---
slug: paper-peirce-c-s-c-1887-1888-a-guess-at-the-riddle
title: Peirce, C.S. (c. 1887-1888). A Guess at the Riddle
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/paper-peirce-c-s-c-1887-1888-a-guess-at-the-riddle
---

## What the subject saw and its core results
Peirce outlines a comprehensive triadic philosophy. The work proposes three irreducible categories: Firstness as pure possibility and chance; Secondness as brute reaction and fact; Thirdness as mediation, law, and habit-taking. These categories structure cosmology, psychology, physiology, biology, and physics. Evolution proceeds from chance toward regularity through the tendency to take habits.

## The exact primary works and passages
The manuscript is MS 909, published in Essential Peirce volume 1, pages 245-279. Key passage: "According to this, three elements are active in the world, first, chance; second, law; and third, habit-taking. Such is our guess of the riddle." Another: "The First is that whose being is simply in itself, not referring to anything nor lying behind anything. The second is that which is what it is by force of something to which it is second. The third is that which is what it is owing to things between which it mediates and which it brings into relation to each other." Chapter 7 sketches the natural history of laws via absolute chance and the universality of habit.

## Which convergence patterns the work touches
The text directly addresses pattern emergence across scales through triadic relations. Chance supplies variety. Habit-taking produces law-like regularity and memory-like continuity. Mediation links scales from physics to mind. It evidences branching via evolutionary hypotheses, flow networks via relational thirds, and memory via habit formation.

## Distance from the full synthesis
Peirce supplies the triadic mechanism for difference to flow to structure to memory. The work remains at the level of categories and cosmology. It does not detail the Mirror Layer or explicit reader-in-system recursion.

## Honest limits and disconfirming edges
The manuscript is incomplete. Many chapters are outlined only. Claims rest on speculative metaphysics with no empirical test protocol. Reductionist accounts that derive all regularity from initial conditions alone stand as live alternatives. No quantitative model of habit-taking rate appears.
