Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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shared his speculative interests and membership in such organizations
as the Metaphysical Society and the Synthetic Society, and much of
Sidgwick’s life outside of Cambridge was divided between the Balfour
estate in Whittingehame, Scotland, the Rayleigh’s Terling Place, and the
various London homes of the family members.
Sidgwick’s first contact with them had come through Arthur Balfour,
who became his student in the late sixties. In fact, Balfour was one of
Sidgwick’s favorite pupils, and one of the very first students to be examined
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under the newly remodeled Moral Sciences Tripos, in . He was thus
one of Sidgwick’s first proper students in philosophy. Balfour’s admiration
for Sidgwick was unstinting:
I came up from Eton to Cambridge in with no Academic ambitions, but with
the highest expectations as to the gratifications which Academic life had to offer,
both in the way of ideas and in the way of amusements. That these expectations,
so far as the first head is concerned, were in no wise disappointed was largely due
to Sidgwick. My philosophic equipment when I first became his pupil was but
slender – being, indeed, little more than what I had acquired at Eton for my own
entertainment. Nor did I find it easy to increase this modest stock of learning
by attendance at ordinary lectures, which others besides myself have found a
somewhat irksome and ineffectual means of increasing knowledge. Few teachers
would, in these circumstances, have taken either much trouble or the right kind of
trouble with so unsatisfactory a pupil, and certainly any teacher would have been
justified in leaving me to my own devices. Fortunately for me Henry Sidgwick took
a more tolerant view. In addition to his other lectures he had at that time a small
class for those specially interested in the metaphysical side of the ‘moral sciences’
Tripos, a class so small indeed that it consisted, if I remember right, only of one
other student besides myself. We met in Sidgwick’s own rooms. The teaching was
largely in the nature of conversational discussion; and though I cannot, at this
distance of time, recall it in detail, I retain a vivid recollection of the zest with which these hours were enjoyed. (M –)
As Balfour goes on to explain, this was in part owing to Sidgwick’s
method, which allowed them “to forget that we were preparing for an
examination, an oblivion which may or may not be desirable in other
branches of study, but is almost essential if the pleasures of speculation
are to be enjoyed without alloy.” Moreover, Sidgwick “did not unduly
force upon us the historic method of studying philosophy,” and “never
drove us into those arid regions of speculation where, to the modern
mind, the arguments seem without cogency and the conclusions without
interest.” (M ) But most important, Balfour allows, was his teacher’s
disinterestedness:
What most people want in order to do their best is recognition; and the kind of
recognition from a distinguished man of eight-and-twenty which is most valued
by a boy of eighteen is the admission that his difficulties are worth solving, his
objections worth answering, his arguments worth weighing. This form of convey-
ing encouragement came naturally to Sidgwick. Of all the men I have known he
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was the readiest to consider every controversy and every controversialist on their
merits. He never claimed authority. . . . (M )
It is worth noting that this frequently cited assessment must have, at least in
part, reflected Balfour’s experiences with Sidgwick in psychical research.
Now, for all of his admiration for Sidgwick as a friend, teacher, and
brother-in-law, Balfour was always at a far remove from him on theological
matters. Such works as his A Defence of Philosophic Doubt () and The
Foundations of Belief () were, as Janet Oppenheim has rightly stressed,
largely devoted to demonstrating “the validity of doubting that scientific
methodology provided the only legitimate way to make inquiries about
man and the universe,” and he “consistently refused to acknowledge that
science and religion could be at cross-purposes, that the former could
fatally undermine the latter.” If such attitudes were not always entirely at
odds with Sidgwick’s distaste for dogmatic materialism, his more expressly
Christian views surely were. For throughout his life, Balfour never really
doubted immortality or the existence of a personal God, “a God whom
men can love, a God to whom men can pray, who takes sides, who has
purposes and preferences, whose attributes, howsoever conceived, leave
unimpaired the possibility of a personal relation between Himself and
those whom He has created.” This was not Sidgwick’s thin, theistic
faith.
Thus, as Oppenheim observes, Balfour “did not need the SPR to prop
up a sagging faith, nor to afford the evidence without which he could enjoy
no peace of mind.” His theology “was grounded, not on sublime certainty,
but rather on the conviction of man’s spiritual needs. Again and again, his
arguments reduced themselves to this: Human life was meaningless and
valueless without religious faith. Religion was worth fighting for because
it was an indubitable ‘benefit’ to mankind.” For Sidgwick, both of these
points might well be true, but it was nonetheless important not to confuse
hope with justified belief.
Yet for all that, Balfour was obviously deeply persuaded that the work
of the Sidgwick Group and the SPR was of profound importance, since
at the least they would demonstrate “that there are things in heaven and
earth not hitherto dreamed of in our scientific philosophy.” If his faith
never sagged or demanded support, he was nonetheless delighted to add
this form of buttressing, which clearly appealed to his speculative cast
of mind.
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The Balfour children came by their religion honestly. Their father had
died prematurely in , of tuberculosis, and afterwards they were very
much in the keep of their evangelical mother, Lady Blanche Gascoigne
Cecil. In a remarkable article, “A Mother’s Role, a Daughter’s Duty:
Lady Blanche Balfour, Eleanor Sidgwick, and
Feminist Perspectives,”
Oppenheim has brought out the significance of this family context, in
connection not only with Eleanor but also with the ways in which Eleanor
became a kind of surrogate mother for her younger brother Arthur –
“Prince Arthur,” as it was sometimes joked. Drawing on two unpub-
lished memoirs that Eleanor – the eldest surviving child, born in –
wrote about her mother, Oppenheim gives a vivid description of the family
backdrop:
The dominant image of Lady Blanche that emerges from her eldest daughter’s
memoirs is, somewhat paradoxically, that of a domestic angel with an iron will.
Incidents illustrating her capacity for self-sacrifice abound, most of them asso-
ciated with the zealous nursing of her family through repeated health crises.
Although exhausted from a decade of childbearing, she devotedly, and almost
single-handedly, ministered to her young husband, James Maitland Balfour, as he
slowly died of tuberculosis between and . In the years that followed,
Sidgwick recorded, she successfully nursed her offspring through bouts with
diptheria, typhoid fever, and whooping cough, at serious personal cost. The im-
pression conveyed is of a mother literally killing herself for her children. Sidgwick was also deeply impressed that Lady Blanche, a ‘naturally sociable’ woman, relinquished the pleasures of society after her husband’s death, when she was only
thirty-one, in order ‘to use the little strength she had’ for her eight children, all under the age of eleven.
Lady Blanche’s seemingly endless capacity for self-denial was coupled in
her daughter’s memory with masterful self-discipline. Both Eleanor Sidgwick
and Evelyn Rayleigh recollected her vigorous attempts to crush all manifesta-
tions of personal vanity, particularly in matters of fashion and adornment. . . .
Lady Blanche was also quick to extirpate evidence of pride in Eleanor’s conduct,
as Mrs. Sidgwick appeared to relish telling her brothers’ and sister’s children.
Once when the family grocer in Edinburgh gave her a little box of sweets, Eleanor
wanted to refuse the gift until her mother persuaded her to accept. ‘She convinced
me afterwards,’ Sidgwick explained, ‘of the ungraciousness of such an action and
how the impulse was in my case rooted in pride. She did that sort of thing without
giving any impression of scolding or preaching.’ At an unspecified date, perhaps
in the wake of this incident, Lady Blanche gave Eleanor a set of uncompromising
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directions ‘for prayer and self-examination,’ which began: ‘Have I given way to
pride, conceit, vanity, temper, waste of time or dawdling, exaggeration or inex-
actness of speech, unkindness or selfishness?’ After queries about Eleanor’s Bible
reading and relationship to God, the instructions ended with a final question no
less relentless than the first: ‘Have I omitted any opportunity of doing good or of
making others happy?’ Although Sidgwick claimed that the strong evangelicalism
of Lady Blanche’s youth had mellowed into a much broader religious outlook as
she matured, enough of it evidently remained to leave her children little room for
moral lapses.
It should be tolerably evident that this type of intense, delicate soul
searching, so characteristic of the widespread evangelicalism of the
Victorian era, was the type of thing that could very easily dispose one
to more sophisticated philosophical or psychological pursuits, as with
the Apostles. The habit of intense scrutiny of one’s own motives was, at
any rate, something that Eleanor and Henry shared from the start (recall
his instructions to the “Initial Society”). This was his form of prayer.
As Oppenheim notes, in later life the other Balfour children would
also deny that, in Arthur’s words, their mother was a “goody” and fondly
recall her amusing and brilliant talk. In her last years, before her death
in , Lady Balfour spent more time traveling, and sought comfort in
spas to help restore her strength. Thus, “as she grew older, Eleanor filled
her mother’s role with greater success. During Lady Blanche’s absences
from Whittingehame, she seems to have functioned as the stable center of
the household, the person to whom the brothers at school or university
turned for family news.” But this assumption of “maternal services for
her brothers,” was not, as Oppenheim stresses, mere matriarchy. Lady
Blanche had been the very able administrator of a very large estate –
Whittingehame covered over , acres, and the family resided in an
eighty-room mansion – which she carefully trained Eleanor to manage,
ensuring that she knew not only how to keep the books, but also how to
do the housework, cook, and perform other tasks that would help her to
“run a household from positions of knowledgeable authority, never at the
mercy of the servants.” Moreover,
Eleanor was pressed into service as her mother’s philanthropic agent as soon as
she reached sufficient age. On Lady Blanche’s behalf, she helped a needy, but
deserving, family in Edinburgh and did ‘some visiting of poor families in London
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too at one time.’ With other siblings, she made up the Christmas parcels of old
clothes and delivered them, while Lady Blanche ‘strongly encouraged’ all her
children to allocate a fixed portion of their allowance ‘for giving.’
Also notable, given Eleanor’s later career, is the fact that Lady Blanche
helped to establish an elementary school at Strathconan, where the family
had another estate, and that at Whittingehame she began a parish lending
library.
To be sure, much of this was a schooling in noblesse oblige, meant to
ensure – as in fact it did – that Eleanor would “associate the special posi-
tion and comforts she enjoyed with an abiding sense of duty not privilege.”
Eleanor certainly regarded her mother’s ends as “unfailingly beneficent,”
and as something that “far more than wealth or rank, betokened mem-
bership in the ruling class.” Still, as Oppenheim goes on to argue, if
Eleanor’s lessons “about the responsibilities of class were straightforward
and unambiguous . . . her lessons on the responsibilities and rewards of
womanhood were anything but.” Although the daughters were not sent
away to school, Lady Blanche herself apparently provided them with a
stimulating education, imparting to Eleanor considerable love of and skill
in mathematics – something for which she would be noted in later life,
especially when she collaborated on scientific pa
pers with her brother-in-
law Rayleigh. If, after the death of her husband, she ended up placing a
lesser value on the education of her daughters than on that of her sons,
she nonetheless “carefully arranged that the girls would be financially
independent of their brothers, free to lead their own lives, without any
pressure to marry if they chose to remain single.” Eleanor’s position and
family would in some significant ways allow her to escape the “subjection
of women” that Mill and Taylor so accurately depicted.
Thus it was that, shortly after the death of her mother, Eleanor Mildred
Balfour – “Nora” to her friends – felt sufficiently independent to collab-
orate with Lord Rayleigh, during a trip up the Nile, and, in the autumn
of , to move to Cambridge to live in the newly completed Newnham
Hall while studying mathematics with Norman Macleod Ferrers, later the
master of Caius College. Henry Sidgwick had, as noted, been busy at work
in building Newnham, the “positive” work that served as counterpoint to
the “negative” work of relinquishing his Fellowship. Inspired by Mill’s
writings and Maurice’s actual collegial collaboration, he had rented and
furnished the original house, at Regent Street, when Anne Clough
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and the first five students began residence there in , and he was a
moving force in all the developments that led to the building of Newnham
Hall, which in October of had Eleanor Balfour and twenty-nine other
students in residence. Women’s higher education and the investigation of
spiritualism had brought them together, and the Sidgwick Group was
born.
III. Love and Ghosts
I would have written to you before, but I have unfortunately nothing to communi-
cate on the interesting subject of Spiritualism – in fact, I find that I must give up the subject for the present, as I am behindhand with my work. I hope, however,
to take it up again at some future time. It is certainly a most perplexing subject.
There is so much crass imposture and foolish credulity mixed up with it, that I am