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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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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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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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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