Jerry,
Your discussion and references about chirality are convincing.
But they go beyond issues that Peirce would have known in his day.
I think that he was using issues about chirality as examples
for making a stronger claim:
For example, in his lecture on phenomenology, (EP2, 159), ends with
a discussion of chirality and the laws of motion (Right—handed and
Left-handed screws)
“There, then, is a physical phenomenon absolute inexplicable by
mechanical action. This single instance suffices to overthrow the
corpuscular philosophy.”
By the end of the 19th century, the general consensus in physics
was that all the major problems had been solved. But the first
decade of the 20th c. shattered their complacency.
If Peirce had access to a university library with the latest
journals, he might have found stronger arguments to "overthrow
the corpuscular philosophy."
John
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