Chauncey Wright Quotes

• All observers not laboring under hallucinations of the senses are agreed, or can be made to agree, about facts of sensible experience, through evidence toward which the intellect is merely passive, and over which the individual will and character have no control.

  Chauncey Wright

  Topics in Experience

  Tags in Character, Control

• By what criterion… can we distinguish among the numberless effects, that are also causes, and among the causes that may, for aught we can know, be also effects, – how can we distinguish which are the means and which are the ends?

  Chauncey Wright

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Among, Criterion, Means

• And we owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization.

  Chauncey Wright

  Topics in Progress

  Tags in Civilization, Men

• If they are, then the only ultimate truths are the particulars of concrete experience, and no postulate or general assumption is inherent in science until its proceedings become systematic, or the truths already reached give direction to further research.

  Chauncey Wright

  Topics in Experience

  Tags in Give, Research, Direction

• Let one persuade many, and he becomes confirmed and convinced, and cares for no better evidence.

  Chauncey Wright

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Better, Evidence, Caress

• Such evidence is not the only kind which produces belief; though positivism maintains that it is the only kind which ought to produce so high a degree of confidence as all minds have or can be made to have through their agreements.

  Chauncey Wright

  Topics in Confidence

  Tags in Kind, Evidence

• Natural Selection never made it come to pass, as a habit of nature, that an unsupported stone should move downwards rather than upwards. It applies to no part of inorganic nature, and is very limited even in the phenomena of organic life.

  Chauncey Wright

  Topics in Nature

  Tags in Selection, Habit

• The accidental causes of science are only accidents relatively to the intelligence of a man.

  Chauncey Wright

  Topics in Intelligence

  Tags in Science, Accident

• The pains of disconcerted or frustrated habits, and the inherent pleasure there is in following them, are motives which nature has put into our wills without generally caring to inform us why; and she sometimes decrees, indeed, that her reasons shall not be ours.

  Chauncey Wright

  Topics in Nature

  Tags in Without, Caring, Pleasure

• The questions of philosophy proper are human desires and fears and aspirations – human emotions – taking an intellectual form.

  Chauncey Wright

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Human, Philosophy

• We receive the truths of science by compulsion. Nothing but ignorance is able to resist them.

  Chauncey Wright

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Ignorance, Nothing

Chauncey Wright (11)

Birth:	10th September, 1830
Death:	12th September, 1875
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Mathematician, Philosopher

About

Chauncey Wright was born in Northampton, Massachusetts. He was an American philosopher and mathematician. In 1852 he graduated from Harvard and became computer to the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac. From 1863 to 1870 he was secretary and recorder to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in the last year of his life he lectured on mathematical physics at Harvard.

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