Chauncey Wright

[1] With financial help from a benefactor, Wright attended Harvard, where his reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson led him to abandon his youthful Unitarianism.

Of these, the former endeavors to explain the most elaborate psychical activities of men as developments of elementary forms of conscious processes in the animal kingdom as a whole; the latter is a defense of the theory of natural selection against the attacks of St George Mivart and Alfred Russel Wallace.

From 1863 to 1870 he was secretary and recorder to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in the last year of his life he lectured on mathematical physics at Harvard.

[4] Following his death, his close friend Charles Eliot Norton spoke of his great devotion to truth and his eagerness to hear criticisms of his own views.

[10] His essays were collected and published, with a biographical sketch, by Charles Eliot Norton in 1877, and his Letters were edited and privately printed at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1878 by James Bradley Thayer.