Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe

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Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe Page 120

by Bart Schultz


  its colliding with popular sentiment or with self-interest; the position of

  ‘Athanasius contra mundum’ would certainly always have had an attraction

  for him.” He was, Sidgwick noted, deploying “an Anglo-Indian phrase

  then current,” a man “to go tiger-hunting with.” He

  had little respect for prevalent prejudices, he had a great respect for facts; he was always self-critical as well as critical of others, and alert and disengaged in the

  collection and valuation of evidence on all sides of any question in which he was

  interested speculatively or practically. He was even circumspect in the sense of

  being anxious to avoid contests on badly chosen grounds; and the enthusiasm for

  human progress, which was strong in him, was kept in check by his intellectual

  habit of steadily and clearly distinguishing his ideals and aspirations from his

  expectations.

  Sidgwick was especially impressed by the patient, minutely detailed ar-

  guments that Pearson marshalled to demonstrate why France was bound

  to win in the Franco-Prussian War, a belief that only final crushing defeat

  managed to shake.

  Bryce, too, was counted amongst Pearson’s friends, and his contribution

  to the memorials recalls how Pearson had been regarded as “one of the

  most brilliant men of an unusually brilliant generation” at Oxford, and

  how he was “a strong Liberal, advocating University Reform and the

  abolition of university tests, as well as most of the political measures, as,

  for instance, for the extension of the suffrage, which the Liberal Party had

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  Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe

  taken up.” It was to Bryce that Pearson sent the syllabus of National Life

  and Character, in order to help him find a publisher. “The firm to which

  I showed it accepted it at once, struck, no doubt, as I had been, by the

  breadth and power with which the subject had been conceived.”

  After the book appeared, Pearson sent Sidgwick a complimentary copy,

  to which gesture the latter replied:

  I am much obliged to you for sending me your book which I am reading with much

  interest. When I find myself too depressed by it, I console myself by thinking that

  sociology is not yet an exact science, so that the powers of prediction possessed

  by the wisest intellect are limited.

  I am glad to see that the reviews are giving you justice – so far as I see them.

  Set in this context, Sidgwick’s tergiversating abstraction starts to look

  much less like cool agnosticism or impartiality. It is impossible to imagine

  Mill, say, reading Pearson or even Bryce with so much admiration and

  so little indignation. To the degree that he thought Pearson indicated

  the likely direction of scientific progress on racial matters, and posed the

  right research agenda, his skeptical resistance would appear to have had

  little practical consequence. How could Sidgwick and Bryce have been

  so warmly respectful of Pearson’s claims? Bryce himself had warned that

  just as

  there are historians and politicians who, when they come across a trait of national

  character for which no obvious explanation presents itself, set it down to ‘race,’

  so there are writers and speakers who, too indolent to examine the whole facts of

  the case, or too ill-trained to feel the need of such examination, pounce upon the

  political institutions of a country as the easiest way to account for its social and

  intellectual, perhaps even for its moral and religious peculiarities.

  But Pearson’s views were apparently thought to be well within the orbit

  of competent authority. In fact, at many points, they may well have over-

  lapped with those of Balfour (who, incidentally, was the one who could

  be credited with injecting the new imperialist ideas into the Tory Party).

  When in , the former prime minister undertook to deliver the Henry

  Sidgwick Memorial Lecture at Newnham College, he used the occasion to

  speak to the theme of “Decadence.” The type of decadence he considered

  was that which infected the Roman Empire – “the decadence which at-

  tacks, or is alleged to attack, great communities and historic civilisations:

  which is to societies of men what senility is to man, and is often like senility,

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  the precursor and the cause of final dissolution.” This is the type of deca-

  dence, or degeneration, that occurs when “through an ancient and still

  powerful state, there spreads a mood of deep discouragement, when the

  reaction to recurring ills grows feebler, and the ship rises less buoyantly

  to each succeeding wave, when learning languishes, enterprise slackens,

  and vigour ebbs away.”

  Balfour worried that Western European civilization might not be quite

  as lucky as the Roman Empire. If cultural advance in these states “is some

  day exhausted, who can believe that there remains any external source

  from which it can be renewed? Where are the untried races competent to

  construct out of the ruined fragments of our civilisation a new and better

  habitation for the spirit of man?” The inexorable conclusion, of course, is:

  “They do not exist; and if the world is again to be buried under a barbaric

  flood, it will not be like that which fertilised, though it first destroyed, the

  western provinces of Rome, but like that which in Asia submerged forever

  the last races of Hellenic culture.” Thus, he would emphatically not infer

  that “when some wave of civilisation has apparently spent its force, we

  have a right to regard its withdrawing sweep as but the prelude to a new

  advance.”

  True, in conclusion Balfour strikes the requisite hopeful note:

  [W]e cannot regard decadence and arrested development as less normal in human

  communities than progress; though the point at which the energy of advance is ex-

  hausted (if, and when, it is reached) varies in different races and civilisations. . . . as regards those nations which still advance in virtue of their own inherent energies,

  though time has brought perhaps new causes of disquiet, it has brought also new

  grounds of hope. . . . there are so far, no symptoms either of pause or of regression in the onward movement which for more than a thousand years has been

  characteristic of western civilisation.

  And Balfour makes a strong Sidgwickian case for science, as a new

  force on the horizon the advance of which is not easily explained, though

  he of course is not one to suppose that science could prove ultimately

  satisfying to the religious consciousness of ordinary people. Democracy

  too is addressed, and finds its due place as a regulative force in at least

  some modern societies. But though the forward movement of humanity

  “may be controlled or checked by
the many; it is initiated and made

  effective by the few,” which was why it is a good thing that even in the

  advanced societies there is, in terms of mental capacity, “a majority slightly

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  Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe

  below the average and a minority much above it.” He denies that “any

  attempt to provide widely different races with an identical environment,

  political, religious, education, what you will, can ever make them alike.

  They have been different and unequal since history began; different and

  unequal they are destined to remain through future periods of considerable

  duration.”

  Balfour’s Sidgwick Lecture found a fascinated and receptive audience

  in the person of the president of the United States, the Bull Moose Pro-

  gressive Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt, who had fond memories of Balfour

  as the man who kept England from interfering in the Spanish American

  War, agreed heartily with much of what his British friend had to say.

  He had “ugly doubts as to what may befall our modern civilisation” and

  thought it an “irritating delusion” that there would necessarily be for-

  ward progress, about which there was nothing inevitable or necessary. In

  writing to Balfour, Roosevelt explained that “[i]t is equally to the interest

  of the British empire and of the United States that there should be no

  immigration in mass from Asia to Australia or North America. It can be

  prevented, and an entirely friendly feeling between Japan and the English

  speaking people preserved, if we act with sufficient courtesy and at the

  same time with sufficient resolution.”

  As Kenneth Young observes, it was quite possibly this letter from

  Roosevelt that “decided Balfour early in  to put some of his most

  cherished and far-seeing ideas on the future before the President. Among

  the Royal papers there is a very remarkable document headed ‘The Possi-

  bility of an Anglo-Saxon Confederation,’ ” which was apparently sent to

  Roosevelt. In it, Balfour outlined the necessity for England and America

  to confront the twentieth century as firm allies, insisting that disarma-

  ment was a dream, that a few nations were bound to control the world,

  and that peace would come “only when these powers have divided the

  world between them.” He worried about the expansion of Russia and

  Germany, but as for most of Africa, it will never be the “home of whites,”

  being already possessed by “many millions of an inferior black race with

  whom white men cannot live and work on equal terms,” and besides,

  “the climate is not suitable for hard manual labour.” Thus, the “progres-

  sive races” might develop some commerce or military installations, but in

  the main, “It will be given over to the negro and, in the North East, to

  the Mohammedans.” Still, such underpopulated areas as Australia and

  South Africa were desirable: “Not until these countries are more thickly

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  populated than they are today can their future as Anglo-Saxon states be

  assured, unless they are protected by a power invincible at sea.”

  As Young suggests, here we find Balfour’s real thoughts about the em-

  pire. He held that the “future for a rapidly overpopulating Britain, equally

  rapidly becoming completely unself-supporting, lay in closer integration

  with the Empire,” but the problem was that – support the navy though

  he did – there could scarcely be an “invincible” sea power. Balfour’s

  point was that the United States and Britain should federate in order to

  “be a more than equal counterpoise to the other great nations of the future

  and also partly in order to secure to them the undisputed possession and

  development of the still thinly populated areas of the world.” Otherwise,

  they will end in conflict, and to what end? “If England and America do

  not federate, the history of the world will continue to be one of warfare,

  for a number of world powers will be competing for the supremacy,” but

  if they unite, they will “be beyond attack.”

  Whatever Balfour’s prescience by way of anticipating the political con-

  figurations of the twentieth century (his scheme barely got beyond the

  theorizing stage), the crucial point is that he sounds very much like an

  advocate of “spiritual expansion” who had read his Seeley and Pearson

  and been tutored in the dangers of philosophical doubt. That so much of

  his vision was contained in his memorial lecture for Sidgwick is surely

  revealing, if alarming. The deep-seated prejudice that it reveals – a smug

  bigotry that must have been a fixture of Sidgwick’s home life, when off at

   Carlton Gardens, or Whittingehame, or Terling Place – cannot help but

  make one wonder whether Sidgwick himself was ever really as agnostic

  as his publications would make him sound. Was this more “prudence,” as

  with Bryce’s evasion of the issue of labor strife?

  Just how evasive Sidgwick’s prophesying could be is evident from

  that review essay on Pearson. It is a singular Mauricean performance.

  For after praising the book as the “most impressive book,” and so on,

  Sidgwick goes on to make it clear that this is not a field governed by

  high standards of impressiveness. Thus, although Pearson’s views are

  not like the sweeping claims of positivists and Marxists concerning the

  laws of social evolution, and “rest on a simple empirical basis” made im-

  pressive by a “remarkably wide and full knowledge of relevant historical

  facts,” and although his “predictions are almost always interesting, and

  sometimes . . . reach a degree of probability sufficient to give them real

  practical value,” still, Sidgwick continues, there is “no book which brings

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  Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe

  home to one more forcibly the imperfection of all such empirical forecasts.”

  (MEA –). As Sidgwick explains, predictions of the direction of so-

  cial change “may be classed under two heads, in respect of the general

  procedure employed in them: they either proceed on the assumption that

  what is will continue to be, or that what has happened will happen again.”

  Each procedure may have its place, under proper conditions, but each

  also has its own imperfections. Sidgwick of course recognizes that these

  familiar assumptions would be hard to do without, and that for a good

  many purposes – say, predicting how many children will be born a year

&n
bsp; hence – they serve well enough, especially given the increasing sophisti-

  cation of statistical forecasting. Still, the “best knowledge of history, even

  if confined to current history, prevents us from accepting the proposi-

  tion that what has been will be, in its crudest form, in which it excludes

  change,” and it is in the subtler shape of expecting a process of change

  to “continue in the same direction” that it is liable to be abused. Indeed,

  Pearson relied on it “somewhat too much,” and in doing so, got tripped up

  on the other assumption that what has happened before will happen again.

  Thus,

  Mr. Pearson found that in the last twenty years – I do not think that the ex-

  perience on which he based his forecast goes farther back – the functions of

  Government have shown a tendency to expand (especially in the colony of

  Victoria): he also found that the influence of religion has shown a tendency

  to diminish, especially the belief in a future life, which our age tends to re-

  gard as ‘nothing more than a fanciful and unimportant probability’: and, as-

  suming these tendencies to continue, he predicted certain depressing effects on

  national life and character. Now, the tendency to Socialism is undeniable; and

  I am not prepared to deny that a drift to secularism is traceable in what may

  be in a wide sense called the educated classes; and I should quite agree with

  Mr. Pearson, that if both tendencies together continue operating long enough

  they are likely to affect our national character very seriously. But I hesitate to infer confidently that this effect will be produced, when I reflect how short a time it is

  since a more fully developed Individualism seemed to thoughtful minds ‘in the

  van of progress,’ and how impossible it would practically have been to prophesy

  on empirical grounds any of the revivals of religious sentiment that have taken

  place during the history of Christianity. (MEA –)

  Sidgwick proceeds by hauling out his favorite target, Herbert Spencer,

  observing that Spencer “formed, before , the opinion that a com-

  pleted Individualism was the ultimate goal of human progress; and to this

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