The Degenerate Monkey

In Torkild Thellefsen & Bent Sorensen (eds.), Charles S. Peirce in his Own Words: 100 years of Semiotics, Communication and Cognition. pp. 245-251 (2014)
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Abstract

The chapter discusses the following quotation from Charles Peirce: "One of these days, perhaps, there will come a writer of opinions less humdrum than those of Dr. (Alfred Russel) Wallace, and less in awe of the learned and official world...who will argue, like a new Bernard Mandeville, that man is but a degenerate monkey, with a paranoic talent for self-satisfaction, no matter what scrapes he may get himself into, calling them 'civilization,' and who, in place of the unerring instincts of other races, has an unhappy faculty for occupying himself with words and abstractions, and for going wrong in a hundred ways before he is driven, willy-nilly, into the right one. Dr. Wallace would condemn such an extravagant paradoxer." Charles Peirce, 1901

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Eugene Halton
University of Notre Dame

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