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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Peter Taylor in triple vision by John Matthias
2. Representation in millimetres by Alan Wall
3. Gianfranco Rosi’s marginalia by Simon Collings
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause and Dreamt Affections| Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych
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Relating the finite to the infinite.
Leslie Stephen, the Metaphysical Society, and Intellectual Life in Victorian England.
By BRUCE KINZER.
THE METAPHYSICAL SOCIETY lasted from 1869 to 1880. The Cambridge philosopher and economist Henry Sidgwick, elected the year of its founding, summed up its purpose eight years after its end. Bringing together men representing “different schools of thought,” it “sought by frank explanation of their diverse positions and frank statement of mutual objections, to come, if possible, to some residuum of agreement on the great questions that concern man as a rational being.” These questions included “the meaning of human life, the relation of the individual to the universe, of the finite to the infinite, the ultimate ground of duty and essence of virtue.”1Politicians, Anglican prelates (a Catholic one too), lawyers, journalists, men of letters and men of science participated in its discussions. (No thought was given to admitting women. The year that gave rise to the Metaphysical Society also happened to see the publication of J.S. Mill’s Subjection of Women.)
While the Metaphysical Society provided a singular forum for the growing assertiveness of agnosticism within England’s intellectual elite, it also embraced multiple shades of Christian belief: Catholic, High Church, liberal Anglican, and Unitarian. Staunch defenders of religious orthodoxy locked horns with vigorous proponents of scientific naturalism. Some of the Society’s members, however, had no difficulty reconciling religious faith with the achievements of modern science; some took up positions without any direct appeal to, or repudiation of, religious authority. Thomas Henry Huxley said of the Metaphysical Society:
Huxley, like quite a few other members, had fond recollections of his participation in the debates of the Metaphysical Society. Although sharing Huxley’s agnosticism, Leslie Stephen offered a lower estimate of the Society’s worth.
The timing of Stephen’s arrival in the Society influenced his judgment of its merits…structural changes in English intellectual life in the quarter century after 1869 heightened his sense of the Society’s inadequacies.
The timing of his arrival in the Society influenced his judgment of its merits; so too the number of years that elapsed between its founding and the occasion that prompted Stephen’s assessment. Structural changes in English intellectual life in the quarter century after 1869 heightened his sense of the Society’s inadequacies. The professionalization of this life, barely detectable at the end of the 1860s, had gained a telling presence before the close of Victoria’s reign.
This warrior mentality was not part of Leslie’s make-up. Indeed, much about Fitzjames’s cast of mind did not sit well with Leslie. Duty, not inclination, moved him to write the biography. In spring 1894 Leslie told Charles Eliot Norton: “I have now undertaken a task which, in some ways, I dread—namely, to write his life. It is very difficult for me; but having offered to do it, and my offer having been evidently pleasing to my sister-in-law, I must do what I can.”5He wanted his portrait of Fitzjames to be true, which required disclosure of his defects. “I never knew a stronger man than my brother in the directions in which he was strong or a man whose strength had such sharp boundaries.”6 Having written a large portion of the book, Leslie reported to Norton that “it is about the stiffest piece of work I ever undertook.”7 The result of the struggle, pithily summed up by Noel Annan, was a book that betrayed the author’s “lack of sympathy with Fitzjames’s mind”; one that “gives the impression of a man sparring at a distance from his opponent; parrying and feinting skilfully enough but never squaring up to him.”8 Squaring up to the Metaphysical Society proved less troublesome.
NOTE: In The Fortnightly’s online template, illustrations are thumbnails with captions or onward text links embedded. To enlarge an illustration, click on it. To read a caption, hover over the illustration.
STEPHEN ATTENDED NINE meetings between mid-March 1877 and mid-April 1880. By the time he joined the Society, its best days were behind it. Slumping turn-out told of diminished vitality. In its early years, the Society routinely drew fifteen or more members to its meetings. More often than not, attendance dipped below ten at the gatherings Leslie took part in. His initial encounter irked him. On 13 March 1877, he presented to the Society a paper written by his brother. Writing to Norton three days later, Leslie Stephen recounted his “odd experience in controversy.” After he finished the reading, those assembled “had an inarticulate wrangle over things in general, which could not have been more rambling if we had been a party of undergraduates.” Before long, he continues, it “came to a game of random abuse, in which we each said the nastiest thing that occurred to us without the smallest reference to the context. I shall hardly go on attending meetings if this was a fair specimen.”9 Inasmuch as Stephen showed up on eight later occasions, the meeting of 13 March 1877 must not have been “a fair specimen.” He even offered two papers of his own, “Belief and Evidence” (12 June 1877) and “The Uniformity of Nature” (11 March 1879). This means he was more active than most members between the time of his election and the demise of the Society. His treatment of the Metaphysical Society rested on a sturdy foundation of personal experience rooted in a particular phase of the Society’s history. He granted that he “was not a member of the Society in its early, and, as I take it, most flourishing days”; instead he “had the honour of membership at a later period, and formed a certain estimate of the performances.”10
Stephen writes that “four out of five” members of the Society “knew nothing of metaphysics.” Most of what was said at its meetings “was the talk of amateurs…”
Stephen says that “four out of five” members of the Society “knew nothing of metaphysics.” Most of what was said at its meetings “was the talk of amateurs, not of specialists.” Discussions tended to be “very ambiguous” owing to “the very varying stages of education” of the participants, yielding a dearth of shared awareness of how the meaning “of the commonest technical terms” varied “in different periods of philosophy.” The random use of such terms frequently placed discussants “at hopelessly cross-purposes.” Stephen goes so far as to intimate that many of the “so-called discussions” were nothing of the sort. Rather they were “in the main a series of assertions. Each disputant simply translated the admitted facts into his own language.” Lacking any common agreement on first principles, participants evinced fundamentally “different modes of thought, and of diverging conceptions of the world and of life, which had become thoroughly imbedded in the very texture of the speaker’s mind.” The result showed “men each securely intrenched in his own fastness, and, though they might make sallies for a little engagement in the open, each would retreat to a position of impregnable security, which could be assaulted only by long siege operations of secular duration.” For all that, there were yet “many pleasant meetings,” and Stephen concedes that some of the subjects taken up in the Society did not call for special competence in metaphysics. Despite discussions amounting to “little more than a mutual exhibition to each other of the various persons concerned,” Stephen found it possible to “hope and believe that each tended to the conviction that his antagonist had neither horns nor hoofs.”11
The formation of the Metaphysical Society presupposed the existence of this circle of men.
Certain features of mid-Victorian intellectual life also showed a dogged persistence. Sir Keith Thomas was not mistaken (to state the obvious) when he wrote, in the Times Literary Supplement, that in the late nineteenth century the “torch of literary culture, previously carried by the metropolitan man of letters and the serious Victorian periodical, was taken over by the professor and the learned journal.”23 All the same, key facets of the mid-Victorian intellectual scene long outlasted the Metaphysical Society, serious general periodicals and the man of letters among them. Was there a more august man of letters, in the fifteen years after Matthew Arnold’s death in 1888, than Leslie Stephen, critic of the Metaphysical Society’s amateurism?
♦
Bruce Kinzer is Emeritus Professor of History at Kenyon College. His books include: The Ballot Question in Nineteenth-Century English Politics; A Moralist In and Out of Parliament: John Stuart Mill at Westminster, 1865-1868 (co-authored); England’s Disgrace?: J.S. Mill and the Irish Question; and J.S. Mill Revisited: Biographical and Political Explorations. He also edited The Gladstonian Turn of Mind: Essays Presented to J.B. Conacher.
More in The Fortnightly Review: ‘Materializations‘ by James Gallant. From our archive: ‘A Defence of Modern Spiritualism’ by Alfred Russel Wallace, originally published in the Fortnightly in 1874, appears here.
NOTES.
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Publication: Saturday, 9 January 2021, at 00:14.
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