Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was an American logician, scientist, and founder of pragmatism and modern semiotics, but his cosmology belongs squarely to the idealist-process lineage.

Peirce defended objective idealism: the view that “matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws.” He held that mind is the fundamental reality and that what we call physical law is congealed habit — even the laws of nature evolved and are still hardening over cosmic time.

His doctrine of synechism asserted the ultimate continuity of mind and matter (no absolute break between them), and agapism proposed that evolution is driven not only by chance and necessity but by an active, creative, ordering love.

Peirce matters to mind-power as a first-rank scientific intellect who nonetheless concluded that mind is primary and matter is “tired mind.” His “laws as habits” doctrine prefigures the idea that the regularities of the universe are not fixed mechanism but learned, evolving patterns — strikingly parallel to Sheldrake’s morphic resonance and to “the universe is conscious and evolving” spirituality.

His synechism (mind-matter continuity) is an early, rigorous form of the consciousness-first / panpsychist intuition. The honest framing: Peirce was a demanding logician and experimentalist whose cosmology was speculative, and he made no manifestation claims; but his stature lends serious philosophical weight to “consciousness is fundamental and the cosmos is mind-like.”