Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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were using a method of communication which would rule out telepathy from the
living as a possible explanation of the out-of-the-way and characteristic bits of
information displayed in the automatic writings.
In essence the method was this. In the script of each automatist there would
be fragmentary and allusive items, without special significance for the person in
whose script they occurred. But these were highly significant for any investiga-
tor, acquainted with the personalities, interests, and acquirements of the alleged
communicators, who might compare and put together the contemporary scripts
of the various automatists in the group.
The extraordinary complexity and arcane nature of the scripts from
Mrs. Willett, Mrs. Verrall, and the other mediums certainly brought out
the most gymnastic hermeneutical talents of the psychical researchers,
who struggled to decipher weird references to the “Ear of Dionysius” and
so forth.
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Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
The timing of these developments is curious. It is shortly before the
failure of the envelope tests, in her presidential address to the SPR in May
of , that Eleanor explains how those
who follow the work of the Society carefully will, I think, perceive that in these
scripts we have at least material for extending our knowledge of telepathy. They
will probably be disposed further to admit that the form and matter of the cross-
correspondences that occur between the different scripts (produced at a distance
from one another) afford considerable ground for supposing the intervention
behind the automatists of another mind independent of them. If this be so the
question what mind this is becomes of extreme interest and importance. Can it be a
mind still in the body? or have we got into relation with minds which have survived
bodily death and are endeavouring by means of the cross-correspondences to
produce evidence of their operation? If this last hypothesis be the true one it
would mean that intelligent cooperation between other than embodied human
minds and our own, in experiments of a new kind intended to prove continued
existence, has become possible, and we should be justified in feeling that we are
entering on a new and very important stage of the Society’s work.
The cross-correspondence cases were thus taken as an ingenious bit
of posthumous experimentalizing by the senior members of the Sidgwick
Group, and were treated with all the seriousness and diligence that the
SPR could muster. Needless to say, few since their time, or at least since
Broad’s, have been quite so impressed by this body of evidence. Indeed,
the reputation of the SPR suffered a good deal from what looked like a
prolonged obsession with mourning the lost founders, carried on by a
group of insiders irretrievably lost to a truly bizarre interpretive method.
Some flavor of this can be had from an unpublished lecture on telepathy
that Eleanor Sidgwick gave at Cambridge on January , :
Three years ago, on January th [], Mrs. Verrall’s script produced sixteen
lines of verse which might be intended for a description of St. Paul’s experience
on the road to Damascus at the time of his conversion – and following these
verses came the words, “That is partly what I had to say, but I think you have
confused it somewhere. There should be an allusion to the Chemin de Damas.
Remember what Renan wrote about it. – F.W.H.M.” (F.W.H.M. were the initials
of Mr. Frederic Myers.) On January th, in another part of the country, Mrs.
Willett obtained in her automatic script the sentence “I want you to do something
for me, to write to Mrs. Verrall and say these words: Eikon Renam. Eikon Renam
(twice repeated). No, don’t send yet. – Myers.”
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Last Words?
The word eikon, Greek for image, was known to Mrs. Willett (who is not a
Greek scholar) in connection with the sacred pictures used in the Greek Church,
but Renam – RENAM – conveyed nothing to her, and it would probably have
conveyed nothing to any of us if it had not been for the mention in Mrs. Verrall’s
script two days before of the French writer on the early Christian narratives,
M. Renan – RENAN. But when we find Renan mentioned in a script of Mrs.
Verrall’s on January th, which is signed with Mr. Myers’ initials, and Renan
emphasised in Mrs. Willett’s script on January th in a message to Mrs. Verrall
also signed by Myers, the conclusion is irresistible that the substitution of M for
N in Mrs. Willett’s script was a slip of the automatist’s.
We have these three coincidences – the scripts were both connected with
Mrs. Verrall, were both signed by Myers and both referred to Renan or Renam.
They led Mrs. Verrall to look up in Renan’s book on the Apostles (which neither
she nor Mrs. Willett had ever read) his account of the journey to Damascus to
which her script referred her; and she then discovered that Renan describes St.
Paul as having seen the figure of Jesus – eikon in Greek – for which there is no warrant in the original account in the Book of Acts. It struck her – and very
plausibly, I think when we remember that her script called special attention to
what Renan said – that the introduction of the word eikon in connection with Renam may have been intended to indicate this discrepancy.
Perhaps this is evidence of something, though it is difficult to say just
what. At any rate, the continuation of such exercises is what ultimately
brought Eleanor to belief. When as honorary president she gave her address
to the SPR on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, she again struck the
positive note, albeit guardedly: “The general effect produced by the study
of these scripts is that some intelligence behind the communications is
acting by design.” Arthur Balfour, with her permission, followed up with
the announcement:
That concludes the Address of your President of Honour. May I be allowed,
before we separate, to add one or two sentences of my own? Some of you may
have felt that the note of caution and reserve has possibly been over-emphsised
in Mrs Sidgwick’s paper. If so, they may be glad to hear what I am about to say.
Conclusive proof of survival is notoriously difficult to obtain. But the evidence
may be such as to produce belief, even though it fall short of conclusive proof.
I have Mrs Sidgwick’s assurance – an assurance which I am permitted to convey
to the meeting – that, upon the evidence before her, she herself is a firm believer
both in survival and in the reality of communication between the living and the
dead.
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Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
Belief short of conclusive proof – whether the message came from the
departed Henry Sidgwick or not, it was certainly in the spirit of his final
views on the theistic postulate. As Barrett observed, in Psychical Research,
the Sidgwick persona of the scripts “retains his propensity for awaiting
results with scrupulous patience, though he has now, as well he may, added
to patience a confident hope.”
Strangely enough, however, the scripts would make it appear that
Sidgwick had finally reached the point where he was not talking:
We no more solve the riddle of death by dying than we solve the problem of life
by being born. Take my own case – I was always a seeker, until it seemed to me at
times as if the quest was more to me than the prize. Only the attainments of my
search were generally like rainbow gold, always beyond and afar. It is not all clear; I seek still, only with a confirmed optimism more perfect and beautiful than any
we imagined before. I am not oppressed with the desire that animates some of us to share our knowledge or optimism with you all before the time. You know who feels like that; but I am content that you should wait. The solution of the Great Problem I could not give you – I am still very far away from it. And the abiding knowledge of
the inherent truth and beauty into which all the inevitable uglinesses of existence
finally resolve themselves will be yours in due time.
Maybe his faith was working after all. But as another script has it:
[B]ut Sidgwick will speak of this later. He feels the burden of unuttered words Do they think of him as standing dry and secure above the seas roar careless of the
turmoil in which he himself was once a buffeted swimmer He pondered deeply on
many things pondered all his life with a sort of serene patience which yet was not
dull or drugged but was partly the result of a belief in the possibility of obtaining any answer underline the word any and partly the realision [sic] that the time had not yet come when the time honoured answers had proved to be completely
unsatisfying to the sons of men the thought that he was by his own labour and
by loyalty to his Spirits Vision – hastening that hour made him often uneasy for
he had no solution to offer in the place of those which he destroyed – destroyed
quite as much by his silence as by the spoken word.
Clearly, we have here a very deep problem indeed: how much of the
Apostolic Sidgwick’s success came, not from his sympathy, but from his
silence?
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Notes
Chapter . Overture
. Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Add.Ms.c... There is a second, tidied up,
version of this crucial statement at Add.Ms.c.., and it is also reproduced in
Henry Sidgwick, A Memoir, pp. –.
. Sidgwick’s casuistry has received scant attention in the century following his death, a recent exception being Sissela Bok’s new edition of Sidgwick’s Practical Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, ). But see also my review of this in Ethics
, no. (April ), pp. -.
. As Walter Houghton has so aptly described it; see his The Victorian Frame of Mind,
– (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ).
. See, e.g., Russell’s Portraits from Memory (New York: Simon and Schuster, ), p. .
. C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
), p. . To be sure, Broad’s admiration for Sidgwick was to some degree
shared by such figures as Hastings Rashdall.
. This is perhaps the most famous, or infamous, pronouncement ever
made on Sidgwick; it originally appeared in Keynes’s letter to his friend
Bernard Swithinbank, dated March , (Keynes Papers, King’s College,
Cambridge). Keynes’s Essays in Biography (New York: Horizon, ) was kinder.
. See also Keynes, “My Early Beliefs,” in The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of
Memoirs and Commentary, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), p. .
. Quoted in Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ), pp. –. Strachey was of course the leading
apostle of the “higher sodomy.”
. Ibid., p. .
. Quoted in Paul Levy, Moore: G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (New York: Oxford University Press, ), p. .
. In Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches (New York: Oxford University Press, ), p. .
. Just how continuous Moore’s views were with Sidgwick’s is happily brought
out in the following works: Tom Regan’s edition of Moore’s Elements of Ethics
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Notes to Pages –
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ), the early set of lectures from which
the Principia was largely derived; Jennifer Welchman’s “G. E. Moore and the
Revolution in Ethics: A Reappraisal,” History of Philosophy Quarterly (), pp. –; and Thomas Hurka’s “Moore in the Middle,” Ethics (),
pp. –.
. I am indebted to Thomas Hurka for cogently pressing me about the significance
of this lineage.
. See my “Bertrand Russell in Ethics and Politics,” Ethics (April ), pp. –, for some suggestions along these lines; among other things, Russell
certainly represented a very Sidgwickian ability to work enthusiastically for social
reform while maintaining a highly skeptical attitude toward the cognitive claims
of ethics.
. Leonard Woolf, “Cambridge Friends and Influences,” p. , and “Old
Bloomsbury,” p. , both in Rosenbaum, ed., The Bloomsbury Group.
. Alan Donagan, “A New Sidgwick?” Ethics (), p. .
. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
); John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press,
).
. Rawls’s reading of John Stuart Mill as inconsistent in his efforts to qualify
Benthamite hedonism is seriously problematic. For an important defense of
Mill’s consistency, see Elizabeth Anderson, “John Stuart Mill and Experiments
in Living,” Ethics (October ), pp. –. I am especially indebted to
Anderson’s work.
. For a good summary of Rawls’s take on Sidgwick, see his Foreword to Sidgwick’s
Methods, th ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, ), and various of
the essays in his Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), especially
“The Independence of Moral Theory,” pp. –.
. J. B. Schneewind, Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). I am profoundly indebted to Schneewind’s seminal work.
. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).
. Peter Singer raised the issue in a pointed way in his contribution to a centen-
nial symposium on the Methods; see his “Sidgwick and Reflective Equilibrium,”
Monist (), pp. –. And the theme has been forcefully developed by David Brink – for example, in “Common Sense and First Principles in Sidgwick’s
Methods,” Social Philosophy and Policy (), pp. –. Rob Shaver’s
Rational Egoism (New York: Cambridge University Press, ) provides a read-
ing of these issues from a perspective somewhat congenial to mine.
. On this latter point, see especially Rob Shaver’s insightful essay “Sidgwick’s
Minimal Metaethics,” in “Sidgwick ,” Utilitas , no. (November ),
pp. –. Intuitionism of the minimal Sidgwickian type is now finally receiving
its due, as will be made evident in Chapter .
. James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in
European and American Thought, – (New York: Oxford University Press,
). Indeed, Kloppenberg hardly seems to recognize how intuitionism differs
from pragmatism.
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. Keynes, in “My Early Beliefs,” famously praised Bloomsbury for having tossed
off both Christianity and Benthamism, construed as a narrow obsession with
efficiency.
. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart, with a new Introduction by F. Rosen, in The Collected Works of
Jeremy Bentham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), pp. –.