CHARLES DARWIN IS SAID to have remarked, “There were enough brilliant minds at the American Cambridge in the 1860s to furnish all the universities of England.”1 Darwin would have had in mind his colleague, friend, and defender Asa Gray, and perhaps his stubborn antagonist Louis Agassiz, but he would also have included at the top of the list Chauncey Wright, who was the intellectual-boxing master of Charles Peirce, Wendell Holmes, and William James.
Wright was an antitheological positivist, a philosopher who was at the center of a series of discussion clubs in Cambridge for twenty years, from 1856 until his death in 1875. First with the Septem, then with the Metaphysical Club, Wright gathered around himself a number of extraordinary persons who took over and revolutionized Harvard, defended and advanced the work of Darwin, and founded and spread the as yet unnamed philosophy of pragmatism.
Chauncey Wright was twelve years older than William James. Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, he had graduated from Harvard in 1852 and immediately taken a job as a mathematical calculator for the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac. He learned to compress the annual work for this inexpressibly dull, Bartleby-like job into three months, leaving the rest of the year free for philosophy and friends. In 1856, when he was twenty-six, Wright and a number of former classmates started a group called the Septem. It included James Thayer (a friend of Emerson’s, a law partner of Wendell Holmes’s, and later a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School), William Ware (later an architect and a founder of American architectural education), Ephraim Gurney (later a professor of history at Harvard and the first dean of the faculty of Harvard College), Charles Dunbar (later the editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser and then the first professor of political economy—i.e., economics—at Harvard), George Shattuck (later a law partner of Thayer’s), and Darwin Ware (later a minor poet). It was a convivial group and its purpose was philosophical discussion—whiskey punch not to be neglected—and the force that held it together was Chauncey Wright.
Wright stood five feet ten inches and had a massive build, which one cannot detect in early photographs, in which his long face, high forehead, regular features, and inexpressive mouth are set off by thin, long, straight hair that we are told was red. He looked at a person with “strange conflicting, conscious light blue eyes.” He smoked a pipe incessantly, whether in his informal gray dressing gown or his public outfit with high collar and bow tie. He was adept at sleight of hand and juggling and was good with children. Chronically depressed—one friend called his depressions “uncontrollable”—he drank heavily when he was feeling down. The daughter of a friend once asked him what were the saddest things in the world. He answered, “Those beginning with’d’ as death, debt, disease, dishonor and all the d—d disses.”2
Every university has around it somewhere one person who is more loved and listened to than most, who tutors and prepares his friends for their exams but who never takes his own, who is generally acknowledged as the most brilliant and gifted of all, who has every gift except the ability to use his gifts. He is the one who never quite finishes, never quite succeeds, never quite writes the great book—a person like Sherlock Holmes’s older brother, Mycroft (who solves Sherlock’s thorniest problems by sheer force of mind without stirring from his chair), or like a member of Melville’s choice circle of the Divine Inert who stands wholly, tragically superior to the working world and the arts the working world requires for success and fame. In the American Cambridge of the 1860s and 1870s this figure, the village Socrates who lived on in the minds of his great students, was Chauncey Wright.
Wright was in many respects the most important intellectual in Cambridge in the 1860s. He was crucial for Charles Peirce, crucial for pragmatism, and crucial for William James. He was an institution, apart from and in some ways more effective than Harvard itself. He was a great teacher and talker, though only twice did he give a formal course (some lectures in psychology in 1870 and a course in mathematical physics in 1874), and he published very little, though what he did publish mattered.
The Septem was revived in June 1865, when James was in Brazil. Into the circle of old regulars, Shattuck, Thayer, and William Ware, now came Eldridge Cutler and Charles W. Eliot. The latter, as we saw, was James’s old chemistry teacher, soon to be president of Harvard. The club fell apart again in 1868. The following year was a bad one for Wright’s drinking and depression, but in 1870 he was asked by Eliot to give a series of university lectures in psychology.
Late in 1871 or early in 1872, a group calling itself the Metaphysical Club gathered around Wright, who was then forty-two. It was not a formal group, it was only rarely referred to by name, and it is not clear how it started or how James came to be part of it. The new club included, besides William James, then thirty, Wendell Holmes and Charles Peirce, thirty-one and thirty-two, respectively. Joseph Warner was the youngest at twenty-four, and Nicholas St. John Greene, who was Wright’s age, was the oldest. The group met sometimes in James’s room, sometimes at Peirce’s, and it also occasionally included John Fiske, then thirty, and Francis E. Abbott, thirty-six.3
Wright was rigorously antitheological. He calmly dismissed what he called mysticism, which he conceived as the essence of unscientific procedure. He had read Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” while at Harvard and liked particularly Emerson’s critique of “historical Christianity.” James Thayer related how one conservative woman told Wright that “she believed implicitly that the world was made in six days. He looked at her,” said Thayer, “as if she were a new order of being, and I shall never forget the tone of his exclamation: ‘Is it possible!’”4 Wright was strongly influenced by John Stuart Mill, from whom he learned that “the determination of the vexed problems of metaphysics was to be sought in a properly scientific and not in an a priori or spiritualist psychology.”5 As an empiricist Wright rejected the idea of necessity, as he rejected all other abstractions and absolutist claims. Wendell Holmes said Wright taught him that “we could not assert necessity of the order of the universe.”6 “‘How could you know,’ he asked Holmes, his pale blue eyes alight with a cold passion, ‘how could you know what the universe considers necessary?’”7
Wright believed in positive science. His friend Charles Eliot Norton explained that Wright “used the term positive, as it is now commonly employed, as a general appellation to designate a whole body of thinkers who in the investigation of nature hold to the methods of induction from the facts of observation, as distinguished from the a priori school who seek in the constitution of the mind the key to the interpretation of the external world.”8
Wright stood, in general, for the universe of physical causation and for a frank, antispiritualist view of nature. James was later to praise Wright’s “power of analytic intellect pure and simple,” and to call him “the great mind of a village—if Cambridge will pardon the expression.” James went on to say that “either in London or Berlin he would, with equal ease, have taken the place of master which he held with us.”9
James also noted Wright’s “shyness, his want of ambition, and to a certain degree his indolence,” and he insisted that “his best work has been done in conversation.” James accurately caught Wright’s particular slant of mind when he wrote, “Whereas most men’s interest in a thought is proportioned to its possible relation to human destiny, with him it was almost the reverse. When the mere actuality of phenomena will suffice to describe them, he held it pure excess and superstition to speak of a metaphysical whence or whither, of a substance, a meaning or an end.” Wright coined the phrase “cosmical weather,” James observed, “to describe the irregular dissipation and aggregation of worlds... When it was objected to him that there must be some principle of oneness in the diversity of phenomena—some glue to hold them together and make a universe out of their mutual independence, he would reply that there is no need of a glue to join things unless we apprehend some reason why they should fall asunder. Phenomena are grouped—more we cannot say of them.”10
Chauncey Wright was in some ways William James’s true college, the whaling ship that taught him what he really needed to know. Wright schooled the naive idealism out of James. At some point in the early 1870s James wrote a short essay against Wright’s “nihilism,” objecting that Wright “denies this to be a universe and makes it out a ‘nulliverse.’” Wright penciled lengthy notes on James’s manuscript; the notes show the meticulous care Wright lavished on his young men, and they suggest that, after Agassiz, it was Wright more than anyone else who taught James the level of attention to detail at which an argument becomes significant.
To take just one example, James tried to argue for intentionality, saying that “the goodness or rightness of a state or act can be described by saying they are meant to be, that the rationality of a set of thoughts points to something which means them, and that our feelings of preference for certain experiences and claims have a quality... a different character over and above their intrinsic character as feeling.” Wright’s note barred the way with a steely objection: “This quality appears to me to be merely a negative one—simply—and no part of the phenomena of our activity.”11 Wright went on for hundreds of words, refusing to let James get away with smuggled assumptions, hidden agendas, buried premises, or received terminology. It would be impossible for a young man not to feel flattered by this depth of attention, by having his work read and responded to with such exhaustive seriousness.
In 1871, just as the Metaphysical Club was taking shape, Wright published a defense of Darwin, against the ideas of the Jesuit scientist St. George Mivart, in the North American Review. Wright’s article so impressed Darwin that he had it reprinted as a pamphlet and circulated in England. The following year, Wright traveled to Europe and visited Darwin, who asked Wright “to turn his analytic powers to work on the problem of determining, in connection with the idea of evolution, when a thing can properly be said to be effected by the will of man.”12 The result was “The Evolution of Self-Consciousness,” which Wright published in the North American Review in April 1873, an article James would first make use of when he came to write his chapter on reason in The Principles of Psychology. Wright took it for granted that if Darwin was right, the line separating humans from other mammals would be a very small, almost imperceptible development. Wright undertook “a critical re-examination of the phenomena of self-consciousness in themselves, with reference to their possible evolution from powers obviously common to all animal intelligences.”13
On the night of September 11, 1875, while he was writing at his desk, Chauncey Wright suffered a stroke. He was found early the following morning; he then suffered a second stroke. Henry James Jr. was the only close friend of Wright’s not away on vacation. He rushed through the streets of Cambridge as soon as he got the word, but arrived a few minutes after Wright died. William eulogized Wright as belonging “to the precious band of genuine philosophers.” Henry spoke for many when he said Wright was “the most wasted and doomed, the biggest at once and the gentlest of the great intending and unproducing... bachelors of philosophy, bachelors of attitude and of life.”14