Henry Sidgwick

THE memoir of Henry Sidgwick is a labor of love, by Arthur Sidgwick, the brother, and Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, the widow, of the late Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cambridge. To many persons, all over the civilized world, his name will recall the work of one of the most profound and suggestive philosophers of our time, the author of treatises on ethics, economics and politics. He will also be spoken of as prominent in the cause of university reform, of the higher education of women, and of psychical research. To a smaller, though not inconsiderable number, chiefly in England, he will be remembered as the keenest, liveliest, most accurate, and most candid of talkers, to whom no problem of thought and action came amiss, and before whose amazing dialectic all adverse arguments seemed to melt away like wax in the fire. From a smaller number still, on both sides of the water, this memoir, chiefly composed of his own letters, will draw out not painful tears in memory of a heart as warm as his head was strong, a sweetness as irresistible as his intellect, and an elevation of soul that never tottered under the hardest questions of life.

Henry Sidgwick was born June 13, 1838, at Skipton in Yorkshire, where his father was rector. The district will best be recognized by Americans as the Brontë country, and Sidgwick’s family were “dalesmen,” — an acute, hard-headed, and never-tiring race. His family always insisted that theirs was the true spelling of the name, and this book asserts that “Sedgwick” was a change unwarrantably made about 1745; but that spelling, in one branch at least, is as old as Cromwell’s day.

Sidgwick lost his father early; his mother found various places of abode, and her children various schools, till Henry was at length placed at Rugby in 1852. He was a quiet boy, intensely keen about any species of mental amusement, but caring little for the athletic sports of the place. The then head-master was not a man to exercise any powerful influence over him; but his constant mentor was Edward Benson, one of the younger masters, destined soon to marry Sidgwick’s sister; he is known to the world as Archbishop of Canterbury. Under his advice and help Sidgwick rose to the top of the school in a very short time, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1855. In the university his career was one of unbroken triumph. He won every scholarship and prize a classical scholar could win, received a highly honorable degree in mathematics early in 1859, took the first classical honors a few weeks later, was chosen fellow of Trinity in October, and was at once in demand as a classical “coach.”

It was then that I first, began to know him, being one of his earliest pupils in the classics. The first lesson showed me that he knew his subjects perfectly, and that he could gauge instantly the value of my own or anybody’s attainments. It took but a very short time to awaken at least our literary sympathies. He expressed, somewhat tentatively, admiration for an exquisite passage in the Æneid, a poem which it was then, and to a certain extent is still, the fashion to undervalue. I assented enthusiastically; and over Virgil we instituted, without swearing, eternal friendship. I shall say more of his wonderful powers of mind later, — enough to say here that as a teacher he could explain anything; and he never needed to have anything explained to him.

For an Englishman with ability like Sidgwick’s the way of life was now sure. A fellowship, accompanied by a college lectureship and private tutoring if he chose to remain in the college walls, would secure him an income out of which a man of simple tastes might easily make considerable savings for seven years; and if he did not marry, and took orders in the Church of England for life, abundance of university offices and honors would come to him, which might in the end be lucrative. If he wished to get out of Cambridge, a mastership in a public school would at once be open to him,— Sidgwick refused one at Rugby, — and if he preferred to study for a profession in London, his fellowship equally gave him a good income for seven years, and his university prestige would always be a mighty lever for success.

For the moment Sidgwick adopted the college life, — as fellow, lecturer, and student of higher things than undergraduate coaching calls for. But a weight soon pressed him that in one sense lay upon him all his life, though his wonderful temper enabled him to bear it. as few could do — or did. The year 1859, the year that saw the Origin of Species, was a year when many men in England were thinking for themselves, and none more vigorously than Sidgwick. The yoke of Benson’s influence, kindly and noble as it was, was dropping away. The membership in the “Apostles” — an absolutely select and secret society for discussion in Cambridge, which has created great thoughts in great men utterly out of proportion to their numbers — was in his mind the immediate cause of his embarking on a sea of thought where the conventional rudders and compasses of Cambridge University could do nothing for him. A fellow in a Cambridge college had at that time to be a bona fide member of the Church of England. How many fellows held to this profession in defiance of all honesty, — how many persuaded themselves that they were members as far as laymen need be, — how many carried their doubts and disbelief into the Holy Place, that they might share the bread so liberally dispensed to the priest’s office, is not to be said here, even though it may be known and have been seen. But Sidgwick was a man to whom rectitude, or harmony of thought and action, was essential. He soon knew very well that for him to take orders in the Church of England was impossible; but it was some years before he found the incongruity of even a passive adherence to his early profession a load too galling to bear.

His college, — always liberal in thought, and in the present day generous to many of its members in whom thought is more free than in those who distribute its offices, but who can appreciate their bolder brothers, — did not allow him to suffer for his scruples. A constantly ascending series of positions, ending with the professorship of moral philosophy, were conferred upon him, enabling him to give instruction in ethics, economics, and politics. He always took great interest in college and university affairs; he was the leader in many measures when such leadership was of the nature of a forlorn hope; and of the movement for the higher education of women he was one of the earliest, most persistent and generous supporters, his efforts being nobly crowned by the establishment of Newnham College in its beautiful and capacious home, and under the presidency of his wife, — a sister of Mr. Arthur Balfour and sisterin-law of Lord Rayleigh.

Nor was he at all wanting in interest in public questions. Always a Liberal, he went with that division of the party which became the Liberal Unionists. He took this step, as he did everything, with combined deliberation and animation. He early arrayed himself on the side of the North in our Civil War, and rejoiced in the final result, although his views were fora moment shaken by the earnest talk of a dear friend, a sympathizer with the South, who, an Englishman himself, happened to have been in Philadelphia, and fancied that that made him an authority on American questions.

But the true history of Sidgwick’s life is the history of a very powerful and very active mind, early interested in the deepest problems of man’s nature. He could not accept the traditional statement of our relations to the unseen world, in which he had been brought up; but he was not therefore going to decide hastily for agnosticism, or any other ism. He had a firm conviction — it is much truer to call it an intuition — that the words soul, God, immortality, duty, mean something, and that what they mean will yet be made plain so as to satisfy at once emotion and reason. To attain this solution, if possible, he studied fearlessly all systems offered. Mill had been the great prophet of his early manhood. He mastered him, he mastered Comte, he mastered Spencer. He had known Greek like English before he left school, and probed to the utmost the philosophy of that divine language. He lived many months in Germany, and learned all that land could tell him. Later on he was one of the pioneers and an untiring worker in the Society for Psychical Research; he pursued persistently a course of studies in spiritualism, determined to neglect nothing that might possibly open that door to the unseen which an undaunted hope assured him should yet be found.

On many men this continued search and suspense might have produced sad effects, both in themselves and in their intercourse with others. There was nothing of that kind in Sidgwick. His nature —the man himself, apart from his opinions — was so sweet, so sunny, and so steadfast that he was never otherwise than candid and charming. He did not hesitate, as soon as his views on any branch of thought assumed something like a substantial state, to publish them in elaborate and profound treatises. His works on ethics, politics, and political economy went through repeated editions, found many readers, and are recognized as of permanent philosophical value, though they can hardly be called popular. He was so anxious to present all sides of a subject, and leave nothing out, that they are wholly free from such sensational dogmatism as Carlyle’s, or such unsympathetic dogmatism as Spencer’s. He will never lack readers, since now, alas! he can have no more hearers.

I do not speak of hearers at his official lectures. He was hardly to be called a popular lecturer. He did not have the presence, the fire, the sense of authority, the eagerness to captivate, that will induce college students to throng to a certain class of instructors. When he first engaged in that work, Charles Kingsley, Professor of Modern History, had the call. Whether the men who in 1862 thronged to hear him may have regretted in 1882 that they had not found their way to the young philosopher instead, is another matter. Not a few of Sidgwick’s hearers felt, and in after years emphatically expressed, the debt they owed to the most profound, most candid, and most penetrative of exponents of ethical and philosophic thought.

But it was as a talker that his power was most manifest and his charm most felt. In a company, large or small, where he felt it was worth while to talk, there was no subject on which he did not delight to expatiate,—analyzing, grouping, distinguishing, and, if not settling, bringing matters as near to a settlement as one could hope. It was almost impossible to argue against him; his knowledge was so extensive, his penetration so acute, his wit so subtle, that gradually one interlocutor after another felt the control of the discussion passing from his hands into Sidgwick’s; and then, for sheer want of material, he would argue with himself! Having pronounced a dictum that no one present could refute, he would say, “Yes . . . I don’t know, for, you see,” — and then his own position, or rather his own occupation of the ground, from which he had ousted every one else, would be stormed, or, one should say, sapped, and its tenure proved precarious.

Yet in all this autocracy—for so it was — there was nothing to offend the shyest undergraduate or the most devout Christian. There was none of the merciless sarcasm of Socrates, to whom we Trinity men, lovers of Plato every one, were constantly comparing our hero. There was none of the brutality with which certain highly developed intellectual machines at our own Cambridge have delighted to draw in rash disputants, as the devilplant flings out its arms, and to suck their soul’s life-blood, with greater joy as they saw domestic prepossessions and saintly aspirations writhe in their clutch. Sidgwick’s wide study enabled him to appreciate every phase of human thought; but his candor was far more than that of reason; it was the candor of sympathy and of modesty, arising from a profound sense of devotion, which, never having exactly found the right temple, — or rather the sure road to the one temple, — kept the fire ever burning on the altar of its Unknown God. He was as far as possible from the agnostic bigotry, of which there is so much now. If living in the Master’s spirit makes a Christian, assuredly he was not far from the kingdom of God, — nay, was in the inner courts of its palace, with the thinnest veil between him and its glories.

Full of reason and full of wit; always independent and never unkindly; playful in his deepest argument, reverent in his boldest speculations; spending and spent for others, yet never neglecting his own darling pursuit of self-improvement and self-establishment, — his friends felt that a great star had set in the heavens when, after a dangerous operation for an all but incurable disease, on the 28th of August, 1900, the grave closed over all that was mortal of Henry Sidgwick.

This attempt to delineate his character might have been illustrated by abundant extracts from his correspondence with intimate friends, — and no one ever had closer ones. I have preferred to leave those who will read his memoir to find them out for themselves, and to give the space allotted me to tell what I myself saw and heard of a mind unsurpassed in power and a soul unmatched in sweetness.