The Evolutionary Philosophy of Chauncey WrightIntroductionIn the recent bestseller, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel C. Dennett argues that the truly "dangerous" aspect of the Darwinian revolution was not the notion that species evolve: Lamarck, Owen, and Darwin's grandfather Erasmus had already advanced popular versions of this thesis. Instead, the real incendiary was the mechanism of evolution – natural selection – by which descent with modification is due neither to latent potentialities within a species nor to the efforts of individual members, but to random variations that preserve "lucky" individuals and their offspring when the remainder are forced to extinction.1 If true, and applicable to humanity, natural selection obviates both the guiding hand of Providence and the alleged "ascent" of mankind.If Darwin's idea remains dangerous after nearly a century and a half, we can well imagine the intensity of the slugfest in the years immediately following the publication of the Origin of Species. John Stuart Mill lamented that "we may still count in England twenty a priori or spiritualist philosophers for every partisan of the doctrine of Experience," but in his homeland Darwin could at least count on genuine academic freedom and tenacious allies such as T. H. Huxley, Joseph Dalton Hooker, and John Lubbock. American colleges, to the contrary, were dominated by theologians such as James McCosh of Princeton, James Walker of Harvard, and Francis Wayland of Brown. Few dissenting voices rose above this pious choir, but the clearest of these was Chauncey Wright's.Chauncey Wright (1830–75) was America's first great champion of scientific empiricism and naturalism. He assailed both German idealism and Scottish realism for infusing a priori "metaphysical" elements into philosophical methodology, insisting that concrete facts should guide ideas and not...