'The Metaphysical Club': Big Thinkers in a Nation Transformed by Civil War

By JANET MASLIN

   None of the letters, diaries or other writings by members of the Metaphysical Club ever saw fit to
   mention the group's brief existence, in Cambridge, Mass., beginning in January 1872. Only Charles
Sanders Peirce, the originator of semiotics and the most eccentric character in a group that made that
honor hotly contested (another member, Chauncey Wright, "once wrote a young woman a thousand-word
letter explaining why taffy turns white when you pull it"), ever referred to the club in writing. And that
was in an unpublished manuscript, 35 years after the fact.

In a way, it's fitting that a group devoted to exchanging purely philosophical ideas should leave almost no
tangible evidence of its existence. Fortunately, Henry James was on hand to make note of this lofty society
in the all too real world, since his brother William was also a member. Henry's brother "and various other
long-headed youths have combined to form a metaphysical club, where they wrangle grimly and stick to
the question," he wrote in a letter. "It gives me a headache merely to know of it."

William James, after discussing several articles in the St. Louis Journal of Speculative Philosophy with
Peirce, had once been prompted to remark along similar lines, "They are exceedingly bold subtle &
incomprehensible and I can't say that his vocal elucidations helped me a great deal to their understanding,
but they nevertheless interest me strangely." There are times when that observation applies equally well to
"The Metaphysical Club," Louis Menand's hugely ambitious, unmistakably brilliant though sometimes
elusive intellectual history of the group and its influence.

Mr. Menand has undertaken nothing less than an explanation of the social, historical, economic and
spiritual forces that caused American thinking to change radically from the period leading up to the Civil
War to the advent of pragmatism in the early 20th century. "The Civil War swept away the slave
civilization of the South, but it swept away almost the whole intellectual culture of the North along with
it," he writes at the start of the book. "It took nearly half a century for the United States to develop a
culture to replace it, to find a set of ideas, and a way of thinking, that would help people cope with the
conditions of modern life." The complexities of that evolution are so vast that notes on Mr. Menand's
research account for nearly 100 pages.

He begins with the Civil War as a formative event in the thoughts of many of the people whose progress
he describes. For the future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., then known as Wendell,
"the lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence," he writes. "It is that certitude leads to
violence." In one of the best-drawn examples here, Mr. Menand traces the early influence on Holmes of
his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, followed by a rejection of the intellectual style of prewar Boston: "To
the Wendell Holmes who returned from the war, generalism was the enemy of seriousness." The judicial
ideas developed by Holmes in the 70 years that he lived after the war are seen here in the light of that
early experience.

Beyond early thoughts about the war and its meaning, the main philosophical lightning rod for virtually
every individual discussed here is Darwinism. Its ramifications are everywhere, from questions of who
will survive in battle, to implications about human behavior when applications of the law of error leads to
the birth of statistics, to the expedition led by Louis Agassiz into the Brazilian jungle to try to document a
hierarchy of human racial types.

"My opinion is only Darwinism analyzed, generalized and brought into the realm of ontology," Charles
Peirce observed on the subject of design and chance, which is one of the many occasions that prompt Mr.
Menand to add a sentence beginning "What he meant was. . . ." In the more abstruse realms of argument to
which these theories sometimes lead, there is a fair amount of explaining to do.

"The Metaphysical Club" might have been more readily accessible if it presented its material in more
linear and straightforward fashion. The larger philosophical constructs at work are exciting and radical
enough to rivet attention in their own right, regardless of some of the finer nuances. But the book has a
way of moving from person to person like a ball rolling on the deck of a boat in choppy seas, so that its
progress is wayward and unpredictable. Perhaps this is an inevitable result of the huge amount of
information that Mr. Menand wants to impart. In any case it gives the book a digressive, wool- gathering
style that Cambridge's 19th-century cosmologists would doubtless have loved.

But this is an immensely impressive and valuable achievement, despite the moments of knottiness. As both
a landmark work of scholarship and a popular history of profound, sweeping change, it is of enormous
worth. Also to be found in "The Metaphysical Club" are figures from Benjamin Peirce, Charles's father, a
mathematics professor ("It was said at Harvard that you never realized how truly incapable you were of
understanding a scientific matter until Professor Peirce elucidated it for you") to Daniel Webster,
Thorstein Veblen to Jane Addams, Eugene V. Debs to John Dewey, whose work with schoolchildren is
understood here as an experiment in the philosophy of pragmatism, the philosophical movement that is this
book's ultimate destination. To watch it taking shape in the midst of the great wealth of brilliant,
innovative thought described here is a good deal better than what Henry James had in mind.

THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB

A Story of Ideas in America

By Louis Menand

Illustrated. 546 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
 

                   Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company