Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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was of special importance in connection with psychical research, as well
as with psychology in general. Sidgwick would in later life write that
“[f]or many years Frederic Myers has been as dear to me as the dearest
of brothers – there is no one so qualified to enrich and make brighter and
nobler the lives of those he loves.” No other member of the Sidgwick
Group, with the possible exceptions of Eleanor Sidgwick and Edmund
Gurney, had a closer perspective on the evolution of Sidgwick’s thinking
in this area, and Myers’s own work – including his posthumously published
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magnum opus, Human Personality and the Survival of Bodily Death (),
which was dedicated to Sidgwick and Gurney – is a rich mine of material
for understanding at least the kinds of beliefs to which Sidgwick was drawn
and with which he was forced to engage. Not surprisingly, Sidgwick, here
as elsewhere, was always the more skeptical friend.
In his obituary of Sidgwick, part of which was quoted in Chapter ,
Myers recalled his own parallel development and the events leading to
their collaboration:
My own entry into his inquiry, at any rate, was in an hour of deep inward need.
“Faith at her zenith, or all but lost in the gloom of doubts that darken the schools”: –
I had passed through all these stages, and visiting Cambridge again in to
examine for the Moral Sciences Tripos, I felt drawn in my perplexities to Henry
Sidgwick as somehow my only hope. In a star-light walk which I shall not forget
(December rd, ), I asked him, almost with trembling, whether he thought
that when Tradition, Intuition, Metaphysic, had failed to solve the riddle of the
Universe, there was still a chance that from any actual observable phenomena, –
ghosts, spirits, whatsoever there might be, – some valid knowledge might be drawn
as to a World Unseen. Already, it seemed, he had thought that this was possible;
steadily, though in no sanguine fashion, he indicated some last grounds of hope;
and from that night onwards I resolved to pursue this quest, if it might be, at his
side. Even thus a wanderer in the desert, abandoning in despair the fair mirages
which he has followed far in vain, might turn and help an older explorer in the
poor search for scanty roots and muddy water-holes.
Myers goes on to admit that his was “a slow and late conversion to
the sense, which so many men had already reached, of Sidgwick’s pen-
etrating wisdom.” Still, in the end, only Arthur Balfour and Edmund
Gurney rivalled him in admiration – the “attitude as of ‘companions of
Socrates’: – as it were, say, a Kritias of happier omen, a Theages, a
Simmias, – feeling an essential stimulus to self-development in his intel-
lectual search, his analysing elenchus; – and feeling also in the steadfastness of his inward aspiration a prophylactic, as each man might need it, against
dilettantism, or self-indulgence, or despair.” On Myers’s account of it, he
and Sidgwick “had caught together the distant hope that Science might
in our age make sufficient progress to open the spiritual gateway which
she had been thought to close; – to penetrate by her own slow patience
into the vestibule of an Unseen World.” And they even occasionally re-
marked with pride that it was the stereotypical English mind and method,
with its fact-gathering ploddingness, that might at last crack the secret of
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the universe – “where the German had been satisfied with embracing the
cloud – where the Frenchman’s logic had lightly accepted negation –
the dogged Anglo-Saxon might yet wrest some secret from silent Fate.”
For Myers, no one was more English in this respect than Sidgwick, that
“veritable incarnation of beneficent wisdom”:
And Sidgwick possessed, in an almost unique degree, that motive for dogged per-
sistence which lay in a deep sense of the incurable incoherence of the intelligible
world, as thus far grasped by men. More thoroughly than any other man known
to me he had exhausted one after another the traditional creeds, and accredited
speculations; – had followed out even to their effacement in the jungle the adver-
tised pathways to truth. Long years of pondering had begotten in him a mood of
mind alike rare and precious; – a scepticism profound and far-reaching, which yet
had never curdled into indifference nor frozen into despair.
In fact, however, Myers would also insist that “Sidgwick was not only
cautious, systematic, self-controlled, he was also unresting, undeviating,
inwardly ardent to the end; – possessed, as Plato has it, with that ‘iron sense
of truth and right’ which makes the least indication of intellectual as well
as of moral duty fall on the heart as an intimate and urgent command.”
This somewhat less English-sounding Sidgwick had his “true core” in
“ardour” rather “than in circumspection, in force of will rather than in
pondering hesitancy.”
One suspects that such praise reveals more about Myers than about
Sidgwick, however. In an letter to Anne Clough, Sidgwick would
remark, by way of explaining how Myers’s appreciation of it proved the
ever-increasing relevance of Arthur Hugh Clough’s poetry, that “Myers
is a man whose turn of mind is so antagonistic to subtle scepticism that
he could not have appreciated these poems except that he is, as every
susceptible youth must be, de son siècle” (M ).
In many ways, Myers, born in , may have seemed an unlikely
intimate of Sidgwick’s. Although he had a similar background – a
clergyman father; well-to-do relatives (including his self-made uncle
William Whewell); an early sensitivity to and preoccupation with religious
matters; and a Trinity College, Cambridge education, marked by study of
classics gradually giving way to an interest in the moral sciences – he was
certainly far more expressive and hopeful by temperament, and appar-
ently far more capable of alienating people. Alan Gauld has nicely pointed
up the contrast: “Sidgwick was ascetic and cool-headed, a political and
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academic liberal and a practical reformer. Myers, by contrast, was not
merely a man pulled this way and that by turbulent emotions and irre-
pressible sensualit
y; he was at this period of his life a snob, a name-dropper,
an arch-tory.”
As Gauld further describes him:
To Myers’ undergraduate contemporaries he appeared an eccentric and a poseur.
His extreme sensibility led him to express his feelings in an unrestrained way and
to dramatise scenes and incidents which others were likely to find merely trivial
or silly. It led also to an arrogance and a vanity which made him widely unpopular,
for his emotions had to him at times a momentous, cosmic import, and he could
hardly help regarding himself as singled out by Fate, for some high destiny. His
pride was augmented by his early successes; and he was perhaps not unaware
of possessing personal advantages – a tallish (though somewhat plump) figure, a
handsome face and silky beard, a delicately flexible voice – denied to many others.
Few liked him, and some detested him. His closest friend during his early years
at Cambridge was Arthur Sidgwick, a clever young classic in the year above him.
Their relationship was of an emotional and aesthetic kind, and its intenseness may
well have caused unfavourable comment, so adding to Myers’ unpopularity.
That Myers and Arthur Sidgwick were linked to the John Addington
Symonds circle at this earlier point (from about ), and widely recog-
nised as intimate, is clear from Symonds’s own letters. And all of them
shared a similar “Arcadian” development, grounded in the classics. As
Myers explained:
That early burst of admiration for Virgil of which I have already spoken was
followed by a growing passion for one after another of the Greek and Latin poets.
From ten to sixteen I lived much in the inward recital of Homer, Aeschylus,
Lucretius, Horace, and Ovid. The reading of Plato’s Gorgias at fourteen was a great event; but the study of the Phaedo at sixteen effected upon me a kind of
conversion. At that time, too, I returned to my worship of Virgil, whom Homer
had for some years thrust into the background. I gradually wrote out Bucolics,
Georgics, Aeneid from memory; and felt, as I have felt ever since, that of all minds
known to me it is Virgil’s of which I am the most intimate and adoring disciple.
Plato, Virgil, Marcus Antoninus; – these, to speak summarily, are the three great
religious teachers of Graeco-Roman antiquity; and the teaching of Plato and that
of Virgil are in the main identical. Other pathways have now led me to something
like the creed which they foresaw; but it is still, and more than ever, the support
of my life.
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The discovery at seventeen, in an old school-book, of the poems of Sappho,
whom till then I had only known by name, brought an access of intoxicating joy.
Later on, the solitary decipherment of Pindar made another epoch of the same
kind. From the age of sixteen to twenty-three there was no influence in my life
comparable to Hellenism in the fullest sense of that word. That tone of thought came to me naturally; the classics were but intensifications of my own being. They
drew from me and fostered evil as well as good; they might aid imaginative impulse
and detachment from sordid interests, but they had no check for lust or pride.
When pushed thus far, the “Passion of the Past” must needs wear away sooner
or later into an unsatisfied pain. In I travelled in Greece. I was mainly
alone; nor were the traveller’s facts and feelings mapped out for him then as now.
Ignorant as I was, according to modern standards, yet my emotions were all my
own; and few men can have drunk that departed loveliness into a more passionate
heart.
Thus it would appear that something astonishingly close to the Oxford
Hellenism of Symonds was very much alive at Cambridge. Myers was
quite clear that his Hellenism “was an intellectual stimulus, but in no
way a moral control. Entirely congenial to my temperament, it urged me
onwards . . . into intellectual freedom and emotional vividness, but exer-
cised no check upon either sensuality or pride. Hellenism is the affirmation
of the will to live; – but with no projection of the desired life into any juster
or sterner world.” For Myers, Plato was right about love being “an inlet
into the spiritual world.”
These “Uranian” connections of the early psychical researchers were
quite significant, as we shall see again in the next chapter. Arthur, however,
was also an Apostle, and although he and Henry worked hard to get Myers
elected, they were unsuccessful in this. Myers would often talk about how
many of Henry’s “contemporaries and juniors in his early student days”
regarded him with a certain “coldness” – he was ‘High, self-contain’d,
and passionless,’ like the mystic Arthur.” But it would seem that Myers
was the more roundly disliked of the two.
As noted in Chapter , Myers’s bad reputation was considerably aggra-
vated by the plagiarism controversy that surrounded his prize poem for
the Camden Medal competition of , for which he appropriated with-
out proper acknowledgment (though apparently in good faith) a number
of lines from a book of earlier Oxford prize poems. The result was that he
had to return the prize and endure a new crop of enemies, who would keep
the memory of this event alive for many years to come. Myers himself,
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in his “Fragments of Inner Life,” is brutally clear that the “swaggering
folly” of his earlier self made this incident more characteristic than not.
At any rate, whatever the degree of Sidgwick’s earlier aloofness, Myers
was clearly the more controversial and disliked figure, in the Cambridge
of the s, and it is consequently not very surprising that he also ended
up resigning his lectureship in , though this was apparently in order
to devote himself more fully to women’s higher education. Eventually, he
became a school inspector, and after was assigned to the Cambridge
district, a turn that proved to be most convenient. Perhaps Sidgwick was
able to accept him because, as the more senior and philosophically adept
member of the partnership, he was less exposed to Myers’s overbearing-
ness than others, and because he had often heard Arthur – who really was
his “dearest brother” – speak favorably of him. And Myers’s more ex-
pressive side must have been a complement to Sidgwick’s greater reserve
and intellectuality. At least, according to Gauld, Myers “was endowed in
the highest degree with that capacity for delight which, in the wake of the
Romantic Revival, seemed to many the most essential mark of a poe
t,” and
the “emotional and poetic side of him felt that everyday events and scenes
are somehow reflections of a deeper order of things from which they take
their meaning and by which they are in some obscure way harmonised
and guided to good ends.” Doubtless this struck a chord in Sidgwick’s
ultra-poetic soul.
Gauld’s reading certainly seems right – Myers was always obsessed with
the “subliminal uprush” of genius, and in his psychological research, at
least, there was a pronounced, even Nietzschean, sense of the dangers of
normalization:
Thus ‘mad-doctors’ tend to supplant theologians, and the lives of lunatics are
found to have more lessons for us than the lives of saints. For these thinkers
know well that man can fall below himself; but that he can rise above himself they can believe no more. A corresponding ideal is gradually created; an ideal of mere
sanity and normality, which gets to look on any excessive emotion or fixed idea, any
departure from a balanced practicality, with distrust or disfavour, and sometimes
rising to a kind of fervour of Philistinism, classes genius itself as a neurosis.
That Myers so evidently supposed himself to have been subject to such
assaults on passionate, individual genius may suggest why his popularity
was less than maximal. Yet Myers had real poetic gifts, which Sidgwick
admired. One his poems, “An Epithalamium,” expresses his admiration for
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the Sidgwicks, though it is perhaps not numbered among his better-known
works. Poetically and of course philosophically, his outlook was always
deeply colored by his Hellenism, especially by his love of Plato and Virgil.
Again, this was a common bond linking him to the Sidgwicks, Symonds,
and the Platonic revival of the nineteenth century – “the affirmation of
the will to live,” in contrast to the “deadness and bitterness” of his more
agnostic periods. But with Myers, especially, Platonism became a vision
of cosmic evolution:
I seem to foresee that the centre of interest must shift from the visible to the