Chauncey Wright. 81 



pressing his thoughts in language generally intel- 

 ligible and interesting, but he was also singularly 

 devoid of the literary ambition which leads one 

 to seek to influence the public by written expo- 

 sition. Had he possessed more of this kind of 

 ambition, perhaps the requisite knack would not 

 have been wanting ; for Mr. Wright was by no 

 means deficient in clearness of thought or in 

 command of language. The difficulty or, if 

 we prefer so to call it, the esoteric character of 

 his writings was due rather to the sheer extent of 

 their richness and originality. His essays and 

 review-articles were pregnant with valuable sug- 

 gestions, which he was wont to emphasize so 

 slightly that their significance might easily pass 

 unheeded ; and such subtle suggestions made so 

 large a part of his philosophical style that, if any 

 of them chanced to be overlooked by the reader, 

 the point and bearing of the entire argument was 

 liable to be misapprehended. His sentences often 

 abounded in terse allusive clauses or epithets 

 which were unintelligible for want of a sufficient 

 clue to the subject-matter of the allusion : in the 

 absence of an exhaustive acquaintance with the 

 contents of the author's mind, the reader could 

 only wonder, and miss the point of the incidental 

 remark. Of such sort of obscure, though preg- 



