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In preparation for a new course I'll be teaching this spring on the James family, I'm deep into (among other things) Robert Richardson's 2006 biography of William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. It's a fascinating account of the wellsprings of James's thought, and along the way a really interesting account of the world in which he lived, and the thinkers with whom he consorted. Tonight I've learned that Darwin asked the American philosopher Chauncey 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.' The result was 'The Evolution of Self-Consciousness,' which Wright published in the North American Review in April 1873...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...[an] evolution from powers obviously common to all animal intelligences'" (p. 132).

Which is to say the line Doug was drawing this morning is...

hard to draw?

And certainly, to Chauncey Wright, not very significant in what he called "cosmical weather," or "the irregular dissipation and aggregation of worlds....:Whereas most men's interest in a thought is proportioned to its possible relation to human destiny, with him it was almost the reverse" (131).