by Bart Schultz
often ignored in more recent commentary, that flesh out the Kantian view
that without a God, “and without a world not visible to us now but
hoped for, the glorious ideas of morality are indeed objects of applause
and admiration, but not springs of purpose and action.” For Kant was clear
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that the “Highest Aim” of the transcendental reason was directed toward
comprehending the “freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and
the existence of God.” When it comes to Rational Theology, Sidgwick
explained, “for Kant the sole important question is, Can the theorising
reason of man prove, what a rational man, who has to act in the world
no less than to know it as completely as possible, must believe?” (LPK
–, ) These were the questions that had made Kant one of his
masters when he was composing the Methods.
Much as he agreed with Green in rejecting the Kantian appeal to the
noumenal realm of “things in themselves” and other points of the original
critical philosophy, Sidgwick nonetheless held that Kant was near the heart
of the “deepest problems.” Unfortunately, he cannot discern a success-
ful Kantian answer, only an ultimate resort to the demands of a coherent
morality that speculative reason is powerless to defend. And inner expe-
rience and the world of feeling were richer resources than the Kantians
and Idealists allowed. Although many have shared John Skorupski’s view
that there “is more to be learnt from the idealist notion of a person’s good
than Sidgwick allows; there is also more to be learnt from the idealist
notion of freedom than he allows,” Sidgwick found the Idealist moral
psychology too thin to capture the richness of inner experience and the
importance of feeling. And this was an approximation to James’s views –
Sidgwick was a whole-hearted admirer of James’s Principles of Psychol-
ogy, a complementary copy of which had been sent him by his SPR
colleague.
Indeed, this is a point of the first importance. For as urged in the previous
chapter, Sidgwick was very much in the vanguard that was producing
complex forms of depth psychology, leaving behind the older schools of
associationism and introspectionism. Freudianism, with its prioritizing
of the therapeutic perspective, was only one offshoot of this; another was
Jamesian pragmatism, which also stressed the role of the unconscious, and
which was in fact deeply indebted to the work of Myers on the “Subliminal
Self.” Both Myers and Symonds figure prominently in James’s Varieties
of Religious Experience:
The subconscious self is nowadays a well-accredited psychological entity; and I believe that in it we have exactly the mediating term required. Apart from all
religious considerations, there is actually and literally more life in our total soul than we are at any time aware of. The exploration of the transmarginal field has
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hardly yet been seriously undertaken, but what Mr. Myers said in in his
essay on the Subliminal Consciousness is as true as when it was first written:
‘Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he
knows – an individuality which can never express itself completely through any
corporeal manifestation. The Self manifests through the organism; but there is
always some part of the Self unmanifested; and always, as it seems, some power
of organic expression in abeyance or reserve.’ Much of the content of this larger
background against which our conscious being stands out in relief is insignificant.
Imperfect memories, silly jingles, inhibitive timidities, ‘dissolutive’ phenomena
of various sorts, as Myers calls them, enter into it for a large part. But in it many of the performances of genius seem also to have their origin; and in our study of
conversion, of mystical experiences, and of prayer, we have seen how striking a
part invasions from this region play in the religious life.
Fascinatingly, what James draws from this speaks directly to the reli-
gious concerns of the Sidgwick Group:
Let me propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side, the
‘more’ with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its
hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life. Starting thus with a recognized psychological fact as our basis, we seem to preserve a contact with
‘science’ which the ordinary theologican lacks. At the same time the theologians’s
contention that the religious man is moved by an external power is vindicated,
for it is one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region to take
on objective appearances, and to suggest to the Subject an external control. In
the religious life the control is felt as ‘higher’; but since on our hypothesis it is primarily the higher faculties of our own hidden mind which are controlling, the
sense of union with the power beyond us is a sense of something, not merely
apparently, but literally true.
The question is, of course, what sense to make of the “farther” side;
but in any event, to cast matters in this way is, James holds, at least a
doorway into the scientific study of the subject, one mediating a variety
of conflicting views.
As we have seen, this was very much the problematic that had emerged
in the Sidgwick Group, and it is well to bear in mind that when Sidgwick
discussed the fallible sense of the perduring self, through the flux of ex-
perience, he had James’s “stream of consciousness” and Myers’s “Sub-
liminal Self ” before his mind. This was the work that rather obviously
had his sympathy. In James’s immortal rendering of the sense of personal
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identity:
[T]he thoughts which we actually know to exist do not fly about loose, but seem
each to belong to some one thinker and not to another. Each thought, out of the
multitude of other thoughts of which it may think, is able to distinguish those
which belong to it from those which do not. The former have a warmth and
intimacy about them of which the latter are completely devoid, and the result is
a Me of yesterday, judged to be in some peculiarly subtle sense the same with the I who now make the judgment.
Like Sidgwick, James was sensitive to the appeal of Idealism, particularly
against reductive forms of empiricism and materialism, while in the end
finding it unsatisfactory – too ambitious, too an
tiscientific, and ultimately,
too inhuman.
Some have suggested that this entire phase of British philosophy –
featuring first Sidgwick versus Bradley and Green, and then James,
Russell, and Moore versus Bradley and McTaggert – was something of
a backwater in the larger currents of history. Richard Rorty, in a witty
comparison of twentieth-century textualism with nineteenth-century
Idealism, wrote of the latter:
[B]y the time of Marx and Kierkegaard, everybody was saying that the emperor
had no clothes – that whatever idealism might be it was not a demonstrable, quasi-
scientific thesis. By the end of the century (the time of Green and Royce) idealism
had been trimmed back to its Fichtean form – an assemblage of dusty Kantian
arguments about the relations between sensation and judgment, combined with
intense moral earnestness. But what Fichte had been certain was both demon-
strable truth and the beginning of a new era in human history, Green and Royce
disconsolately knew to be merely the opinion of a group of professors.
Yet clearly, the principal players did not see it that way. Here was a
group of professors who were out to rule the world, and who profoundly
shaped the men who actually did. The importance of being earnest was
never so palpable, philosophy never more relevant, even if it was becoming
professionalized. The world needed revitalizing, and philosophy was never
more charged. Neither Sidgwick nor Green had any clear sense that their
efforts to professionalize philosophy might at some future time drain it
of the passion and personal investment that had so marked their own
formative soaring.
And Green’s world had much more in it than any reduction of it to the
professionalization of philosophy and canon formation would indicate,
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even if Green was responsible for imposing Hume versus Kant as the
testing ground for students. Indeed, however unsatisfactory his philosoph-
ical efforts may have been to Sidgwick, the larger Cosmic Optimism they
represented was to emerge as a profound challenge to some of Sidgwick’s
deepest beliefs when it found expression in the life and work of Symonds.
Symonds was not a professional philosopher. But to Sidgwick’s mind, he
knew where the deepest problems were to be found, and his psychological
explorations brought home to Sidgwick the problems of inner experience
and the unity of the self in ways that the Idealists never could. For what-
ever else he was, Symonds was a voyager in the inner world and a shaper
of the future of psychology. James singled him out as beautifully articulat-
ing mystic and Whitmanian notions of cosmic consciousness, and for his
part, Symonds was utterly persuaded of the importance of Myers’s work
on the unconscious, the subliminal “uprush” of genius being especially
appealing. And Symonds was, with Walter Pater, a formidable proponent
of the lower, Goethean alternative, recast as a revitalizing “New Chivalry”
or, more accurately, “New Paganism.”
Patently, the Oxford of Jowett and Green was destined to shape
Sidgwick’s consciousness in myriad ways. His connections to the famous
rival institution were manifold and intense – his brothers Arthur and
William would both end up as Oxford dons, and Henry was in constant
contact with Oxford life through such vehicles as the Ad Eundem Soci-
ety, a dining club founded by William in precisely in order to foster
such fellowship. For all his Cambridge ways, Sidgwick, too, owed much
to Jowett, and he would owe even more to Symonds – another of Jowett’s
discoveries, for whom education was a very personal affair that might save
the world.
II. Liberty of the Heart
Seen in the context of such other politically liberal undergraduate essay societies
as the Cambridge Apostles of Tennyson and A. H. Hallam or the Decade of
Matthew Arnold and A. H. Clough, the Old Mortality society of Pater and
Symonds, T. H. Green and James Bryce thus stands forth as a two-handed engine
of cultural transformation by which liberal influences are to be introjected into the larger society . . . as well as into Tory Oxford itself. The language of this transform-ing influence would always be that of the Oxford intellectual elite: the discursive
vocabulary of the Greats course with its intermixture of Plato, Hegel, and J. S.
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Mill, that procreant combination Pater’s essay adopts when it joins the ‘forgotten
culture’ of philosophic love to the cultural anxieties of On Liberty. Pater thus allows his ‘hearer’ to understand that precisely the answer to Millian fears about
the ‘regeneration of the world’ or about ‘our collective life’ sinking ‘to the level of a colourless uninteresting existence’ (‘Diaphaneitè’ ) may indeed mean returning to the Platonic eros, as to ‘a relic from the classical age, laid open by accident to our alien modern atmosphere’ () – Pater’s central image for cultural renaissance to which he would constantly recur.
Sharing in Pater’s sense of a dawning moment of extraordinary cultural expan-
sion and possibility, Symonds, writing in an prize essay, had already read
enough Michelet and Burckhardt to be able to declare that the Renaissance itself
began when the Aristotle of the medieval schoolmen yielded his place to Plato,
whose ‘sublime guesses and far-reaching speculations suited the spirit of the awak-
ening age’ ( Renaissance ). On the most obvious level, one readily apprehensible to themselves, Pater and Symonds are both participating in the moment when the
full mission of the reformed Greats curriculum was being carried out in the spirit
of Mill’s ringing dictum in On Liberty – that one’s first duty as a thinker is ‘to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead’ (). Pater and Symonds
are quietly determined to do nothing less than follow Mill’s notion of a cultur-
ally reinvigorating liberty of opinion and experience to its boldest conclusion: a
‘liberty of the heart,’ as Pater was to call it in The Renaissance (), so free as to encompass even male love.
Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford
Peculiar as it may seem to affiliate Sidgwick with the growth of depth
psychology and Jamesian pragmatism, that is a context of singular impor-
tance for understanding his work. If Sidgwick did not go all the way with
the cheerful, insouciant Jamesian “will to believe” or think of himself as
naturalistic in the same way as the pragmatists, nonetheless, as we have
seen, he was at one with James on a great many counts. Besides, whatever
“naturalism” marked James’s view of the universe, it was one capacious
enough to include psychical research
and the normative structure of prac-
tical reason. Sidgwick’s minimal metaethics was just on the other side of
the line demarcating any such naturalism from non-naturalism. His ret-
icence about postulating any Moorean “objective property” of goodness,
much less any special faculty of intuition, and his sticking instead to the
less ontologically ambitious claim that, simply put, in any given situation
there is something that ought to be done, made it difficult for pragmatists
to find anything in his metaphysics that they did not in some way
share.
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To be sure, if the Jamesian enthusiasm for the rich particularity of life
was for James a healthy restorative from the soaring of Idealism, whether
Platonic or Hegelian, Sidgwick tended to find himself more regretful, with
a sense of the loss involved in such a retreat from the great ambitions of
capital-P Philosophy. Even so, the arc of their thought was similar. After
all, Sidgwick’s skeptical results, and his sense that infallibility was nowhere
to be found, were in their way every bit as heretical as the pragmatists’
rather breezier acceptance of fallibilism, particularly from the standpoint
of orthodox Christianity. However reverential he was about the great philo-
sophical quest, to deny that universal moral truth was known was the type
of thing that, under certain circumstances, could get one into a great deal of
trouble. Especially if one was given to pursuing pleasurable consciousness
with the wrong people.
Yet there was something utterly characteristic about this graceful
Victorian decanting from airy Platonism to earthy life. Sidgwick’s restless
tossing between the high of sympathetic unity and the low of Goethean
harmonious development was almost written into the times, with the jour-
nalistic world invoking the contrasts of “sympathy” and “egotism” at
every turn. James may have been somewhat readier to endorse this toss-
ing on its own terms, but even he would pale beside Sidgwick’s intimate
friend Symonds, when it came to Cosmic Optimism sustaining a vac-
