20 Quotes by Chauncey Wright

  • Author Chauncey Wright
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    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.

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  • Author Chauncey Wright
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    A fact is a proposition of which the verification by an appeal to the primary sources of our knowledge or to experience is directand simple. A theory, on the other hand, if true, has all the characteristics of a fact except that its verification is possible only by indirect, remote, and difficult means.

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  • Author Chauncey Wright
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    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 it is thus that a knowledge of nature, having all the certainty which the senses are competent to inspire, has been attained--a knowledge which maintains a strict neutrality toward all philosophical systems and concerns itself not with the genesis or a priori grounds of ideas.

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

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  • Author Chauncey Wright
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    The very hope of experimental philosophy, its expectation of constructing the sciences into a true philosophy of nature, is basedon induction, or, if you please, the a priori presumption, that physical causation is universal; that the constitution of nature is written in its actual manifestations, and needs only to be deciphered by experimental and inductive research; that it is not a latent invisible writing, to be brought out by the magic of mental anticipation or metaphysical mediation.

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  • Author Chauncey Wright
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    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 of changing external conditions; and that while in the mindless and motionless plant these resources are at a minimum, their maximum is reached in the mind of man, which, at length, rises to a level with the total order and powers of nature, and in its scientific comprehension of nature is a summary, an epitome of the world.

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  • Author Chauncey Wright
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    Strictly speaking, Natural Selection is not a cause at all, but is the mode of operation of a certain quite limited class of causes.

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  • Author Chauncey Wright
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    This does not deny, however, that they may be, as truths, the conclusions of other processes; to wit, the inductions of experience.

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