Science & Tech Quote by Chauncey Wright

Wright is doing something deceptively aggressive here: stripping science of its aura of inevitability. He’s not denying that science reaches truths; he’s denying that those truths begin life as grand principles. The “ultimate truths” he’s willing to grant are small, stubborn, and local - the particulars of concrete experience. Everything else, the “postulate” and the “general assumption,” arrives late, as a tool we invent once the messy accumulation of results forces our hand.

That’s a pointed intervention in a 19th-century intellectual climate hungry for capital-T systems: positivists looking for a unified method, metaphysicians smuggling first principles in through the back door, and even Darwinism being rapidly converted from a biological argument into a total worldview. Wright, a key American pragmatist before pragmatism had the brand name, insists that science earns its abstractions only when “proceedings become systematic.” System is portrayed not as a starting virtue but as a retrospective organization - a filing system built after the paperwork exists.

The subtext is a warning against premature certainty. By saying no assumption is “inherent” until research is already underway, Wright rejects the comforting story that science progresses by applying a timeless recipe. He frames inquiry as improvisational: truth discovered in fragments, then stabilized into method. Even “direction” comes from “truths already reached,” not from philosophical mood boards. It’s an ethic of humility with teeth, aimed at anyone treating science as a pipeline for pre-approved conclusions.