by Bart Schultz
modernism, and the fate of the university.
Still, for Sidgwick the ultimate meaning of education ran deeper than
any canon or curriculum, and reflected his conversational virtues. In line
with recent sentiment, he would have agreed that although it is important
which books one has read, more important still is how one has read
the books. Sidgwickian inquiry, like Socratic inquiry, demanded critical
thinking, not displays of barren erudition or fawning invocations of great
thinkers and great books. As Balfour, who had been his student before
becoming his brother-in-law, observed: “Of all the men I have known he
was the readiest to consider every controversy and every controversialist
on their merits. He never claimed authority; he never sought to impose
his views; he never argued for victory; he never evaded an issue.” In an
afterthought richly suggestive of the tensions in Sidgwick’s life, Balfour
adds: “Whether these are the qualities which best fit their possessor to
found a ‘school’ may well be doubted.” (M )
Sidgwick regarded this as the meaning of education, even of culture,
which he rarely missed an opportunity to advance. In a later essay on “The
Pursuit of Culture,” filled with the reflections of a lifetime, he explained
that
since the most essential function of the mind is to think and know, a man of culti-
vated mind must be essentially concerned for knowledge: but it is not knowledge
merely that gives culture. A man may be learned and yet lack culture: for he may
be a pedant, and the characteristic of a pedant is that he has knowledge without
culture. So again, a load of facts retained in the memory, a mass of reasonings got
up merely for examination, these are not, they do not give culture. It is the love of knowledge, the ardour of scientific curiosity, driving us continually to absorb new
facts and ideas, to make them our own and fit them into the living and growing
system of our thought; and the trained faculty of doing this, the alert and supple
intelligence exercised and continually developed in doing this, – it is in these that culture essentially lies. (PE )
Perhaps, in the end, it was the promotion of culture in this sense that de-
fined Sidgwick’s reformism and his efforts to “elevate and purify” social
life. Like both Mill and Dewey, he had before his mind a vision of an
educating society, not simply an educated society. But his endeavors
followed a certain pattern. Although, in one capacity or another, he often
found himself participating in the more conventional forms of public and
private address, the one project to which he was unstintingly devoted,
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for which he never seemed to want energy, was the discussion group.
Not only did he always remain faithful to his first and formative such
group, the famous Cambridge Apostles, but he became a mainstay of
any number of other discussion societies as well: the “Grote Club,” the
Eranus, the Metaphysical Society, the Political Economy Club, the Ad
Eundem Society, and Synthetic Society all received years of commitment
from him, and these are only the better known of the groups to which he
lent his skills. Such interaction provided him with his model for critical
inquiry – be it philosophical, theological, or scientific – and thus for both
his academic work and his work for academic reform – for example, his
work for philosophy as an academic discipline, for universities open to
women and extending their resources to all classes, and for a curriculum
less preoccupied with rote learning of the classics and more attuned to
modern methods and topics. Pluralistic and interdisciplinary, drawing
from academic and nonacademic worlds, these were vehicles for cultivating
humanity that went beyond narrow institutional reformism. And the traces
of his participation in these groups are visible in The Methods of Ethics,
even if it was in person that Sidgwick struck others as the true lumen
siccum, or “pure white light.”
The lure of discussion was always the same: free and open inquiry into
issues of deep concern, usually involving religious or moral questions, and
this as a search for unity in a conflictual world and an antidote to the dogma
and dogmatism of school and church. If the Enlightenment project were
to be realized, it would have to be realized in this context, with the sincere
pursuit of truth and no authority but the better argument. What Sidgwick
brought to these discussions, however, was genuinely exceptional, and
reflective of the character that he brought to his friendships. As his student
and colleague F. W. Maitland put it, in a review of Henry Sidgwick, A
Memoir:
Sidgwick was a wonderful talker; a better I have never heard. . . . Sidgwick’s talk never became, and never tended to become, a monologue. He seemed at least
as desirous to hear as to be heard, and gave you the impression that he would
rather be led than lead. Even more than the wit and the wisdom, the grace and
the humour, it was the wide range of sympathy that excited admiration when the
talk was over. To see with your eyes, to find interest in your interests, seemed to
be one of his main objects, while he was amusing and instructing and delighting
you. As a compliment that was pleasant; but I cannot think that it was a display
of mere urbanity. Sidgwick genuinely wished to know what all sorts of people
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thought and felt about all sorts of things. His irony never hurt, it was so kindly;
and, of all known forms of wickedness, ‘Sidgwickedness’ was the least wicked.
Good as are the letters in this book, I cannot honestly say that they are as good,
or nearly as good, as their writer’s talk. A letter, being a monologue, cannot
represent just what seemed most to distinguish him from some other brilliant
talkers.
Maitland allowed that Sidgwick was a “most unegotistical talker, and a
most unegotistical man,” whose singular virtue was “truthfulness.”
Relatives, friends, colleagues, former pupils, acquaintances were all in
agreement about the singular attractiveness of Sidgwick as a conversational
partner: he impressed everyone from Gladstone to Madame Blavatsky.
Again, this did not necessarily refer to his lecture style, which, though
it had the merits of careful, many-sided argument, could be something
of a strain for those not truly engaged with the relevant subject. Many
students found his lecturing admirable – W. R. Sorley called his teaching
“a training in the philosophical temper – in candor, self-criticism, and
regard for truth” – but even some of the good ones, such as Bertrand
Russell and G. E. Moore, found
him dull. Russell observed that Sidgwick
always told precisely one joke per lecture, and that after the suspense
of awaiting its appearance had passed, attention flagged. But Russell
would also in due course confess that he and Moore had not given
Sidgwick anything like the respect that he deserved, even as both of
them more or less unconsciously absorbed a great deal of Sidgwick’s
outlook.
According to James Bryce, who knew Sidgwick well and joined him in
many discussion societies:
Sidgwick did not write swiftly or easily, because he weighed carefully everything
he wrote. But his mind was alert and nimble in the highest degree. Thus he
was an admirable talker, seeing in a moment the point of an argument, seizing
on distinctions which others had failed to perceive, suggesting new aspects from
which a question might be regarded, and enlivening every topic by a keen yet
sweet and kindly wit. Wit, seldom allowed to have play in his books, was one of the
characteristics which made his company charming. Its effect was heightened by
a hestation in his speech which often forced him to pause before the critical word
or phrase of the sentence had been reached. When that word or phrase came, it
was sure to be the right one. Though fond of arguing, he was so candid and fair,
admitting all that there was in his opponent’s case, and obviously trying to see
the point from his opponent’s side, that nobody felt annoyed at having come off
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second best, while everybody who cared for good talk went away feeling not only
that he knew more about the matter than he did before, but that he had enjoyed
an intellectual pleasure of a rare and high kind. The keenness of his penetration
was not formidable, because it was joined to an indulgent judgment: the ceaseless
activity of his intellect was softened rather than reduced by the gaiety of his
manner. His talk was conversation, not discourse, for though he naturally became
the centre of nearly every company in which he found himself, he took no more
than his share. It was like the sparkling of a brook whose ripples seem to give out
sunshine.
“A first-rate talker,” “a brilliant talker,” “the best talker I ever heard” –
such phrases are littered throughout the reminiscences of Sidgwick. In his
younger days, as an undergraduate and junior Fellow, he was apparently
more aloof, striking some as cold or priggish, with a chilly Socratic wit.
When F. W. H. Myers praised a mediocre religious writer, exclaiming “Of
such is the Kingdom of Heaven!,” Sidgwick sneered, “H-h-h-ave you been
there?” And even some of his later friends, such as his prize student and
literary executor E. E. Constance Jones, could paint Sidgwickedness in
this cooler light, complaining that the Memoir failed to catch the “Socratic irony, that Horatian satire, that malice (in the French, not the English,
sense of the word) which gave a peculiar zest and charm to Sidgwick’s
conversation.” When Balfour exclaimed that he would follow the Church
of England through thick and thin, Sidgwick dryly replied that he would
follow it through thin.
On Myers’s account, the reserve and preoccupation of Sidgwick’s
youth, when he was professedly “cased in a bark of selfish habit,” gave
way because “by sheer meditation, by high resolve, he made himself such
as we all know him.” Whether this was quite the case may be doubted –
it rather smacks of the Victorian worship of self-command and character
building. But Myers would come to know Sidgwick very well, as a long-
standing member of the “Sidgwick Group” of psychical researchers. What
is surely correct is that Sidgwick regarded himself as a kind of psycholog-
ical experiment – or “experiment in living,” to use the Millian expression.
He did think of his life in terms of a test of the human potential, of the
possibility of a more sympathetic and conversational culture, one less de-
pendent on orthodox religion. The “New Woman” whom he did so much
to encourage was to be accompanied by a “New Man,” and both would
enter a “New Age.” Such was the distillation of Sidgwick’s quest to solve
the “deepest problems” of human life.
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Tracing the vicissitudes of this experiment, of how Sidgwick became
what he was, is no small task. The multitude of respects in which he re-
mained a creature of his time will become plain enough. Certainly, he
was not immune to talk of character and self-control, or civilization and
progress, or race and rule. And he felt, to varying degrees, the three great
anxieties of modern liberalism. As sketched by Alan Ryan, these are: “fear
of the culturally estranged condition of what has been variously called the
‘underclass,’ the ‘unwashed mob,’ the lumpenproletariat, or (by Hegel) the
Pöbel . . . unease about ‘disenchantment,’ the loss of a belief that the world possesses a religious and spiritual meaning . . . [and] fear that the degeneration of the French Revolution between and into a regime of
pure terrorism was only the harbinger of revolutions to come.” These
anxieties have often congealed into something resembling the Platonic
dread of genuine democracy (as apt to degenerate into mob rule, dema-
goguery, etc.) or have resulted in a kind of “self-inflicted wound,” since
liberals “want the emancipation that leads to disenchantment, but want
the process that emancipates us to relocate us in the world as well.” This
last, as we shall see, was what produced the most troubled Sidgwickian
dreams.
But if Sidgwick felt these anxieties, so did Mill, James, Dewey, and a host
of others whose works remain highly relevant and contested today, and it is
vital to achieve some comparable understanding of just how he negotiated
these matters, so crucial to the development of the public sphere.
Clearly, Sidgwick’s experiment was filled with unresolved tensions. It
was Sidgwick the philosopher who chastened a nephew for dismissing a
scientific heretic for having no claim to be heard: “He asks for attention,
not to his authority, but to his arguments.” An admirable position, but it
was also Sidgwick the philosopher who held that “those who could hope
to advance the study of philosophy, or even could profit by the study, were
few” (M ). How did he construe the role of the philosopher in the
educating society? What were his hopes for the democratic potential of
the more open, more sympathetic, more utilitarian society of the future?
How might the conversational norms of the private discussion group be
translated into a larger cultural sp
here? Between Mill’s belief in a cul-
tural elite or vanguard, the Coleridgean clerisy, and Dewey’s Whitmanian
faith in radical democracy and social intelligence, where does one find
Sidgwick? Did quantity of participation stand in inverse relation to qual-
ity of participation? Was he the apostle of the democratic Socrates, or the
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elitist Plato? Whose voices mattered, and why? And what did all this talk
have to do with utilitarianism?
II. Sidgwick the Apostle
I still think the best motto for a true Metaphysic are those two lines of
Shelley: –
I am the eye with which the Universe
Beholds itself and knows itself divine.
Sidgwick to Roden Noel (M )
It is not too much to say that Cambridge University destroyed the
young Henry Sidgwick, and as a result the mature Henry Sidgwick fell in
love with the place. For when Sidgwick arrived at Trinity College in the
autumn of , he was as fortified in Anglican orthodoxy as any young,
rising member of the bourgeoisie could be, thanks in large measure to his
first mentor, Edward White Benson, the future archbishop of Canterbury.
But by the time of his graduation in , wreathed in every possible
honor, he was in a state of religious, moral, and philosophical turmoil
that took ten years to work out – his years, as he explained to Benson, of
“Storm and Stress.” The ongoing crisis culminated in the resignation of
his Fellowship because he could no longer in good conscience subscribe
to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England.
In external respects, his life had been an unbroken success story. As at
Rugby, he distinguished himself in both classics and mathematics, and he
was reading voraciously in literature, poetry, philosophy, political econ-
omy, and many other areas. He had won the Bell scholarship in his
second term, and the Craven in , when he was also made a scholar of
Trinity College. In , he added Sir William Browne’s prize for Latin
and Greek epigrams. Although he took both the classical and the mathe-
