I02 Chauncey Wright. [vi. 



weather " happily comports with our enormous igno- 

 rance of the real tendency of events. But as terres- 

 trial weather is after all subject to discoverable laws, 

 so to an intelligence sufficiently vast the appearance 

 of fickleness in " cosmical weather" would no doubt 

 cease, and the sequence of events might begin to 

 disclose some dramatic tendency, though whether 

 toward any end appreciable by us or not it would 

 be idle to surmise. 



In the discussion of such questions, called up 

 by Mr. Spencer's philosophy, Mr. Wright always 

 appeared in the light of a most consistent and 

 unquahfied positivist. He hardly could be called a 

 follower of Comte, and I doubt if he even knew the 

 latter's works save by hearsay. But he needed no 

 lessons from Comte. He was born a positivist, and 

 a more complete specimen of the positive philosopher 

 has probably never existed. He went as far as it was 

 possible for a human thinker to go toward a philo- 

 sophy which should take no note of anything beyond 

 the content of observed facts. He always kept the 

 razor of Occam uncased and ready for use, and was 

 especially fond of applying it to such entities as 

 "substance" and "force," the very names of which, 

 he thought, might advantageously be excluded from 

 philosophical terminology. Sometimes he described 



