0521834058 cambridge university press the logical foundations of bradleys metaphysics judgment inference and truth nov 2004

It reinforces Chapter1 Subse-by showing that the relation between thought and reality was a centralissue for anyone working within the framework of transcendental logic.Chapters3,4, and5

Judgment, Inference, and Truth

This book is a major contribution to the study of the philosopher

F H Bradley, the most influential member of the nineteenth-centuryschool of British Idealists It offers a sustained interpretation of

Bradley’s Principles of Logic, explaining the problem of how it is

possi-ble for inferences to both be valid and have conclusions that containnew information The author then describes how Bradley’s solutionprovides a basis for his metaphysical view that reality is one intercon-nected experience and how this gives rise to a new problem abouttruth

James W Allard is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Montana StateUniversity

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James Willard Allard, Sr., and in memory of my mother, Mary Irene Dieterich Allard

Despite a recent revival of interest in F H Bradley within a small nity of analytic philosophers, the feeling persists that Bradley’s philosophyand the late-nineteenth-century British Idealism it represents was a weedyexotic – an import from Prussia that stimulated a revolution in philosophy

commu-by G E Moore and Bertrand Russell, but that has since been rooted out,leaving only faint traces of its passage This feeling has been reinforced

by vast differences between the issues engaging philosophers today andthose that engaged nineteenth-century British Idealists, by the currentuse of mathematical logic in philosophy, and by the widely held belief thatconstructive work in philosophy consists in solving problems rather than

in constructing systems Less obviously, but perhaps more significantly, ithas been further reinforced by concentrating on the metaphysics of theBritish Idealists at the expense of their logic Their metaphysics certainlydeserves attention They saw metaphysics as the most significant part ofphilosophy as well as the only all-encompassing one Nevertheless, theyoften found the materials for their metaphysics in logic In fact, theiruse of logic as a basis for metaphysics was a new departure in Britishphilosophy, one that has left a lasting mark

The longest and most influential book on logic written by a British

Idealist is Bradley’s The Principles of Logic It is a difficult book, more cult than Bradley’s better-known Appearance and Reality, because of both

diffi-its greater length and diffi-its poorer organization Bradley provided no nation of its selection of topics, of the order in which he discussed them,

expla-or even of his purpose in writing it As a result, The Principles of Logic has

usually been read selectively as a source for Bradley’s views rather than

as a continuous argument There is justification for doing so The most

ix

important part of the book, roughly its first third, is the most provocativepart, and it does not presuppose the remainder of the book It contains,among other things, Bradley’s rejection of psychologism, a topic connect-ing his philosophy with that of his more analytic contemporaries, as well

as his account of how judgments refer to reality The latter emerges as

a central topic, perhaps the central topic, in Appearance and Reality But the remainder of the book is also important for Appearance and Reality In

fact, it creates the problem about the relation between thought and

real-ity to which Appearance and Realreal-ity is the solution Furthermore, placing

the book in its historical context shows that it is not merely a collection ofessays on related logical topics but a drawn-out, convoluted answer to theKantian question “How is deductive inference possible?” Bradley’s dualaim in the book uses his answer to this question to defend deductive logicagainst the criticisms of John Stuart Mill and to reject the Hegelian viewthat thought is identical to reality In carrying out his aim, Bradley dis-tinguished between the grammatical and logical forms of judgments anddenied what had until then been a truism, that truth is correspondence

with reality These aspects of The Principles of Logic form part of Bradley’s

enduring legacy to analytic philosophy

The eight chapters of this book lay out the main line of Bradley’s

ar-gument in The Principles of Logic and connect it with the forms of idealism

that preceded it and with the pragmatism and analytic philosophy that lowed it The first two chapters sketch the historical context in which thebook was written This context determines Bradley’s concerns Chapter 1explains how British Idealism provided a response to the Victorian crisis

fol-of faith produced by the conflict between evangelical Christianity and thetwin disciplines of evolutionary biology and the scholarly study of Scrip-ture It sketches the way British philosophers from J H Stirling to T H.Green introduced and developed ideas they found in German philoso-phy, particularly the ideas of Kant and Hegel, as a way of resolving theconflict The most important of these philosophers, T H Green, arguedthat nature is constituted by relations By claiming that relations exist onlyfor a knowing consciousness, he concluded that reality exists only for such

a consciousness Green thought this knowing consciousness was a sal self-consciousness in which individual human knowers participate Byidentifying this universal self-consciousness with God, he concluded thatGod’s existence is a necessary presupposition of human knowledge and sonot something that can be threatened by any form of knowledge, whetherscientific or scholarly Green, in other words, met the crisis of his age byidentifying God’s thought with reality, an identification anticipated by

univer-Hegel But while this identification resolved the crisis, late in his careerGreen began to question it One mark of this questioning was his interest

in translating the works of Hermann Lotze, a German idealist who nied that thought is identical to reality Prevented by his early death fromalleviating his doubts, Green left the problem for his successors Becausefor them logic was the study of thought, resolving it demanded a study oflogic, a study that Bradley was the first British Idealist to provide.Chapter 2 sketches the three principal developments in logic thatformed the context for Bradley’s book These were innovations in formallogic, the elaboration of logic as the theory of scientific method, and thedevelopment of transcendental logic The third was of particular impor-tance for Bradley By modeling the functions of the knowing mind on thedifferent forms of judgments recognized in Aristotelian logic, Kant cre-ated a new form of logic, transcendental logic For Kant, transcendentallogic was concerned with the logical categories inherent in the mind bymeans of which thought constructs objects of knowledge from sensorymaterials and with the forms of inference by means of which thought or-ganizes the systematic interrelationships between the judgments consti-tuting knowledge As Kant conceived it, thought imposes these categories

de-on reality as it is known but not as it is in itself In this limited respect,

as a constituent of knowable reality, thought for Kant is reality quent philosophers, principally Hegel, rejected Kant’s identification ofthe categories of thought with reality as it is known and identified it in-stead with reality as it is in itself Transcendental logic thus provided twoincompatible ways of understanding the relation between thought and re-ality Chapter2discusses the disagreement over this issue among Germanphilosophers, including Hermann Lotze and Christoph Sigwart, philoso-phers to whom Bradley expresses indebtedness It reinforces Chapter1

Subse-by showing that the relation between thought and reality was a centralissue for anyone working within the framework of transcendental logic.Chapters3,4, and5are concerned with Bradley’s analysis of the truth-conditions of judgments: Chapter3covers Bradley’s definition of judg-ment “Judgment proper is the mental act which refers an ideal content

to a reality (recognized as such) beyond the act” (PL 10) There are twoimportant elements in this definition First, Bradley treats ideas as mean-ings that have been abstracted from the presentational continuum given

to the senses Abstracting for Bradley always removes qualities As stract, meanings are always general or, as Bradley prefers to say, universal.Second, Bradley insists that judgments contain a reference to reality as it

ab-is given in immediate experience and that thab-is reference ab-is independent

of the ideas in the judgment The ideas in a judgment, in other words,

do not enable the judgment to refer to reality An additional element isrequired, and this is analogous to a demonstrative reference to reality.Chapter 4 covers Bradley’s analyses of categorical and conditionaljudgments with its consequent commitment to holism The results ofthese analyses are summarized by the following simple argument:All conditional judgments are abbreviated inferences

All judgments are conditionals

Therefore, all judgments are abbreviated inferences

Bradley supports the first premise by taking counterfactual als as his model for conditional judgments Counterfactual judgments,

condition-he claims, are thought experiments Tcondition-hey suppose tcondition-he truth of tcondition-he tecedent and they assert that when it is conjoined with the relevant laws

an-of nature combined with a description an-of the circumstances in which theexperiment is imagined to take place, it entails the consequent Condi-tional judgments are thus true if and only if the inference they abbreviate

is sound Bradley then argues that all judgments are conditionals Thisconclusion rests on his analysis of judgments that are grammatically cate-gorical This analysis is relatively straightforward for universal categoricaljudgments but quite intricate for singular categorical judgments Fromthis analysis Bradley concludes that all judgments are conditional Whentaken with his premise that all conditional judgments are abbreviatedinferences, this analysis entails his conclusion that all judgments areabbreviated inferences This conclusion, in turn, is also a statement ofhis holism For if all judgments are abbreviated inferences, then evaluat-ing a judgment involves determining the soundness of the inference itrepresents But this requires determining the truth of the premises of thatinference But because they too are condensed inferences, this requiresdetermining their truth and so on Judgments for Bradley thus becometrue of reality only in the context of other judgments

Although Bradley repeatedly claims that all judgments are als, his argument for this rests on his treatment of categorical judgments

condition-He provides quite different treatments of the other forms of judgments heconsiders Negative judgments, disjunctive judgments, modal judgments,and judgments of probability, he claims, are also abbreviated inferences,but he reaches this conclusion by separately analyzing these forms ofjudgment Chapter5covers these analyses Of particular importance arethe interrelated analyses of negative and disjunctive judgments Nega-tive judgments, Bradley claims, presuppose a positive basis That is, if the

negative judgment “A is not b” is true, then it is because the affirmative judgment “A is c” is true where A’s being c is incompatible with its being

b In other words, A is b or c ; because it is c, it is not b In this way negative

judgments are implicitly inferences with disjunctive premises tive judgments likewise involve inferences Their disjuncts are mutuallyexclusive, and exclusiveness is to be understood by means of conditional

Disjunc-judgments For example, if “A is b or c” is true, then if A is b it is not c

and conversely Because conditionals are abbreviated inferences, it lows that disjunctive judgments are as well When taken with Chapter4,Bradley’s analyses of these other forms of judgments support his conclu-sion that all judgments are abbreviated inferences the premises of whichcontain conditional judgments Or to put it his way, they are components

fol-of a system fol-of judgments It is the system rather than the individual ment that is true or false of reality This analysis of the truth-conditions

judg-of judgments is the basis for Bradley’s treatment judg-of inference

Chapter6explains the problem that Bradley’s theory is meant to solve,

a problem he describes as “the essential puzzle of inference.” It was ularized by John Stuart Mill, who claimed that all arguments can be re-duced to syllogisms and that valid syllogisms are circular Consider hisexample of a “syllogism”:

pop-All humans are mortal

Socrates is human

Therefore, Socrates is mortal

Mill argued that the general proposition “All humans are mortal” is a junction of singular propositions about all individual humans If Socrates

con-is human, then one of these singular propositions con-is “Socrates con-is mortal.”But if this is true, then the conclusion of the argument is already asserted

in the first premise, in which case the argument is circular After cussing Mill’s version of this problem and his solution, that syllogisms areuseful only as a way of registering the conclusions of ampliative, nonde-ductive inferences, I consider two Idealistic versions of the problem – one

dis-by Hegel, the other dis-by Bradley’s contemporary and fellow British IdealistBernard Bosanquet Both Hegel and Bosanquet defend deductive logic,but in quite different ways Hegel argues that deductive inferences can

be legitimate even though their conclusions contain information not serted in their premises Bosanquet, by contrast, claims that inferencesneed not be circular even though they appear to be when analyzed assyllogisms

as-Chapter 7 covers Bradley’s solution to this problem and his quent rejection of the identity between thought and reality His solutionrests on his theory of inference, a specification of the principles thatenable inferences to be both legitimate and informative Bradley treatsinferences as thought experiments that synthesize their premises andthen derive a conclusion from this synthesis by analysis Analysis and syn-thesis thus become two of his principles of inference Bradley calls histhird principle “The Axiom of Identity”; it is presupposed by analysis andsynthesis because it justifies treating terms in different judgments as se-mantically equivalent These principles, taken with Bradley’s claim thatall judgments are abbreviated inferences, allow him to offer his own so-lution to the problem of inference He maintains that the conclusions

conse-of inferences can be both legitimate and informative because judgmentsalways abbreviate inferences having conditional premises Their conclu-sions can be legitimate and informative because they assert informationthat is present in their premises only in conditional, unasserted form Onthis basis Bradley addresses the problem of the relation between thoughtand reality He argues that in order for thought to be identical to real-ity, systems of judgments, including the inferential relations contained inthem, must be identical to reality But because these relations are idealrather than real, he concludes that thought is not identical to reality andthat because even valid inferences do not correspond with reality, truthmust not be understood as correspondence Bradley’s conclusion thuschallenges what had until then been regarded as a truism, that truth is

by nature correspondence with reality

Chapter8describes how the argument of The Principles of Logic shaped

the development of Bradley’s later work as well as his confrontations withthe pragmatists and with Bertrand Russell Denying that thought is identi-cal with reality left Bradley the problem of clarifying the relation between

thought and reality, and this is the main problem in Appearance and Reality.

Thought, he argued there, contains a criterion of success that it is unable

to satisfy To the extent that it does not satisfy it, thought is not identicalwith reality But were it able to satisfy its own criterion, then it would beidentical to reality The criterion of success that Bradley proposes func-tions as a criterion of truth, and this allows Bradley simultaneously toinsist that no thought is completely true, yet all thoughts contain a de-gree of truth Bradley’s admission that thought is unable to satisfy itsown criterion exposed him to criticisms from pragmatists, who asked whythought should assume a preeminent position in philosophy, given itsadmitted failings Bradley responded to these criticisms by setting forth

his account of the relation between thought and reality as a theory oftruth This, in turn, brought him into conflict with Bertrand Russell, whoforcefully criticized what he called “the monistic theory of truth.” Thesecriticisms, by the pragmatists and by Russell, together with Bradley’s in-sistence on a robust alternative to the correspondence theory of truthgenerated a debate about the nature of truth and thereby created a newproblem of philosophy, the problem of the nature of truth By developinghis metaphysics from his theory of judgment, Bradley showed that logic,with its accompanying concepts of truth and reference, provides a basisfor metaphysics.

AcknowledgmentsThis book has been a long time in gestation I first seriously studiedBradley as a graduate student at Princeton in Richard Rorty’s semi-nar “Idealism from Bradley to Quine.” I greatly appreciate the support,friendly criticism, and advice he gave me while I was writing my disserta-tion and all that I have learned from him since The year after complet-ing my doctorate I was fortunate to be able to attend the late MauriceMandelbaum’s National Endowment of the Humanities summer seminar

“Philosophy and the Social Sciences” at Johns Hopkins University Thisgave me the opportunity to explore broad themes in nineteenth-centuryphilosophy with a discriminating and amazingly knowledgeable guide

I wrote the first draft of this manuscript during a sabbatical leave as

a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign I

am grateful to Montana State University for the leave and to the facultyand graduate students in the Department of Philosophy at the Univer-sity of Illinois for taking me in and allowing me to have the advantages

of being a member of the department, while not insisting that I attenddepartmental meetings Particularly helpful were Marcia Baron, HughChandler, Timothy McCarthy, Kevin O’Neill, Richard Schacht, FrederickSchmitt, Timothy Tessin, Robert Wengert, and the late Peter Winch Iwould also like to thank Walter Arnstein from the Department of His-tory at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign for his help andencouragement

During the long revising process that followed, I was helped surably by contacts and conversations with my fellow members of TheBradley Society, a community of philosophers interested in British Ideal-ism Although I have not referred to the work of the members of the soci-ety as often as I perhaps should have, I have learned an immense amount

immea-from them I would particularly like to thank Leslie Armour, W J Mander,and Don MacNiven for their encouragement, criticism, and help I wouldalso like to thank Stewart Candlish not only for what I have learned fromhis work but also for reading and giving me helpful comments on anearly draft of what is now Chapter8 I owe special debts to Guy Stock and

Timothy Sprigge In the course of editing F H Bradley: Writings on Logic and Metaphysics, Guy read all of my many drafts of introductions, carefully

explained things I did not understand, corrected my all-too-frequent takes, and was extremely patient throughout our collaboration Timothynot only taught me a great deal through his articles and books, partic-

mis-ularly The Vindication of Absolute Idealism and Bradley and James: American Truth and British Reality, but he also read my entire manuscript, offered

constructive criticism, and explained to me the importance of the riential element in Bradley’s definition of judgment In addition, I wouldlike to thank three anonymous reviewers for Cambridge University Press.Their thoughtful and constructive comments made this book a muchbetter one than it would otherwise have been

expe-Two books on Bradley’s logic that I have only occasionally mentioned

have been important in my thinking The first, Bradley and the Structure of Knowledge, was written by Phillip Ferreira, a friend and fellow member of

The Bradley Society whom I would like to thank not only for what I havelearned from his work but also for a number of constructive discussions.His book covers Bradley’s theory of judgment and uses it as a basis forunderstanding Bradley’s coherence theories of truth and knowledge andhis use of immediate experience as a criterion of reality In part because

of Phillip’s good work on these latter topics, I have mostly shied away

from them and focused on inference instead The second book, Bradley’s Logic, was written by Anthony Manser, a philosopher I never had the

privilege of meeting His book showed me that the revolution in phy that made problems of meaning central to the discipline began withBradley rather than with G E Moore or Bertrand Russell This in turn

philoso-persuaded me that reconstructing the main argument of The Principles of Logic, something Bradley’s Logic does not attempt, was worthwhile.

I have had the good fortune of spending my professional career inthe Department of History and Philosophy at Montana State University

in the heart of the northern Rocky Mountains Montana State has ported my work with a sabbatical leave that enabled me to write my firstdraft, a College of Letters and Science Research and Creativity Awardthat allowed me extra research time in the fall of 1998, and a Scholarshipand Creativity Award that provided me with a reduced teaching load in

sup-the spring of 2003 Numerous students who have raised questions, posedobjections, and remained skeptical of my arguments have stimulated mythinking more than I can say Several librarians at Montana State Univer-sity have been particularly helpful over the years I would especially like

to thank Audrey Jean Haight for her willingness to improve the phy collection and Kay Carey for providing me with so many interlibraryloan materials My past and present department heads, Edward Barry,Thomas Wessel, and Robert Rydell, have supported my work in a number

philoso-of ways, and this has made it possible for me to participate in the ties of The Bradley Society I have also benefited greatly from conversa-tions with colleagues I have discussed my work repeatedly with PrasantaBandyopadhyay, Vrinda Dalmiya, Jack Gilchrist, Peimin Ni, and QingjieWang All were attentive listeners and readers, and they all gave me valu-able comments Arindam Chakrabarti made acute comments on an ear-lier draft of Chapter8that greatly improved it and pointed out to me howmuch more difficult the doctrine of degrees of truth was than I had orig-inally thought I owe great debts to my longtime colleagues Marvin Shaw,Sanford Levy, and Gordon Brittan Marvin gave me the benefit of his wideknowledge and offered constructive advice about numerous difficulties.Sanford repeatedly read drafts of my chapters, gave me frequent and de-tailed criticism, and offered valuable suggestions about how I might solveparticular problems or explain issues that I did not understand Gordongave me good advice from the very beginning of this project He not onlyread drafts of my chapters while I was writing them, but he also read theentire manuscript, gave suggestions about how I might improve it, andhelped me to shape the chapters into a book Without the help of all of

activi-my colleagues in The Bradley Society and at Montana State University,this would probably not be a book, and if it were, it would be of muchlower quality It would no doubt be a better book if I had taken moreadvice, and for the remaining mistakes I am alone responsible

I owe special debts to my copy editor, Eric Newman, for his help in pleting the manuscript; to James Connelly for locating material for me;

com-to Nicholas Griffin for explaining com-to me why Russell’s view of Joachim’sinaugural lecture is so scathing; to Christopher Childs for writing a macrofor me; and to Margaret Hausser for sharing with me homemade pastries,good coffee, intelligent conversation, and her excellent library I also owe

a great debt to my old friend Walt Sylva who, as we walked the Montanahills together, never ever let me forget that I was writing a book

Several chapters in this book contain reworked versions of some of

my earlier papers I am grateful for permission to reprint portions of the

following articles: “Bradley’s Argument against Correspondence,” istic Studies 1980 (included in Chapter3); “Bradley’s Intensional Judg-

Ideal-ments,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 1985 (also included in Chapter3);

“Degrees of Truth in F H Bradley,” in W J Mander, ed., Perspectives on the Logic and Metaphysics of F H Bradley, Thoemmes Press,1996(included inChapter8); “The Essential Puzzle of Inference,” Bradley Studies 1998 (in-

cluded in Chapter7); my review of Refinement and Revision, 1903–1924 The Collected Works of F H Bradley, Vol 3, Carol Keene, ed., Bradley Studies

2001 (included in Chapter8); and “Bradley’s Chain Argument,” in W J

Mander, ed., Anglo-American Idealism, 1865–1927, Greenwood Press,2000

(included in Chapter3) I am also grateful to Oxford University Press for

allowing me to reprint “Bradley’s Principle of Sufficient Reason,” in The Philosophy of F H Bradley, Manser, A and Stock, G ed., Oxford Univer-

sity Press,1984, by permission of Oxford University Press (included inChapter4)

My family has been a great help to me during the entire process Mydaughter, Dori Allard, identified the sources of quotations for me, helped

me with software, and gracefully permitted a father’s absence of mind Mywife, Mary Bushing, former collection development librarian at MontanaState University, now professor emeritus and a library consultant, helped

me acquire obscure books, instructed me about library reference sources,showed me how to mend dilapidated philosophy books, introduced me

to new pleasures of food and travel, and made me see how very good lifecan be Without her good will, I never could have finished this book

AR Appearance and Reality [1897]1930 2d ed., ninth impression

corrected Oxford: Clarendon Press

CE Collected Essays.1935 Oxford: Clarendon Press

CW1 Collected Works of F H Bradley.1999 Vol 1 Ed Carol A Keene

ES Ethical Studies.1927 2d ed Oxford: Clarendon Press

ETR Essays on Truth and Reality.1914 Oxford: Clarendon Press

PL The Principles of Logic [1922]1928 2d ed., corrected

impression Oxford: Clarendon Press

xix

Faith, Idealism, and Logic

Lord Macaulay, man of letters, member of Parliament, the only historianever raised to the peerage on the strength of his work, recorded in his

diary in 1852 his first and only attempt to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

I received today a translation of Kant. I tried to read it, but found it utterly

unintelligible, just as if it had been written in Sanscrit Not one word of it gave meanything like an idea except a Latin quotation from Persius It seems to me that

it ought to be possible to explain a true theory of metaphysics in words that I canunderstand I can understand Locke, and Berkeley, and Hume, and Reid, andStewart I can understand Cicero’s Academics, and most of Plato; and it seemsodd that in a book on the elements of metaphysics I should not be able to

comprehend a word (Blanshard1954, 1, quoting Trevelyan1923, 515)

Despite this reaction from one of Britain’s leading intellectuals, in five years the philosophy of Kant and, more amazing still, Hegel had pro-gressed from being unintelligible to providing much of the metaphysicalbackbone of the dominant philosophy It supplanted both empiricismand the Scottish philosophy of common sense, while claiming possession

twenty-of articulate bands twenty-of followers at Glasgow and Oxford This change inthe philosophical climate was certainly not the result of the attractive style

in which German philosophy was written It was not the result of the factthat in the 1840s many Balliol men began to converse and correspond(among themselves, of course) in German, although this speeded theprocess (Faber1957, 179) Despite the common concerns of British ro-mantic poets and German philosophers, it was not the activities of poetsthat domesticated the alien philosophy, although some of them, partic-ularly Wordsworth and Coleridge, provided essential aid (A C Bradley

1

1969) More than anything else it was a result of the fact that Germanphilosophy provided a contribution to the leading intellectual concern

of thinking inhabitants of Britain: evangelical Christianity In this ter I explain how Idealism provided a defense of the faith and how theneed for such a defense was the force behind the rise of British Ideal-ism To do this I will begin by briefly describing the Victorian crisis offaith I will then explain the stages by which German idealism, particu-larly in its Hegelian form, developed in Britain as a response to it: howthe elements for this defense were introduced by James Hutchinson Stir-ling, elaborated by William Wallace and Edward and John Caird, andsystematized by T H Green I will conclude by explaining how internalproblems in the Hegelian defense of religion engendered the need for anidealistic examination of the principles of logic, a need that F H Bradleyattempted to satisfy

chap-INineteenth-century Britain was the scene of an evangelical revival Itbegan much earlier, in 1739, with the preaching of John Wesley andGeorge Whitefield, and by the mid-Victorian years it had affected thewhole of Victorian society Its physical presence in the form of sermonsand religious pamphlets, the most common Victorian publications, wasenormous By the time of his death in 1892, the most popular Victorianpreacher, Charles Spurgeon, had sold 50,000,000 copies of his sermons

A young Victorian from a good family might hear as many as 1,000 mons before reaching majority (Young1960, 14) Those less exposed tosermons would still encounter Christianity as a central concern in almostevery serious piece of Victorian literary culture Its effects extended fromthe printed word to language itself Biblical categories were commonlyused to categorize people; prostitutes, for example, were Magdalenes

ser-It was politically important as well Evangelical propaganda led to thesuppression of duels and blood sports, evangelical drives to protect chil-dren in factories enjoyed some success, evangelicals played an importantrole in prison reform, and in their most impressive accomplishment by

1807 they had succeeded in abolishing the slave trade (Hal´evy 1961,453–7) They played a dominant role in education: 55 percent of chil-dren between 5 and 15 were enrolled in church-run Sunday schools Everymajor figure in British political life from 1830 to 1870 with the exception

of Palmerston was touched by evangelicalism (Ensor1936, 137) It haseven been claimed that evangelicalism was responsible for the stability

of the institutions of British society in a revolutionary century (Hal´evy

1961, 387) As R C K Ensor has said, “No one will ever understandVictorian England who does not appreciate that among highly civilized,

in contradistinction to more primitive, countries, it was one of the mostreligious that the world has ever known” (Ensor1936, 137).1The intel-lectual, moral, and political cultures of Victorian Britain were based onevangelical Christian foundations

Yet its success created problems There were two essential elements

in evangelicalism First, evangelicalism was marked by its concern withindividuals, not only in this life but in the next Earthly life was impor-tant only as a preparation for eternity, when individuals would be judgedfor their actions during their earthly lives and punished or rewarded ac-cordingly Even more important was a second belief which grounded thefirst, that the Bible was literally true This included belief in a transcen-dent God who created the world in time (Webb1933, 9) Yet despite thecentrality of these beliefs in Victorian life, by the mid-Victorian years thesecond belief was being seriously challenged by the natural sciences and

by scholarly studies of Scripture

The challenge came initially from geology and then from biology Asgeology established itself as a science in the early nineteenth century, it be-came apparent that geological processes operated on a larger time scalethan allowed for by the number of generations, as recorded in Scripture,since the creation The age and variety of fossils presented additionalproblems If God had created the animals for Adam and his children tohave dominion over and preserved them with the aid of Noah, why werethere fossils of extinct species? The active involvement of gentleman sci-entists, including a large number of clergy, in geology exacerbated theconflict Numerous attempts were made in early Victorian Britain to rec-oncile the Biblical account of creation and Noah’s flood with the presence

of fossils, but none of these attempts met general acceptance.2As Ruskinremarked, “If only the geologists would let me alone, I could do quitewell, but those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end ofevery cadence of the Bible verses” (Himmelfarb1968, 239) The conflictbecame more extreme when Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evo-lution This theory not only eliminated the need for divine creation, but

it also suggested that the moral of the Garden of Eden story, that human

beings have fallen, is incorrect From an evolutionary perspective, human beings have risen from lower animals (Webb1933, 76–7)

Likewise, the scholarly study of Scripture challenged the evangelicalbelief in the literal truth of the Bible This attack, too, was a result of the

success of the natural sciences Because of the outstanding achievements

of natural philosophy, efforts were made to define scientific method andapply it to the moral sciences as well The most familiar of these attempts

is embodied in John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic (Webb1933, 63–4).Yet as textual principles were applied to Scripture it became apparentthat the Biblical narratives could not be construed to be the divinely dic-tated stories that evangelicals claimed they were Thoughtful Victorianswere thus caught in a conflict between their religious beliefs and theirintellectual commitments They were unwilling to abandon evangelicalChristianity, but the intellectual basis for it was rapidly eroding

Victorian literature provides a record of this conflict, not only betweendifferent individuals but even within the same individual A well-knownstatement of it was given by the extremely popular poet laureate Alfred,

Lord Tennyson, in In Memoriam Published in 1850, before the

publi-cation of The Origin of Species, the poem testifies to the tension already

present before the Darwinian controversy The occasion for the poemwas the death of the poet’s friend Arthur Hallam Taken as a whole thepoem provides a record of Tennyson’s attempt to reconcile himself withHallam’s death Because part of Tennyson’s difficulty in reaching such areconciliation lay in his skepticism about immortality, the religious doubtmost strongly expressed in the poem is doubt about personal immortality.Yet Tennyson’s doubt is not confined to immortality The climax of despair

in the poem occurs in Sections 55 and 56 when Tennyson extends thisdoubt to all spiritual values Here he represents nature as caring nothingfor either individuals or whole species and so crying out against humanmoral and religious values and burying them along with humanity In hiswords

. And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,

Such splendid purpose in his eyes,Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation’s final law –Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and clawWith ravine, shriek’d against his creed –

Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,

Who battled for the True, the Just,

Be blown about the desert dust,

Or seal’d within the iron hills? (1906, sec 56)

Tennyson’s question is whether a loving God controls the world orwhether the world is subject to random violence that will eventually wipeout the only being who ever believed in a loving God The implication

of such an event would be that human values are merely human and notbuilt into the structure of the world by an omnipotent but loving Creator

As the poem continues, Tennyson gradually becomes reconciled to thedeath of his friend and, as a consequence, is able to resolve his doubts.3

He does not, however, find this resolution easily Part of the power of In Memoriam is that it so successfully blends Tennyson’s honest doubt with his

deep desire for belief The belief he finally is able to salvage is a tenuousthing – belief without proof, much evidence, or even strong convictionsupporting it It is the personal answer of a poet, but it did not prove to

be an intellectually satisfying answer for many thinking Victorians.Other Victorian writers, like Matthew Arnold and A H Clough, wereconscious of the same conflict, but unable to reach even this tentativesolution This lack of a firm resolution of the conflict in literature wasadmitted by the writers and stressed by the philosophers Many thinkingVictorians did not find a personal solution like Tennyson’s intellectuallycomforting They could admit that there is much good philosophy in po-

ems like In Memoriam while recognizing that the personal view expressed

by the poet is not a reasoned solution to the problem Someone who held

it as a poetic truth might still believe it to be false from a scientific point Many regarded this as an undesirable state of affairs and looked

stand-to philosophy stand-to reconcile these beliefs in a rational way (e.g., Green

1906, 1–4)

Yet the two dominant philosophies of mid-Victorian Britain seemedunable to do this At the end of his life John Stuart Mill did bring theresources of the empiricist tradition to bear on religious problems, but in

a way that disconcerted rather than consoled Mill’s reluctant admissionthat supernatural religion had some utility and that there is some evi-dence for the existence of a limited, finite God failed to ease the distress

of his more religious contemporaries (1969, 419–20, 482) Furthermore,

in his last major work, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy,

Mill succeeded for all practical purposes in destroying the reputation ofthe last original member of the Scottish school of common sense Tak-ing its origin from Thomas Reid, this school claimed to defend commonsense and religion against Hume’s skepticism It was the other consid-erable philosophy in mid-Victorian Britain By attacking Hamilton soeffectively, Mill showed that the Scottish school was unable to reconcilereligious belief with scientific theory

The inability of these philosophies to deal with the Victorian problemwas not just the result of the fact that their arguments were unacceptable.Even more telling was the fact that neither school seemed to be able toaddress the issues effectively Mill had nothing substantial but doubts toadd to the views of William Paley, views that Darwin undermined, whilethe Scottish defense of religion seemed to reduce itself to nothing morethan simple agnosticism As a contemporary writer put matters, with

the recent crowding in of new scientific conceptions Neither system seems

to present its leading principle bent as one would like to see it into the curves andjunctures of the most anxious thought of our time (Masson1877, 137; quoted

in James Bradley1979, 16)

The stage was thus set for the arrival of a new form of philosophy Victorian culture faced a serious question which its members were able toformulate effectively but unable to answer in a principled, rational way

Mid-A new philosophy seemed necessary to provide the answer

IIThe stirrings of a new philosophy had been felt for some time In sepa-rate ways Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle voiced importantthemes found in German idealism Neither, however, developed them

in the systematic way that some thinking Britons felt was needed to dealwith the current crisis At the same time, two British philosophers, JohnGrote and J F Ferrier, began to develop their own versions of idealism.Unfortunately, John Grote, who had the disadvantage of being eclipsed

by his older utilitarian brother George, died before he was able to fectively systematize his views, and Ferrier’s works, although systematic,never captured public attention The first idealistic work to do so was

ef-James Hutchinson Stirling’s dark, uneven Carlylean tome, The Secret of Hegel.4This book introduced German philosophy as the answer to theBritish crisis of faith and contained, in a very rough form, the strategy fordefending the faith that subsequent British idealists would develop.While visiting Germany in 1857, Stirling, a Glasgow physician, saw thename “Hegel” and “was very peculiarly impressed by it” (1898, xviii) Afterlearning that Hegel was by repute the deepest and the darkest philoso-pher, the one who had reconciled philosophy to Christianity, Stirling setout to master his system The result, published eight years later, was atwo-volume, 1,000-page opus of irregular contents After opening with

a preface defending the value of German philosophy, it continues with a

series of long notes, originally not intended for publication, that icle Stirling’s thoughts as he began to understand Hegel This section,amounting to almost one-third of the book, is aptly titled “The Struggle toHegel.” It includes discussions of Kant, Coleridge, Fichte, Schelling, andPlato, along with explanations of some parts of Hegel This is followed by

chron-a trchron-anslchron-ation of the first section of The Science of Logic, “Quchron-ality,” to which

is appended a commentary Thenext sectionis a partial translation

in-terspersed with commentary of the second section of The Science of Logic,

“Quantity.” The volume is rounded out by a discussion of some of Hegel’scommentators and an application of Hegel’s views to what Stirling saw asthe problems of his day.5

The Secret of Hegel was by no means a bestseller, but for such a weighty

book it sold remarkably well There were many favorable reviews, andStirling received letters filled with praise from writers as diverse as J E.Erdmann, Thomas Carlyle, T H Green, and Ralph Waldo Emerson(Muirhead 1931, 170–1) More than anyone else, Stirling introducedHegel to a British audience and made his views intellectually respectable,even if not fully understood He also provided an important service byfinding English equivalents for some of Hegel’s German terminology.Most important of all, he succeeded in showing in a preliminary way howHegel couldsoothe mid-Victoriananxieties( James Bradley1979, 17–20).Four elements in Stirling’s approach to Hegel were particularly impor-tant for the early British idealists First, Stirling situated Hegel’s thought

in the series of systems of philosophy that, in Stirling’s view, constitute thehistory of philosophy Unlike many philosophers in this century who haveseen the history of philosophy as a series of attempts, often misguided, tosolve the perennial problems of philosophy, Stirling saw it as an orderedsequence of philosophical systems This order exhibited the progress ofreason, because each new system added essential elements for the ratio-nal understanding of reality.6This sequence reached its climax in Hegel,who showed that reality was completely a manifestation of reason Stirlingthought Hegel was the greatest thinker of the modern world and closedmodern thought just as Aristotle closed ancient thought (1898, 78) Hethus approached Hegel as a systematic philosopher whose thought should

be evaluated by comparing it with other systems of thought

Second, Stirling approached Hegel through Kant This allowedStirling to attribute Kant’s project of reconciling science and religion toHegel Like a good Scottish nationalist, Stirling claimed that just as Humeinspired Kant, so Kant inspired Hegel (1898, 185) But while Humeawoke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers and so changed the direction of

philosophy, Hegel merely completed what Kant had initiated As Stirlingput it, the secret of Kant is the secret of Hegel (1898, 98) Kant’s se-cret, his Copernican revolution, consisted in his claim that the familiarobjects of the everyday world are partially constituted by the experienc-ing subject In Stirling’s view, this meant that sensations, contributed by

a source external to finite minds, the thing-in-itself, are converted intoobjects by a priori subjective machinery in finite minds This machin-ery includes the forms of space and time and the categories that arefunctions of the transcendental unity of apperception Because these cat-egories are functions that enable finite minds to form judgments, they arerational, logical categories Consequently, the world as finite minds know

it, the world constructed by subjectivity from sensation, is shot throughwith rationality This is made possible by the fact that it is a purely phe-nomenal world It depends for its existence on the rational activity of asubject working with materials contributed by the unknown thing-in-itself(1898, 156–8)

As Stirling saw it, Kant succeeded in showing that the phenomenalworld is rational, but he failed to show that this is the only world there is –

he failed to eliminate the in-itself By failing to include the in-itself, Kant’s Copernican revolution was incomplete Stirling thoughtthat it was completed by Hegel, who eliminated the thing-in-itself and thusshowed that reality was completely in accordance with reason Instead ofbeing the product of sensations from an unknown source, Hegel showed,objects were categories materialized and externalized by the divine mind

thing-in which fthing-inite human mthing-inds participate (1898, 84–5)

The third element in Stirling’s approach that was appropriated by theearly British idealists was Stirling’s belief that the work in which Hegel

succeeded in eliminating the thing-in-itself was not the Phenomenology of Spirit but The Science of Logic It did this, Stirling thought, by providing a

proper deduction of the categories Rather than merely following Kant’slead and organizing the categories by means of an external principle,which in Kant’s case was supposedly a list of the kinds of judgments rec-ognized by formal logicians, Hegel showed that the categories defined theinterconnected, unfolding nature of thought and reality (1898, 335–8)

Hegel’s Logics thus became the vehicle by means of which Hegel entered

Britain

The last and most important element in Stirling’s approach to Hegelwas his use of Hegel as a Christian apologist Stirling differed from lateridealists, however, by remaining relatively orthodox In the “Preliminary

Notice” to The Secret of Hegel he announced that “Kant and Hegel have

no object but to restore Faith – Faith in God – Faith in the immortality ofthe Soul and the Freedom of the Will – nay, Faith in Christianity as theRevealed Religion – and that, too, in perfect harmony with the Right ofPrivate Judgment, and the Rights, or Lights, or Mights of Intelligence ingeneral” (1898, xxii) Stirling thought Hegel’s Logic shows – this is the

secret of Hegel – that the world is a materialization of rational thought.But, as Stirling reminds his readers, this is not the thought of a finitespirit but of “God as he is in his ‘eternal essence before the creation ofthe world and any finite spirit’” (1898, 85).7In proving that the world is

an externalization of thought, Hegel is thus proving, at least in Stirling’sview, the existence of God Because reality is God’s thought, no scientificinvestigation, if properly conducted, can cast doubt on God’s existence.Even though the strategy behind Stirling’s use of Hegel is clear, more

is required to show that Hegel’s argument vindicates Christianity At thevery least, some account is needed of why the thought with which Hegel isconcerned is the thought of God Surprisingly, Stirling provided no such

account In fact, The Secret of Hegel lacks any detailed discussion of Hegel’s

philosophy of religion Instead, Stirling identifies Hegel with Christianity

in two other ways First, he quotes a large number of passages from Hegelthat testify to Hegel’s sympathy with revealed Christian doctrines and tothe “depth and fervency” of his religious feelings Second, he makes alarge number of extravagant, unsupported claims about the religious im-plications of Hegel’s views It comes as no surprise that Stirling thinksthat Hegel has shown Christianity to be the one and only revealed reli-gion It is more surprising to find him saying that with Kant’s help Hegelvindicated the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and theexistence of God And it is quite astonishing that he took Hegel’s claimthat Spirit is embodied in finite particulars to show that the soul is neces-sarily immortal and that for Hegel God is a personal God (Stirling1898,717–21) Stirling did not defend these claims He only assured his readersthat Hegel had shown them to be true

This allowed Stirling to use Hegel uncritically to combat the two mainscholarly disciplines that were undermining the faith of his contempo-raries He was more successful in defusing the force of the scholarly study

of Scripture He criticized it for grubbing in historical fact and, ing Hegel, argued that the essence of Christianity is not to be found inits external, historical details but in its spiritual core Like other matters

follow-of fact, historical facts are, he said, contingent and not essential to thefaith It is the spiritual core of the faith that matters, not its accidental,historical manifestations (1898, 728–9)

He was less successful in dealing with the other major challenge toChristianity – Darwinism Because Darwin and Hegel are both concernedwith development, Stirling might have attempted to show that they arecompatible Instead, he took the unpromising line that Darwinism com-

mitted philosophical mistakes The major “mistake” identified in The Secret of Hegel concerns the transformation of species Stirling followed

a passage in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (Hegel1970, 20, sec 249) byclaiming that nature is organized into a system of grades or species Thesegrades or species can be generated from each other, Hegel claimed,only as logical categories As really existing, species comprise individu-als Only individuals occupy space and time, which, according to Hegel,

is (necessarily!) the realm of contingency To attempt to identify logicalchanges in the contingent realm is a mistake Consequently, Stirling’scriticism of Darwinism is that it confuses a logical transformation with anempirical one (1898, 735–47).8

As a footnote to the discussion of Stirling, it is worth noting that even

though The Secret of Hegel was primarily concerned with religious

ques-tions, it did have a social dimension Stirling was sharply critical of temporary uses of political economy in British politics In his view, po-litical economy represented the principle of Enlightenment, self will Itfailed to see that reason was not confined to the individual, but that therewas a universal reason active in the formation of social institutions Thiswas the realm of the ethical, and in his view it was essential that it becultivated in Britain Following the individual self-interest embodied inpolitical economy would lead only to “a wilderness of self-will and animalrapine” (1898, 716) Stirling had no positive social program to suggest,but his mention of the need for one in this context foretold what was tocome from later idealists (1898, 695–719)

con-Even though Stirling convincingly introduced Hegel to a British

audi-ence as a defender of the faith, he failed to give this defense in The Secret

of Hegel Moreover, none of his many subsequent works had anything motely approaching the importance or influence of The Secret of Hegel.

re-Although he was widely regarded as one of the pioneers who introducedHegel into Britain, he did not write the kind of systematic defense of thefaith for which many of the educated were looking Moreover, he neverobtained a chair in philosophy and so was not in a position to continuethe propagation of idealism by introducing students to Hegel’s work.What he did accomplish, however, should not be underestimated or dis-missed with a joke about the title of his main work He pioneered thefirst serious British approach to Hegel By treating Hegel as a systematic

philosopher whose Science of Logic completed Kant’s system, Stirling

in-troduced the British idealist defense of religion By arguing that reality isGod’s thought, he showed how scientific findings could be harmonizedwith religion

IIIFrom the point of view of the British intellectual establishment, Stirlingwas an outsider His Hegelian defense of religion was promising, but it didnot by itself introduce large numbers of people to Hegel’s thought Oth-ers were responsible for the domestication of Hegel From their academicpositions they drew from Hegel the weapons with which they defendedChristianity against Darwinism and higher criticism The academic whoinspired this use of Hegel in Britain was Benjamin Jowett, who is re-membered today as a liberal theologian, a translator of Plato, and thegreatest nineteenth-century master of Balliol College, Oxford His inter-est in Hegel marked the beginning of a second stage in the rise of BritishIdealism

Jowett’s first contact with Hegel came in 1844, when he spent part ofhis summer vacation in Germany One of the books he carried with him

during the trip was Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason Jowett apparently studied

Kant during much of the trip and, discovering that Hegel was someone to

be taken seriously, met the foremost Hegelian of his day, J E Erdmann,

then at work on his Geschichte der Philosophie, and obtained his advice on

the proper manner of studying Hegel Jowett studied Hegel seriouslyover the next few years and even prepared a translation of most of the

Logic from the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences In subsequent years

Jowett’s interests shifted from Hegel to Plato, and his translation was neverpublished, but in later years he insisted that he gained more from Hegelthan from any other philosopher Furthermore, his interest in Plato wasrelated to his idealistic leanings, and he mentions Hegel in some of his

introductions to the individual dialogues – for example, the Parmenides and the Sophist (1871aix;1871b239, 445) The most important point,however, was that he encouraged his ablest students to study Hegel Heintroduced both Edward Caird and T H Green to Hegel, and he was

the inspiration for William Wallace’s translation of Hegel’s Logic from The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences It was from Jowett’s college,

Balliol, that Hegel began radiating into British intellectual life.9

The main difference between Stirling’s Carlylean Hegel and the figurewho began to make a mark at Balliol College was that Stirling’s Hegel was

a defender of the faith against modern life, while the Balliol Hegel was

a reinterpreter of the faith in conformity to modern life (Bradley1979,12–15) This is most clearly illustrated by the fact that Balliol Hegeliansseldom used Hegel to defend particular doctrines without reinterpretingthem For example, unlike Stirling, no one from Balliol used Hegel todefend personal immortality, or, more important, to attack Darwin Thisdifference first became apparent in the work of William Wallace, who likeBradley was a fellow of Merton College

Wallace’s most important contribution to British Idealism was his

trans-lation of Hegel’s Logic from The Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences This

made available in abbreviated form what most British idealists followedStirling in regarding as Hegel’s major work The impact of this transla-tion was increased by the fact that Wallace prefaced it with a number ofshort essays that approached Hegel from a variety of perspectives (1874;

1968) Although Wallace presented a much more balanced approach toHegel than Stirling – he denied, for example, that there was any secret

to Hegel except perseverance – he accepted Stirling’s general approach

He, too, regarded Hegel as a systematic philosopher whose Science of Logic

showed reality to be divine thought and thus completed Kant’s project

of reconciling science and religion This approach allowed Wallace tofollow Stirling in claiming that the core of Christianity is not historicaland that it has nothing to fear from higher criticism (1874, xxvi;1968,23–4)

Where Wallace differed from Stirling significantly was in his attitudetoward evolution On this topic he extended Stirling’s defense of Chris-tianity by rejecting the inerrancy of Scripture This enabled Wallace toaccept the theory of evolution Replying to Stirling’s criticism of Darwin,Wallace acknowledged the distinction Hegel drew between the devel-opment of logical concepts and the evolution of new species UnlikeStirling, however, Wallace rejected much of Hegel’s philosophy of nature,the part of Hegel’s system that conflicted with Darwin (Wallace,1892,xi–xii) Rather than using Hegel’s views to criticize Darwin as Stirlinghad, he emphasized the parallels between Hegel’s dialectic and Darwin’saccount of evolution Hegel’s dialectic, Wallace said, “is the natural se-lection, caused by the struggle for existence” (Wallace1874, clxxx).10Wallace illustrated this by applying Darwin’s use of the similarity betweenthe artificial and natural breeding of animals to the history of philosophy(Darwin1993, chap 1) Just as we can learn something about natural se-lection through artificial breeding, breeding that is under conscious hu-man control, so we can learn something about the natural relationships

between concepts by studying their relations under conscious control –that is, in the history of philosophy Just as the history of philosophy is astruggle for survival between systems, so is the conceptual developmentrecorded in Hegel’s logic (1874cix–cx;1968, 62, 114–22) Rather thanoppose Darwin, Wallace accepted the theory of evolution and arguedthat it was the counterpart of the development of the ego that Hegelfound in the history of philosophy Hegel, Wallace thought, described in

his Logic the pure forms involved in both spheres By this means Wallace

incorporated the theory of evolution into his Hegelian defense of tianity (1874, lx–lxi) Dismissing Hegel’s philosophy of nature allowedhim to show how Hegel’s account of the identity of thought and realitywas consistent with Darwin’s theory of evolution Wallace was thus able

Chris-to use Hegel Chris-to meet both of the major challenges facing mid-VicChris-torianChristianity

Wallace’s contribution to British idealism was thus to translate theshorter version of what the British idealists regarded as Hegel’s mainwork and to show how this work would enable thoughtful Victorians toaccept the results of science and higher criticism, while retaining a liberalChristian faith But he did not himself formulate a detailed general de-fense of Christianity, even though he showed that the materials for such

a defense were present in Hegel That task was reserved for two Scottishphilosophers, the brothers John and Edward Caird.11 John was fifteenyears older than Edward, but his philosophical development was slower.John had little formal training in philosophy From 1845 until 1862 heserved as a minister in a number of Presbyterian parishes During theseyears he developed an interest in theology, and in order to follow thisinterest he learned German In 1862, after much hesitation, he becamethe successful candidate for the chair in theology at the University ofGlasgow In 1873 he became principal of the University of Glasgow Hisinterest in German philosophy seems to have matured following the ar-rival of his brother Edward in Glasgow After studying at both Glasgow andOxford, Edward became a fellow of Merton before returning to Glasgow

in 1866 as Professor of Moral Philosophy During the next twenty-eightyears, until Edward succeeded Jowett as master of Balliol, the brothersCaird were very close, having almost daily contact while the university was

in session Their discussions were frequently about philosophy (EdwardCaird 1904b, lxiv–lxvii) Although not entirely in agreement (EdwardCaird 1904b, lxxvi), they remained among the most Hegelian of the

British idealists, and they followed Wallace’s lead in using Hegel’s Logic

to insulate Christianity against both Darwinism and higher criticism

While the Cairds agreed in their Hegelian outlook and while their guments for it overlapped, they tended to defend Christianity in ratherdifferent ways Edward’s main task was to work out a detailed interpre-tation of Kant’s system that was supposed to show why it needed to be

ar-completed by Hegel This he did in his two large books on Kant: A ical Account of the Philosophy of Kant (1877) and The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1889).12He also wrote works on the development of reli-gion generally that exhibited his Hegelian point of view (1893;1904a).13John, as befitted a theologian, focused less on the history of philosophy

Crit-or of religion and mCrit-ore on the actual content of Christianity His main

philosophical works, The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity (1904) and troduction to the Philosophy of Religion (1910), are on the nature of theChristian religion

In-What the Cairds saw as the goal of this kind of defense is perhaps bestsummarized by Edward Caird In his essay “The Problem of Philosophy

at the Present Time,” he writes:

The need for philosophy arises out of the broken harmony of a spiritual life, inwhich the different elements or factors seem to be set in irreconcilable opposition

to each other; in which, for example, the religious consciousness, the ness of the infinite, is at war with the secular consciousness, the consciousness ofthe finite; or again, the consciousness of the self, with the consciousness of theexternal world It is easy to see this, if we reflect on the nature of the controversieswhich most trouble us at present (1892, 191–2)

conscious-What these controversies were was not secret, but even so Caird goes

on to say that it is the task of philosophy to reconcile thoughts aboutthe world, the self, and God Philosophy thus has the special function ofunifying oppositions through a higher synthesis; it finds a way to reconcileopposing views by showing that both depend in crucial ways on commonground

Although it is impossible to do justice to the wealth of detail in theCairds’ elaboration of this argument, its bare bones are perhaps best il-

lustrated by a very informal argument of John Caird’s in his Introduction

to the Philosophy of Religion Caird begins by claiming that materialism is

self-refuting The reason is that materialism is an attempt to explain theproperties of mind as properties of matter But to do this, the materialistmust begin with a set of data that are nonmental Following Kant, Cairdclaims that this is impossible To conceive of data requires the categories

of self-consciousness Even supposing that bare sensations are given, they

do not become data without the unifying action of mind by means oflogical categories Because these data presuppose the existence of mind,

it follows that materialism presupposes the existence of mind and hence

is self-contradictory Caird formulates the result of this argument by

say-ing that the unity of thought and besay-ing is a principle that it is impossible

to doubt But because this thought cannot be finite human thought, itmust be divine thought Consequently, all knowledge presupposes the ex-istence of God, and any attempt to explain away His existence will be self-contradictory (John Caird1910, 94–8, 147–9) In particular, Darwinismand higher criticism presuppose the existence of God, so their findingscan never conflict with religious faith when it is properly understood.Caird thus claimed to use logic to do what Hegel, he thought, had soeffectively done: overcome opposing views by including them in a higherunity

IVStirling, Wallace, and the Cairds in their different ways used commentary

on Hegel and vastly simplified versions of Hegel’s arguments in defense of

Christianity They explained why they thought Hegel’s Logic showed that

reality was identical to God’s thought and thus completed Kant’s defense

of Christianity Like Wallace, however, the Cairds were dissatisfied with

a portion of Hegel’s system: his philosophy of nature (Caird1907, 195–202) In keeping with their regard for the importance of philosophicalsystems, they needed to incorporate their defense of Christianity intosuch a system – a system that would not only defend Christianity but thatwould also provide a defense of morality But, again like Wallace, theywere not systematic philosophers They did not create a philosophicalsystem to complete their defense of the faith

The first systematic philosopher among the British idealists, the personwho made British idealism into a force in British philosophy and even inBritish life, was the Oxford philosopher T H Green, arguably the mostimportant philosopher to teach at Oxford since John Wyclif (Quinton

2000, 21) After initial success as a Balliol scholar under Jowett, Greenbecame a Balliol fellow, a tutor, a lecturer, and, finally, late in a short careerthat ended with his death by blood poisoning shortly before his forty-sixthbirthday, Whyte’s Professor of Moral Philosophy Green’s achievementwas to construct a philosophical system around a Hegelian defense ofChristianity.14

Like Stirling, Wallace, and the Cairds, Green approached his task torically He thought philosophy articulated humanity’s progressive un-derstanding of the rationality of the world (1885, 1–3;1888b, 93) But

his-philosophy in Britain was stagnant Green thought that the last stage

in the development of British philosophy, empiricism, had become the

popular philosophy and that in a simplistic form it had been codified asBritish common sense This happened, Green thought, in spite of thefact that the last great British philosopher, David Hume, had shown thatempiricism failed on its own terms It claimed to give an explanation

of the origin of human knowledge, but, as Hume showed, on cist principles knowledge is impossible This failure, especially apparent

empiri-in the face of higher criticism and evolutionary theory, was empiri-in Green’sopinion responsible for much of the religious anxiety of his age (1888b,92–7) Green’s plan for removing this anxiety was to replace the popularphilosophy – empiricism – with idealism This was the task Green set forhimself in his first substantial work, his destructive 371-page introduction

to his edition of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature His thesis was that with

Hume empiricism was “played out” and that the cure for the present iety was to be found in rethinking the nature of human knowledge andaction with the help of Kant and Hegel (1885, 371)

anx-Green saw empiricism as an attempt to explain the origin of ideasand the connections between them that constitute knowledge Its distin-guishing feature for Green is its claim that there are no innate ideas –apart from experience, the mind is empty The ideas that fill the mindare fainter replicas of what is passively received in sensation or, at least forHume, fainter replicas of impressions like hope or fear that result fromreflecting on ideas received in sensation Green’s fundamental objection

to empiricism is that if the mind received all of its contents from sensation,then it would not be aware of relations between ideas Because knowledge

is composed of judgments that require relations between ideas, a mindthat received all of its contents from sensation would lack knowledge.Green thinks that empiricists have covered this lacuna in their theoryonly by conflating judgments and sensations (1885, 19) His critical writ-ings on empiricism are mostly an attempt to show that a mind whosecontents were derived from sensory impressions would not be able torelate those contents Specifically, it would lack the “formal conceptions”like substance and causation that are essential for knowledge (Green

1885, 27) To show this he argues that these relations are neither pressions nor ideas, nor, despite Hume’s strenuous attempt in the case ofcausation to show otherwise, are they habits From this Green concludesthat empiricism, particularly in the form in which it inhabits the popularconsciousness, is bankrupt and should be replaced with a very differentphilosophy.15

im-Despite the fact that Green’s arguments are frequently original, hisreplacement for empiricism is largely derived from Kant and Hegel Infact, the core of his alternative to empiricism is found in three main things

he acknowledged borrowing from Hegel:

That there is one spiritual self-conscious being, of which all that is real is theactivity or expression; that we are related to this spiritual being, not merely as parts

of the world which is its expression, but as partakers in some inchoate measure

of the self-consciousness through which it at once constitutes and distinguishesitself from the world; that this participation is the source of morality and religion;this we take to be the vital truth which Hegel had to teach (1888c, 146)

In other words, Green thought, first, that Hegel had shown reality to bethe manifestation of a nonmaterial self-consciousness Green called this anonnatural or spiritual principle Second, he thought this self-consciousspiritual principle was realized in human agents and that, third, it pro-vided a rational foundation for religion and morality Like his predeces-

sors, Green thought these truths were found in Hegel’s Logic and that

they could be appropriated only by approaching them through Kant’sphilosophy

This approach is apparent in the opening book of Prolegomena to Ethics,

where Green gives the most elaborate version of his argument for the istence of an all-encompassing spiritual principle Specifically, he tries toshow that such a principle is necessary for both knowledge and nature.Green begins his argument by defending Kant’s claim that knowledgerequires the synthetic activity of the knower Green calls this syntheticactivity a spiritual principle because he thinks it cannot be explained nat-uralistically Knowledge, Green says, is always a knowledge of objects thatare distinguished from and related to experiences of them But such ob-jects, he continues, are at least in part constituted by their qualities, andthese are at least in part constituted by relations Following Locke, Greenasserts that relations are the work of the mind; only thought makes re-lations possible Consequently, objects of knowledge are at least partiallyconstituted or synthesized by a self-conscious mind, one able to distin-guish objects from its experiences of them Thus knowledge, as Greenlikes to put it, requires a spiritual principle (1906, 16–22)

ex-On Green’s interpretation, Kant was content to stop at this point

He claimed that knowable objects are the joint product of sensationscontributed by things-in-themselves and the transcendental faculties thatstructure them Green is not content to stop here He argues that ifanything at all can be known about the thing-in-itself, if it can even be an

object of thought, then it, too, is synthesized by thought In his view Kantdid not adequately recognize the implication of his own discovery Green

concludes that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason needs to be supplemented with Hegel’s Logic (1906, 32–45)

Green follows Hegel by claiming that it makes no sense to say thatwhat is known, the synthesized object, is not the real object, the thing-in-itself What is known must be real But if this is so, then the object as it isknown is the object as it really is Because the object as it is known has re-lational characteristics, and because such characteristics are the product

of intellectual synthesis, it follows that the object, as it really is, is also theproduct of intellectual synthesis More spectacularly, Green asserts thatreality depends for its existence on a spiritual principle Because every-thing is related to everything else, it follows that all objects depend on asingle, all-inclusive spiritual principle Reality, he concludes, is the man-ifestation of a spiritual principle (1906, 45–54) Green thus uses Kant’s

Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel’s Logic to overcome the failure of

empiri-cism by showing that knowledge requires a spiritual principle that must

be understood as constituting nature This is the first of the three truthsthat Green takes from Hegel

The second truth is that as finite knowers, human beings participate inthe self-conscious spiritual principle The argument here is that humanself-consciousness has two characteristics, neither of which is reducible

to the other On the one hand, it is a consciousness of a changing series

of events in time, a consciousness that itself changes through time Onthe other hand, it is a consciousness of the relations between events thatoccur at different times Green argues that it can be a consciousness ofthe relations between events occurring at different times only if it is insome respect outside of time He then asserts, almost without argument,that the only way these two features can be explained is by supposing thatfinite human self-consciousness is a limited realization of a self-consciousspiritual principle This is Green’s sketch for a defense of the secondlesson he derives from Hegel (1906, 59–78) His early death preventedhim from filling out this defense in more detail

The third truth Green takes from Hegel is that his spiritual principleprovides a foundation for morality and religion and thus a resolution ofthe mid-Victorian conflict between doubt and duty Green’s defense ofthis claim parallels his defense of the necessity for a spiritual principle

in knowledge Just as knowledge requires an object constituted by thespiritual principle, so, Green argues, moral action requires an objectiveend that, as objective, is also constituted by the spiritual principle (1906,