The world-conception of Mr. Peirce agrees in one fundamental maxim with our own, but it disagrees with the latter in the main and most important application of this maxim. Mr. Peirce says, "Law is _par excellence_ the thing that wants a reason." This maxim was the guiding star of our inquiry into the fundamental problems of philosophy.[56] The world considered as a universe displaying in all its innumerable actions one and the same law is called a cosmos; if considered as a heap of processes with no common law pervading them it is called a chaos. We found in our inquiry into the forms of existence that the laws of form possess intrinsic necessity. The laws of the form of existence are represented in the laws of formal thought (arithmetic, mathematics, logic, mechanics, and pure natural science). So long as the formal laws hold good, (and we have found in the chapter "Form and Formal Thought" that they will hold good under all circumstances,) any kind of world, whatever materially or dynamically it be, must be a cosmos, and cannot be a chaos. We can imagine that we had a world consisting of some other substance and being different either in the amount or in the action of its energy to this world of ours, but we cannot imagine that a world should exist which does not exhibit the harmony of form, and is not regulated as it were by the formal laws of existence. One plus one would be two in any kind of a world, and obviously all the other more complex statements of formal laws would remain true with the same intrinsic necessity. The truth 'one plus one makes two' contains the universal applicability of causation and of the conservation of matter and energy. Taking this ground we arrived at the conclusion that the world is a cosmos: there is no chaos and there never has been a chaos. A chaos, in the sense of an absolute non-existence of law, is an impossibility. [56] See the author's _Fundamental Problems_.