Peirce's letters to Lady Welby summarize critical issues in the last decade of his life. When the dates of the letters are correlated with the dates of his MSS, they provide informal explanations of his more technical issues and relate them to her writings. They also mention issues in his personal life and relate them to his ongoing work.
The long letter of 25 May 1911 is especially important for clarifying some issues we had discussed on P-list: the major revision of EGs in R670 and the long letter to Mr. Kehler (L231, 52 printed pages). Coincidentally, 25 May 1911 happens to be the date when Peirce began writing R669 on Assurance through reasoning. In the transcription of "Two papers on assurance through reasoning", Ahti Pietarininen states the times and dates of each page of R669 and R670. There are long gaps in the writing of R669, which are likely to be the times when Peirce was writing to Lady Welby. In the first paragraph of that letter, Peirce wrote "I will do my best to send you in two months -- or better say three -- the first part of a book I want so much to write. This part deals with the kinds and degrees of assurance that the different kinds of reasoning afford..." On 7 June 1911, Peirce began R670 with a new foundation for existential graphs. On June 22, he began L231 to Mr. Kehler (NEM 3:191), which appears to contain a draft of the book he had been writing. The content is consistent with an outline of a "Big Book" he had outlined in a letter to William James (NEM 3:867-875, December 1909). Apparently, Peirce realized that Mr. Kehler, a member of Lady Welby's Significs group, would be able to circulate the letter to the group. Therefore, he included his best and final version of EGs and added the latest version of the book he had promised to send to Lady Welby (and to Carus, if he could finish it). On 6 December 1911, Peirce began a letter to Risteen (L376), which he may have intended as a more complete version. In the first two paragraphs, he confirmed the EG version of L231 and rejected the 1906 version of modality: "I have a diagrammatic syntax which analyzes the syllogism into no less than six inferential steps. [An example in L231] I now describe its latest state of development for the first time. [The syntax of 1906 was] as bad as it well could be. [The reason was] chiefly due to the lines called cuts which simply appear in the present description as the boundaries of shadings, or shaded parts of the sheet... the Alpha, the Beta, and the Gamma, parts [are] a division I shall here adhere to, although I shall now have to add a Delta part in order to deal with modals..." Unfortunately, Peirce could not finish L376 because he had an accident a few days later. He slipped on a piece of paper on a highly polished floor. Could that paper have been a continuation of L376? In his last long letter L477 (October 1913), the content is consistent with the outline of the Big Book and with the content of L231 and L376. L477 contains Peirce's last known examples of EGs, which use the same notation as L231. John
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