by Bart Schultz
plaint was not that historical criticism was valueless (though he sometimes
made it sound that way), but that it was insufficient by itself to solve the
“deepest problems of human life.” The exasperation that he vented over
his inconclusive results scarcely conveyed just how indebted he was and
would remain to Strauss and Renan. After all, Seeley’s shortcomings were
shared by many more orthodox figures, such as Bishop Mansel, another
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object of Sidgwick’s critical talents. Of Mansel’s Bampton Lectures, he
wrote: “He really is a well-meaning man, and il a raison for the most
part against Metaphysicians. But he talks of Revelation as if the Bible
had dropped from the skies ready translated into English; he ignores all
historical criticism utterly.” (M ) And in a review of , in which he
anticipates a number of arguments he would later marshall against the ide-
alists, he challenges Mansel’s apparent claim that, theological beliefs being
designed to guide practice rather than to satisfy reason, the contradiction
between two such beliefs is no argument against them:
It is no use to say that it is restricted to the interpretation of Revelation: for the deduction of dogma from Scripture is a process of reasoning, which has always
been guided by the maxim that different texts of Scripture must be made mutually
consistent. Now either this maxim is invalid, in which case the creeds must crumble
again into a chaos of texts: or if it is valid, we require some criterion to distinguish the contradictions that we ought to embrace. Such a criterion Mansel never offers:
and he seems to deal in a perfectly arbitrary manner with the antinomies which
beset the exercise of our reason when it strives to attain the absolute.
This hardly seems like a profession of the uselessness of historical crit-
icism, and it is in fact more in keeping with Sidgwick’s general attitude,
evident in many other works, than the impatience expressed in some of his
letters. Before embarking on his biblical criticism, he could complacently
say that a man “impressed with the Divine Government and the Divine
sympathy” by “reading simply and candidly the New Testament, will end
by being more orthodox than at first one thinks possible when one feels
one’s indignation kindled against Persecuting Bishops” (M ). No such
claim could have passed his pen after his exposure to Renan and Strauss.
Although Sidgwick did at one time or another toy with going whole-
heartedly with “Maurice and Broad Church,” his fundamental objections
to that position formed a more conspicuous feature of his theological twists
and turns. They were given cogent expression in an review of a book
by one of Maurice’s disciples:
[T]he key to Mr. Hutton’s theology, as it is to that of his master, Mr. Maurice . . .
may be expressed thus: ‘God is immediately or intuitively, but not adequately,
made known to us: and what is made known of Him is more than can be expressed
in propositions, or communicated from one man to another.’ This seems to me
an appropriate account of our apprehension of Divine, as of much other, fact:
but I am unable to see how it furnishes the barrier against scepticism which
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Mr. Maurice and Mr. Hutton seem to find in it. The ‘sources of our faith’ may be
indefinitely wider than that ‘evidences of our convictions’: but when the diversities of faith cause any one to enquire into the truth or falsehood of his own, a rational
answer must indicate ‘evidences’ and not ‘sources.’ Mr. Hutton sees this, and
offers ‘really universal reasons’ for believing the Incarnation. These are the old
combination of psychological and historical premisses: only miracles are omitted
from the latter. ‘We have need of believing in a Filial God: and Jesus claimed to be
and was recognised as such.’ In explaining the former premiss Mr. Hutton rather
confounds emotional want with intellectual anticipation: even if it be true that our
spiritual yearnings cannot be satisfied without this belief, the presumption thus
obtained cannot be compared with the presumption that a friend or a chemical
substance will act in a given way. The exposition of these spiritual needs, as
Mr. Hutton apprehends them, is highly interesting: but they seem to me too
idiosyncratic to constitute ‘really universal reasons.’ Who, except him, ‘knows’
that the ‘free will of all men (except Jesus) is intrinsically indifferent,’ and that ‘self-sacrifice is not indigenous in man’? If we long to institute a complete comparison
of the spiritual effects of pure theism and Christianity, we find the materials too
scanty: so that Mr. Hutton’s method of psychological proof, even if cogent, is as
yet inapplicable.
Much as Sidgwick admired the Mauricean passion for unity, he was
too sharply aware of conflict and difference to go along with that version
of Platonized Christianity. For what if what is being apprehended is only
the God of theism, rather than that of Christianity in its more proper
forms? Perhaps the unifying intuition was more Platonic than Christian.
Or perhaps it was more Socratic than Platonic, something simpler and even
less amenable to articulation than Plato’s eternal forms. Maurice’s appeal
to conscience was a wonderfully sophisticated and liberal-minded one, but
for all that, it was still an appeal to conscience, and for practical purposes
useless. Sidgwick, who found that his conscience “was more utilitarian
than most,” sought a way of actually reconciling conflicting “evidences”
(M ). Sympathetic, conversational soul searching required more tools
with which to work. Jesus was no more above criticism than Socrates, and
the criticism often ran on parallel tracks.
He even sticks up for Goethe, against Hutton’s account. In a most
revealing passage, he urges that Hutton is
even betrayed here and there into phrases which have a touch of impatient
Philistinism. To talk of Goethe’s “sickly pottering” about the “pyramid of his ex-
istence” is surely an inadequate manner of speaking of the apostle of self-culture.
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And on the whole the critic seems to lean too much to the common error, which
in one passage he resists, of taking the Goethe of the autobiography for the real
Goethe. No one was ever fascinated by the hero of W
ahrheit und Dichtung. The
charm of Goethe depends on the rare harmony of strikingly contrasted qualities,
the poise and balance of strongly conflicting impulses: the intellect of driest light, yet with perpetual vision of a radiantly coloured world: the nature responsive to
all gales of emotion and breezes of sentiment, yet using all as forces to carry it in its “unhasting unresting” course – which we only see by comprehensive comparison of his studied and unstudied utterances, and his life as seen and felt by his
contemporaries.
Of this essay, Noel wrote to Sidgwick, “It is wonderfully terse, pregnant,
to the point. I suppose nothing has ever been said about Goethe more to
the point than the last sentences.”
The criticisms of the Mauricean vision were telling, and profoundly
suggestive of the course of Sidgwick’s theological probing. Even in ,
impatient with his historical work, he had urged that what is “required
is psychological experiments in ethics and intuitive Theism: that is what
on the whole the human race has got to do for some years” (M ).
The call for such experiments was serious: he had long held that more
work needed to be done on the psychology of religious belief – indeed,
on psychology generally – if one were to argue with any plausibility
as to just what kind of religious belief humanity might require. After all,
there “is no proof against there being a Mind & Heart behind phenomena,”
and, Sidgwick confessed, “the contemplation of this hypothesis answers
to a need now existing in my nature, and the experience of thousands tes-
tifies that such contemplation generates an abiding , with
all its attendant noblenesses and raptures.” But what was the mean-
ing of this need and this effect? Was the human condition one of abject
superstition, demanding totem and taboo? Was it less superstitious but
nonetheless inherently prone to some minimal faith in a just universe,
such that the suffering of innocents was only apparent and righteous-
ness would in the long run receive its reward? Was some sort of faith,
even if incapable of rational demonstration, essential to human flourish-
ing or functioning? How far away from earlier religions might civiliza-
tion progress? What if Socrates, for example, turned out to be simply
a schizoid combination of critical acumen and primitive idolatry? One
could not make either Mauricean or Comtean claims until such issues were
sorted out.
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In his early Apostolic days, Sidgwick had read a paper entitled “Is Prayer
a Permanent Function of Humanity?” – it was a question that epitomized
much of his thinking, during the sixties and beyond, and one to which he
would return at the very end of his life. He wondered whether there were
not some psychological natures so “healthy, finely moulded, well nerved,
symmetrical” that they could do without the practice of supplication and
all that went with it. Moreover, he suspected that such natures “might
feel in reading history as if mankind had gone to sleep after the bright
sunny days of Athenian life and were just waking up again after the long
nightmare of mediaeval superstition.” Sidgwick predictably goes on to
confess that he feels the opposing case “with much more force,” since one
could argue from “the virtue and happiness that religion has produced in
the unsymmetrical and weak to the still greater effects of the same kind, it
might produce in the symmetrical and strong.” (CWC) And the religious
have an edge over the symmetrical people in facing the trials of old age
and death. Yet even so, the doubts were there, and had been watered by
the example of the ancient Athenians. And by that of Goethe and those
of Sidgwick’s friends who followed him.
These issues, with their psychological, sociological, and anthropological
orientations, were coming at Sidgwick from all sides – from Darwin,
Maurice, Mill, Renan, Comte, and others – and they would continue to
haunt him for the rest of his life. But he gave them a novel twist, carrying
them in directions never quite anticipated by his predecessors.
For Sidgwick, psychology meant, in large part, parapsychology. The
crucial questions could not be fully addressed without consideration of a
much wider range of evidence than had previously been treated of. Perhaps
personal survival of death was one of the elements of truth in Christianity,
to be separated from the husk of legend. Perhaps Maurice was at least
right in thinking that one must address sympathetically the evidences of all
the world religions, including, of course, the Socratic. Maurice, however,
thought that “disembodied spirits” belonged “to the realm of fancy and
not of fact. Our Lord took all pains while He was on earth to show how
much He cared for bodies.” Here he was in an odd accord with Renan, who
also had no time for ghosts. But for Sidgwick, the natural reply was that
it was just as dogmatic to go along uncritically with materialistic science
as it was to go along with orthodox religion. What evidence was there for
ghosts? For the miraculous as a permanent function of the universe? Just
possibly, Maurice did not take the Socratic Daimon seriously enough.
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In , in a singularly illuminating letter to his friend Roden Noel,
Sidgwick explained:
Only I happened to read Lecky in the Long. You know the book – History of
Rationalism. With the perverseness that sometimes characterises me I took up
the subject from entirely the opposite point of view to Lecky, and determined to
investigate the evidence for medieval miracles, as he insists it is not an investigation of this evidence, but merely the progress of events, march of mind, etc. which
has brought about our present disbelief in them. The results have, I confess,
astonished myself. I keep silence at present even from good words, but I dimly
foresee that I shall have to entirely alter my whole view of the universe and
admit the “miraculous,” as we call it, as a permanent element in human history and experience. You know my “Spiritualistic” ghost-seeing tendencies. These all
link on, and the Origins of all religions find themselves explained. However, as I
say, I keep silence at present; I am only in the middle of my inquiries. (M )
Curiously enough, this venture was in part an inheritance from Benson.
Among the discussion societies that Sidgwick had joined as an undergrad-
uate, there was also the Ghost Society, devoted to the collection and critical
examination of ghost stories. It had been founded by Benso
n and some
friends during his undergraduate tenure, and thus Sidgwick had been
steadily accumulating the results of collective research on the subject for
a decade prior to the letter. A letter to his sister in explains that
“my ghostological investigations are flourishing; I have taken unto myself
associates here, and am prosecuting my researches with vigour; meeting
with failures and vexatious exaggerations but still getting a good deal of
real matter.”
As his diary reveals, the theological relevance of this subject – something
Benson ultimately rejected – had come home to him early on: “Why should
not God be willing to give us a few glimpses of the unseen worlds which
we all believe exist.” This was an interest that apparently endured intact
through all his theological wanderings. In , he wrote to Dakyns: “In
Theology I am much as ever: I have not yet investigated Spiritualism,
but I am still bent upon doing so as soon as I have the opportunity”
(M ). And again, in , “As to Spiritualism, do not speak of it: I
have not progressed, but am in painful doubt; still, I have some personal
experiences and much testimony, and I find it hard to believe that I shall
not discover some unknown laws, psychological or other” (M ). T. H.
Green may have “sniffed” at the project, but Sidgwick was unmoved.
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Interestingly, though not surprisingly, Sidgwick’s ghostological inves-
tigations tended to mirror the Apostolic mode of inquiry. This is not
merely because a number of the associates he had taken on were in fact
also Apostles – for instance, Oscar Browning and J. J. Cowell, the latter of
whom collaborated with Sidgwick in experiments in automatic or “spirit”
writing. More important was the overall mission and method; in Janet
Oppenheim’s view, the Apostolic “idea of a group of men meeting regu-
larly to discuss, with utter frankness and without restrictions, questions
of religious, philosophical, and ethical import” would inspire a number of
those who went on to form the the Society for Psychical Research, in ,