The cosmology of Charles Peirce has traditionally been amongst the least celebrated aspects of his thought. It is typically considered far too anthropomorphic to be a serious contribution to our understanding of the evolution of reality. While this anthropomorphism may or may not disqualify the cosmology from serious scientific consideration, it is possible that the cosmology does offer philosophical insights about the very human experience that inspired it. My intent is to look to the Peircean cosmology not for insights about the growth of the cosmos as such, but for insights about the growing self. Specifically, the paper attempts to apply Peirce's thoughts about abduction and the growth of cosmic ideas to the growth of the self. Taking cue from Peirce's three-fold distinction between models of evolutionary growth in "Evolutionary Love," I contrast authentic growth of the self with two models of degenerate growth.
It looks to me as though the investigation we are undertaking is no ordinary thing, but one for a man who sees sharply. Since we're not clever men... we should make this kind of investigation of it: if someone had, for example, ordered men who don't see very sharply to read little letters from afar and then someone had the thought that the same letters are somewhere else also, but bigger and in a bigger place, I suppose it would look like a godsend to be able to consider the littler ones after having read these first, if, of course, they do happen to be the same.

The macrocosm and the microcosm in Plato's Republic do, of course, "happen to be the same," at least in an essential respect. The inference from the one to the other is justified by the reality of the Idea of justice, by that which makes justice justice in both the city and the soul. And so Socrates goes on to construct the perfectly just polis by which he infers, analogously, the structure of the perfectly just soul. This strategy yields a compelling account of the harmonious soul and the benefits of virtue. Socrates looks to the macrocosm and learns about the human.
In the Peircean cosmology we have a macrocosm of significantly larger scope. The cosmology was intended by Peirce to be a unified theory of all reality -- mental and physical, possible, actual and general -- with implications for every branch of human learning. Indeed, it would, Peirce hoped, be in its book-long formulation "one of the births of time." It has, in fact, turned out be perhaps the least celebrated aspect of his thought, famously referred to as the "black sheep or white elephant" of Peirce's philosophy by W.B. Gallie in 1966. The considered, though not unanimous, verdict on Peirce's cosmology is that it is far too anthropomorphic a description of reality to be thought of as a serious scientific hypothesis. But while Peirce's infusion of final causality, feeling and consciousness into the physical world has alienated many scholars seeking a scientifically satisfactory cosmology per se, these features of Peirce's cosmology can only be an occasion for intrigue for those of us who may be interested in the human as such. The phenomenon that is writ large across the growing Peircean cosmos is, after all, human growth. And so, with a strategy similar to that of Socrates, I suggest that we consider looking to the Peircean macrocosm for wisdom about the microcosm. In this article I offer a "reclaiming" of the anthropomorphic Peircean cosmology. I attempt, in some small fashion, to take back what is ours. Specifically, I intend to apply a number of Peirce's suggestions about cosmic growth to our understanding of the growth of the Peircean self.