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psychical research, there were, as noted in the previous chapter, some big
developments in , just when all seemed to be lost. Partly, this resulted
from the tragic death of Gurney; as the journal records:
Edmund Gurney died in a hotel at Brighton on Friday night (? June). Arthur
Myers was telegraphed for on Saturday morning: on Saturday evening and Sunday
the calamity was communicated by him to one or two relatives and friends. Nora
and I and Fred Myers learnt it (from Arthur M) on Sunday. The inquest took
place on the Monday: but the news was not generally known in London till the
Tuesday. On Sunday in London Miss F. a friend of Fred Myers, known to him
(and to me) through psychical research, – who has already had more than one
apparently telepathic impression – wrote the following lines in her diary (which
Myers has seen)
“Sun. Is Mr Myers in trouble? Involuntary, and I hope meaningless note of sympa-
thy floating by my mind since yesterday morning. Wrote it down but still present.
‘one offers an expression of sympathy chiefly perhaps for one’s own sake, – for all
else silence is best. Your friend is out of sight, your fellow-worker still with you.
Believe this I speak as one who knows.’
What can this mean?”
Miss F says that the ‘note of sympathy’ was written down by her on a separate
scrap of paper on Saturday evening, after floating in her mind since the morning:
and then copied into her diary on Sunday. She had no idea what it could mean:
she only felt a vague dread of some calamity having happened to Myers; which
led her to call on another friend of his on the Monday, on the chance of hearing
what (if anything) had happened. She is quite sure she knew nothing of E.G.’s
death till the Tuesday. We think her a perfectly trustworthy witness.
Can this be pure coincidence? If not, what can be the explanation? This we
anxiously ask ourselves. (CWC)
Again, Gurney’s death galvanized the psychical researchers, and the
positive turn this work took through the s was undoubtedly one reason
why Sidgwick felt that his academic prestige was still needed by the society,
which he again headed. When he blazed forth, if he ever did, it was to be
with maximal efficacy.
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But there was much else going on as well, though on many fronts
the story was less encouraging. The s were for Sidgwick a decade
of extremely active academic politicking, politicking which had taken its
toll. And there was a certain Whitmanian flavor, paradoxical as that may
sound, to his work for the “general academic reorganisation.” The Memoir
explains how important the new statutes proposed by the university com-
mission were, when they came into effect in . The new “General
Board of Studies” was to carry out this major program of reorganiza-
tion, and Sidgwick would be much involved with it: “Sidgwick joined
the General Board, when it was first constituted in November , as
the representative of the Special Board for Moral Science, and, with the
brief interruption caused by his absence in Italy in the Lent term of ,
served on it continuously till the end of ,” by which time he had
partly lost interest in administration because Cambridge “had seemed to
him to show want of adequately progressive action in several instances”
(M ).
But work with the General Board was to be an exceedingly difficult and
painful task:
Among the most important duties of the new Board was that of administering
to the best advantage a common fund for University purposes composed of con-
tributions exacted from the Colleges by the new statutes – contributions which
were to increase at intervals of three years to a stated maximum. By means of this
additional income the University was to establish Professorships, Readerships,
and University Lectureships, to increase the emoluments attached to some of the
existing Professorships, to provide necessary buildings, and otherwise to enlarge
its work and render it more efficient; and it was the business of the General Board
to co-ordinate the demands of different departments so as to present to the Uni-
versity a workable scheme which should give the utmost efficiency possible under
the circumstances. When, however, the demands of the Special Boards were for-
mulated it became “immediately obvious,” as the General Board said in a report
in May , “that the funds at the disposal of the University would be for the
present wholly inadequate to supply the wants which the several Boards consid-
ered to be urgent,” and it will be seen that the work of adjusting these claims was
necessarily a very delicate and difficult one. The difficulty was, moreover, greatly
increased by the unforeseen effect of agricultural depression, which by impover-
ishing the Colleges, whose property was and is largely agricultural, rendered it
impossible to exact from them the full tax counted on by the Commissioners in
framing the statutes. (M –)
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Naturally, however, this project of academic reform was “an object
which Sidgwick had long had in view and had long been working for.” It
was, he hoped, to be turned in the direction of the academic liberals:
He desired on the one hand to extend the influence of the University, and to open
its doors as widely as possible to different classes of serious students, and on the
other so to organise the teaching offered as not only to provide as far as possible
for all subjects required, and (for industrious students) do away with the need of
private tuition, but also to avoid the overlapping, and consequent waste of funds
and energy, apt to arise from the separate organisation of the Colleges.
This he took very, very seriously:
Of his desire to open the doors of the University to different classes of students his work for women is an example, but by no means the only one. The maintenance
and development of teaching for Indian Civil Servants was an object to which he
devoted both time and money, and in May , when there had been some ques-
tion, on pecuniary grounds, of discontinuing the attempt to provide adequately
for them, he said, in a discussion in the Arts Schools, that his own “opinion was
well known that research should be much more considered and encouraged in the
University than now; still, the discredit of abandoning the connection with these
students [Indian Civil Servants] would be so grave that he would rather postpone
important research than incur the loss.” The view here expressed is typical; he
sympa
thised with every effort to enlarge the field of University influence both
on the literary and scientific sides, and the development of departments of study
which by some were viewed with distrust as too narrowly professional, such as –
besides the Indian Civil Service studies – engineering, agriculture, and the train-
ing of teachers, was always encouraged by him. His desire to extend the sphere
of influence of the University in the interest of sound learning was one of the
reasons which made him wish that the imposition of Greek on all its members
would be done away with, since he believed that this would make it possible for
the University to put itself at the head, as it were, of the modern sides of schools
as well as of the classical sides, and also at the head of those “modern” schools,
already numerous and certain to increase, of whose curriculum Greek was not a
regular part. (M –)
The aim here was less that of Mr. Gradgrind than that of Green and
Symonds, who agreed about the Greek. It is not in the least to be wondered
at that he “had on the Board a few strong opponents, and many half-
convinced supporters who might turn at any time into opponents,” or that
he won a reputation as “a very dangerous person.” “Himself a professor,
and a very conscientious one, he took a large and generous view of the
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work which a professor should be expected to do. The professors, however,
resented the proposed regulations.” (M , , ) It was at this time
that he received the severe dressing-down from Alfred Marshall.
Now, it is certainly appropriate to wonder just how elitist such educa-
tional work was. This talk of opening the university to all classes did not,
it would seem, translate into any actual reverence for political democracy
in and of itself, much less for revolutionary economic reform. Indeed, the
new Whitmanian rhetoric often had a lot in common with the old Mau-
ricean Christian socialism or Millian agnostic socialism, allowing for the
celebration both of fellowship and of a guiding intellectual aristocracy, a
clerisy.
The attitude was happily captured in a piece by Roden Noel explaining
the significance of Whitman and how his views demanded qualification:
[I]s equality a truth in the manner in which he asserts it? I believe not; and if not, it must be so far mischievous to assert it. That common manhood is a greater, more
cardinal fact than any distinctions among men which raise one above another I
most firmly believe. Still these distinctions do exist, and so palpable a fact cannot be ignored without very serious injury. If great men could not have been without
average men, and owe most to the grand aggregate soul of the ideal unit, humanity –
which is a pregnant truth – yet, on the other hand, this grand aggregate soul could
never have been what it is, could never have been enriched with the treasures it
now enjoys, without those most personal of all personalities – prophets, heroes,
men of genius. . . . I do not believe that the mere proclamation of friendly love as between comrades (any more than of sexual love and equal union between man
and woman) is at all sufficient. Veneration, reverence, also must be proclaimed,
as likewise necessary; and the great point we ought to aim at, in helping to solve
the momentous question of the social future, seems in that respect to be this –
that mankind be taught, and gradually accustomed, to place their reverence where
reverence is indeed due, and not upon mere idols of popular superstition.
This passage explains what to many has seemed either absolutely ludi-
crous or utterly hypocritical about the English Whitmanians – that is, the
way in which so many of them could celebrate Whitman without aban-
doning or compromising their vanguardist belief in some sort of clerisy or
intellectual aristocracy that would play a vital role in cultural and polit-
ical leadership and reform. Whitman is valuable in that “he corrects the
prevalent tending of advanced thought to rely on more or less question-
able social Utopias, leaving the nature of individuals unchanged; teaching
that each is honourable in his own position and calling.” However, he “is
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defective in not granting more unreservedly the need of spiritual regen-
eration, and of that heavenlier Civil Constitition, or City of God, which
the noblest have ever anticipated and aspired to as slow and sure consum-
mation of such regeneration, social and individual.” Perhaps Whitman
himself “may be so morally well-knit, and sweet-natured that he may not
need that repentance and renewal, which the Tannhäusers amongst us,
and the average men, do so sadly, and unquestionably require.” Still, he
“does now and then distinctly acknowledge the claims of greatness to
lead mankind, insisting on the supreme worth of ideal manhood, strong
mastering personality.”
Noel’s Essays on Poetry and Poets was dedicated to none other than
Symonds, who had enthusiastically encouraged him to publish it. And it
won Sidgwick’s approval as well: “For relaxation from ‘Value’ and ‘Capital’
I have been reading and meditating on Roden Noel’s book. On the whole
I find it solidly satisfactory: and it removes a lurking fear in my mind that
in spite of his originality, vigour, and flow of ideas he would be found not
exactly to ‘come off ’ as an essayist – would, in fact be rather eccentric than
original.” Of course, “the fundamental difference between him and me is
that he thinks the Poet has Insight into Truth, instead of merely emotions
and an Art of expressing them.” (CWC)
Even so, the poets, like the subjects of psychical research, are for
Sidgwick all-important as vehicles for getting at the emotions, for un-
derstanding the true self and reforming the current one. Feeling, not
Thought, is the source of ultimate value, but it needs cultivating, and
Sidgwick wanted the modern curriculum to include modern literature for
just that reason. It had to be studied with all the care an Apostle could
muster. As a later, Bloomsbury Apostle, E. M. Forster, put it: “The poet
wrote the poem, no doubt, but he forgot himself while he wrote it, and we
forget him while we read. What is so wonderful about great literature is
that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man
who wrote, and brings to birth in us also the creative impulse.”
Needless to say, Sidgwick himself was constitutionally incapable of
being the whole-hearted Whitmanian worshipper of the people, much
as he was touched by the efforts of Symonds and Noel. If he shared mu
ch
with them by way of the search for a new synthesis and new casuistry, and
a sense of the incoherence of commonsense morality and the importance
of the investigation of the deepest problems via intimate conversation,
the appreciation of art, and so forth, he was for all that inclined to worry
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about “powerful uneducated persons,” not to celebrate or seduce them.
He did, under the influence of his friends, descend somewhat from the
Apostolic pedestal, allowing that “constructing a Theory of Right” cannot
“be thoroughly well done by philosophers alone,” because they must learn
from people “in the thick and heat of the struggle of active life, in all
stations and ranks, in the churches and outside the churches” (PE ,
). Entering into the Universal Heart of Humanity did, he now realized,
involve experiencing the messy realities of actual people. But in the end,
he remained the more critical, Millian philosopher who tended to view
his friends’ lives as challenging experiments for testing the horizons of
happiness, for demonstrating the potential of new cultural alternatives
capable of fostering happiness and avoiding social strife in a post-Christian
era. His Millianism was eclectic enough to appropriate elements of these
visions for the effort to advance culture and education. After all, Mill
and Maurice agreed about the importance of poeticizing life, and how
could Sidgwick resist any plea to foster sympathetic friendship for the
sake of reform? Still, Whitmania, like Idealism, was always set against his
Apostolic conscience and his skeptical doubts.
Quite possibly Symonds and Noel were not all that radical either. Eve
Sedgwick has dismissed Symonds as a “glib rationalizer,” by compari-
son with the genuine Whitmanian socialist Carpenter, even on matters of
sex: “the difference between Symonds’ political ideal and the bourgeois
English actuality of sexual exploitation, for cash, of proletarian men and
women is narrow and arbitrary. It seems to lie mostly in the sanguine
Whitmanian coloration of Symonds’ rhetoric and erotic investment.”