Chauncey Wright

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

— Chauncey Wright

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

— Chauncey Wright

What a fearful object a long-neglected duty gets to be

— Chauncey Wright

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

— Chauncey Wright

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

— Chauncey Wright

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

— Chauncey Wright

Natural Selection never made it come to pass, as a habit of nature, that an unsupported stone should move downwards rather than…

— Chauncey Wright

The pains of disconcerted or frustrated habits, and the inherent pleasure there is in following them, are motives which nature has put…

— Chauncey Wright

All observers not laboring under hallucinations of the senses are agreed, or can be made to agree, about facts of sensible experience,…

— Chauncey Wright

Science asks no questions about the ontological pedigree or a priori character of a theory, but is content to judge it by…

— Chauncey Wright

Such evidence is not the only kind which produces belief; though positivism maintains that it is the only kind which ought to…

— Chauncey Wright

A fact is a proposition of which the verification by an appeal to the primary sources of our knowledge or to experience…

— Chauncey Wright

If they are, then the only ultimate truths are the particulars of concrete experience, and no postulate or general assumption is inherent…

— Chauncey Wright

By what criterion... can we distinguish among the numberless effects, that are also causes, and among the causes that may, for aught…

— Chauncey Wright

The very hope of experimental philosophy, its expectation of constructing the sciences into a true philosophy of nature, is basedon induction, or,…

— Chauncey Wright

In the scale of life there is a gradual decline in physical variability, as the organism has gathered into itself resources for…

— Chauncey Wright