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I've mentioned elsewhere my current state of lostness in Robert Richardson's 2006 biography of William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. There's much here of relevance to the discussions of the Evolving Systems group; if nothing else, it provides a deep history for many of our conversations. For example, it turns out that Alice's proposal, a couple of months ago, that we add "love" to the key forces circling in the universe, as a key contributor to the evolutionary process, was anticipated by the great pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who

"'distinguished among three basic kinds of evolution, the tychastic, the anancastic, and the agapastic--that is, evolution by fortuitous variation, by mechanical necessity, and by creative love--and he insisted that tychasm and anacasm are degenerate forms of agapasm'....He came early to accept Darwin's idea of random, fortuitous variation (what he called tychasm or tychism...), but he never accepted the idea that natural selection is sufficient to account for the evolution of mind. For the latter Peirce would require 'the gentle purposive action of love,' or what he called agapasm" (pp. 135- 136).