by Bart Schultz
and his work for women’s higher education – and appears to be headed
toward a midlife crisis along with his fiftieth birthday. But worst of all,
of course, is the news from psychical research. As shown in the previous
chapter, it is at just this juncture that he seems utterly despairing of being
able to find evidence for survival of death, and the “blackness of the end”
is making him feel acutely asymmetrical.
All is confessed in his journals to Symonds, naturally. And it is in
January of that he pens the famous passage about how fifteen years
before, when finishing the Methods, he “was inclined to hold with Kant
that we must postulate the continued existence of the soul, in order to effect that harmony of Duty with Happiness which seemed to me indispensable
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to rational moral life.” He had, as shown, “provisionally” postulated it,
while setting out on his hunt for evidence. Now, the question is:
If I decide that this search is a failure, shall I finally and decisively make this
postulate? Can I consistently with my whole view of truth and the method of its
attainment? And if I answer ‘no’ to each of these questions, have I any ethical
system at all? And if not, can I continue to be Professor and absorb myself in the
mere erudition of the subject.
As always, he has “mixed up the personal and general questions, because
every speculation of this kind ends, with me, in a practical problem, ‘What
is to be done here and now.’ ” That, he feels, is the question that he simply
must answer, “whereas as to the riddle of the Universe – I never had
the presumption to hope that its solution was reserved for me, though I
had to try.” (M –) Of course, he did have more than his share of
presumption, as Symonds was fond of pointing out.
Sidgwick describes his state as a “mental crisis.” He finds himself mostly
“fingering idly” the old “Gordian knot.” Symonds is not so sure. He
answers:
I am alluding to the passage of your Diary, in which you announce your expectation
of having to abandon in this life the hope of obtaining proof of the individual soul’s existence as a consciousness beyond death. What this implies for yourself, in its
bearing I mean, upon Moral Philosophy, and its bearing upon the sustained quest
of twenty years, I am able to appreciate.
And I may add that it was for myself also a solemn moment, when I read
that paragraph in the Diary, through the measured sentences of which a certain
subdued glow of passion seemed to burn. I do not pretend that I had ever fixed
my views of human conduct clearly or hopefully upon the proof of immortality
to our ordinary experience. I do not deny that I never had any confidence in the
method you were taking to obtain the proof. I will further confess that, had you
gained the proof, this result would have enormously aggravated the troubles of
my life, by cutting off the possibility of resumption into the personal-unconscious
which our present incertitude leaves open to my sanguine hope.
Ethics, I feel, can take care of themselves – that is to say, human beings in social
relations will always be able to form codes of conduct, profitable to the organism
and coercive of the individual to the service of its uses. In humanity, as in nature,
‘est Deus, quis Deus incertum.’
I have no apprehension for civil law and social and domestic institutions, even
though the permanence of personal consciousness after this life remain undemon-
strated. Those things are necessary for our race, of whose position in the universe
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we are at present mainly ignorant; and a sanction of some sort, appealing to imag-
ination, emotion, unformulated onward impulses, will always be forthcoming.
Man has only had about , years of memory upon this planet; and the most
grudging of physicists accord him between ten and twenty millions to come. Dis-
locations of ethical systems, attended by much human misery, possibly also by
retrograde epochs of civilisation, are likely to ensue. History, if it teaches anything in its little span of past time, prepares us to expect such phases in the incalculably longer future. But our faith lies in this: that God, in the world, and in humanity as a portion of the world, effectuates Himself, and cannot fail to do so. I do not see,
therefore, why we should be downcast if we cannot base morality upon a conscious
immortality of the individual.
But I do see that, until that immortality of the individual is irrefragably demon-
strated, the sweet, the immeasurably precious hope of ending with this life the
ache and languor of existence, remains open to burdened human personalities.
A sublime system of ethics seems to me capable of being based, in its turn,
upon that hope of extinction. Demonstration, ex argumento ipso, will not here be attained. But I am of opinion that the persuasion, if it comes to be reasonably
entertained, of man’s surcease from consciousness when this life closes, will afford
quite as good a basis for submission to duty as any expectation of continuance in
its double aspect of hope and fear has lately been.
This hit Sidgwick about as hard as any psychological experiment possi-
bly could. In February he is rereading Tennyson’s In Memoriam, amazed
at the “intensity of sympathy” with which he does so. The explanation
is of course the obvious one, though now Sidgwick owns up to his own
presumption: “This is due, I think, to my final despair of obtaining – I
mean my obtaining, for I do not yet despair as regards the human race –
any adequate rational ground for believing in the immortality of the soul.”
Tennyson is “the representative poet of an age whose most characteristic
merit is to see both sides of a question.” (M –)
Sidgwick remains in a meditative funk over these matters for the rest
of the winter, in March responding:
I have been thinking much, sadly and solemnly, of J.A.S.’s answer to my January
journal. In spite of sympathy of friendship, I feel by the limitations of my nature
incapable of really comprehending the state of mind of one who does not desire the continuance of his personal being. All the activities in which I truly live seem to
carry with them the same demand for the ‘wages of going on.’ They also carry with
them concomitant pleasure: not perhaps now – aetat – in a degree that excites
enthusiasm, but quite sufficient to satisfy the instinctive claims of a man who has
never been conscious of having a creditor account with the universe. Whether if
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this pleasure failed I could rely on myself to live from a pure sense of duty I do
not really know; I hope so, but I cannot affirm.
But at present the recognised failure of my efforts to obtain evidence of immor-
tality affects me not as a Man but as a Moralist. ‘Ethics,’ says J.A.S., ‘can take care of themselves.’ I think I agree with what is meant, but should word it differently.
I should say ‘morality can take [care] of itself,’ or rather the principle of life in human society can take care of morality. But how? Perhaps always by producing
an illusory belief in immortality in the average man, who must live content with
Common Sense. Perhaps he will always
Fix perfect homes in the unsubstantial sky,
And say what is not will be by and by.
At any rate, somehow or other, morality will get on; I do not feel particularly
anxious about that. But my special business is not to maintain morality somehow, but to establish it logically as a reasoned system; and I have declared and published that this cannot be done, if we are limited to merely mundane sanctions, owing to
the inevitable divergence, in this imperfect world, between the individual’s Duty
and his Happiness. I said in that without some datum beyond experience ‘the
Cosmos of Duty is reduced to a Chaos.’ Am I to recant this conviction – which
no one of my numerous antagonists has yet even tried to answer? Or am I to use
my position – and draw my salary – for teaching that Morality is a chaos, from the point of view of Practical Reason; adding cheerfully that, as man is not after all a
rational being, there is no real fear that morality won’t be kept up somehow. I do
not at present see my way to acquiesce in either alternative. But I shall do nothing
hastily, non ego hoc ferrem calidus inventa, but the ‘consulship of Plancus’ is long past.
This would appear to be about as plain an affirmation of the rationality
of egoism as one could want from Sidgwick – he is not sure that he himself
is up to living “from a pure sense of duty.” As in the case of pursuing
love, so in the case of fearing death, is it not paradoxical to deny that
one is pressing the claims of a separate self, the personal point of view?
And if even Sidgwick could doubt his ability to follow self-sacrificing
duty without this reassurance, what of the “sensual herd”? Even if ethics
could take care of themselves in the long run, a reduction to this worldly
forms of egoism would, to Sidgwick’s mind, prove pretty rough on the
social order. How very odd that the Goethean Symonds should turn out
to be so much more able than Sidgwick to overcome self with a vision of
Cosmic Enthusiasm. This baffled Sidgwick; if he had long felt that the
“alternatives of the Great Either-Or seem to be Pessimism or Faith,” he
could not see his way to this form of faith. (M )
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Symonds gave another such account to Roden Noel, making note of
Sidgwick’s attitude:
I should call my attitude a highly spiritualized Stoicism rather than Calvinism.
The latter assumed inequality in the Divine dealings with man. All my notions about Law & and homogeneity of the Universe lead me to expect absolute equality.
Only I feel that I have no power & no right to speculate on what may be; but, like a private soldier in a campaign, to accept orders & discipline. I do not understand or criticize. . . . Practically I believe that our opinions differ (I do not mean merely yours & mine, but those of all people) very much according to their want to go on living – the attraction that immortality has for them. I have always been singularly
apathetic about that. Sidgwick tells me I am quit abnormal in my indifference –
an indifference which, if I indulged one part of it, would make me as desirous of
annihilation as other people are averse to it.
I am therefore in the peculiar position of an optimist who is prepared to accept
extinction. This enables me to feel a really passionate interest in the spectacle
of the Universe, & a firm conviction that its apparent injustice & inequalities must have a meaning, imply a good in process. At the back of my thought lie two perceptions ) our incapacity of formulating the future & what we want in the
future ) our right to assume that manly & cheerful acquiescence in this state of ignorance, combined with continued effort to get the utmost out of our lives by
work in our own way, one man’s way being action, another’s art, another’s service
of his fellows in philanthropy, & so forth, is the best preparation for any grace that may be granted to us, & the best energizing for the totality of human nature.
It is extremely difficult to state what sort of hope I have and I can readily believe that my idiosyncratic indifference regarding immortality makes my attitude of
faith unintelligible. It may also make it seem frigidly unsympathetic toward those
who have had far less of good in this life than I have.
How very imperfect and unsympathetic historical Christianity has been in
this respect – especially toward the unnumbered millions who built our race up
before Christ’s Gospel was preached. I counterpose my Stoicism to this, not to any philosophical construction* which provides a sphere for all souls – including beasts & trees etc.
The asterisked note reads “Bruno attracts me so much because he specu-
lated so evidently in this direction.”
Sidgwick had used the very same image of his taking his intellectual
position “as a soldier takes a post of difficulty” (M ). This was the
practical upshot of the Symonds–Sidgwick experiments in living, but
there was a big difference. When Sidgwick had used the expression, it
was in the course of explaining to his sister how he did not want to bring
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her around to his position. His worldview was “an inevitable point in
the process of thought,” but he could take neither the “responsibility of
drawing any one else to it” nor “the responsibility of placing obstacles in
their way” (M ).
At any rate, Symonds, Sidgwick reflects, has not quite caught his ap-
proach on one point – namely, how he has “tried all methods in turn,”
only to find that “all in turn have failed – revelational, rational, empir-
ical methods – there is no proof in any of them.” Now it is Sidgwick
pushing the skeptical challenge. Symonds’s inner voyaging may have
revealed much about the deeper layers of his sexual self, but Sidgwick
is not being knocked flat by the Cosmic Optimism that resulted. The
mystic “phenomena” continue to elude him; the felt Divine remains be-
yond him. It is not merely the poverty of philosophy that has crushed his
hopes.
Still, the
tide of vermicular skepticism recedes and the Socratic faith
remains: it is “premature to despair,” and he is “quite content to go on
seeking while life lasts; that is not the perplexing problem; the question is
whether to profess Ethics without a basis” (M –).
Of course, he did do so, and the very next edition of the Methods was
none other than the famous fourth edition, with the more direct statement
concerning the rationality of egoism. Like Symonds, perhaps, Sidgwick in
the late s was getting rather bolder with – if also more anxious about –
his expressions of his deeper doubts, suggesting that the famous first edi-
tion of the Methods may have been the less overtly skeptical one. In his
last decade, he would spend more time teaching politics and metaphysics,
and working with the “ethical culture” movement to foster greater ethical
behavior without dwelling on the ultimate questions of ethical justifica-
tion. Of course, in the s, psychical research began to offer new rays
of hope.
In any case, whether he had an inherited predisposition toward it or
a painful series of buried childhood memories concerning it, Sidgwick
never could shake his conviction that immortality was the great question,
or fully enter into Symonds’s “abnormal” way of dealing with the matter.
He was – at this point, as in – rather tactless in his philosophi-
cal self-importance. For this exchange about the afterlife and its human
importance was going on at precisely the time that Symonds’s eldest
daughter, Janet, was succumbing to tuberculosis. She died on April ,
at the age of twenty-one, and yet Sidgwick’s journal finds him still in his
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introspective turmoil, even after having received notification of the death
from Symonds:
[W]hile I find it easy enough to live with more or less satisfaction, I cannot at present get any satisfaction from thinking about life, for thinking means – as I am a philosopher – endeavouring to frame an ethical theory which will hold together,
and to this I do not see my way. And the consideration that the morality of the