and signs of ultimate orientation may further all the other aims of inquiry in
important respects. At present, ultimate orientation seems to be an option
available only to human inquirers since it requires enormous cognitive,
imaginative, and semiotic sophistication. If human religiosity may be exhaus-
tively analyzed without reference to ultimate orientation, then the remain-
der of the book’s arguments are invalid. If, however, the persistence of human
attempts to signify Ultimacy, regardless of the literal truth or adequacy of
those signs, really functions to alter the efficacy and efficiency of inquiry,
then any examination of religious communities of inquiry must wrestle with
the meaning of such attempts.
Chapter 5 resumes the argumentative thread and contends that inquiry
is both a ubiquitous and communal phenomenon. While traditional com-
munities are conservative in many ways, Sect. 5.1 argues that they also play
an invaluable enabling role in inquiry. Returning to the theme of Chap. 1,
I argue that relatively stable traditions of inquiry are best understood as
fallible inhabited experiments and embodied hypotheses. As such, their
networks of signs and habitual modes of engagement represent vital, large-
scale, multigenerational lines of invested inquiry. Here I develop an impor-
tant distinction between dormant and active inquiry that helps to explain
the inquisitive character of even the most habituated conservative commu-
nities. The social and existential security religious communities promise,
and to some extent provide, is only ever provisional, but as continuous lines
of experimentation they offer a wealth of resources for pursuing further
avenues of inquiry within their boundaries and a rich store of semiotic
resources for engaging the world more deeply than most participants ever
could on their own. Section 5.2 reexamines themes from Chap. 2 with a
special focus on the ways in which tradition and community contribute to
the efficiency of inquiry. Here I expand upon Peirce’s treatment of senti-
ment, commonsense, and instinctual habits and consider communally
mediated habits or dispositions as similarly fertile loci of experimental
engagement. While inquisitively and experimentally adopting such signs
xx PREFACE

and habits is no guarantee of successful engagement in either the short or

long run, such an approach promises to be more efficient at supporting
progressive inquiry than the alternative. The argument is applicable both to
religious and non-religious communities but is particularly relevant when
inquiry involves matters of existential import and risk. In Sect. 5.3 I pivot
to an explicit consideration of religious communities of inquiry, especially
enduring, traditional, large-scale religious communities. Venerable reli-
gious traditions of inquiry, I argue, are best understood as deeply invested
experimental explorations of the value of engaging the world with a suite
of culturally mediated habits and signs. The choice to participate in such
communities, at least for adults in pluralistic societies, is often caricatured
as a decision to forgo inquiry. Such participation is better understood as
participation in a particular kind of inquiry. Venerable religious traditions
cultivate and conserve a variety of vague signs, rituals, myths, and habits for
engaging the world. The vagueness of the signs, I argue, enables relatively
rich inquiry and flexible engagement within a multitude of contexts.
Section 5.4 argues that religious traditions also become venerable through
developing interpretive habits and signs that encourage communal self-
correction and self-reform through disciplines of self-control. Together
Sects. 5.3 and 5.4 make a case for participation in venerable traditions as a
variety of controlled inquiry into vital matters and argue that such partici-
pation often enables individuals to inquire both more widely and more
deeply than they could without such communal participation.
Chapter 6 takes up the theme of interpretive engagement and examines
each of the components of religious signs in turn. Section 6.1 explores the
material signs of religious communities and introduces a conception of
religious participation that I label “Semiotic Orthodoxy.” Here I argue
that belonging to a religious community entails experimentally inhabiting
the tradition’s sign networks. Further, robust participation includes an
obligation to acknowledge the brokenness of a community’s signs for
Ultimacy and to respond inquisitively. Section 6.2 addresses the object of
religious signs and develops a theory of how such signs might be true
despite the vacuity of Ultimacy. Because Ultimacy proffers no corrective
feedback, signs of Ultimacy, if they are to be meaningfully true, cannot
mirror their object. They are true only insofar as they yield living indices
that engender inquisitive religious interpretants. Therefore, Sect. 6.3 pur-
sues the character of religious interpretants and argues that the final inter-
pretant of genuinely religious signs is continuous active inquiry. This
argument requires revisiting the distinction between active and dormant
inquiry, raised in Chap. 5. Religious interpretants are actively inquisitive
 PREFACE
   xxi

and are motivated, in part, by the brokenness and inadequacy of their

material signs for Ultimacy. Active inquiry may, thereby, be characterized
as pious, humble, and hopeful insofar as it pursues more harmonious
engagements even as it recognizes the mediating role of tradition and
signs. The final section addresses the didactic role of religious communi-
ties and their relationship to Pragmaticism and the intentional cultivation
of encounters that might generate doubt and lead to the reformation of
communal semiotic habits. The best argument for participating in a vener-
able religious tradition is that such participation affords opportunities and
supports semiotic practices that awaken adepts to the impossibility of ade-
quately signifying Ultimacy. The inevitable failure of all such attempts
alerts participants to the ultimate precarity of determinate reality and
encourages deeper inquisitive explorations of the wider community of
being. Religion is a semiotic and social technology for sustaining commu-
nal habits, but it is also a means of generating doubts and perpetuating
inquiry. These are, I argue, complementary moments in the extended life
of religious communities of inquiry.

Sainte-Anne-De-Bellevue Brandon Daniel-Hughes

QC, Canada

Notes
1. These lectures are published in full in (Peirce 1992) but important sections
may also be found in (CP 1.616–677, 6.185–237, and 7.468–517).
2. Where James focused his attention on experience as the ground of cogni-
tion, Peirce was more interested in experience as a product of interpretively
engaging the world and inquiry as a process of meliorating these interpretive
engagements. See Chap. 3, “Radical Empiricism in Religious Perspective,”
pp. 83–112 of (Frankenberry 1987) for a helpful interpretation of James on
religious experience.
3. While Peirce often hyphenated “common-sense” and its cognates, I use
“commonsense” throughout this text except in direct quotations.

References
Anderson, Douglas R. 2004. Peirce’s Common Sense Marriage of Religion and
Science. In The Cambridge Companion to Peirce, ed. Cheryl Misak, 175–192.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
xxii PREFACE

Anderson, Douglas R. 2012. The Pragmatic Importance of Peirce’s Religious

Writings. In Conversations on Peirce: Reals and Ideals, ed. Douglas R. Anderson
and Carl R. Hausman, 149–165. New York: Fordham University Press.
Dewey, John. 1977. The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 4, 1899–1924, ed. Jo
Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press.
Frankenberry, Nancy. 1987. Religion and Radical Empiricism. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1975. Common Sense as a Cultural System. The Antioch Review
33(1): 5–26.
Hoopes, James. 1998. Community Denied: The Wrong Turn of Pragmatic
Liberalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
James, William. 1976. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
McCauley, Robert N. 2011. Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931–58. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce,
ed. Arthur W. Burks, C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, 8 vols. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1992. Reasoning and the Logic of Things: Cambridge
Conference Lectures of 1898, ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Raposa, Michael. 1989. Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Wildman, Wesley. 2010. Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative
Inquiry: Envisioning a Future for the Philosophy of Religion. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
 Acknowledgments

My mother and father top the list of people to whom I owe thanks, not
only because they were there first but because they have always been such
active and loving parents. As the contents of this book demonstrate, their
lifelong commitment to both their religious community and education
were and continue to be sources of inspiration for me, and I trust that they
will read every last word of what follows!
I am delighted to have an opportunity to thank many colleagues and
mentors who have shown tremendous patience with me over the years. I
was exceptionally fortunate to have both Robert Cummings Neville and
Wesley Wildman as teachers and mentors during my doctorate at Boston
University and continue to learn from them every day. They are not only
prolific and insightful scholars but genuinely gracious people whose lives
and deeds speak as loudly as their numerous publications. I was also lucky
during my early years as a graduate student to become fast friends with
Nathaniel Barrett. We have been arguing about naturalism and pragma-
tism for going on twenty years and have developed a shared philosophical
shorthand that allows for both mutual understanding and incisive criti-
cism. This book is, in large part, the fruit of our years of mutual provoca-
tion and support. In 2014, on the recommendation of these three friends,
I attended my first meeting of the Institute for American Religious and
Philosophical Thought and found there a community of scholars that has
proven invaluable to me in assembling this manuscript. There I met
Michael Raposa whose work on Peirce’s philosophy of religion continues
to set the standard for scholarship in the field. I also came to know Gary
Slater, David Rohr, and Robert Smid, all of whom have been stimulating

xxiii
xxiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

conversation partners and shared helpful feedback on the manuscript and

its arguments. I also extend my appreciation to the anonymous reviewers
who provided the kind of “corrective feedback” that I write about at
length in the text. My editors at Palgrave Macmillan were attentive and
thorough and I am thankful for their guidance. Additionally, I must thank
my one-time office mate and now dean Roger Haughey, a fellow Sox and
Pats fan, who has not only supported my efforts to complete this project
but also made living in a hockey town more bearable.
Finally, when my wife published her first book she joked that her
acknowledgments should include a subsection entitled “accusations.”
Well, I concur and close by accusing both Carly Daniel-Hughes and our
son Silas of delaying the completion of this text. Were the two of them not
such constant sources of joyful distraction, I would be a much more effi-
cient writer, though I wager that the task would have been a much drearier
affair. I am not a naturally sanguine person and credit the two of them
with nurturing my latent optimism, and I hope that some of the joy they
give me can be felt in these pages. I am tremendously lucky to be married
to such a patient woman and gifted scholar and father to such precocious
young man.
 Contents

1 Inquiry and Living Hypotheses   1

2 Correction: A Double-Edged Sword  25

3 Selves, Communities, and Signs  55

4 Anthropology and the Religious Hypothesis 101

5 Religion and Traditions of Inquiry 129

6 Religion as Communal Inquiry 181

Afterword 231

Bibliography 235

Index 243

xxv
 Note on Abbreviations

Charles Sanders Peirce was a prodigious writer but accessing his works
presents a challenge. Most of his work was not published during his life-
time and, while several collections of his writing have been published
since, each is incomplete. The present volume uses the following abbrevia-
tion and conventions for referencing his work.
CP, Charles Sanders Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders
Peirce, vols. I–VI., ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1931–1935) and vols. VII–
VIII., ed. Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1958). References follow the convention of noting vol-
ume and paragraph number within parentheses. Read (CP 6.466) as vol-
ume 6, paragraph 466. References to all works by Peirce not included in
this collection are cited separately.

xxvii
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 The continuum of inquisitive risk 32

Fig. 2.2 The continua of inquisitive risk and inquisitive control 37
Fig. 2.3 Nested layers of inquisitive self-control 47

xxix
 CHAPTER 1

Inquiry and Living Hypotheses

Between November 1877 and January 1878, Popular Science Monthly

published two essays by Peirce, The Fixation of Belief and How to Make
Our Ideas Clear, which would become perhaps his most famous and
anthologized works. They were the first of six essays known collectively as
the Illustrations of the Logic of Science, and we know that Peirce himself
valued the essays immensely as he planned to include them as chapters in
several projected books on logic. The essays are famous, in part, because
their portrayal of invested inquiry contrasts so starkly with the antiseptic
prescriptions of rationalists like Descartes. Inquiry, for Peirce, is a living
practice, a “struggle to attain a state of belief,” not an intellectual affair
(CP 5.374).1 Certainly there are problems with the circumscription of
inquiry in these works, and I examine these shortcomings later in the
chapter, but the first essay in particular serves as a convenient introduction
to many of the most important and attractive themes of Peirce’s philoso-
phy of inquiry. Belief, habit, doubt, reality, truth, fallibilism, and science
are all given the formulations to which Peirce will return continuously
throughout his career. The essay contains two distinct but related move-
ments that are treated separately in the two following sections. The first
movement deals with inquiry generally and formulates the causes and ends
of inquiry. The second movement examines several methods of inquiry
and compares their relative efficacy, highlighting the fecundity of science.
In Sects. 1.3 and 1.4, I argue that despite his innovative approach, Peirce
did not push his theory of inquiry far enough in these early works.

© The Author(s) 2018 1

B. Daniel-Hughes, Pragmatic Inquiry and Religious Communities,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94193-6_1
2 B. DANIEL-HUGHES

The Fixation of Belief still treats inquiry as an action undertaken by i­ ndividuals.

In Sect. 1.3 I argue that a more robust conception of a continuum of inquiry
is needed, a conception that makes room for temporally extended processes
of hypothesis adoption and testing. In Sect. 1.4 I argue for a working theory
of inquiry that is strengthened by a more refined conception of doubt and a
broader appreciation of the diverse manifestations of inquiry. While Peirce’s
early conceptions of belief, doubt, and inquiry offer many helpful insights,
they paint a too stark contrast between doubt and belief. True, inquiry is the
key conceptual link between doubt and belief, but inquiry is often an
extended process that may include moments of tentatively exploring promis-
ing hypotheses, moments of half-­doubt and partial belief, as well as occasions
in which hypotheses are entertained as possibilities by an entire community
even as they are only embodied and actively tested by a portion of that com-
munity. Doubt, Peirce seems to suggest in these early essays, is always an
irritant to be exterminated. But, at least in some communities, it may also be
understood as a positive good to be sought. In short, Peirce’s early portrayal
of belief, doubt, and inquiry is invaluable, but as a philosophical corrective it
paints too ideal a picture of actual communities of inquiry, including the
scientific community. Outlining and then criticizing this picture will clarify
the need for a more nuanced theory, one that takes seriously the mediating
role of communal habits and signs in even the most self-controlled commu-
nities of inquiry.
To these ends, this short chapter introduces the reader who is not already
familiar with Peirce to the broad outlines of his theory of inquiry but also
begins a process of appreciative criticism. Hypotheses are not merely ideas
that inquirers entertain, they are often the habits of life that characterize
both individual inquirers and entire communities of inquiry. In these cases,
the distinction between a hypothesis tested and a hypothesis lived disap-
pears, and both believers and doubters find themselves questioning, not
merely what to think but how to go on. Peirce’s theory of inquiry allows us
to think more clearly not only about the logic of inquiry and the pursuit of
knowledge but also about the constitution and maintenance of our indi-
vidual and communal lives as living processes of exploration and reform.

1.1   Peirce’s Early Portrayal of Belief,

Doubt, and Inquiry
Peirce’s theory of inquiry has been abbreviated as the belief-doubt model
or, as Elizabeth F. Cooke has labeled it, the “belief-doubt-belief model”
of inquiry (2006, p. 21–23). This is a helpful place to begin, for Cooke’s
 INQUIRY AND LIVING HYPOTHESES 3

formulation calls attention to the cyclical nature of inquiry and the desire
of all inquirers to return to a state of habitual belief. This characterization
also establishes a contrast with modernist models of inquiry that claim to
begin with doubt so as to arrive at assured belief. What is immediately
striking is the degree to which Peirce is unbothered by our holding to a
welter of unexamined, unclear, and indistinct beliefs. In fact, the exis-
tence of problematic beliefs is a prerequisite for doubt and inquiry. We
are content, Peirce suggests, with exactly those beliefs we happen to have
and most of us find this is “a calm and satisfactory state which we do not
wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else” (CP 5.372). One
should take care, however, to avoid confusing belief with assenting to a
proposition. To say that one believes is to say that one “shall behave in a
certain way, when the occasion arises” (CP 5.373). In How to Make Our
Ideas Clear, Peirce goes further, “[w]e have seen that it [belief] has just
three properties: First, it is something that we are aware of; second, it
appeases the irritation of doubt; and, third, it involves the establishment
in our nature of a rule of action, or, say for short, a habit.” By tethering
belief to habits of action, Peirce acknowledges the embeddedness of
thought in the bio-cultural nexus and rejects any kind of mind-body
dualism. “[T]hought is essentially an action,” he argues; thus, the criti-
cism and fixation of our beliefs will necessarily involve our feelings, bod-
ies, and social interactions (CP 5.397). This conception of belief as the
establishment of a general habit will prove to be invaluable to the analyses
to come.
A belief is not a proposition, nor mere assent to a proposition. A belief
is an active habit of an actor in a particular environment. Here Cooke
again gets sharply to the point. Because belief occurs in a particular envi-
ronment, “[t]he environment, including its social and natural aspects,
influences what the individual sees or experiences as doubt” (2006,
p. 22). If belief is understood as a state of “fit” between the habits of an
actor and her environment, then doubt is best understood as an inter-
ruption of those habits. The lack of fit between environment and habit is
a stimulating irritant that initiates a cascade of significant events. The
irritation of doubt may lead to the conscious recognition of previously
unconscious routines so that one becomes aware of a belief where previ-
ously there was only blind habit. But most importantly, for Peirce,
“[t]he irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief.”
Peirce terms this struggle “inquiry” (CP 5.374). At its inception, inquiry
is not a pursuit of truth. Rather, it is a basic response to a stimulus.
Peirce writes:
Another random document with
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 THE “LAURENTIC” ON THE STOCKS.
From a Photograph. By permission of Messrs. Harland & Wolff.

Two interesting new ships were commissioned in 1909 by the

White Star Line, for the Liverpool-Quebec service, named
respectively the Laurentic and Megantic. An illustration, showing the
former on the stocks at Harland and Wolff’s yard, Belfast, is given
opposite page 210. The Laurentic and Megantic are, as to hulls,
sister ships, and each has a tonnage of 14,900, thus being among
the largest steamers in the Canadian trade. But whilst the latter is a
twin-screw ship propelled by reciprocating engines, the former has
three screws and a combination of reciprocating engines and a low-
pressure turbine, being the first large passenger steamship to be
designed with this ultra-modern method. Each of the “wing”
propellers is driven by four-crank triple balanced engines, the central
propeller, however, being driven by the turbine. The object aimed at
by this novel hybrid method was to retain the advantages of the
carefully balanced reciprocating engines, but at the same time to
obtain the benefit of the further expansion of steam in a low-pressure
turbine, without having to employ a turbine specially for going astern.
The reciprocating engines of the Laurentic are adequate for
manœuvring in and out of port, and for going astern, since they
develop more than three-quarters of the total combined horse-power.
This steamship, single-funnelled and two-masted, measures 565 feet
in length, and 67 feet 4 inches in width, and besides having
accommodation for 1,690 passengers, carries a large quantity of
cargo. Like many other big steamships that we have noted in the
course of our story, she has a double cellular-bottom which extends
the whole length of the ship, being specially strengthened under the
engines. Her nine bulkheads divide her up into ten water-tight
compartments. It will be noticed that the rudder has gone back to the
ordinary type common before the introduction of the balance
method. Notice, too, that the blades of the propeller are each bolted
to the shaft, and that the latter terminates in a conical shape now so
common on screw-ships. This is called the “boss,” and was invented
by Robert Griffiths in 1849. It was introduced in order to reduce the
pressure of the water towards the centre. This method was first tried
on a steamer in the following year at Bristol and afterwards on
H.M.S. Fairy. By reason of its shape, it naturally causes less
resistance through the water.
Whilst these lines are being written, there are building at Harland
and Wolff’s yard still another couple of ships for the White Star flag,
which, if not in speed, will be the most wonderful, and certainly the
largest ships in the world. After the Baltics and Mauretanias one
feels inclined to ask in amazement: “What next, indeed?” They will
measure 850 feet long, 90 feet broad, and be fitted with such
luxuries as roller-skating rinks and other novelties. They will each
possess a gross register of 45,000 tons. (By way of comparison we
might remind the reader that the Mauretania has a gross register of
33,000 tons.) Named respectively the Olympic and Titanic, they will
be propelled by three screws, and have a speed of 21 knots, so that
besides being leviathans, they will also be greyhounds, and are
destined for the Southampton-New York route. The first of these, the
Olympic, will take the water in October, 1910, and some idea of her
appearance may be gathered from the illustration which forms our
frontispiece. Like the Laurentic, these ships will be fitted with a
combination of the turbine and reciprocating engines, and will thus
be the first ships running on the New York route to have this system.
Their builders estimate that the displacement of each of these mighty
creatures will be about 60,000 tons, which is about half as much
again as that of the Baltic. Each ship will cost at least a million and a
half of money, and it will be necessary for each of those harbours
which they are to visit to be dredged to a depth of 35 feet. It is a
complaint put forward by both ship-builders and owners of modern
leviathans that the governing bodies of ports have not shown the
same spirit of enterprise which the former have exhibited. To
handicap the progress of shipping by hesitating to give the harbours
a required depth, they say, is neither fair nor conducive to the
advance of the prosperity of the ports in question, and on the face of
it, it would seem to be but reasonable that if the honour of receiving
a mammoth liner means anything at all, it should be appreciated by
responding in a practical manner. In New York Harbour this fact is
already recognised, for dredging is being undertaken so as to
provide a depth of 40 feet.
At the present moment the Cunard Company are also engaged
in replenishing their fleet, consequent on the removal from service of
the Lucania, the Umbria, the Etruria, and the Slavonia. An 18,000
ton steamship, to be called the Franconia, is being built by Messrs.
Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson, Ltd., the firm which turned
out the Mauretania, and will be ready some time in 1911. This latest
addition will not, it is understood, be a “flyer,” for her speed is
believed to be less than 20 knots, and it is therefore probable that
she is intended to replace the Slavonia. But it is supposed that
another vessel is to be built presently to relieve the Mauretania and
Lusitania, or to co-operate with them, and that her speed will be 23
knots, though it must not be forgotten that this ship will not be built
with the help of Government money, but will be purely and solely a
commercial transaction.
 In the meantime German enterprise shows but little signs of
lagging. The Hamburg-American Line are understood to have
ordered from the Vulcan Yards at Hamburg a new passenger liner of
more than 800 feet in length and a displacement of between 45,000
and 50,000 tons. Her speed is to be 21 knots. Herr Ballin a couple of
years ago had a similar project in view, and entered into a contract
with Harland and Wolff for building the largest ship in the world, to be
called the Europa. But the condition of the Atlantic passenger trade
became unfavourable for the enterprise, and the contract was
annulled. The contract now goes, not to Belfast, but to Hamburg, for
the Belfast yard has no slip vacant for several months to come. It will
mean, therefore, that this Europa, which is destined to excel the big
Cunarders in size though not in speed, will be the largest
undertaking that German ship-building yards have yet had to face,
for the biggest merchant ship which up till now they have turned out
is the George Washington, of 26,000 tons. Since the Deutschland
lost the honour of holding the “blue ribbon,” the Hamburg-American
Line have not worried much about recapturing the first position in
speed. Economy plus a first-class service would seem to be the
modern combination of influence that is dominating the great
steamship lines. Speed is a great deal, but it is not everything in a
passenger steamship, and whether the limits have not already been
surpassed, and the Mauretania and Lusitania with their high speeds
and enormous cost of running will presently be regarded rather as
belonging to the category of white elephants than of practical
commercial steamships, time alone can show.
After all, the Atlantic and the other oceans were made by the
Great Designer as barriers between separate continents, and
although we speak of them casually as rather of the nature of a
herring-pond, and build our big ships to act as ferries, yet are we not
flying in the face of Nature, and asking for trouble? In the fight
between Man and Nature, it is fairly plain on which side victory will
eventually come, in spite of a series of clever dodges which
throughout history man has conceived and put into practice for
outwitting her. You can fool her very well in many ways for part of the
time; but you cannot do this for ever in every sphere. When we read
of fine, handsome, well-found modern liners going astray in the
broad ocean, or of excellent, capable little cross-channel steamships
foundering between port and port, without any living witnesses to tell
how it all happened, we have a reminder that the ways of man are
clever beyond all words, but that Nature is cleverer still. What the
future of the steamship will be no one can tell. Already ship-builders
profess themselves capable of turning out a monster up to 1,000 feet
in length. But whether this will come about depends on the courage
of the great steamship lines, the state of the financial barometer, and
any improvements and inventions which the marine engineer may
introduce in the meantime. Perhaps the future rests not with the
steam, but the gas engine: we cannot say. It is sufficient that we
have endeavoured to show what a century and but little longer has
done in that short time for the steamship. Sufficient for the century is
the progress thereof.
 CHAPTER VIII
SMALLER OCEAN CARRIERS AND CROSS-
CHANNEL STEAMERS

Although it is true, as I have already pointed out, that the North

Atlantic has been the cockpit wherein the great steamship
competition has been fought out, yet it is not to that ocean alone that
all the activity has been confined. Because of the limitations which
the Suez Canal imposes it is not possible to build steamships for the
Eastern routes of such enormous tonnage as are customary for the
North American passages.
In the course of our story we have seen the beginnings of the
principal steamship companies trading not merely to the west, but in
many other spheres. In tracing the history of steamship companies
as distinct from that of the steamship herself, we are immediately
confronted with difficulties, for the company may be older than
steamships of any sort; or, again, the company may be of
comparatively modern origin, yet from the first possessed of the
finest steamships, of a character surpassing their contemporaries.
For instance, one of the very oldest lines is the Bibby Line to
Rangoon. This was founded as far back as 1807, yet it was not until
1851 that it adopted steam. The White Star Line, as we have seen,
was previously composed of sailing vessels, and its first steamship,
the Oceanic, did not appear until 1870, but when she did make her
appearance, she surpassed anything else afloat by her superior
virtues. To take, therefore, a chronological survey of the
establishment of the steamship organisations would be to convey
nothing satisfactory to us in our study of the evolution of the
steamship, but nevertheless, we may pertinently set forth some of
the more venerable but no less active steamship lines of the present
day.

THE “MOOLTAN.”
From a Photograph. By permission of the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co.

In addition to those already mentioned whose coming certainly

was intimately connected with the evolution of the steamship, we
might mention Messrs. George Thompson and Company’s Aberdeen
Line, which at one time was famous for its fine fleet of sailing ships.
This line was established in 1824, the year of incorporation of the
General Steam Navigation Co. Six years later the Harrison Line
arose, though the Allan Line, which dates back to 1820, did not run
its first steamer until 1854. The well-known Hull firm of Messrs.
Thomas Wilson and Sons appeared in 1835, and the African
Steamship Company three years earlier. In 1849 the City Line, now
amalgamated with the Ellerman Line, was founded, as also were
Messrs. Houlder Brothers. The Anchor Line came in 1852, and the
Castle Mail Packets Company, which is now amalgamated with the
Union Line to form the Union-Castle Line. The British East India
Company dates from 1855, and the Donaldson Line a year earlier.
The year 1856 saw the inauguration of Messrs. J. T. Rennie and
Sons’ Aberdeen Line to South Africa, and in 1866 the Booth Line
was first started, whilst the Collins Line had been formed in 1850, the
Inman Line the same year, the North German Lloyd in 1858, the
Compagnie Transatlantique in 1861, the National Line in 1863, and
the Guion Line (originally Williams and Guion) in 1866. Some of the
last-mentioned are now extinct, and have been dealt with in another
chapter. Within the last few months the P. and O. Company have
absorbed the Lund Line, and the shipping interests of the late Sir
Alfred Jones have been consolidated by Lord Pirrie, whose name is
so well known by his close connection with the firm of Harland and
Wolff. During 1910 another Atlantic service was inaugurated by the
appearance of the Royal Line, which the Canadian Northern Railway
Company is running between Bristol and the Dominion. Their two
ships the Royal Edward and the Royal George were originally built
under different names for an express service between Marseilles
and Alexandria, but that venture was not found profitable. They have
recently been modified to suit the North Atlantic route and are
representative of the finest examples of the modern steamship,
though not so large as the biggest liners. Propelled by turbines
driving triple screws, they have all the luxury of the most up-to-date
ships, with lifts, wireless telegraphy, special dining-room for children,
cafés and many other up-to-date features. The Royal Line is thus
another instance of a new steamship organisation stepping right into
the front rank at the first effort. If it is alleged that some of the older
lines engaged on the South Atlantic and Eastern routes have not
shown that same progressive spirit which the North Atlantic
companies have exhibited, at least recent ships have shown that
everything is being done which can be expected, short of reaching
the mammoth dimensions of the Atlantic liners. Passengers
voyaging to Australia, India, South Africa, and South America, for
example, realise that they are destined to remain at sea for a long
period, and the question of the utmost speed is not of primary
importance. Owing partly to the American spirit of speed and the
much shorter distance which separates the two continents, the
voyage between England and New York has become rather an
elongated channel passage than a journey in which one settles
oneself down for weeks, and the incentives to make it shorter still are
never for a moment wanting.
The recent additions to the P. and O. fleet are indicative that
progress is not confined to any one route. A new epoch in the history
of this company began when the first of their “M” class was added.
Reckoning them historically from 1903 these are the Moldavia,
Marmora, Mongolia, Macedonia, Mooltan, Malwa, Mantua, and the
Morea. The smallest of these, the Moldavia, is of 9,500 tons; the
largest are the last three mentioned, which are of 11,000 tons, and
though wireless telegraphy has not played the same conspicuous
part as on the Atlantic, yet this is now being installed in all the P. and
O. mail steamers on the Bombay and Australian routes. Two new
steamers, also of the “M” class, are being built, to be called
respectively the Medina and the Maloja, which will be thus fitted. It is
no doubt owing to the slowness with which Australia, India, and
Ceylon have adopted land installations that a corresponding
reluctance has been found in the case of the steamships to adopt
what is so significant a feature of the modern steamship. The
illustration facing page 216 shows one of this “M” class, the Mooltan,
coming to her berth in the Tilbury Dock, whilst the opposite
illustration will afford some idea of the starting platform in her engine
room. Her measurements are: length 520·4 feet, beam 58·3 feet,
and depth 33·2 feet; her tonnage is 9,621, with an indicated horse-
power of 15,000. She was built in 1905 by Messrs. Caird and
Company, of Greenock. It was owing to the increase in size of the
new P. and O. ships that the comparatively recent transfer was made
of the company’s mail and passenger steamers from the Royal
Albert Dock to Tilbury.
THE STARTING PLATFORM IN THE ENGINE ROOM OF THE “MOOLTAN.”
From a Photograph. By permission of the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co.

The Union-Castle fleet is composed partly of those ships which

belonged at the time of amalgamation to the old Castle Line, and
partly of those which were of the Union Line. In addition to these,
new steamships have been since brought out to swell the list. The
depression in South Africa consequent on the Boer War
necessitated a careful consideration before the addition of other mail
steamers, but the Balmoral Castle (see opposite page 220), which
was completed in 1910, and her sister the Edinburgh Castle, are the
largest and most powerful vessels employed in the South African
trade. This Balmoral Castle has a gross tonnage of about 13,000,
with an indicated horse-power of 12,500, and is fitted with twin-
screws. Fitted, of course, with water-tight bulkheads and cellular
bottom, every modern improvement has been taken advantage of in
her internal arrangement with regard to the service for which she
was built. The Balmoral Castle has a deck space larger than that
usually given in this line, the first and second class having practically
the whole of the boat deck; whilst by joining the poop and
promenade deck the third class have their deck space doubled. She
is installed with the modern loud-speaking telephones between the
bridge and engine-room and the extremities of the ship. Wireless
telegraphy has not been installed, but a room has been specially
built and equipped if it is decided hereafter to adopt this apparatus.
On the fore-mast head a Morse signalling lamp has been placed for
long distance signalling, and a semaphore after the Admiralty pattern
on the bridge for short distance signalling. She is propelled by two
sets of quadruple-expansion engines, and has ten boilers.
The White Star Line, in addition to their regular mail and
passenger service across the North Atlantic, have three special
freight and live-stock steamers—viz. the Georgic, of 10,077 tons, the
Cevic of 8,301 tons, and the Bovic of 6,583 tons—all of these having
twin-screws. Besides these they possess four ships engaged on the
New Zealand route, five on the Australian trade, besides two smaller
ships for freight.
We have already mentioned the Ivernia and Saxonia as
belonging to the intermediate, economical types which the Cunard
Company own in addition to their bigger liners. They also carry on a
Mediterranean service from New York to Gibraltar, the Italian and
Adriatic ports, to Algiers and Alexandria. The North German Lloyd
Company also own a number of smaller steamships employed in
intermediate service to ports other than those served by their fast
liners, the largest being of about 6,000 tons.
The American Line, which was formerly the old Inman
organisation, own besides the Philadelphia, already discussed, the
New York, the St. Louis, and St. Paul, but the last two, each being
only 11,629 tons, are the largest of their small fleet. Besides the
Anchor and the Allan Lines and the new Royal Line the Canadian
Pacific Railway now maintains a long connection by steamship and
railway from Liverpool right away to Hong Kong through Canada.
The Empress of Britain, with her quadruple-expansion engines and
twin-screws, is one of the finest steamships on the Canadian route.
 THE “BALMORAL CASTLE.”
From a Photograph. By permission of the Union-Castle Mail Steamship Co.

We could continue to deal singly with all the steamship lines

which have now sprung into existence, with the fine ships of the
Atlantic Transport Line, whose Minnehaha, in the spring of 1910, had
the misfortune to run on to the Scillies during her voyage from
America to this country. We might instance the Holt Line, the Nelson
Line, and other enterprising organisations, but such matter would
hardly come within the scope of our subject, which shows the
manner in which the steamship has developed into so useful an
institution. Since we have now been able to witness the manner in
which the steamship has been adapted for service across the deep,
wide ocean, let us, before we close this chapter, take a glance at the
way in which she has also become so indispensable for those
shorter but no less important cross-channel passages.
 THE “CAMBRIA” (1848).
From a Painting. By Permission of the London & North Western Railway.

ENGINES OF THE “LEINSTER” (1860).

From the Model in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
 At an earlier stage we saw that the cross-channel steamship
service owed its inauguration almost exclusively to that shrewd
Scotsman, Napier, who, after devoting a great amount of patient
study to the subject, evolved the Rob Roy. But we must not omit to
give credit also to others whose work in this connection has been of
such historic importance. From about the second decade of the
eighteenth century there had been a service between Holyhead and
Dublin, carried on by means of sailing packets, as there was, indeed,
between Scotland and Ireland, as well as England and the
Continent. Then had come the first steam service when the Talbot, of
156 tons, built in 1818 at Port Glasgow, for David Napier, began
running in the following year between Holyhead and Dublin. In 1819,
also, was inaugurated the Liverpool and Dublin service, and in 1823
one of the oldest steamship companies still in existence, the Dublin
Steam Packet Company, was formed. It must be recollected that the
journey between London and Dublin was a long and tedious one, for
there was no railway, and considerable sums of money were
expended in order to improve the road between Holyhead and the
English capital. The sailing packets took on the average about
twenty hours to cross the Irish Channel. The Royal William, already
alluded to when we discussed the first Atlantic steamers, was one of
the early steamships of this City of Dublin fleet. In 1836, when
George Stephenson proposed the construction of the Chester and
Holyhead Railway, he intended that the company should also
provide ships between the latter port and Ireland, but the various
steamship companies opposed this until 1848. The London to
Liverpool railway was opened in 1838, and so, since the Liverpool to
Dublin route was the quickest way to get from London to Ireland,
Holyhead was given the cold shoulder for the next ten years. But
when the continuous railway was opened between London and
Holyhead, the popularity of the Welsh port returned, and the
directors and principal shareholders of the Chester and Holyhead
Company, who had formed themselves into a small independent
company, ordered four new vessels, the Cambria, the Anglia, the
Hibernia, and the Scotia. Of these the first is illustrated herewith.
These ships were 207 feet long, 26 feet wide, and 14 feet deep, with
a draught of 8 feet 10 inches. They had a gross tonnage of 589,
carried 535 passengers, and possessed the remarkable speed of 14
knots. Instead of the slow passages of the old sailing packets these
four ships lowered the average voyage to 3 hours 34 minutes. In
1859 this Chester-Holyhead railway was amalgamated with the
London and North Western Railway, and in 1863 the latter
introduced a new type of craft, with the same speed as before, but of
700 tons. Both a day and a night service were presently instituted,
and this service has continued to be one of the most efficient and the
fastest of all the cross-channel ferries from this country. Of four new
vessels which were built for the Holyhead-Kingstown service in 1860
we may mention the Leinster. She was a large vessel for those
times, with a displacement of 2,000 tons, and constructed of iron.
The illustration facing this page shows a capital model of her
engines, which were of the oscillating type, and since we have
previously described this kind it is hardly necessary to deal with them
now, further than to remark that they gave the ship a speed of nearly
18 knots.
Coming now further south, it will be remembered that Napier’s
Rob Roy, which had first plied between Greenock and Belfast in
1818, was in the following year transferred to the Dover and Calais
route, and was thus the first regular steamship to open the mail and
passenger service between these ports. This was followed for a long
time by other steam “ferries,” some of which were Government mail
packets, and others were privately owned. The General Steam
Navigation Company, which had been formed in 1820, and
commenced its steam coastal trade, was not long before it had
inaugurated a service between London and Hamburg, and by 1847 it
had steamships running between London and the following ports:—
Hamburg, Rotterdam, Ostend, Leith, Calais, Havre, as well as from
Brighton to Dieppe, and Dover to Boulogne. These were all paddle-
steamers until the screw was introduced in 1854. In April of 1844
their paddle-steamer Menai was advertised to leave Shoreham
Harbour, calling at Brighton Chain Pier—or rather Brighthelmstone,
as it was then still known—and thence proceeding to Dieppe. She
was thus the first channel steamer to run between these places.
 It was not until the old stage-coach had given way to the railroad
that the numbers of travellers between England and the Continent
increased. By June of 1843 the South Eastern Railway had reached
Folkestone, and in February of the following year it had also joined
Dover. The London, Chatham, and Dover Line was of later date, and
did not reach Dover until 1860, where they were able to put to the
best use their capable fleet of passenger boats which steamed to
Calais. But in 1845 the South Eastern Railway had, like the Chester
and Holyhead Line, formed themselves into a separate company, to
run a line of steam packets, owing to the fact that the successors to
the Rob Roy were deemed unsatisfactory, and endless objections
were made by the complaining passengers who reluctantly crossed
the choppy waters of the English Channel. Previous to this date the
South Eastern Railway were wont to hire steamships to carry their
passengers between England and the Continent to Boulogne,
Calais, and Ostend. When their line had joined up Dover they started
running from there to Calais with their own boats in two hours,
twenty-eight minutes, calling at Folkestone on the way for twenty-
eight minutes. The first of these steamboats were the Princess Maud
and the Princess Mary. The run from Dover to Ostend took four and
a half hours.
In 1848 the Admiralty, which had been responsible for the steam
mail packets service (as also we have seen earlier in this book they
had charge of the transatlantic mails), handed over their charge to
the Post Office. But neither of these Governmental branches was
able to make a success of this, and after a time the Post Office
withdrew their mail packets and in 1854 put the carrying out to
contract. A Mr. Churchyard was accepted as the contractor, and his
agreement continued until 1862. It will be recollected that two years
previous to the latter date the London, Chatham and Dover
Company had connected their line to Dover, and they obtained the
contract in succession to Churchyard for carrying the mails from
Dover to Calais. At the same time the South Eastern Railway
Company withdrew their steamboat service to Folkestone. It should
be mentioned that the General Steam Navigation Company had also
withdrawn from this route owing to the competition on the part of the
railway companies, who were in a superior position by being able to
run their passengers on both their own railways and their own
steamboats.
The general character of these early cross-channel steam-craft
was very similar to that of the Cambria. Some of the steamboats
employed on this Dover-Calais route have been marked by the
possession of exceptional features. It was in 1875 that the Bessemer
was designed with the object of making the dreaded passage across
the Straits of Dover less disagreeable and free from the infliction of
sea-sickness. To this end she was given a unique apparatus which
was to swing with the motion of the vessel, and in such a manner
that the passengers would always be kept on a level, however much
the ship might roll. She was built double-ended, so that she would
not have to be turned round when she reached the French port. But
emphatically she resulted in a complete failure, for not only was this
ingenious deck found to be unworkable, and had to be fixed, but the
Bessemer collided with Calais Pier, and succeeded in knocking away
about fifty yards thereof.

THE “ATALANTA” (1841).

From a Painting. By permission of the London and South Western Railway
Co.
 THE “LYONS” (1856).
From the Model in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

THE “EMPRESS” LEAVING DOVER HARBOUR.

From a Photograph. By permission of the South Eastern and Chatham
Railway Co.

Another ingenious vessel on this service was the Castalia. She

was a twin-ship composed of a couple of hulls. Those who crossed
in her about the year 1876 found her very comfortable, and she was
so steady that comparatively few of her passengers were sea-sick,
but her drawback was that she was not fast. The genesis of this
double-hulled ship was in order to obtain greater steadiness, and the
experiment was first tried by fastening two Woolwich steamers
together, having first removed the inside paddle-wheels. Following
up this, the same principle was exemplified in a ship called the
Express, which had been constructed for a firm that became
financially embarrassed, and she was accordingly taken over instead
by the owners of the Castalia, and became the famous Calais-
Douvres, which most of my readers will well remember. She was
certainly a fast ship, but her life was not devoid of adventures. In
May, 1878, she collided with Dover Pier through her steering-gear
going wrong, her main engines having previously broken down. She
was subsequently repaired and did well until 1887, when, worn out
by active service, she was withdrawn, having proved an expensive
boat to run, and obtained an unenviable reputation for a large coal
consumption. The Castalia was withdrawn in 1878, and became a
floating small-pox hospital on the Thames, where she remained for
about twenty years, and was finally towed therefrom to Dordrecht by
one of that fleet of Dutch tugs which we shall mention in a later
chapter as being famous for the towage of big docks. In the course
of time new and improved Channel steamers continued to be put on
this Dover-Calais route, and in 1899 an amalgamation of interests
owned by the South Eastern and the London, Chatham and Dover
Railways took place, so that now the two fleets are under one
management. Within recent years they have shown a very
enterprising spirit by leading the way in placing turbine steamers on
their route, and the illustration on the opposite page shows their
turbine steamer Empress clearing out of Dover Harbour. In general
character we may take the appearance of this vessel as typical of
the more modern cross-channel steamers which now ply also on
other routes owned by the various railway companies. The fine
service of steamboats, for instance, possessed by the Great
Western, Great Eastern, the Midland, the London and North
Western, the Great Central, and the London and South Western
consists rather of miniature liners of a very up-to-date type. Not
merely wireless telegraphy and turbines have been introduced into
the cross-channel steamers, but every conceivable regard for the
comfort of the passengers has been taken commensurate with the
size of the ships, and the special work which they are called upon to
perform.
 We have addressed ourselves especially to the services
between Dover and Calais and between Holyhead and Dublin, for,
owing to their geographical character, these two are naturally the
most important and the most historic. The custom of railways being
owners of steamships has continued, the chief exception being the
Great Northern Railway. The Newhaven to Dieppe route is of
comparatively modern origin, and it was not until 1847 that the
London to Newhaven line was completed. During the following year
there were three steamers running to Dieppe from this port, but at
first the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway was thwarted
owing to legal difficulties, and properly their service dates from 1856,
for at one time they were compelled to run a service under different
ownership from their own. The model shown opposite page 226
shows the packet steamer Lyons, which was built in 1856 for the
Newhaven-Dieppe service. She was a paddle-boat of 315 tons
displacement.
Between England and the Channel Isles connection in the pre-
steamship days was kept up by sailing cutters. After that the
Admiralty conveyed the mails from Weymouth to Jersey and
Guernsey by ships of the Royal Navy, and one of these—the Dasher
—was until recent years employed in watching the oyster fisheries
off Jersey. But in 1835 a steam packet service was started from
Southampton to Havre, twice a week, and between the Hampshire
port and the Channel Islands, which was owned by the South of
England Steam Navigation Company, while a rival came forward in
the British and Foreign Steam Navigation Company, which ran to the
Channel Isles. One of the earliest steamers belonging to the former
company was the Atalanta, of which we give an illustration opposite
page 226. She was afterwards lengthened, and as thus altered she
appears in our illustration. Her days were ended as a coal hulk in
Jersey.
From 1838 to 1845 the mail service between England and the
Channel Isles was carried on from Weymouth, but in the latter year
this service was transferred to the South Western Steam Packet
Company, and remained exclusively with the Southampton steamers
until 1899, when the joint running of the Channel Islands service by