by Bart Schultz
tion of sympathy was a matter not simply of changing sentiment, but of
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crucial epistemological significance – an evolution of sympathetic under-
standing. And the intimate inquiring of the Sidgwick Group functioned
within the larger, more formal, and less effective institutional environment
of the SPR in much the same fashion as the Apostles did within the frame-
work of the university. In both cases, the real action was taking place in
the elite, vanguard element, the “leaven in the loaf.”
Frank Podmore, one of Sidgwick’s younger and congenially critical
comrades in psychical research, gave a vivid impression of the force of
Sidgwick’s Apostolic tendencies in the conclusion to his review of the
Memoir:
Mr. Haldane, in his recent address to the University of Edinburgh, has described
what should be the function of a University in the national life: that the best minds should there receive their training for the highest service to the state. I do not
know where there could be found a finer example than that exhibited by Henry
Sidgwick of the “dedicated life” which Mr. Haldane describes – a life dedicated,
however, not to the state, but to humanity – a life wholly given to the strenuous
search for Truth, and finding in that search its sole and sufficient reward. Nearly
all lives – our own or others – as we look back on them must seem desultory and
incomplete. But Henry Sidgwick’s had a unity and completeness beyond that of
most men. I do not mean that it was complete if measured by the results, for of the
results we are scarcely yet able to judge. But if we consider not the achievement
but the purpose, we shall find that Sidgwick’s life presented more than others a
symmetrical whole. Its symmetry was marred by no infirmity of endeavour, by no
self-seeking, by no petty personal aims. His years were continuously spent from
youth upwards in the one high impersonal quest. In looking back on such a life
we can see “age approve of youth, and death complete the same.”
What so struck Podmore was how “to Sidgwick nothing was common
or unclean. And just as no fact was to him too insignificant to be worthy
of study, so no person was so foolish but that something might be learned
from him.” Henry advised Eleanor to “get yourself into the state of mind
of taking a large amount of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as
inevitable, and merely endeavour to extract the grains of useful suggestion”
(M ).
Doubtless this attitude sustained Sidgwick in his psychical research,
but of course, not just anyone was allowed a place at the séance. Yes,
psychical research made some curiously democratic demands, as Gurney
had noted, and yes, the experience of the researcher with those strug-
gling to explain their paranormal experiences was virtually an intimate
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form of depth psychotherapy. But the Apostolic searcher was still
“exceptional,” the one who solicited and interpreted the rough truth,
dimly perceived, of ordinary (or not-so-ordinary) experience. Even if he
was fidgety.
For all that, what if all this sympathetic openness and self-revelation
did not produce the unifying thread? And what was the responsibility
of the Socratic intellectual to the larger, unphilosophical, and potentially
dangerous public? Clearly, Podmore’s account notwithstanding, Sidgwick
ardently did hope to crack the “secret of the Universe.” The world of
mundane experience might be improved somewhat, but it was bound to
end up a sorry compromise compared to what a new theistic religion could
offer, especially by way of harmonizing duty and interest.
Was this later crisis, then, the disintegration of Sidgwick’s strong belief
in personal identity – effectively, belief in some type of soul surviving
bodily death – and with it, of the value of seeking the harmony of reason
and duty in the moral order of the universe? That, of course, was precisely
what was at issue, though Sidgwick did not quite take the turn. As he
summed matters up in :
My attitude towards Christianity is briefly this. () I think Optimism in some
form is an indispensable creed – not for every one, but for progressive humanity
as a whole. () I think Optimism in a Theistic form – I mean the belief that there
is a sympathetic soul of the Universe that intends the welfare of each particular
human being and is guiding all the events of his life for his good – is, for the
great majority of human beings, not only the most attractive form of optimism,
but the most easily acceptable, being no more unproven than any other form of
optimism, and certainly more satisfying to the deepest human needs. () I think
that no form of Optimism has an adequate rational basis; therefore, if Theism is
to be maintained – and I am inclined to predict the needs of the human heart will
maintain it – it must be, for Europeans, by virtue of the support that it still obtains from the traditional belief in historical Christianity. (M )
It is in this connection that Sidgwick laments the pains that come with
having “taken service with Reason.” The “blackness of the end” threatened
to crush the most viable form of optimism he knew. While his experiments
in “intuitive Theism” had continued to impress upon him the needs of the
human heart, his experiments in psychical research, like those in philo-
sophical ethics, had left him feeling that the theistic postulate, the thing
that might harmonize duty and interest, was in deep trouble.
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In some ways, Sidgwick’s felt relationship to humanity at large had
found expression in the small in his relationship to Myers, in a way that
also goes far to explain his attitude toward teaching. In , while working
on the Methods, he had written to him:
You know that in spite of my love of truth, I am too fond of you not to be keenly
pleased by your overestimate of me: I only feel bound from time to time to warn
you that you will find me out. My only merit (if it be a merit) is that I have never
swerved from following the ideal
Evermore unseen
and fixt upon the far sea-line
but I have a double sorrow first that I cannot come to know the relation of the
ideal to the actual, and secondly that I myself show so m
ean and uncomely to my
own vision. Further as to you, I have another sadness in feeling that during the
years in which we have exchanged thoughts I have unwillingly done you more
harm than good by the cold corrosive scepticism which somehow in my own mind
is powerless to affect my ‘idealism’, but which I see in more than one case acting
otherwise upon others.
Still your friendship is one of the best delights of my life and no difference of
ethical opinion between us can affect this, though it may increase my despondency
as to things in general.
By the late eighties, Sidgwick’s idealism had been dampened, and he felt
ever more the “Great Either-Or” – pessimism or faith. The friends of this
Socrates rightly worried about his despair over “Things in General,” the
loss of confidence in that cosmic invisible hand that he had always deemed
an essential supplement to any mundane harmonizing of interests.
It is singularly odd that philosophical commentary on Sidgwick has
failed to look for the sources of his belief in the “deep truth” about per-
sonal identity in this rather obvious place. Although his profound aversion
to materialism and guarded optimism about the possibility of personal
survival do not quite in themselves yield a metaphysical defense of a
nonreductionist view of personal identity, the larger dimensions of his
project – the emergent depth psychology, including the sense of the un-
canny that came from his experiences in interviewing the people reporting
“phenomena” – point to the ground of his unshakeable sense of the logical
priority of egoism, of egoism as a reflection of the true self that somehow
endured. After all, he was genuinely excited about the prospects for
Theosophy.
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To grasp the import of this singular Sidgwickian crisis, however, it is es-
sential to introduce at greater length another crucial character, one whose
pioneering explorations of human psychology, in self and other, were of
vital interest to Sidgwick and perhaps of more lasting value than those of
the Sidgwick Group. This, of course, is Sidgwick’s intimate friend John
Addington Symonds. Exploring their friendship, which brought forth
Sidgwick’s candid thoughts and feelings like no other, will bring out other
dimensions of Sidgwick’s psychological views and their bearing on his
philosophical work, and also set the stage for consideration of the larger
political and social vision that informed his worries about the practical
implications of the dualism of practical reason. Once again, Sidgwick’s
inquiry should not be construed simply in narrow philosophical terms:
along with his larger metaphysical concerns, there was a very highly de-
veloped sense of the political context of the morality of common sense,
and of the task of the enlightened dualist. After all, this account of his
work in psychical research has only raised again, rather than answered, all
of the difficult questions about just how elitist, patriarchal and orientalist
the Sidgwickian “consensus of experts” might have been.
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Part I
Henry Sidgwick told me something about his spirits, but nothing new. He spoke
on a more important subject, [letter incomplete]
John Addington Symonds to Henry Graham Dakyns, May ,
I. Idealisms
Sidgwick’s life project, as should by this point be clear, involved an effort
to find some evidence for the thin theistic postulate capable of resolving
the dualism of practical reason and, of course, undergirding his casuistry.
If his psychical research was a logical development of his theological and
ethical interests – his chosen path for restoring the moral order of the uni-
verse in a way that recognized the force of egoism as part of the religious
hope for a happy immortality – it was also yet another manifestation of
his Apostolic love of intimate fellowship in the service of inquiry into the
“deepest problems.” Such inquiry, as it transpired, positively demanded
new forms of intimacy and sensitivity, new horizons for the Millian and
Mauricean attempt to achieve sympathetic unity. The confessional had
become the depth psychological, the romantic the experimental, the em-
pathetic the telepathic. In an age of transition, the notion of a clerisy had
itself been transformed, but there was still a good deal of the poetic and
romantic inspiring Sidgwick’s transfigured utilitarianism. His educational
ideal of culture may have underscored the importance of science, but his
conception of science was being reconfigured by something akin to the
depth psychological recognition that intimate confession and drawing out
were what it took to get at the deeper truth about human nature. Even the
Methods represented an extended testimonial to his efforts to penetrate
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his “true self.” Sidgwick’s school of sympathy was to be a very Millian
one and a very Apostolic one, but still, in the end, it can only be described
as a special Sidgwickian one, his own synthesis.
Was it, for all that, a men’s school, or club? Worse, an elite and very
Eurocentric men’s school that, in its own skeptical and reticent way, was
also a rival to Green’s Idealistic training school for statesmen to run the
empire? After all, the Society for Psychical Research, despite Eleanor
Sidgwick’s involvement in it, has been charged with being a force against
many developing modes of feminism, and with reinscribing patriarchal
notions of “rational” male authority. Furthermore, as already noted, it
certainly betrayed some extremely Eurocentric prejudices, an orientalism
that was at times overtly racist. Did Newnham College do so as well?
Given the Apostolic roots of Sidgwick’s educational ideal, it can scarcely
be above suspicion. After all, just who were his friends and fellow seekers?
These are very serious questions, questions that point up the larger
epistemological and political significance of Sidgwick’s views on sex, gen-
der, and race. To truly grasp what he had in mind when he sought the
“consensus of experts” – a refashioned notion of aristocracy that cast it
basically as a clerisy with more professional opportunities – it is simply
imperative that one have some sense of how he delimited the soc
ial dimen-
sions of authority, and of whatever gendering and orientalism were at work
in his construction of expertise and understanding. What, at the limit, so
to speak, did sympathetic unity really require, in terms of sameness and
difference, familiarity and otherness?
This chapter will, in due course, begin to address the matter of elitism
in Sidgwick’s feminism and in his work with such reformist institutions as
Newnham College, but this will be via a further examination of his Apos-
tolic notion of friendship, with its powerful homosocial/homosexual un-
dercurrents. It is here, with this latter, that one finds his deeper meditations
on hypocrisy, publicity, sex, friendship, and the inconclusiveness of ethics
and experiments in intuitive theism. Appropriately enough, however, it is
best to approach this matter with some indirection, albeit indirection of a
metaphysical stripe that will help to tie together some of the themes of the
last two chapters. For just as Sidgwick had a closet full of theological con-
cerns, so too he had a closet full of metaphysical ones, which, in so many
ways, were the very stuff of his intimate soaring. His closest friends –
Frederic Myers, John Jermyn Cowell, Henry Graham Dakyns, Roden
Noel, John Addington Symonds – were all irredemiably metaphysical in
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their cast of mind, albeit in a rather Shelleyan fashion, and Sidgwick’s min-
imal metaethics was in truth a tenuous middle way between the extremes
of sense and speculation. And just how passionate and metaphysical he
could be has not yet been demonstrated. At times, it could well seem that
a precondition for his personal affection and philosophical admiration
was to have some serious thoughts about immortality and the grounds
for Cosmic Enthusiasm, with all the erotic charge that the Victorian
Platonic revival could muster. His best friends typically stimulated him
with their visions of immortality or of alternative cosmic faith that could
do without personal survival. Only such souls were attuned to the “deep-
est problems.” Awakened by poetry, alive to philosophy, and always,