by Bart Schultz
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Abbreviations
Posthumous Books
GSM
Lectures on the Ethics of T. H. Green, H. Spencer, and J. Martineau,
ed. E. E. Constance Jones, .
PSR
Philosophy, Its Scope and Relations: An Introductory Course of Lec-
tures, ed. James Ward, .
DEP
The Development of European Polity, ed. Eleanor Mildred
Sidgwick, .
MEA
Miscellaneous Essays and Addresses, ed. Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick
and Arthur Sidgwick, .
LPK
Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant and Other Philosophical Lectures
and Essays, ed. James Ward, .
M
Henry Sidgwick, A Memoir, ed. Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick and
Arthur Sidgwick, .
For a complete bibliography, covering all of Sidgwick’s many essays, ar-
ticles, and reviews, as well as the archival resources and reviews of his
major works, see the entry on him by J. B. Schneewind and Bart Schultz
in The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Vol. , –,
rd ed., ed. Joanne Shattock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
). The only complete collection of Sidgwick’s writings is The Complete
Works and Select Correspondence of Henry Sidgwick, ed. Bart Schultz et al.
(Charlottesville, VA: InteLex Corporation, ; nd ed. ), an elec-
tronic database to which frequent reference is made in the text. This
collection is referred to in the text by the abbreviation CWC; because of
the electronic format, no page references to it are given, though the origi-
nal print or archival references are often provided or simply used instead.
However, much of the material in the database – such as the complete,
matched Sidgwick–Dakyns correspondence – has been transcribed and
reproduced for the first time, and the originals are from private collections
without archival or other reference numbers. Please note that the transla-
tions of Greek terms and expressions are reserved for the notes, though,
unless otherwise indicated, these are simply the translations given in the
work being cited.
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Overture
My aim in what I am about to say now is to give such an account of my life – mainly
my inner intellectual life – as shall render the central and fundamental aims that
partially at least determined its course when apparently most fitful and erratic,
as clear and intelligible as I can. That aim is very simply stated. It has been the
solution, or contribution to the solution, of the deepest problems of human life.
The peculiarity of my career has been that I have sought light on these problems,
and that not casually but systematically and laboriously, from very various sources
and by very diverse methods.
Henry Sidgwick, “Autobiographical Fragment” dictated from his deathbed
Stranger lives than Henry Sidgwick’s have resulted from the philosophical
quest for the ultimate truth about the Universe, but his is nonetheless a
source of considerable fascination. As a Victorian philosopher, social scien-
tist, literary critic, educator, reformer, and parapsychologist, an academic
who spent nearly his entire adult life teaching at and reforming Cambridge
University, Sidgwick was at the philosophical heart of England when
England was at the height of its worldly power. He was friendly with
everyone from William Gladstone to George Eliot, had in one brother-
in-law a future prime minister and in another a future archbishop of
Canterbury, and served as a leading figure in that most famous of elite
secret discussion societies, the Cambridge “Apostles,” which would go on
to give the world the Bloomsbury circle and the Cambridge spies. And,
after the publication of his masterpiece, The Methods of Ethics (), he
was often regarded as the most philosophically sophisticated defender of
the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill, who had been perhaps the single
most influential intellectual figure of the mid-Victorian period.
Sidgwick represented a form of philosophical life that held on to many
of the reformist Millian hopes for an open, educating society rich in social
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experimentation and cultural vanguards, a society that would represent
a progressively expanding circle of human sympathy and the flourish-
ing of social intelligence. Like other academic liberals, notably his friend
T. H. Green, he helped open the way for such developments as the ethical
culture movement and the settlement movement. In fact, Sidgwick battled
in a brilliant series of culture wars about the fate of religion, morals, art, and
education, proving himself a forceful critic of Matthew Arnold’s claims
about “the best that has been thought and said.” Significant portions of
the modern university curriculum now being fought over were shaped
by Sidgwick, the classicist who opposed mandatory Greek and Latin,
who helped to establish philosophy as an independent professional disci-
pline, who worried about the scientific illiteracy of the graduates in the
humanities, and who fought to extend educational opportunities to women
and the working class. Cambridge University’s Newnham College stands
today as a vivid reminder of Sidgwick’s life and work, or at least of one of
the more public parts of it. His influence often worked behind the scenes.
Yet Sidgwick always remained rather distanced, even alienated, from a
good many of his cultural contexts; his life, like Mill’s, was punctuated by
mental and moral crises. An exceptionally self-critical, reflective voice, his
brilliance shone through more in his perpetual doubt about the proposed
solutions to “the deepest problems of human life” than in the defense of
one. One formative event, personally and philosophically, was his agonized
decision in to resign his position at Cambridge because he could no
longer in good conscience subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the
Church of England, as legally required. This drama would replay itself
over and again in his life, his detailed casuistical reflections on it extending
from his early publications and to his last, since even after subscription
was no longer required he would question whether someone as skeptical
as himself ought to be teaching ethics. Ironically, given how recent critics
of
utilitarianism have urged that it cannot effectively handle the matter
of integrity, Sidgwick’s life and work were entangled from beginning to
end with precisely this issue, which was of a piece with his struggle with
hypocrisy, both his own and that of the larger culture.
Sidgwick thus represented the classic mid-Victorian, post-Darwinian
struggle between the “emancipated head and the traditional heart.” How-
ever, to paint his deepest concerns in such broad strokes is scarcely to do
justice to the richer, more intriguing, and more troubling elements of his
legacy. Unlike Nietzsche, who died at nearly the same historical moment,
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Overture
Sidgwick was an eminently sane person much loved for his sympathetic
and beneficent character, with a certain genius for intimate friendship and
conversation, albeit of a seriously philosophical sort. But like Nietzsche,
and unlike Bentham or Mill, he regarded the “death of God” as of mon-
umental significance for Western civilization, a potential cataclysm. This
was where the deepest problems were to be found, the ones most demand-
ing of serious reflection and self-scrutiny, of all the rigors of the Socratic
quest. Sidgwick’s various inquiries and reformist efforts were infused with
a sense of urgency and anxiety that finds no clear parallel in the earlier
utilitarians, energetic reformers though they were; this urgency and anx-
iety had everything to do with the fate of civilization in a post-Christian
era and with the need for a new cultural synthesis.
My aim in this book is to convey some sense of just what Sidgwick’s
self-assessment actually involved, and of how his “inner intellectual life”
ultimately evolved, how he became what he was. But the Sidgwick who
emerges in the following pages is quite different from the one featured
in most twentieth-century readings of him, framed when his legacy was
often rather cloudy.
As a once-popular line of interpretation had it, the utilitarian tradition
of promoting the greatest happiness for the greatest number began, in its
modern, secular form, with Jeremy Bentham’s fanatical legal and political
reformism, culminating in Britain’s Reform Act of , which movement
was then philosophically and politically developed and qualified mainly
by the younger Mill, with whom it crested. Sidgwick is then cast as a kind
of bookish, academicized remnant of this legacy, holding out against the
wave of philosophical idealism that swept such figures as Green and F. H.
Bradley into the forefront of British philosophy, until with the new century
G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell shifted the current, and contemporary
analytical philosophy was launched. “The last surviving representative of
the Utilitarians” is how Russell depicted and dispatched his teacher, “Old
Sidg.”
Indeed, during the twentieth century, Sidgwick was all too often viewed
as merely an “eminent Victorian,” an erudite but dull read, what with all
that tedious Victorian earnestness. By the time Russell, Moore, Lytton
Strachey, J. M. Keynes, and Ludwig Wittgenstein were designing the
Cambridge scene, in the early decades of the twentieth century, Sidgwick
was deemed the dead hand of a pre-philosophical, hypocritical, sexually
warped era. It was a lonely C. D. Broad, a later successor to Sidgwick’s
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chair at Cambridge, who would write that “Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics
seems to me to be on the whole the best treatise on moral theory that has
ever been written, and to be one of the English philosophical classics.”
For the most part, the aesthetic vanguards of Bloomsbury, along with the
logical positivists and empiricists and those under the spell of the mag-
netic Wittgenstein or of ordinary language philosophy, found Sidgwick’s
substantive ethical theorizing a quaint relic of Cambridge’s dim past, bet-
ter forgotten. And the (long) enduring elements of the earlier, idealistic
school were not exactly given to recalling the importance of Sidgwick,
even when they criticized what they saw as the simplistic formalism of the
new analytical movement. F. H. Bradley went from being a youthful critic
of Sidgwick to being an older critic of Russell and Moore.
Ironically, it was the remarkably pervasive Bloomsbury mentality that,
as much as anything, clouded the reception of Sidgwick during the first
half of the twentieth century. “He never did anything but wonder whether
Christianity was true and prove it wasn’t and hope that it was” – this was
the famous pronouncement of J. M. Keynes, after reading Henry Sidgwick,
A Memoir (), assembled by Eleanor Sidgwick and Arthur Sidgwick.
The Bloomsbury letters, especially those between Keynes and Strachey,
are littered with disparaging remarks about Sidgwick, his life, his times,
and his philosophy. Strachey called it “an appalling time to have lived”
and “the Glass Case Age”:
Themselves as well as their ornaments, were left under glass cases. Their refusal to
face any fundamental question fairly – either about people or God – looks at first
sight like cowardice; but I believe it was simply the result of an innate incapacity
for penetration – for getting either out of themselves or into anything or anybody
else. They were enclosed in glass. How intolerable! Have you noticed, too, that
they were nearly all physically impotent? – Sidgwick himself, Matthew Arnold,
Jowett, Leighton, Ruskin, Watts. It’s damned difficult to copulate through a glass
case.
Strachey had in fact seriously considered using Sidgwick as one of the
featured figures in his wickedly sarcastic Eminent Victorians (), but
he contented himself with pronouncing him a “shocking wobbler,” and a
dishonest one at that, someone whose lamentations over his lost faith were
suspiciously prolonged. Moreover, the leading Bloomsberries, mostly bred
by the Apostles, were none too pleased with the light shed on them by the
Memoir, which told of Sidgwick’s involvement with the group.
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Overture
Even those who lamented the ascendance of Bloomsbury tended, in
the very act, to concede its importance. F. R. Leavis, the famous literary
critic who directed much of his criticism at both Bloomsbury and the
cult of Wittgenstein, expostulated, “Can we imagine Sidgwic
k or Leslie
Stephen or Maitland being influenced by, or interested in, the equivalent
of Lytton Strachey? By what steps, and by the operation of what causes,
did so great a change come over Cambridge in so comparatively short
a time?” That the change was great was something that few cared to
deny, whatever their stance on its quality. But in any event, the younger
generations of Apostles were scarcely prone to casting nostalgic backward
glances, even at one of their “Popes” who had profoundly shaped their own
order.
Given the social and intellectual positioning of the Bloomsbury group, it
is perhaps not surprising that their judgments on cultural matters carried
such punch, though in the case of Sidgwick, the disparagement was ex-
acerbated by the constant flow of invidious comparisons to Moore, whose
Principia Ethica () was virtually an object of worship. Strachey effused
to Moore:
I think your book has not only wrecked and shattered all writers on Ethics from
Aristotle and Christ to Herbert Spencer and Mr Bradley, it has not only laid the
true foundations of Ethics, it has not only left all modern philosophy bafouee – these seem to me small achievements compared to the establishment of that Method
which shines like a sword between the lines. It is the scientific method deliberately applied, for the first time, to Reasoning. Is that true? You perhaps shake your
head, but henceforward who will be able to tell lies one thousand times as easily
as before? The truth, there can be no doubt, is really now upon the march. I date
from Oct. the beginning of the Age of Reason.
Echoes of this can still be found in some philosophers of a metaethi-
cal bent. An influential recent work, “Toward Fin de siècle Ethics: Some
Trends,” coauthored by Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter
Railton,” takes Moore’s Principia as setting the agenda for twentieth-
century ethical philosophizing: “However readily we now reject as anti-
quated his views in semantics and epistemology, it seems impossible to
deny that Moore was on to something.”
But of course, despite his own Bloomsbury-style rhetoric, most of what
Moore was “on to” was already there in Sidgwick, his teacher in the s,
whose Methods is the most heavily cited work in the Principia. Moore
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