Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
Page 141
. Gauld, Founders, pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Broad, “Sidgwick and Psychical Research,” pp. –.
. Sidgwick, “Society,” p. .
. Quoted in Gauld, Founders, p. .
. “The Canons of Evidence in Psychical Research,” May , (CWC); this
paper originally appeared in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research
P: GnI
notb.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Notes to Pages –
(). Interestingly, Sidgwick’s studied silence about his paranormal experi-
ences much perturbed Alfred Russel Wallace, who deemed it a betrayal of those
who went public (Oppenheim, Other World, p. ).
. Indeed, a significant part of the personal knowledge to which Sidgwick alludes
had to do with his psychical experiments with his intimate Apostolic friend
Cowell, during the sixties. Sidgwick’s description of these, which was included
in Myers’s later work Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, is given Chapter .
. On this, I largely follow the line of Dixon, Divine Feminine, who also shows in detail how, despite the efforts of the SPR, the Theosophical movement went on
to thrive, becoming a serious political force in the early twentieth century.
. See Gauld, Founders, p. .
. Interestingly, even during the sixties, when his adoration of Clough was so intense, Sidgwick could marvel at how Tennyson’s “The Voyage” had “caught the spirit
of the age” (M –).
. Myers Papers, .().
. Sidgwick to Myers, Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge
University, Add.Ms.c... The extensive, matched correspondence between
Sidgwick and Myers, now in the Sidgwick Papers, was held by Arthur Sidgwick,
when working on the Memoir, to be nearly as fascinating as the correspondence with Dakyns, but it is overwhelmingly concerned with the details of their psychical
research.
. Again, this is a point of fundamental importance for understanding why
Sidgwick’s discussions of sympathy did not reduce to an exploration of inter-
nal sanctions. See also the following chapter.
. Frank Podmore, “Review: Henry Sidgwick, A Memoir,” Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Cambridge University, Add.Ms.c.., p. .
. Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University,
Add.Ms.c..–.
. Naturally, the allusion in the foregoing remarks is to Parfit’s work, particularly Reasons and Persons. My own misgivings about Parfit’s reductionist alternative can be found in “Persons, Selves, and Utilitarianism,” Ethics , no. (July ), pp. –, which includes a “Comment” by Parfit. Interestingly, and controversially, Parfit in some fundamental ways agrees with Sidgwick about the im-
portance of empirical evidence for supporting or undermining a nonreductionist
view of identity (see Reasons and Persons, pp. –). What he fails to appreciate, however, is the force of Sidgwick’s view that evidence from different forms of
depth psychology, including neurophysiology, might as yet be unable to fix the
nature and significance of psychological continuity and connectedness. For exam-
ple, the importance of the body – indeed, of deeper forms of organic awareness –
in the growth of the conscious sense of self-identity is emphasized by Damasio,
in The Feeling of What Happens. Sidgwick would no doubt have rejected any
such account as materialistic, but he nonetheless found the problem of the deeper
sources of the conscious self to be of fundamental importance. One of the stranger
P: GnI
notb.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Notes to Pages –
ironies in this history is that Freud, who so profoundly influenced the Bloomsbury
group, made his published debut in England courtesy of Myers and the SPR. On
this, see Luckhurst, Telepathy, pp. –.
Chapter . Friends versus Friends
. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. , ed. H. M. Schueller and R. L. Peters (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, ), pp. –. The incompleteness
of this and other highly revealing letters may well reflect the censoring efforts of
Eleanor Sidgwick and Arthur Sidgwick when they were at work on Henry Sidgwick,
A Memoir.
. In Letters and Papers of John Addington Symonds, ed. Horatio F. Brown (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, ), pp. –. At the same dinner party, Tennyson had
openly avowed his conviction that “Niggers are tigers” and other expressly racist
views, corollaries to his imperialist sentiments. See the discussion in Chapter .
. As noted, Dickenson was an influential and much-loved figure who had a consider-
able impact on the Apostles, setting the stage for the more openly avowed “higher
sodomy” of Strachey and Keynes. (Dickenson’s father painted a posthumous por-
trait of Sidgwick that today hangs in Trinity College.) James Ward was in some
respects another of Sidgwick’s discoveries. Raised in a narrow Congregationalist
environment, he steadily expanded his intellectual horizons by, among other things,
studying in Germany and becoming versed in the philosophy of Lotze; eventually
he made his way to Cambridge, where Sidgwick helped him to advance through
the ranks from student to Fellow to professor (in ). Ward was very well-versed
in science as well, and in some respects his attack on naturalism and defense of
theism, in such works as Essays in Philosophy and The Realm of Ends, or Pluralism and Theism, was less important, even as a development of Sidgwick’s concerns, than his pioneering efforts in psychology. Ward’s arguments in such works as his
article on “Psychology” in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and his book Psychological Principles advanced a sophisticated “genetic” psychology and helped finish off the old associationism. Thus, Ward provides yet another example of
the emergent (pragmatist and phenomenological) concerns that Sidgwick deemed
promising, and a close, extended comparison of their work would be most valuable.
Among other things, Ward was Bertrand Russell’s chief tutor in philosophy, and
he edited two of Sidgwick’s posthumous works – Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant and Philosophy, Its Scope and Relations.
. Sidgwick, “Reminiscences of T. H. Green,” Balliol College Library, University of
Oxford. Symonds also composed such “Reminiscences,” which are included in The
Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. .
. T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, ed. A. C. Bradley (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
; first edition ), p. . Much as Green loved Tennyson’s “In Memo-
riam,” he felt that the poet was overly impressed with science – the very thing that
S
idgwick liked about Tennyson. Green would no doubt have urged, unfairly, that
Sidgwick himself was too willing to let poetry take its chances, rather than really
P: GnI
notc.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Notes to Pages –
taking up the call to bring in systematic philosophy to vindicate poetically
expressed truth.
. Green to Henry Scott Holland, quoted in Schneewind, Sidgwick’s Ethics,
pp. –.
. Ibid.
. Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and His Age, pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Annan, The Dons, p. .
. Quoted in Richter, Politics of Conscience, p. .
. These points are developed in a number of other places, such as the “Introductory: Kantian Influence in England” that heads the lectures on “The Philosophy of Mr.
Herbert Spencer” in the same volume.
. Green rather famously tackled the Millian arguments, in On Liberty, against the temperance movement; see his famous lecture on “Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract,” in T. H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, and Other Writings, ed. P. Harris and J. Morrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). The best discussion of the political views of the Idealists is
Peter Nicholson, The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists: Selected Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).
. And Jane Addams, the remarkable founder of Chicago’s Hull House – perhaps
the most successful of the U.S. settlement houses – took her inspiration directly
from a visit to Toynbee Hall in London, which began life when Arnold Toynbee
moved there, to Whitechapel, “to experience firsthand the notoriously poor living
conditions endured by Londoners of humble means.” See the sympathetic account
in Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy (New York: Basic Books, ), p. ; but see also my review of Elshtain’s work in Ethics
(January ). As Elshtain remarks, “Toynbee Hall offered something new: In
place of old-fashioned modes of relief to the poor, it provided mutual engagement
across class lines and a broad education for working men and women. Run by the
impressive Canon Barnett, Toynbee Hall emphasized the importance of art and
culture to a ‘people’s university.’ ” (p. ) This was but another of the educational experiments meant to ease the pain of capitalism and the democratic transition
through a Mauricean mingling of the classes; see Chapter for more details about
Sidgwick’s perspective on this very important development.
. For these details about the school and the Passmore Edwards Settlement, see Tom
Regan’s Introduction to his edition of Moore’s The Elements of Ethics, especially pp. xv–xix.
. Which is of course not to deny that they remain concerns. The settlement move-
ment has often been charged with reflecting the elitism and even racism that
infected the Progressivist currents that would usher in the twentieth century.
Besides, Alfred Milner, the architect of much of England’s imperialist ventures
in South Africa – who was tutored by Green and befriended by Toynbee – also
represented the philosophy of “social service.” And Ruskin, like Tennyson, was
P: GnI
notc.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Notes to Pages –
a notorious champion of the spiritual “destiny of the British race” form of im-
perialist ideology. Milner and Toynbee, along with Oscar Wilde and others, were
recruited by Ruskin for the cause of the dignity of labor, which for him involved
doing road construction between North and South Hinksey. See, e.g., Symonds,
Oxford and Empire, p. and pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Bertrand Russell, in so many ways an authentic voice of the Victorian era carried on through the mid twentieth century, was always at his most eloquent in describing
the massive changes to the Millian world and worldview that came with the growth
of large-scale social organization; see, for instance, his valuable study Freedom versus Organization, – (New York: Norton, ). Just how easily Green’s Idealism could be naturalized and transformed into Dewey’s pragmatism (which
in many respects precisely paralleled it in its political program, support for the
settlement movement, etc.) has been brought out by Robert Westbrook in John
Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ).
. See Richter, Politics of Conscience, pp. –, for a valuable discussion of how Green and his disciples supported the COS, though this account does not provide
an accurate account of the larger organization and its history. On this, see the
following chapter.
. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, pp. –.
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., pp. –.
. This summary is from Sidgwick’s late lecture “The Philosophy of T. H. Green,”
included as an appendix to “The Metaphysics of T. H. Green” (LPK).
. Skorupski, English-Language Philosophy, –, p. .
. See, for an updated account, John Searle’s The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), pp. –. Sidgwick might well have shared Searle’s bafflement at the many and varied materialist and behaviorist efforts in the twentieth
century to evade rather than address the nature of consciousness. The deficiencies
of the Wundtian forms of introspection were one thing, but the rejection of the
philosophical concern with the subjective point of view was something else entirely.
. Henry Sidgwick, “Bradley’s Ethical Studies,” Mind o.s. (), p. .
. Mind o.s. (), p. –.
. Schneewind, Sidgwick’s Ethics, p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. It is curious that Sidgwick is rarely recognized for having approximated many
of the objections to Idealist logic, especially the doctrine of internal relations,
that would later be championed by Russell and Moore. Peter Hylton’s otherwise
excellent work Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ) makes no mention of Sidgwick whatsoever, even in its
extended discussions of Green and Bradley.
. As explained in Chapter , this would of course turn out to be one of the biggest bones of contention in the critical reception of Sidgwick’s work. In addition to
the better-known criticisms advanced by Moore and Rashdall, there were also
P: GnI
notc.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Notes to Pages �
�–
objections coming from James Ward, whose The Realm of Ends, or Pluralism and
Theism addressed some of the (very) similar passages in the Methods: Now, first of all, is there not here a radical confusion . . . between analytical distinction and actual separation? To say that ‘we may take conscious life in a
wide sense as including objective relations’ implies that we may also take it in
a narrow sense as excluding these. But the psychologist assuredly has no such
choice: he must take what he always finds. No reflexion will enable him to take
the consciousness accompanying or resulting from objective relations apart from these relations themselves; for there is no consciousness, or as we had better
say, no experience, unless these form an integral part of it. It is clear, from the
context, I allow, that what Sidgwick here meant by consciousness was pleasure
(or pain). But it is equally clear that feeling alone, a purely subjective state,
though always an element in consciousness or experience, is never the whole of
it. We cannot talk of pleasure or happiness or, to speak generally, of pure feeling
as in any measure an alternative to the cognitions or actions from which it
is inseparable. And yet Sidgwick not only admits this inseparability, but even
urges that ‘if we finally decide that ultimate good includes many things distinct
from Happiness,’ hedonism becomes ‘entangled in a vicious circle.’ But if the
inseparability be admitted, how is that decision to be avoided? (pp. –).
But to this, Sidgwick would surely have replied that the moral philosopher must
utilize methods of reflection, including thought experiments, that perforce go
beyond the actual psychology of lived experience. Ward, interestingly, also clearly
formulates the population problem as an objection: “Maximum pleasure being
the end of the world, it would seemingly be indifferent whether the number of
conscious individuals were increased and their capacity pro tanto diminished, or vice versa. . . . ” (p. ).
. Sumner, in Welfare, Happiness and Ethics, does not quite bring out this side of Sidgwick’s argument.
. Sidgwick’s remarks here make it pretty evident that he did not agree with Green
(or Mill) that, as Skorupski puts it, “whatever is desired is desired as part of one’s own good,” though doubtless he could have been rather more forthcoming on