Few nowadays question the great value of these pioneer minds; and it is often claimed that universities are established to facilitate their work, and to prevent it from being lost. But universities, like other well-managed institutions, can find place only for those who work well in harness. The restless, impatient minds, like the socially or conventionally unacceptable, are thus kept out, no matter how fruitful their originality. Charles S. Peirce was certainly one of these restless pioneer souls with the fatal gift of genuine originality. In his early papers, in the _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, and later, in the _Monist_ papers reprinted as Part II of this volume, we get glimpses of a vast philosophic system on which he was working with an unusual wealth of material and apparatus. To a rich imagination and extraordinary learning he added one of the most essential gifts of successful system builders, the power to coin an apt and striking terminology. But the admitted incompleteness of these preliminary sketches of his philosophic system is not altogether due to the inherent difficulty of the task and to external causes such as neglect and poverty. A certain inner instability or lack of self-mastery is reflected in the outer moral or conventional waywardness which, except for a few years at Johns Hopkins, caused him to be excluded from a university career, and thus deprived him of much needed stimulus to ordinary consistency and intelligibility. As the years advanced, bringing little general interest in, or recognition of, the brilliant logical studies of his early years, Peirce became more and more fragmentary, cryptic, and involved; so that James, the intellectual companion of his youth, later found his lectures on pragmatism, “flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness”—a statement not to be entirely discounted by the fact that James had no interest in or aptitude for formal logical or mathematical considerations. Despite these limitations, however, Peirce stands out as one of the great founders of modern scientific logic; and in the realm of general philosophy the development of some of his pregnant ideas has led to the pragmatism and radical empiricism of James, as well as to the mathematical idealism of Royce, and to the anti-nominalism which characterizes the philosophic movement known as Neo-Realism. At any rate, the work of James, Royce, and Russell, as well as that of logicians like Schroeder, brings us of the present generation into a better position to appreciate the significance of Peirce’s work, than were his contemporaries. I