Charles S. Peirce - The Use of Solitude (MS 891, 1860)

The following is an entry in Peirce's notebook "Private thoughts principally on the conduct of life" (MS 891), dated April 1, 1860. Scans of the original notebook entry are available here and here.

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     O, they who know what it is, feel its use! But who does know it? The poet or sentimentalist who shuts himself up for an hour or a day or three days seems to himself to feel the excellence of solitude. But he is mistaken; his condition is not solitude; this: to live in the desert after the two months home-sickness, thoughts of home, and care for home are over, and before any prospect of return to the world has brought them back, this is solitude.
     And these are its properties:
     Negatively, it is a soothing absence of all care for appearances,—it is the normal absence of all thoughts of the fictitious and factitious.

"Sleep, sleep, today, tormenting cares

Of earth and folly born."

     Positively, everybody knows it is drawing nigh unto the personality in nature, and that it is, in an humble sense, walking with God. It is a calmness preparatory to enthusiasm on those things worthy of enthusiasm & the enthusiasm it makes is of calm and noble, unparitzan nature. Thus, rightly used, Solitude has a reference to the world, and if it is rightly used, the mind grows under its climate. Man, certainly, was not made for solitude; hence taken as an end in itself, it only hurts. It enervates. The mind just emerged from it lacks that hardihood which pertains to those who have been grappling with circumstances & exposed to the storms of life. It is, in fact, a green-house and a nursery.
     The Important portion of this earth consists of variegated land, with inland seas (the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Indian, the Arctic) all made for the promotion of intercourse. This is man's workshop. But a full half of the globe is nothing but a polynesian ocean—all isolation—with nothing out of the monotony, either to think of or to care for. Thus we see that the idea that man should sometimes be solitary is expressed in the very contour and face of the planet.
     THE MIND, too, is constructed in its contemplative, concentrative faculties, with the same thing in view; and people who live in cities and who violate this physical and mental law of nature, are doomed to a degeneracy, in consequence; and, in my opinion, it should be made one principal point in a boy's or a girl's education, besides instructing them in literature & philosophy & in the accomplishments of discernment and readiness, to teach them also the depth, the power, and the use of solitude.