VI. HENRY SIDGWICK AND SHADWORTH HODGSON

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These writers had not much in common beyond the two points which have led to their being placed together here. They both saw that evolution was not an sesame to the secrets of philosophy, and neither owed allegiance to the idealist movement which rose to prominence in their time. They were probably the ablest and most influential writers who made independent advances on lines more closely connected with the older English tradition.

Sidgwick taught philosophy for many years at Cambridge, and held the chair of moral philosophy there from 1883 until 1900, the year of his death. His reputation as a philosophical writer was made by his first book, The Methods of Ethics (1874). He afterwards published treatises on a similar scale on political economy and on politics; and, after his death, various occasional articles were issued in collected form, and a considerable series of books was compiled from his manuscripts, dealing with general philosophy, with contemporary ethical systems, and with political constitutions. Within certain limits Sidgwick may be regarded as a follower of John Stuart Mill, at least in ethics, politics, and economics. In these subjects he took Mill's views as the basis of his own criticisms and reflections, and he accepted the utilitarian criterion. At the same time he gave much more weight than Mill had done to the intellectualist tradition in philosophy. He saw that the empirical philosophy was based on conceptions which it was unable to justify by its customary method of tracing their origin in experience. This did not lead, however, to any agreement with Kant's analysis of knowledge. He was an adverse and somewhat unsympathetic critic of the Kantian theory. He inclined, rather, to a return to the natural realism' of Thomas Reid, on the question of the knowledge of external reality;

and his ethical doctrine includes a synthesis of the views of Clarke and Butler with those of Mill.

His first book remains his most striking contribution to philosophy and the most accurate index of his philosophical attitude. In spite of his utilitarian sympathies, its starting-point and most fundamental ideas show the influence of a different type of thought. He starts with the fundamental notion of 'ought' or duty, and argues that enquiries into its origin in our consciousness do not affect its validity. The knowledge that there is something right or rational to be done depends, in the last resort, upon an intuition or immediate view of what is right or reasonable. All the old arguments of the utilitarians are swept away; the analysis of conduct into pursuit of pleasure is shown not only to be itself incorrect, but to be irreconcilable with the acceptance of general happiness as the ethical end. His own utilitarianism is based upon a new synthesis of intuitionism and empiricism. Here enters his central doctrine of the axioms of the practical reason.' These do not prescribe any concrete end as good -that has to be determined in another way; but they are formal principles eternally valid whatever the nature of goodness may prove to be. To these formal principles are given the names prudence, benevolence, and justice; but they include much less than is usually covered by these terms and may, perhaps, be adequately summed up in the statement that neither the time at which, nor the person by whom, a good is enjoyed affects the degree of its goodness. From the distinction and yet equal validity of the axioms of prudence and benevolence, Sidgwick's ethical theory terminates in a doctrine of the dualism of the practical reason.' It would appear, however, that this dualism was not adequately tested by him and that it really arises from the ambiguity of the term prudence. Prudence may mean either "regard for one's own good on the whole or (what is not the same thing) the principle that "hereafter as such is neither less nor more

valuable than now." Both forms of statement are used by Sidgwick; but only the latter has a claim to express an absolute ethical principle; and it is not inconsistent with the axiom of benevolence. The other side of his utilitarianism the reduction of goodness to terms of pleasureis carried out by analysing conscious life into its elements and showing that each in its turn (except pleasure), when taken alone, cannot be regarded as ultimate good. This analytic method is characteristic of Sidgwick's thinking, as it was of that of most of his predecessors-intuitionist as well as empirical. It rests on the assumption that the nature of a thing can be completely ascertained by examination of the separate elements into which it can be distinguished by reflection-an assumption which was definitely discarded by the contemporary school of idealists, and on which the evolutionist writers also do not seem to have relied.

As was natural, therefore, Sidgwick did not produce a system of philosophy. He made many suggestions towards construction, but, in the main, his work was critical. He was severely critical of the attempts at speculative construction made in his day, and he carried on some controversies in which his subtlety and wit had full play: neither Spencer nor Green was his match in dialectics. It was not, however, of systems and theories only that he was a great critic. His powers are seen at their highest when he analysed and described the moral opinions of ordinary men, not as they are reflectively set down in philosophical books, but as they are expressed in life, compact of reason and tradition, fused by emotion and desire. The third book of his Methods of Ethics consists, in large part, of an examination of the morality of commonsense. It is an elucidation and sifting of the ideas under which men act, often without clear consciousness of them; and it shows the sympathetic apprehension of a mind which shares the thoughts it describes and can yet see them in perspective and sum up their significance. Both

Kantian, more commonly as Hegelian or neo-Hegelian. But its members describe it simply as idealism, though it is an idealism of a form new in English thought. Before them Kant's speculative successors had not obtained currency in England, unless perhaps in a slight measure through some of the utterances of Coleridge; and the powerful influence of Hamilton's criticism had been almost sufficient to put a ban on what he called "the philosophy of the unconditioned."

The first important work of the new movement was The Institutes of Metaphysic (1854) by James Frederick Ferrier, professor at St Andrews. Before this date he had written a number of philosophical articles, and in particular a series of papers entitled 'The Philosophy of Consciousness,' which showed the trend of his thinking. After his death these were collected and published together along with a series of lectures as Lectures on Greek Philosophy and other philosophical remains (1866). As a historian of philosophy Ferrier did not pretend to exceptional research; but he had a remarkable power of entering into the mind of earlier thinkers and of giving a living presentation of their views. The history of philosophy was, for him, no mere record of discarded systems but "philosophy itself taking its time." He was a sympathetic student also of the German philosophers banned by his friend Hamilton. It is difficult to trace any direct influence of Hegel upon his own doctrine, and indeed he said that he could not understand Hegel. But both his earlier and his later writings have an affinity with Fichte —especially in their central doctrine: the stress laid on self-consciousness, and its distinction from the 'mental states' with which the psychologist is concerned. This doctrine connects him with Berkeley also. He was one of the first to appreciate the true nature of Berkeley's thought, as not a mere transition-stage between Locke and Hume, but as a discovery of the spiritual nature of reality.

The philosophy which he worked out in The Institutes of Metaphysic is, however, strikingly original. He claimed that it was "Scottish to the core." But it is very different from the traditional Scottish philosophy. It disclaims all connection with psychology. He even formulates a false and psychological theorem as the counterpart of each true and metaphysical theorem. And this reiterated opposition, it must be confessed, grows a little wearisome, and can be excused only by the backward state of psychology, and its confusion with philosophy, at the time when the book was written. Further, the Scottish philosophy relied on intuition or immediate apprehension of reality; Ferrier's method is that of rational deduction from a first principle. Philosophy is "reasoned truth," he says; and it is more proper that philosophy should be reasoned, than that it should be true." Unfortunately he takes Spinoza's method as his model, though he does not follow the model in all details. There is no array of definitions, axioms, and postulates, but only propositions, each deduced from the preceding. Thus a heavy weight is thrown on the first proposition of the series. This proposition formulates the primary law or condition of all knowledge, and is stated in the words, " Along with whatever any intelligence knows it must, as the ground or condition of its knowledge, have some cognisance of itself." What follows is little more than the elaboration of this statement. Ferrier has not only an epistemology, or theory of knowledge, but also an agnoiology, or theory of ignorance, the main doctrine of which is that we can be ignorant only of what can possibly be known. Through this, in his ontology or theory of being, he reaches the conclusion that absolute existence is "a supreme and infinite and everlasting mind in synthesis with all things." Ferrier's writings had, and continue to have, a considerable reputation, yet a reputation hardly commensurate with their philosophical insight and perfect style. Perhaps the formalism of his method counteracted the lucidity of the