Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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the whites will in South Africa hold the position of an aristocracy, and may draw
from that position some of the advantages which belong to those who are occupied
only on the higher kinds of work and have fuller opportunities for intellectual
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cultivation than the mass of manual laborers enjoy. A large part of the whites will
lead a country life, directing the field work or the ranching of their servants.
Here one finds again the abysmal stereotypes attached to notions of
national character, linked to vague, Pearsonian notions about fitness for
certain types of labor, and making Sidgwick’s warm feelings for rehabil-
itating the notion of aristocracy look quite sinister. Bryce was effectively
providing a brief for overcoming strife by means of apartheid. He had yet
to read DuBois.
“Race repulsion” and “race debasement” were notions that Sidgwick
ought to have treated with all the destructive force of his skeptical intelli-
gence. But he did not, and what Bryce spelled out as a likely future scenario,
Sidgwick countenanced in abstract terms, maintaining that “greater im-
partiality of tone” that could mask so much. It is instructive how he could
criticize Spencer for failing on this count, for giving in to “cheap sneers
at bishops for their warlike sentiments,” which sounded too much like
“the one-sided rhetoric of a professional advocate of the Peace Society.”
Yes, there was surely “plenty of barbaric feeling surviving in the so-called
civilised world,” but such sneers are “not what we expect from a philoso-
pher.” Insists Sidgwick, in a passage quoted earlier:
Theoretically it is one-sided, and practically it gives no guidance. Civilised na-
tions, so long as they are independent, have to fight; and, in performance of their
legitimate business – for it is their legitimate business on utilitarian principles –
of civilising the world, they have to commit acts which cannot but be regarded as
aggressive by the savage nations whom it is their business to educate and absorb.
From both points of view the problems presented by International Morality are
very difficult. (GSM –)
Sidgwick may have been antimilitaristic and genuinely committed to
impartial justice, but his efforts on behalf of moralizing war and advancing
international law were grounded on Eurocentric prejudice. When his dear
old friend Dakyns wrote to him in January of , it was with a question
that would well define what were seen as the political alternatives:
I have just been reading John Morley’s speech. If the spirit moves you – I wish
you would write me your views on his attitude. With his spirit and his ‘Uranian’
versus ‘Pandême Imperialism’ and his anti jingoism I have the utmost sympathy.
But I fancy that neither Lord Salisbury nor your Brother in Law are pandême
imperialists. I think Joe Chamberlain is – and I half suspect Roseberry to be – and
so is more than half the population of the British Isles – is it not?
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I want to know whether it strikes you that John Morley’s attitude is in any
respect illogical – and his counsel except as a counsel of perfection impractical,
unstatesmanlike? I don’t want to be swept along by the Destiny-of-the-British-
Race-daemon – at the cost of abandoning all my noble principles (Xtian, posi-
tivistic, dakynsian). Neither do I want to go to sea in a sieve with Labouchère –
to float round & round a duckpond & my own axis. Whom are they going to
send as Peace Commissioner to the Czar’s Congress? I hope it may be per-
haps yourself or if not Arthur Balfour. But I don’t see how the latter can
be spared from his Parliamentary Duties. Ergo it is you who have got to go.
(CWC)
Unfortunately, the spirits did not move Sidgwick to reply, though he
would no doubt have expressed a good deal of sympathy for Morley
and Uranian imperialism. Morley was another long-standing friend of
Sidgwick’s, one who had opposed him over Home Rule for Ireland, but
who was otherwise a prudent reformer of the type that Sidgwick always
admired – indeed was very much a representative of the old Millian party,
which insured some memorable confrontations with Balfour. He would
in due course become secretary of state and, ironically, would work hard
to undo the damage done to India by Lord Curzon, who was of course a
product of the educational methods of Browning himself. The “Czar’s
Congress,” interestingly, was the first Hague Conference, which produced
a revision of the “laws of war” (if they could be called that) and the es-
tablishment of the very thing Sidgwick so desired – a court of arbitration.
Unfortunately, Germany effectively killed the Russian proposals aimed at
a steady reduction of “excessive armaments.” Sidgwick would no doubt
have made an excellent representative.
Nor is it far-fetched to think he might have been one. He was very busy
in public life during the nineties, what with his connections to Balfour,
and despite being steadily crushed in his efforts for women’s higher edu-
cation. His correspondence with his brother-in-law often had a decidedly
practical bent; it involved much eager planning of such institutions as the
School of Social Ethics, a “teaching University for London,” and what
would become the British Academy. And Sidgwick was an active partici-
pant in various royal commissions, producing such works as “Note on the
Memorandum of Sir R. Giffen to the Royal Commission on the Financial
Relations of Great Britain and Ireland,” “Memorandum in Answer to
Questions from the Royal Commission on Secondary Education,” and
“Memorandum to the Royal Commission on Local Taxation.” (CWC)
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He had some pangs of conscience about declining such duties, writing to
Balfour, “When you asked me . . . whether I should like to be on the new
Commission, I answered the question simply, I should not like it. But if
you asked me to undertake the work as a public duty, I should not think it
right to refuse. To have a right to refuse I should require a much stronger
conviction than I actually have of the value to mankind of my philosophic
studies.”
But these were very strange days. From the Home Rule controversy,
to the Wilde trial, to the Boer War, Sidgwick found himself decidedly
alienated from the te
mpo of the times; materialism and militarism did not
enhance his belief in common sense. In the nineties, the anticipations of
war were everywhere – marked, as Hobsbawm observes, by crazy
Nietzschean prophesies of a militarized Europe and a war that would “say
yes to the barbarian, even to the wild animal within us.” D. H. Lawrence
and T. E. Lawrence were looming on the horizon, and as Kiernan has put
it, in a vivid redescription of the colonial mentality:
What was really about to erupt was the first of Europe’s two great internecine
wars, its own relapse into savagery. When white men in the most desolate parts of
Africa recoiled from scenes of massacre and ravage, they were in a way recoiling
from something lurking in their own souls. Caliban, the African, was the baser
self that Christendom with its dualistic philosophy of soul and flesh had always
been conscious of; he was the insecurely chained Adam of the Puritan preachers,
the Hyde of Stevenson’s novel, the id of the Freudians. When he was let loose the same devastation that Africans or invaders had inflicted on Africa would fall on
Europe.
The “beast” that had so racked Sidgwick’s soul did seem, to the
Sidgwicks of the world, very much on the loose, and after all, the dual-
ism of practical reason had always carried with it a whiff of the older
Christian dualism. Symmetry and sympathy remained only possibil-
ities, the human potential rather than the reality of the “normal”
person. All the old problems were still alive with Sidgwick, and then
some.
Of course, there was a sense in which Sidgwick went into his last
decade with a resolve to throw off depressing speculations and keep him-
self trained on the practical. Again, the bleak end of the eighties had
found him busily working with the Ethical Societies of Cambridge and
London – warning them, in effect, to watch out for too much soaring.
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When he addressed the Cambridge Ethical Society, in May of , it was
in bittersweet tones:
In order to set an example of frankness, I will begin by saying that I am not myself
at all sanguine as to the permanent success of such a society in realizing what I
understand to be the design of its founders, i.e., to promote through discussion the
interests of practical morality. I think that failure in such an undertaking is more
probable than success: but, lest this prognostication should be too depressing, I
hasten to add that while permanent success in realizing what we aim at would be
a result as valuable as it would be remarkable, failure would be a very small evil;
indeed, it would not necessarily be an evil at all. Even supposing that we become
convinced in the course of two or three years that we are not going to attain the
end that we have in view by the method which we now propose to use, we might
still feel – I have good hope that we shall feel – that our discussions, so far as they will have gone, will have been interesting and, in their way, profitable; though
recognizing that the time has come for the Ethical Society to cease, we may still
feel glad that it has existed, and that we have belonged to it.
This cheerfully pessimistic view – if I may so describe it – is partly founded on
an experience which I will briefly narrate.
Many years ago I became a member of a Metaphysical Society in London; that
was its name, although it dealt with ethical questions no less than those called
metaphysical in a narrow sense. It included many recognized representatives of
different schools of thought, who met animated, I am sure, by a sincere desire
to pursue truth by the method of discussion; and sought by frank explanation
of their diverse positions and frank statement of mutual objections, to come, if
possible, to some residuum of agreement on the great questions that concern man
as a rational being – the meaning of human life, the relation of the individual to
the universe, of the finite to the infinite, the ultimate ground of duty and essence
of virtue. Well, for a little while the Society seemed to flourish amazingly; it
was joined by men eminent in various departments of practical life – statesmen,
lawyers, journalists, bishops and archbishops of the Anglican and of the roman
persuasion: and the discussions went on, monthly or thereabouts, among the
members of this heterogeneous group, without any friction or awkwardness, in
the most frank and amicable way. The social result was all that could be desired;
but in a few years’ time it became, I think, clear to all of us that the intellectual end which the Society had proposed to itself was not likely to be attained; that,
speaking broadly, we all remained exactly where we were, “Affirming each his own
philosophy,” and no one being in the least convinced by any one else’s arguments.
And some of us felt that if the discussions went on, the reiterated statement of
divergent opinions, the reiterated ineffective appeals to a common reason which
we all assumed to exist, but which nowhere seemed to emerge into actuality, might
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become wearisome and wasteful of time. Thus the Metaphysical Society came to
an end; but we were glad – at least, I certainly was glad – that we had belonged
to it. We had not been convinced by each other, but we had learnt to understand
each other better, and to sympathize, in a certain sense, with opposing lines of
thought, even though we were unable to follow them with assent. (PE –)
With these remarks in mind, Sidgwick goes on to urge the Ethical
Society not to emulate the Metaphysical Society, but instead to “give up
altogether the idea of getting to the bottom of things, arriving at agreement
on the first principles of duty or the Summum Bonum.” By contrast with
his statement of purpose in the Methods, “the aim of such an Ethical
Society, in the Aristotelian phrase, is not knowledge but action: and with
this practical object it is not equally necessary that we should get to the
bottom of things.” Rather than seeking agreement on first principles, the
aim is simply “to reach some results of value for practical guidance and
life.”
This was something of a reversal of the priorities of the Methods, and
bespoke the hard lessons life had taught the old Apostle, whose prag-
matic tendencies always stemmed from his sense of duty and his despair
of the higher soaring that he so loved. Suggestively, one of the finest philo-
sophical pieces in Practical Ethics is an incisive number on “Unreasonable
Action,” on “voluntary action contrary to a man’s deliberate judgement
as to what is right or best for him to do.” Although Sidgwick thought it
more common
for people to sophisticate or rationalize, to shy away from
uncomfortable truths, he admitted the reality of the rarer case, where “a
man with his eyes open simply refuses to act in accordance with his prac-
tical judgment, although the latter is clearly present in his consciousness,
and his attention is fully directed towards it.” With “habitually reflec-
tive persons,” he dryly explained, this usually involves “negative action,
non-performance of known duty,” since it is “far easier for a desire clearly
recognized as conflicting with reason to inhibit action than to cause it.”
(PE , –)
As Rashdall had observed, Sidgwick was as exercised by unreason as by
divided reason. The aim of the Ethical Societies was to edify and elevate,
much as the settlement movement sought to edify and elevate.
All very well, but Sidgwick had imbibed too much of the Platonic
Revival to rest content for long with any Jamesian embrace of real,
unreasonable people. Ultimately, he could not put such a low estimate
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on his philosophical work or its urgency, whether his work on “Kant and
Kantism in England” or with the SPR. He took over financial responsi-
bility for the philosophical journal Mind in and in due course helped
found the “Mind Association.” The old Apostolic lure was always irre-
sistible, and as the Memoir records,
In a discussion society called the Synthetic Society, somewhat like the old
Metaphysical Society, had been formed through the action of a group of per-
sons differing from each other in theological opinions, and yet equally desirous
of union in the effort to find a philosophical basis for religious belief. It met in
London five or six times in the season, and among its members it counted A. J.
Balfour, James Bryce, F. W. Cornish, Albert Dicey, Canon Gore, R. B. Haldane,
Baron Frederic v. Hugel, R. H. Hutton, Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir Alfred Lyall,
Dr. James Martineau, F. W. H. Myers, the Bishop of Rochester (Dr. Talbot),
Father Tyrrell, Mr. Wilfrid Ward, who was one of its most energetic founders and