The text is marked up for navigation in such a way that it is possible to move freely back and forth between the ten parts by use of the button bar at the top of the web page. You can also make use of the Table of Contents to jump directly to any section or memoir, regardless of what part it is in, and you can jump from any given memoir or section to the one following or preceding it by using the up and down arrowheads at the beginning of the given memoir or section. In general, though, the use of hypertext techniques in this version of it is minimal, and the HTML markup is used primarily to present the text more perspicuously than in the plain ASCII format of the earlier version which it is based upon.

      This editorially constructed document consists of a transcription of the final version and five draft versions of Peirce's 1902 application to the Carnegie Institution for financial support, with the material from the five draft versions analytically decomposed and then distributed under the appropriate headings of the final version. The purpose of reconstructing it in this way is to present it in its most perspicuous form for philosophical purposes, and it is believed that the special significance of this particular manuscript material for understanding Peirce's thought, as well as the peculiar character of the text itself, justifies this special editorial strategy for this document. (See the Editorial Introduction for explanation of that.)

      Although I believe it is adequate for its purpose, it is not in definitive scholarly form. Before explaining some of the editorial liberties taken, though, let me simply say to readers not concerned with that sort of detail that the general motive has been to produce a maximally legible and perspicuous text, and that it is unlikely that any of the compromises made in the interest of that actually have any substantive import that would concern anyone other than a Peirce scholar. You should feel free, therefore, to move directly to the text itself if you wish and return later to the rest of this preface, in which I briefly indicate several sorts of such considerations, for those who have a special scholarly interest in this.

      There is a (very) small amount of variant material which is yet to be integrated into this version -- sentence fragments, mostly -- none of which is likely to be of significance. Of far more importance as regards its being unfinished as an editorial product is the lack of editorial documentation of the works of his own as well as works of others that Peirce is referring to in many passages throughout the text. In this respect the text will never be definitively finished now, I am sure, but perhaps it is time to abandon the use of the word "definitive" in reference to such matters, anyway. The task of moving toward an ideal complete scholarly documentation of that sort is, at any rate, a task that can be assigned to the Peirce telecommunity in general to work at over the years, reference by reference, if there is a serious desire to track these references down and make use of the power of hypertext linkage to establish the present text as a kind of master index to his work generally, as it was originally planned to be. I will add some links like that myself, now and again, time permitting, in order to meake clear how it might do that; but whereas I used to think that it was up to me as editor to do that sort of thing, I no longer think that is so, given the change in the role of the editor implicit in the advent of digitized text and open access to it through world-wide networking.

      I have regularized the text in several ways in transcribing it, e.g. in respect to punctuation, misspellings, and elimination of abnormal capitalization, all in the interest of legibility. Any place where the regularizing seemed to me raise any interpretational question is noted where it occurs, but it rarely occurs.

      As regards capitalization, Peirce frequently used this device to flag words which should be regarded as taking on a special technical sense in his work. One would normally honor his intention in this respect and I originally intended to do so, but it turned out that, on balance, it seemed best not to do so in the case of the present version of the text because the rhetorical function it was intended to serve was more than being outweighed by the visual fatigue induced by excessive capitalization. Since an alternative editorial version (Version 2), constructed along more conventional lines, is also being made available here which includes images of the original MS pages, and these images will also be keyed to this version as well, so that an image of the original can be consulted at any time, it seems all the more clear that it is best not to respect his intention in this case, especially since he was not consistent about it himself in the various drafts.

      Since this version was originally prepared and made available as an ASCII file, the underscoring in the original was largely ignored, except in a few exceptional contexts, in order to avoid compromising legibility through use of obtrusive asterisks or flanking underlines of blank spaces (which are the usual ways of indicating emphasis in ASCII format). Underscoring is currently being restored in this version, though, using italics instead as the usual conventional equivalent. However, Peirce is not consistent on this practice throughout either, so that fidelity to the original has to be compromised at times in the interest of consistency. In the case of graphical elements contained in the text that also had to be omitted, or for which rather lame surrogates had to be introduced, these are also in process of being restored but this is not complete at the present time.

      In sum, I do not regard the discrepancies and omissions as of substantive significance, and in spite of the fact that the graphical and typographical elements in the original have not yet been fully restored, I believe the reader can make use of this in citations and quotations with reasonable confidence, qualified by the understanding that in addition to errors of judgment on my part there must also be assumed to be mechanical errors in transcription. But this is true of all edited work, and the incidence of bad judgment and mechanical error here is probably no higher than what we usually take for granted in using the Collected Papers, for example. That is not good enough from the point of view of pure scholarship, but there are other intellectual values as well and the text will be perpetually subject to correction in that direction from now on, in any case.

Notes on Pagination

      This version originates from an ASCII text version that used a reduced form of reference to the pages in the original manuscript from which the present transcription derives. The motive for this was to minimize the clutter in the text in the interest of maximizing legibility. The "chunks" of original text out of which this reconstructed text is composed are usually only a few MS pages in length, and since the MS pages are themselves only half-pages, it seemed reasonable to insert into the text referential pagination only for the "chunks" rather than inserting numerals for each MS page at the point where a new page occurs. Each "chunk" of text, then, is preceded by a specification of the version from which it comes—either the final version (FV) or one of the five drafts (A, B, C, D, or E)—and the range of MS page numbers it spans: e.g. "Final Version - MS L75.346-349" says that the segment of text which follows is from MS pages 346 through 349 of the final version, and of course something like "From Draft A - MS L75.21-29" is obvious in meaning. This is being retained in the present version so that the actual construction of the text will be obvious to the reader, but the individual pages in the original are being identified as well by inserting the MS page numbers (within flanking vertical bars) at the corresponding point in the transcription, e.g. "|345|" for MS page 345.

      It should be understood, though, that the page numbers are not Peirce's but are rather the numbers that were stamped on the photocopy of the original for editorial purposes shortly after the photocopies were made. These are sometimes referred to as "ISP numbers", short for "numbers sequentially assigned at the Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism", which was, for some time, the standard scholarly numbering system for the manuscript material as available through photocopy images of it which were made at Harvard in 1974. In this system of reference, the full citation for MS page 345 would be "MS L75.345".