A half century ago the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce explored canons of greatness, wondering whether there might be some rule or set of rules to tell who were the century's great men. Definitions of greatness, he felt, were only like rules of grammar ; these do not '(render an expression bad English, but only generalize the fact that good writers do not use it." Hence, according to Peirce, "in order to establish a definition of greatness, it would be necessary to begin by ascertaining what men were and what men were not great, and that having been done the rule might as well by dispensed with."
Peirce's own "opinion" of the matter seems a strange issue from a mind steeped in logical analysis, a mind which invented the term "pragmatism." It is the romantic "opinion," which more of us hold than are apt to be willing to admit the fact in public, and so we may understand why Peirce stated that his "opinion . . . has not been lightly formed nor without long years of experimentation."
But he did fear that "some intellectual men" would consider only as "foolishness" the view "that the way to judge of whether a man was great or not is to put aside all analysis, to contemplate attentively his life and works, and then to look into one's heart and estimate the impression one finds to have been made. This is the way in which one would decide whether a mountain were sublime or not. The great man is the impressive personality, and the question whether he is great is a question of impression."
We do not hold Franklin to be a great man, and gather to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth, because of objective standards that