by Bart Schultz
relations. And finally, if ‘mutual independence of thought and feeling has no place
in the world-consciousness,’ difficult questions arise to which Green suggests no
answer. For instance, if any feeling is attributed to the world-consciousness, must
not all feeling in the world be so attributed? or how are we to distinguish? does
God then feel the pleasure and the pain of the whole animal kingdom? And if so,
is not the ground cut from under the anti-hedonistic position of Green’s Ethics?
(LPK –)
Thus, Sidgwick concluded his last public philosophical talk by saying
“But I perceive that this topic will introduce so great a wave of discourse –
as Plato says – that I must reluctantly abandon it, and apologise for the
extent to which I have already tried your patience.”
A neat twist: it is intriguing that in this final encounter, Sidgwick would
end up charging the Idealists with harboring the image of one great calcu-
lating utilitarian consciousness, and thus tacitly admitting the coherence
of a sum of pleasures, etc. But in any event, he had again made plain
his distaste for an unfeeling universe, whether championed by Huxley or
by Green, and from this, it was only a few short steps to an aestheticism
revolving around the fine discrimination of the pleasures of friendship,
love, art, and the other Bloomsbury passions, as we shall see. And it was
not even a short step to the critique of Idealism framed by William James,
who would in due course lampoon Bradley’s “sort of religious princi-
ple against admitting ‘untransformed’ feeling into philosophy,” which he
tracked back to “the old and obstinate intellectualist prejudice in favor
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of universals,” revered as “loftier, nobler more rational objects than the
particulars of sense”:
The motive is pathetically simple, and any one can take it in. On the thin wa-
tershed between life and philosophy, Mr. Bradley tumbles to philosophy’s call.
Down he slides, to the dry valley of ‘absolute’ mare’s nests and abstractions, the
habitation of the fictitious suprarelational being which his will prefers. Never was
there such a case of will-to-believe; for Mr. Bradley, unlike other anti-empiricists, deludes himself neither as to feeling nor as to thought: the one reveals for him the
inner nature of reality perfectly, the other falsifies it utterly as soon as you carry it beyond the first few steps. Yet once committed to the conceptual direction,
Mr. Bradley thinks we can’t reverse, we can save ourselves only by hoping that the
absolute will re-realize unintelligibly and ‘somehow,’ the unity, wholeness, cer-
tainty, etc., which feeling so immediately and transparently made us acquainted
with at first.
To opt with Bradley for the road leading inevitably to “the whole bog
of unintelligibilities through which the critical part of ‘Appearance and
Reality’ wades” is for James virtually to choose death over life:
When the alternative lies between knowing life in its full thickness and activity, as one acquainted with its me’s and thee’s and now’s and here’s, on the one hand, and knowing a transconceptual evaporation like the absolute, on the other, it seems
to me that to choose the latter knowledge merely because it has been named
‘philosophy’ is to be superstitiously loyal to a name. But if names are to be used
eulogistically, rather let us give that of philosophy to the fuller kind of knowledge, the kind in which perception and conception mix their lights.
James’s vital, nonreductive “radical empiricism” was rather plainly res-
onant with Sidgwick’s eclectic and only qualifiedly empiricist epistemol-
ogy. Indeed, James not only shared the Sidgwickian concern over the
way Idealism inexplicably voided the universe of its feeling side, but also,
as James Kloppenberg has urged, followed Sidgwick on the dualism of
practical reason, resisting both Idealist and naturalist efforts to show how
something other than theism might resolve the conflict. Of all the prag-
matists, James was the one who was most truly a kindred Sidgwickian
spirit, and what with their shared subversions of the traditional epistemo-
logical and ethical projects, and their shared enthusiasm for the fresh facts
of psychical research, it was a remarkably close kinship. Although Dewey
may have been the one to coin the expression the “quest for certainty”
as a summary assessment of what was wrong with the Great Tradition,
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Sidgwick and James – both so sensitive to the attractions of soaring – were
ahead of him in discovering that infallibility was nowhere to be found, and
that Idealism, in particular, afforded no fresh hope. After all, Sidgwick
too, however grudgingly, had ended up with a keen appreciation of the
distance between abstract, universal ethical truth and the demands of
practical action. The gap between axioms and actions called for pragmatic
measures.
What is astonishing about Sidgwick’s critique is not only its cogency,
but also how consistent it was over the decades. Such leading concerns
about Idealism’s unsatisfactoriness were to some extent evident even in
his review essay on the Prolegomena, which appeared in Mind in and in which he complained that, although Green
recognizes that it is the function of philosophy to supply men with a ‘ rationale of the various duties’ prescribed to them, I cannot perceive that the enthusiasm for
human well-being which the whole treatise breathes has actually impelled him
to furnish such a rationale, or even to provide his readers with an outline of a coherent method by which a system of duties could be philosophically worked
out.
The slipperiness of Green’s practical ethics had fairly appalled Sidgwick
for quite some time, particularly when he considered how Green, with all
his Idealist theological unorthodoxy, could seriously entertain the idea
of becoming a deacon of the Anglican Church. As he wrote to Dakyns,
in : “I talked to Green in Oxford; I was horrified by his idea of
diaconising; it is only in such a milieu as Oxford that a high-minded man
could think of it” (M ). Even if the great Mill had urged liberal-
minded young clergymen to stay in the church and reform it, Sidgwick,
as we have seen, thought the cost of this form of hypocrisy too high.
Fortunately, Green was spared the necessity of having to affiliate himself
with any particular institutional orthodoxy.
Ironically, then, for all his earnest reformism, Green was in the end
left in much the same position as Bradley, theoretically speaking. And
against both Green and Bradley, Sidgwick often appeared as the defender
of pleasure and progress, the brighter light of academic liberalism. But
as we have seen, outside the realm of philosophical polemics, and some-
times even within it, he was plagued by uncertainty. His project was not
as positive or confident as Green’s; it did not breathe moral uplift in
the fashion of the Idealists. Consider Sidgwick’s famous bout of
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introspective self-scrutiny, provoked by an attack on him by Alfred
Marshall, fresh from stints at Bristol and Oxford, who among other things
blasted him for his mania for “over-regulation” and invidiously compared
Sidgwick’s “lecture-room, in which a handful of men are taking down
what they regard as useful for examination, with that of Green, in which a
hundred men – half of them B.A.’s – ignoring examinations, were wont to
hang on the lips of the man who was sincerely anxious to teach them the
truth about the universe and human life.” Sidgwick pondered his “fail-
ure to attract men on a large scale” and, in assessing his “Character and
Opinions,” borrowed some lines from Bagehot’s description of Clough:
Though without much fame, he had no envy. But he had a strong realism. He
saw what it is considered cynical to see – the absurdities of many persons, the
pomposities of many creeds, the splendid zeal with which missionaries rush on
to teach what they do not know, the wonderful earnestness with which most
incomplete solutions of the universe are thrust upon us as complete and satisfying.
As he noted, this “represents my relation to T. H. G. and his work.”
Destiny had been good to him, had bestowed upon him
richly all external sources of happiness – friends, a wife, congenial occupation,
freedom from material cares – but, feeling that the deepest truth I have to tell
is by no means ‘good tidings,’ I naturally shrink from exercising on others the
personal influence which would make men [resemble] me, as much as men more
optimistic and prophetic naturally aim at exercising such influence. Hence as a
teacher I naturally desire to limit my teaching to those whose bent or deliberate
choice it is to search after ultimate truth; if such come to me, I try to tell them all I know; if others come with vaguer aims, I wish if possible to train their faculties
without guiding their judgements. I would not if I could, and I could not if I
would, say anything which would make philosophy – my philosophy – popular.
(M –)
Missionary “zeal” and “wonderful earnestness” – all in the service of
very incomplete solutions to the deepest problems – seem a pretty shrewd
assessment of Green. Where would Green’s Idealism lead, without the
concrete experience of the church? The Idealist temperance movement
was as baseless as the Millian antitemperance movement. Green’s philos-
ophy merely reproduced in new terms an unfeeling Universe, the dualism
of practical reason, egoism, complacency with (some types of ) orthodox
religion, and all the rest of Sidgwick’s worries. In fact, all the old the-
ological conundrums arise again in connection with Idealism. Consider
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the problem of evil, the suffering of innocents. Sidgwick, sounding a note
more often associated with Russell’s atheism, wondered “Why does the
eternal spirit, reproducing itself so many million times in connexion with
so many organisms, produce so much error and so much vice? I find no
serious attempt to answer this in Green.” (LPK ) Worse still, no one,
not even Green’s fondest admirers, could make out just where he stood on
the question of personality – that is, whether God has a personal nature
(that one might pray to) and whether there is such a thing as personal
immortality.
Perhaps the cogency of Sidgwick’s critique of Green was in part a result
of his own intense ambivalence over the allures of German philosophy. He
had, like Green, found himself uniquely attracted to German erudition and
civilization. But, as we have seen, in some crucial respects he had already
thought and fought his way free of the great source of Green’s project –
the Kantian conception of the self. In a vital, deeply revealing section of
his lectures on “The Metaphysics of Kant,” Sidgwick argued, concerning
Kant’s conception of the “Transcendental I” as barren of content:
Now perhaps this language is justifiable if the ‘I’ of the thought ‘I think’ is treated as strictly transcendental and examined in rigorous abstraction from experience.
But in saying that ‘in inner perception there is nothing permanent, for the “I” is
simply the consciousness of my thinking,’ Kant has abandoned the transcendental
ground; and here I think he is guilty of a transition as illegitimate as that which he rightly attributes to his opponents, although in an opposite direction. That is, he
tries to reduce the notion of Self as object of inner experience to the meagreness
of the ‘I’ of transcendental thought. Now of the self which introspection presents
to us as a thinking thing, introspection doubtless tells us little enough: all the
particularity of the mind, all that interests us in our thought of ourselves and
other minds as relatively permanent objects of thought in contrast with the more
transient states of consciousness, we only know by inference from the transient
and ever-varying element of inner experience. But still it is going too far to say
that the self presented in inner experience is merely thought as a logical subject
without predicates. However little ‘I’ know of ‘myself’ in introspection, I still know myself as one and identical, perduring through the empirical stream of thoughts, feelings, and volitions.
This cognition may be liable to error – I find infallibility nowhere in human
thought – or again it may seem unimportant: but it is presented as immediate and
is as certain as any empirical cognition, and in it I certainly find ‘given’ – if anything is ever ‘given’ – the empirical permanence which Kant – in the Kritik – denies.
(LPK –)
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The actually experienced self was richer than the Kantians or the Ide-
alists owned, and here was an opening for psychical research, made all the
more imperative by the total failure, to Sidgwick’s mind, of the Kantian
and neo-Kantian efforts to wrest from the critical philosophy a resolution
of the dualism of practical reason. In one of his most explicit prono
unce-
ments on this all-important subject, as handled by Kant, he stated:
In the case of Immortality, speculative reason – the non-empirical study of the
soul, when duly critical – appears to do nothing but guard against materialistic
explanations of mental phenomena. Rational psychology, with its idea of an abso-
lute subject, ‘is merely a discipline which prevents us . . . from throwing ourselves into the arms of a soulless materialism,’ and serves as a regulative principle totally to destroy all materialistic explanations of the internal phenomena of the soul –
for these can never account for self-consciousness, – but it gives no ground for
inferring the permanence of the soul beyond the period of mundane life. I may
observe that as regards the practical postulate of Immortality, Kant’s ideas appear
to have undergone a development between the Critique of Pure Reason () and the Critique of Practical Reason (). In the former, he does not distinguish between the belief in immortality and the belief in ‘a future life’ or ‘future world’ in which the connexion which reason demands between morality and happiness may
be realised. But by the time he came to compose the Critique of Practical Reason, it seems to have occurred to him that the postulate of a future life, adequate to
the rewarding of desert with happiness, does not necessarily involve endlessness
of life. Here, accordingly, he rests the argument for immortality on the necessity
for the realisation of the highest good by man, of ‘perfect harmony’ between this
disposition and the moral law. ‘Such a harmony,’ he says, ‘must be possible, as it
is implied in the command to promote the highest good’ – a form in which the
command to do duty may be conceived; on the other hand, ‘a finite rational being’
cannot attain moral perfection, it is only ‘capable of infinite progress towards it.’
Hence, as we must postulate that our ‘existence should continue long enough to
permit of the complete realisation of the moral law,’ we must postulate that it will
continue for ever. I shall have occasion to refer to this argument later. It always
seems to me to illustrate well both the ingenuity of Kant and what I may perhaps
be allowed to call his na¨ıveté. (LPK –)
Understandably, Sidgwick was specially attuned to those bits of Kant,
