Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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comforting thought that our anxieties and uncertainties are not new,”
that our educational situation today is not “an especially fallen one,” and
that even in the midst of “culture wars” we can still “do a great deal of
good.”
Missing from Ryan’s account, however, is the further comfort, or in-
sight, to be gained by considering Sidgwick v. Arnold. For, in keeping with
the themes developed in the previous chapter, it should be clear that the
confrontation with Arnold is merely one more manifestation – though an
extremely important one – of the attempt by the Millians to recapture and
rethink the Platonic legacy, turning it into their own usable history at a
time when history seemed rather desperate for political precedent. Arnold
was no unthinking Tory, no defender of what Mill famously termed the
“stupid party.” His challenge was the more important precisely because he
shared so much of the liberal progressivism of his critics, of their recog-
nition that a cultural revolution was required, in conjunction with the
political one. As Ryan notes, Arnold was as earnest as Mill in wishing
“the blessings of a literary high culture to be extended to the working
class.”
As in the case of Mill, one can get a very good feel for Sidgwick’s
priorities by closely comparing him to Arnold. Sidgwick himself recog-
nized this, and he devoted considerable effort to defining himself against
“The Prophet of Culture,” as he entitled his first essay on the subject,
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published in Macmillan’s. His life was in fact framed by two such essays –
“The Prophet of Culture,” from , and the “The Pursuit of Culture
as an Ideal,” from . Arnold took Sidgwick seriously and responded
to him in one of the essays included in Culture and Anarchy, in which he
insinuated that Sidgwick was puritanical. Sidgwick did not seem terribly
annoyed by the charge.
Sidgwick’s take on Arnold is often quite Millian, but it also highlights
his own special concerns. The first essay condemns Arnold mostly for
being effete and self-indulgent when it comes to religious enthusiasm and
calls to action; the second, curiously more Millian, takes more direct aim at
the excessively literary notion of culture favored by Arnold and reaffirms,
after long reflection, the views expressed in various of Sidgwick’s earlier
works to the effect that no notion of culture that neglects the scientific
attitude could possibly be relevant to the nineteenth century. Thus, in a
line quoted earlier (one that he could have written at nearly any point in
his adult life),
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 )
In any event, both essays suggest how “culture” needs to be construed
in the modern age, and how it should be complimented by such things
as an ethic of self-sacrifice. This search for a new synthesis was a
defining one.
It is worth dwelling some on the first essay precisely because of the
religious questions addressed, the way in which it fills out the story of
Sidgwick’s storm and stress and expresses his vision of what modernity
demands. Sidgwick dryly marvels at “the imperturbable cheerfulness with
which Mr. Arnold seems to sustain himself on the fragment of culture that
is left him, amid the deluge of Philistinism that he sees submerging our age
and country” (MEA ). He allows that “the impulse toward perfection
in a man of culture is not practically limited to himself, but tends to
expand in infinitely increasing circles. It is the wish of culture, taking
ever wider and wider sweeps, to carry the whole race, the whole universe,
harmoniously towards perfection.” (MEA ) But it is all too rarely that
this “paradisaical state of culture” exists, such that there “is no conflict,
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no antagonism, between the full development of the individual and the
progress of the world.” Thus,
We dwell in it a little space, and then it vanishes into the ideal. Life shows us the conflict and the discord: on one side are the claims of harmonious self-development,
on the other the cries of struggling humanity: we have hitherto let our sympathies
expand along with our other refined instincts, but now they threaten to sweep
us into regions from which those refined instincts shrink. Not that harmonious
self-development calls on us to crush our sympathies; it asks only that they should be a little repressed, a little kept under: we may become (as Mr. Arnold delicately
words it) philanthropists ‘tempered by renouncement.’ There is much useful and
important work to be done, which may be done harmoniously: still we cannot
honestly say that this seems to us the most useful, the most important work, or
what in the interests of the world is most pressingly entreated and demanded. This
latter, if done at all, must be done as self-sacrifice, not as self-development. And
so we are brought face to face with the most momentous and profound problem
of ethics. (MEA –)
This, as we have seen, is very much what Sidgwick was forever lamenting
as the most momentous and profound problem of ethics, his own and
society’s – recall his youthful remarks about selfishness. But it is not what
Mill would have said, being far too much a vision of the rationalist fruit out
of the Christian seed. According to Sidgwick, the very essence of religion
is self-sacrifice; not so, culture.
The religious man tells himself that in obeying the instinct of self-sacrifice he
has chosen true culture, and the man of culture tells himself that by seeking self-
development he is really taking the best course to ‘make reason and the will of
God prevail.’ But I do not think either is quite convinced. I think each dimly feels
that it is necessary for the world that the other line of life should be chosen by
some, and each and all look forward with yearning to a time when circumstances
shall have become kinder and more pliable to our desires, and when the complex
impulses of humanity that we share shall have been chastened and purified into
something more easy to harmonise. And sometimes the human race seems to the
eye of enthusiasm so very near this consummation: it seems that if just a few simple
things were done it would reach
it. But these simple things prove mountains of
difficulty; and the end is far off. I remember saying to a friend once – a man
of deep culture – that his was a ‘fair-weather theory of life.’ He answered with
much earnestness, ‘We mean it to be fair weather henceforth.’ And I hope the
skies are growing clearer every century; but meanwhile there is much storm and
darkness yet, and we want – the world wants – all the self-sacrifice that religion
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can stimulate. Culture diffuses ‘sweetness and light’; I do not undervalue these
blessings; but religion gives fire and strength, and the world wants fire and strength even more than sweetness and light. Mr. Arnold feels this when he says that culture
must ‘borrow a devout energy’ from religion; but devout energy, as Dr. Newman
somewhere says, is not to be borrowed. At the same time, I trust that the ideal of
culture and the ideal of religion will continually approach one another: that culture will keep developing its sympathy, and gain in fire and strength; that religion will
teach that unnecessary self-sacrifice is folly, and that whatever tends to make life
harsh and gloomy cometh of evil. And if we may allow that the progress of culture
is clearly in this direction, surely we may say the same of religion. . . . To me the ultimate and ideal relation of culture and religion is imaged like the union of the
golden and silver sides of the famous shield – each leading to the same ‘orbed
perfection’ of actions and results, but shining with a diverse splendour in the light of its different principle. (MEA –)
Small wonder that those who embrace what critics take to be the exces-
sive “demandingness” of utilitarianism – for example, Peter Singer – look
to Sidgwick as their spiritual godfather, or that those who (misguidedly)
think of perfectionism as more high-minded or idealistic than utilitari-
anism should find him so baffling. For Sidgwick was, in a plain sense,
searching for a new religion, a new synthesis combining the best of the
classical and the Christian. Mill himself had recognized the enervating
state of society, the sickening Philistinism and conformity that called for
strong medicine. But Mill had also stressed in no uncertain terms that
the foundation of utilitarianism lay in “the social feelings of mankind; the
desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures,” such that not “only does
all strengthening of social ties, and all healthy growth of society, give to
each individual a stronger personal interest in practically consulting the
welfare of others; it also leads him to identify his feelings more and more
with their good” and to come “as though instinctively, to be conscious of
himself as a being who of course pays regard to others.” And Mill could be
so upbeat in his conviction that in
an improving state of the human mind, the influences are constantly on the in-
crease, which tend to generate in each individual a feeling of unity with all the rest; which feeling, if perfect, would make him never think of, or desire, any beneficial
condition for himself, in the benefits of which they are not included. If we now
suppose this feeling of unity to be taught as a religion, and the whole force of
education, of institutions, and of opinion, directed, as it once was in the case of
religion, to make every person grow up from infancy surrounded on all sides both
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by the profession and by the practice of it, I think that no one, who can realize this conception, will feel any misgiving about the sufficiency of the ultimate sanction
for the Happiness morality.
Such statements, depicting an end Sidgwick himself felt deeply drawn to,
nonetheless sounded the note of sweetness and light, rather than the fire
and strength needed for the shorter run, the enthusiasm of Seeley or Noel.
Arnold’s not unworthy response to this Sidgwickian flourish was to
suggest that whether or not the world needed fire and strength more than
sweetness and light would depend, as Sidgwick allowed, on the historical
situation. But “any glance at the world around us shows that with us, with
the most respectable and strongest part of us, the ruling force is now, and
long has been, a Puritan force, – the care for fire and strength, strictness
of conscience, Hebraism, rather than the care for sweetness and light,
spontaneity of consciousness, Hellenism.”
Once again, therefore, the ancient Greek world came back to challenge
and bend Sidgwick, as it would yet again, and still more formidably, in the
views of his close friend John Addington Symonds, with whom, ironically
enough, he was forming a close relationship at just this time. Rival efforts
to co-opt the Platonic legacy were everywhere. And the Goethean ideal
would find champions far more formidable than Arnold.
Still, there was real force in Sidgwick’s objections to Arnold, beyond
the obvious point that it was difficult to cheerfully wave aside the impact of
the various scientific revolutions. For Sidgwick, Arnold has not probed the
intellectual or emotional sources of religion. He allows that they “subdue
the obvious faults of our animality,” but in fact he only judges “of religious
organisations as a dog judges of human beings, chiefly by scent.” By
contrast, for Sidgwick, who in this proves himself a true forefather of
James and Dewey,
every man of deep culture ought to have a conception of the importance and
intricacy of the religious problem, a sense of the kind and amount of study that
is required for it, a tact to discriminate worthy and unworthy treatment of it,
an instinct which, if he has to touch on it, will guide him round the lacunae of
apprehension that the limits of his nature and leisure have rendered inevitable.
(MEA )
Arnold allows that culture is, in the main, a matter of curiosity, but he
has no curiosity about or sympathy for the roots of religion. He shows no
appreciation for experiments in ethics and intuitive theism. Yet even Mill,
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anticipating James’s “will to believe,” had allowed that as long as reason
is not impaired, “the indulgence of hope with regard to the government
of the universe and the destiny of man after death,” although it can be
no more than hope, “is legitimate and philosophically defensible. Such
hope “makes life and human nature a far greater thing to the feelings, an
d
gives greater strength as well as greater solemnity to all the sentiments
which are awakened in us by our fellow-creatures and by mankind at
large,” affording that “enlargement of the general scale of the feelings”
such that the “loftier aspirations” might no longer be “in the same degree
checked and kept down by a sense of the insignificance of human life –
the disastrous feeling of ‘not worth while.’” Perhaps Mill, too, harbored
some doubts about the age of transition.
What is more, Sidgwick is only too happy to voice the more democratic
side of his puritanism. If any culture really has the
noblest element, the passion for propagating itself, for making itself prevail, then
let it learn ‘to call nothing common or unclean.’ It can only propagate itself by
shedding the light of its sympathy liberally; by learning to love common people
and common things, to feel common interests. Make people feel that their own
poor life is ever so little beautiful and poetical; then they will begin to turn and
seek after the treasures of beauty and poetry outside and above it. (MEA )
Again, the task of education, in the broad as well as the narrow sense,
is to stimulate the mind, not merely to discipline it. For purposes of il-
lustration, Sidgwick turns, not to Mill, but to the old antagonist of the
Benthamites, Thomas Macaulay. Macaulay, “though he loved literature,
loved also common people and common things, and therefore he can
make the common people who live among common things love literature”
(MEA ). One should not despise popularizers or those they serve.
And Sidgwick’s Apostolic mind could not help but emphasize the im-
portance of literature for the culture of the future, albeit literature of
a certain type. Ironically, as we shall see, some of his friends identified
him with the art for art’s sake aesthetic vision of Swinburne, the poet and
critic, a product of Oxford Hellenism who found Arnold rigid and humor-
less. The power of poeticizing life was surely not a concern to which he
was deaf.
However, given their partisan angle, Sidgwick’s initial attacks on Arnold
were in some ways less revealing of his overall, enduring perspective on
these matters than his later reflections. During the sixties, he was especially
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