Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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Henry’s various (mature) concerns – from religion, to ghosts, to women’s higher
education, to sympathetic understanding, to same-sex relationships – uncannily
reflected his evolving sympathy for his sister’s side of things against the tyran-
nical force of Benson. As Askwith has judiciously observed, Archbishop Benson
“had the Mid-Victorian virtues: intellectual and physical energy, devotion to duty,
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unswerving rectitude and sincere religious feeling. The qualities he lacked in-
cluded imagination and the power of putting himself into another’s place. He was
unceasingly strenuous, vital, dogmatic and domineering and from early on he had
armed himself with the triple authority of paterfamilias, schoolmaster and priest.”
(Askwith, Two Victorian Families, p. ) Askwith also notes that, unlike Benson, Minnie “approached god through the love of human beings” and sought a “harmonious” life, which was deemed by Benson “a kind of longing for comfortableness
and not specially worthy” (p. ). Minnie was sympathetic, somewhat volatile,
and given to trance states as well as very deep attachments; after Benson’s death,
she shared her bed with her close friend Lucy Tait. It is also noteworthy that
after Mary’s mother’s death, the Benson family retained the services of the re-
doubtable Elizabeth (Beth) Cooper, the same adored nurse who had raised Minnie
and her brothers, and who thus ultimately devoted some eighty years of service to
the family.
. Benson, Life of Benson, pp. –.
. Rothblatt, Revolution, p. .
. Benson, Life of Benson, p. .
. In fact, when Sidgwick was dying, in August of , his old friend Dakyns would
try to sound a hopeful note by recalling how he had bounced back from this earlier
and very alarming illness, when he had seemed to his friends to be at death’s door.
See the various letters from August included in Strange Audacious Life.
. Maitland, “Henry Sidgwick,” p. .
. See Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), especially Chapter .
. Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Add.Ms.d..
. Thus, having learned the trick of indirection, he applied it to such things as his insomnia; he discovered that the best approach was simply to lie in bed for a
set time come what may, content to rest at least physically, instead of fruitlessly
struggling to sleep. The intriguing question of how he dealt with his impotence
will be considered in a later chapter.
. Sidgwick to Dakyns, August (CWC).
. See Browning, Memories of Sixty Years at Eton, Cambridge, and Elsewhere (London: John Lane, ), p. .
. Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Cambridge University, Add.Ms.d..
. Benson, Life of Benson, p. , pp. –.
. F. D. Maurice, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, vol. (London: Macmillan,
), p. .
. Quoted in Allen, Apostles, p. .
. The significance of Grote and the Grote Club will be noted again in later chap-
ters. For some helpful background, see John Gibbins, “John Grote and Modern
Cambridge Philosophy,” Philosophy (July ), pp. –, and the entry on Grote by Gibbins and Schultz in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed.
E. Craig (London: Routledge, ). Grote was constitutionally averse to the
polemics between Whewell and Mill and, like Maurice, sought to be a unifying
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force. The discussants included Alfred Marshall, John Venn, J. R. Mozley, and
W. K. Clifford.
. This is from an account by Alfred Marshall; see also Keynes, Essays, pp. –.
. Melvin Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and His Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), pp. –.
. This passage is from an letter to T. Erskine, reproduced in Toward the
Recovery of Unity: The Thought of Frederick Denison Maurice, ed. J. Porter and W. Wolf (New York: Seabury Press, ), p. .
. Most Marxists have dismissed Christian socialism as a sham, but it had a very
considerable following in its day, and both Mill and Sidgwick regarded it as on the
whole a force for the good. In essence, the message was that capitalism was indeed
cruel and unfair to the working man, and degrading to the capitalists themselves,
but that community, religious fellowship, and self-improvement were the answer,
not revolution. Both Mill and Sidgwick looked to new, post-Christian forms of
religion to do the job, but they shared the inclusive, reformist outlook.
. Maurice, Toward Unity, p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. F. D. Maurice, The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, Chiefly Told in His Own Letters (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, ).
. J. S. Mill, Autobiography (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, ), pp. –.
. Maurice, Toward Unity, p. .
. Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part One (London: SCM Press, ),
p. –.
. Schneewind, Sidgwick’s Ethics, pp. –.
. Mill, “Coleridge,” in Ryan, ed., Utilitarianism and Other Writings, p. .
. Allen, Apostles, p. .
. Allen, Apostles, p. , p. .
. See Dowling, Hellenism, on this development.
. Allen, Apostles, p. .
. Especially in its insistence on personal testimony, putting one’s life on the line, and being transfigured by philosophy. This larger vision of the philosophical life
continues to attract defenders – e.g., Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ).
. Rothblatt, Revolution, p. , p. .
. Maurice, Life, vol. , p. .
. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
), p. .
. See G. Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), and his Socratic Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, ), especially the chapter entitled “Socrates and Vietnam.”
. Maurice, Life, p. .
. Quoted in Frank Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), p. . I am much indebted to Turner’s
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fascinating work, though it pays insufficient attention to such later developments
as J. A. Symonds’s use of Plato.
. Maurice, Life, vol. , p. .
. Richard Deacon, The Cambridge Apostles (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
), p. .
. Though Bentham himself often had very harsh words for Socrates and Plato, re-
ferring to the latter as the “master manufacturer of nonsense.” See, for example,
Jeremy Bentham, Deontology, ed. A. Goldworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
), pp. –. It would appear that James Mill played a crucial role in strate-
gizing the utilitarian co-optation of Socrates and Plato that Grote and the younger
Mill would play out. See the insightful essay by Kyriacos Demetriou, “The Devel-
opment of Platonic Studies in Britain and the Role of the Utilitarians,” Utilitas
(March ), pp. –, which shows just how the early utilitarians “approached
Plato as the exponent of critical epistemology, who replaced the authority of the
commonplace with the sovereignty of undisguised intellect. The effective method
of the Platonic elenchus in discussing moral issues was an antidote to the traditional prejudices which have been always detrimental to social and political progress”
(p. ). As Demetriou also shows, Grote’s polemic was more complex and brought
out more of Plato’s constructive side, albeit in a way congenial to utilitarianism:
“First, it prevented Plato from being seen as a religious idealist, an interpretation favoured by the British university scholars of his times; and secondly, contrary
to narrow German perfectionism, it exposed Plato’s philosophical complexity”
(p. ).
. See Irwin, “Mill and the Classical World,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mill, ed. J. Skorupski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .
. Turner, Greek Heritage, pp. –.
. See his “Henry Sidgwick, Cambridge Classics, and the Study of Ancient
Philosophy: The Decisive Years (–),” forthcoming. I discuss Todd’s claims
further in the next chapter.
. Henry Sidgwick, “Review: Essays on the Platonic Ethics,” The Academy (September
, ), pp. –.
. These essays were originally published in The Journal of Philology in and
.
. Sidgwick shows remarkable insight in these claims, which are in line with, e.g.,
Irwin’s account in Classical Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), which notes that the Greek sophistês simply means “expert,” not necessarily
with unfavorable connotations (see p. , n. ). The sophists were, however,
contrasted with the rhetoricians.
. One should bear in mind here the sexual side of popular morality in ancient Greece, as so marvelously described by Kenneth Dover in Greek Popular Morality in the
Time of Plato and Aristotle (Indianapolis: Hackett, ) and Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, , ). The treatment of
Sidgwick and Symonds in later chapters will return to this question of how the
hypocrisy of Greek popular morality served as a source for them in considering
the hypocrisy of their own day.
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. These passages are drawn from Sidgwick’s posthumous Development of European
Polity, which was based on lecture notes that he had assembled over many years of teaching the subject. See, especially, p. and pp. –.
. Vlastos, Socratic Studies, p. , p. . For further discussion of Sidgwick and the Grotes on Plato, see Chapter .
Chapter . Unity
. “Initial Society Papers,” in the Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Cambridge
University, Add.Ms.c...f.
. “On the Classical Tripos Exam,” p. . This pamphlet was circulated in .
. It was included in Essays on a Liberal Education, ed. F. W. Farrar (London: Macmillan, ).
. Christopher Brooke, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. This valuable work gives a quite appreciative account of Sidgwick’s importance to the creation of modern Cambridge.
. I am indebted to Robert Todd for sending me his extremely interesting work
on Sidgwick and the creation of the Moral Sciences Tripos – “Henry Sidgwick,
Cambridge Classics, and the Study of Ancient Philosophy: The Decisive Years
(–).”
. Todd, “Henry Sidgwick, Cambridge Classics, and the Study of Ancient
Philosophy,” pp. –.
. Ibid.
. Macmillan’s Magazine (April ), p. .
. The Sidgwick brothers in fact devoted a great deal of time and effort to bridging
the gap between Cambridge and Oxford, via such dinner/discussion societies as
the Ad Eundem, which was initiated in the s for this express purpose.
. Henry Sidgwick, “Liberal Education,” Macmillan’s Magazine (April ),
p. .
. See especially his essays “Philosophy at Cambridge” and “Liberal Education,”
though as his correspondence with Dakyns at this time makes clear, he may for
polemical purposes have slightly exaggerated his antipathy toward the standard
method of teaching Latin and Greek.
. The original is in the Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge
University, Add.Ms.c...
. He was, of course, not so uniformly upbeat. His more pessimistic side was evident in an undergraduate letter to Mary: “I am in very low spirits – continually preaching myself profitless sermons on the following texts: . There’s nothing true & nothing new & it do’nt matter. . This world is’nt much. . Science is laborious frivolity, philosophy wordy emptiness, knowledge a wearisom dream, love /th honey
concealing /th gall, fame a shadow, & even that only obtained by desperate
bigotry or deliberate hypocrisy & – but let’s stop this bosh.” Sidgwick Papers,
Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, Add.Ms.c...
. Sidgwick’s linguistic studies of Arabic, German, and Hebrew were quite intensive, and he made some four trips to Germany during this period expressly for this
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purpose. As Chapter will show, on one of these he developed a certain romantic
interest that stimulated his exchanges with Noel on the value of marriage for the
philosopher.
. Strauss’s The Life of Jesus had been translated into English in by none other than George Eliot, with whom Sidgwick formed something of a mutual admiration
society. See her Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings (London: Penguin, ) for material on Strauss.
. My thanks to J. B. Schneewind for reminding me of just how complex the history
of philological and historical criticism of the Bible had been in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries as well. Renan and Strauss were not the first of their
breed, though on the history of philology, Edward Said’s observation that Renan
regarded philology as “a comparative discipline possessed only by moderns and
a symbol of modern (and European) superiority” should serve as a reminder of
the agenda for philology that one finds in his work – see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, ), p. .
. Quoted in Blanshard, Four Reasonable Men, pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Said, Orientalism, pp. –.
. Desmond Heath, Roden Noel: A Wide Angle (London: DB Books, ), p. .
This valuable and delightful work tells the story of how Noel’s papers ultimately
came into the possession of his great granddaughter, Silvia Putterill, who married
Heath.
. This letter is dated January and can be found in the Noel Papers, Archives
and Special Collections, Brynmoor Jones Library, University of Hull, DNO//.
Unfortunately, Noel’s letters to Sidgwick exist only in partial, typescript form,
though they are a most important resource even in that abridged condition. More
unfortunately still, only a handful of Sidgwick’s letters to Noel have been located
to date. As in so many other cases, however, it is to be hoped that future research
will turn up more material.
. Noel to Sidgwick, October , , Noel Papers, Archives and Special
Collections, Brynmoor Jones Library, University of Hull, DNO//, p. . This
remarkable letter, which is singularly helpful for understanding Sidgwick’s du-
alism of practical reason, will be analyzed in great detail in Chapter . The
(presumbly) Greek expression is missing in the typescript letter.
. Sidgwick tried, unsuccessfully, to get Seeley into the Apostles and would remain
supportive of him throughout his life. Said has also noted Seeley’s contribution
to orientalism – see especially his Culture and Imperialism.