Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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Mohammedanism is such a very inferior article to Judaism that I do not think
much is to be gained from comparing the two. And then I do not believe that the
earlier prophets admitted even the qualified hypocrisy one finds in Mohammed.
However, when one gets to the heresies, one may get hold of some laws of religious
progress.
Sidgwick to Dakyns, October , (M )
As regards the Chinese nightmare – what troubles me is that in the year
when so many have gone to and fro and the knowledge of the world in which
we live is increased so much, we are still so very ignorant of what is really going
on and has been going on in this great state embodying the one civilization that
it remains to Europe to overcome. I have always thought that the collision and
interpenetration of European science and Chinese institutions – which it seemed
to me must come – will be an interesting phenomenon of the th century, but the
present shock of the two civilizations in battle is something quite different and
what will come of it I know not.
Sidgwick to George Young, August , (M )
For all his fear of inappropriate historical analogy, Sidgwick’s politics
did tend to reflect his early convictions about the fate of Socrates – it was
the hypocritical, incoherent public that represented the true sophist, not
the philosophers or the promoters of the “new learning.” And the danger
was largely of a potential, rather than actual, nature, something ready to
emerge in the vacuum left by traditional religion. Philosophy was, or ought
to be, the answer, the helpmate to a (genuine) aristocracy.
Clearly, Sidgwick came close to personally realizing his vision of
the high-minded reformer, despite (or because of) his deeper doubts.
His contributions to the educational enterprise were even more exten-
sive than those sketched in earlier chapters. Money, time, and expertise
were given unstintingly to academic service and institutional growth –
it was Sidgwick who funded positions for Maitland (in law), Ward (in
psychology), and Michael Foster (in physiology), and the overflow of his
library was always distributed to various colleges. His devotion to higher
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education in general, and to Newnham College in particular, are in so
many ways difficult to fault. Much of his esotericism, or “Government
House” utilitarianism, was in the name of such things as educational re-
form and challenging dogmatic religious (and sexual) orthodoxy. Cautious
vanguardism, not reactionary conservatism, for the end of universal
happiness.
True, Sidgwick’s socialism was cautious, gradualist, and conservative in
many of the same ways as that of Mill and Maurice. Cast in a certain light,
however, his reformist educational politics can appear quite noble, despite
his persistent tendencies toward Apostolic elitism. The ethical culture
movement was in many ways complementary to the settlement movement,
when it came, in Addams’s words, to the aim of bringing “into the circle
of knowledge and fuller life, men and women who might otherwise be
left outside.” The universal heart of humanity at least throbbed over
opening up new worlds for those with few prospects; no one was to be
left out.
But this vision, whether in Sidgwick or in Green, plays out rather dif-
ferently when applied beyond the domestic context, to other countries
and cultures, where the self-sacrificing moral educator tends to take on
the trappings of the missionary. What, then, is the content and function of
the instruction? The spread of culture becomes the spread of civilization,
with the “experts” involved all coming from the small club of European
nations. Many of Sidgwick’s Cambridge colleagues were notorious repre-
sentatives of the imperialist mentality that so shaped the later Victorian
era – Seeley, Maine, Trevelyan, Pearson, and others were some of the
most illustrious architects of the ideology of British imperialism in its
most flourishing state. If the Balliol of Jowett and Green produced a great
raft of philosophical statesmen, Sidgwick’s Cambridge also did its part.
Indeed, the step from old academic liberal to new imperialist was short
and effortless.
Hence, the importance of the questions broached time and again in
earlier chapters: how elitist was Sidgwick’s reformism, especially when
considered in relation to the empire? Correlatively, was Sidgwick’s work
infected with those forms of racism that were becoming ever more virulent
in this imperialistic and post-Darwinian context, cutting across socialism,
imperialism, liberal unionism, progressivism, and every other political
movement? What did he mean by those references to the “lower races” and
the possibility of “race degradation”? Was he also a “Government House”
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utilitarian in the way charged by Williams and Walker? Or a Cambridge
orientalist?
Given the long history of utilitarian involvement in and philosophizing
about India, an imperialist enterprise that provided both James and John
Stuart Mill with much of their livelihood, it is striking how comparatively
little Sidgwick had to say about these issues. Unlike so many of his
contemporaries and colleagues in the post-Darwinian period, he scarcely
dwelt on the subject of race at all. In his writings, he resolutely focused on
the world that he knew best. This in itself was unusual, and makes it that
much more difficult to decipher just where he stood on so many of the
political controversies swirling around him. But he wrote and did enough
to put together a rough picture.
Some sense of the imperial mission of Sidgwick’s Cambridge can be
gained by considering his connections with the work of Seeley and Maine,
two of the “competent authorities” to whom he would make frequent
reference. They profoundly shaped his conception of the historical method
and his views of India, China, Egypt, and even Ireland.
Seeley was, of course, slightly senior to Sidgwick, having been born in
. As we have seen, he was the anonymous evangelical author of Ecce
Homo, which Sidgwick had so admired, however critically, during his years
of storm and stress. He went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in ,
graduating in at the top of the Classical Tripos, but, like Sidgwick,
with a strong performance in mathematics as well. He was appointed a
Fellow and lecturer in classics, wrote poetry, and left Cambridge, becom-
ing in professor of Latin at University College, London. I
n ,
while on his honeymoon, he received a letter from Gladstone offering him
the professorship of modern history at Cambridge, which Charles Kings-
ley had resigned. At Cambridge, he was, unlike Sidgwick, an enormously
popular lecturer, with very large classes filled with students from many
different departments. If he was not generally known outside Cambridge,
his influence was nonetheless great. As Sheldon Rothblatt has observed:
“As a don and professor his achievements were no less important than
those of other, more celebrated reformers, his contemporaries (and
Oxford heroes) Jowett and Pattison, for examples, with whom his efforts
compare.”
As Rothblatt also observes, Seeley’s general method of argument “was
sociological. His concern was with the institutions responsible for social
stability, and he therefore laid primary emphasis on the family, regarding
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it as an early form of political organization.” One of his successors, George
Prothero, summed up Seeley’s approach this way:
Though he did not coin the phrase ‘History is past politics, and politics present
history,’ it is perhaps more strictly applicable to his view of history than to that
of its author. ‘The indispensable thing,’ he said, ‘for a politician is a knowledge of political economy and of history.’ And again, ‘our University must be a great sem-inary of politicians.’ . . . The statesman was to be taught his business by studying political history, not with a view to extracting arguments in favour of particular
political theories, but in order to understand, by the comparative and histori-
cal method, political science, the science of the State. . . . Modern history being specially applicable to existing political problems, he lectured by preference on
modern times.
For Seeley, historical facts “pure and simple” had no allure. The facts
called for interpretation, “deducing from them the main lines of historical
and political evolution.” As Prothero goes on to note:
In the year , Professor Seeley’s lectures on the foreign policy of Great Britain
in the th century were published under the title ‘The Expansion of England.’
This book aroused as wide-spread an interest as ‘Ecce Homo,’ and its reception
was more uniform. The applause which it met with was almost universal. So
vigorous and thoughtful an apology for the British Empire, and for the way by
which it had been founded, had never before appeared. It brought together in one
concise survey and regarded from one point of view a number of occurences which
historians had previously treated in a disconnected manner. Its conclusions were
easily grasped: they appealed to a large audience: they were immediately applicable
to one of the greatest questions of the day. In its clear-cut, animated style, its
deliberate omission of all superfluous detail, its concentration of illustrative facts on the main thesis, and the confidence with which that thesis is maintained, the
book is a model of what an historical essay, with a practical end in view, should
be.
Of Seeley’s knighthood, bestowed in when the Liberal Rosebery
became prime minister, Prothero remarks that he “had the satisfaction of
receiving public acknowledgement of the services which by his writings
and addresses he had rendered to the empire.” Seeley, Prothero urges,
“was a good citizen, with a high sense of political responsibility.” He was
a “Liberal so far as domestic progress was concerned, anxious for the
wider spread of education, for the open career,” but he was “ardently
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conservative of what he conceived to be the foundation of the state.” For
Seeley, a
little England, an England shorn of Empire, was . . . synonymous not only with national degradation but national ruin. To foster an enthusiasm for the British
State, to convince the people that it is worth preserving, to eradicate the Turgot
view of colonies, and to set men thinking how the existing union may be preserved –
such were the aims of many lectures and addresses delivered during his final years.
The same convictions led him to become, with Sidgwick and Dicey, a
“vigorous opponent of Irish Home Rule, regarding it as a first step towards
a dissolution of the empire.”
Sidgwick had of course known Seeley ever since his undergraduate
days, when he was disappointed that he could not get his older friend
into the Apostles. They shared a great deal by way of efforts at academic
reform, with Seeley being, if anything, even more radical than Sidgwick
about introducing modern subjects and downplaying classics. Thus, they
would both be writing in support of the reform of the Classical Tripos in
the mid-sixties, though Seeley wrote from his perch at University Col-
lege. Seeley was also a supporter of higher education for women and, like
Sidgwick, found the Girton program problematic in part because it was
aimed at replicating the same curriculum that he found objectionable in
the case of men. At any rate, he would lecture and examine for both Girton
and Newnham, and also be much involved in efforts to spread education
generally, lecturing at the Working Men’s College in London, Toynbee
Hall, and at the various locations that marked the beginning of the uni-
versity extension movement. Thus, Seeley was undeniably part of that
group of Cambridge reformers – Sidgwick, Browning, Myers, Jackson,
and all the rest – trying both to extend education and to professionalize
it, to adapt it to the needs of the children of the rising middle class.
In fact, Sidgwick thought so highly of Seeley’s contribution to
Cambridge life that in the late seventies he anonymously supplemented
Seeley’s (rather modest) professorial income by about £ per year, in or-
der to help him leave off extracurricular activities designed mainly to bring
in revenue. And it should be recalled again how he had in enthusias-
tically written to Pearson that “we had separated History from Law and
ballasted it with Political Philosophy and Economy and International Law
in order to make the course a better training for the reasoning Faculties – in
fact, to some extent carried out Seeley’s idea of identifying History and
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Politics” (M ). Although they would naturally enough have various dif-
ferences, especially about Sidgwick’s work on the General Board (when
> most of his friends abandoned him), nevertheless when Seeley died in
, Sidgwick lamented, “it makes Cambridge feel diminished and poor
to have lost within a year two men so remarkable as him and Robertson
Smith. We have no young men coming on of the same mark – at any rate,
outside mathematics and physical science.” (M )
After Seeley’s death, Sidgwick read and advised the publication of the
material that became Introduction to Political Science, a work that pro-
foundly influenced his own Development of European Polity. His Editor’s
Preface to this work contains various fond recollections of Seeley, includ-
ing this rather Sidgwickian-sounding appreciation of his teaching method
by J. R. Tanner. Seeley, too, had the personal touch in education:
His old pupils carry with them grateful recollections of his ‘Conversation Class.’
The subject was political science studied by way of discussion, and discussion
under the reverential conditions that prevailed resolved itself into question and
answer – Socrates exposing the folly of the Athenians. It was mainly an exercise
in the definition and scientific use of terms. What is liberty? Various definitions of the term would be elicited from the class and subjected to analysis. The authors
of them would be lured by a subtle cross-examination into themselves exposing
their inconsistencies. Then the professor would take up his parable. He would
first discuss the different senses in which the term had already been used in
literature. . . . From an examination of inconsistent accounts the professor would proceed to the business of building up by a gradual process, and with the help
of the class itself, a definition of his own. . . . It was not told us on authority as something to remember, but we assisted ourselves at the creation of it.
And Sidgwick himself gives a generous summation of Seeley’s work and
historical method:
As regards the general view that these lectures enforce and illustrate – the two-
sided doctrine () that the right method of studying political science is an es-
sentially historical method, and () that the right method of studying political
history is to study it as material for political science – I think it may be said that this was one of his deepest and most permanent convictions. . . . it grew stronger and clearer as years went on, and assiduous study enlarged his knowledge and