As can be inferred from Peirce’s semiotic perspective, the dialogic conception of signs and otherness together form a necessary condition for his doctrine of continuity, or synechism, the principle that ‘all that exists is continuous’ in the development of the universe in its globality and of the human self that inhabits it (cf. CP 1.172).
The dia-logic relation between self and other – both the other from self and the other of self – emerges as an essential condition for the growth of reasonableness and continuity in the creative process. Peirce transcended the limits of theoreticism in semiotics working in a direction that could be described as pragmatic-ethic or operative-evaluative, semioethical in our terminology, significal in Welby’s. In the final phase of his research Peirce specifically turned his attention to the normative sciences: beyond logic, he contemplated aesthetics and ethics and therefore such issues as the ultimate good or the summum bonum, which he neither identified in individual pleasure (hedonism) nor in the good of society (English utilitarism), but in the ‘evolutionary process’ itself, and more precisely in the ‘growth of reasonableness’:
Almost everybody will now agree that the ultimate good lies in the evolutionary process in some way. If so, it is not in individual reactions in their segregation, but in something general or continuous. Synechism is founded on the notion that the coalescence, the becoming continuous, the becoming governed by laws, the becoming instinct with general ideas, are but phases of one and the same process of the growth of reasonableness. This is first shown to be true with mathematical exactitude in the field of logic, and is thence inferred to hold good metaphysically. It is not opposed to pragmatism in the manner in which C. S. Peirce applied it, but includes that procedure as a step. (CP 5.4)
The most advanced developments in reason and knowledge are achieved through the creative power of reasonableness and are fired by the power of love, agapasm: ‘the impulse projecting creations into independency and drawing them into harmony’ (CP 6.288). In Peirce’s conception of evolution, which he developed with reference to the Gospel of St. John and to the theosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg, human semiosis is enhanced by the power of love understood as orientation toward the other, as care for the other.
Reasonableness is endowed with the power of transforming one’s horror of the stranger, the alien, one’s fear of the other (the fear one experiences of the other foreign to oneself) into sympathy for the other. And, in fact, recalling his essay of 1892, ‘The Law of Mind’ (1892), Peirce asserted that the type of evolution foreseen by synechism is evolution by love, where reason warmed by love becomes reasonableness and the hateful becomes “lovely”:
Everybody can see that the statement of St. John is the formula of an evolutionary philosophy, which teaches that growth comes only from love, from I will not say self-sacrifice, but from the ardent impulse to fulfill another’s highest impulse. [ ] It is not dealing out cold justice to the circle of my ideas that I can make them grow, but by cherishing and tending them as I would the flowers in my garden. The philosophy we draw from John’s gospel is that this is the way mind develops; and as for the cosmos, only so far as it yet is mind, and so has life, is it capable of further evolution. Love, recognizing germs of loveliness in the hateful, gradually warms it into life, and makes it lovely. That is the sort of evolution which every careful student of my essay ‘The Law of Mind’ must see that synechism calls for. (CP 6.289)