Chauncey Wright Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Chauncey Wright
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
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
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.

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

Chauncey Wright
True science deals with nothing but questions of facts...

Chauncey Wright
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
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.

Chauncey Wright
Truth is eternal, of course, but whether there are some truths which are not facts or some facts which are not truths may be left to the logicians, and other former inhabitants of the fanes of science, discredited dwellers in the temples of truth.

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

Chauncey Wright
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