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possible, a philosophical school in Cambridge” (M ). By , he was
lecturing on moral and mental philosophy and, as noted earlier, busily
defining the Cambridge school by contrasting it with Oxford’s Literae
Humaniores. Ultimately, he would expand the role of Lecturer to encom-
pass more individual teaching.
With the return of Maurice, as Knightbridge Professor, it looked as
though Cambridge philosophy would have a decidedly reformist bent.
As Rothblatt has argued, Maurice “was an Apostle who had returned
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to Cambridge especially to guide the new generation.” Whether it was
Maurice or Sidgwick who did the guiding is unclear, but in any event
they worked together at close quarters – notably in the discussion society
known as the Grote Club – until Maurice’s death, in .
The Grote Club, it should be added, was a singularly important venue
for this work. Its origins are somewhat hazy, but it seems to have included
from the start at least John Grote, Sidgwick, J. B. Mayor, and Aldis Wright,
and to have been a faculty discussion group largely devoted to philosophy.
Grote, who was both Knightbridge Professor and vicar at the parish at
Trumpington, was the senior member and host, once the meetings ceased
being held in various members’ rooms and were moved to his vicarage.
As a (slightly) later member, John Venn, noted, Grote was an admirable
moderator: “Nothing escaped his keen and critical judgment, and he as-
serted himself just sufficiently to draw out the thoughts of those who were
shy in expressing themselves, and to keep the conversation from strag-
gling into side issues.” He also had an “extreme aversion to any dogmatic
statement,” and Sidgwick found this most Apostolic, as he explained in
an letter to Dakyns:
The kind of talk we have at Trumpington, my “Apostolic” training makes me in
some respects appreciate peculiarly. Consequently, I am a sort of Thaliarchus at
that feast of reason, i.e. other men may be truer , in fact, I know they are,
but I am a genial !. But at Cambridge there is a good deal of the feast
of reason if you know where to look for it, and if you evade shams. But there is
very little of the flow of soul. We communicate in one kind (this is not a ribald
joke, but a profound allegory).
Distinguished names – but ’tis, somehow,
As if they played at being names
Still more distinguished.
This is becoming a motto of mine, not of course with regard to Cambridge, but
to our age. (M )
Apparently, the Apostles and the Grote Club were for Sidgwick the two
speculative societies at Cambridge that especially encouraged the flow of
soul. According to John Gibbins, “Grote trained Sidgwick in impartiality,
fair-mindedness, and the rigorous enquiring style that is generally held to
be the most characteristic and praiseworthy feature of The Methods of Ethics
of , and of George Moore’s Principia Ethica of . He also helped
reform Trinity College, the Knightbridge Chair of Moral Philosophy and
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the Moral Science Tripos significantly, before Sidgwick.” For his part,
Sidgwick would sometimes wonder just what he had got from Grote; as
he put it to Dakyns, in a letter of :
I have less of a creed, philosophically speaking. I think I have more knowledge of
what the thoughts of men have been, and a less conscious faculty of choosing the
true and refusing the false among them.
I wonder whether I shall remain a boy all my life in this respect. I do not say
this paradoxically, but having John Grote in my mind, who certainly retained,
with the freshness, the indecisiveness of youth till the day of his death [sic].
I wonder whether we are coming to an age of general indecisiveness; I do not
mean the frivolous scepticism of modern Philistines (I almost prefer the frivolous
dogmatism of ancient ditto), but the feeling of a man who will not make up his
mind till mankind has. I feel that this standpoint is ultimately indefensible, because mankind have never made up their mind except in consequence of some individual
having done so. Still there seems to me to be a dilemma. In the present age an
educated man must either be prophet or persistent sceptic – there seems no media
via. (M –)
As the following chapter will suggest, this emphasis on doubt and con-
sensus was given formal expression in the epistemology of the Methods.
In any event, Grote powerfully reinforced the Apostolic and Mauricean
elements in Sidgwick’s work, and the Grote Club, along with the Apostles,
oiled the machinery for the further reform of Cambridge and Cambridge
philosophy, what with Grote being succeeded by Maurice. Although
some of their work was visible to the (educated) public eye, much would
take place behind the scenes or appear only in that guarded, masked
form that Maurice had done so much to perfect. Indeed, Apostolic se-
crecy had at this point become formal Apostolic policy. As Lubenow
records:
[I]n the s, the question had been addressed when a quarrel broke out amongst
the Brethren about the extent to which secrecy was binding in the apostolic tra-
dition. John Jermyn Cowell, the future barrister and sometime secretary of the
Alpine Club, wrote to the greatest living Angel, Lord Houghton, about ‘the tra-
ditions of the Elders’, to settle the dispute. Houghton thought little good would
come from talking about the Society ‘to the general world who are more likely to
mistake its objects & misunderstand its principles’, and urged a policy of secrecy.
Concluding with a suitable apostolic salutation, Houghton authorized Cowell to
use his letter in discussions about the question.
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In any event, now many of Sidgwick’s practical reformist concerns
would take definite shape: educational reform, higher education for
women, the Charity Organization Society, the working men’s colleges, the
Free Christian Union, the cabinetmakers cooperative – these were matters
of common cause with the older, more experienced Maurice. Sidgwick the
social and educational reformer was not, however, lingering in the back-
ground. According to Rothblatt, Sidgwick “must be considered a central
figure in any account of the generation of the s. His hand, sometimes
his inspiration, was in every major administrative or teaching reform in
that critical period in which modern Cambridge was born.”
But again, as important as the reform of Sidgwick’s home base surely
was, it was but one battle in a much larger war. Even in , he had
presciently explained to Dakyns that “[i]f I stay at Cambridge I should like
to divide my time between general scepticism as free as air, and inductive
‘Politik’ as practical & detailed as I can get it, to secure me from being a
dreamer,” and that he wanted to “form a Liberal Mediative party on the
principles of J. S. Mill” (M ). Once he awoke from “the thralldom” of his
historical investigations, he was apt to “agree with Mill against Comte” as
to the impossibility of history standing on its own as a science, and to think
that “Politick, besides, is so infinitely more important just now” (M ).
This it would have been hard to deny. After all, the era in question was
that leading up to the Second Reform Bill, the great reform act of ,
which marked the first real extension of the franchise to the working class
and hence the first real move to something like representative democracy.
The great battles between Palmerston, Russell, Derby, Gladstone, and
Disraeli kept the public fascinated and frightened – no one was sure quite
what to expect. Nor would the economic setbacks of the seventies and such
upheavals as the French Commune do much to reassure those who worried
about the winds of political change. As Eric Hobsbawm has framed the
dilemma of nineteenth-century liberals:
What indeed, would happen in politics when the masses of the people, ignorant and
brutalized, unable to understand the elegant and salutary logic of Adam Smith’s
free market, controlled the political fate of states? They would, as likely as not,
pursue a road which led to that social revolution whose brief reappearance in
had so terrified the respectable. In its ancient insurrectional form, revolution might no longer seem imminent, but was it not concealed behind any major extension of
the franchise beyond the ranks of the propertied and educated? Would this not,
as the future Lord Salisbury feared in , inevitably lead to communism?
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And J. S. Mill, whose Logic and Principles of Political Economy had become the textbooks of the nation, was increasingly being revealed as a voice for
radicalism; as MP for Westminster, he dared to propose granting the vote
to women, the first such effort ever made in Parliament. But even Mill wor-
ried about what would happen when political empowerment came to a class
that was largely illiterate and subject to a wide array of evils. True, he did
not share the contempt for the working class expressed by Robert Lowe,
in : “If you want venality,” Lowe asked, “if you want drunkenness
and facility for being intimidated . . . if . . . you want impulsive, unreflecting and violent people . . . do you go to the top or the bottom?” Still,
Mill himself had warned the workers that strong drink and weak morals
did not make for healthy political participation, and his Considerations on
Representative Government urged that one’s ballot power be proportional
to one’s education. His socialism, he later explained, made him less
sympathetic to democracy, under the circumstances.
Sidgwick, as we shall see, for all his candor and sympathy, was not
capable of this degree of Millian forthrightness, and he fell rather short
of Mill in his radicalism. He wrote to Oscar Browning, in November of
:
As for Rent, I for one do not mind the Ricardo-rent of land getting accumulated in
large masses, provided care is taken (by giving long leases, etc.) that this does not interfere with the amelioration of the soil: and then you have your "
at once. What I want to do is to put an end to the existing and threatening strife
between Labour and Capital by any possible means.
Browning had worried that Sidgwick and political economy generally were
hostile to the “families of ancient wealth” supposedly necessary for a high
degree of culture. Sidgwick assured him that this was not so, in his own
case at least, though he notes that
of course people who make the lucky hits are uneducated generally, but that is
just the point; if you could get all classes properly educated in the highest sense
of the term, a man who came into a fortune by ‘striking ile’ would not waste it:
and if he did not become a patron of Art himself, he might bring up his children
to be so. (M –)
Education was the indispensable key, according to both Mill and
Sidgwick. Both could not help but admire, whatever their theological
qualms, Maurice’s work for Christian socialism, workingmen’s colleges,
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and so on – efforts to reach out to and culturally encompass the alien-
ated workers. But the issue here was first and foremost the educational
quality of the larger cultural sphere of society, rather than institutional
or curricular changes. One inevitably colored the other; school and so-
ciety were never quite distinct (as Dewey would go on to spend a ca-
reer arguing). Consider Sidgwick’s explanation of why he wanted to join
the Freemasons: “My reasons for joining the fraternity are partly gen-
eral, for, though I do not at all know what the object of it is and am
aware that the ‘Great Secret’ must be humbug, I am still desirous of
helping the mingling of classes, wh. I conceive freemasonry does.” He
admits, however, that his main hope is that it will give him “at least a
slight additional means of penetrating the life of foreign countries: for
Freemasonry is all over the world.” Although it is not known just what
became of this particular strategy, Sidgwick’s reasoning is extremely re-
vealing of his quest to conquer otherness, at home and abroad. As with
the Apostles, it was through the work of a society famous for shrouding
its workings in secrecy that understanding and reform were supposed
to come.
Some sense of the complex web of Millian educational reformism can be
gleaned from Alan Ryan’s comparison of Mill with another great culture
critic of the period, Matthew Arnold, author of the famous Culture and
Anarchy, published in . As Ryan rightly insists, there are some inter-
esting allegiances between Mill the utilitarian and Arnold the perfectionist
champion of literary culture:
Both,
evidently, think of the ideals of liberal education as even more important
for an industrial and commercially minded society than for its simpler prede-
cessors. Against the critics of liberal education in nineteenth-century America,
who thought a more utilitarian, practical, and vocational education should replace
traditional liberal education, their reply is that just because the society offers so many incentives to acquire the vocational and practical skills we require, it is all
the more important to balance these pressures by disinterested, non-instrumental,
and in that sense impractical instruction.
This is quite accurate, and suggests how in order even to begin to think
sensibly about Mill’s utilitarianism (and Sidgwick’s), one must forget the
image of soulless, antipoetical utilitarianism popularized in Dickens’s
Hard Times. The call for a clerisy, common to Arnold, Mill, and Sidgwick,
was not a celebration of the virtues of Mr. Gradgrind.
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But the differences between the two are still more important:
Mill’s ideal of a liberal education was firmly rooted in an attachment to the classics, as his rectorial address to St. Andrews University insisted. What the classics were
to teach was another matter. Mill admired the Athenians for their politics, for the
vitality of their citizens’ lives, and for their democratic aspirations. Athenians did not confine their interests to a literary education, and they were not superstitious
about the wisdom of their ancestors. In short, a concern for the classics was to feed a concern for a lively democratic politics, and for a kind of political and intellectual ambition that Mill thought Victorian Englishmen lacked. It followed that when
Mill asked the question whether we should seek an education for citizenship or
an education in the classical tradition, he inevitably answered Both, and when he
asked whether such an education ought to be a scientific or a literary education he
unhesitatingly answered Both once more. These were not Arnold’s politics, nor
Arnold’s educational ideals.
Ryan suggests that we might take away from Mill v. Arnold the “half-