Chauncey Wright Quotes

14 quotes in 319 categories

• 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…
• What a fearful object a long-neglected duty gets to be
• Science asks no questions about the ontological pedigree or a priori character of a theory, but is content to judge it by its performance; and…
• And we owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization.
• Let one persuade many, and he becomes confirmed and convinced, and cares for no better 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…
• The accidental causes of science are only accidents relatively to the intelligence of a man.
• 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,…
• The questions of philosophy proper are human desires and fears and aspirations - human emotions - taking an intellectual form.
• We receive the truths of science by compulsion. Nothing but ignorance is able to resist them.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• In the scale of life there is a gradual decline in physical variability, as the organism has gathered into itself resources for meeting the exigencies…

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