by Bart Schultz
Rand mines in the Transvaal: “Merely in itself it was a horror; for to ship tens
of thousands of Chinese young men overseas to perform for long years the hard-
est underground toil, and coop them up for their leisure in horde-compounds
with no society but each other’s, meant deliberately creating, as in the sequel
it did create, moral sinks of indescribable human beastliness” (Ensor, England, p. ). Milner was of course a Balliol believer in “social service.”
. Kiernan insightfully analyzes Curzon’s erudition: “Curzon’s book on Persia came
out in , a few years before he was made Viceroy of India. He saw Persia in
Churchillian fashion, as an arena where the mastery of Asia was to be decided;
he prepared for his tour with Churchillian thoroughness, turning over all the two
or three hundred books in European languages. Probably none of them did more
to fix his ideas than Hajji Baba; in he wrote a foreword to a new edition of the novel, recommending it as a still faithful inventory of the ‘unchanging
characteristics of a singularly unchanging Oriental people.’ His concern as he
rode about the country filling his notebooks was with facts about Persia’s trade,
resources, politics, just as later on he was passionately interested in India, but not much in Indians, mere clay to be moulded on the potter’s wheel of empire” ( Lords
of Human Kind, p. ). And Said rightly stresses Curzon’s “almost pedagogical view of empire”–captured in his remark that “we train here and we send out to
you your governors and administrators and judges, your teachers and preachers
and lawyers,” and his comparison of the “Imperial fabric” to Tennyson’s “Palace
of Art,” with English foundations and colonial pillars supporting “the vastness of
an Asiatic dome” ( Orientalism, p. ). See also Gilmour, Curzon, Chapter .
. Sidgwick to Balfour, April , , Balfour Collection, British Library. Again, see Collini, “My Roles and Their Duties,” for a knowledgeable account of Sidgwick’s
advisory work.
. Quoted in Hobsbawn, The Age of Empire, p. .
. Kiernan, Lords of Human Kind, p. .
. Clearly, Sidgwick himself had always worried about the temptation to inaction, to being antipractical.
. Dr. Talbot, too, was appreciative of Sidgwick’s efforts: the Society “benefited
greatly by the quiet way in which [Sidgwick] introduced order into our rather
rambling discussions, and, along with the quality of his own contributions, by his
earnest and hopeful desire to draw some result out of our work, which should in
some degree correspond with its object of helping men of different kinds to some
joint constructive thought” (M ).
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Notes to Pages –
. Sidgwick to Balfour, April , , Balfour Collection, British Library.
. Attached to a letter of , Balfour Collection, British Library.
. Sidgwick to Ward, May , (CWC). The originals of this correspondence
are in the Wilfrid Ward Papers, St. Andrews University.
. Sidgwick to Ward, December , .
. Sidgwick to Ward, March , .
. See James Ward’s singularly helpful Preface to this work, which nicely traces the overlap between Sidgwick’s ethics, politics, and metaphysics.
. The passage continues: “For there can be no doubt that one of the most impor-
tant sources of human error lies in the acceptance of traditions and suggestions
incapable of being supported on adequate evidence.”
. Sidgwick to Ward, March , .
. Sidgwick to Ward, May , .
. On this, see F. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), a fairly exhaustive account of
the religious anxieties behind Kant’s philosophizing. And as a construction of the
dualism, the passage cited here lends weight to Schneewind’s account, discussed
in Chapter . Again, Mackie, in The Miracle of Theism, has also given a lucid summation of Sidgwick’s dualism as a simple conflict between different accounts
of what one has “most reason to do” that arises absent the moral well-orderedness
of the universe.
. Eleanor Sidgwick to Wilfrid Ward, July , , Wilfrid Ward Papers, St. Andrews
University.
. Oppenheim, Other World, p. .
. Sidgwick to Bryce, Aug. , .
. It should be duly recorded that Sidgwick also gave a great deal of money to support Hodgson in his work in the U.S., and largely paid for his travels to India and to
England. See Gauld, Founders, p. . Luckhurst, in The Invention of Telepathy, also has much to say about Hodgson, who appears to have been a Victorian version
of Joe Nickels, the brilliant debunker of more recent parapsychological pretensions.
. Oppenheim, Other World, p. .
. Broad, Lectures on Psychical Research, p. . According to Broad, “although instructed opinion is almost unanimous in holding that trance-mediumship supplies
data which require a paranormal explanation of some kind, there is no consensus of experts in favour of any one suggested paranormal explanation.” Broad also
noted that the “interest of these phenomena to the psychical researcher depends,
of course, primarily on their containing this nucleus of something para normal, as distinct from merely ab normal. But he would be most unwise to confine his attention to this, and to ignore the question of the psychological processes at the
back of the phenomena of trance-mediumship in general. For any particular view
that one may take as to the nature of those processes will inevitably be relevant,
favourably or unfavourably, to any particular type of proposed explanation of the
paranormal features which characterize some of these phenomena.”
. Quoted in Oppenheim, Other World, p. .
. Ibid., p. .
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Notes to Pages –
. Quoted in ibid., p. .
. Almeder, Death and Personal Survival: The Evidence for Life after Death (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, ), pp. –. See also Tom Shroder, Old Souls:
The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives (New York: Simon and Schuster, ).
. Quoted in Almeder, Death and Personal Survival, p. .
. Eleanor Sidgwick, “Different Types of Evidence for Survival,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (December ), pp. –.
. Oppenheim, Other World, p. .
. Symonds, Letters, vol. , p. .
. Gauld, Founders, p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, p. . Needless to
say, this work includes an exhaustive and very enthusiastic account of the Piper
sittings, providing all the details of the reports by Lodge, Hodgson, and others.
. Broad, “Henry Sidgwick and Psychical Research,” pp. –.
. It is this vanguardism that one finds missing from such otherwise valuable accounts as Reba Soffer’s “The Modern University and National Values, –,” Historical Research (June ), pp. –.
. Lubenow, The Cambridge Apostles, p. .
. Quoted in ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Brown, Metaphysical Society, p. .
. Allen, The Cambridge Apostles, p. .
. Lubenow, The Cambridge Apostles, p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Brown, Metaphysical Society, p. .
. In Maisie Ward, The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition (London: Sheed and Ward,
), p. .
. See Michael Foldy’s The Trials of Oscar Wilde (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), p. and p. ; George Wyndham had written to his father that “I
know on the authority of Arthur Balfour, who has been told the case by the lawyers
who had all the papers, that Wilde is sure to be condemned, and that the case is in
every way a very serious one, involving the systematic ruin of a number of young
men.”
. Sheffield Archives, ref. Carpenter MSS /. This altogether remarkable letter
continues with Brown explaining that in his view “men understand men & women
women better than men understand women or women men” and that in “carnal
connection . . . a man with a woman thinks most of his own sensation; a man with
a man thinks quite as much of his companion as of himself,” views that Symonds
may well have shared.
. Sheffield Archives, ref. Carpenter MSS /.
. For a somewhat fuller account of this and other exchanges between Sidgwick and
Brown, see my “Eye of the Universe: Henry Sidgwick and the Problem Public,”
Utilitas (July ), pp. –.
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. Ibid., pp. –. See also Schultz et al., Strange Audacious Life, especially on Gosse’s role in constructing Symonds’s reputation.
. Brown to Carpenter, Sheffield Archives, ref. Carpenter MSS .
. Sheffield Archives, ref. Carpenter MSS /. This letter revealingly remarks
that: “I should like to say a word on the charge of having acted unfairly to J.A.S.
The question was, for me, one of great difficulty; I should like to point out that as far as J.A.S.’s place in the history of the controversy is concerned that is secured
by the German book which contains all he had to say, and more than Mr. Ellis
was prepared to publish in English. . . . J.A.S. had all this matter by him for years, most of it in print; the Problem in Greek Ethics was finished & printed more than ten years before his death and yet he never published it, never even put his name
to the few copies he printed – this proves to me he had at least grave doubts about
publishing – of course in view of his wife and family.”
. Phyllis Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis, A Biography (New York: Knopf, ), pp.
–. Grosskurth, along with Timothy D’Arch Smith, has been emphatic in
condemning Sidgwick’s efforts, albeit in a confused fashion.
. The London specialist was Dr. Allingham.
. I am grateful to Andrew Belsey (who enjoys the distinction of having Sidgwick as
a great great uncle) for making this letter available to me.
. Arthur Sidgwick was quite incensed when he thought that Brown might be fea-
turing his letters in the Symonds biography, and he in fact was not particularly
cooperative in supplying them.
. Quoted in Lubenow, The Cambridge Apostles, –, p. .
. These details are recounted in a letter from Dakyns to his son Henry, dated August
, ; my thanks to Andrew Dakyns for providing me with a copy of it, as part
of our work on the unpublished manuscript Strange Audacious Life.
. See Lubenow, The Cambridge Apostles, –, pp. –.
. Curiously, however, Russell would often go on record as holding that it was important to treat the religious impulse with respect; see, e.g., “A Free Man’s Worship.”
Even in this he was often the disciple of Sidgwick. And to his credit, Sidgwick was
impressed with Russell’s philosophical talents, writing a very enthusiastic letter
of recommendation for him. It is mildly amusing, and suggestive of how little
the younger set knew about Sidgwick, that, at the very time when the latter was
overseeing the Symonds biography, Russell would discuss one of his Apostolic
performances thus: “I was very glad, as it turned out, that they had chosen
Mr. Bennet for me to write on, as [Henry] Sidgwick and two other angels turned
up, and the other subjects were too intimate to read about before an old man like
Sidgwick” ( Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. I, p. ).
. Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University,
Add.Ms.c...
. Myers, Fragments, pp, –.
. Sidgwick, “Prayer,” p. .
. Myers, Fragments, p. .
. Ibid., p. .
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. The report of the wickerware coffin was made directly to me by the Rt. Hon. Guy
Strutt, who as a boy attended Eleanor’s funeral. Apparently it was when Eleanor
was finally laid to rest, in , that the inscription on the monument was changed
to “In Thy Light Shall We See Light.” The cemetary and surrounding area remain
as tranquil and beautiful as in Sidgwick’s day.
. Quoted in Gauld, Founders, p. .
. Though it should be noted that Podmore’s death in may have been a suicide.
See Oppenheim, Other World, p. .
. Ethel Sidgwick, Mrs Henry Sidgwick, pp. –.
. Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University,
Add.Ms.c..
. Myers had joined James at Dr. Baldwin’s clinic in Rome, to be treated with a
“serum, concocted from the testicles and other glands of goats, injections of which
were alleged to relieve atheromatous conditions of the arteries.” He suffered an
inexplicable reaction, marked by Cheyne-Stokes breathing, and seemed, according
to James, to evince an “eagerness to go.” See Gauld, Founders, p. . For a very full, recent account, see Luckhurst
, The Invention of Telepathy, pp. –.
. This letter is from the Houghton Library, Harvard University, “Sidgwick,
Eleanor,” –.
. Broad, Lectures on Psychical Research, pp. –.
. This is included in Presidential Addresses to the Society for Psychical Research –
(Glasgow: Robert Maclehose for the SPR, ), pp. –.
. This is included as an Appendix to Ethel Sidgwick, Mrs Henry Sidgwick,
pp. –.
. E. M. Sidgwick, “The Society for Psychical Research, A Short Account of Its
History and Work on the Occasion of the Society’s Jubilee, ,” Proceedings of
the Society for Psychical Research (–), p. .
. Barrett, Psychical Research, p. .
. Gerald Balfour, “Psychological Aspects of Mrs. Willett’s Mediumship,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (), p. .
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Index
Abbreviations: S = Henry Sidgwick; EMS = Eleanor Sidgwick; for other abbreviations, see pp. xvii–xviii.
aborigines: S, EP on treatment of, –;
and, –; Ad Eundem and, ;
Bryce on,
see also academic liberals; Cambridge
Absolute, the: S on, ; James on Bradley on,
University; higher education for women
–; see also Bradley, F. H.; Hegel/
Academy, the British, S helps to found,
Hegelianism
act/action: and S’s Kantianism, ; ME on
absolute good, see good/goodness
right versus good, –; S and J. S.
academic liberals, ; S becomes one, ;
Mill on utilitarianism and, ; J. S. Mill to
diversity of, ; against donnishness, ;
