Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
no sensation of touch. I thought that I was near death; when, suddenly, my soul
became aware of God, who was manifestly dealing with me, handling me, so to
speak, in an intense personal present reality. I felt Him streaming in like light upon me, and heard Him saying in no language, but as hands touch hands and communicate sensation, ‘I led you, I guided you; you will never sin, and weep, and wail in madness any more; for, now, you have seen Me.’ My whole consciousness seemed
brought into one point of absolute conviction; the independence of my mind from
my body was proved by the phenomena of this acute sensibility to spiritual facts,
this utter deadness of the senses; Life and Death seemed mere names, for what was
there then but my soul and God, two indestructible existences in close relation. I
could reason a little, to this extent that I said; ‘Some have said they were convinced by miracles and spirit-rapping, but my conviction is a real new sense.’ I also felt
God saying, ‘I have suffered you to feel sin and madness, to ache and be abandoned,
in order that now you might know and gladly greet Me. Did you think the an-
guish of the last few days and this experience you are undergoing were fortuitous
coincidences?’ Then as I gradually awoke from the influence of the anaesthetics,
the old sense of my relation to the world began to return, the new sense of my
relation to God began to fade. I suddenly leapt to my feet on the chair where I was
sitting, and shrieked out, ‘It is too horrible, it is too horrible, it is too horrible,’
meaning that I could not bear this disillusionment. Then I flung myself on the
ground, and at last awoke covered with blood, calling to the two surgeons (who
were frightened), ‘Why did you not kill me? Why would you not let me die?’ Only
think of it. To have felt for that long dateless ecstasy of vision the very God, in all purity and tenderness and truth and absolute love, and then to find that I had after
all had no revelation, but that I had been tricked by the abnormal excitement of my
brain.
Yet, this question remains, Is it possible that the inner sense of reality which
succeeded, when my flesh was dead to impressions from without, to the ordinary
sense of physical relations, was not a delusion but an actual experience? Is it
possible that I, in that moment, felt what some of the saints have said they always
felt, the undemonstrable but irrefragable certainty of God?
Symonds appeared to be “knocked flat,” at least for a time. He wrote
to Dakyns a little later that the
vision I had in London of God still haunts me. It was not all a dream. ‘Behind the
veil’ has an odd meaning for me now; & yet I stick to your idea of writing out a
series of memories. What remains to us upon this shore of oblivion but to place
some waifs & strays of our dying selves – some portion of that which made us be –
upon ledges above the surf & spray? Because such a work is introspective it has
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not therefore no value, nay rather it has therefore its value. Up then! Woo beauty,
while yet you may. Love – for Art is Love – while you still can.
But this was indeed a felt experience. As he later explained to Green,
in June of :
I always feel that theological philosophy starts with a petitio principii about God, and that the subjective proof to which you so eloquently appeal is unsatisfactory
to the very people who require to be convinced – those who have it not. . . . Why Nature should not be without a thinking subject . . . I could never comprehend. I am so obtuse that I cannot get over the reflection of what Nature must have been
before man appeared, and is where man is not. That the spirit of man is no part
of what we call nature may be conceded arg.gr. without the corollary that God is to be sought in it, or that it is the creative principle of the Universe. It is just this latter position: viz. that humanity is Deity in the sense of effectuating Nature by
its thought, which seems to me to divide you, and those who think with you, from
those who, however they feel the Divine in the Universe, do not venture to assert
its cognisability.
Thus, Symonds’s vision of God was the type of unphilosophized, raw,
paranormal psychological experience that James and Sidgwick, at least,
found so suggestive and promising. Symonds the nonphilosopher, rather
than Green the philosopher, was the one raising the right question – and
this at the very time that Sidgwick was completing the Methods. And
this sensibility, of tenuous dying selves falling before a greater reality,
was stamped all over Many Moods, particularly the parts that Sidgwick
admired. As ever, Sidgwick was positively addicted to “psychological ex-
periments.” However, there is no evidence that he shared Symonds’s habit
of using sleep-inducing drugs, and even such recreational items as hashish,
to stretch his own consciousness in such ways.
Yet with the retreat to Davos and the Alps, Symonds’s consciousness
was to take a new turn. Already, with his academic hopes smashed and his
happy experience with soldier love, he was mentally very much beyond
Many Moods and the forms of dipsychia that England had fostered in him.
The last of his peccant pamphlets, Rhaetica, was perhaps the boldest of
all. About this, Sidgwick was feeling none too cooperative. As Symonds
related to Dakyns, in June of :
I found here yesterday an awful letter from H. Sidg about Rhaetica. If I were not
so ill & hopeless & impervious, it would have crushed me. But as it is, I am bored
& less sanguine than before.
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The gist is that I am on the brink of a precipice, on the verge of losing my
reputation & bringing disgrace on Henry & you & all who call me friend. Rhaetica, if smelt out by a Critic, would precipitate me altogether.
I think I ought to ask you, under these conditions, to destroy the peccant
pamphlet, together perhaps with all my confounded verse in print or out of it. I
am sure they are not as well worth keeping as they seem to be perilous, & to you
they must only now be very ancient bores – pathetic perhaps & a little humorous,
if we think about them in the past. If you don’t wish to burn them, make a packet
of the things addressed to me, to be consigned by your executors or burned unseen
if I am dead first.
I think this is due to Henry, who is really in a state.
Among other things, Rhaetica included a poem “To H. F. B.” and
another called “What Might Have Been,” with the lines “The love we
might have known, if we / Had turned this way instead of that; / The
lips we might have kissed, which he / For whom they parted, pouted at!”
It is uncertain just when this poem
was penned, but it carries a peculiar
resonance with a certain turn of phrase common to Symonds, Dakyns,
and Sidgwick. In a letter of uncertain date, but surely from sometime in
, just around the time of his wedding, Dakyns had in his singular way
challenged Sidgwick:
I saw one letter (the last?) from you to Johnnie about the various scepticisms, & your right to comprehend them. It was a ray of light – (to continue the ancient
simile of me regarding you by a disciple of K’ung fou tsze regards the earth or sun
without need of speech resting under or upon the general embrace – but now if the
sun be dark, or earth thorny, then the disciple no more believes in the existence of
benign unseen powers). So I liked one ray. But you don’t comprehend vermicular
scepticism I think & rejoice to think. It perhaps isn’t worth even classification e fango é mondo. (CWC)
Dakyns apparently shared Symonds’s shrewd assessment of the limits of
Sidgwick’s sympathy and skepticism, as suggested by the brilliant phrasing
“vermicular scepticism.”
In a letter just prior to this, carrying the salutation “Dear Friend” and
written to accept the role of trustee for Dakyns’s marriage settlement,
Sidgwick had written, in a passage carefully abridged in the Memoir:
As for our past – you do not think that I have any such thoughts as you suggest.
I feel often as unrelated and unadapted to my universe as man can feel: except
on the one side of friendship: and there, in my deepest gloom all seems strangely
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good: and you among the best. And if you might have been more – I know nothing
of Might-have-been, and suspect too that if I did enquire, the fault would turn
out to be my own.
But ‘golden news’ expect none unless I light perchance on the Secret of the
Universe, in which case I will let you know. (CWC)
Coincidence? What “Might-have-been” but for Henry’s fault?
At any rate, it is not at all surprising that by the time of Rhaetica,
Sidgwick should worry about any potential scandal that might erupt over
Symonds and his poetry. Sidgwick is married, building an academic career
(in part as an ethicist), and sheparding Newnham College into existence,
along with his psychical research. And he is of course generally known
as one of Symonds’s friends and supporters, who sought to place him in
a professorship at Oxford. In short, he has a great deal to lose, should
Symonds, safely off in Davos, provide Tyrwhitt and his ilk the ammuni-
tion to mount another attack on the pagans and their circle. The whole
cause of university reform, of reducing the influence of religion in aca-
demics, could suffer immeasurable damage if the academic liberals could
be linked to the Platonic revival and then to a paganism in sharp conflict
with commonsense morality. Sidgwick knew full well precisely how stupid
conservative religious opinion could be in general, and particularly when
it came to anything having to do with sex. His “new casuistry,” in con-
nection with Symonds’s coming out, is perfectly consistent with his old
casuistry, in connection with his resignation, despite the different resul-
tant actions – if uncertain, remain silent, and everything depends on just
what the public is ripe for. Moral rigorism was subject to consequentialist
reckoning. And now, Sidgwick was Praelector of Moral and Political
Philosophy, and an aspirant to the Knightbridge Professorship.
What happens after his “awful letter”? Once again, there is no “rift
in the lute.” To the contrary, Symonds repairs to Davos permanently;
Sidgwick is his frequent visitor; and to compensate for the lack of per-
sonal contact, they decide on an exchange of their private confidential
journals, kept intermittently from to . Rhaetica never sees the
light of day – in its original, naked, pamphlet version – and Symonds is
increasingly steered, by Sidgwick and others, to channel his candor into
a course bearing the stamp of scientific legitimacy – as in his work with
Havelock Ellis. It was all just too shrewd. Plainly, if anyone deserves the
credit – or blame – for keeping Symonds from something like the scandal
that engulfed Oscar Wilde, it was his very well-connected friend Sidgwick,
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who, however deficient in vermicular skepticism, had a much better feel
for the deficiences of commonsense morality.
Sidgwick received a great deal in return. His invalid, sexually active,
God-feeling friend would shepard him into and out of another very real
crisis.
VII. Vermicular Skepticism
Weaving throughout all these encounters between Sidgwick and Symonds,
Noel and Dakyns, one finds, in slightly altered, more immediate, personal-
ized form, so many of the very same conflicts informing Sidgwick’s better
known philosophical work: the haziness of practical ethics, the claims of
egoism, the problem of self-sacrifice, the mystery of the true self, the im-
portance of immortality, the worries about hypocrisy, and so on and on.
Indeed, the very language of Sidgwick’s religious and philosophical strug-
gles was rife with allusions to and appropriations of the pregnant poetry
of Symonds. And nowhere, outside of this nexus, is it more striking just
how esoteric much of Sidgwick’s moral thinking was. Sidgwick wanted
Symonds’s Whitmania relegated to the enlightened future rather than the
bigoted present.
But ultimately, what was so remarkable to Sidgwick about the Symonds
“psychological experiment” was the paradoxical way in which Symonds’s
ongoing invalidism effectively rendered him a case study in attitudes to-
ward death – the great test for any working philosophy. For all of Symonds’s
envy of Sidgwick’s robustness and strength, he was very perceptive in chal-
lenging Sidgwick’s estimate of his own sympathetic powers, and, ironically
enough, of the normality of the human longing for personal immortality.
Here, after all, was someone who at many points counted his life by days or
months rather than by years – particularly after , when the graveness
of his consumptive condition was impressed upon him by various eminent
physicians, leading to his sojourn to Davos. How was Sidgwick supposed
to lecture him about attitudes toward death?
Recall how, in his early Apostolic days, some such issues had figured
in that paper for the “Wise and the Good” in which Sidgwick considered
whether prayer would “be a universal function of the ideal humanity” and
challenged his religious sentiments with an appreciation of “a rather rare
&
nbsp; and very admirable class of men: men that are in mind what the models
of the Greek Statues were in body, healthy, finely moulded, well nerved,
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symmetrical.” His defense of prayer invoked the “one trial that may befall
the most symmetrical – old age which is rarely borne as well as youth by
the non-religious.” Impending death was the final test of unbelief. To be
sure, religion was “not yet quite fitted to become the crown of glory of a
symmetrical nature.” But he looks “forward to a type of man combining
the highest pagan with highest medieval excellences” – that is, with a much
greater capacity for sympathy and benevolence.” (CWC) Like Symonds,
Sidgwick was working on a new religion, a new synthesis. And his inter-
est in the “symmetrical people” was evidently lifelong: he addressed the
very same issue at a meeting of the Synthetic Society held on May ,
– the last such philosophical meeting (this one private) that he would
attend.
But Symonds increasingly put the lie to the claim that ill health or
an unfavorable constitution or the confrontation with death could not be
borne without the comfort of belief in personal immortality, theistic if not
orthodox. Paradoxically enough, despite (or because of ) his invalidism,
Symonds lived and breathed the ideal of symmetry – in the Greeks, in
Goethe, in Whitman. By contrast, Sidgwick’s reconciliation project ap-
pears asymmetrical and weak, more modern and less Hellenistic, more
distrusting of the deeper self.
The in-built tensions in their friendship come to a head in the s,
when Sidgwick finds himself in another crisis, a crisis that in a great
many respects was the old one over subscription revived. In and
, Sidgwick finds all his familiar bothers coming back to haunt him.
Although he has won many honors, he has also, like Symonds, suffered
woe upon woe – the death of various old friends; being passed over for the
mastership of Trinity; frustration with the economy, academic politics,