Chauncey Wright

Evolution Of Self-Consciousness Chauncey Wright

In The Evolution of Self-Consciousness, Wright endeavored to explain the most elaborate psychical activities of men as developments of elementary forms of conscious processes present in the animal kingdom as a whole. The immediacy of sensible qualities to consciousness entails that there is no way to separate subject and object in consciousness. In this quotation, Wright suggests that the division of subject from object may constitute "rightly dividing the world" as indexed by survival value. A division made in these terms, rather than by an individual's experiences of himself and the world, is a reasonable basis for natural realism.