The Age of Reason, of ratiocination, had seen things differently. Peirce reversed Hume's dictum, ‘that chance, when strictly examined, is a mere negative word, and means not any real power which has anywhere a being in nature’. It wasn't easy. Peirce had tried to settle on half measures.

For a long time I myself strove to make chance that diversity in the universe which laws leave room for, instead of a violation of law, or lawlessness. That was truly believing in chance that was not absolute chance. It was recognizing that chance does play a part in the real world, apart from what we may know or be ignorant of. But it was a transitional belief which I have passed through.

Peirce denied determinism. He also doubted that the world is a determinate given. He laboured in a community seeking to establish the true values of Babbage's constants of nature; he said there aren't any, over and above those numbers upon which we increasingly settle. He explained inductive learning and reasoning in terms of merely statistical stability.