Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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perturbed by the Arnoldian tendency to drop “from the prophet of an ideal
culture into a more or less prejudiced advocate of the actual.” Perfectionism
of this sort could too easily become a counsel of complacency when it
came to social reform, “always hinting at a convenient season, that rarely
seems to arrive.” It remains effete and elite: “For what does action, social
action, really mean? It means losing oneself in a mass of disagreeable,
hard, mechanical details, and trying to influence many dull or careless or
bigoted people for the sake of ends that were at first of doubtful brilliancy,
and are continually being dimmed and dwarfed by the clouds of conflict.”
(MEA , )
When he returned to the subject in the nineties, his recollections of
the old controversies were more seasoned and judicious. True, as the man
himself admitted, Arnold was “not a systematic thinker with philosophical
principles duly coherent and interdependent.” Consequently, “it is not
surprising that he did not always mean the same thing by culture . . . his
conception expanding and contracting elastically, as he passes from phase
to phase of a long controversey.” Thus, from an earlier and more narrowly
construed account of culture as literary culture – the “Greek and Roman
learning” of Lord Chesterfield – Arnold had swung wildly, expanding his
conception to cover religion and science as modes of inquiry, efforts at
“seeing things as they really are” but inflated to deal with all dimensions
of human perfection. And this is confusing.
It was evident that Arnold had changed his idea; at the same time, he had not
changed it altogether. For in subsequent essays, and even in the same essay, it is
made clear that the method of culture is still, for Arnold, purely literary: it is
attained by reading the best books. Now even in the latter half of the nineteenth
century the desire to cultivate the intellect and taste by reading the best books,
and the passion for social improvement, are not, if we look at actual facts, always
found together; or even if we grant that the one can hardly exist without some
degree of the others, at any rate they co-exist in different minds in very varying
proportions. And when Arnold tells us that the Greeks had arrived, in theory at
least, at a harmonious adjustment of the claims of both, we feel that his admiration
for Hellenism has led him to idealise it; for we cannot but remember how Plato
politely but firmly conducts the poets out of his republic, and how the Stoics
sneered at Aristotle’s praises of pure speculation. In short, we might allow Arnold
to define the aim of culture either as the pursuit of sweetness and light or, more
comprehensively, as the pursuit of complete spiritual perfection, including the
aim of making reason and the will of God prevail: but, in the name of culture
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itself, we must refuse to use the same word for two such different things; since
the resulting confusion of thought will certainly impede our efforts to see things
as they are.
And when the alternatives are thus presented, it seems clear that usage is on the
side of the narrower meaning. For what philanthropy is now increasingly eager
to diffuse, under the name of culture, is something different from religion and
morality; it is not these goods that have been withheld from the poor, nor of which
the promotion excuses the luxurious expenditure of the rich. Poverty – except so
far as it excludes even adequate moral instruction – is no bar to morality, as it is
happily in men’s power to do their duty in all relations of life, under any pressure
of outward circumstances; and it is the rich, not the poor, that the gospel warns of
their special difficulty in entering the kingdom of heaven. Again, if the pursuit
of culture is taken to transcend and include the aim of promoting religion and
morality, these sublimer goods cannot but claim by far the larger share of attention.
Indeed, Arnold himself told us, in a later essay, that at least three-fourths of human life belong to morality, and religion as supplying motive force to morality: art and
science together can at most claim the remaining fourth. But if so, any discussion
of the principles that should guide our effort after the improvement of the three-
fourths of life that morality claims, of the difficulties that such effort encounters, of the methods which it has to apply – all this must inevitably lead us far away
from the consideration of culture in the ordinary sense.
The more encompassing vision of perfection was more in accord with
Sidgwick’s own efforts to define “culture,” of course, but he thought that
he was more in touch with the spirit of the age than Arnold, who, for all his
elasticity, had never really managed the scientific attitude: “His method of
‘seeing things as they are’ is simply to read the best books of all ages and
countries, and let the unimpeded play of his consciousness combine the
results.” These were to be the “Great Books,” needless to say – the works
of “Plato, Cicero, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Goethe.” But
imagine a man learning physical science in this way. . . . imagine a learner, desirious of seeing the starry universe as it is, set down to read the treatises of Ptoloemy,
Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and so on, and let his consciousness play about them
in an untrammelled manner; instead of learning astronomical theory from the
latest books, and the actual method of astronomical observation in a modern
observatory!
Moreover,
Man, whatever else he is, is part of the world of nature, and modern science is more
and more resolutely claiming him as an object of investigation. . . . the intuitions
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of literary genius will not avail to reduce to scientific order the complicated facts of psychical experience, any more than the facts of the physical world. And this
is no less true of those special branches of the study of social man which have
attained a somewhat more advanced condition than the general science of society
which, in idea, comprehends them – e.g., economics, political science, archaelogy,
philology.
Nor can literature of itself “establish a relation between the results of
science and our sense of conduct and our sense of beauty,” important as
that function is for it.
For when we try to sati
sfy completely the demand I have just indicated, to bring
into true and clear intellectual relations the fundamental notions of studies, so
diverse as positive science, ethics, and the theory of the fine arts, order, coherence, system must be the special objects aimed at; and this result can only be attained by
philosophy, whose peculiar task, indeed, it is to bring into clear, orderly, harmo-
nious relations, the fundamental notions and methods of all special sciences and
studies. But it is not a task which philosophy can as yet be said to have satisfactorily accomplished; the height from which all normal human aims and activities can
be clearly and fully contemplated in true and harmonious relations, is a height
not yet surmounted by the human mind – perhaps it never will be surmounted –
perhaps (to change the metaphor) the face of this ideal
“Is evermore unseen
And fixed upon the far sea-line,”
which changes with every advance in the endless voyaging of man’s intellect.
Yet Sidgwick is willing to make
a very substantial concession – that literature of the thoughtful kind, the poetry
and eloquence that really deserves to be called a criticism of life, gives even to
philosophers a most important part of the matter of philosophy, though it does
not give philosophical form and order; and it gives a provisional substitute for
philosophy to the many who do not philosophise. It gives, or helps to give, the kind
of wide interest in, the versatile sympathy with, the whole complex manifestation
of the human spirit in time, which is required – even if we are considering merely
the intellectual element of culture – as a correction to the specialisation which the growth of science inexorably imposes.
For Sidgwick, the specialist is not by virtue of expertise a person of culture;
the “habit of taking delight in the best literature” is a crucial corrective,
with the function of maintaining “our intellectual interests and sympathies
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in due breadth and versatility, while at the same time gratifying and exer-
cising our sense of beauty.” In this respect, literature is special. In addition
to being widely available – unlike Greek sculpture – it is “the most altruistic
of the fine arts” in that “it is an important part of its function to develop
the sensibility for other forms of beauty besides its own.”
And Sidgwick takes the occasion to issue some very Apostolic words
about how to acquire culture, understood as “the love of knowledge, the
ardour of scientific curiosity,” and how “to acquire along with it the refine-
ment of sensibility, the trained and developed taste for all manifestations
of beauty which no less belongs to culture.” Culture, like virtue, can only
be taught in a certain way:
Virtue can be taught by a teacher who loves virtue, and so can culture, but not
otherwise; since, as Goethe sings: – ‘Speech that is to stir the heart must from the
heart have sprung.’ Experience shows that the love of knowledge and beauty can
be communicated through intellectual sympathy: there is a beneficent contagion
in the possession of it; but it must be admitted that its acquistion cannot be secured by any formal system of lessons. No recipe for it can be enclosed in a syllabus, nor
can it be tested by the best regulated examinations.
True education, in fine, has the personal touch. Nor is this necessarily
a matter of the relationship between teacher and student, in the formal
sense:
So far I have spoken of culture as something to be communicated by teachers or
acquired by solitary study. But when men of my age look back on their University
life, and ask themselves from what sources they learnt such culture as they did
learn, I think that most would give a high place – and some the chief place –
to a third educational factor, the converse with fellow-students. Even if we did
not learn most from this source, what we so learnt was learnt with most ease
and delight; and especially the value of this converse in broadening intellectual
interests, and keeping alive the flame of eager desire to know truth and feel beauty, is difficult to over-estimate. Indeed, this always appears to me one great reason
why we have Universities at all, as at presented constituted.
Perhaps many of these remarks did reflect Sidgwick’s more mature
appreciation of what culture and education were all about. But surely
many, many elements were consistent features of his Apostolic mind:
the visions of inquiry, education, art, culture, and philosophy were in
their essence the fixed points of his mental universe. There was a dis-
tinct, continuous effort on his part to have it all – science and religion,
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self-sacrifice and self-development, philosophy and literature, aristocracy
and democracy, quality of education and quantity of education.
To be sure, the younger Sidgwick was more conflicted, less happily rec-
onciled to the ongoing search for ever-receding truth. And he was clearly
of a divided mind when it came to entering into the common mind, the
“rustic” brain. How strange that the same person could have written to
Symonds in , the very same year as “The Prophet of Culture”: “my
best never comes out except when I am played upon & stirred by affection
and subtle sympathy combined: when I do not get this, I become lethargic.
Among the ‘dim’ common populations I seem to change and become com-
mon.” (CWC) And in that early, Apostolic paper on “Prayer,” he had
explained that “religion will always be beneficial and often of vital necessity
on the one hand to natures where the emotional and passionate elements
preponderate over the rational and active: and again to those whom con-
stitution or fortune have depressed and saddened,” adding breezily that
he is not going to “speak of the sensual herd of whom Religion will ever be
the only real elevator.” Even his dear friend Noel, an aristocrat after all,
though one with a decidedly radical bent, could during the sixties tease
Sidgwick for tending toward a “Pseudo-Philosophy . . . that opposes itself
to the vulgar opinion out of a kind of esoteric pride, which perchance we
of ‘the Brotherhood’ may be peculiarly liable to.” Among other things,
Sidgwick had wondered about the advisability of marriage, which, though
valuable for the “inferior man,” was perhaps a drag on the “superior man”
in his effort to identify with the “universal heart of humanity.” The just-
married Noel’s advice ran:
Let the mere student be content to be a mere student, all well. But let him not
hope to
acquire a fuller sympathy with the ‘universal heart of humanity’ than the
practical man, by the process of placing himself above or outside of humanity and
contemplating it, (or rather contemplating his idea of it formed a priori and from
books.) A curious sympathy will result.
Such remarks were telling indeed, as was Noel’s advice that, if it is “not
always by any means our duty to take ‘our largest cut’ of pleasure,” still
“this pleasant course may be duty sometimes.”
As later chapters will elaborate, this form of elitism was something
that Sidgwick would strain to moderate in the years to follow, not always
successfully. But it is instructive in suggesting the nature of his point
of departure and the tensions that would define his struggles. And after
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all, Macaulay rather notoriously had no love at all for the literature of
Hinduism; his “love” for the common people of India demanded that
they be taught English and the love of Western literature. To invoke him
as Sidgwick did raises the spectre of England’s “civilizing” mission in
India and other parts of the globe.
In any event, these various points, even when qualified in recognition
of Sidgwick’s imperial context, do also suggest the significance of Ryan’s
plea for the ongoing relevance of the Victorian debates. That the general
cultural atmosphere is vital to the educational and democratic potential
of society, that this culture must value critical inquiry in a way capacious
enough to recognize the worth of both science and religion, philosophy
and literature, in addition to the Hellenistic legacy – these were not revela-
tions that awaited the twentieth century. And some might even be a little
nostalgic for the eloquence and passion shown by a Mill or a Sidgwick
on the subject of encouraging the mingling of classes and stimulating the
educational potential of all citizens, even if they did grotesquely under-
estimate what they stood to learn from other classes and other cultures,
tending to think of intellectual stimulation as proceeding from themselves