Bernard Bosanquet and the Legacy of British Idealism 9781442684058

Table of contents :
Contents
Contributors
Introduction: Rediscovering Bosanquet
History
1. ‘The Restoration of a Citizen Mind’: Bernard Bosanquet and the Charity Organisation Society
2. Social Holism and Communal Individualism: Bosanquet and Durkheim
Logic
3. Bosanquet and the Problem of Inference
4. Bosanquet, Idealism, and the Justification of Induction
Aesthetics and Education
5. Bosanquet, Aesthetics, and Education: Warding off Stupidity with Art
6. Bosanquet, Santayana, and Aesthetics
Metaphysics and Religion
7. The Balance of Extremes: Metaphysics, Nature, and Morals in the Later Philosophy of Bernard Bosanquet
8. Bosanquet and Religion
Moral and Political Philosophy
9. Bosanquet and State Action
10. Bosanquet, Perfectionism, and Distributive Justice
Legacy
11. A New Leviathan among the Idealists: R.G. Collingwood and the Legacy of Idealism
12. Bosanquet on the Ontology of Logic and the Method of Scientific Inquiry
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

B E R N A R D B O S A N QU E T A N D T H E L EG A C Y O F BRIT ISH ID EA LISM

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Edited by William Sweet

Bernard Bosanquet and the Legacy of British Idealism

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-8981-6

Printed on acid-free paper Toronto Studies in Philosophy Edited by Donald Ainslie and Amy Mullin

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Bernard Bosanquet and the legacy of British idealism / edited by William Sweet (Toronto studies in philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-8981-6 1. Bosanquet, Bernard, 1848–1923. I. Sweet, William, 1955– II. Series B1618.B54B47 2007

192

C2005-905909-5

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Contributors

vii

Introduction: Rediscovering Bosanquet william sweet

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History 1 ‘The Restoration of a Citizen Mind’: Bernard Bosanquet and the Charity Organisation Society 33 s.m. den otter 2 Social Holism and Communal Individualism: Bosanquet and Durkheim 50 andrew vincent

Logic 3 Bosanquet and the Problem of Inference james w. allard

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4 Bosanquet, Idealism, and the Justification of Induction phillip ferreira

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Aesthetics and Education 5 Bosanquet, Aesthetics, and Education: Warding off Stupidity with Art 113 elizabeth trott

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Contents

6 Bosanquet, Santayana, and Aesthetics philip macewen

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Metaphysics and Religion 7 The Balance of Extremes: Metaphysics, Nature, and Morals in the Later Philosophy of Bernard Bosanquet 147 leslie armour 8 Bosanquet and Religion t.l.s. sprigge

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Moral and Political Philosophy 9 Bosanquet and State Action peter nicholson

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10 Bosanquet, Perfectionism, and Distributive Justice kevin sullivan

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Legacy 11 A New Leviathan among the Idealists: R.G. Collingwood and the Legacy of Idealism 247 james connelly 12 Bosanquet on the Ontology of Logic and the Method of Scientific Inquiry 267 fred wilson

Bibliography Index

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297

Contributors

James W. Allard is Professor of Philosophy at Montana State University-Bozeman, and the author or editor of several scholarly studies on F.H. Bradley, including The Logical Foundations of Bradley’s Metaphysics: Judgement, Inference, and Truth (2005). Leslie Armour is Research Professor of Philosophy at the Dominican College of Philosophy and Theology (Ottawa), and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa. He is author of ‘Infini Rien’: Pascal's Wager and the Human Paradox (1993), Being and Idea: Developments of Some Themes in Spinoza and Hegel (1992), The Idea of Canada and the Crisis of Community (1981), The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada, 1850–1950 (with Elizabeth Trott, 1981), The Conceptualization of the Inner Life (with Edward T. Bartlett, 1980), Logic and Reality: An Investigation into the Idea of a Dialectical System (1972), The Concept of Truth (1969), and The Rational and the Real: An Essay in Metaphysics (1962). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. James Connelly is Professor of Political Thought in the School of Human Sciences at the Southampton Solent University, England. He has authored several studies and edited a number of volumes on the philosophy of R.G. Collingwood (Philosophy, History and Civilization: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on R. G. Collingwood, with David Boucher and Tariq Modood, 1995), on environmental politics (Politics and the Environment: From Theory to Practice, with Graham Smith, 1999; 2nd ed., 2003), and on social policy (Citizens, Charters and Consumers, 1993). He is on the Board of Directors of the Collingwood and British Idealism Society.

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S.M. den Otter is Associate Professor of History at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. She is the author of British Idealism and Social Explanation (Oxford, 1996), a study of late nineteenth-century social theory. Her interests include the intellectual, cultural, gender, and imperial history of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. She is currently working on a study of how the experience of governing India shaped debate in mid-nineteenth-century Britain about the nature of the individual, community, and society. Phillip Ferreira is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Bradley and the Structure of Knowledge (1999) and numerous articles on British idealism. He specializes in modern philosophy, nineteenth-century philosophy, and idealism. Philip MacEwen is a graduate of the Royal Conservatory of Music in cello and the University of Toronto in philosophy. He has done graduate studies in religious studies at Westminster Theological Seminary, in philosophy at York University, and in music at the University of London. Currently, he is Fellow in Philosophy at McLaughlin College, York University, and is president of a music company, Simply Strings. He has published in the areas of environmental ethics, philosophy of religion, and the history of modern philosophy. He is the editor of Ethics, Metaphysics and Religion in the Thought of F.H. Bradley (1996). Peter Nicholson was, until his recent retirement, Reader in the Department of Politics at the University of York, England. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists (1990), editor of The Collected Works of T.H. Green (1997) and The Collected Works of D.G. Ritchie (1998), and a co-editor of Toleration: Philosophy and Practice (with John Horton, 1992). T.L.S. Sprigge is Emeritus Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh and is author of Santayana: An Examination of His Philosophy (1974; rev. 1995), James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality (1993), The Rational Foundations of Ethics (1987), Theories of Existence (1984), The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (1983), and Facts, Words and Beliefs (1970). His principal research interests include Spinoza, Royce, Hegel on religion, Pascal, Whitehead, Bradley, Bosanquet, and T.H. Green. His book, The God of Metaphysics, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2006.

Contributors ix

Kevin Sullivan teaches philosophy at Heritage College, Gatineau, Quebec. He has published in Idealism, Metaphysics, and Community (2001). His PhD thesis in philosophy was entitled Release and Realization: A Study of the Concept of Spiritual Liberation in the Philosophy of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (University of Ottawa, 1993). William Sweet is Professor of Philosophy at St Francis Xavier University (Antigonish, Nova Scotia). He is the author of Idealism and Rights (1997), Religious Belief: The Contemporary Debate (2003), and Responses to the Enlightenment: An Exchange on Foundations, Faith, and Community (2007). He has edited several collections of scholarly essays, including Approaches to Metaphysics (2004), The Philosophy of History: A Re-examination (2004), Philosophical Theory and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (2003), Philosophy, Pluralism, and Culture (2002), Idealism, Metaphysics, and Community (2001), The Bases of Ethics (2000), and God and Argument (1999). He has also published an edition of The Philosophical Theory of the State and Related Essays by Bernard Bosanquet (with Gerald F. Gaus, 2001) and edited Early Responses to British Idealism (3 vols, 2004), Bernard Bosanquet: Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 1883– 1922 (3 vols, 2003), and The Collected Works of Bernard Bosanquet (20 vols, 1999). Elizabeth Trott is Professor of Philosophy at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. She is co-author (with Leslie Armour) of The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada, 1850–1950 (1981), co-editor (with Leslie Armour) of The Industrial Kingdom of God by John Clark Murray (1981), and has published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Education, Dialogue, Philosophy and Culture (ed. Venant Cauchy), Philosophy after F.H. Bradley (ed. James Bradley, 1996), Maritain Studies, and The Canadian Encyclopedia. Andrew Vincent is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Sheffield. He was formerly Senior Fellow at the Research School of the Social Sciences, Australian National University, and Professor of Political Theory at Cardiff University, where he was also Co-Director of the Collingwood and British Idealism Centre. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Political Ideologies and has published widely on contemporary political philosophy. His recent books include British Idealism and Political Theory (with David Boucher, 2000), Political Theory: Tradition and Diversity (1997), Theories of the State (1987; reprinted 1994), Modern Polit-

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ical Ideologies (2nd ed., 1995), A Radical Hegelian: The Political and Social Philosophy of Henry Jones (with David Boucher, 1993), and Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship: The Life and Thought of the British Idealists (coauthor) (1984). Fred Wilson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He graduated from McMaster University in theoretical physics and went on to study philosophy at the University of Iowa, where he took his PhD in 1965. He has been teaching at the University of Toronto since then. He is the author of The Logic and Methodology of Science in Early Modern Thought: Seven Studies (1999), Hume’s Defence of Causal Inference (1997), Empiricism and Darwin’s Science (1991), Psychological Analysis and the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (1990), Laws and Other Worlds: A Humean Account of Laws and Counterfactuals (1987), and Explanation, Causation and Deduction (1985). He has published a number of papers on British idealism and its relations to empiricism. Most recent has been ‘The Significance for Psychology of Bradley's Humean View of the Self,’ Bradley Studies (1999). Professor Wilson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1994.

B E R N A R D B O S A N QU E T A N D T H E L EG A C Y O F BRIT ISH ID EA LISM

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Introduction: Rediscovering Bosanquet WILL IA M SWEET

At his death on 8 February 1923, the idealist philosopher and social theorist Bernard Bosanquet was described as ‘the central figure of British philosophy for an entire generation.’1 He had published major volumes in, and made significant contributions to, logic, aesthetics, metaphysics, and political philosophy; had authored important studies in religion, psychology, and the history of philosophy; and had translated or edited work by Plato, Hegel, and Rudolf Hermann Lotze. He had also been a well-known figure in social and public policy, was part of the movement that brought university-level education to a broad public, and was one of the few philosophers who wrote for a public beyond the audience of professional academics. For his contributions to philosophy and to social work, he had been made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1907 and had received honorary doctorates from the universities of Glasgow, Birmingham, Durham, and St Andrews. Yet within a few decades of his death, he was virtually forgotten in Anglo-American philosophical circles. This neglect touched not only Bosanquet, but almost all of his idealist confrères, and it lasted well through the middle decades of the twentieth century. Nevertheless – and no doubt due in part to the revival in Anglo-American philosophy of studies on Hegel – there has recently been a renewed interest in the writings of the British idealists. There are several other reasons for this turn of events. Some are primarily historical. To many, the ‘idealist interlude’ in Britain – roughly, the period between J.S. Mill and G.E. Moore – is aberrant and (if only for an accurate historical account) requires further explanation. Others (such as A.M. McBriar2) have rightly noted the influence of the idealists on social and public policy in early twentieth-century Britain and

4 William Sweet

wish to see whether anything specific in British idealist philosophy lay at the root of this concern with practical issues. Some wish to understand better the relation of idealism to later philosophical traditions and, particularly, to the development of Anglo-American ‘analytic’ philosophy.3 But, at least on a par with these ‘historical’ reasons, it has also been claimed that we can find insights in British idealism that directly bear on contemporary debates in political philosophy, metaphysics, logic, the philosophy of history, and religion. And, in recent years, this interest has progressed through the writings of T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley, and J.M.E. McTaggart to those of Bosanquet. What insights might there be in Bosanquet’s philosophy? What is the legacy of this idealism – its relation to philosophers outside of the idealist ‘school’ (e.g., Samuel Alexander, Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein), to philosophers of succeeding generations in Britain (e.g., R.G. Collingwood, Harold Laski, Michael Oakeshott), in the Anglo-American world (e.g., Josiah Royce, George Santayana, and the American ‘realists’), and on the European continent (e.g., Émile Durkheim, Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, and Edmund Husserl), and to such disciplines as sociology, aesthetics, psychology, metaphysics, the philosophy of religion, political philosophy, logic, and social work? It is to begin to answer these questions that the essays in this volume are devoted. But before the contribution and the legacy of Bosanquet can be assessed and the arguments of the essays in this volume can be appreciated, we need to understand something of the man and his work. Life Bernard Bosanquet was born on 14 July 1848 at Rock Hall (near Alnwick), Northumberland, England. He was the youngest son of the Reverend Robert William Bosanquet and Caroline MacDowall. The Bosanquet family was moderately well to do – they owned an estate and farms at Rock and travelled throughout England and on the Continent. Bernard was not the only Bosanquet child who would become accomplished; Charles, the eldest (1834–1905), was a founder of the Charity Organisation Society and its first secretary. Another brother, Day (1843–1923), became an admiral in the Royal Navy and served as governor of South Australia (1909–14). Yet another, Robert Holford (1841–1912), was a mathematician, physicist, barrister, and a talented musician, and was elected to the Royal Society.4

Introduction: Rediscovering Bosanquet 5

Bernard attended Harrow (1862–7) and Balliol College, Oxford (1867–70), where he became friends with C.S. Loch, A.C. Bradley, and Charles Faulkner (who later became a partner of William Morris and who inspired Bosanquet’s early interest in artistic handiwork). Bosanquet’s studies focused on the Greek and Roman classics – the standard course for those interested in philosophy. Though he had initially intended to enter the ministry, he soon gave up this plan. Philosophy in Britain in the late 1860s was predominantly empiricist and materialist (influenced by the work of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Alexander Bain, and others). Nevertheless, there were challenges to this, largely through the efforts of Benjamin Jowett, Edward Caird, and T.H. Green. These men combined the Anglo-Saxon penchant for empirical study with a vocabulary and conceptual apparatus borrowed from the Continent, and particularly from Kant and Hegel – though the extent of this influence has been a matter of some debate. At Balliol, Bosanquet fell under the influence of Caird and Green. Part of the first generation of married faculty at Oxford, Green took a spirited interest in both university and town politics, and Bosanquet’s undergraduate essays5 show the influence of this dimension of Green’s activities. Green’s impact on his students was enormous. It was largely due to his inspiration that Toynbee Hall, an education settlement in the east end of London named after the Oxford economic historian Arnold Toynbee (1852–83), was established; there, educated young men and women lived and worked among and with the poor. Bosanquet received first-class honours in classical moderations (1868) and literae humaniores (1870) – Green is said to have described Bosanquet as ‘the most gifted man of his generation’6 – and was elected to a Fellowship at University College, Oxford, over another student of Green, F.H. Bradley. Bosanquet took his teaching responsibilities seriously, but published little. Upon the death of his father in 1880, and the receipt of a small inheritance, Bosanquet left Oxford in 1881, for London. One motive for the move was to work on philosophy, but another was to be close to some of his cousins, his brother Charles, and his college classmate, C.S. Loch. Through his cousin Mary McCallum, Bosanquet learned about the Home Arts and Industries Association and its role in practical education, and he joined his brother and Loch in working for the Charity Organisation Society (COS).7 Bosanquet was also active in the London Ethical Society (LES); he frequently lectured and taught university extension courses for the LES and its successor, the short-lived London

6 William Sweet

School of Ethics and Social Philosophy (1897–1900). Many of his publications, including The Essentials of Logic, A Companion to Plato’s Republic for English Readers, Psychology of the Moral Self, and The Philosophical Theory of the State, were based on or were prepared to accompany such lectures. Nevertheless, Bosanquet continued with serious philosophical writing, encouraged by the existence of the newly established Aristotelian Society – an association sympathetic to speculative philosophy and a rival to the more empiricist-dominated Mind Association. (Bosanquet joined the Society in 1886 and served as its vice-president in 1888 and as its second president from 1894 to 1898.) His early published work was in logic, but his philosophical interests were extremely wide ranging. Here, in addition to classical Greek philosophy, Bosanquet frequently drew on the writings of Hegel (whom he respected both in his own right and as the ‘most faithful interpreter’ of Greek thought) for inspiration. Bosanquet was soon recognized as one of the principal representatives of the idealist school. He was also generally considered to be one of the most ‘Hegelian’ – though this designation can be misleading and is not especially helpful.8 During his time in London, Bosanquet met and married (in 1895) Helen Dendy, an activist in social work, who would become a leading figure in the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1905–9). Together, they shared a strong commitment to social reform. In 1903, Bosanquet accepted an invitation to return to university life, as professor of moral philosophy at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. But he retired to Oxshott from St Andrews in 1908; his health was not good, his wife’s health had suffered under the strain of her activities on the Poor Laws Commission, and Bosanquet felt that there was much writing that he wanted to do but which could not be undertaken while he had university responsibilities. Though officially retired, during the years from 1908 to 1922 Bosanquet remained busy. In 1911, he was appointed Gifford Lecturer in the University of Edinburgh. His lectures, published as The Principle of Individuality and Value and The Value and Destiny of the Individual, are recognized as the most extensive and systematic account of his metaphysical views. Bosanquet also continued to lecture, to serve on the executive of the COS, and, despite his increasingly fragile condition, was elected president of the Fifth International Congress of Philosophy, which was to have been held in 1915 in London but cancelled because of the war. By the summer of 1922, however, Bosanquet’s

Introduction: Rediscovering Bosanquet 7

health had so seriously deteriorated that he and his wife decided to move back to London. He died there, in his seventy-fifth year, on 8 February 1923. Work Bosanquet’s death did not put an immediate end to interest in his work. His widow edited the last manuscript that he had been working on, Three Chapters on the Nature of Mind, and also wrote a short – and, to date, the sole – biography, Bernard Bosanquet: A Short Account of His Life. In late 1923, the Philosophical Review devoted an entire issue to studies of Bosanquet’s work by leading North American and British philosophers, and in 1927, J.H. Muirhead and Bosanquet’s nephew, R.C. Bosanquet, prepared a collection of some of his major essays, published under the title Science and Philosophy. In 1935, Muirhead edited a volume of letters9 that provides an invaluable context and background for understanding the sources and development of Bosanquet’s philosophical and social thought. But the shift in Anglo-American philosophical interests to a more empirical approach, and the deaths of other leading idealists – Bradley in 1924 and McTaggart in 1925 – weighed against much serious study of Bosanquet’s thought. While The Philosophical Theory of the State continued to have some place in discussion in political theory, interest in his logic and metaphysics among philosophers diminished significantly. In the last two decades, Bosanquet’s work and its contribution to philosophy – and British idealism in general – have come to attract more attention. There have been major studies of Bosanquet’s writings on social policy, political thought, and aesthetics, but several areas – his logic and metaphyics in particular – remain relatively unexplored. The essays in this volume go some way further in clarifying Bosanquet’s views, addressing some of the misunderstandings or misrepresentations of his work, identifying its influence, and tracing its legacy.

Logic Bosanquet’s first major work was in logic, and it was initially considered to be one of his more significant contributions to philosophy. An early statement of Bosanquet’s views is found in his 1883 essay ‘Logic as the Science of Knowledge.’10 One sees here the influence of

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Hegel and of Lotze11 (whose work he translated and edited, with the encouragement of Green). More developed expositions of his logic appear in Knowledge and Reality: A Criticism of Mr F.H. Bradley’s ‘Principles of Logic’ (1885) and, especially, in Logic, or the Morphology of Knowledge (1888). (Principal elements of this latter work were recast in a short volume published while he was engaged in adult education, The Essentials of Logic [1895].) Bosanquet produced a second edition of Logic in 1911, supplementing the earlier edition with a number of notes and three chapters dealing specifically with pragmatist and realist criticisms of idealist coherence theory. During the last decade of his life he continued to engage in a number of exchanges on questions in logic, culminating in the publication of Implication and Linear Inference (1920), which C.D. Broad described as containing ‘the clearest and most plausible account’ of Bosanquet’s views.12 For Bosanquet, logic has a central role in philosophy. The ‘inherent nature of reason’ is, he argues, ‘the absolute demand for totality and consistency,’13 and thus logic is ‘the clue to reality, value and freedom.’14 Not surprisingly, then, Bosanquet argues that metaphysics – ‘the general science of reality’ – cannot be distinguished from logic – the science of knowledge – any more than one can separate a result from the process which produces it. Despite the connection between logic and knowledge, however, Bosanquet denied that he was offering an epistemological view – in the sense of a theory of cognition in which truth and reality are treated as external to one another. Bosanquet’s view is best described, therefore, as a coherence theory – but a coherence theory that, as he argues (for example, in the second edition of his Logic),15 involves more than the formal consistency of the set of true propositions. Two central features of Bosanquet’s logic have tended to be the focus of debate: the nature of inference and the theory of induction. In Implication and Linear Inference, Bosanquet repeats his earlier view that inference is ‘every process by which knowledge extends itself.’16 It is made possible by implication – that is, the property of each system whereby one can go from one part to all other parts. Standard formal logic – linear inference or syllogistic – is only a limited form of inference for, Bosanquet reminds his readers, logical principles are not part of some abstract real but are the expression of the movement and life of the mind. Like a number of other logicians, such as Christoph Sigwart and W.S. Jevons, Bosanquet saw induction as importantly related to deduction. To begin with, Bosanquet’s account of induction distinguishes

Introduction: Rediscovering Bosanquet 9

between the ‘verification’ of a hypothesis and its ‘establishment.’ In induction, a hypothesis is ‘verified by the agreement of its deduced conclusion with observed facts’; it is established only ‘in proportion as we are convinced that the verified results could not be deduced from any other principle.’17 But then Bosanquet adds that ‘every verified result is pro tanto a confirmation of any principles from which it is deducible.’18 To be precise, then, inference is not deductive (i.e., from general principles) or inductive (i.e., from ‘instances’ or ‘sense data’) but ‘systematic’ – it proceeds from within a whole or a system. Thus, knowledge does not exist as a set of isolated formal propositions; all that we know constitutes a system. Bosanquet’s logic follows, in many respects, that of Hegel, and some have taken Bertrand Russell’s criticism that Hegel’s logic unconsciously assumes and incorporates the faults of traditional logic to apply equally to Bosanquet’s. James Allard, however, notes that this view has recently been challenged.19 In ‘Bosanquet and the Problem of Inference’ (in this volume), Allard argues, moreover, that Bosanquet and the British idealists were, in large part, responsible for ‘rehabilitating’ logic in British philosophy, particularly after the critiques of Locke and his successors. Allard states that Bosanquet’s work was a challenge to the (then) dominant view of Mill that deductive inference is ‘useless’ (because those who know the premises already know the content of the conclusion). According to Allard, Russell’s criticism is misplaced, and it is Bosanquet’s defence of deductive logic against Mill that ‘made philosophy safe for logic.’ Phillip Ferreira (in ‘Bosanquet, Idealism, and the Justification of Induction’) addresses Bosanquet’s contribution to the thorny question of induction. Ferreira traces the modern ‘problem of induction’ from David Hume, through the responses of Kant and Hegel, to Bosanquet. Bosanquet’s position, Ferreira notes, is influenced by the German idealists but goes beyond them to the position that the ‘concrete grasp of the system of experiences’ results in a higher degree of certainty than those ‘formal postulates’ that are ‘abstract and indeterminate’ – which leads Bosanquet, in the end, to the contemporary view that we can reject the difference between necessary and contingent truths as well as between inductive and deductive inference. Allard and Ferreira confirm the perception of Griffin and others that Bosanquet’s view of inference and of induction had significant consequences, not only for the then-contemporary understanding of the logic of J.S. Mill but also for the ‘new’ logic of Frege, as developed by

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Russell and Whitehead, where judgment was separated from inference and ‘linear implication’ was the norm. It is perhaps for this reason that Bosanquet’s arguments incited not only a wide-ranging critical response – particularly from the ‘neorealists’ at Cambridge and in the United States – but the tantalizing remark by Wittgenstein to Moore in 1914 that much of Wittgenstein’s (unsuccessful) Cambridge BA dissertation was ‘cribbed’ from Bosanquet’s logic.20

Social Policy and Sociology Bosanquet’s lectures and essays on social topics deal with both specific questions on social reform and general concerns on the role of social institutions and the state in promoting the good life. Many of these essays were published in the Charity Organisation Review, but several were of a broad interest and appeared in leading philosophical and sociological journals and books. In Essays and Addresses (1889), Bosanquet advances an ‘ideal of modern life’ which he calls ‘Christian Hellenism.’ There, in ‘The Kingdom of God on Earth,’ he gives an analysis of the human individual and the community that (as Peter Nicholson notes later in this volume) was taken up later in his political philosophy. Bosanquet was familiar with the empirical data on ‘the social problem,’ and detailed recommendations for social reform are to be found in his discussion and critique of Salvation Army General William Booth’s program for the alleviation of pauperism – for example, in ‘In Darkest England’ On the Wrong Track (1891) and in Aspects of the Social Problem (1895), a collection of essays which he edited and to which he contributed six of the eighteen chapters. For Bosanquet, the key to social progress is the development of individual character. It is one’s character, he held, which largely determines the actual influence of social conditions on one’s life. The policies of the Charity Organisation Society, and of the Bosanquets in particular, were accused of being ‘conservative’ and out of touch with both the root of the problem of poverty and the power of the state to effect change. In particular, Bosanquet’s focus on ‘character’ rather than ‘conditions’ brought him into conflict with a number of reformers, including the Fabian social radicals Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and led to the accusation that his views were ‘individualist.’ This clash came to a head during the sessions of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, on which both Helen Bosanquet and Beatrice Webb served.

Introduction: Rediscovering Bosanquet 11

As Sandra den Otter points out in ‘‘The Restoration of a Citizen Mind’: Bernard Bosanquet and the Charity Organisation Society,’ Bosanquet’s position was far from individualist; it was highly nuanced and rooted in both a notion of community and an organic view of the state. The emphasis on character and not (just) on changing structural factors reflected Bosanquet’s view that the material environment was something that could be shaped by individual will. The aim of social reform, then, was to ensure appropriate conditions for the improvement of character. Although the Majority Report of the Poor Laws Commission reflected the views of the Bosanquets, for much of the twentieth century, den Otter notes, it was the Fabian approach that was the more influential. Still, when one examines specific suggestions on practical policy, some commentators have noted that the differences between the Bosanquets and their opponents are more often over strategy than principle. Some critics challenged Bosanquet’s views, arguing that he was not well informed about ‘facts’ – about the complex effects of an increasingly international economic system, the corresponding repercussions on society, and, particularly, relevant insights from the new field of sociology. Andrew Vincent points out (in ‘Social Holism and Communal Individualism: Bosanquet and Durkheim’), however, that the idealists actually had a highly developed social philosophy – one that took account of both social phenomena and the findings of sociology. Vincent examines the theory of society as well as the understanding of the place of sociology found in Bosanquet and in his contemporary Émile Durkheim, and discusses how each saw the relation of philosophy to sociology. Vincent notes a number of similarities in their work (despite Durkheim’s mistrust of metaphysics and Bosanquet’s suspicion of separating facts from mind) but argues that Bosanquet provides a more persuasive case for the importance of philosophy – that, in order to fully grasp the character of mind, social study needs (idealist) philosophy. Moreover, Vincent adds, Bosanquet’s criticism of positivist sociology is far from a condemnation of sociology as such. For Bosanquet, while philosophy gives significance to sociology, sociology vitalizes philosophy.

Aesthetics and Education Bosanquet’s love of the fine arts and poetry is evident throughout his writings, and his lifelong interest in aesthetics was no doubt a result of

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this. Bosanquet’s first work in aesthetics was a translation, with a lengthy Introduction, of The Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Fine Art (1886), but this was soon followed by a number of articles principally addressing the place of art in education. In 1892, Bosanquet’s A History of Aesthetic – the first such study in the English language – appeared. This volume provided a broad account of the development of aesthetic consciousness from the time of Plato to the end of the nineteenth century, but the fullest expression of Bosanquet’s own aesthetic views was to be found only some twenty years later, in a series of lectures given in 1914 at University College, London, and later published as Three Lectures on Aesthetic.21 Bosanquet placed a greater emphasis on art and aesthetic experience than did any other major thinker in the British idealist tradition. His aesthetics is largely influenced by Aristotle and Hegel, but extends the views of both in novel ways. In his Three Lectures, for example, Bosanquet is primarily concerned with analysing the ‘aesthetic attitude,’ which, he says, is a condition not of the mind alone, but of the whole person – ‘body-and-mind.’ His discussion goes beyond this, however, and also addresses such issues as the relation of art to the medium an artist may use, the forms of aesthetic satisfaction, and the different ‘kinds’ of beauty. Moreover, Bosanquet did not conceive of art narrowly. Following Ruskin and William Morris, he saw the work of artisans as instances of genuine art and as reflecting the same character as products of the fine arts. Regardless of the medium, then, Bosanquet held that art is revelatory of the spiritual dimension of the world. While Bosanquet was explicitly interested in the development of aesthetic consciousness, there is reason to believe that he thought that this was similar to the development of political consciousness and was a model for the development of consciousness in general. Not surprisingly, then, Bosanquet saw aesthetics as importantly related to education. In ‘Bosanquet, Aesthetics, and Education: Warding off Stupidity with Art,’ Elizabeth Trott explores Bosanquet’s views on the methods of education of his time. Trott notes that, to put it bluntly, Bosanquet was opposed to stupidity – by which he meant being insensitive, unappreciative, and unadaptive. Education, then, requires the acquisition not only of knowledge, but of values. Thus, his early writings, but also his later work, reveal Bosanquet’s concern with how moral and aesthetic values can be inculcated through craftwork or artistic handwork. While a proper education requires having some understanding of general

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principles, knowledge and moral values involve more than this, and Trott argues that Bosanquet provides us with several clues as to the kinds of activities that contribute to the development of the intelligent individual. Through the social activities involved in participation – particularly of the young – in the arts or in artistic training, we can facilitate both the appreciation of beauty and the recognition of moral excellence. Bosanquet’s suggestions are, no doubt, explicitly apt at a time when art is already recognized for its use in therapy, and so its extension as a model for education in general seems entirely appropriate. Bosanquet’s aesthetic theory has largely been eclipsed by that of his contemporary Benedetto Croce (though recently some have argued that Bosanquet’s account of the ‘externality’ of the work of art is superior to that given by Croce).22 And idealist theories of art were, in any case, challenged by such contemporaries as George Santayana (1863– 1952) and John Dewey (1859–1952). Are these criticisms as successful as they have generally been taken to be? In ‘Bosanquet, Santayana, and Aesthetics,’ Philip MacEwen begins by presenting Santayana’s attempt to unite naturalism and idealism. But Santayana’s project breaks down, MacEwen argues, when it comes to his account of beauty. Santayana leaves beauty as an essence that has no correlate in existence, and thus his attempt to bring naturalism and idealism together fails. Ironically, perhaps, given Santayana’s criticism of idealism, Bosanquet’s aesthetic theory is able to explain such a unity by its emphasis on the work of art as embodying aesthetic feeling. MacEwen concludes that Bosanquet’s account not only allows for a unity of naturalism and idealism, but also provides a more adequate portrayal of the relation of the artist to the work of art. If Trott and MacEwen are correct, Bosanquet’s writings on aesthetics still have much to provide at both a theoretical and a practical level. They raise the possibility that Bosanquet’s analysis of aesthetic consciousness bears on concerns about the function of art and about the relation of aesthetics to metaphysics – and, interestingly, it is on just this point that the late Dorothy Emmet wrote, shortly before her death, that Bosanquet’s account of the relation between the metaphysical and the aesthetic makes his Three Lectures on Aesthetic his ‘most successful book.’23 Trott and MacEwen also suggest that Bosanquet’s work is worth studying, at least for historical reasons. At Bosanquet’s death, A History of Aesthetic was described by A.C. Bradley (a leading Shakespeare scholar and professor of poetry at Oxford) as the only comprehensive study of this part of philosophy within the British idealist

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tradition,24 and it was the standard work in English in this area for a half-century after its publication.25

Moral and Political Philosophy Today, Bosanquet is perhaps best known for his political philosophy – though his views, like those of the British idealists in general, have frequently been misunderstood or misrepresented. Bosanquet’s early discussion of political topics can be found in Essays and Addresses,26 in articles in the early 1890s on the nature of the general or ‘real’ will,27 in his 1895 book-length commentary on Plato’s Republic,28 and most extensively in The Philosophical Theory of the State (1899).29 The central place of Bosanquet’s political thought in the British idealist tradition is clear from the fact that the standard criticism of idealist political philosophy, Leonard Hobhouse’s The Metaphysical Theory of the State (1918), is principally an attack on Bosanquet’s book. Bosanquet’s aim, in The Philosophical Theory of the State, was to address problems in then-dominant empiricist political thought and, in particular, its treatment of political obligation. Bosanquet maintained that, in order to provide a coherent account of the legitimacy and proper role of the state, one must abandon some of the assumptions of the liberal tradition – particularly those that reflect a commitment to ‘individualism’; he argued at length against the analysis of liberty and of law found in such writers as Bentham, Spencer, and Mill. Drawing on an analysis of the will that was in keeping with ‘modern’ psychology, Bosanquet believed that he could provide a satisfactory explanation of the nature and justification of the state, its positive role in promoting human freedom, and its limits. His notion of the ‘real will,’ influenced by Rousseau’s account of the ‘general will,’ also enabled Bosanquet to provide an account of human rights (based on one’s ‘station’ or function in society and the duties that follow from it) and to explain the character and legitimacy of punishment (which he took to be retributive). For Bosanquet, the purpose of state action was ‘the hindrance of hindrances’ to human development. He saw in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right a plausible account of the modern state as an ‘organism’ or a whole united around a shared understanding of the good but believed that Hegel’s view had to be modified in light of more recent experience. Bosanquet also found reasons in Kant (both directly and, indirectly, through Green) for emphasizing the moral development of the indi-

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vidual and for limiting the state from acting directly to promote this end. Some critics took Bosanquet’s position to be at best only an extension of that of German idealism, and argued that his analysis of the state was vague, non-empirical, and ahistorical, that it allowed the state to avoid moral evaluation or critique and only served to legitimate the status quo, and that it rested on an account of the ‘real will’ that was unintelligible. Peter Nicholson challenges these critics. In ‘Bosanquet and State Action,’ Nicholson argues that Bosanquet’s theoretical analysis of the state is rooted in a more concrete account found in his earliest work, particularly in lectures published in Essays and Addresses. Nicholson insists that, even in these early writings, Bosanquet’s goal was to establish the conditions for ‘the noble life for all,’ that his concern was to provide this in the most effective way possible, and that this required a participatory democracy and an active citizenship. Thus it is this ‘life,’ and not the specific structure of social and political institutions, that is primary for Bosanquet. Nicholson’s views reflect other recent studies of Bosanquet’s political thought which reject the accusation that Bosanquet’s political philosophy and views on social policy were conservative or statist. These studies have emphasized that Bosanquet was an active Liberal, that he held staunchly liberal views on the Boer War and Irish Home Rule,30 and that, in the 1910s and early 1920s, he supported the Labour Party.31 Some have even claimed that his ‘theory as a whole’ is not inconsistent with socialism.32 At the very least, Nicholson reminds us, Bosanquet’s position is far more sophisticated than many critics give credit. Like his political philosophy, Bosanquet’s ethics shows a strong influence of Kant and Hegel, but also of classical Greek philosophy. While Bosanquet did not write much directly on moral theory, he did produce a number of essays on ethical problems. His 1893 volume, The Civilization of Christendom,33 and his inaugural lecture at St Andrews in 1903 on ‘the practical value of moral philosophy’34 can be seen as early efforts to articulate an applied ethics. What Bosanquet means by the word ‘morality’ is sometimes unclear. In general, however, he understands ‘morality’ to be roughly the same as Hegel’s Sittlichkeit or ‘ethical life’ – not Kantian individualistic Moralität.35 Perhaps the most extensive statement of Bosanquet’s ethical views is to be found in Some Suggestions in Ethics (1918). Developing a theme initially articulated in ‘The Kingdom of God on Earth’36 and, indirectly, in The Civilization of Christendom (1893), Bosanquet proposes

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a morality of ‘my station and its duties’ – that what one ought to do should be determined in light of the roles or functions one has in social life. Although largely ‘applied’ in character, these essays not only provide a general account of the nature of ethics, but also reveal several differences in emphasis, if not in substance (e.g., concerning the principle of value and the nature and value of the human person), from Bradley’s moral and social philosophy.37 Thomas Hurka has described Bosanquet’s ethics as ‘perfectionist’ – that is, as exemplifying an ethic of self-realization that has as its aim the perfection of human personality.38 This description is apt; Bosanquet’s moral theory is teleological, but not consequentialist. Hurka rightly notes that Bosanquet emphasizes the importance of motive and, particularly, intention in the assessment of the moral character of an act, and also recognizes Bosanquet’s insistence that, in judging the moral goodness of the person or act, one must be attentive to the moral character of the agent as well as the success of the act in achieving its end. While Bosanquet does not say so explicitly, it seems that what is ‘moral’ is what the Aristotelian ‘practically wise person’ would do. There is no ‘moral law’ from which one can derive or deduce one’s duties or obligations; one is simply ‘to respond adequately to the situation.’39 But Hurka also argues that Bosanquet is a staunch supporter of laissez-faire – for Bosanquet defends the value of private property and argues against ‘economic socialism’ – and that Bosanquet’s view of property and the market (which underlies this laissez-faire) not only is implausibly optimistic and naive but leads to anti-egalitarian and conservative consequences. Kevin Sullivan argues against Hurka here. In ‘Bosanquet, Perfectionism, and Distributive Justice,’ Sullivan points out that while Bosanquet did argue for the importance of property in the self-development of the individual, and for its role in establishing moral character, Bosanquet also dismissed Adam Smith’s justification of laissez-faire capitalism and its limited version of the public interest. Bosanquet’s support for capitalism is qualified; its value lies in its relation to the development of our rational and moral capacities. Private property is not justified as such. And one can extend Sullivan’s response by noting that Bosanquet allows that reform can take place as much through the intervention of the state as the market, and that while individual initiative is necessary, it is, in the end, the state that has the role of guaranteeing the framework of social and moral life.

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The political and the ethical in Bosanquet’s philosophy are clearly of a single piece, but much more needs to be said to provide a complete account of his ethical views.

Metaphysics and Religion Although British idealism is generally seen as centred on metaphysics, it is curious that it was not until he was in his sixties – with the invitation to give the Gifford lectures – that Bosanquet published a book on metaphysics. While Bosanquet’s first essays on metaphysics date from the late 1880s, it is important to realize that it was only as he developed his views in ethics, social work, philosophical psychology, and political philosophy that his metaphysics took form. Some of Bosanquet’s earliest ‘metaphysical’ writings focused on the nature of mind,40 and in 1893–4 he offered a course of lectures that became the basis of his book Psychology of the Moral Self (1897). In this volume, Bosanquet discusses a number of influential views in psychology, especially those of James Ward and William James, and lays the foundation for a theory of ‘mind’ and ‘will.’ Opposed to the crude associationist and the ‘push and pull’ psychology of empiricists (such as David Hume, J.S. Mill, and Alexander Bain) who held that thought consists of disconnected, discrete data of the senses and the ‘psychological habits’ that arise out of the contiguous relations of these data, Bosanquet argues that one cannot separate the human individual from ‘everything that goes to make up its world.’41 In a lecture on ‘the organisation of intelligence,’ Bosanquet suggests that ‘[t]he psychical elements of the mind are so grouped and interconnected as to constitute what are technically known as Appercipient masses or systems.’42 The mind or self, then, is a multiplicity of such systems. Bosanquet describes the mind as ‘a growth of material, more like a process of crystallization, the material moulding itself according to its own affinities and cohesions.’43 (With such a view, Bosanquet says, ‘we come back to the conception of Plato and Aristotle at their best.’)44 The Gifford lectures – The Principle of Individuality and Value and The Value and Destiny of the Individual – are, however, the most extensive and systematic account of his metaphysics. Here, Bosanquet focuses on a principle underlying much of his philosophical thought and rooted in his studies in logic – individuality. According to Bosanquet, when we speak of ‘the real’ or ‘truth,’ we have in mind a ‘whole’ (i.e., a sys-

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tem of connected members), and it is by seeing a thing in its relation to others that we can say not only that we have a better knowledge of that thing, but that it is ‘more complete,’ more true, and more real. Since this whole is self-contained and self-sufficient, Bosanquet calls it (following Aristotle) an ‘individual.’ But because of its ‘independence’ and self-explanatory character or necessity, it is also a universal. The ‘whole’ is, then, what Bosanquet calls a ‘concrete universal.’45 It is a ‘logical universal as a living world’; he calls this ‘positive individuality’ or ‘the Absolute,’ and the position he adopts is often referred to ‘absolute idealism.’ Bosanquet argues that the ‘mainspring of movement and effort in the finite world’ is ‘contradiction.’ Nevertheless, as principles come into conflict, a process of harmonization also occurs. Terms are readjusted or new distinctions are introduced, so that both conflicting elements find a place in the product. This process or method of meeting and removing contradiction, characteristic of the growth of any thing, is what Bosanquet calls the argument a contingentia mundi, and it is through this process that one is led to the Absolute. This principle of individuality is the principle of value. Since individuality is ‘logical self-completeness and freedom from incoherence,’ Bosanquet holds that, insofar as things are completely organized and have parts which confirm and sustain one another, they have value; it is not a matter of whether they are, for example, desired. In this metaphysics, it is difficult to draw a rigid line between ‘nature,’ or the physical, and ‘mind.’ Bosanquet is clearly opposed to dualism; he sees the ‘mind as a perfection and cooperation of the adaptations and acquisitions stored in the body’46 and not a separate thing, independent of the body. Bosanquet’s anti-dualism does not, however, lead to panpsychism – the view that nature has consciousness. (In this respect he appears to differ from Bradley.) Still, he argues that nature is complete only through human consciousness. Human consciousness serves, Bosanquet holds, as a copula between nature and the Absolute. In the second series of Gifford lectures, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, Bosanquet focuses on the finite (i.e., human) individual by showing how his theory of the Absolute bears on its nature and value. He does so, first, by saying something of the evolution or development of the human person, as both a natural being and a being possessing a self-determining will, then, by looking at finite beings in relation to one another, and, finally, by showing in what finite selfhood can have stability and security.

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The ‘progress’ in the development of the human individual, Bosanquet suggests, is not ‘serial,’ nor should it be seen as approximation towards a static telos. The destiny of the finite self, moreover, is that it comes to recognize itself as an element of the Absolute. It is in this way, Bosanquet says, that one sees its value. To some, however, Bosanquet’s arguments eliminated the value of the human person because, they claimed, the ‘perfection of human personality’ that he advocated was not the development of a finite individual as a finite individual. This concern appears particularly in an important exchange among Bosanquet, Pringle-Pattison, G.F. Stout, and R.B. Haldane on ‘Do Individuals Possess a Substantive or Adjectival Mode of Being?’ (published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1917–18). Here, Bosanquet denies that finite selves could be ‘necessarily eternal or everlasting units’ or ‘differentiations of the absolute.’ Yet he also asserts that individuals characterize the world ‘as permanent qualifications.’47 Bosanquet’s ‘absolute idealism,’ then, leads him to challenge certain conceptions of the self, but he does not reject its existence or its value. He simply denies that it is in some way independent, self-existent, and the principle of value. Although Bosanquet describes his philosophy as ‘idealist,’ he was aware that the term was rather broad and potentially misleading and, following the Gifford lectures, took some pains to try to explain how it was entirely unlike the subjective idealism challenged by G.E. Moore.48 In fact, by 1917,49 he expressed the view that his approach would be better described as simply ‘speculative.’ Bosanquet discusses this issue in The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects (1913) – which dealt with the common characteristics of American neorealism and Italian neoidealism (here, that of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile), and the relation of his own account to that of ‘philosophical realism’ and the ‘neo-realists’ – and in the last book to be published during his lifetime, The Meeting of Extremes in Contemporary Philosophy (1921). As Leslie Armour writes, in ‘The Balance of Extremes: Metaphysics, Nature, and Morals in the Later Philosophy of Bernard Bosanquet,’ the title of this volume reveals Bosanquet’s long-held conviction that, despite the apparently radical differences separating the major philosophical schools of thought, there was often substantial agreement among them. In The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects, Bosanquet argues that the terms ‘idealism’ and ‘realism’ are both vague and misleading. There are, as he notes, different kinds of realism and (as his comments

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on Croce and Gentile illustrate) different kinds of idealism as well. The terms are not antithetical; in fact, Bosanquet saw some affinity between himself and the realist Samuel Alexander. Nevertheless, Bosanquet thoroughly rejected the views of such authors as R.B. Perry, W.P. Montague and E.B. Holt. He argued that, while aiming at providing a comprehensive view of reality, this ‘new realism’ restricts the place of mind and cuts it off from physical reality. Armour reminds us, then, that in this book and in The Meeting of Extremes, Bosanquet argues that there is a convergence both in aim and in result of the investigations of these different ‘schools’ – for example, on such matters as the reality of time, and the confidence of progress in ethics and in the advance of humanity as a whole. Admittedly, when one considers critical realism (distinct from neorealism) and absolutism, there is a clear disagreement among them concerning the nature of ‘the real.’ But, Bosanquet notes, as each seeks a complete view, it is led to adopt positions that are characteristic of its ‘opponent.’ Bosanquet’s own ‘speculative philosophy’ – based, he maintains, on careful analysis of experience – complements both of the preceding approaches. Armour notes Bosanquet’s claim that, with a more reasoned understanding of progress and a correct account of the nature of ‘individuality’ and the ‘unity’ of reality (where mind and its objects are seen together in a single context), the absurdities of the extremes of idealism and realism can be avoided and the opposition between them can be overcome. While Bosanquet’s solution is still incomplete, Armour notes that one may find resources in some of Bosanquet’s late contemporaries, such as J.A. Smith, to supplement this. Bosanquet’s metaphysics seems to leave little room for the objects or doctrines of traditional theology, and his account of religion is typical of the humanistic demythologizing associated with many thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as David Strauss, Ferdinand Baur, and, more recently, Rudolf Bultmann.50 The most extensive statement of Bosanquet’s views appears in What Religion Is (1920), though, as T.L.S. Sprigge reminds us (in ‘Bosanquet and Religion’), one finds important essays on the topic from the beginning of Bosanquet’s career.51 Bosanquet speaks of religion as ‘evolving’ from ‘subjective’ to ‘objective’ forms towards what he calls ‘Absolute religion.’ Since, as noted earlier, we see the operation of the principle of non-contradiction, not only in the organic process, but in knowledge and thought as a whole – a kind of evolutionary view – it is not surprising that this is also claimed to be the case with religious consciousness.

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Nevertheless, Bosanquet held that religious faith should be treated with respect, and he seems to have understood religion or ‘faith’ in a broad sense – as ‘that set of objects, habits, and convictions, whatever it might prove to be, which [one] would rather die for than abandon, or at least would feel himself excommunicated from humanity if he did abandon.’52 Sprigge argues, however, that there was a gradual change in Bosanquet’s attitude towards religion – that, as time continued, he became less enthusiastic about Christianity (even in its more demythologized forms) and its emphasis on compassion. Bosanquet’s continued insistence on the necessity of suffering and vicarious atonement in the realization of the good seems to conflict with a genuine concern for those who suffer, Sprigge argues, and Bosanquet’s apparent willingness to tolerate evil ignores its reality. On this latter point, Sprigge’s analysis comes close to the standard critique of Bosanquet (and of absolute idealism) on ethics and religion – that by its ‘assimilation’ of evil into the Absolute, it not only fails to take evil seriously, but encourages passivity, assuming that evil is either inevitable or will eventually disappear on its own. Sprigge allows that in some respects Bosanquet’s view is ‘far-sighted’ and that there are several respects in which they are not far from those found in R.B. Braithwaite,53 R.M. Hare,54 W. Cantwell Smith,55 D.Z. Phillips,56 and Don Cupitt.57 But the claim that Bosanquet’s absolute idealism entails such an attitude towards evil seems difficult to square with Bosanquet’s concern for public welfare. The problem Sprigge raises clearly merits further investigation. Legacy At the time of his death, Bosanquet was arguably ‘the most influential of the English idealists.’58 He had been a prolific author – having written or edited some twenty books and over two hundred articles and reviews – and the breadth of his work was obvious from the diversity of topics he treated. Even in his last years, Bosanquet was astonishingly productive.59 Yet Bosanquet’s philosophy came to take second place to that of Bradley and Green, and his work has certainly long been in their shadow. It is, then, far from obvious how one should best gauge the nature and contribution of Bosanquet’s thought and his place within the British idealist tradition. Interestingly, the legacy of Bosanquet and British idealism is greater than many realize. To begin with, it is worth noting that there was a

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‘third generation’ of idealists or idealist-influenced philosophers, which included R.G. Collingwood (1889–1943), C.E.M. Joad (1891– 1953), A.C. Ewing (1899–1973), G.R.G. Mure (1893–1979), C.A. Campbell (1897–1974), Michael Oakeshott (1901–90), and Dorothy Emmet (1904–2000); these and others had an important place in philosophy through the middle decades of the twentieth century. British idealism also had a significant impact in English-language philosophy in Canada (with John Watson [1847–1939] and Rupert Lodge [1886–1961]); in the United States (with George Holmes Howison [1834–1917], Josiah Royce [1855–1916], Evander Bradley McGilvary [1864–1953], W.E. Hocking [1873–1966], Elijah Jordan [1875–1953], Gustavus Watts Cunningham [1881–1968], and Brand Blanshard [1892–1987]); in Australia (with W.R. Boyce-Gibson [1869–1935], Sir William Mitchell [1861– 1962], and John Anderson [1893– 1962]); in South Africa (with Jan Christian Smuts [1870–1950], R.F.A. Hoernlé [1880–1943], A.R. Lord [1880–1941], and Andrew Murray [1905–97]); and in India (with Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan [1888–1975], J.C.P. d’Andrade [1888–1949], and P.T. Raju [1904–1992]). This influence continues today and can be seen in the work of Errol E. Harris (1908–), Nicholas Rescher (1928–), Leslie Armour (1931–), T.L.S. Sprigge (1932–), and their students. While the conclusions of these later figures often become less and less homogeneous with those of their predecessors, their principal concerns (such as the rejection of naturalism, materialism, and various forms of reductionism, the insistence on a greater recognition of the role of ‘mind’ in the understanding of reality, and the importance of the social character of the human person) remain. A precise account of the legacy of Bosanquet’s work would be a lengthy task; in this volume, however, two authors discuss some of the ways in which Bosanquet’s arguments bear on later – and current – debates. A first area – one that is only beginning to be explored – is that of Bosanquet’s relation to philosophers of succeeding generations in Britain, such as R.G. Collingwood, Harold Laski, and Michael Oakeshott. In ‘A New Leviathan among the Idealists: R.G. Collingwood and the Legacy of Idealism,’ James Connelly raises the questions of the unity of the idealist tradition and of what, if anything, follows from the work of figures such as Green, Bradley, Bosanquet, and J.A. Smith. Connelly seeks to address these questions by looking at Bosanquet’s and Green’s views in political philosophy – specifically, on the function or role of the state as ‘the hindrance of hindrances’ – and comparing them with

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the response of Collingwood. Collingwood was certainly critical of Bosanquet’s and Green’s accounts, and he took pains to avoid being labelled an idealist. Nevertheless, Connelly argues, there are many affinities between Collingwood’s work and that of earlier idealists. One might add that, even if there is no essentialist definition of idealism which applies to all those figures identified as idealists, there might plausibly be a definition based on ‘family resemblance,’ and that to include later figures like Collingwood and Oakeshott among them may not do them any injustice. But which features one might include among these resemblances is a question that requires further investigation. A second area in which we find a legacy of Bosanquetian idealism is in logic. This is intriguing because many accept the standard view that idealist logic was problematic and no rival for the later logic of Russell and Wittgenstein. Yet logic was central to Bosanquet’s work and (as noted earlier) there has been some suggestion that Bosanquet had an influence on Wittgenstein’s early logical views.60 Fred Wilson focuses on the relevance of Bosanquet’s philosophy to contemporary philosophical logic. In ‘Bosanquet on the Ontology of Logic and the Method of Scientific Inquiry,’ he argues that Bosanquet’s views on logic and scientific method are close to those of some contemporary critics of empirical accounts of natural laws, such as Fred Dretske and David Armstrong. Bosanquet, Wilson notes, both raises many of the problems later stated by these authors and is able to avoid or address a number of concerns in their views. Here, Wilson focuses on Bosanquet’s account of scientific inference, and argues that Bosanquet succeeds in replying to the empiricist account of lawful or causal necessity in a way that more recent critics do not. But the legacy of Bosanquet and British idealism goes beyond this. In recent years, interest in Bosanquet’s political and social thought has increased substantially, for it has been seen as being at least close – or even an alternative – to the work of some contemporary communitarians. Bosanquet’s emphasis on the importance of a common good, on the social character of the individual, and on the fundamental place of substantive social ends within a community, seems to be echoed in the more recent writings of Charles Taylor61 and Alasdair MacIntyre.62 Some (like Gerald Gaus)63 see in Bosanquet’s work a model of a substantive liberalism, and others still find Bosanquet’s views consistent with those of William Galston.64 Other areas that are worth exploring include Bosanquet’s views on religion and on aesthetics. While, in this

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volume, T.L.S. Sprigge gives a somewhat critical analysis of Bosanquet, in several respects Bosanquet’s account is remarkably contemporary. Not only would Bosanquet disagree with the foundationalist and evidentialist characterization of religious belief as a whole, but, in many ways, his emphasis on the moral, and not doctrinal, character of belief is not far from that found in the more recent work of Cantwell Smith, Phillips, and Cupitt. And, though relatively little has been written on the topic of idealist aesthetics,65 the renewed interest within aesthetics on the concept of beauty and the nature of aesthetic consciousness might find resources in Bosanquet’s proto-expression theory. Further studies of Bosanquet’s aesthetics may show, as MacEwen has suggested in his essay in this volume, that Bosanquet is able to answer problems in later aesthetic theories that, ironically, had supplanted his own. Still, more work needs to be done to appreciate fully the legacy of Bosanquet and British idealism, not only in each of these areas but in others besides. For example, it is fair to say that the intellectual roots of Bosanquet’s idealism need to be more thoroughly explored. Though Bosanquet’s debt to the writings of Hegel and Kant is relatively wellknown, there were a number of other important influences on his work. Perhaps the most significant is that of classical Greek thought, and it is only recently being acknowledged that Bosanquet’s philosophy cannot be fully appreciated without a recognition of his debt to Greek philosophy.66 Moreover, little has been written on the character and quality of Bosanquet’s later work and writings. In such volumes as the posthumously published Three Chapters on the Nature of Mind (1923), Bosanquet addressed (then) recent work by Meinong, Brentano, and Russell. There, for example, Bosanquet closely examines Russell’s account in the Analysis of Mind, claiming that there were many points on which both were in agreement, and that Russell’s view was not so much wrong as ‘too narrow.’ It may, then, be well worth pursuing whether Bosanquet’s arguments here really do identify problems with the views of Russell – and of the others. At the very least, it is important to see how far he is able to engage the views which came to have such a wide reach. That there was a legacy of Bosanquet’s philosophy, and of British idealism in general, is therefore clear. It is implicated not only in attempts to overcome religious division and to encourage the growth and development of national consciousness, but also in efforts to support both politics of assimilation and those of multiculturalism. And even as the influence of British idealism diminished at home, it contin-

Introduction: Rediscovering Bosanquet 25

ued for some time afterward in other countries of the English-speaking world. How far and how significantly it extended, however, can only be the subject of later study. The essays in this volume, then, raise some of the many issues that need to be addressed in explaining both the philosophy and the contribution of Bernard Bosanquet, and the legacy of the tradition with which he is so closely associated. Given the number of studies published during the past twenty years on Hegel, Green, and, more recently, Bradley, and given the reevaluation of the significance of the work of British idealism and its place in the history of philosophy, it is not unreasonable to think that Bosanquet’s contribution to philosophy and social policy may yet come to be better recognized for its philosophical fruitfulness, and that the second century after his death will be better to him than the first.

NOTES I wish to acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support, under standard research grant 410-2000-0056. In this Introduction, I draw on some of my earlier published work, particularly my Introduction to the Collected Works of Bernard Bosanquet, 20 vols (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1999). 1 J.H. Muirhead, ed., Bernard Bosanquet and His Friends: Letters Illustrating the Sources and the Development of His Philosophical Opinions (London: Allen and Unwin, 1935), 19. 2 A.M McBriar, An Edwardian Mixed Doubles: The Bosanquets versus the Webbs – A Study in British Social Policy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 3 Peter W. Hylton, Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 4 Bosanquet’s fourth brother, George, died at the age of twenty-four, in 1869. 5 See Trunk I (I) of the Bosanquet papers, which contains essays on ‘The Proper Function of Universities,’ ‘The Greek Idea of Citizenship,’ ‘The Chief Points of View in Which the Relation between Church and State May Be Regarded,’ ‘What Constitutes Citizenship?’ ‘The Advantages and Disadvantages of Commercial Prosperity,’ ‘Legislation and Morality,’ and ‘A Sense of Beauty as an Element in Morals.’ 6 Helen Bosanquet, Bernard Bosanquet: A Short Account of His Life (London: Macmillan, 1924), 28. 7 For more details, see the ‘Preface’ to vol. 3 (Essays on Aspects of the Social

26

8 9 10

11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22

William Sweet Problem and Social Policy) in Bernard Bosanquet: Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 1883–1922, ed. William Sweet, 3 vols (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2003) (hereafter Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy). William Sweet, ‘Was Bosanquet a Hegelian?’ Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 31 (1995): 39–60. Muirhead, ed., Bosanquet and His Friends. Bernard Bosanquet (1883), ‘Logic as the Science of Knowledge,’ in Bernard Bosanquet: Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, vol. 2, 299–332. This essay is also reprinted in vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Bernard Bosanquet, ed. William Sweet, 20 vols (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1999). Bosanquet’s essay was originally published in Essays in Philosophical Criticism, ed. Andrew Seth (later, Seth Pringle-Pattison) and R.B. Haldane (London: Longmans, 1883), 67–101. R.H. Lotze, Lotze’s System of Philosophy Part I. Logic in Three Books of Thought, of Investigation, and of Knowledge, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884; 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888); Lotze’s System of Philosophy Part II. Metaphysic in Three Books Ontology, Cosmology, and Psychology, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884; 2nd ed., 1887). C.D. Broad, ‘Critical Notice of Implication and Linear Inference,’ Mind, n.s., 29 (1920): 323. Bernard Bosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual (London: Macmillan, 1913), 9. Bernard Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value (London: Macmillan, 1912), 23. Bernard Bosanquet, Logic, or the Morphology of Knowledge, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888; 2nd ed., 1911), 2: chap. ix. Bernard Bosanquet, Implication and Linear Inference (London: Macmillan, 1920), 2. ‘Logic as the Science of Knowledge,’ 329 (Essays in Philosophical Criticism, 99). ‘Logic as the Science of Knowledge,’ 329 (Essays in Philosophical Criticism, 100). Nicholas Griffin, ‘F.H. Bradley’s Contribution to the Development of Logic,’ in Philosophy after F.H. Bradley, ed. James Bradley (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), 195–230. B.F. McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life – Young Ludwig, 1889–1921 (London: Duckworth, 1988), 199–200. Three Lectures on Aesthetic (London: Macmillan, 1915). A second set of lectures was given during the war, but the manuscript was lost. William Sweet, ‘British Idealist Aesthetics: Origins and Themes,’ in Bradley Studies, 7 (2001): 131–61.

Introduction: Rediscovering Bosanquet 27 23 Dorothy Emmet, Outward Forms, Inner Springs: A Study in Social and Religious Philosophy (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1998), 27. 24 Helen Bosanquet, Bernard Bosanquet, 61. 25 Munroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 14. 26 For example, ‘Some Socialistic Features of Ancient Societies,’ in Essays and Addresses (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1889, 48–70, and ‘The Kingdom of God on Earth,’ in Essays and Addresses, 108–30. 27 ‘Will and Reason,’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 49–60, originally published in Monist, 2 (1891–2): 18–30; and ‘The Reality of the General Will,’ in Science and Philosophy and Other Essays by the Late Bernard Bosanquet, ed. J.H. Muirhead and R.C. Bosanquet (London: Allen and Unwin, 1927), 256–68, originally published in International Journal of Ethics, 4 (1893–4): 308–21. 28 Bernard Bosanquet, A Companion to Plato’s Republic for English Readers. Being a Commentary Adapted to Davies and Vaughan’s Translation (London: Rivingtons, 1895). 29 Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State (London: Macmillan, 1899; 4th ed., 1923); see The Philosophical Theory of the State and Related Essays, ed. William Sweet and Gerald F. Gaus (South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press, 2001). 30 H. Bosanquet, Bernard Bosanquet, 99. 31 See his letter of 24 October 1922, to ‘Rob,’ in which Bosanquet asks about the possibility of a common front between Liberals and Labour. See Bosanquet Papers, Trunk I (A5). 32 Adam Ulam, The Philosophical Foundations of English Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 60. 33 Bernard Bosanquet, The Civilization of Christendom and Other Studies (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893). 34 Bosanquet, On the Practical Value of Moral Philosophy. Inaugural Address Delivered October 21, 1903 [at the University of St Andrews] in Science and Philosophy, 135–49 (originally published in Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1903). 35 See Bernard Bosanquet, Some Suggestions in Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1918), 102n.1: ‘‘morality’ in this sense [of Moralität] is a thing of theory. It is not the moral world or total of observance and institutions in which man finds himself realised, and in some sense justified.’ See also Logic, or the Morphology of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888; 2nd ed., 1911), 2: 222n., and Muirhead, Bosanquet and His Friends, 238–9. 36 Essays and Addresses, 108–30.

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37 William Sweet, ‘F.H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet,’ in Philosophy after F.H. Bradley, ed. James Bradley (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1996), 31–56. 38 Thomas Hurka, Perfectionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 39 Bernard Bosanquet, Some Suggestions in Ethics, 14, and The Philosophical Theory of the State and Related Essays, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 39 (cf. The Philosophical Theory of the State, 4th ed., 1923, liii). 40 See ‘Is Mind Synonymous with Consciousness?’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 1: 125–9 (originally published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 1, no. 1 (1887–8): 12–16); ‘What Takes Place in Voluntary Action?’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 1: 3–10, originally published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 1, no. 2 (1888–9): 70–6. 41 Bernard Bosanquet, Psychology of the Moral Self (London: Macmillan, 1897), 5. 42 Psychology of the Moral Self, 42. For an account of Bosanquet’s theory of the appercipient mass, see John W. Chapman, Rousseau – Totalitarian or Liberal? (New York: AMS Press, 1968), 128ff. 43 Psychology of the Moral Self, 9. 44 Ibid., 123. 45 Logic, or the Morphology of Knowledge, 1st ed., 1: 242. 46 Principle of Individuality and Value, xxv. 47 Bernard Bosanquet, ‘Do Finite Individuals Possess a Substantive or an Adjectival Mode of Being?’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s., 18 (1917–18): 479–506. Reprinted in Life and Finite Individuality, ed. H. Wildon Carr (London: Williams and Norgate, 1918), 86–7. 48 G.E. Moore, ‘The Refutation of Idealism,’ Mind, n.s., 12 (1903): 433–53. 49 ‘Realism and Metaphysic,’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 1: 151–62, originally published in Philosophical Review, 26 (1917): 4–15. 50 William Sweet, ‘Bernard Bosanquet and the Nature of Religious Belief,’ Anglo-American Idealism: 1865–1927, ed. W.J. Mander (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishers, 1999), 123–39. 51 See ‘On the True Conception of Another World,’ Essays and Addresses, 92– 107; ‘How to Read the New Testament,’ Essays and Addresses, 131–61; ‘The Kingdom of God on Earth,’ Essays and Addresses, 108–30; and ‘The Evolution of Religion’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 1: 17–28, originally published in International Journal of Ethics, 5 (1894–5): 432–44. 52 ‘Religion (Philosophy of),’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 1: 33, originally published in Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, ed. J.M. Baldwin, (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 2: 454–8. 53 R.B. Braithwaite, An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955).

Introduction: Rediscovering Bosanquet 29 54 R.M. Hare, ‘Theology and Falsification: The University Symposium,’ in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. A. Flew and A. MacIntyre (London: SCM Press, 1955), 99–103. 55 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Belief and History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977); Faith and Belief (Princeton, 1979). 56 See, for example, D.Z. Phillips, Belief, Change and Forms of Life (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986); Faith after Foundationalism (London: Routledge, 1988). 57 See Don Cupitt, Explorations in Theology (London: SCM Press, 1979); The Leap of Reason (London: Sheldon Press, 1976); Taking Leave of God (London: SCM Press, 1980); Radicals and the Future of the Church (London: SCM Press, 1989). In Taking Leave of God, for example, Cupitt argues for a ‘nonrealist’ and highly non-cognitivist view, maintaining that ‘an objective metaphysical God is no longer either intellectually secure nor even morally satisfactory as a basis for spiritual life.’ Given Cupitt’s analysis of (institutional) faith as a (purely) ‘human creation,’ and of the notion of religious truth as highly ‘naturalistic,’ ‘relativistic,’ and ‘individualistic,’ his position remains to be distinguished from Bosanquet’s. 58 J.H. Randall, Jr, ‘Idealistic Social Philosophy and Bernard Bosanquet,’ in The Career of Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 3: 114. 59 J.S. Mackenzie, ‘Review of The Meeting of Extremes in Contemporary Philosophy,’ International Journal of Ethics, 32 (1921–2): 333. 60 McGuinness, Young Ludwig, 199–200. 61 Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2: Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 62 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). 63 See Gerald F. Gaus, The Modern Liberal Theory of Man (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1983); ‘Bosanquet’s Communitarian Defense of Economic Individualism: A Lesson in the Complexities of Political Theory,’ in The New Liberalism: Reconciling Liberty and Community, ed. Avital Simhony and D. Weinstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 64 William Galston, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 65 See Sweet, ‘British Idealist Aesthetics.’ 66 Bosanquet saw his greatest ‘teacher’ to be Plato. Muirhead, Bosanquet and His Friends, 21.

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History

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1 ‘The Restoration of a Citizen Mind’: Bernard Bosanquet and the Charity Organisation Society S.M. DEN OTTER A striking feature of late Victorian public debate about poverty was its infusion with philosophical language and principle. When the Fabian Beatrice Webb identified her most vigorous opponents in the battle over the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, she singled out ‘the Hegelians led by Bosanquet, clinging to the “category of the destitute.”’1 Bernard Bosanquet was then widely regarded as the ex-cathedra philosopher of the Charity Organisation Society (COS), the premier philanthropic agency in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. For almost twenty-five years, he and Helen Dendy, whom he later married, helped lead the organization, retiring before its transformation into the Family Welfare Association (1946), an arm of the early welfare state. Founded in 1869, the COS aimed to curb what it regarded as increasing reliance on philanthropy and to establish a more scientific evaluation of the need for relief. COS caseworkers (modern case social work finds its roots in the COS) visited applicants and recorded observations about their income, expenditure, conduct, and manners. This was a species of empirical sociology which led to the poverty investigations of Charles Booth, Seebohm Rowntree, and others. The Bosanquets directly connected their labours for the society with philosophical idealism: they regarded the COS ‘to a large extent an attempt to apply the philosophy of T.H. Green to current problems.’2 Even a cursory reading of the Society’s minutes or printed publications displays a distinctive idealism: pauperism defined as ‘a defective participation in the social mind’; references to property as ‘the unity of life in its external ... form,’ and to ‘the material force and effective reality which belong to character; in other words, the operation of ideas in life.’3 This language may seem less incongruous when we consider that

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many of the COS caseworkers and members of the District Councils had been at Balliol College, Oxford, in the 1870s and 1880s, where idealists such as T.H. Green were transforming philosophical debate (though COS women absorbed their idealism elsewhere), and that Bosanquet was not the only idealist in its inner circle. Bosanquet’s life-long involvement with the COS poses dilemmas for interpreting his political philosophy. He was an ‘advanced Liberal’ who by the early 1920s supported the Labour Party and, in his most widely read book The Philosophical Theory of the State (1899), defined the state in terms which many contemporaries found excessively authoritarian. In apparent contrast, at the same time, he guided the COS, an organization which was dedicated to a seemingly aggressive atomism and minimal state intervention. Some of his contemporaries regarded Bosanquet as an old-fashioned individualist who was unduly suspicious of state intervention. Beatrice Webb’s depiction of Bosanquet adhering to archaic principles coincided with the New Liberal J.A. Hobson’s assessment that COS theory reflected ‘an ignorance of industrial facts and shallow psychology.’4 Hobson also disparaged Bosanquet’s attachment to an old-fashioned individualism: ‘it looks upon society as embodied in the separate action of individual wills, without allowance for any organic relation among those wills, constituting social solidarity.’5 Other Fabian critics attacked Bosanquet for failing to see how the material environment of the poor thwarted their independence and made state intervention necessary.6 Scholarship on Bosanquet continues to probe the apparent dichotomy between his political thought and practice.7 But the paradox set up between Bosanquet’s affiliation with the COS and his ruminations in The Philosophical Theory of the State is misleading. It depends on one hand on an exaggerated and simplistic view of the COS, one which studies by Andrew Vincent and Jane Lewis and others have counteracted.8 Moreover, Bosanquet’s political philosophy was more thoughtful and nuanced than suggested by numerous combative reactions to The Philosophical Theory of the State, especially during the war years.9 Bosanquet did not see a disjunction between his political philosophy and his practical social reform work. On the contrary, The Philosophical Theory of the State emerged from a lecture series given at the London School of Ethics and Social Philosophy to a primarily COS audience. It was dedicated to Charles S. Loch, the long-time secretary and the primary spokesman for the society. The book then was not only one of the important texts in political philosophy of the last century, but also a primer for social reformers and a

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defence of COS principles at a time when the COS was under attack. The question is not whether Bosanquet’s philosophy of the individual and the state, which he formulated in his COS activities and his more formal writings, was invariably coherent, but rather how Bosanquet attempted, like many other contemporary liberals, to define a liberalism which enhanced communitarian ends. In his affiliation with the COS, Bosanquet encountered dilemmas which he addressed more abstractly in his philosophical writings – most notably, negotiating the role of the individual, community, and the state in the creation of the moral citizen. Using Charity Organisation Society archival material and Bosanquet’s writing on COS issues, I re-examine Bosanquet’s role as the unofficial theorist of the COS. This role should not be over-exaggerated; C.S. Loch, Helen Bosanquet, and some others dominated the organization and framed its social policy to a greater degree. Neither did Bosanquet invariably intone COS orthodoxies. Nonetheless, reading The Philosophical Theory of the State within the context of Bosanquet’s COS work helps explain aspects of his political philosophy and COS theory and practice, in particular, the theme of regeneration which was pivotal to contemporary understanding of individual, community, and state activity. Bosanquet and the Problem of Poverty While many other idealists were active in social reform – T.H. Green served in municipal government; Edward Caird campaigned to extend women’s university education, to improve the conditions of women’s and child labour, and to establish university settlements in Glasgow and London – the degree of Bosanquet’s engagement with the COS was less usual. Upon his father’s death, Bosanquet took advantage of the freedom offered by an independent income, gave up his academic position at University College, Oxford, and in 1881 moved to London to devote his life to social reform and philosophy. He found that university life was somewhat narrow and that the students were not only less astute than he thought they ought to be, but that teaching also distracted him from writing. Shortly after the move, Bosanquet joined the Chelsea branch of the COS. That Bosanquet chose to apply T.H. Green’s philosophy to the treatment of poverty rather than some other aspect of public life is not surprising. Although historians differ in their assessment of its extent and severity, poverty and pauperism had become the prominent public

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issue of the 1880s. Most late Victorians would have agreed with Helen Bosanquet when she maintained that a community indifferent to extreme poverty stood in ‘danger of dissolution’: chronic poverty was inimical to progressive, stable society.10 But this broad agreement on the threat of extreme poverty did not extend to broad agreement on causes or remedies. Some pointed to the decline of individual self-reliance fostered by widespread philanthropy. Others highlighted the breakdown of traditional communities, replaced instead by a ‘geography of poverty’ in which the poor of East London were cut off from the rest of society. Although the ideology of the New Poor Law of 1834, which regarded the able-bodied pauper as prodigal and indolent, had never been embraced by all, and was never as stringently implemented as its principles commanded, by the 1880s economists and social commentators were beginning to identify structural factors which contributed to pauperism, notably the casual labour market: seasonal, underpaid, and unskilled. Nonetheless, the character of the pauper remained central to the debate, particularly as the idea of a ‘residuum’ gained currency in the 1880s. Employing the ideas of social evolution, racial degeneration, and animal psychology, some social theorists observed the growth of a ‘residuum,’ a class of desperate people of little intellect and of corrupt character. This strengthened the growing conviction that pauperism had consequences not just for the individual alone but for society more broadly and that something must be done. A brief survey of the principal campaigns to ameliorate poverty which were popular in the 1880s clarifies why Bosanquet chose the COS over the alternative channels for the late Victorian social conscience. Such philanthropic organizations as Shaftesbury’s Society for Improving the Condition of the Labour Classes and model dwelling societies attracted numerous middle-class would-be social reformers. Bosanquet did volunteer for a local Sanitary Committee, but he was already inclined to criticize a philanthropy which supported the poor without a complete understanding of their individual circumstances. Bosanquet might also have undertaken or contributed to empirical investigations of poverty in London, a firmly established industry which pre-dated by at least four decades Charles Booth’s massive survey. Beatrice Webb, for example, became a researcher for Booth when she left the COS in 1887. Although Bosanquet praised Booth’s survey – in contrast to the official COS criticism of the survey – and more generally saw inductive, statistical studies, for example, on infant mortality

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and other public health issues, as indispensable, he nonetheless regarded this approach as incomplete and founded on a false atomism. He regretted that the ‘doctrine of hard fact’ had no sympathy for the mind or soul of a people.11 He might have taken up undercover social sleuthing in the East End or South London, as many did, but he found this approach uncongenial and disliked the ‘affectation of intimacy’ contained in the often melodramatic social discovery literature popular in the 1880s.12 Other philosophical idealists, notably D.G. Ritchie, became involved in the Christian Socialist Guild of St Matthew, founded in 1877 by Stewart Headlam, and the Christian Social Union, founded several years later by Green’s student Henry Scott Holland. Their language of cooperation, community, and moral regeneration resonated with arguments which Bosanquet later developed in The Philosophical Theory of the State, but Bosanquet already was sceptical of reliance on the state and found that too little attention was placed on the regeneration of the individual. Certainly he was not attracted to the other important socialist venue, the Fabian Society, when it came into being in 1884. His opposition to Fabianism was unambiguous. He regretted the atomistic and materialist assumptions of the Fabian Society and regarded his own approach to be diametrically opposed: ‘in the concrete, they are frightfully anti-COS still and I could never work with them or w. any of them in any practical effort; we should be daggers drawn at every detail.’13 Neither was Bosanquet active in the Cooperative Movement, another avenue which attracted young men influenced by T.H. Green, notably R.L. Nettleship, D.G. Ritchie, and Arnold Toynbee. The Settlement Movement was another attempt to translate the idealism of T.H. Green into practice, and while many other Oxford idealists were affiliated to Toynbee Hall, Bosanquet was not directly involved, partly because he was older than the first generation of Oxford students and graduates to reside in Toynbee Hall. The COS was in many ways an obvious place for Bosanquet to pursue his ambition for social reform. It was the main relief organization in London, and its leading members were known more broadly as experts on social policy. The society enlisted middle-class men and women – dons, economists, philosophers, reformers, and philanthropists – and was intended to be an umbrella organization which encompassed most other initiatives in the metropolis. Because it was the largest organization and most directly connected to state apparatus (primarily through the Poor Law), the COS provided the most authoritative field for his efforts, though it did represent an understanding of

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poverty and society that was quite distinct from most of the other contemporary alternatives enumerated above. Bosanquet’s life-long involvement in the COS also owes much to the ties of family and friendship, and he reflected that he was loyal to the COS partly because nowhere else had he found such unity and friendship. He was first drawn to the Society in part by personal attachments: his half-brother Charles Bosanquet was the first secretary (1870–5); and Charles Loch, who next filled this post, had been a friend of Bosanquet’s since they as undergraduates shared a staircase at Balliol College. It was at the COS that Bernard became acquainted with Helen Dendy, and their courtship and eventual marriage was a COS affair. Raised in a liberal non-conformist Birmingham family, Helen Dendy had studied moral sciences at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she earned a first. She became a COS district secretary in Shoreditch in 1890 at the same time Bosanquet sat on the Shoreditch committee. Their marriage in 1895, which paralleled Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s intellectual partnership, cemented their shared allegiance to COS principles. Like Beatrice Webb, Helen Bosanquet established an independent and professional life in social policy, primarily on the basis of her COS involvement, and her own life-long activity in the society sustained Bosanquet’s allegiance to that group. Both Helen Dendy and Charles Loch advocated a sterner and more exacting defence of COS principles than Bosanquet himself did, and both exerted a substantial and life-long impact on Bosanquet’s views. COS minutes record numerous incidences in which Bosanquet supported Loch’s reading of controversial issues; for example, censuring the Woolwich District Committee for their deviation from the COS principle that poverty owed as much to character as to structural factors.14 Clearly though, one of the most significant reasons for Bosanquet’s involvement with the society was the marked congruence between his philosophical inclinations and COS principles. This is not unexpected: he was of course instrumental in shaping these principles. But there were striking parallels between the COS and philosophical idealism, as articulated, for example, by T.H. Green, even before Bosanquet, Loch, and other idealists began to frame COS policy. Before Bosanquet had moved to London and become active in the society, he had written little other than a translation of a history of Athens. He wrote most of his work then while absorbed in the COS and many of his shorter articles and, of course, The Philosophical Theory of the State were initially delivered to society audiences. The society was not just a peripheral activity

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or hobby; its principles and practice became interwoven with Bosanquet’s formal philosophy. Using the religious language which came so easily to late Victorian intellectuals who had grown up in the rectory or manse, he described a collection of essays which he published almost forty years after he joined the society as ‘heavily interjected with COS things’ and containing ‘the essence of my faiths.’15 COS archives and Helen Bosanquet’s short biography give some idea of the nature of Bosanquet’s involvement in the COS. He sat on the COS District Committees in Chelsea and Shoreditch. In 1890 he became a member of the Administrative Council and six years later, its chair. He was vice-chairman for the period 1901–15. He served as chairman of the Society again in 1916; he looked on this as his war-time work. As a member of the Chelsea and Shoreditch committees, he would have been expected to visit families who sought assistance, but Bosanquet, unsurprisingly, found this task ‘uncongenial’ – ‘he did not know what to say’ – and only very rarely visited applicants for relief.16 He would have helped determine, case by case, which applications for poor relief merited assistance. On one level, this meticulous, case-by-case involvement scarcely fits with Bosanquet’s reputation as the master theorist of the COS, but he, as well as other prominent COS figures, consistently maintained that the philosophy of the society was to be found in the treatment of individual cases and not in any over-arching theory. This is a little disingenuous, for while it is true that the society tended to oppose a universalist social policy and dealt with cases individually, COS workers approached each case with a distinctive understanding of poverty, character, and need. As a member of the Administrative Council, Bosanquet helped to define this understanding. The mandate of this council was to ‘propagate sound principles in regard to charity administration,’ but there is no indication that he, despite his reputation as a COS theorist, wrote any of the policy reports put out by the society on such subjects as assistance to school children or old-age pensions, although he, as a member and sometimes chairman of the Administrative Council, was involved in deciding whether these reports ought to be adopted as official COS policy.17 Nor did he serve on the special subcommittees which addressed such issues as insurance and medical charities. COS minutes record Bosanquet’s occasional, certainly not frequent, contributions to debate in the Administrative Council. His attendance was sporadic, and as chair, many of his duties were primarily administrative. His role then as a leader of the COS was less authoritative and extensive as is sometimes assumed.

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Bosanquet was much more active in the education wing of the society: he lectured COS members on idealism in social work and assisted in launching the School of Sociology in 1903, a training ground for COS workers, Poor Law officers, and the general public. He chaired the Executive Council of the School from 1908 until its transfer to the London School of Economics four years later. His other substantial task was to defend the society against increasingly hostile criticism. By the mid-1890s there was an increasing worry that the society was out of step with the spirit of the age. High-profile members like the Barnetts publicly criticized it for underestimating the structural causes of poverty. This was perhaps his most significant visible contribution, for in defending COS practice he gave form and substance to a theory of poor relief. The Philosophical Theory of the State This theory of poor relief was developed in The Philosophical Theory of the State (1899). This book had a wide-reaching influence and addressed those dilemmas which faced the Charity Organisation Society at the end of the century. While Bosanquet deliberately did not make many practical applications in the book or many specific references to the society, his self-styled ‘social experience’ framed his discussion, and his conviction that theory and practice should inform each other provided the book’s rationale. Its central contention – that the role of the state was ‘the hindrance of hindrances’ to the best life or common good – animated COS practice.18 The extent of state intervention was to be measured by the test of character: state intervention could only be justified if ‘it liberates resources of character and intelligence greater beyond all question than the encroachment which it involves.’19 Limiting the sweep of the state to ‘the hindrance of hindrances’ owed much to T.H. Green’s adaptation of the Kantian principle that the state cannot compel virtue, and it was also animated by a thoroughly moral reading of the state’s responsibility. The state had a moral function – an obligation to facilitate the good of each of its members. For Bosanquet, as for many other idealists, virtue was the product of life in civil society. By living in a community and by adjusting one’s private good to a common good which was more permanent than the transient pleasures of private goods, individuals not only perfected the virtues of cooperation and other-regarding conduct, but they also could reach ‘self-realization.’

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In The Philosophical Theory of the State, Bosanquet attempted to answer the dilemma of how freedom could be reconciled with political obligation by formulating a theory of the general will. In a radical break from an atomistic understanding of the juxtaposition of the individual and the state, Bosanquet argued that individual interests, aims, and ideals were collectively gathered in a general will and that this general will instead expressed a common interest. This was not an unusual argument to make at the turn of the century, when other contemporary theorists like D.G. Ritchie, J.A. Hobson, and the Fabian Graham Wallas, in their own concern to strengthen social coherence, sought diverse alternatives to an atomistic understanding of civil society and advanced different versions of collective mind or general will theories. A burgeoning interest in Rousseau’s general will prompted the legal and political theorist H.S. Maine to regret the ‘new Rousseauism ... which made every form of government, except Democracy, illegitimate.’20 But Bosanquet’s solution was unusual because he argued that the general will was embodied in the state and its panoply of institutions. In the peculiarly tempestuous climate of war-time Britain, some of his contemporaries viewed Bosanquet’s state as eerily akin to the Prussian state, which, they believed, had catapulted Europe into war. The New Liberal L.T. Hobhouse, for example, charged that the book celebrated ‘the Hegelian exaltation of the state ... deeply interwoven with the sinister developments in the history of Europe.’21 Bosanquet was a little puzzled by this reading of his book and in subsequent editions sought to reassure readers that he had not intended to elevate the state above the moral constraints which bind individuals.22 He had not proposed to make a case for either rampant individualism or an oppressive state, but rather a community in which the individual and the common good were in harmony. Bosanquet’s long involvement with the COS strengthened the regenerative theme which he distinctively advanced in The Philosophical Theory of the State. The notion of developing one’s uniquely human qualities was a leitmotif of Victorian liberalism more generally, and Bradley’s Ethical Studies (1876) provided an influential idealist interpretation of this theme. But Bosanquet drew from COS experience evidence to support these more philosophical arguments. While one of the early aims of the society was the repression of mendacity, and there are many examples of the COS exposing fraudulent claims for assistance, this more punitive aspect did not surface significantly in the Bosanquets’ COS writings; it had faded from the society’s stated aims,

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and ‘repression of mendacity’ was dropped from its official title in 1910. Increasingly prominent instead was the regenerative aim, or, in Bosanquet’s words, ‘to raise men and women to a fuller state, and to give them a larger, completer and more perfect life.’23 In this regard, Bosanquet looked back to classical notions of citizenship, specifically to Plato’s description of forward-looking, rational, and active citizenship. A good citizen was able to plan ahead, unlike the ‘invertebrate residuum’ which, Bosanquet wrote, was marked by ‘its absence of clear ideas, of looking before or after, of any form of self-control or continuous application.’24 Bosanquet regarded the best life as one which satisfies individuals as rational beings:25 this entailed performing one’s function in society and fulfilling one’s duties mindful of a common good. The rational citizen ought not to act as an autonomous, selfstanding entity but ought to be always mindful of belonging to a larger social whole. Bosanquet explained: ‘And just because the service is in principle something particular, unique and distinctive, he feels himself in it to be a member of a unity held together by differences.’26 It is not my purpose here to analyse the foundations of this position in Bosanquet’s moral philosophy and metaphysics – areas which have been critically explored elsewhere27 – but to highlight how Bosanquet provided philosophical justification for COS axioms which were under attack, in particular, the society’s opposition to ‘indiscriminate’ state or philanthropic interventions. Bosanquet rejected any expectation that poverty was an insoluble feature of modern industrialized societies and roundly condemned the idea that there was a ‘residuum’ of desperately and hopelessly criminally poor, an idea which was gaining popularity in the 1880s and 1890s. Such an idea ran counter to Bosanquet’s evocation of community because it threatened to amputate the desperately poor from the rest of society.28 COS literature abounded with accounts of good character destroyed by ‘hand-outs.’ ‘I have heard of a lad,’ Bosanquet told a London audience in the 1890s in an uncharacteristically theatrical tone, ‘who was morally murdered by benevolent ladies who gave him little casual jobs one after the other, and kept him hanging on and on in expectation till the time and spirit in which he could have fitted himself for an industry had left him and passed by.’29 The society routinely turned down numerous applications for support on the grounds that the applicants had exhibited insufficient independence; they failed the moral means test. The commitment to preserving individual self-reliance also meant that the COS opposed comprehensive, publicly funded relief schemes

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which granted aid without a case-by-case examination. For example, most COS members, including Bosanquet, continued to oppose universal old-age pensions, even though the society granted numerous pensions to families whom it had first investigated.30 A COS case-file records the case of three unmarried, respectable, elderly sisters, ‘lineal descendants of Daniel De Foe [sic],’ who had worked to support themselves until one became disabled. The COS investigation into their case ‘showed the genuineness of their pedigree, and that they had striven to maintain themselves, and were unable to do so any longer.’ The COS arranged for annuities funded by Queen Victoria to be given to them. This emphasis on a case-by-case examination of each application for poor relief accorded with the image of a highly complex and differentiated society which Bosanquet developed in The Philosophical Theory of the State.31 That character was the standard against which any proposed relief program was to be measured helps explain specific COS policies, for example, the society’s and Bosanquet’s opposition to free school meals. Taking responsibility for their children ennobled parents – they had to look to the best interest of their families and this ideally led them to control their instincts and desires. It must be emphasized that neither Bosanquet nor the society counselled leaving individuals to themselves or ignoring poverty, but rather attempting to create deliberately and carefully the conditions in which individuals could cultivate their own better self. Bosanquet did not automatically oppose all state provision: he favoured the introduction of school eye examinations and treatment and supported public housing projects, especially after the First World War. He connected an aesthetically pleasing and healthy home to the betterment of character and argued that if a new home ‘sets at liberty a growth of mind and spirit,’ state intervention would be justified.32 This position also demonstrates how far Bosanquet stood from conservatives within the COS who took up a very different stance and argued instead: ‘The people’s homes are bad because they are badly built and arranged; they are tenfold worse because the tenants’ habits and lives are what they are. Transplant them tomorrow to healthy and commodious houses, and they would pollute and destroy them.’33 The regenerative theme of COS policy was circumscribed by the expectations of late Victorian middle-class social reformers. The ideal was a primarily pastoral one, patterned on the manly, hard-working, deferential, rural labourer or artisan. Helen Bosanquet was particularly harsh about city women who failed to live up to this ideal – her writ-

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ings were sprinkled with references to the urban woman who ‘hardly knows why she is such a slattern’ or the ‘lazy woman of bad character.’34 Even contemporary critics regretted the inflexibility of COS expectations of the moral character. A Fabian reviewer of the COS essays which Bosanquet edited noted in 1896 an almost arrogant antagonism to all other approaches to poor relief: ‘the total impression of the book is that the social reformer who will not enter in by the narrow gate of the Charity Organisation Society is destined to perish by the way.’35 But Bernard Bosanquet was less judgmental and censorious than other COS members: he tended, although not invariably, to describe the good character in more universal terms,36 and his theory of a general will was required in part because ideas of the good life might be incommensurable. But his views occasionally sound simplistic and out of step with changes to urban labour patterns: in the face of the endemic casual labour problem, Bosanquet could say of unemployed men: ‘no one has told them that every member of the social organism has a function which is the essence of his being.’37 On the other hand, Bosanquet did not attribute destitution to failed character or ‘the culture of dependence’ alone, as some COS members tended to do. He saw that one of the causes of poverty was the large surplus of unskilled labourers who competed for poorly paid, temporary work. He supported the organization of dock workers in an attempt to confine the number of casual workers to about 6,000 rather than the current 12,000 to 20,000 who regularly competed for employment.38 At the same time, he opposed publicly funded work projects, like those introduced in 1895, which provided employment for unskilled workers, on the grounds that such programs did not encourage the cultivation of foresight or independent citizenship (as labour agitation did). The work was not permanent, nor did the projects equip men and women with skills on which they might base future employment.39 Bosanquet tended to see material environment as something shaped as much by individual will as by external forces.40 He tended to regard ‘function’ – and the ideal character which the COS sought to cultivate – in artisanal terms, even though these skilled trades were moving out of London and formed only a small part of the metropolitan workforce. The idealist J.H. Muirhead suggested that Bosanquet’s support for the COS reflected in part nostalgia for the paternalistic community of the Northumbrian estate (Rock) where he grew up, and this example remained a model: ‘I can’t help thinking sometimes,’ Bosanquet wrote to his nephew, ‘how simple all social problems would be if the

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spirit that has ruled at Rock had ruled over the English town and country.’41 An integral part of the regenerative ideal which Bosanquet developed in The Philosophical Theory of the State and in his COS work was community, or ‘organic relation.’ From the start, the building of community had been an aim of the COS, to ‘bring back the rich into such close relation with the poor as cannot fail to have a civilizing and healing influence, and to knit all classes together in the bonds of mutual help and goodwill.’42 In an increasingly urban Britain, philanthropy no longer entailed a visible and direct relationship between philanthropist and recipient. The COS sought to restore the immediacy of this relationship, a goal which Beatrice Webb, when still enthusiastic about the society, praised: ‘Does not the advisability of charity depend on the moral qualities which are developed in the relationship of giver and receiver?’43 The relationship was difficult to achieve: the society refused to consider relief programs which did not employ an individual case-by-case approach, but the organization struggled under the burden of this onerous and increasingly impracticable casework which philosophical principle dictated. It was difficult to find visitors who could ‘feel the tensions and relaxations of fibre in character,’44 and increasingly they relied on untrained officers willing to accept the poor wages paid, except after spectacular and well-publicized ‘events’ of distress when, ‘the lady-brigades from the West End’ descended on the East End.45 Bosanquet defended the role of the COS in ‘the transformation of charitable chaos into an orderly and friendly neighbourhood.’46 Bosanquet meant many things by ‘community’: physical neighbourhood, institutions and associations, and those metaphysical connections among individuals which were part of the underlying unity of all things.47 However paternalistic this ideal of a community connected by mutual sympathy and understanding might seem, it reflected an organic view of society in which a labyrinthine network of social duties and obligations bound individuals together.48 This was not a highly atomistic view of society at all, but one in which voluntarism cemented social organicism and created a climate for good character to flourish. When Helen Bosanquet explained why her husband became so involved in the society, she recalled: ‘The application of knowledge in the sphere of practical charity could not fail to appeal to him.’49 But the attempts by both Bosanquets to define the principles of poor relief and COS attempts to apply them were fiercely contested. Moreover, the application of knowledge to practice seemed to entail incongruities

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which contemporary critics were quick to identify – in particular between the COS’s promotion of the self-reliant individual and those parts of Bosanquet’s philosophy which outline a communitarian outlook and justify an enlarged state. But viewing Bosanquet’s political philosophy within the context of the society helps explain some of these disjunctions; it also contributes to a more balanced depiction of the COS practice. Bosanquet strove to cultivate those communal connections which appeared to be increasingly endangered. This was not – and is not – an easy task. For much of the twentieth century, the COS approach to poverty was not the authoritative one. That honour went to the opponents of the society, notably to the Webbs (the COS actually closed down in Fabian Hampstead in 1909, ‘from an excess of dread of unpopularity,’ explained Helen Bosanquet). In the end, The Philosophical Theory of the State was read and debated as a text of political philosophy rather than as a primer for the social reformer. Nevertheless, Bosanquet’s work for the COS was an earnest attempt to redress the exigencies of urban industrial economy while preserving individual self-governance. In this, he was an exemplary Victorian.

NOTES 1 B. Webb, Our Partnership, ed. B. Drake and M. Cole (London: Longmans, Green, 1948), 432. 2 H. and B. Bosanquet, ‘Charity Organization: A Reply,’ in Bernard Bosanquet: Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 1883–1922, vol. 3: Essays on ‘Aspects of the Social Problem’ and Social Policy, ed. William Sweet (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2003), 141, originally published in Contemporary Review, 71 (1897): 112, 113. 3 B. Bosanquet, ‘Charity Organization and the Majority Report,’ Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 255, originally published in International Journal of Ethics, 20 (1910): 398; B. Bosanquet, Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 111, 88, originally published in Aspects of the Social Problem (London: Macmillan, 1895), 311, 117. 4 J.A. Hobson, The Social Problem: Life and Work (London: Nisbet, 1901), 202. 5 Hobson, ‘The Social Philosophy of Charity Organization,’ Contemporary Review, 69 (1896): 719. 6 S. Ball, ‘The Moral Aspects of Socialism,’ International Journal of Ethics, 6 (1896): 308; repr. in Fabian Tract 72 (1896). 7 See, for example, G. Gaus, ‘Bosanquet’s Communitarian Defence of Eco-

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8

9

10 11 12

13 14

15

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nomic Individualism: A Lesson in the Complexities of Political Theory,’ in The New Liberalism: Reconciling Liberty and Community, ed. Avital Simhony and D. Weinstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 137–58. See J. Lewis, The Voluntary Sector, the State and Social Work in Britain (Aldershot: E. Elgar, 1995); R. Humphreys, Sin, Organized Charity, and the Poor Law in Victorian England (New York: St Martin’s, 1995); A.M. McBriar. An Edwardian Mixed Doubles: The Bosanquets versus the Webbs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); A. Vincent, ‘Citizenship, Poverty and the Real Will,’ Sociological Review (1992): 702–25, and ‘The Poor Law Reports of 1909 and the Social Theory of the Charity Organization Society,’ Victorian Studies, 27 (1984): 343–65; A. Vincent and R. Plant, Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). For other historical accounts of the COS see H. Bosanquet, Social Work in London 1869–1912 (London: J. Murray, 1914); C.L. Mowat, Charity Organisation Society 1869–1913 (London: Methuen, 1961). See P. Nicholson, The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); J. Morefield, ‘Hegelian Organicism, British New Liberalism and the Return of the Family State,’ History of Political Thought, 23, no. 1 (2002): 141–70; John Morrow, ‘Community, Class and Bosanquet’s New State,’ History of Political Thought, 21, no. 3 (2000): 485–99; M. Carter, ‘Ball, Bosanquet and the Legacy of T.H. Green,’ History of Political Thought 20, no. 4 (1999): 674–94; P. Monaghan, ‘Ball, Bosanquet and the Green Legacy: A Reply to Matt Carter,’ History of Political Thought, 22, no. 3 (2001): 525–9. H. Bosanquet, The Strength of the People (London: Macmillan, 1902), 110. Bosanquet, Social and International Ideals: Being Studies in Patriotism (London: Macmillan, 1917), 28. Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, in The Philosophical Theory of the State and Related Essays by Bernard Bosanquet, ed. William Sweet and Gerald F. Gaus (South Bend, IN: St Augustine's Press, 2001), 3; 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1923), ix. J.H. Muirhead, ed., Bernard Bosanquet and His Friends (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1935), 74. COS Papers, Greater London Record Office, A/FWA/C/A1/11/1, Council Minute Books, 22 January 1894. He also seconded Loch’s proposal to publicly condemn General Booth’s In Darkest England, although the Administrative Council split down the middle. A/FWA/C/A1/10/1, Council Minute Books, 17 November 1890. University of Newcastle Library, MSS Bosanquet, I, A(4), Bosanquet to Nellie Bosanquet, 29 June 1919. The reference is to Social and International Ideals (London: Macmillan, 1917).

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16 H. Bosanquet, Bernard Bosanquet: A Short Account of His Life (London: Macmillan, 1924), 54. 17 1897 COS Papers. 18 Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 189ff. (4th ed., 184). 19 Ibid., 187 (4th ed., 179). 20 H.S. Maine, Popular Government (London: J. Murray, 1885), vii, 75. 21 L.T. Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1918), 23. For a discussion of Hobhouse’s critique of Bosanquet, see S. Collini, ‘Hobhouse, Bosanquet and the State,’ Past and Present, 72 (1976): 86–90. 22 Bosanquet to W.E. Plater, 26 January 1919, in J.H.Muirhead, ed., Bosanquet and His Friends, 203. See also the 1909 preface to the second edition of The Philosophical Theory of the State. 23 Bosanquet, The Civilization of Christendom and Other Studies (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893), vi. 24 Bosanquet, in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 84, 83, originally published in Aspects of the Social Problem (London: Macmillan, 1895), 112, 110. 25 Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 189ff. (4th ed., 168). 26 Ibid., 278 (4th ed., 291). 27 See S.M. den Otter, British Idealism and Social Explanation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), and ‘Liberals, Idealists and the Retrieval of Community,’ An Age of Transition: British Politics, 1880–1914, ed. E.H.H. Green (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997); John Morrow, ‘Community, Class and Bosanquet’s New State,’ History of Political Thought, 21, no. 3 (2000): 485–99; P. Nicholson, The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists: Selected Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); W. Sweet. ‘F.H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet,’ in Philosophy after F.H. Bradley, ed. J. Bradley (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996). 28 Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 282 (4th ed., 296). 29 Bosanquet, Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 89 (Aspects of the Social Problem, 117). 30 Bosanquet, ‘Limitations of the Poor Law,’ Economic Journal, 2 (1892): 369–71 31 Gaus, ‘Bosanquet’s Communitarian Defence,’ 154–7. 32 Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 191 (4th ed., 185). 33 Octavia Hill, cited in H. Bosanquet, The Strength of the People, 46.

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34 H. Bosanquet, The Strength of the People, 103. 35 S. Ball, ‘The Moral Aspects of Socialism,’ 291. 36 Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 127 (4th ed., 102–3). 37 Bosanquet, Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 85 (Aspects of the Social Problem, 113). 38 Ibid., 3: 87–8 (Aspects of the Social Problem, 116). 39 Council Minute Book (1895), 161. 40 Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 67, 68 (4th ed., 28, 29). 41 Muirhead, ed., Bosanquet and His Friends, 312–13. 42 Charles Trevelyan (1870), cited in H. Bosanquet, Social Work in London, 53. 43 B. Webb, The Diary of Beatrice Webb, ed. N. and J. Mackenzie (London: Virago, 1982–5), 1: 85. 44 Bosanquet, Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 79 (Aspects of the Social Problem, 106). 45 H. Bosanquet, Social Work, 55 46 Bosanquet, ‘The Principles and Chief Dangers of the Adminstration of Charity,’ Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 65, originally published in The International Journal of Ethics, 3 (1893): 327. 47 Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 265–7 (4th ed., 276–8). 48 Ibid., 197–200 (4th ed., 193–7). 49 H. Bosanquet, Bernard Bosanquet, 52.

2 Social Holism and Communal Individualism: Bosanquet and Durkheim ANDREW VINCE NT In terms of the philosophical traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is notable that idealist thinkers can be described as being both political and social philosophers. The concepts of both society and state form crucial motifs, both being fully integrated into the larger systematic structures of idealist thought. However, the subtle and insistent emphasis placed on the concept of society – as nonetheless subtly and structurally related to the state and prefaced in Hegel’s rich distinctions between civil society (and the system of needs) and the state – is relatively unique in political philosophy, even to the present day. One noteworthy point here on the idealists – particularly the generation of British idealists who were writing at the turn of the twentieth century – is that their conception of society and social philosophy interacted in complex ways, not only with the social policy, but also with burgeoning ideas of the new discipline of sociology. This latter point has been explored very fruitfully in some recent work; however, this essay will concentrate particularly on Bernard Bosanquet’s responses to this issue in order to reveal important aspects of his thought.1 One precise question lies at the core of this essay. This question is used to investigate an important dimension of the relationship between sociology and philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century – although it has ramifications over a hundred years later. Bosanquet’s answer to this question is also central to his conception of the role of developing sciences like biology and psychology. The question is: Is sociology a discrete discipline which has, by cultivating itself as a ‘science,’ transcended philosophy? In other words, to put the point at its most stark, can sociology explain ultimately even the philosophical impulse? Or, conversely, to put the question more sympathetically,

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does philosophy still have a place in reflective study, such that it is able to incorporate sociological findings within a broader interpretative framework? In order to provide a clearer locus for this question, the discussion will concentrate on the relationship between Émile Durkheim’s and Bosanquet’s understanding of sociology. The relation between Durkheim and Bosanquet is by no means notional. Bosanquet regarded Durkheim as one of the most original and forceful of all sociological thinkers at the time.2 There are a number of significant areas of agreement between the two thinkers as well as major differences. This comparison reveals significant dimensions not only of Bosanquet’s more general theory of society, but also of the parameters of the debate about sociology and philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mind and Society On the 20 June 1904, the Sociological Society met at the London School of Economics for a paper by Émile Durkheim dealing with the relation between sociology and philosophy. As one scholar has commented, ‘Durkheim interpreted this controversy as evidence of a still prevalent and unfortunate confusion between sociology and philosophy.’3 The meeting included figures like L.T. Hobhouse and J.A. Hobson, and written responses came from Bertrand Russell, Ferdinand Tönnies, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and others. Durkheim could not get to the meeting and his paper was read for him (with Durkheim’s agreement) by Bosanquet. Bosanquet had already commented on Durkheim’s writings some years earlier as ‘among the most original and suggestive works of modern sociology.’4 He regarded Durkheim’s thought as the most challenging and forthright contribution to sociological theory. His responses over this period to Durkheim are thus instructive about his general view of the nature of sociology and philosophy. The debate is an ongoing one which still has important ramifications. As MerleauPonty commented, some sixty years after the original debates, still with a weather eye on Durkheim, ‘philosophy and sociology have long lived under a segregated system which has succeeded in concealing their rivalry only by refusing them any meeting ground ‘making them incomprehensible to one another.’’5 Before we focus on the differences between the two thinkers it is worth noting a number of striking parallels between their ideas. Both

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had a strong sense of the ontological importance of societies as collective wholes that embody collective values. In this sense, in contemporary terminology, both thinkers can be seen as contributors to a resolute communitarian mode of thinking. Both were, equally, deeply suspicious of the exclusive use of either psychology or evolutionary biology in sociological analysis.6 Bosanquet observed, for example, that the analogy between biological organisms and society had an ancient genealogy.7 However, with the advent of biological evolution, the analogy had taken on enormous significance. For one thing, it enhanced the scientific status of disciplines like sociology and anthropology. Yet, for Bosanquet, the biological analogy often tended to explain the higher by the lower – the social by the biological. Human action was explained by natural or biological development. In Bosanquet’s terms, the higher degree of reality was equated with that which comes first in a temporal sequence. This logic was a simple prejudice. It assumed that what comes first, in a temporal succession, must be of a higher order of reality, in terms of explanatory force. It becomes, in other words, a ‘cause.’ Bosanquet remarked that ‘so strong has been this bias among sociologists, that the student, primarily interested in the features and achievements of civilised society is tempted to say in his haste that the sociologist as such seldom deals seriously with true social phenomena at all.’8 The focus was always on the more primitive social phenomena. The general problems Bosanquet had in mind here are threefold. First, the higher stage of human evolution, which has produced unparalleled levels of scientific development and cultural sophistication, was not something that could be simply evaluated by earlier stages of human development. To foster such an idea was simple-minded materialism. Second, Bosanquet questioned the precision of the analogy between a biological organism and a complex industrial society constituted by human cultural action. Within the organism, there is a single dominant nervous system with controlling powers. In advanced societies, there are immensely complex and diverse cultural organizations of individuals. Third, biology might have some direct application visà-vis elementary instincts. Yet, natural selection and organic analogies do not really explain the way society functions. The state, for example, in helping the weak or protecting the vulnerable, appears to stand for none of the things which evolution indicates as crucial.9 Thus, the idea of natural selection and the ‘struggle for existence’ are not necessarily adequate to explain advanced social life.10

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For Bosanquet, biological ideas had a double effect on sociology. One whole aspect of sociological theory – which Bosanquet associated with Herbert Spencer – centred on the application of biological notions, like the survival-of-the-fittest thesis, to human society.11 The central issue was that ‘life can be maintained only in virtue of definite qualities adapted to that position.’12 It was the species rather than the individual which was at issue. Other views, however, not only insisted on the comparison of society with an individual organism, but also maintained that the view of continual conflict was too superficial to grasp society. As Bosanquet commented, competition and cooperation were the negative and positive aspects of the division of labour. Spencer did, in fact, have a particular intellectual problem with the notion of mind and state institutions taking any control, and it was here that he introduced the idea of the ‘super organism.’ For Bosanquet, however, Spencer’s super-organic category ‘brings us perhaps to the limit of what biological sociology is able to suggest with regard to the unity of a human commonwealth.’13 There is more than an element of truth to this point, even in the present day with regard to sociobiology. In an essay written in 1898, ‘Individual and Collective Representations,’ Durkheim, echoing the above sentiments in a more strident manner than Bosanquet, argued that biological sociology, qua Spencer, was utterly ‘worthless.’ He noted that, ‘Instead of trying to control their studies of society by their knowledge of biology, they tried to infer the laws of the first from the law of the second.’14 Others, like Gabriel Tarde, however, focused on individual psychology. Tarde, ironically, was also deeply critical of Spencer’s use of biology in social study. Yet, he founded his own system of sociology on an individualistic psychology (what he later called ‘interpsychology’). For Tarde, ‘everything in the social world is explained in terms of beliefs and desires that are imitated, spread and susceptible of increasing and diminishing, and these rises and falls are measured by statistics.’15 Society is a union of sorts, but that unity derives from individual minds subconsciously imitating practices within groups. All social phenomena were therefore reduced to the elementary fact of imitation. Tarde did not attempt a fully developed psychology of imitation, but rather assumed it to be true. He was also deeply critical of Durkheim’s methodological collectivism. Tarde, then, was a psychologically based methodological individualist. Society, to Tarde, did not rest on any civic sense or mutual concern; rather, it was based upon contractual agreements. The rights implicit in

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such agreements were not adopted consciously, but were simply the products of imitation. Society itself was thus defined by Tarde as ‘an organization of imitations.’ As Tarde’s English admirer, William McDougall, put it, Imitation is the prime condition of all collective mental life ... when men think, feel, and act as members of a group of any kind – whether a mere mob, a committee, a political or religious association, a city, a nation, or any other social aggregate – their collective actions show that the mental processes of each man have been profoundly modified in virtue of the fact that he thought, felt, and acted as one of a group and in reciprocal mental action with other members of the group and with the group as a whole.16

For Tarde, imitation and repetition were therefore crucial for social life. These were the means (or contagion) by which ideas spread through groups. Bosanquet was critical of this perspective, which suggested that each man, in Tarde’s reading, became a ‘hypnotical creature’ – ‘a somnambulist acting under suggestions.’17 This view appeared to totally deny the existence of both agency and rationality. Yet Bosanquet also noted, more sympathetically, that suggestion or imitation were not harmful, as long as they contributed to the best life or provided the conditions for the development of a more rational nature. Through imitation and suggestion a society can become ‘habitually recognised as a unit lawfully exercising force,’18 and thus becomes a fully-fledged state. If the habit has the end result of establishing a secure rule of law and liberating worthwhile aspects of human character, then it is justified. Durkheim, again, was tougher in his criticism of Tarde than was Bosanquet. Individual psychology was viewed, by Durkheim, as plainly ridiculous. To reduce social life to individual psychology is analogous to reducing the mind to cells in the organism, which would, he claimed, deny ‘all specificity’ to mental life. Similarly ‘life’ itself would be reduced to oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and so forth, lost in the particulars to which it was reduced. Yet, as Durkheim adds, ‘life cannot be thus divided; it is one.’19 The reason Durkheim was more stringent in his criticism here than Bosanquet was that he was more intrinsically mistrustful of all mental introspection – which he regarded as mere ‘dilettantism.’ Social investigation could not rely on subjective reports of mental life. Minds reflect social facts. As Durkheim put it, social facts are ‘ways of acting, thinking and feeling, external to the individual and

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endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him.’20 Such social facts needed presuppositionless scientific assessment, and sociology, for Durkheim, provided such a science. For Durkheim, Tarde’s individualistic psychology was premised on an old-fashioned idea dressed up in new ‘scientific’ clothes. It applied traditional ‘principles of materialist metaphysics to social life.’21 It explained the complex by the simple, the whole by the part. Bosanquet clearly accepted the same logic as Durkheim’s argument against atomistic and associationist psychology. However, Bosanquet denied its application to a more collective and philosophically orientated psychology, which integrated part and whole within an identity-in-difference argument. A truly cooperative structure is not premised on simple repetition, but rather on ‘identity in difference.’22 For Bosanquet, identity is not necessarily incompatible with difference. Imitation does not necessarily exclude difference. In his view, sociologists and psychologists neglect the question as to how a social whole can remain internally different and yet whole. Bosanquet’s reading of psychology here was idiosyncratic. Durkheim’s response to this was that the ‘science of collective ideation’ was probably a necessary future development within sociology,23 but that, in sum, ‘collective psychology is sociology, quite simply.’24 This was a direct, if slightly elusive, response. At this point we begin to encounter the first significant difference between the two thinkers. Durkheim expressed a more general deep suspicion of all forms of metaphysics.25 He rejected idealist metaphysics, in particular, which derived the part from the whole – ‘since the whole is nothing without the parts which form it and cannot draw its vital necessities from the void.’26 Interestingly, he interpreted idealist metaphysics as propounding an undifferentiated and abstract holism. Ironically, this was the same critique that Bosanquet offered against group psychologists, such as Gustave Le Bon’s understanding of the ‘associated crowd’ in works like Psychologie des Foules (1893). The crowd in Le Bon is seen as a collective entity, but it is a collectivity that in effect excludes individuals. Le Bon, for Bosanquet, was unable to conceive a collectivity that embodies individuality or an identity that embodies difference. For sociology, in general, identity and difference are thus often regarded as separate. Yet, for Bosanquet, for example, the ‘separation of Imitation and Invention is simply the popular exclusion of Difference from Identity.’27 Identity implies difference. The individual cannot do without society, since the very nature of individuality implies society. Yet, this does not entail that individuality is lost,

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but, rather, that both (individuality and society) are preserved in a deeper and richer unity. Thus, Durkheim’s critique of idealism here misses its target with regards to Bosanquet’s idealist analysis. In fact, Bosanquet remarked that Durkheim’s social holism did not adequately meet the point that Durkheim himself laid at the door of idealism. Bosanquet comments that ‘The conception of a whole held together by its differences, its identity consisting in and being measured by their ... individuality is not at the command of [most sociological] writers, although the greater part of M. Durkheim’s theory seems imperatively to demand such a conception.’28 Durkheim’s theoretical stress did appear to fall on the ontology of the organic whole. In fact, one might say that Durkheim was intoxicated with the idea of the group or collectivity. The reality of the individual thus became a moment of the organic whole. As Durkheim commented, ‘The group thinks, feels, and acts quite differently from the way in which its members would were they isolated. If, then, we begin with the individual, we shall be able to understand nothing of what takes place in the group.’29 Strangely, however, Durkheim classifies himself in a via media position between individualist psychology and idealism, namely, as a ‘sociological naturalist,’ although ‘sociological holist’ would now be a more common denotation. As Durkheim remarked, ‘We must ... explain phenomena that are the product of the whole, since the whole is nothing without the parts which form it.’30 He concludes that we should always explain the parts by the properties of the whole. This, again, sounds similar to Bosanquet’s conception of an identity-in-difference argument, with the proviso that the ontological stress falls on the social whole. Thus, Durkheim comments that ‘social facts are in a sense independent of individuals and exterior to individual minds.’31 This is a clear affirmation of the autonomy of the social world (and the science of sociology). For Durkheim, society does not depend upon the nature of the individual person. One need only take the totality of society into consideration to grasp the individual sentiment. It is worth noting here that Durkheim does not deny the notional importance that is given to individuals. He only contends that individualism, as we see it, is the ‘product’ of a particular society. He thus notes that ‘moral individualism ... is in fact the product of society itself. It is society that instituted it and made of man the god whose servant it is.’32 For Bosanquet, Durkheim emphatically did not envisage society as a sphere of natural causation, but rather of social causation. Society provided a set of conditions ‘in psychical life, corresponding to external

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facts which admit of more or less precise statement.’33 Crime, for example, is not something that could be biologically, psychologically, or economically explained. Summarizing his reading of Durkheim, Bosanquet states that an act is a crime, in Durkheim, when it ‘offends the strong and definite collective sentiments of society.’34 Bosanquet saw this as still aiming at a social cause – ‘The act is a crime because it offends; it does not offend because it is a crime.’35 There is a broader logic at stake here. For Durkheim, space, time, logic, rationality, morality, religion, aesthetics, as well as crime, are all effects, and the social whole is the cause. This is why Durkheim regarded sociology as the most fundamental of all the sciences, more fundamental than natural science. For Bosanquet, however, crime is found offensive. It is a mental reaction and judgment. In this interpretation, ‘we see at once the unity of aspects which the forms of law, and legal or philosophical theory, tend later to dissociate in a fictitious degree.’36 A law, for Bosanquet, ‘must have something behind it’; it embodies an idea or conviction.37 But, Bosanquet asks, can law be reduced to a ‘collective sentiment’? Crime offends the collective conscience – the collective psychic symbols that have common meaning for all the members of a society. Crime, like suicide, is rooted in social causation. It is not a matter of individual judgment. Yet, for Bosanquet, a penal law is different from the anger of a mob. Law has some degree of ‘permanence.’ It is embodied in codes. There is also a right-and-wrong distinction implicit within it. Law implies something is worthwhile and that this is widely recognized as such. Thus, Bosanquet notes that ‘the relation of pure ‘sociological’ causation to juristic facts is the well-known relation of the more abstract to the more concrete sciences.’38 Approaching law as a ‘collective social sentiment’ which can be objectively and causally studied is equivalent to the physicist’s analysis of musical sound, which tells us little about music per se. It is the same, for Bosanquet, with regard to the relation of ‘strong collective sentiment’ and a ‘true law.’ A strong sentiment is a factual force. A law, however, involves will, ideas, a sense of justice, and rational judgment. It has to be apprehended, understood, and judged by the rational agent. It is, thus, far more than just a collective sentiment to be scientifically studied. Law points to a good; mere force alone ‘cannot by its reaction constitute a crime.’39 In summary, for Bosanquet, jurisprudence – the science of right – shows us ‘a formal act of mind and will, aimed at maintaining some relative right or hindering some relative wrong.’40 Right is embedded in the facts of jurisprudence. Such social phenomena are ideal at heart.

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They involve conscious recognition by intelligent beings. Society and its laws are thus the product of will, rational design, and agreement among conscious beings. In society, we are always dealing with selfconscious, purposive intelligence. Law has been interpreted by political economy, evolutionary biology, and naturalistic sociology. Bosanquet acknowledges that statutes do indeed have an economic and social context, but ‘this focusing of social influences makes the laws not less acts of social will, but more. To suppose the contrary would be like supposing that nothing is a true act of will which embodies an individual’s distinctive purposes in life.’41 In this context, Bosanquet uses the discussion of law and crime as a marker for a larger question about sociology, namely, how useful scientific sociology is in really understanding legal phenomena. His conclusion is that scientific sociology provides rich empirical detail, but, to grasp the full character of legal phenomena, sociology needs to be supplemented by a sensitive social philosophy. For Bosanquet, ‘the generalities of Jurisprudence are vitalised and completed by the work of the sciences of culture.’42 Mind, qua cultural construction, must take its central place in social theory.43 The role of mind and judgment in social logic becomes central to the difference between Bosanquet and Durkheim. Facts and Values In a paper in 1911, Durkheim made a conventional positivist distinction between facts and values. Statements about the volume of gas were distinct from statements about ‘preferences.’ The former statement did not attach value to an object. However, value judgments, at the same time (and here Durkheim adds his own unique perspective), ‘have the objectivity of things.’ Values were objective social facts which, although qualitatively distinct from facts in nature, were nonetheless ‘social objects’ that could be scientifically studied and measured. Thus, a state of feeling could be ‘independent of the subject that feels it.’44 This might be explained through intrinsic value theory. Yet, for Durkheim, intrinsic value theory could not account for value pluralism. For Durkheim, private judgment was not the same as objective value judgments. In objective social morality the scale of values is ‘released from the ... subjective evaluations of individuals.’45 All of us are bound by the objective social morality – collective conscience. This was the nub of his sociological treatment of values. Neo-Kantians have often argued that ‘value’ and the ‘empirically

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real’ are distinct. But, as Durkheim commented, ‘If the Ideal does not depend on the real it would be impossible to find in the real conditions and causes which would make it intelligible.’46 If we desire an ideal, it must be something more than speculation. It must be part of the furniture of our universe.47 Thus, we should be able to analyse it. Value systems do change in distinct groups; however, respect for human persons in groups is, for Durkheim, ‘at the root of the moral ideal of contemporary societies.’48 In many societies, however, this common ideal is poorly rooted. Yet, society is still the centre of moral life. Groups have a unique psychic life, which is distinct from the individual per se. Group thoughts and group morality are distinct from private experiences of the individual. The individual ‘forgets himself for the common end and his conduct is orientated in terms of a standard outside himself.’49 This is often mistaken for the ‘ideal’ and ‘real’ distinction; in fact, ‘society moves ... the individual to rise above himself.’50 Society embodies collective ideals. Such ideals are not abstractions, but conversely constitute the very dynamism of society. Ideals are both natural and moral at the same time. An ideal is both immanent and transcendent. Thus, for Durkheim, value judgments are not separate from nature. Value is ‘of and in nature.’51 It can be examined like any other ‘physical universe.’ Collective thought, qua morality, is something that can be studied by positive sociology. There is no difference here between value judgments and judgments of fact. A value judgment ‘expresses the relation of a thing to an Ideal.’ All judgments are based on fact. All judgments bring some concept or ideal into play. There is only one undivided faculty of judgment. However, there are different types of ideals. Some ideals are concepts which try to ‘express the reality to which they adhere’ – the ideal is a symbol of a thing – while others try to ‘transfigure the realities to which they relate’ – the thing here symbolizes the ideal and acts ‘as a medium through which the ideal becomes capable of being understood.’52 These are often mistakenly divided up on the basis of ideal and real. Durkheim also viewed morality through the same sociological lens. Society ‘constitutes a moral authority which, by manifesting itself in certain precepts ... confers upon them an obligatory character.’53 Each individual thus expresses the social morality. He or she articulates an objective morality. As Durkheim argues If we cannot be bound by duty except to conscious beings and we have eliminated the individual, there remains as the only other possible object

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Andrew Vincent of moral activity the sui generis collective being formed by the plurality of individuals associated to form a group. Further, collective personality must be thought of as something other than the totality of individuals that compose it ... We [therefore] arrive then at the conclusion that if a morality, or system of obligations and duties, exists, society is a moral being qualitatively different from the individuals it comprises.54

He continues that the similarity between this argument and that of Kant in favor of the existence of God will be noted. Kant postulates God, since without this hypothesis morality is unintelligible. We postulate society specifically distinct from individuals, since otherwise morality has no object and duty no roots.55

Thus, for Durkheim, the real choice facing us is between God and Society! Thus, ‘to love society is to love both something beyond us and something in ourselves.’56 In summary, Durkheim contended that positive sociology does not make a fetish of facts. Religion, morality, and aesthetics all embodied ideal values. Sociology moved in this field of values, dealing with them as a science. It was not constructing ideals per se; conversely, it treated such entities as ‘objects’ for study. In fact, for Durkheim, sociology in itself contained a complete epistemology, which provided clear answers to all the older philosophical problems of knowledge. Sociology explained the philosophical impulse itself, a point that Auguste Comte had made earlier in the nineteenth century. Humans (and their cognitive existence) had no distinctive attributes outside of society. As indicated in the above reference to Kant, Durkheim offers a form of ‘sociological Kantianism.’ Society is the transcendental subject that is the logical precondition to individuals and their activity. Society makes experience possible. Thus, sociology provides answers to all the Kantian problems of knowledge. Durkheim, in fact, always retained from his studies with the neo-Kantian philosopher Charles Renouvier a deep admiration for Kant’s enterprise. However, it was a transformed, empiricized Kantianism which had become, in effect, a realistic sociological epistemology.57 In many ways, Durkheim absorbed Comte’s impatience with metaphysics, reinforced by an empiricized Kantianism. It is little wonder, in this scenario, that Durkheim should have felt a deep disquiet with all manifestations of Hegelian idealism.

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In considering Bosanquet’s response, it is important to bear in mind here certain details about idealism. First, thought enters in subtle ways into the constitution of our experience, although it is worth noting that this is not something that Durkheim denies. Second, objects and facts are also linked to the constituting activity of self-consciousness. Selfconscious thought is the uniting principle of all the spheres of knowing. Thus Bosanquet comments: It is no metaphor, but literal fact, to say that man’s whole environment is transformed by the training even of his mere apprehension of natural objects ... My individual consciousness does not make or create the differences between the species ... although it does create my knowledge of them ... The actual facts of this world do directly arise out of and are usually sustained by conscious intelligence; and these facts form the world above sense.58

In discussing Durkheim’s position on sociology, Bosanquet observes that every student of social affairs will have noted that social facts are not physical entities. There is some agreement here again between Bosanquet and Durkheim. Both recognize the ideality at the heart of social facts. Social facts are facts, but they are still intangibles. No statistical datum can be literally handled. All such facts attach themselves, as Bosanquet put it, to ‘an underlying relation of mind as the only unity which will make it intelligible.’59 Statistics, for example, see a moving social creature as if through a wall of holes. Bosanquet thus remarked that ‘to see the creature as he is ... you must get him into the open.’60 To do so is ‘hermeneutically’ to reconstruct the mind – although Bosanquet does not use the term hermeneutics. Without that interpretation and reconstruction all we have are mere fragments of reality. Thus, ‘with widening experience and deepening criticism, mind has become the centre of the experiences focused by sociology.’61 In Durkheim, we reconstruct the social whole to understand the particular event. What, however, did it mean to get a social entity into the open? The answer for Bosanquet was a form of hermeneutic interpretation of the cultural ‘mindfulness’ implicit within the action. Human action implies mind, and mind requires cultural interpretation. This is an approach which, even if expressed in slightly dated language, would still be well regarded by hermeneutic and interpretative theorists in the late twentieth century and beyond. For Durkheim, it is less straightfor-

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ward. Although he used statistics in works like On Suicide, the empirical detail only made sense in terms of the ontology of the whole. Where Bosanquet stressed mind within the facts, Durkheim stressed (qua empirical Kantian) the collective whole presupposed within the facts and that this ‘whole’ could be treated as an object. This strategy led Durkheim, in one direction, to positivism and social science – the whole is thus an ‘object’ distinct from the subject that cognizes it. In another direction, it also led him to almost absurd extremes of sociological relativism – in fact, a highly self-referential and reflexive relativism. Even the reasoning and structure of Durkheim’s own sociology had to be subject, by its own logic, to the structural determinism of a particular social whole. This self-referential structural determinism is peculiarly not that distant from later complex developments in French sociology and philosophy, in theorists like Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, or Bourdieu, where ideology, philosophy, or academic disciplines themselves become ‘social objects’ to be explained. In yet another direction, Durkheim stressed the ‘ideality’ of all social facts. This gives his theory a distinctly philosophical, in fact, ironically, idealist feel. It is not surprising, in this context, that many commentators, such as Talcott Parsons, saw Durkheim wavering and shifting between positivism and philosophical idealism. It is also not surprising to find Durkheim, near the end of his life in 1914, giving an enthusiastic reception to the philosophical pragmatism of William James and John Dewey. His enthusiasm was for aspects of the pragmatic, ‘actionbased’ conception of truth. Truth was that which could be used or ‘cashed out’ within a particular ‘social whole.’ This view ties in with his sociological relativism. His critical anxiety about pragmatism was over the virulence of its potential attack on the objectivity of scientific rationalism. Understandably – given Durkheim’s ontological schizophrenia – he did not wish the positivistic rationalism of scientific sociology to be undermined by pragmatism.62 For Bosanquet, Durkheim’s insistence upon social facts illustrates something worrying in the whole character of early twentieth-century sociology. Empirical facts and statistics alone tell us little, but ‘to focus a number of groups of fact, and coordinate the points of view which they substantiate, into the conception of a living being, with its individual character and spiritual utterance, needs more than a merely literary or statistical study.’63 This does not mean that the empirical world is dependent for its existence on cognition. There is a definite empirical dimension to Bosanquet’s idealism here. As Bosanquet com-

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mented, in one of his last works, the philosopher does not deny or alter ‘our world of fact and externality, but accepting for it all it claims of existence and reality, then passes on to interpret its conditions, and assigns its significance more profoundly.’64 Empirical description has a positive role to play. However, this should not lead the social investigator to forget that ‘no fact has a true social bearing except in as far as, sooner or later, it comes to form part of the world which a being capable of sociality and therefore intelligent, presents to himself as his theatre of action.’65 This connects with Bosanquet’s conception of appercipience.66 The error of sociology, in the way it was developing, including, to some degree, Durkheim’s, is ‘not in identifying the mind and the environment, but in first uncritically separating them, and then substituting not merely the one for the other, but wretched fragments of the one for the whole in which alone either can complete.’67 When philosophy deals with society, it has to contend with the problems that arise ‘out of the nature of a whole and it parts, the relation of the individual to the universal.’68 Durkheim has a partial answer to this criticism through his emphasis on social wholes. However, for Bosanquet, Durkheim’s collapse of individuality and rationality into a social holism, which could only be rendered scientifically, not only relied upon a thin and faulty empiricism (with a questionable distinction between observer and observed), but also appeared to reflexively refute itself through its own social logic. It is worth noting that the substantive contents of the debate in which Bosanquet engages with Durkheim are far from defunct in the social sciences. In many ways, idealist arguments like those of Bosanquet anticipate many of the critical interpretivist points made in the late twentieth century by those who have been uneasy with positivist-inspired social science.69 Philosophy or Sociology Gabriel Tarde and Durkheim had a number of heated public debates in Paris. Both men clearly disliked each other. In the final debate, in 1903– 4, they contested over the status of sociology vis-à vis philosophy. Lukes comments that Durkheim’s lecture argued that sociology was the daughter of philosophy (‘born in the womb of the Comtist philosophy, of which it is the logical completion’) but now it must specialize in studies of complex, concrete

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Andrew Vincent phenomena, rather than seeking abstract, general laws. Special disciplines must become truly sociological sciences, becoming infused with the ideas evolved originally by social philosophy.70

Sociology, in Durkheim’s estimation, had thus gone beyond philosophy. It had matured intellectually as a discipline. Sociology, also in Comtean mode, had transcended and could even account for the philosophical approach, as a stage of scientific immaturity. There was, in other words, a sociology of philosophy. For Durkheim, as also for Comte and Bosanquet, psychology also was inadequate. To study society, one had to have some grasp of collective ideation, collective morality, collective representations, and so forth. Such collective entities were discrete and unique and needed their own distinctive form of analysis – scientific sociology. Idealism, on the other hand, had a basic problem accepting the methods of positive natural science. For many commentators, the particular sciences – physics, biology, psychology, mathematics, economics, history alike – all assume that the object studied is distinct from and independent of our cognitions of it. This might not be so strongly the case with contemporary physics, but in Bosanquet’s time this assumption was widespread. The idea that sociology was a science of society that stood apart from, for example, moral beliefs and studied them as objects was something idealists found philosophically problematic for a number of reasons. First, the observer is actually involved in the process of observation and may modify the actual nature of the observed. The idealists were thus more directly sympathetic here to (what might now be known as) an interpretivist or hermeneutic approach. Second, social facts or statistics do not ‘speak for themselves.’ As Thoreau once said, it is not worth it to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Facts are not tangible entities in themselves. Rather, to gain any sense of meaning one has to grasp the fact in terms of what it embodies. Facts (especially social facts) embody ideas, values, and interpretive judgments. Third, for the idealist, it was a very basic detail of philosophical argument that in order to determine what something is we must think it. All thinking necessarily involves cognition. Therefore cognition is always integral in any thought about the nature of the world. This did not mean that the objective world was dependent on our cognition. We do not think the weather. The subject/ object relation is certainly viable, as long as we realize that it is premised on the prior unity of thought.

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For Bosanquet, social phenomena all embody ideals or dominant ideas which make sense of our experience and order our activities. Social reality can only really be explained via these dominant ideas. Society, per se, is seen as an organization of such ordered experiences. Idealists thus called society a concrete, as opposed to an abstract, universal. This did not deny the significance of the findings of empirical sociology, political economy, biology, or psychology.71 But these sciences, for Bosanquet, had to be considered in the more complete context of the rational agent, cognition, and evaluative judgment. Mind was crucial to the understanding of social existence. Empirical sociology and psychology were not therefore regarded as alien. They were complementary and contributed rich details to a larger picture, but they did not provide the larger picture. To grasp this larger picture one needed to be acquainted with the mind and/or dominant ideas of participants. To grasp the character of mind, in this larger context, requires philosophy. Social study therefore needs philosophy, and this, for Bosanquet, is what is fundamentally missing in Durkheim. There was, therefore, a need for a philosophy of sociology. Thus, for Bosanquet, ‘philosophy gives significance to sociology; sociology vitalises philosophy. The idea of mind is deepened and extended by the unity and continuity which sociological analysis ... vindicates.’72 Although the particular vocabulary and manner in which Bosanquet expresses his idea may sound slightly unusual to the contemporary ear, his problems, and the manner in which he criticizes positivist sociology, are not strange; in fact, they are profoundly familiar and still as pertinent today as they were a century ago.

NOTES 1 See, for example, the recent work by Sandra den Otter, British Idealism and Social Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); see also Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant, Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship: The Life and Thought of the British Idealists (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), chap. 6; also Andrew Vincent, ‘The Poor Law Reports of 1909 and the Social Theory of the Charity Organization Society,’ Victorian Studies, 27, no. 3, (1984): 343–63, and ‘Citizenship, Poverty and the Real Will.’ Sociological Review, 40, no. 3 (1992): 702–25. 2 As Bosanquet put it in one essay, ‘I have a high esteem for M. Durkheim, and I believe myself to have learned a great deal from him.’ Bosanquet,

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3 4

5 6

7

8 9

10

11

Andrew Vincent ‘Atomism in History’ in Social and International Ideals: Being Studies in Patriotism (London: Macmillan, 1917), 30. den Otter, British Idealism, 133. The Philosophical Theory of the State, in The Philosophical Theory of the State and Related Essays by Bernard Bosanquet, ed. William Sweet and Gerald F. Gaus (South Bend, IN: St Augustine's Press, 2001), 75; 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1923), 35. M. Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Philosopher and Sociology,’ in Phenomenology, Language and Sociology (London: Hutchinson, 1974), 95. For example, Durkheim engaged in heated critical exchanges with Tarde. For Tarde, social reality was composed of psychological states of individuals. For a fuller exposition of idealist understandings of evolution, see David Boucher and Andrew Vincent, A Radical Hegelian: The Political and Social Philosophy of Henry Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993), chap. 4; also David Boucher, ‘Evolution and Politics: The Naturalistic, Ethical and Spiritual Bases of Evolutionary Arguments,’ Australian Journal of Political Science, 27, no. 2 (1992): 87–103. The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 61 (4th ed., 20). The notion of natural selection does not adequately account for ‘the growth of sympathy together with the whole system of laws and institutions which have for their object the preservation of the weak,’ J.H. Muirhead and H.J.W. Hetherington, Social Purpose: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Civic Society (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1922), 41. Bosanquet admitted that there were sociologists who dealt with developed societies. Interestingly, however, Bosanquet remarked that he did not consider the Webbs’ activity as strictly sociological at all. He noted that they did not ‘attach themselves to the peculiar method and language of sociology.’ The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 61n.6 (4th ed., 20n.1). This judgment would be partially true, at the time, of some French and German sociology, which did have a distinct vocabulary and theoretical bent. However, the comment would be less accurate of British sociology, which was less self-consciously theoretical. However, Bosanquet considered that when dealing with contemporary problems in pauperism, charity, sanitation, education, and the like, sociologists had generally had little success. In fact, he considered that all sociologists had much to learn from those on the ground dealing with such practical problems – the Charity Organization Society was obviously his reference point here. Bosanquet has in mind Spencer’s discussion in The Principles of Sociology, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1893–8).

Social Holism and Communal Individualism 67 12 The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 63 (4th ed., 23). 13 Ibid., 64 (4th ed., 24). 14 Émile Durkheim, ‘Individual and Collective Representations,’ in Sociology and Philosophy (New York: Free Press, 1974), 1. 15 Tarde quoted in Steven Lukes, Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1973), 302. 16 William McDougall, Introduction to Social Psychology, 25th ed. (London: Methuen, 1943), 326. 17 The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 79 (4th ed., 42). 18 Ibid., 181 (4th ed., 173). 19 ‘Individual and Collective,’ 29. 20 Émile Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method (1895), 8th ed., ed. George E.G. Catlin (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1938), 3. 21 ‘Individual and Collective,’ 29. 22 The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 80 (4th ed., 44). 23 ‘Individual and Collective,’ 32. 24 Ibid., 34n.1. 25 He contended that ‘sociology does not have to choose between hypotheses which divide metaphysicians. It needs to affirm free will no more than determinism. All that it asks is that the principle of causality be applied to social phenomena.’ Quoted from Durkheim’s Rules in H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society (Sussex: Havester Press, 1979), 281–2. 26 ‘Individual and Collective,’ 29 27 The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 80 (4th ed., 43). 28 Ibid., 81 (4th ed., 44). 29 Rules, 103–4. 30 ‘Individual and Collective,’ 29. 31 Ibid., 26 32 ‘The Determination of Moral Facts’ in Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy (New York: Free Press, 1974), 59. 33 The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 70 (4th ed., 31). 34 Ibid., 73 (4th ed., 35). 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. (4th ed., 35–6). 37 Ibid. (4th ed., 36). 38 Ibid., 74 (4th ed., 36). 39 Ibid. (4th ed., 37). 40 Ibid., 71 (4th ed., 32). 41 Ibid., 72 (4th ed., 34). 42 Ibid., 76 (4th ed., 38–9).

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43 Bosanquet also raises the issues of comparative politics, which he thinks brings out the ‘conscious character of society,’ and thus he corrects the view that government is a natural phenomenon. 44 ‘Value Judgments and Judgments of Reality’ in Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy (New York: Free Press, 1974), 81–2. 45 Ibid., 84. 46 Ibid., 88. 47 Lukes remarks here that Durkheim’s neo-Kantian teacher, Charles Renouvier, had already prepared the ground for this interpretation. Renouvier contended that Kant’s theoretical reason was subject to practical reason, namely, will and choice. The basic categories of our thought are thus more contingent than other Kantians had suggested. Lukes remarks, ‘One can see that it is a relatively easy step from this to the sociological epistemology which Durkheim began to elaborate.’ Lukes, Émile Durkheim, 56–7. 48 ‘Value Judgments,’ 89. In many ways this is a strangely cosmopolitan remark from a sociological relativist. 49 ‘Value Judgments,’ 91. 50 Ibid., 92. 51 Ibid., 94. 52 Ibid., 95–6. 53 ‘Determination,’ 38. 54 Ibid., 51. 55 Ibid., 51–2. 56 Ibid., 55. 57 On the powerful impact of Renouvier’s Kantianism on Durkheim, see Lukes, Émile Durkheim, 54ff. 58 Bernard Bosanquet, ‘On the True Conception of Another World,’ in Science and Philosophy and Other Essays by the Late Bernard Bosanquet, ed. J.H. Muirhead and R.C. Bosanquet (London: 1927), 323–4. 59 The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 77 (4th ed., 39). 60 Ibid. (4th ed., 40). 61 Ibid. 62 On Durkheim’s reception of pragmatism see Lukes, Émile Durkheim, 486ff. 63 The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 81 (4th ed., 45). 64 The Meeting of Extremes in Contemporary Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1921), 2. 65 The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 81 (4th ed., 45). 66 See ibid., 167ff. (4th ed., 163). 67 Ibid., 84 (4th ed., 48). 68 Ibid.

Social Holism and Communal Individualism 69 69 One aspect of the philosophy of social science even in the last thirty years has been a deepening suspicion about the Comtean ideal of science, or, more generally, about natural method qua social theory. One path of doubt was articulated by Max Weber, namely that the reason of positive sciences was an ‘iron cage.’ This was taken up by many of the key early members of the Frankfurt school, who saw scientific reason as a form of repression. Bosanquet would have had no truck with this idea. However, other theories have articulated a more hermeneutically nuanced conception of reason. Modern philosophers of interpretation still see reason as a vital aspect of human existence, a means toward awareness and self-reflection, yet thoroughly embedded in the practices of everyday life. Bosanquet is at one with this view, which has been generally characteristic of the hermeneutic tradition from Dilthey through to Ricoeur and Gadamer. For many contemporary social philosophers, the human sciences, including social study, cannot follow the path of the natural sciences. For the human sciences, the observer and the observed, the language we use to describe something and the thing described, are implicated with one another. We are, as Charles Taylor has put it, ‘self-interpreting creatures.’ (See Charles Taylor, ‘SelfInterpreting Animals,’ in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 1: 45–76.) In politics and sociology, we have to deal with socially constituted actions. No categories that we use in social study are free of context and interpretation. Where Bosanquet differs from these modern exponents of the interpretivism in social study is that, first, he thinks that the ‘empirical’ can be integrated within philosophical study as a moment of understanding. The empirical fact may be transcended by reason, but it integrates the rich detail of empirical science within itself. Second, Bosanquet has a teleological theory of mind and social study. Thus, reason and mind have a telos. The bulk of modern interpretivists (and hermeneuticists) are idealists without any explicit teleology. Thus, Bosanquet would not have accepted the postmodern view that we simply make truth. 70 Lukes, Émile Durkheim, 312. 71 ‘The origin of forms of consciousness is one thing, their status and value in the life of the mind as a whole is another.’ Muirhead and Hetherington, Social Purpose, 44. 72 The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 83 (4th ed., 48).

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Logic

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3 Bosanquet and the Problem of Inference JAMES W. ALL ARD

In chapter 2 of Our Knowledge of the External World, entitled ‘Logic as the Essence of Philosophy,’ Bertrand Russell dismisses idealistic logic. In a passage that might be challenged in a number of ways, Russell says: Hegel and his followers widened the scope of logic ... In their writings logic is practically identical with metaphysics ... Hegel believed that, by means of a priori reasoning, it could be shown that the world must have various important and interesting characteristics, since any world without these characteristics would be impossible and self-contradictory. Thus what he calls ‘logic’ is an investigation of the nature of the universe, in so far as this can be inferred merely from the principle that the universe must be logically self-consistent ... And though he criticizes the traditional logic, and professes to replace it by an improved logic of his own, there is some sense in which the traditional logic, with all its faults, is uncritically and unconsciously assumed throughout his reasoning.1

There is no doubt that Russell intended the phrase ‘his followers’ to refer primarily to the British idealists of the late nineteenth century. By describing them as Hegel’s followers, Russell effectively dismisses the idea that they might have made any original contributions, and by criticizing Hegel, the philosopher they ‘followed,’ he denies that they made any contribution at all. Although widely held,2 this view is clearly mistaken.3 By almost any standard the British idealists made some contribution to logic. But what they contributed to logic pales in comparison with what they did for logic. Nineteenth-century British idealism grows out of the work of

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Immanuel Kant, the philosopher who first used logic as a model for understanding the transcendental faculties of the mind. Part of Kant’s reason for using logic in this way was that it was ‘to all appearances a closed and completed body of doctrine,’ one that, except for a few subtleties, was brought to perfection by Aristotle.4 Hegel echoes this sentiment.5 Yet by using logic as a model of the mind, Kant and Hegel changed its position in philosophy and made it a central concern. By following their lead the British idealists rejected the dismissive attitude toward logic that had infected the British tradition in philosophy since Locke and made it ‘the essence of philosophy.’ It is true, as Russell says, that they tended to identify logic with metaphysics. But this is what Russell himself did in a different way, and it has set the tone for twentieth-century metaphysics in the English-speaking world. The British idealists made philosophy safe for logic. One way in which they did this has been repeatedly noted – their attack on psychologism. Bradley was the pioneer here.6 By separating logic from psychology, he was able to define logic as a philosophical subject in its own right. Other British idealists followed him in this. But their rejection of psychologism does not exhaust what they did for logic. They also defended the usefulness of deductive logic. Their particular target was John Stuart Mill’s interpretation of deductive reasoning as a way of registering non-deductive inferences. By rejecting Mill’s interpretation, they showed that deductive logic is a serious subject in its own right, not merely a propaedeutic to philosophy nor a convenient way of recording non-deductive inferences. This is nowhere more apparent than in the work of Bernard Bosanquet, a philosopher who not only tended to identify philosophy with logic,7 but presented his views at length in four logic books, one in two volumes. In this chapter I will explore this aspect of British idealism by explaining the problem of deductive inference as set forth by John Stuart Mill. I will then turn to Bosanquet. Here I will discuss Bosanquet’s formulation of the problem, describe his conception of deductive inference, and then explain how this conception enables him to solve the problem of inference. Mill’s statement of the problem of deductive inference depends on his identification of deductive reasoning with syllogistic reasoning.8 Following Aristotle, valid syllogisms in traditional logic were divided into perfect and imperfect ones. Perfect syllogisms were thought to be self-evidently valid, while imperfect ones were shown to be valid by being reduced to perfect syllogisms. Since perfect syllogisms are syllo-

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gisms in the first figure, Mill takes as his example of deductive reasoning the following ‘syllogism’ in the first figure: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.9 In order for this syllogism to be useful, Mill thinks it must provide new knowledge. That is, it must be the case that those who know the premises acquire knowledge they did not previously have by inferring the conclusion. The knowledge contained in the conclusion must augment the knowledge contained in the premises. The problem is that Mill also thinks that for a syllogism to be valid, there must be nothing in the conclusion that was not already assumed in the premises. In other words, Mill thinks that (1) If an inference is legitimate, then its conclusion is asserted in its premises. But it is also true, he thinks, that (2) If the conclusion of an inference is asserted in its premises, then the inference is circular. Finally, he thinks that (3) If an inference is circular, then it is not useful. From these premises he concludes (by two hypothetical syllogisms) that (4) If an inference is legitimate, then it is not useful. Mill supports this conclusion by arguing that those who know the premises of valid syllogisms to be true also know their conclusions to be true.10 How, he asks, could anyone know that the major premise, ‘all men are mortal,’ is true? He answers that this could only be known by knowing that each individual person, including Socrates, is mortal. Mill here interprets general propositions as conjunctions of singular propositions.11 If this is correct, then one who knows that a general proposition is true will thereby also know the singular propositions of

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which it is the conjunction are true. But one who knows this will already know the conclusion. Accordingly, if a deductive inference is legitimate, then it is useless.12 At this point it is tempting to say something like – here Mill quotes Richard Whately, whose Elements of Logic revived the study of formal logic in nineteenth-century Britain – the object of reasoning is ‘merely to expand and unfold the assertions wrapped up, as it were, and implied in those with which we set out, and to bring a person to perceive and acknowledge the full force of that which he has admitted.’13 To this Mill replies that Whately ‘does not, I think, meet the real difficulty requiring to be explained, namely, how it happens that a science, like geometry, can be all ‘wrapped up’ in a few definitions and axioms.’14 Mill then goes on to argue that the problem can be solved by treating syllogisms as registers of non-deductive inferences. Rather than pursuing Mill’s solution further, however, I will now turn to Bosanquet. Bosanquet accepts the validity of Mill’s argument,15 and he takes it to formulate ‘the problem of inference.’ Although he states the problem differently in different places,16 the clearest statement, appropriately, is in his Essentials of Logic, a set of lectures on elementary logic. ‘The Problem of Inference,’ he says there, is something of a paradox. Inference consists in asserting as fact or truth, on the ground of certain given facts or truths, something which is not included in those data. We have not got inference unless the conclusion, (i.) is necessary from the premises, and (ii.) goes beyond the premises. To put the paradox quite roughly – we have not got inference unless the conclusion is (i.) in the premises, and (ii.) outside the premises.17

As this quotation indicates, Bosanquet sees both parts of the problem. The first is the problem of legitimacy. Solving it requires showing how the conclusion of an inference is justified by the premises of the inference. The second part is the problem of usefulness. Solving it requires showing how knowledge is increased by drawing a conclusion justified by the premises. The paradox is that solving the first seems to require the conclusion to be implicit in the premises, while solving the second seems to require that it go beyond and hence not be implicit in the premises. Bosanquet’s solution to this problem, unfortunately, is by no means clear. In his subsequent discussion of it in The Essentials of Logic he almost immediately qualifies his description of it by saying that ‘the

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necessity of the inference is more essential than the novelty.’18 A few pages later he says that ‘in a sense’ formally valid syllogisms are intended to be circular but without explaining in what sense they are.19 His other statements of the problem are for one reason or another equally obscure. As a result, Bosanquet’s solution to the problem of inference needs to be reconstructed from the role inference plays in his conception of logic. Bosanquet takes logic to be the study of thought that claims to be knowledge.20 Despite this description of the subject matter of logic, Bosanquet agrees with Husserl in rejecting psychologism. But Bosanquet also rejects Husserl’s contention that logic is the study of ideal entities.21 Logic must, Bosanquet claims, ‘take account of mental processes in a way which is not necessary for special sciences.’22 He holds this view because he takes logical necessity to be material rather than merely formal. As such it requires a mental operation in which the data from which the inference begins are conceptualized in a new way. ‘Thought,’ however, has a wider meaning than usual here. Instead of being contrasted with feeling and will as it sometimes is (by Bradley, for example), Bosanquet takes it to have an intuitive element and so to be present in all developed experiences, whether sentient conative, emotional, or cognitive.23 Logic, however, is concerned with only one aspect of thought, thought as limited to cognitions which are true or false. Bosanquet calls these cognitions ‘judgments.’ In fact, at one point he says that judgment is ‘the act of thought which is capable of truth and falsehood.’24 He follows Bradley in saying that a judgment is composed of ideas which are to be understood not as mental particulars but as symbols having general signification.25 They are universals, not particulars. In judgments these universals are referred to reality or have ‘objective reference,’ a term which Bosanquet may have been the first to use.26 In simpler forms of judgment – ‘This is hot’ for example – the reality referred to is present to the judger. By attributing its content to reality as present, a judgment attributes it to reality as a whole.27 Judgment is thus ‘the effort of thought to define reality.’28 This treatment of judgments allows Bosanquet to describe inferences as mediated judgments. An inference is a judgment asserted of reality on the basis of another judgment.29 Bosanquet’s conception of the universals contained in judgments, ‘concrete universals’ in his vocabulary, may be illustrated by his account of names. Names, of course, are words, but since words for

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Bosanquet only have meanings in sentences30 and since sentences that assert something – ‘propositions’ as Bosanquet calls them – are the verbal counterparts of judgments,31 his account of names is a good introduction to his treatment of concrete universals. In fact, he recommends Bradley’s discussion of judgments containing proper names as a good introduction to concrete universals.32 A name, Bosanquet says, ‘is a sign which rouses the mind to a set of activities having an identical element.’33 The identical element for Bosanquet is that it makes the hearer of such a word think of its reference. This object of reference is inevitably something which remains the same in different contexts. For example, the name ‘Caesar’ in a judgment like ‘Caesar crossed the Rubicon’ refers to an individual who is the same person in different relations, the relations of, say, being in Gaul, and returning to Italy.34 Caesar’s identity in these different contexts is a kind of unity, as personal identity is a kind of unity. The structure of Bosanquet’s Logic is defined by the development of judgments and then inferences with the universals they contain from simple to complex. Like Bradley, Bosanquet takes the subject matter of logic, thought which claims to be knowledge, to progressively develop through stages towards an ideal. He likens this development to evolution.35 Judgments and inferences evolve into more adequate forms as thought progressively defines reality. Bosanquet’s treatment of demonstrative judgments like ‘This is hot’ illustrate this. Making such a judgment presupposes understanding how the term ‘this’ acquires its meaning by being contrasted with ‘that.’ But since terms are only meaningful in judgments, understanding demonstrative judgments requires understanding a more complex form of judgments, the comparative judgment of which ‘This is hotter than that’ may serve as an example. Since comparative judgments are less dependent than demonstrative judgments on other forms of judgment, they have more content of their own and hence more fully define reality. They may be regarded as having evolved from demonstrative judgments.36 Bosanquet thinks that dependency relations between types of judgments define an increasingly complex series of judgments and eventually inferences which finally specify an ideal of human knowledge. One of the goals of logic, as he sees it, is ‘to analyze judgment into its principle kinds, and, as a necessary consequence, to trace their affiliation.’37 This, he finds, arranges judgments in a non-linear order of increasing adequacy in defining reality. Since different forms of judgments have different degrees of adequacy, Bosanquet’s conception of

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logic requires a criterion of adequacy. The criterion he chooses is the principle of non-contradiction. A form of judgment, he says, will not be adequate if it contradicts itself. This is the criterion that generates the development of logic.38 Bosanquet’s account of how his criterion does this has been widely misinterpreted. Russell, for example, in the passage quoted earlier, suggests that for ‘Hegel and his followers’ logic is concerned with what can be inferred about the nature of the universe from the fact that the universe is self-consistent.39 Bosanquet does, of course, think that reality is self-consistent, but his metaphysics is not simply a deduction of the significant consequences that follow from this fact. His use of his criterion depends on a number of substantive views as well. This is what enables him to say that ‘It is all one whether we make non-contradiction, wholeness or Individuality our criterion of the ultimately real.’40 Appreciating Bosanquet’s use of his criterion depends on understanding the way in which he thinks judgments can be contradictory and on how the removal of these contradictions generates the evolution of different forms of judgments and inferences. Some judgments are clearly contradictory. A conjunctive judgment of the form ‘p and not p’ is an obvious example. Judgments like this, however, are not Bosanquet’s primary concern. The sort of contradiction he has in mind is not internal to the content of a judgment taken in isolation. It is rather one between a judgment taken as self-contained and the rest of what is known. Thus he says, ‘By coherence or consistency we mean the consistency, so far as attainable, of the whole body of experience with itself. Nothing less would satisfy the law of individuality or the necessity of non-contradiction.’41 Once again, there are some obvious examples of how a judgment can be inconsistent with a body of knowledge. If a body of knowledge includes the judgment of the form ‘not p’ and I judge that p, then the body of knowledge contradicts my judgment. This is the sort of contradiction Bosanquet has in mind, although the contradictions he finds depend on an additional feature of his view of judgments, specifically the fact that judgments are attempts to define reality by means of general ideas. Consider, once again, the judgment ‘This is hot.’ The demonstrative pronoun ‘this’ refers to the point of reality which is asserted to have the quality of being hot. This point of reality, Bosanquet continues, is designated but seems not to be described. However, it is described since the word ‘this’ stands for an idea, although one with the distinctive feature that it can always be applied. The reason is

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that the idea of ‘this’ makes no distinctions between different aspects of reality. It is in virtue of this fact that Bosanquet regards the judgment ‘This is hot’ as contradictory. This is because ‘This is hot’ conflicts with the body of accepted knowledge which includes judgments, made under appropriate conditions, like ‘This is not hot’ or ‘This is cold.’ These judgments also attribute their contents to reality as a whole. They do so by means of the same idea, the idea that the pronoun ‘this’ stands for, but they predicate of it qualities contrary to the quality of being hot. Consequently, Bosanquet holds that through the failure of the ideas in ‘This is hot’ to explicitly restrict the judgment to some aspect of reality, the judgment contradicts other judgments. There is no problem resolving the contradiction in cases like these. The judgment ‘This is hot’ simply needs to be qualified so that it is confined to a different aspect of reality than the one described by judgments like ‘This is not hot.’ Doing so leads to contrasting affirmative judgments and negative judgments and by recognizing degrees of heat. This is how Bosanquet explains the transition from demonstrative judgments to judgments of comparison. Judgments of comparison, he says, ‘arise naturally out of the Demonstrative judgment of quality, because ... it is impossible to prevent the present subject from revealing differences within itself.’42 As this example illustrates, resolving contradictions between a judgment and the rest of knowledge qualifies the original judgment so that it can be incorporated into the body of knowledge. Doing so may, as in the present case, require a new form of judgment. As this process proceeds and more and more judgments are assimilated into the body of knowledge, the forms of these judgments become more complex and reality is more fully defined by them. The order Bosanquet finds here is not a simple linear one. Judgments evolve in different branches that finally unite in disjunctive judgments which in their fully developed form attribute to reality an exhaustive set of mutually exclusive alternatives. Judgments for Bosanquet always have grounds. When these grounds become explicit, judgments have evolved into inferences. Inferences, in other words, are judgments that contain part of their own justification. Since the ground of the judgment justifies the assertion of the rest of the judgment, Bosanquet defines inference as ‘the mediate reference of an ideal content to Reality.’43 By this he means that the grounds mediate or justify what is asserted in the remainder of the judgment. One of Bosanquet’s examples of a judgment that is an infer-

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ence is ‘The tide at new and full moon, being at these times the lunar tide plus the solar tide, is exceptionally high.’44 As Bosanquet describes it, this is the judgment, ‘The tide at new and full moon is exceptionally high,’ with the justification for the relation between the elements in it made explicit. The less explicit judgment, Bosanquet says, ‘pulls out like a telescope ... as it passes into inference.’45 In the course of this passage the reason why the judgment is asserted to hold becomes explicit. It is usual to think of inferences as ‘a mental process in which a thinker passes from the apprehension of something given, the datum, to something, the conclusion, related in a certain way to the datum, and accepted only because the datum has been accepted.’46 According to this definition, inference is a process of drawing a conclusion from premises. Bosanquet, however, has a rather different understanding of inference. ‘You obtain the most vital idea of Inference,’ he writes, ‘by starting from the conclusion as a suggestion, or even as an observation, and asking yourself how it is proved, or explained, and treating the whole process as a single mediate judgment, i.e., a reasoned affirmation.’47 This difference is partially the result of Bosanquet’s unwillingness to separate logic from epistemology. Inference as he conceives it ‘includes prima facie every operation by which knowledge extends itself. When by reason of one or two things you know, you believe yourself to have arrived at the knowledge of something further, you claim to have effected an inference.’48 Inference for Bosanquet is thus the assertion of a particular kind of judgment that extends knowledge. Like other judgments, inferences evolve by eliminating contradictions to form a non-linear sequence in which their necessity becomes increasingly explicit. Bosanquet likens three central inferences in this sequence to Aristotelian syllogisms in the third, second, and first figure respectively. The simplest, analogous to a third figure syllogism, is a form of enumerative induction, for example, a, b, c, d, are rational; a, b, c, d, are men; [Therefore,] Are men rational? or, Men may be rational.49 Here the individuals referred to in the first premise are conceptualized as men in the second premise. But the properties of being a man are not completely enough specified to guarantee that men are mortal. As a result, this form of inference fails to define reality completely. This is why Bosanquet expresses its conclusion as the disjunction of a ques-

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tion and a problematic judgment. Such a syllogism represents the starting point of an investigation, not its termination. It suggests that being mortal is connected with being human, but it does not prove that it is. Bosanquet thinks that enumerative inductions develop into other forms of inference along two different tracks. The more important track, comprising arguments analogous to all three figures of syllogisms, is described using a single subject matter in his Essentials of Logic. In its ‘third figure’ form it is Yesterday it rained in the evening. Yesterday smoke tended to sink. The smoke sinking may be ... a sign of rain.50 In this instance the inference is made on the basis of a single case, a case of sinking smoke followed by rain. From this case Bosanquet draws the conclusion that sinking smoke and rain may be causally linked. The next step in the investigation is analysing the individual referred to by the middle term (in this syllogism what occurred yesterday) in an attempt to strengthen the link between rain and sinking smoke. Here Bosanquet searches for a universal common to both rain and sinking smoke that will allow him to reconceptualize the data of the inference and thereby link sinking smoke and rain more closely. For this reason the concrete universals Bosanquet finds in judgments are especially important in inferences. ‘It is possible to proceed from content to content [in inference],’ he writes, ‘because the world as known consists of universals exhibited in differences, and the contents of which and to which we proceed are not shut up within their respective selves, but depend on the pervading identical character of which they are the differences.’51 Bosanquet thinks that the presence of concrete universals explains the legitimacy of inferences. He is fond of illustrating this with a story of Thackeray’s.52 In this story an ‘Abbé, talking among friends, has just said, ‘Do you know, ladies, my first penitent was a murderer’; and a nobleman of the neighborhood, entering the room at the moment, exclaims, ‘You there, Abbé? Why, ladies, I was the Abbé’s first penitent, and I promise you my confession astonished him!’’53 This story, with its implied inference, nicely illustrates Bosanquet’s conception of how inferences contain concrete universals. The universal in this inference is the one referred to by the descriptions ‘my first penitent’ and ‘the Abbé’s first penitent.’ The judgments containing

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these descriptions attribute different characteristics to the same person. The first attributes to him a shocking confession, while the second identifies him with a particular nobleman. In virtue of the identification of a common content in these two judgments, the quality attributed to the person referred to by the Abbé in the first may be transferred to the person identified as the nobleman in the second. This is only one type of inference, but it indicates Bosanquet’s way of using concrete universals to explain how one judgment can be asserted on the basis of another. It imposes a substantive requirement on legitimate inferences. It requires denying the principle ‘ex falso quodlibet’ – that any conclusion whatsoever follows from contradictory premises. Finding that a concrete universal will generally be present in sinking smoke and rain enables Bosanquet to transform the middle term in the first figure syllogism into a general term.54 This allows him to restate the inference as the ‘second figure syllogism’: Smoke that goes downwards is heavier than air. Particles of moisture are heavier than air. [Therefore] Particles of moisture may be in descending smoke.55 Although still not a valid inference, this syllogism tightens the link between sinking smoke and rain. But as its modal conclusion indicates, it fails to define reality completely. It says how it may be, but not how it is. In order to transform this syllogism into a valid inference, a hypothesis is needed to identify the middle term connecting sinking smoke and rain. Bosanquet represents the result of this development as a ‘first figure syllogism’: All particles that sink in the air in damp weather more than in dry, are loaded with moisture when they sink. Smoke that descends before rain is an example of particles that sink in the air in damp weather more than in dry. [Therefore] Smoke that descends before rain is loaded with moisture when it descends (and therefore in sinking is not accidentally a sign of rain, but is really connected with the cause of rain).56 The hypothesis introduced here as the first premise reveals that necessary connection between sinking smoke and rain. By means of the universal contained in this hypothesis, the premises and the conclusion of the inference are now connected. Conceptualizing sinking smoke as a

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cloud of particles connects it with rain by means of the hypothesis. The universal introduced in the hypothesis is thus the ground of the inference. This account of inference incorporates Bosanquet’s solution to the problem of inference. As his discussion of the ‘three figures of syllogisms’ shows, he takes inference to be the development of a concrete universal from the data with which an inference begins to its termination. The data are conceptualized in a judgment about matters of fact, as, for example, the judgment that it rained yesterday evening and smoke descended all day. This judgment develops through ‘three figures of syllogisms’ as the universal it contains becomes more fully articulated. In the process the original judgment is combined with the body of knowledge to make its ground explicit. ‘[E]very universal nexus,’ Bosanquet says, ‘tends to continue itself inventively in new matter.’57 This process is guided by the ‘natural working of intelligence’ which attempts to define the world completely by extending present knowledge and it is controlled by the requirement that this development avoid contradiction. In the process the certainty attached to knowledge as a whole is extended in new directions as knowledge grows.58 In discussing this, Bosanquet distinguishes between the inference as a mental process of ‘growing insight’59 and the insight itself.60 Considered as a process the inference is obviously in time. Bosanquet describes it by saying ‘We meet the data with a judgment when they are laid before us, and we modify this judgment continuously throughout our inference.’61 The last judgment in this process is no different from any of the others; it simply marks the point where the inference terminates. It is a judgment like ‘The tide at new and full moon, being at these times the lunar tide plus the solar tide, is exceptionally high,’ a judgment that makes its grounds explicit. The temporal process of inference is the transformation of judgments into a form in which their grounds are more explicit. It has stages marked by Bosanquet’s versions of the ‘three figures of syllogisms.’ The process begins with noting the circumstances under which a conjunction occurs, finding a law covering its occurrence, and exhibiting that law as a ground for the judgment. This process involves two components, a new insight or insights, and a concept (i.e., a concrete universal) unifying the data with which the inference began that makes this possible. It is with this concept that novelty enters the inference. The concept unifies the data in a new way, either by being a new concept and so reconceptualizing the data or by

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being the expansion of an existing concept.62 An example of a new concept is the concept of particles of air introduced into the second figure of the above syllogism. An example of an expanded concept is the concept of ‘bright’ in the inference ‘Oxygenated blood is bright; the blood in arteries is oxygenated blood, therefore the blood in arteries is bright.’63 ‘Bright,’ Bosanquet says, acquires a new meaning in this process and it is a matter of convenience whether a new term is required to express the expanded meaning. Since the introduction or expansion of a concept is a process, a mental process, logic must take account of such processes. But the meaning introduced is not mental, and this is what saves Bosanquet from psychologism. The meaning is an identical element abstracted from temporally distinct mental occurrences.64 As such it is not in time. Its role in the inference is to conceptualize the data in a new way, to ‘colligate’ it, to use the term Bosanquet borrowed from William Whewell.65 This makes possible the insight contained in the inference. In the first figure syllogism considered above, this insight is that it must be the case that smoke descending before it rains is loaded with moisture when it descends. The insight is not seeing the explanation of why smoke descends; it is seeing that it must be the explanation. In this respect Bosanquet’s account of inference bears some similarity to inferences to the best explanations, except that for him it is inference to the only explanation. ‘All inference,’ Bosanquet writes, is within a connected system, and consists in reading off the implications which this system, construed as one with the whole of knowledge so far as relevant, imposes upon some of its terms. The inference is founded on our acceptance of the joint system so arising. Its necessity may be expressed ... in the formula ‘This or nothing.’66

The insight that this must be the explanation of the phenomenon in question is the expansion of knowledge that completes the inference. It is not a temporal or a psychological process. ‘As intellectual insight,’ Bosanquet says, ‘its parts are inward to each other and exempt from temporal succession.’67 As an insight, it refers an ideal content to reality on the basis of another content. To use the previous example, the inference ‘The tide at new and full moon, being at these times the lunar tide plus the solar tide, is exceptionally high,’ affirms that the tide at new and full moon is exceptionally high on the basis of the fact that the tide at new and full moon is the lunar tide plus the solar tide. Since the rela-

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tion between these facts is what is grasped in the process of growing insight, it is not itself in time. Because of his treatment of inferences as mediated judgments, Bosanquet insists that the conclusion is not properly separable from the rest of the inference. (But he admits that practical considerations sometimes require detaching it.) It is, however, presented as separable when the inference is analysed as an argument. The point of the analysis is to exhibit the necessity of the insight that terminates the process of inference. It does this by exhibiting the conclusion as the logical consequence of the premises.68 Syllogisms are examples of such analyses. Bosanquet is quite explicit about this. ‘I have always understood the Syllogism,’ he says, ‘as considered in logical theory, to be an analysis of inference, itself subsequent to the inference, and bound to exhibit the actual nexus of reasoning which we are able to take as having been employed.’69 As a result, he accepts (1), ‘If an inference is legitimate, then its conclusion is asserted in its premises.’ But he denies (2), ‘If the conclusion of an inference is asserted in its premises, then the inference is circular.’ The fact that an analysed inference is circular does not show that the inference itself is. The inference would be circular only if its conclusion were present in the data from which it commenced. But if this were the case, then there would be no need to search for a reconceptualization of the data. Without this reconceptualization there would be no inference to the only explanation and hence no expansion of knowledge, an expansion which, for Bosanquet, is essential for inference. In this intricate and complex way, Bosanquet defends the importance of deductive logic against Mill and many other writers in the British empiricist tradition. This extended defence, which occupied Bosanquet throughout his long and productive career, was immensely important in rehabilitating logic in the face of the attacks on it from representatives of the British tradition from Locke through Mill. It was a crucial step in the evolution of logic as a subject from being a completed body of knowledge to becoming the essence of philosophy.

NOTES I would like to thank Gordon Brittan, Phillip Ferreira, Sanford Levy, Sheyar Ookerjee, William Sweet, and two anonymous referees for the University of Toronto Press for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. I would

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also like to thank Sheryar Ookerjee for giving me a copy of his paper ‘Bosanquet on Bradley on Inference,’ Bradley Studies, 10 (2004): 33–41, from which I learned a great deal. 1 Our Knowledge of the External World, rev. ed. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926), 47. 2 For example, there is no discussion of Bosanquet or Bradley in William and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). This is noted by Stewart Candlish is his wonderful description of the Bradley stereotype in ‘The Truth about F.H. Bradley,’ Mind, 98 (1989): 331–48. See esp. 331–2. 3 Nicholas Griffin, ‘F.H. Bradley's Contribution to the Development of Logic,’ in Philosophy after F.H. Bradley, ed. James Bradley (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1996), 195–230. 4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin's, 1929), B viii. 5 G.W.F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, part 1 of The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, tr. William Wallace, 2nd ed., rev. and augm. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), 318, 183. 6 See, e.g., Richard Wollheim, F.H. Bradley, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), 17–42. 7 ‘Life and Philosophy’ in Bernard Bosanquet: Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 1883–1922, 3 vols, ed. William Sweet (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2003), 2: 560–4, reprinted in vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Bernard Bosanquet, 20 vols, ed. William Sweet (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1999), xxxix– lx, first published in J.H. Muirhead, Contemporary British Philosophy, 1st ser. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1925), 60–3. 8 I have taken this discussion of Mill, with a few slight revisions, from James W. Allard, ‘The Essential Puzzle of Inference,’ Bradley Studies, 4 (1998): 61– 81; see 64–5. 9 Although a very old example of a syllogism, this argument is not in fact an Aristotelian syllogism, since it contains a singular term. 10 I have borrowed this formulation from John Skorupski, John Stuart Mill (London: Routledge, 1989), 106–7. 11 Mill offers different interpretations of universal categorical propositions elsewhere. 12 Mill, A System of Logic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973/4), 183–7. 13 Ibid., 185, quoting Richard Whately, The Elements of Logic, 2nd ed. (London: J. Mawman, 1827). 14 A System of Logic, 185.

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15 Logic, or The Morphology of Knowledge, 2nd ed., 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 2: 205. 16 It is not obvious that it is always the same problem. 17 Bosanquet, The Essentials of Logic: Being Ten Lectures on Judgement and Inference (London: Macmillan, 1895), 137. 18 Ibid., 138. 19 Ibid., 149. Elsewhere he is even more emphatic. ‘Novelty or discovery,’ he says, ‘is an accident of inference.’ Logic, or The Morphology of Knowledge, 2: 8. I am indebted to Sheryar Ookerjee for pointing out to me the importance of this passage. 20 ‘Logic as the Science of Knowledge,’ in Bernard Bosanquet: Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, ed. William Sweet, 3 vols (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2003), 2: 300, originally published in Essays in Philosophical Criticism, ed. Andrew Seth and R.B. Haldane, with a preface by Edward Caird (London: Longmans, Green, 1883), 68. 21 Bosanquet, Implication and Linear Inference (London: Macmillan, 1920), 140–9. 22 Ibid., 149. 23 Bosanquet, Principle of Individuality and Value (London: Macmillan, 1912), 55, 60–1. 24 Logic, 1: 67. 25 Ibid., 1: 68. 26 Ibid., 1: 71; ‘Life and Philosophy’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 2: 566, in Muirhead, Contemporary British Philosophy, 66. 27 Logic, 1: 73. 28 Ibid., 1: 95. 29 Ibid., 2: 1. 30 The general acceptance of this view by British idealists is emphasized by Anthony Manser, Bradley’s Logic (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983), 60– 2. 31 The Essentials of Logic, 82. 32 Principle of Individuality and Value, 40. 33 Logic, 1: 12. 34 Bosanquet, Essays and Addresses (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1889), 165–6. 35 Logic, 1: 1. 36 Ibid., 1: 108–9. 37 Ibid., 1: 84–5. 38 Principle of Individuality and Value, 31. 39 Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, 47. 40 Principle of Individuality and Value, 68.

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Logic, 2: 267. Ibid., 1: 108. Ibid., 2: 1. The Essentials of Logic, 138. Ibid. L. Susan Stebbing, A Modern Introduction to Logic, 7th ed. (Evanston: Harper and Row, 1961), 211–12. The Essentials of Logic, 138. Implication and Linear Inference, 2. Logic, 2: 51. The Essentials of Logic, 147. Logic, 2: 2. The Essentials of Logic, 140–1; Implication and Linear Inference, 26. Implication and Linear Inference, 26n. Logic, 2: 86–7. The Essentials of Logic, 147. Ibid., 148–9. Logic, 2: 182. Bosanquet makes this statement about universals in inductive inferences, but on his account it seems to me to be true of universals in all inferences. Implication and Linear Inference, 3. Logic, 2: 4–5. He makes the same distinction with other judgments as well (ibid., 1: 81–4). Here again I am indebted to Sheryar Ookerjee. Ibid., 2: 2. Strictly speaking, this is a description of Bosanquet’s ideal of inference rather than of all inferences. Bosanquet acknowledges that what is already known may nevertheless be inferred and as a result does not contain novelty (ibid., 2: 8). I have neglected such cases, since the problem of inference does not arise for them. Implication and Linear Inference, 27. Logic, 1: 4–5. For Bosanquet’s comments on Whewell, see ‘Logic as the Science of Knowledge,’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 2: 302, in Muirhead, Contemporary British Philosophy, 71; Logic, 2: 155–7, 226–30. Implication and Linear Inference, 10. Logic, 2: 4. I take this to be the sense in which Bosanquet thinks a syllogism is intended to be circular. Bosanquet, Knowledge and Reality (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1884), 314.

4 Bosanquet, Idealism, and the Justification of Induction P H I L L I P F E R RE I R A

In what follows I would like to consider some aspects of what is seen by many as an important but frustrating topic – the justification of inductive inference. And, specifically, I want to examine how some of the great idealist writers – especially Bernard Bosanquet – viewed this matter. To begin, though, let us recall the difficulty as described by David Hume.1 The problem, simply put, is that since all inductive inference must assume the truth of the principle ‘the future will resemble the past’ (or ‘same cause, same effect’ or ‘once true, always true’), and given that this inductively derived principle is not – at least on the empiricist view – a ‘truth of reason,’ any justification it may have can arise only if the following conditions are met: (a) there are prior cases of the future resembling the past, and (b) the proposition ‘the future will resemble the past’ is already known to be true. But, since the truth of ‘the future will resemble the past’ is precisely what is at issue, no non-circular justification of our inductive inferences can be found. And, in the end, the crucial principle behind all factual inferences – what has been called the ‘principle of induction’ – is merely assumed. It is for this reason, then, that Hume is forced to say that inductive inference proceeds upon not logically defensible grounds but something akin to animal faith. However, what needs to be emphasized is that without an independent logical justification of the principle of induction the very ideas of ‘evidence’ and ‘probability’ go by the boards. Indeed, Hume’s problem is not just that we can have no certain knowledge of the external world. It is the far more serious claim that without the guaranteed truth of ‘same cause same effect’ (or some similar principle), no number of experiences of y following x can be justifi-

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ably construed as ‘inductive support’ for the claim that this relation will hold good in other times and places. Hence, without the logical justification of the principle of induction, even our probable inferences are undermined. Hume softens the blow somewhat when he tells us that, as a matter of fact, we cannot help but assume the principle of induction’s truth. (Our conviction is, it would appear, the result of the contingent evolutionary process.) However, Hume equally insists that we do not – and cannot – have any guarantee that the principle is not false. And the challenge of Hume’s empiricism for subsequent writers has been to provide for this fundamental principle of inductive inference the logical vindication that our deepest intuitions suggest should be possible. Kant, Hegel, and Inductive Inference But how did the modern idealist writers attempt to meet this challenge? Perhaps the most famous response to Hume is that provided by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s solution to the ‘problem of induction’ is, though simple, quite ingenious.2 Briefly put, Kant attempts to vindicate the principle of induction by showing that there exists within the mind of each of us a primitive system of concepts that, taken together, describe a regular, law-governed world wherein the future must, in all relevant respects, resemble the past, and wherein the same cause will, again in relevant respects, always be followed by the same effect. And when Kant tells us these concepts are ‘primitive’ he means to be taken seriously. These primitive conceptual forms are seen by Kant as wholly necessary; and they constitute what he calls the ‘a priori concepts’ or ‘categories’ according to which all experience must proceed. They, along with the a priori intuitions of space and time, guarantee that – if we are to apprehend phenomena at all – we shall apprehend them under these conditions. In other words, our belief that ‘the future will resemble the past’ (or ‘same cause same effect’) is – because implied by the categories – one that we cannot not assume. And the reason why we must assume it, Kant tells us, is not because it has contingently evolved and constitutes a merely psychological fact of human apprehension; rather these categories (and the principles we derive from them) are a priori in the strongest sense; that is, they are conditions of any possible experience. We cannot possess an experience in which they are not operative, because what we understand as ‘experience’ – even the minimal possible experience – must be built upon them.

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But how does Kant attempt to establish all of this? Here is where his famous ‘transcendental method’ comes into play. To put the matter as simply as possible, Kant argues that the presence of the categories and the a priori intuitions of space and time can be proved through an intellectual experiment. Try to conceive of an experience in which space and time are not operative and you will find, Kant tells us, that you cannot. Even the minimal experience we can conceive will be of objects that assume both a spatial and temporal position. But most important, when we analyse the conditions of our minimal apprehension of objects in space and time we shall see that there is already at work a kind of ‘necessary synthesis’ – an organization of sensuous data according to unifying principles that are completely uniform and regular. And it is just these principles that Kant identifies as necessary to any possible experience, and hence ‘categorial.’ Now, if we understand that any description of this framework of a priori principles would involve propositions that are both factual and necessary, we shall understand Kant’s notion of ‘synthetic a priori’ propositions. ‘Every event has a cause,’ ‘All objects are spatially and temporally located’ – these are examples of the kind of principles Kant’s a priori concepts (categories) imply. And it is also among these that we must include ‘The future will resemble the past,’ ‘Same cause, same effect,’ or any other version of the principle of induction. Of course, that there are tremendous ambiguities in the Kantian response to Hume hardly needs mention; and some of these we shall consider below. But first I would emphasize the fundamentally different nature of Kant’s approach to these difficulties. When Hume tells us that we have no choice but to assume ‘same cause, same effect,’ his claim is a psychological one. Hume is making an empirical observation on human experience. And, even though he acknowledges that we cannot, as a matter of psychological fact, fail to believe in this principle, he can provide no assurance that the principle is not false. For Hume it is, so far as we can tell, quite possible that some other principle could have developed. And, for Hume, it could be the case that – though we must believe in this principle – the principle is, nevertheless, mistaken. Kant’s own method, however, seeks (at least at its best) to be purely logical. On Kant’s view, the categories are not to be understood as the contingent psychological forms of human experience only. They are understood as wholly necessary since they represent the bedrock of any experiential apprehension of objects in space and time. And because of this primitive logical status, we may rely upon their opera-

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tion in any creature to whom we might attribute ‘experience.’ If there is some sort of ‘experience’ that does not assume these forms, it would be for us, Kant says, ‘as good as nothing.’ However, that Kant was not always consistent in putting forth this view was admitted by many. And this lack of consistency gave rise to extensive criticism in both Germany and Great Britain.3 For many writers who followed Kant – I shall primarily concern myself with Hegel here – the Kantian project, though sound in many respects, falters for (at least) two reasons.4 First, Kant repeatedly finds himself unable to maintain a strictly logical account of his categories (what has been called the ‘transcendental’ account). Hegel tells us that, time and again, Kant falls into a manner of speech that sees ‘sense’ and ‘understanding’ as distinct faculties; and, while their union and mediation by imagination (yet a third faculty) are necessary for knowledge to arise, this union is artificial. It is said to be ‘artificial’ because the individual faculties of sense and understanding retain, on Kant’s description, their ultimate discontinuity and indifference towards one another. The ‘synthesis’ of the data of sense becomes, on the most common reading of Kant, the mere superimposing of the understanding’s categories upon the given and external data of sense. And both sense and understanding, in the absence of a genuine synthesis, retain their individual natures. However, according to Hegel, the failure to effect an authentic union between the contents of sense and the a priori concepts leads to a critical problem. If the a priori forms of the mind (the categories) do not penetrate – do not equally belong to – the nature of perceived things, then they must (despite Kant’s intentions) be understood as characteristic only of our psychological being. But if the a priori concepts are merely psychological forms of the mind, they must be condemned as contingent, and Kant has failed to answer Hume’s challenge. This follows, Hegel claims, because if the a priori concepts are merely psychological forms of human experience, the possibility arises that the given matter of sense could, for creatures possessed by a different psychological makeup, be synthesized according to a different set of principles. Hence, it is argued, we must not be misled by Kant’s language when he suggests that the a priori forms of experience are imposed upon a sensuous matter that is wholly external to them. Any a priori forms of the mind must, according to Hegel, equally be seen as the a priori forms of real objects and events. But by taking this view we are forced to confront a further difficulty. If we overcome the persisting duality of the Kantian analysis

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and realize that the categories are not just the forms of the mind but that they belong equally to the structure of reality, we are forced to acknowledge that the threads of necessity indicated by the categories cannot be limited to a mere twelve forms. To see that the necessity of the categories belongs to both thought and reality forces us to acknowledge that an unlimited number of a priori principles may, in fact, be discovered. This is, I suggest, a crucial aspect of the Hegelian reworking of Kant. And what we must realize here is that, once we establish that our transcendentally justified principles constitute a kind of ‘knot’ between finite minds and the larger universe, we introduce into these principles an impurity of sorts. To put the matter differently, the fact that we cannot grasp the totality of the real universe of objects and events implies that those a priori principles, which are part and parcel of that universe, remain for us partially unknown. While their ‘necessity’ (in one sense of the term) can be established through transcendental argument, it is a necessity that entails its own completion through a more encompassing set of principles. When it comes to the justification of our belief in the law-governed regularity of the universe, then, we find Hegel attempting to redo the Kantian project with the following differences: (i) The search for a priori forms begins at the most fundamental level; that is, instead of beginning with ideas like ‘causality’ and ‘reciprocity,’ Hegel starts with an even more basic ‘condition of any possible experience’ – the belief that something ‘exists’ or ‘is.’ (ii) From this rudimentary beginning Hegel attempts to ‘deduce’ further principles – that is, he attempts to show that an increasingly complex and comprehensive system of principles is implied by even the most basic category. (This system will, it should be understood, include but go beyond the Kantian categories, and in doing so it will also comprise any formulation of the principle of induction.) (iii) Hegel will attempt to carry forward this ‘deduction’ to the point that it can be shown that the necessity that was originally seen as belonging to the category of ‘Being’ applies to and influences, in one way or another, every experiential content. What is crucial to understand about the Hegelian analysis, however, is this: first, the threads of necessity that Hegel identifies – his categories – are not understood as ‘optional’ in the sense that experiencing subjects different from ourselves could be said to possess different modes of categorial apprehension. Since the categories exist as both forms of the mind and forms of reality, such conceptual variation is impossible. And second, these categories must be seen as exhaustive in

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that no element of experience can be construed as perfectly and completely beyond their grasp. This does not mean that Hegel thought he could deduce the existence of his fountain pen, or that the pen’s shape and colour were necessary from the beginning of time. What it does mean, though, is that experiencing subjects always presuppose a nexus of necessary connection; and, while many of our actions are, indeed, contingent (in the sense that they ‘could have been otherwise’), after the various contingent decisions in life are made, they receive their intelligibility through their participation in the one experiential nexus which is law-governed, regular, and ineluctable. I would conclude this brief consideration of Hegel by pointing out that Hume’s problem is solved by him in what is essentially the same manner it is for Kant. And, on this issue, we may see Hegel’s rationalistic idealism as a radical and, some would say, more consistent Kantianism. That is, Hegel attempts to vindicate our natural confidence in inductive inference by showing that the law-governed universe described by the principle of induction is a condition of any possible experience. And since, on Hegel’s view, it is meaningless to speak of possibilities completely beyond experience, we must also acknowledge that the principle of induction is true in any and all possible worlds. Bosanquet’s ‘Formal Postulates of Knowledge’ Now, I would be the last to suggest that the view described here is without its difficulties. However, rather than pursue the controversies that surround Hegel’s development of these ideas, I would now like to consider how Bosanquet (who sees his position as largely in agreement with Hegel) treats these matters. And we may first notice that, unlike his German predecessors, Bosanquet does not talk about ‘categories’ per se; rather, he speaks of the ‘formal postulates of knowledge.’ While he claims that there are many more formal postulates than he can discuss, Bosanquet focuses in his Logic on what he sees as the four most primitive. These he describes as (i) the law of identity, (ii) the law of contradiction, (iii) the law of excluded middle, and (iv) the principle of sufficient reason.5 We should note immediately, however, that the principle of sufficient reason contains as one of its ‘subforms’ what Bosanquet calls at various times the ‘law of Causation,’ the ‘law of the Unity of Reality,’ and the ‘law of the Uniformity of Nature,’6 all names for the principle of induction.7 And taken together, these laws and principles constitute, for him, the minimal structure of an experienceable world

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of objects and events. What must be stressed here, though, is that Bosanquet (like Hegel) does not see these laws and principles as mere ‘forms of thought.’8 They are, rather, ‘axioms of experience,’ by which is meant that they characterize both our thought about things and the things themselves. As we read: They [the formal postulates] cannot therefore be taken in a definite form as hypotheses or axioms antecedent to experience. Experience may be said to begin with the certainty that ‘there is somewhat’; and the postulates of knowledge do but express in abstract form the progressive definition of this ‘somewhat.’9

We may put this idea differently, I think, by saying that all experience (or at least all conscious experience) must begin with the judgment ‘something is.’ And when we analyse what is contained in this most primitive assertion we shall find that we have on our hands (at least) the four principles adumbrated above. However, let us consider more closely what is meant in calling these principles formal postulates of knowledge. As Bosanquet tells us, We class them [the formal postulates] not as principles of intelligence apart from experience, but as principles of science or of rational experience as such. Discoverable by analysis in every minutest portion of its texture, and capable of being regarded by an easy abstraction as essential to its existence.10

There are at this point several claims that demand our notice. First, Bosanquet’s formal postulates of knowledge are for him truly ‘categorial’ in the sense already discussed – that is, they are conditions of any possible experience which describe characteristics of both the mind and the experienced object.11 Most significant for our purposes, though, is the idea that among these formal postulates belongs the ‘principle of sufficient reason’ – the belief that ‘every consequent has a ground from which it necessarily follows’ – and its ‘subform’ the ‘law of the uniformity of nature.’ We should always understand that Bosanquet sees the ‘law of the uniformity of nature’ (principle of induction) as immediately derivable from the most basal logical principles, and that this law is, for him, just as necessary as the primitive notions of identity, contradiction, and excluded middle.12 But how can Bosanquet defend such a claim?

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We shall consider below the general line of argument by which Bosanquet assimilates the principle of induction to the more primitive logical conceptions. First, though, I would mention that Bosanquet sees the most often appealed to test by which we determine what is and what is not a contingent judgment as largely worthless. While it is often argued that we can easily ‘conceive’ of a world in which the uniformity of nature does not obtain (thereby demonstrating the wholly contingent status of the inductive principle), Bosanquet sees such arguments as confused. When such claims are made, what is usually meant by ‘conceiving’ the non-uniformity of nature is really the imaginative picturing of objects behaving in an erratic and inconsistent fashion. But what Bosanquet points out is this: such ‘picturing’ is hardly what constitutes clearly conceiving a state of affairs.13 To actually conceive a state of affairs as obtaining (in any meaningful sense) would involve going well beyond the act of juxtaposing images before one’s mind. To clearly conceive a state of affairs is to expand the meanings of the various constituents within this state of affairs so that their relations to one another are made fully explicit.14 And when this process is taken very far, one often discovers that many things seen by our picture thinking as possible are, in fact, incapable of obtaining; and conversely, some things that are seen by this same picture thinking as merely contingent are, in fact, necessary elaborations of our most certain truths. More important for our purposes, though, even the ‘conceived’ (i.e., ‘pictured’) state of affairs that is said to demonstrate the contingent status of the principle of induction cannot be entertained, Bosanquet believes, without assuming the principle’s truth. But let us consider why this is so. The kind of ‘picture test’ that condemns the principle of induction as merely contingent usually involves seeing an object (or objects) behaving differently at different times. But, for Bosanquet, to say that object A behaves in fashion X at time T1, but in fashion Y at time T2, and in fashion Z at time T3 presupposes first of all that there is an identifiable object (an ‘identity-in-difference’) that persists through T1, T2, and T3. And it is his belief that the mere awareness of such continued identity on the part of the object already implies the presence of the principle in question. This follows on Bosanquet’s analysis because object recognition itself presupposes the uniformity of nature. That is, since the recognition of any cluster of perceived characteristics as occupying various time slices entails their uniform cohesion, we find that this perceived togetherness turns on the assumption that the universe is law-governed and unified in its operation. The ongoing and regular relations

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between the internal characteristics of our persisting object(s) are, on this view, a primitive manifestation of the uniformity of nature (the principle of induction) in that they reveal the regular attraction and repulsion of attributes as conceived under a single conceptual identity. (Indeed, what we are ordinarily inclined to see as ‘causal regularity’ is merely an extension of this same principle.) And if we were to purge completely from our awareness this sort of uniform cohesion among attributes, we would be left with such sheer chaos as to be unable to select from the sea of changing sensations any recurring object or event – that is, we would be without any intelligible experience whatsoever.15 Bosanquet and the Synthetic a priori We find, then, that Bosanquet’s procedure follows closely up to this point that of the German idealists. These formal postulates are for him both a priori and, since ‘about the world,’ synthetic. But since the idea of a synthetic a priori assertion is alien to so many philosophers, let us consider more closely how Bosanquet views these assertions. One of the persisting objections to the existence of principles that are both necessary and factual (i.e., synthetic a priori) turns on the idea that if a judgment is genuinely ‘about the world’ it will undergo (eventually) some sort of revision. But, the criticism continues, if a judgment is revised at all it cannot be ‘necessarily true.’ And, since experience has shown that all genuinely factual judgments have at some point been revised, we may conclude that there are no synthetic a priori truths. What we should realize, though, is that Bosanquet’s conception of the factual but necessary element in experience (the synthetic a priori) is such that it concedes to the empiricist the point he is making here. Bosanquet admits some revision and modification of even the most necessary of truths to be unavoidable;16 and he is the first to acknowledge – indeed, to insist upon – the fact that concepts that once strike us as completely true can thereafter be rejected as inadequate approximations to some notion, we often know not exactly what. But let us consider this idea in relation to Bosanquet’s formal postulates of knowledge. We must always bear in mind that, for Bosanquet, there exists a crucial difference between experience’s presupposed ideal and any judgment made by this or that finite subject. What we presuppose and what we explicitly think are not, for him, quite the same thing. As we read:

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A synthetic judgment a priori would be a judgment, not tautologous, but yet so determining the whole arrangement and cohesion of our experience that if it were untrue we should have to give up the pretension to connected intelligence. Whether any [actual] judgment can be known as having this character is doubtful; but it is the logical ideal to which every proved fact must approximate, and is fairly realized in such judgments as those of which ... we learn to find their contradictory inconceivable.17

But what can we learn from this passage? First, that Bosanquet believes that we assume the reality of – but do not explicitly think – pure synthetic a priori principles; and that these perfectly necessary principles are what constitute the logical ideal of all experience. It is clear throughout Bosanquet’s writing that the judgments that come closest to this ideal are his formal postulates of knowledge. And, he tells us, this ideal is ‘fairly realized’ in these principles in that we cannot conceive of an experience from which they are absent. What I would now like to consider, though, is why, for Bosanquet, it is ‘doubtful’ that any actual judgment we make fully measures up to this ideal. As we have already learned, we may on Bosanquet’s view justifiably see as necessary and universal (and in this sense, a priori) any judgment whose denial would upset or preclude the basis upon which it is made. Put differently, since all assertions assume the existence of what we may call a minimal systematic universe, any judgment that denies this minimal universe must be seen as necessarily false (and any principle so denied as necessarily true). Of course, it is just such a minimal universe that Bosanquet’s formal postulates of knowledge seek to describe.18 But we should also understand that our apprehension of these postulates in any finite act of judgment is, according to him, always ‘flawed’ or ‘impure.’ And our apprehension is flawed because our grasp of the necessity of these principles is indeterminate and incomplete. That is, since the necessity in question is not merely formal – but is also of the nature of reality – we are forced to say that every such a priori principle points beyond itself to its concrete manifestations.19 However (and this is the point to be emphasized), unless and until these concrete manifestations are brought fully into our apprehension, the formal principle that they fall under remains for us partially opaque. And, since the full meaning of any principle – formal or material – can never be perfectly realized until seen as that which runs through and systematizes its concrete manifestations, it is (relatively) unstable and subject to correction, restatement, and modification (at

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least in the sense that our understanding of the principle will seek to indefinitely deepen itself). But, in an effort to understand this idea, let us recall a point made in our earlier discussion. There we examined Hegel’s claim that if the categorial forms of experience (formal postulates) belong to reality as well as the mind we must see their necessity as somehow bound up with and penetrated by the entirety of the natural order – an order whose workings are never wholly transparent to us. What this means, though, is that we could have complete insight into the necessity of some categorial form – some formal postulate of knowledge – only if we had complete insight into the actual matter which this form systematizes and penetrates. But (again) since we are finite knowers whose awareness of the larger unfolding universe is always limited, we may explicitly possess only a partial (and thus flawed) apprehension of how this categorial (formal) necessity manifests itself either in physical reality or the sphere of subjective knowledge.20 Thus, so far as our actual thought processes are concerned – that is, so far as we explicitly apprehend it – both truth and necessity (logical and physical) are always a matter of degree. And, while we may understand that certain truths are necessary (in the sense that no experience could deny them without contradiction), the fuller comprehension of this necessity is something we may only progressively, and never fully, grasp. Necessity This idea constitutes what is, perhaps, the most distinctive aspect of Bosanquet’s logical theory. And to illustrate his view more fully let us consider the following passage from his Principle of Individuality and Value: It is often thought that the criterion [which justifies our inferences] should belong to a special class of principles [i.e., the formal postulates of knowledge] which are distinguished by the peculiarity that they cannot be denied without being affirmed by the denial. Such a principle, it may be said, is expressed by the assertion that there is a self-consistent reality; for to say that there is no self-consistent reality (or even that reality need not be self-consistent) implies a degree of insight into the nature of things and the conditions of the assertion regarding it, which in turn involves at its basis the postulate of a reality with a coherent nature of its own – the only principle intended to be denied. [However] It is a mistake to regard these

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as logically peculiar cases – case[s] of a priori truth – and therefore to rely wholly on the formal refutation of scepticism which they seem to afford, neglecting the fuller account of non-contradiction as the principle of the ‘more’ of positive experience and of its self-maintenance.21

What we must notice here, then, is that, while Bosanquet believes that there exist principles that are ‘necessarily true’ (in the sense that they are assumed even in the minimal conscious experience), he does not see them functioning as some of their proponents claim. As we read further down, This distinction, which seems to confer a special guarantee upon principles of the type in question, is in truth merely apparent, and due to our insufficient perception of logical content. The proof of everything that is proved is ultimately one and the same, namely that if it is to be denied, nothing can be affirmed. And as it is impossible to deny everything, a proposition so guaranteed must be allowed to stand ... [But] A certainty thus grounded is really and in the spirit of logic greater in proportion as the whole of experience is fuller and more coherent; for the difficulty of denying everything obviously becomes enhanced as everything becomes a more completely apprehended cosmos with a fuller self-maintenance.22

This is, I suggest, a striking comment. And it is striking because, though it exhibits Bosanquet’s acceptance of both formal postulates of knowledge (as synthetic a priori principles) and the transcendental arguments used to establish them, he sees these principles – so far as they remain abstract – as possessing less logical force than what we may call our ‘fuller lived experience.’ Put differently, Bosanquet wants to argue that, while we must certainly give these sorts of a priori principles their due, they do not in themselves – that is, in the absence of a ‘fuller lived experience’ – constitute the ultimate justification of our belief in the laws of logic, the principle of induction, or anything else.23 Now, we have already learned that Bosanquet sees our apprehension of even the most primitive formal postulates as, in one sense, subject to revision. But what he is suggesting here is that to the extent that they remain for us abstract and indeterminate, our formal postulates cannot really do the work required of them; and this is because the abstract apprehension that a principle functions as a ‘condition of any possible experience’ is not the same thing as the concrete grasp of the system of experiences that falls under that principle.24 So far as we

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entertain principles without an awareness of their concrete determinations, they remain for us mere ‘extracts’; and, since their truth-making conditions lie largely outside themselves, they are subject to a kind of reservation. For example, if I engage in Kant’s transcendental thought experiment and find that I cannot conceive of any experience that does not contain condition X, this is a very different thing from fully understanding the role of all Xs in the larger universe.25 And it is only to the extent that I can consciously grasp those Xs as being systematically required by that universe that the abstract principle begins to carry conviction.26 But let us pursue this idea by considering again the law of the uniformity of nature. While we have learned that Bosanquet sees this principle as a formal postulate of knowledge whose necessity can be transcendentally established, we must realize that it receives its determinate meaning only in our actual experience of instances of causal interaction. Indeed, every ascription of a causal relation between different entities or events constitutes a concretization of the principle. And it is only our experience of a formal principle’s systematic function (and not its mere abstract formulation) that provides it with its actual logical force. As we read, The fuller ranges of experience with reference to which we say that the truth is the whole, reveal themselves as not separate in kind, but as a further confirmation and manifestation, in its complete growth and maturity, of the truth which in its undifferentiated form presents itself in abstract principles such as their denial involves their affirmation. So called ‘contingent’ truth might in this sense be held truer and more fundamental than what passes as ‘necessary.’27

But why truer than the principle whose denial would ensnare us in contradiction? Because, if ‘the truth is the whole,’ then it is only insofar as the whole is experienced in its concrete determinations that any abstract principle (which always refers to those determinations) could be understood. Put otherwise, it is at the end of experience (and not the beginning) that the meaning of anything we apprehend can fully come into our possession.28 And thus the significance of even the most restricted awareness that ‘something is’ could only be appreciated in its entirety by a mind that has penetrated the ‘form of eternity’ – that is, a mind that has grasped the ‘universe-as-a-whole.’ We may say, then, that the full and precise nature of the necessity that accrues to any for-

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mal principle cannot be known until the experiential universe has unfolded; and it is thus only after the contingent material postulates have made their appearance that we may completely understand the necessity that lies at their foundation. But let us consider one more result of this doctrine. Given Bosanquet’s view of the relation between abstract a priori principles – the formal postulates of knowledge – and their manifestation in my fuller experience, should I ever sense a discrepancy between an abstract principle and some larger sphere of experience, I would sacrifice (without hesitation) the abstract principle and not the larger experience. For example, if I were confronted by the choice between the truth of some abstract idea whose internal logic seemed initially compelling, and the rejection of, let us say the entirety of my aesthetic experience, I would always choose to preserve my aesthetic experience over the abstract principle. But why is this? Simply because the cost of impeaching my aesthetic experience as a whole is greater than that of overturning the abstract principle. In such a case I would maintain the larger sphere of lived experience and revise my formulation of the abstract principle, because it is the whole of experience that I take – that I cannot help but take – as the ultimate arbiter of truth.29 I would also mention that there would be, for Bosanquet, no loss, but only gain, in such a confrontation between abstract principle and lived experience. And there would be no loss because the abstract principle would in this situation betray its element of untruth.30 Thus it is only through this sort of conflict between abstract principle and concrete experience that I shall come into possession of a principle that is a truer – a more accurate – formulation of itself. We may put this same idea differently by saying that it is the whole of reality that provides all a priori principles with their actual content. And, as our conscious grasp of this whole becomes more expansive, we shall find that our a priori principles – at least as originally understood – will (to some degree) undergo refinement and modification. Material Postulates and Contingency With the understanding that formal axioms constitute the presupposed ideal of all knowledge, we may now more easily grasp what Bosanquet means by a ‘material’ postulate. And we may offer a minimal definition of a material postulate as a judgment whose denial does not contradict what we have called the ‘minimal systematic universe.’ As we are told,

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material postulates are ‘not necessary to the existence of experience, or involved at all events equally’; and their difference, Bosanquet insists, is ‘plainly a matter of degree.’31 But what exactly is meant by this? Though Bosanquet’s fuller understanding of the role of contingency in experience is beyond the scope of this essay, we should remember that he sees the necessity of the formal postulates as – while being always operative as the ideal of knowledge – never perfectly manifesting itself in our actual assertions. As we have seen, some judgments come very close to exhibiting the complete necessity that is assumed by the formal postulates. But, so far as they are explicitly apprehended by us, they contain an element (however slight) of the contingent and unknown. We should also realize that many judgments (e.g., those of the natural sciences) – though clearly material – can possess a level of necessity that approaches that of the formal postulates (again, at least as they are understood by us). And we may measure the degree of necessity found in material postulates (as well as their conformity to the formal axioms) by asking the following question: How much must be given up if this judgment is denied? So far as the denial of any judgment takes down with it the structure of our fuller lived experience, so far (on Bosanquet’s view) do we see that judgment as necessarily true. While some material judgments are so deeply entrenched within experience that they may be seen as only marginally less necessary than the formal postulates themselves, others may be seen as so peripheral as to have little riding on their truth or falsity. And it is just this idea, then, that constitutes the doctrine of ‘degrees of necessity’ and what Bosanquet calls the ‘reciprocal implication of the formal and material postulates in one another.’32 But we are also told that the formal and material postulates stand in the relation of teleological significance to one another. And, as inadequate as my comments must be, something still, I think, needs to be said about this idea. We should always realize that Bosanquet sees the progress of knowledge as residing primarily in our increased capacity to discover within our material assertions the systematic necessity assumed by the formal axioms. And thus ‘necessity’ in knowledge is something that (largely) awaits our discovery.33 There is, however, a further and more difficult conception of necessity that is at work in Bosanquet’s writing. The necessity that knowledge seeks is not, to his thinking, completely preexistent and merely waiting to be found. While he believes ‘nothing that happens is without an aspect of law,’ Bosanquet does not believe that we live in a fully ‘closed’ or ‘completed’ system.34 The universe is,

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for him, permeated by contingency in the sense that many things that occur ‘could have been otherwise.’ And many material postulates that are now seen as possessing a high degree of necessity may have been, at some point in the history of the universe, quite contingent (in that they had not yet integrated themselves into the larger structure of reality). There is a real sense, then, in which Bosanquet is willing to see material necessity as having evolved over time. But this brings us to an extremely difficult aspect of his thought. Throughout his work, Bosanquet makes it clear that he sees both the material universe and our specifically human experience as striving to manifest an ethical ideal.35 That is, Bosanquet believes that the formal postulates of knowledge (as described by logic) constitute but a partial expression of some deeper ‘nisus’ towards unity and completeness. And it is this nisus that ultimately constitutes the ‘end’ or ‘purpose’ of the material universe and its various inhabitants. The problem this poses for logic (or the theory of knowledge), however, is this: any description of knowledge that fails to take this purpose into account will be faulty. And it will be faulty because the part (or parts) within reality can only be explained by the whole. This is why logic (or epistemology) must continually give way to a more encompassing metaphysical account; and this is why metaphysics, as a merely intellectual activity, must, in the end, give way to an experience that includes but transcends it. This is not to say that genuine knowledge cannot be had (on the contrary). But it is to remind us that all knowledge – at least within its own boundaries – carries an irremediable defect that can never be fully overcome. Conclusion That these doctrines constitute, from our contemporary perspective, logical heresy there can be no doubt. Bosanquet challenges some of the most guarded articles of faith that have been bequeathed to us by both rationalist and empiricist traditions. He rejects the rigid distinction between not just analytic and synthetic judgments, but also necessary and contingent truths. And in doing so, he equally rejects the idea that there is an absolute difference between inductive and deductive inference. For Bosanquet, all knowledge receives its justification through the system of experience as a whole. But since this system is itself unfolding in time, we must acknowledge its teleological character and the provisional nature of even our most certain truths.

106 Phillip Ferreira NOTES 1 Hume’s discussion of this difficulty is found primarily in his Treatise of Human Nature, part III, section II; and in part IV, sections I and II. See also his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, chaps IV and VI. Hume’s Philosophical Works, 4 vols., ed. T.H. Green and T.H. Grose (London: Longmans, Green, 1874–5). 2 These matters are discussed in the ‘Transcendental Analytic’ of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp-Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), 102–281. My account has been deeply influenced by Edward Caird. See his Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant (Glasgow: Maclehose and Sons, 1877), esp. 254–75, 370–405, and the two-volume Critical Philosophy of Kant (Glasgow: Maclehose and Sons, 1889), esp. 314–19, 426–30, 478–88; see also Hegel (Glasgow: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1883). 3 The British reaction to Kant, though usually seen as beginning with J.H Stirling’s Secret of Hegel (London: Longmans, Green, 1865), is best exemplified by the work of Edward Caird (see note 2). Of great importance too are T.H. Green’s commentaries. See Thomas Hill Green, Collected Works of T.H. Green, 5 vols, edited and introduced by Peter Nicholson (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1997), 2: 2–81. Also of great value is Andrew Seth’s (later Seth Pringle-Pattison) The Development from Kant to Hegel (London: Williams, 1882), and ‘Philosophy as Criticism of Categories,’ in Essays in Philosophical Criticism, ed. R.B. Haldane and Andrew Seth (London: Longmans, Green, 1883). Significant too is the work of Caird’s student, John Watson. See Kant and His English Critics (Kingston, ON: Stacey and Walpole, 1881), and The Philosophy of Kant Explained (Glasgow: Maclehose, 1903). 4 Relevant passages from Hegel would include (at least) the following: Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959), 61–3, 191–9, 541–50; Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences: Logic, trans. William Wallace (1873) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), sections 41–3, 123–8, 237–8 (and related Zusätze); Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences: Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace (1894) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), sections 415, 420, 444, 448, 467 (and related Zusätze); also Faith and Knowledge, trans. W. Cerf and H.S. Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), 67–96. 5 Bernard Bosanquet, Logic, or The Morphology of Knowledge, 2nd ed., 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 2: 212–18. 6 Ibid., 2: 217, 223. 7 While I have not addressed this issue in the text, it should be noted that Bosanquet saw the more common formulations of the principle of induc-

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8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15

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tion as deeply flawed; and this is because propositions like ‘the future will resemble the past’ and ‘same cause, same effect’ too easily suggest that nature’s uniformity consists in what he called the ‘mere repetition of similars.’ That is, we take ‘A causes B’ as meaning that when a thing of a certain kind A occurs, another kind B will always follow; and that the various occurrences of A (or B) are essentially indistinguishable from one another. For Bosanquet, however, there is much more to nature’s uniformity than this. And, while beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to understand that Bosanquet saw the idea of system as that which most accurately captures the true uniformity of nature. (‘Once true, always true,’ Bosanquet thought a more accurate statement of the principle of induction.) In a system – though there occurs a repetition of similars – each repetition is, to some degree, influenced by other instances of itself. For example, when understood within the context of a system the various occurrences of A–B are each somewhat different. And their difference is determined by (among other things) where in the series of A–Bs a given instance occurs. This matter receives its fullest treatment in chaps 2, 3, and 4 of The Principle of Individuality and Value (London: Macmillan, 1912). However, see also: Science and Philosophy and Other Essays by the Late Bernard Bosanquet, ed. J.H. Muirhead and R.C. Bosanquet (London, 1927), 65–75; Implication and Linear Inference (London, Macmillan, 1920), 63–9; The Essentials of Logic: Being Ten Lectures on Judgement and Inference (London: Macmillan, 1895), 165–6; and Logic, 2: 174–84. Essentials of Logic, 50–1; Logic, 2: 210, 305. Ibid., 2: 209. Ibid., 2, 216. Ibid., 2: 271, 305, 309. Ibid., 2: 218. Ibid., 2: 229–30. I have considered this idea in greater detail in ‘Why the Idealist Theory of Inference Still Matters,’ in Current Issues in Idealism, ed. Paul Coates and Daniel D. Hutto (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), 235–65. It may be objected that the argument in the text does less work than it thinks. For example, the sceptic could respond here by saying that he/she can easily imagine fires that are sometimes hot, sometimes cold, and sometimes neither hot nor cold. And, while it may be true that a limited uniformity in nature is required in order to apprehend different kinds of objects and events (things like ‘fire’ and ‘heat’), we may, with complete consistency, understand nature’s uniformity as going no further than this. Thus (the sceptic may further claim) it is perfectly intelligible to think of a world of

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16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

objects and events that behaves in a largely chaotic and unpredictable fashion. The idealist response would, I think, run as follows: The uniformity of nature that is conceded as necessary for the minimal apprehension of objects (or events) cannot be arbitrarily truncated. The principle of uniformity that allows us to recognize different occurrences of objects (or events) must not cease to function when it extends beyond a primitive awareness of objects; rather it must be seen – on pain of self-contradiction – as permeating all of reality. If we deny the principle’s operation at what we may call the ‘macro level’ (the level at which, for example, fires cause heat), so too must it be denied at the ‘micro level’ (the level required for primitive object recognition). Logic, 2: 230. From ‘Logic as the Science of Knowledge’ in Bernard Bosanquet: Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 1883–1922, ed. William Sweet, 3 vols (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2003), 2: 303, originally published in Essays in Philosophical Criticism, ed. Haldane and Seth, 72). Principle of Individuality and Value, 267. Implication and Linear Inference, 124–5. Logic, 2: 234. Principle of Individuality and Value, 46–7. Ibid., 49; my emphasis. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 48. Implication and Linear Inference, 149–50. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that, for Bosanquet, it is not the number of occurrences that constitute the depth of our apprehension of this necessity. One occurrence – if seen in its systematic relation to the larger universe – is capable of providing greater understanding than many. See Science and Philosophy, 65–75; also Implication and Linear Inference, 63–9, Essentials of Logic, 165–6, and Logic, 2: 174–84. Principle of Individuality and Value, 51–2. Logic, 2: 301. Principle of Individuality and Value, 48–51. Logic, 2: 228. Ibid., 2: 216. Ibid., 2: 233. It has been pointed out that Bosanquet appears to assimilate two things that for most contemporary philosophers are importantly distinct: knowledge and explanation. For example, it might be said that I can know that objects fall to earth but not know why they fall. In response, I would say

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that Bosanquet certainly does acknowledge this difference. That he sometimes appears not to is because he sees the difference as one of degree (and not kind). On Bosanquet’s view, much of my assertive awareness of objects falling to earth resides in the ordinary categorical judgment – a judgment that purports to describe mere fact. And so far as my awareness remains within the confines of such judgments it is seen by him as a limited – and thus defective – form of something higher. Put differently, mere knowledge (as expressed by the categorical assertion) always presupposes explanation; and mere knowledge – in being torn out of a larger experiential context – always points beyond itself to a context which would, if made explicit, transform it into an element within an explanation. Explanation thus constitutes the fuller (and more adequate) statement of what is (less adequately) stated in knowledge. 34 Logic, 2: 218. 35 Ibid., 2: 218–22; Principle of Individuality and Value, 138–42; The Value and Destiny of the Individual (London: Macmillan, 1913), 100–9. This is particularly true of his ‘Gifford Lectures.’ Central to the argument of both The Principle of Individuality and Value and its companion volume, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, is the idea of a supra-intellectual ‘Individuality’ that functions as the ultimate criterion of knowledge.

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Aesthetics and Education

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5 Bosanquet, Aesthetics, and Education: Warding off Stupidity with Art ELIZABETH TROTT

Bosanquet wrote no definitive treatise on education, but, like most philosophers, he was not without views about the past, present, or future state of the system of education of his times.1 He was interested in all the usual questions about education: the sociological impact of curriculum (e.g., Should Latin be abandoned in favour of health studies to help improve the sanitation conditions of the poor?); the aims and ends of education; and the importance of moral lessons and the pedagogical methods best suited to the development of good character and civic virtues in the young. Bosanquet was a popular choice for addressing these issues in public lectures and talks. Among those published were two small papers of special note. One has the unlikely title ‘We Are Not Hard Enough on Stupidity,’ in his book Some Suggestions in Ethics.2 The other, ‘Artistic Handwork in Education,’ in Essays and Addresses,3 celebrates the moral and aesthetic values that can be inculcated by learning how to do craftwork of various kinds. In combination, these two papers address most of the important questions in education noted above – goals, methods, curriculum, and character. We begin with his paper ‘We Are Not Hard Enough on Stupidity,’ a title that the serious researcher might overlook because its simplicity suggests a polemic rather than an argument. Political correctness and shifts in discourse disincline educators today from using such blunt words in discussing methods and goals of education. In an era before political correctness, sensitivity to multicultural needs, and confidence building, Bosanquet could bluntly say, ‘our social administration is full of things that are stupid.’4 He could write: The recent ‘fashion in reflective thought has been hostile to what is stigmatised as intellectualism.’5 But what does he mean by stupid? He is not referring to intellectual

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capacity, for, he observes, some are less endowed than others but not stupid.6 He means a lack of intelligence. Intelligence, for Bosanquet, is a special quality, much more than the mere power of reason. To be intelligent one must be alive, responsive, awake to interests. Stupidity means being insensitive, unappreciative, unadaptive.7 ‘It is inability to see.’8 Stupidity is not ignorance. Ignorance is about facts or truths I do not know. Stupidity is blindness to values, or ‘to facts or truths or consequences in as far as they carry values.’ Stupidity is not knowing what matters. A system (the human being is a system) may be highly rational in its own internal coherence, but it may fail ‘in responsiveness or adaptiveness.’9 Censurable stupidity has a moral element. Those afflicted with it are unresponsive to the values of life.10 Bosanquet has more in mind though. Unresponsiveness to values is not a general affliction or character trait of indifference; it is more specific in focus. Stupidity is indicated by a ‘want of interest or scrupulousness,’ a lack of attention to ‘minute obligations of one’s work.’11 We shall return to this curious association of details and values when we consider his paper on education and handicrafts. A few more of Bosanquet’s observations will help reveal the overall thrust of his concerns. To avoid the condition of ‘ultimate and superlative stupidity,’12 undoubtedly a benchmark of the failure of education, Bosanquet demands that the educated person recognize that virtue is knowledge. This Platonic declaration is not just a scholarly incantation. For, unlike Plato, he did not think all knowledge was virtuous. (In fairness to Plato, he did distinguish between a grasp of reality and the use one might make of one’s educational acquisitions once one has crossed over the Divided Line.)13 Bosanquet does not see a preoccupation with vicious or trivial interests as a matter of a strong intellect with a weak will. He thinks the intellect of such a man lacks intelligence; that is, it lacks the ability to see an orderly whole as a goal of life and suffers from the inability to recognize pervading discrepancies and internal conflicts within itself. For example, a hypocrite who neither knows he is one nor recognizes the damage his hypocrisy inflicts on others lacks intelligence. He or she may be a brilliant mathematician and still lie about personal achievements to his or her colleagues and/or sell theories to the enemies, and in spite of these actions, can happily accept a salary from the public trust. There are details of life as a mathematician that he or she just does not grasp as being part of a greater whole.14 Bosanquet recognizes the academic distinction of distinguishing

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facts from values; otherwise, stupidity could not be the end result of an education. Education must be such that in acquiring knowledge we are also learning values as ‘characters, qualities, of systems of facts’ – knowing facts in a certain way.15 Our feelings towards states of affairs signify the ‘difference which the recognition of value makes in our whole state of being.’16 If we are, for example, morally stupid, we are in trouble. In being so we are blind to the order and harmony that is the centre and foundation of the mind’s structure and habits, and thus blind to facts and truths of this moral system.17 The harmonious mind has no moral guilt. Let us expand this observation. According to Bosanquet, thinking and living with a feeling of wellbeing require knowledge of moral facts and truths. This knowledge associated with systems of other interrelated bodies of knowledge gives those systems characteristics and qualities that make a world of human experiences what they are. Science running free is, in modern vernacular, a loose cannon. Science in service of universal human needs is a system of facts that are valued and promoted. Education must alert students to the interrelations between bodies of knowledge and the fragile shield that values create between an understanding of good and the condition of ignorance or stupidity that can unleash evil in the world. If one is blind to that larger world of systems of knowledge as intrinsically connected to good, one is stupid, full of ‘intellectual ignorance’ and ‘aesthetic dullness.’18 Bosanquet charmingly distinguishes between what he calls pagan values – temperance, justice, and courage – and Christian values – faith, hope, and charity. (One can only presume he was eager to reach many and offend few.) Wisdom is the connection of virtues with systems and so is not one of the virtues. Bosanquet does not think that the occasional breach of conventional rules is a sign of stupidity. Everyone makes mistakes. (He also rejects the narrow moralist as a candidate for stupidity, though such a moralist is surely a candidate for shortsightedness.) Not recognizing morality as a principle of unity that is instrumental to the world at large is the far worse condition and a telltale sign of stupidity (though he does not really specify how the educator would actually test for the development of the above moral insight as one’s schooling progresses). The key is to know virtues as determinants of which facts are important and relevant to the problem that one has.19 On the one hand, we need some understanding of general or universal ideas. On the other hand, we need knowledge of the details of the situation. In his paper ‘The Practical Value of Moral Philosophy,’ he

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writes: ‘Theory, a mere theory, is to us something akin to a fiction; it is a logical contrivance by which the interconnection of facts is rendered possible.’20 He follows with this thought: ‘Ethical theory cannot either lay down the rules for conduct or pronounce judgment on particular actions.’21 Bosanquet’s reason for this stems from his belief that complete knowledge of a system or event or fact is a goal, not a measurable state of affairs. As long as another perspective can be offered, as long as a theory can be challenged, then complete certainty is not possible. The theory will have limited application. The ‘entire context which makes up the individuality of the moral agent’ is a particular action. Of most importance is the part that lies within the agent’s own mind which ‘cannot possibly be known to anyone else, and is indeed but imperfectly known to himself’ and therefore cannot be subsumed under a particular theory.22 Furthermore, anyone who claims to share the moral agent’s experiences and confidences cannot be sure that he or she is not the ‘victim of the moral agent’s self-deception.’23 In effect, these observations stand as a strong condemnation of the principle that one learns moral behaviour by reciting catechisms or any similar childhood ritual under threat of punishment. The echoes of Plato cannot be ignored in Bosanquet’s remarks for it was Plato who wisely observed that nothing learned under compulsion stays with the mind).24 Ethics, with the help of metaphysics, can establish general ends and principles of human nature, and general theories can be expressed, but Bosanquet does not think that one can generate universally recognized moral solutions to particular problems through the application of rules and laws. Moral philosophy can express ideals which may affect human action, but the criticism of ideals can do so as well. Bosanquet does not think you can ‘make a man out of ethical theories.’25 We may gain general truths, role models, visions of excellence, but no rule will handle all of the complicated details with which an individual moral conscience may have to grapple. If blindness misreads these principles or interprets them narrowly and substitutes ‘a more mechanical for a more spirited conception,’ this is ‘not only a stupid, but a dangerous thing.’26 Bosanquet’s stand on the particularity of moral problems and their solutions is also an educator’s nightmare. When teachers try to help children develop into moral beings – those who see and are not stupid – and are faced with forty potentially stupid children in a classroom, a moral rule, theory, or policy has a strong appeal. Bosanquet does not advocate a dependency on moral rules. In light of his visions, the advantage of small classes becomes overwhelmingly obvious.

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Bosanquet has great faith in the potential of education. ‘If there is a panacea for stupidity, surely it should be here. It [education] is the special and principal engine for awaking interests and proportioning them to values, so that the area of life may have some tolerable chance of being duly represented in our value-field.’27 But he says that he cannot offer a method, and suggests that the institution of education – the system itself – is not connected to other social systems that it is intended to serve. ‘Education is often blamed as the actual creator of stupidity, and if it is in spirit obscurantist, or utilitarian, or narrowly specialist, that may very well be the case.’28 Though he has not tried to offer a philosophical model of pedagogy in his concerns to ward off stupidity, Bosanquet does leave us clues as to what kind of activities do contribute to the development of the intelligent individual. These are activities which demand attention to detail, encourage the development of a vision of the greater system, and offer a venue for our feelings to become connecting links between the recognition of value and the difference that very recognition makes in our whole state of being.29 The individual teacher cannot possibly deal with each moral issue independently, though Bosanquet would urge the activities enumerated above. Edith Schell has carefully reviewed the links between Bosanquet’s focus on individual differences and his metaphysics of knowledge in her paper ‘Bernard Bosanquet’s Theory of Moral Education.’ She admires the spirit of particularizing each moral problem, but notes its impracticality.30 Schell finds much that is good in Bosanquet’s account – the avoidance of rewards and punishments (with rewards and punishments students acquire the wrong motives to behave well), the promotion of discussion, the attempt to understand all of the facts involved – but she worries about what the real subject matter of moral education will be.31 Bosanquet’s answer, I would suggest, beyond his promotion of exposure to universal values and well-known sayings which act as recurring beacons of civility, lies in the arts. If we are to see the particular value in knowing a fact within a system, within a network of systems, if we are to ward off stupidity, we will give our students maximum exposure to the arts and all of the minute details of their execution. As high-minded as that sounds, Bosanquet does not just mean viewing, or hearing, or having lessons on great works of art. Listening to someone recite a moral rule does not make a child behave well or understand a moral choice and what is involved in making such a

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choice. Similarly, looking at great works of art and listening to great compositions are passive activities that may please the self but do not necessarily promote the development of an intelligent mind – one that recognizes the moral pervasiveness of informed decisions. Bosanquet’s article ‘Artistic Handwork in Education’ addresses the critical role that actual participation in the making of art has in both aesthetic and moral development. The teacher may not find a panacea for moral ills in Bosanquet’s remark, ‘It is an accepted principle among educational reformers that some form of handicraft should be introduced into all elementary education, and into continuation schools.’32 Bosanquet does have grounds for his advocacy of exposure to minute details and of paying scrupulous attention to one’s work. Bosanquet is not advocating the benefits of mechanical handicrafts as much as he is those handicrafts which involve artistic qualities and assist in the recognition of beauty. There is method in his passion for aesthetic education and its role in preventing stupidity. As was mentioned earlier, Bosanquet observed that stupidity involves both intellectual ignorance and aesthetic dullness. Art, firstly, deals directly with human life and passion, not only in the representational qualities of artistic content, but also in what is ‘done and felt in making and admiring a finely designed picture frame.’33 Bosanquet does not expect all students to become great artists, but there are many artistic skills associated with fine art that can be taught and many beautiful things that can be made. A picture frame involves appreciation not only of the final product, but also an appreciation of beauty in nature. Experience informs our attitude toward life. Through such experience, the particular will extend beyond itself, as we begin to see beauty in the world.34 This kind of seeing is the same kind that will expand the moral conscience when we experience a personal moral dilemma and begin to see it as part of the network of human relations. When we learn to carve an oak leaf on a piece of wood, we begin to see more oak leaves, to spot their subtle differences, to grasp the complexity of detail in the natural world. In working with different kinds of wood, one discovers enormous differences. Each kind requires different skills to carve, and each carving reveals its own beauty. In handicraft art we select, modify, and see the beauty emerge with our own efforts. No other activity gives us as close an encounter with ‘facts ... in as far as they carry values’35 and requires of us such considerable attention to ‘the minute obligations of one’s work.’36 ‘An active or original apprehension of nature is of the

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essence of art, and gives the mind a new vision of nature itself.’37 Bosanquet explains that when we begin to see the beauty in what we make, we begin to see the beauty in existing art, no matter its historical origins. Fine art represents the ‘quintessence of history, and the appreciation of beauty in art is one great avenue to the knowledge of humanity.’38 The process of evolution from one’s own experience of the particular – the detailed, slow work that takes place when an individual creates something – to the recognition of values at the more universal level – those of humanity through epochs of civilization – is exactly the same process that Bosanquet thinks people need to experience in becoming moral agents. Bosanquet believes that fine art reveals the character of nations and that the common decorative arts give us contact with the ordinary people. One should not rely on history alone to learn about human character because, he writes, history is a ‘very moralizing and theorizing sort of business.’39 From our experience of particularity – of works of art created by individuals – we may grasp the universal. For Bosanquet works of art also include exact details and painstaking precision, features of creations found most obviously in the handcraft work of ordinary people. No moral education occurs in memorizing do’s and don’ts, catechisms, and recitations dictated by the high and mighty from lofty places. Nor does one grasp a sense of universal good through fear of punishment. Careful observation of the tiny but extraordinary details of the world both in nature and in the creative processes in the workshop reveals the care, perseverance, and standards of excellence that the human mind is capable of achieving. One can begin to encounter the complexity of things that are excellent and, if education does its job, one will more easily recognize the complexity of social systems that must work together in order to serve the common good. The success of this interrelated gridwork of society is ensured only by the unerring commitment of the citizenry to attend constantly to its moral strengths in the same way a watchmaker guards his creation from dust and damage in its making so that his creation has universal value – it tells the time for anyone, anywhere, as long as it is cared for. The purpose of artistic training in handicrafts for children is not to produce great artists. It is to awaken children not only to hard work and minute observations but also to the experience of beauty, beauty they discover through their own creative efforts. Through that experience, Bosanquet reasons, children will begin to see beauty elsewhere.

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They will appreciate the labours and excellences of common folk like themselves when they notice the decorative arts on a grand scale, such as the carvings and weavings and stone sculptures that adorn cathedrals and museums. Teachers need a full grasp of their duty to educate ‘in the sense of beauty and of the feeling for design.’40 Bosanquet urges not only increased emphasis on the activity of creating in the classroom but also a change in attitude towards the craftsman’s trades. When the public begins to recognize the artistry in the work of the labouring classes, new respect and support for their contributions to society will be forthcoming. In short, individual and social reform will result from these educational initiatives.41 The process of developing aesthetic awareness and moral sensitivity involves a metaphysical methodology. As individuals, we have partial concepts of reality. Our actions shape and change the network of relations that define us. If we never grasp the nature of the systems within which we carve out our identities, we will never understand the full significance of seeking to contribute at the level of those systems or gain a better awareness of the nature of our world. But if we do begin to see, as Bosanquet has put it, our feeling of well-being at this conceptual discovery – that we are part of numerous systems and can affect their operations – motivates us to keep learning. Knowledge involves understanding these systems, and the acquisition of knowledge requires that we constantly sharpen and refine our perceptions. In Knowledge and Reality, Bosanquet discusses the impact of technology on our capacity to refine observations. He reminds us that it is not the instrument or tool that gives us the precision of the measurement, but the embodiment of knowledge in the instrument.42 ‘A measurement, ultimately the perception that two marks coincide, is valuable of course solely by what it proves. But that the accuracy of the perception depends on knowledge and on systematic relations ... is worth insisting on, for it strikes at the root of the belief in immediate knowledge.’43 Our discoveries can further the development of science when we know what to do with our new data and how those data relate to other bodies of knowledge. Bosanquet observes that the highly trained eye will spot tiny discrepancies and coincidences. But such training is not always the only source of reliable information. The layman describing his own observations will also identify his own set of precise details. The bodies of knowledge within which each individual locates his observation become the cumulative measure of the precise differences, more so than a single instrument, or trained eye.

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The experience of children starts at the particular. With a gradual exposure to the beauty in their creations, they begin to see and feel themselves as centres of values in the world, both as creators and as recipients of the pleasures that beauty provides. With personal struggles to make moral choices, they should be encouraged to work through the details of a problem and not succumb to their first reactive emotion. Nothing of beauty or excellence results from a child’s temper tantrum. No fit of anger produces great art. (One can only work with diligence as the anger subsides.) No development of intelligence is furthered by an educator who teaches through punishment, and no social good is guaranteed by a ruler whose power is secured by instilling public fear. The primary mission for the teacher who wants to ward off stupidity is to inculcate in children a passion for detailed knowledge about the problems that children encounter, whether in making a beautiful little paper basket or in learning to deal with squabbles that erupt. Each little detail of observation will grow into knowledge that will affect the precision of observation with which children approach the next task. The processes of observing and creating will be essential for the development of aesthetic appreciation and moral sensitivities as part of an individual’s character. The intelligent person values the good life that these strengths of character ensure. Yet for each of us the growth away from stupidity will take a different path. Our unique perspectives and talents will be stamped on the outcomes of our moral decisions and our aesthetic tastes and creations in the way that beautiful violins and watches carry the stamp of their different makers and yet serve universal good. Warding off stupidity can be accomplished. A good way to start is with a sandbox. If someone knocks down one’s first sandcastle, a better one, a more interesting one, may be the next step. Perhaps its special details will garner interest on the part of other children, who can be encouraged to speculate about the purposes of the details. Perhaps these suggestions from other children will inspire the sharing of the project. Any activity that encourages artistic imagination and precision of execution and that promotes both individual achievement and cooperation with others offers two educational opportunities: (1) practice in the art of living with humanity (and all the precise sensitivities that that requires) and (2) discovery of the feeling of well-being as one’s own material craftwork or creative inspiration inspires appreciation for beauty and reinforces the value of character. Bosanquet did not expect all children to achieve excellence in their

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creative efforts. His motive was not to elevate those with gifted visions or exquisite eye–hand coordination. He knew perfectly well that there are considerable individual differences in intellect and ability. He simply thought that creative activities would facilitate the development of the intelligent person, one who recognized aesthetic beauty and moral excellence as personal and social values, both of which are essential to the good life. One does not have to be of superior intellect or ability to gradually come to know what is relevant to the well-being of the whole. For Bosanquet, material beauty and moral beauty come from the same human resources: hard work, a keen attention to details, and a capacity to celebrate the diversity of the individual things that we make and the people we meet, and to value their place in the greater scheme of reality.44

NOTES 1 Bernard Bosanquet’s works span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His writings are situated at the end of the Victorian era, a period that witnessed the struggle to further philosophical idealism. This movement was inspired by art, religion, and the possibility of self-realization through the conscious grasp of the unity of all things. Idealists faced the encroachment of science, logic, and the secularization of social orders but worked to find common ground between all developing disciplines and discourses. 2 ‘We Are Not Hard Enough on Stupidity,’ Some Suggestions in Ethics, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1919). 3 ‘Artistic Handwork in Education,’ Essays and Addresses (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1889). 4 ‘Stupidity,’ 213. 5 Ibid., 214. 6 Ibid., 215. 7 Ibid., 216. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 217. 10 Ibid., 219. 11 Ibid., 221. The phrase ‘minute obligations to one’s work’ (which refers to the complexity of our relationships, commitments, and tasks) finds support in Bosanquet’s ethical writings. In his essay ‘The Duties of Citizenship,’ Science and Philosophy and Other Essays by the Late Bernard Bosanquet, ed. J.H. Muirhead and R.C. Bosanquet (London: Allen and Unwin, 1927), he writes:

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15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

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‘But in human life it is untrue that there is only one right course open to us ... every course is right, which, presenting itself as a genuine oath of duty – though not the only one possible – is followed with the full force of our nature, and with the determination to make it effective to the common good’ (284). All work has multiple duties, and the more one recognizes this, the better chance there is of contributing to the good of others. ‘Stupidity,’ 223. See Republic, 532a–539c. The possibility of failure in the greater whole introduces a possible weakness in Bosanquet’s idealism. In The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects (Manchester: The University Press, 1913) Bosanquet affirms his idealism, asserting that reality is a whole, a unity in which ‘every part permeate[s], every other ... And all this means mind’ (39). Objects for the mind are fragments of the whole. Universals are understood only through the focus of the mind, and those experiences most real to us – the aesthetic, the feelings we have – can never be understood as external, lifeless facts (37–9). It follows that selves which can be objects for the mind can also be fragments, as objects of other minds. It is not clear how a fragment of mind could grasp the greater whole, without being that whole. The whole as an object for the mind is both a fragment and a whole, which raises some ontological concerns. ‘Stupidity,’ 228–9. Ibid., fn.229. Ibid., 230. Ibid., 231. ‘Stupidity,’ 233–6. ‘The Practical Value of Moral Philosophy,’ Science and Philosophy and Other Essays by the Late Bernard Bosanquet, ed. J.H. Muirhead and R.C. Bosanquet (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1927), 139. Ibid., 144. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 146. The Republic, 536e ‘Moral Philosophy,’ 147. Ibid. Bosanquet’s notion of intelligence reflects a holistic concept of reality in that the intelligent mind will grasp all fragments, and objects for the mind, as interrelated. These include facts and values, both aesthetic and moral. And if they are interrelated they must comprise what is good. Evil, it seems, results from the failure of the intellect to grasp the harmonious whole. If this is true there is a high potential for evil in humans whose intellect may be sufficiently uneducated in ‘intelligent’ visions.

124 Elizabeth Trott 27 ‘Stupidity,’ 237. 28 Ibid., 238. 29 Bosanquet’s emphasis on the importance of knowing the details of any particular practice before judgment can be passed on the excellence, or lack thereof, of the execution of the practice, has a long history. For example, in Laws, Book II, 670c–671b, Plato reminds us that great singers are so because of their thorough training in every requirement of musical composition, structure, and form. Enjoying the melody and finding pleasure in singing is not enough. David Hume, in Book 3 of the Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Biggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), warned that moral judgments of character, or judgments about any object of evaluation, would seldom find agreement, or ‘a common point of view,’ because such judgments stem from each person’s assessment of his or her own pleasures and pains, and ‘every particular persons pleasures and interests being different, ’tis impossible men could ever agree in their sentiments and judgments, unless they chose some common point of view’ (591). Awareness of the range of particular details and perspectives precedes any attempt at generating a more general or universal principle. Recent authors who address the complexity of particulars that complicate moral judgments are Martha Nussbaum, ‘The Discernment of Perpection: An Aristotelian Conception of Private and Public Rationality,’ Love’s Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 54–105; John McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason,’ Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 50–73; and Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London, Routledge, 1971). 30 Edith Schell, ‘Bernard Bosanquet’s Theory of Moral Education,’ Paedagogica Historica, 6 (1966): 211. 31 Schell, ‘Bosanquet’s Theory of Moral Education,’ 214–15. 32 ‘Artistic Handwork,’ 117. 33 Ibid., 118. 34 The connection Bosanquet is making between awareness of the particular and awareness of a general aesthetic principle requires some explanation. If the particular is an event, or occurrence, or even a detail of an object or artwork that is observed to repeat or occur without irregularities, the laws of induction easily move us towards universal claims, even though such claims never quite escape conjecture. ‘The sun will rise tomorrow’ is a familiar inference. Bosanquet is not referring to repeated instances of the particular, but individuated different particulars. As we learn we come to know the part or role of each different particular in the whole, and when particulars are grasped in necessary relation to each other they are collectively grasped as a whole. (See The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects,

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35.) For example, many details are learned in the course of discovering what a frog as a whole is, but those details may or may not contribute to our understanding of moral goods in the world and the part frogs play in the morally good whole. To understand what a frog is requires understanding its environment, and this requires that a whole set of details be grasped. The moral context – one that requires care of the frog world – will be one of those details. Bosanquet thought that learning about the details in making arts and crafts would be a more direct route to grasping the good, both moral and aesthetic, because arts and crafts aim at the beautiful. Bosanquet is not just adopting Platonic ideals that the beautiful is the morally good. By beautiful he means a new harmonious expression of an idea that can be grasped by the mind of another (Lecture III, Three Lectures on Aesthetic [London: Macmillan, 1915], 56). This could be an artistic expression, but the harmony of friendship, good deeds, and comforting, not hurtful, human experiences are also beautiful. We should not have preconceptions of the beautiful (58). If the expression is successful we will grasp it and understand it through our reasoning minds with the pleasure that accompanies knowing, free from fear or humiliation. Bosanquet explores his ideas about beauty in his Three Lectures on Aesthetic, acknowledging his indebtedness to Croce at times but also transforming the synthesis of our thoughts and worldly experiences into his own views on ‘the Ugly.’ Citing K.W.F. Solger as his source (Lecture III, n. 17, 55), Bosanquet starts with the principle that we experience ‘the ugly’ when we look for but do not find beauty. The cause of failure can be a ‘pretension to pure expression ... or insincere and affected art’ (56). We are left with thwarted expectations, and confrontations with expectation and failure leave a dissonance or unharmonious encounter in the mind. (Exactly this kind of experience results from moral harms and frustrations as well.) The ugly is recognizing a failed attempt to express a new and creative form. Thus for Bosanquet Nature could never be ugly as only man can intend to express beauty, and only man can fail (57). Rational dissonance in art and failed or pretentious expressions of friendship are the same kind of experience of the ugly. In both cases we are thwarted or hurt or disappointed. The harmony of beauty in life and art can be grasped at an early age and the attentiveness to the complex details of harmonious relations and arrangements as we learn to grasp wholes can only further our desire to avoid the ugliness of irrational, incoherent ideas and the frustrations of disappointing experiences. 35 ‘Stupidity,’ 217.

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Ibid., 221. ‘Artistic Handwork,’ 118. Ibid., 119. Ibid. Ibid., 122. ‘Individual and Social Reform,’ Essays and Addresses (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1889), 25–33. 42 Knowledge and Reality: A Criticism of Mr. F.H. Bradley’s ‘Principles of Logic’ (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1885), 325. 43 Ibid., 324. 44 In his paper ‘The Part Played by Aesthetic in the Development of Modern Philosophy,’ Science and Philosophy and Other Essays by the Late Bernard Bosanquet, ed. J.H. Muirhead and R.C. Bosanquet (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1927), 367–91, Bosanquet traces the evolution of aesthetics in Europe from Baumgarten through Kant, Schiller, and Schelling. Aesthetics emerges as the means through which various philosophers tried to synthesize the idealist dichotomies as manifest evidence of idealism’s philosophical truth. According to Bosanquet in England, only John Ruskin (1823– 1900) seemed to recognize the ‘profound underlying unity between modern fine art and modern natural science’ (388) in his writings on art and nature. Bosanquet cites Turner (Ruskin’s passion) and Darwin as two men who recognize the inevitable fusion of nature, history, and art.

6 Bosanquet, Santayana, and Aesthetics PHI L I P M AC E W E N

I In the Department of Philosophy at Harvard in 1891 were William James, Josiah Royce, George Herbert Palmer, George Santayana, and Hugo Münsterberg, a quintet of striking personalities, each differing from the other four in many convictions and opinions, while dwelling together in fraternal harmony. Apart from their distinction as scholars, every one was a literary artist. They all knew how to write, not merely with force and with what clearness is possible on such themes, but with that beauty of expression that belongs only to consummate mastery of style. And the best writer among them, although he was overshadowed by the reputation of his older colleagues, was George Santayana.1

So said William Lyon Phelps in recollection of one of his panoply of friends. What was a boon to the literary Phelps, however, was a bane to much of the philosophical public. Santayana has been condemned for his literary savoir-faire by philosophers who view such prowess as an indication of logical lassitude and conceptual confusion. Sister M. Cyril Edwin Kinney’s grim verdict, ‘all that he [Santayana] writes is overshot with literary imagery [which] savours more of literature than of wisdom, for figurative language obscures rather than makes clear philosophical concepts,’2 might well serve as Santayana’s philosophical epitaph. Despite this censure, Santayana’s works have never been accorded the last rite their author may have received before his demise.3 This is true of both his philosophical and literary output. H.T. Kirby-Smith’s recent assessment that Santayana’s ‘reputation suffered a temporary eclipse during the thirty years ... follow[ing] his death in

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1952’4 notwithstanding, the eclipse was only partial. A few shafts of light always penetrated the gloom. For example, Santayana’s doctoral thesis, ‘Lotze’s System of Philosophy,’ languished in obscurity for years in the Harvard University Archives until it was published in 1971, complete with a tomelike introduction and a lengthy Lotze bibliography.5 Between 1955 and 1969, many manuscripts that were previously unpublished or published only in journals saw the light of day in works like Animal Faith and Spiritual Life, The Birth of Reason and Other Essays, and Physical Order and Moral Liberty.6 The first edition of what is undoubtedly the most thorough examination of Santayana’s philosophy appeared in 1974.7 On the literary front, much of Santayana’s literary criticism was collected and published in a single volume in 1956, and his complete poems appeared in a critical edition in 1979.8 More recently, there has been a whirlwind of activity in Santayaniana as particularly evidenced by the Santayana Project, which, since 1986, has made individual works available in definitive editions issued by the MIT Press.9 Whatever the traditional philosophical view of Santayana may be, therefore, it has never managed to squelch interest in his works though it has certainly marginalized their place in the academy.10 Santayana’s philosophy is fundamentally an attempt to unite naturalism and idealism. It is premised on the claim that what is variously called existence/matter/substance/nature is the primordial stuff of being and that ideas/ideal characters/essences are dependent on the former through the mediation of perception – either aesthesis or conception – despite the tendency of the latter to play the role of the prodigal and forget from whence they came. This is an ontological interpretation of Santayana's philosophy, but ontology permeates it from start to finish, even though it is not until Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) and Realms of Being (1927–40) that it is systematically developed. While the naturalistic basis of Santayana’s ontology, where essence is ‘just that character which any existence wears in so far as it remains identical with itself and as long as it does so,’11 can hardly be doubted, his axiology – with one notable exception which I discuss in section II – is definitely psychological. This is true of his pronouncements on value right from The Sense of Beauty (1896), his first major philosophical publication, to the doctrine of essences, which he presented systematically in Scepticism and Animal Faith and Realms of Being. In The Sense of Beauty, he claims that ‘Beauty ... is a value; it cannot be conceived as an independent existence which affects our senses and which we consequently perceive ... A beauty not perceived is a pleasure not felt, and a contra-

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diction.’12 In Scepticism and Animal Faith, he insists that ‘Value accrues to any part of the realm of essence by virtue of the interest which somebody takes in it, as being the part relevant to his own life.’13 This is an appropriate context in which to introduce Bosanquet’s work in aesthetics for it is intended as an antidote to psychologism. True, Bosanquet is not responding to Santayana in particular – nor is Santayana, for all the calumny he heaped upon British idealism, targeting Bosanquet specifically14 – but Santayana’s axiology is representative of what Bosanquet regarded as the central problem of modern philosophy. According to Bosanquet, the theory of the beautiful among the ancients was connected with the notions of rhythm, symmetry, and harmony of parts; in short, with the general formula of unity in variety in works of art. In modern philosophy, on the other hand, the emphasis shifted away from the characteristics of works of art to the idea of significance, expressiveness, and the utterance of all that life contains; in a word, to the sense of beauty. Bosanquet thought that both of these approaches have merit but a synthesis was needed to affect a comprehensive definition of the beautiful. Thus defined, beauty is ‘That which has characteristic or individual expressiveness for sense-perception or imagination, subject to the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same medium.’15 This synthesis in aesthetics is precisely what is required to redress the prevailing tendency in modern philosophy towards a pronounced and prolonged psychologism or attachment to the percipi at the expense of the esse. Aesthetics thus defined is suited to do the job because it illustrates perhaps better than any other area of philosophy what happens when psychologism is taken to its logical conclusion. We can talk about expressiveness and feeling in art all we want, but unless there is something which expresses and something to feel about, there can be no art and therefore no theory of art. When properly pursued, aesthetics will atone for the psychologism, or what Bosanquet calls the ‘false idealism’16 of modern philosophy by recognizing the objet d’art as the embodiment of the artist’s feeling. Only thus can the fundamental question of aesthetics, ‘How [are] feeling and its body ... created adequate to one another?’17 be suitably answered. This paper will argue that Bosanquet’s aesthetics, by affecting such a synthesis, unites the disparate poles of naturalism and idealism, something which Santayana’s philosophy, for all its richness and complexity, is unable to do. The foundering point for Santayana is beauty, which is divorced from the naturalistic basis of his philosophy. In

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Bosanquet’s aesthetics, however, beauty is precisely the factor which unites the realms of the natural and the ideal. Beauty is the fusion of body and soul, where the soul is a feeling and the body its expression. Thus construed, beauty is neither simply a feeling nor a thing. Rather, it is the embodiment of feeling in the objet d’art. This response uses naturalism and psychologism to obtain its results but transforms them into a greater whole. It precludes the possibility of disembodied beauty (contra Croce)18 while recognizing that feeling is requisite for beauty (à la Santayana), and defines beauty as the adequate embodiment of the feeling of the artist in his or her creation. II Santayana began his career as an aesthetician and literary critic with works like The Sense of Beauty (1896) and Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900). Interspersed with these were literary writings such as Sonnets and Other Verses (1894), Lucifer: A Theological Tragedy (1899), and A Hermit of Carmel, and Other Poems (1901). Overall, however, Santayana regarded himself as a moral philosopher, declaring that moral philosophy ‘is my chosen subject.’19 If one looks at the later writings, this may not make much sense since none of them is a work of moral philosophy as we understand it today, be that descriptive ethics, prescriptive ethics, or meta-ethics. There are certainly sections of works which deal with moral philosophy, most notably Santayana’s treatment of pre-rational morality, rational ethics, and post-rational morality in The Life of Reason (1905–6);20 ‘Hypostatic Ethics,’ which is part of his critique of the philosophy of Bertrand Russell;21 and his chapter on ‘Moral Truth’ in Realms of Being.22 It is in the larger sense of moral philosophy as ‘the conscious and attentive consideration of human activity, practical, and theoretic, that would deepen, insure, and estimate its relative values, and relations, and consequences in experience’23 that we must understand Santayana’s subject. Thus defined, his whole philosophy – from the early work in aesthetics, literary criticism, and the life of reason to his middle career abroad as a critic of other cultures and philosophies to his later endeavours in epistemology, ontology, and the doctrine of the spiritual life – is a grand project in moral philosophy, perhaps unrivalled in richness and scope in modern Western thought with the single exception of Hegel. While Santayana’s subject is moral philosophy, this does not mean that all values are moral values. In The Sense of Beauty, Santayana draws

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a contrast between moral and aesthetic values. The first difference between them is that moral values have more to do with the prevention of suffering than the attainment of pleasure, whereas the converse is true of aesthetic values. Second, aesthetic values are intrinsic whereas moral values are instrumental and calculated on the probable consequences, for better or for worse, of observing them. These differences are questionable, no doubt, but Santayana does not use them, as we might expect, to argue for the autonomy of aesthetics. Rather, he argues for the overall subjection of aesthetics to ethics. The ultimate cause of this is material. The sad business of life is to escape certain dreadful evils to which our nature exposes us such as death, hunger, disease, weariness, isolation, and contempt. The awful authority of these things stands like a spectre behind every moral injunction, and flaunting them can place us in material, and even mortal, danger. The appreciation of beauty, on the other hand, is something which belongs to ‘our holiday life, when we are redeemed for the moment from the shadow of evil and the slavery to fear and are following the bent of our nature where it chooses to lead us.’24 This is why Santayana espouses ‘the authority of morals over aesthetics’25 in the event that the two conflict. What is suitable for a Hegelian (à la James) moral holiday is not necessarily suitable, or even desirable, for the realities of everyday life. Forms that are pleasing in themselves may become disagreeable when practical interests have to yield to them. Too much eloquence in a diplomatic document, a familiar letter, or a prayer, is an offence against practical sense. A prison as gay as a bazaar or a church as dumb as a prison offend by their failure to support the moral emotion with which we approach them. The arts must study their occasions and stand modestly aside until they can slip into the practical interstices of life.26 For Santayana, the cause of morality is material but the reason for morality is rational. Actually, the distance between the material and the rational is not all that great since ‘Reason is an operation in nature and has its roots there.’27 Specifically, reason is ‘a form of animal faith’28 which tries to fuse the most radical and the most reflective manifestations of animal life: impulse and ideation. By themselves, these two are ‘monsters’29 and would reduce us either to beasts or maniacs. The rational animal is generated by their synthesis, and the life of reason, which ‘compare[s], combine[s], and harmonizes all [its] interests, with a view to attaining the greatest satisfaction of which [its] nature is capable,’30 is the life that is proper to such a being. Reason is an interest just like impulse and ideation. Unlike these other interests,

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however, reason is interested in reconciling the other interests for the perfection of our ‘natural happiness.’31 What the life of reason amounts to is a morality (or, more precisely, an ‘ethic’)32 of self-realization and social realization, not defined by interests pursued as either impulse or ideation beckons, but as determined by the harmonization of different – and sometimes conflicting – interests so as to achieve the greatest satisfaction which impulse and ideation permit.33 Even this brief explanation of the life of reason is sufficient to indicate two things: first, the life of reason is a morality in which moral values must take precedence over aesthetic values in the event that the two cannot be reconciled. A surgeon ought not to sing operatic arias to his or her patients, for example, no matter how fine a singer he or she may be, because this is not part of the doctor–patient relationship and may indicate a cavalier – and even irresponsible – attitude towards it. This does not mean that the surgeon cannot engage in these activities outside professional life (indeed, there may be a moral obligation to pursue aesthetic interests during ‘holiday life’), but the harmonization of different interests is not accomplished by wielding the knife while in full vocal flight. Second, in his explanation of the life of reason, Santayana has seconded what he thinks are intrinsic values to what he thinks are extrinsic values. Not only is this logically problematic, since extrinsic values should be seconded to intrinsic values and not vice versa, but it subverts the alleged authority of morals over aesthetics. In fact, what Santayana has done in The Life of Reason is posit an aesthetic end which is to be reached, insofar as it can be reached, by moral means. The life of reason includes ideal society, true art, ideal science, and so forth, which are aesthetic ends reached by moulding experience after the image of reason. All are instances of beauty or ‘pleasure objectified’34 and illustrate Santayana’s indication as perfectly as possible. Their contemplation brings, or at least ought to bring, supreme enjoyment to those who observe them. If morality is the handmaiden of aesthetics, however, the naturalistic basis of Santayana’s philosophy is purely instrumental to the end of the life of reason. Morality, which is the intimation of matter in animal life, is the means of living the life of reason. The end of the life of reason is an aesthetic ideal and morality is of value because, and only insofar as, it helps to realize it. ‘Evidently all values must ultimately be intrinsic. The useful is good because of the excellence of its consequences; but these must somewhere cease to be merely useful in their turn or only excellent as a means; somewhere we must reach the good

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that is good in itself and for its own sake, else the whole process is futile, and the utility of our first object illusory.’35 While Santayana insists that ‘Every genuine ideal has a natural basis’36 and that ‘A good, absolute in the sense of being divorced from all natural demands ... would be as remote as possible from goodness: to call it good is mere disloyalty to morals,’37 the ideal of the life of reason is disloyalty to morals in the sense that, as an aesthetic value, it does not belong to their realm but has transcended them. Needless to say, this can easily lead to the situation in which ‘a process [which] is turned successfully into an art ... begins to boast that it directs and has created the world in which it finds itself so much at home,’38 something Santayana tried to resist but which his aesthetics and doctrine of the life of reason implicitly endorse. Perhaps Santayana recognized this difficulty because he later denied the distinction between moral and aesthetic values. ‘I can draw no distinction – save for academic programmes – between moral and aesthetic values: beauty, being a good, is a moral good; and the practice and enjoyment of art, like all practice and all enjoyment, fall within the sphere of morals.’39 This apparent change of heart still comes complete with the original distinction, however, for Santayana goes on to say: ‘On the other hand, the good, when actually realized and not merely pursued from afar, is a joy in the immediate; it is possessed with wonder and is in that sense aesthetic.’40 We may have the clue here to Santayana’s later philosophy, where the discipline of aesthetics is swallowed up in a larger moral whole which nevertheless continues to have a distinctively aesthetic end. To those reared on The Sense of Beauty, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, and even The Life of Reason, Santayana’s later philosophy can come as a surprise. Gone is any reference to ‘aesthetics,’ save to deny that there is such a distinct category or discipline at all: ‘in philosophy I recognize no separable thing called aesthetics; and what has gone by the name of the philosophy of art ... seems to me mere verbiage.’41 As a result, instead of seconding aesthetic values to moral values, the former are now purportedly identified with the latter. Discussion of beauty persists, though the earlier account of beauty as ‘pleasure objectified’ is replaced by the indication that beauty is ‘a vital harmony felt and fused into an image under the form of eternity.’42 Thus indicated, beauty would seem to be an essence itself as well as ‘an indefinable quality felt in many things ... which receives this name by virtue of a special emotion, half wonder, half love, that is felt in their presence.’43

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In the latter sense, beauty is ‘a great liberator of other essences.’44 Whenever we feel that something is beautiful, it is raised above its external situation and sublimated into an essence coloured by beauty. Whether beauty is an essence itself or something which colours our intuition of other essences, what confronts us is a good which is ‘absolute’ in the sense that it is ‘single and all-sufficient, filling the whole heart, and leaving nothing in the rest of the universe in the least tempting, interesting, or worth distinguishing.’45 What we have here is not simply a moral philosophy in the larger sense but a moral philosophy with an aesthetic end, or what Santayana calls ‘the spiritual life.’ Space prevents me from presenting the nature of the spiritual life in detail, so I shall limit myself to three points. First, whatever the similarities or differences between the life of reason and the spiritual life, they are both moral philosophies with an aesthetic ideal. According to the former, interests ought to be harmonized so as to achieve the greatest satisfaction of the self and society that impulse and ideation permit. The harmonization of interests is an aesthetic ideal for it brings – or at least ought to bring – supreme enjoyment to those who observe it (including those who live it). The spiritual life is a moral philosophy as well. Initially, this claim seems to counter Santayana’s own position. ‘Spiritual life is not a worship of ‘values’ ... It is the exact opposite; it is disintoxification from their influence.’46 Unlike psyche, which is the principle of animal life and the means by which we distinguish good from evil – what furthers or frustrates our existence and welfare – spirit raises its subjects to a level where things are seen ‘under the form of eternity, in their intrinsic character and relative value, in their transitiveness and necessity, in a word, in their truth.’47 Clearly, if spirit sees things in their intrinsic character and relative value, it cannot be devoid of value. Rather, it is no longer the slave of the passions, to use Hume’s language for un-Humean purposes, but sees things in terms of the characters they have beyond immediately threatening or promoting animal existence and welfare. Alternatively, the spiritual life is a life of interested disinterestedness for it is interested in contemplating essences on their own account and disinterested in colouring them with moral values (save at the insistence of psyche from whose influence it is never entirely free). Despite the intimations of morality in the spiritual life, no one has an obligation to lead such a life, including those who are ‘called to it.’48 Obligations are moral and presuppose a physical and social organism with immanent spontaneous interests which may impose those obliga-

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tions. Rather, spirituality is ‘the supreme good ... for the few whose intellectual thirst can [only] be quenched thereby.’49 Here essences can be contemplated in as wide a variety and pure a fashion as animal life will permit. Spirit finds in this experience ‘peace, liberation, and a sufficient token that fate ... has lost its terrors.’50 The end of the spiritual life is the peace that passeth understanding. The spirit is free – as far as it can be – from the concerns of psyche, free to contemplate beauty as an essence and a liberator of other essences. Second, Santayana’s claim that aesthetic values are really moral values notwithstanding, what he has done in fact, as in his early philosophy, is second moral values to aesthetic values. This is precisely why the spiritual life is a moral philosophy whose end is the blissful and serene contemplation of essences, including the essence of beauty and other essences coloured by beauty. Third, and most important, beauty as defined by the later Santayana is about as far removed from the naturalistic basis of his philosophy as that philosophy will permit. If beauty is the coloration we give to essences, or ‘the great liberator of other essences,’ then what it liberates them from is precisely their connection to the flux of nature. ‘The most material thing [i.e., the most materially connected essence], insofar as it is felt to be beautiful, is instantly raised above external personal relations, [and] concentrated and deepened in its proper being.’51 Granted, Santayana would argue that the liberation of essence from existence can never be complete since spirit, even in its purest form, is still ‘an overtone of animal life,’52 but the gulf between them is about as wide as his philosophy will allow. As far as beauty as an essence is concerned, it is even more removed from Santayana’s naturalism. Santayana says very little about beauty thus defined, save to note that ‘The essence of the beautiful, when made an object of contemplation by itself ... marks a spiritual consummation’53 and ‘requires much dialectical and spiritual training to discern it in its purity and in its fullness.’54 While beauty understood in this way has certain advantages, such as mitigating the charge of subjectivism, it has even greater disadvantages. For one, it flies in the face of Santayana’s critique of hypostatic values in the thought of Plato and Russell, among others.55 It also introduces value into the realm of essence, where it does not belong. Most important, if beauty is an essence, it has no correlate in existence. Even the beauty that colours certain essences is not anything which existing things possess but rather the manner in which we intuit those essences. A fortiori, beauty

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as an essence has no relation to the natural world. Of course, we have the animal bodies and material apparatus Santayana believes are necessary to intuit it, but this is not a naturalistic basis for beauty but only a means of accessing it. Again, then, there is a gaping gulf between Santayana’s naturalism and his account of aesthetic values. III Compared with Santayana’s philosophy of beauty, Bosanquet’s aesthetics is a paradigm of candour and economy. Part of the reason for this is that Bosanquet regarded aesthetics as ‘a distinct province of theoretical inquiry.’56 ‘Aesthetics’ means ‘the Philosophy of the Beautiful’ and the history of aesthetics, on which Bosanquet wrote his treatise, means ‘the History of the Philosophy of the Beautiful.’57 This is not to say that Bosanquet’s aesthetics are not intimately connected to the rest of his philosophy, but they are never integrated in the manner, or to the extent, that epitomizes Santayana’s philosophy. Thus, it is possible to treat Bosanquet’s aesthetics without excursions into others areas of his philosophy, such as his metaphysics and ethics. Within the distinct province of aesthetics, there are subdivisions, and one of the most important of these is the history of aesthetics. Not only did Bosanquet approach aesthetics from a historical perspective, but his own contributions to the discipline are designed to redress a particular historical problem. This problem, as mentioned earlier, is that the ancient theory of beauty, with its emphasis on the notions of rhythm, symmetry, and harmony of parts of the objet d’art, and the modern theory, with its emphasis on the sense of beauty, both indicate an aspect of the beautiful, but neither tells the whole story. ‘Things give pleasure sometimes because they are beautiful, and sometimes for other reasons, [but] they are not beautiful simply because they give aesthetic pleasure; and the nature of the presentation that gives aesthetic pleasure is the matter to be ascertained.’58 This is the problem Bosanquet traced historically from the Greeks to his own time in A History of Aesthetic and which he addressed substantively in his diminutive Three Lectures on Aesthetic. The size of this ‘lovely little book,’ as Ralph Ross describes it,59 should not belie its importance. Like Bosanquet’s small but equally significant Some Suggestions in Ethics,60 Three Lectures on Aesthetic is calculated to complete a great task. The central question Bosanquet sets out to answer here is ‘How [can] feeling and its body [be] created adequate to one another?’61

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His answer is that ‘the aesthetic attitude lies in the fusion of body and soul, where soul is a feeling and the body its expression, without residue on either side.’62 To understand Bosanquet’s question and response, we need to know what he means by ‘feeling,’ how feeling is ‘embodied’ in a work of art, and what constitutes an ‘adequate’ embodiment of the former in the latter. By ‘feeling,’ Bosanquet means aesthetic pleasure, which is distinguished by five characteristics. First, it is a stable experience which does not cease in proportion as it is gratified. It is not like the pleasures of eating or drinking, which are satisfied as our hunger or thirst is alleviated. Rather, it persists even though the source of the pleasure – for example, viewing an art exhibit – comes to an end. Second, it is a relevant experience or annexed to the quality of some object in all its detail. The pleasure I have is so embodied in the object concerned that it (the pleasure) ‘will stand still to be looked at’63 or heard. The work of art captures exactly the way I feel. Third, it is a common experience or one that is shared with others without diminishing its value. Many people have exulted in the beauty of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll or Liszt’s Liebesträume, for example, but the fact that the experience has been shared has not diminished it in the slightest. Fourth, the aesthetic attitude is contemplative. In it, we perceive objects and are absorbed or carried away by them. Everything else fades into the background and the object alone commands our attention. Fifth, and most important, aesthetic experience is plastic or incarnate. In it, mind is all body and body is all mind. When I am sorry about something, for example, I have a more or less dull pain, and what I feel sorry about is a thought associated with my pain. There is generally no gain or advance in the depth of my experience by virtue of this association. If, however, I am to have the power to give imaginative shape to the object of my sorrow – if I am to satisfy my feeling by freely pursuing and exploring the possibilities suggested by the connection of my experience in plastic form – then it must undergo a transformation. The feeling is submitted to the laws of an object and takes on permanence, order, harmony, and meaning; in short, value. It ceases to be simply something with which I am personally absorbed and becomes an incarnate expression of my feeling.64 To further understand the nature of feeling as aesthetic pleasure, we must look at how it can be embodied in an object. This will also help us better appreciate Bosanquet’s claim that, in such embodiment, ‘mind is all body and body is all mind.’65 According to Bosanquet, there are

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many things which exist which we do not perceive or imagine. We may know a great deal about a thing as it exists – its history, composition, market value, causes and effects, and so on – but none of this per se has anything to do with perception and imagination. For the aesthetic attitude, the only things which exist are those which embody feelings. In other words, objects are valued by the aesthetic attitude solely for their appearance. This leads to a paradox for we can truly say of the aesthetic attitude that the object which embodies feeling is valued solely for its own sake and that the object which embodies feeling is valued solely for its appearance to perception and imagination. Is there any way to bring these two truth claims – which historically represent the ancient and modern views of beauty –together? The path of reconciliation is clear since the object is valued solely for its own sake as embodying aesthetic feeling, which is the way it appears to perception and imagination. Alternatively, the way the object appears to perception or imagination is something which is valued solely for it own sake, that is, as the embodiment of aesthetic feeling. Thus, the paradox can be resolved without denying either of the philosophies of beauty which constitute its original moments. Bosanquet is fond of referring to the original moments as the ‘body’ and ‘mind’ (‘life’/‘soul’) of the aesthetic attitude. The body is the object in which aesthetic feeling has become plastic and is valued solely for its own sake while the mind is the valuing of that object solely on the basis of its appearance to perception or imagination. In the synthetic moment of the aesthetic attitude, the mind becomes all body and the body becomes all mind. We have seen that the object in the aesthetic attitude is the object as it appears to perception or imagination. Thus construed, our imagination, or our ‘imaginative perception’66 as Bosanquet calls it, has a practically infinite choice of objects because all appearances of things, in any context or connection, are open to it. The law of context and connection of things is ‘form’67 and form, in the aesthetic attitude, is discerned by imaginative perception as objects become transparent to it. Here we are not restricted to think of cloud as ‘a mass of cold wet vapour,’ for example. Taken ‘as we see it with the sun on it, cloud has quite different possibilities of revealing aesthetic form, because its wonderful structure is variously lit up.’68 As objects reveal more of their form to imaginative perception, aesthetic feeling is increasingly drawn out and united to it in an activity of ‘body-andmind.’69 This process admits of various degrees and ‘Great objects of art contain myriads of elements of form on different levels ... till the feeling which they demand is such as to occupy the whole powers of

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the greatest mind.’70 The result, ideally, is the fusion of aesthetic feeling with the object – and especially its form or connecting and pervading correlations – such that mind is all body and body is all mind. The last thing we need to know is what constitutes an ‘adequate’ embodiment of aesthetic feeling in a work of art. Bosanquet recognizes that the aesthetic attitude can be examined either in terms of nature or the fine arts since four of the five chief characteristics of aesthetic feeling can be predicated of either one. Whether the object is a water lily or Monet’s Pool of Water Lilies, for example, the aesthetic experience of it is stable, relevant, common, and contemplative (though not necessarily incarnate). The nature we perceive thereby is not the valueless flux postulated by modern science but ‘what we love and admire. It is the living external world, as we relive it in our fullest imaginative experience.’71 Incarnation raises the issue of representation in the fine arts which is not involved in the aesthetic appreciation of nature per se. In the fine arts, the principle of representation asserts itself to various degrees. ‘In architecture, it is present hardly at all; in sculpture and painting, it is predominant; in music, it has hardly any place as of right, or a very subordinate one; in poetry it reasserts itself with almost predominant power.’72 Bosanquet devotes much of Lecture II of Three Lectures on Aesthetic to a consideration of this problem and its relevance to the adequacy of embodied feeling in the work of art. Since some of the fine arts are essentially non-representative and since sculpture, painting, and poetry are often less representative than Bosanquet is prepared to acknowledge, however, the principle of representation is not crucial to the issue of adequacy. What is crucial is creativity. Indeed, this is implied in Bosanquet’s question ‘How [can] feeling and its body [be] created adequate to one another?’ Bosanquet’s theory of creativity is, as it should be, primarily about the artist and secondarily about the spectator or audience. Rightly or wrongly, he takes ‘the spectator’s attitude ... to be merely a faint analogue of the creative rapture of the artist.’73 The aesthetic attitude, as an attitude to natural objects, where all of us are reduced to spectators or observers, thus drops from view and is never subsequently reconsidered. Creativity is an exercise of imaginative perception which underlies the effort the artist makes to produce, in his or her own medium, an embodied feeling in which he or she can rest satisfied. Creativity initiates and nurtures this process and, ideally, culminates it too. As an exercise of imaginative perception, creativity is incomplete without a creation. If, à la Croce, we ‘try to cut the thought and fancy loose from the body of the stuff in which it moulds its pictures and poetic ideas and

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musical constructions, [we] impoverish ... fancy, and arrest its growth, and reduce it to a bloodless shade.’74 Creativity needs a creation which embodies the aesthetic feeling of the creator. A creation and the feeling of the creator it embodies are adequate to one another if and only if the creator rests satisfied in the creation as an incarnation of his or her mind or soul – if and only if the creator sees that it is good, in other words. ‘His fascinated imagination lives in the powers of the medium; he thinks and feels in terms of it; it is the peculiar body of which his aesthetic imagination and no other is the peculiar soul.’75 IV While he does not use the terminology, what Bosanquet has done in responding to ‘the fundamental question of aesthetics’76 is unite naturalism and idealism. The materials of the work of art – be they pieces of clay, metal, wood, strips of canvas, individual sounds, and so forth – before they are encountered by the aesthetic attitude, are natural objects. They belong to the external world, and everything Santayana attributed to existence can be predicated of them. When the artist takes them and uses them as the means of expressing his or her aesthetic feelings – when the artist ‘breathes into [their] nostrils the breath of life’ – they become natural objects which embody the artist’s mind or soul; they become, spiritually speaking, ‘living soul[s].’77 That is why the work of art is a ‘body-and-mind’ or a body which is all mind and a mind which is all body. Bosanquet’s response respects naturalism because it precludes the possibility of disembodied beauty, contra Croce, and recognizes incarnation as one of the chief characteristics – indeed the most important – of the aesthetic attitude. It respects idealism because it is the mind of the artist filling the object with feeling which makes beauty in the fine arts possible. Lastly, it respects the unity of idealism and naturalism because beauty is aesthetic feeling adequately embodied in the work of art.

NOTES 1 William Lyon Phelps, Autobiography with Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), 332. 2 A Critique of the Philosophy of George Santayana in the Light of Thomistic Principles (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1942), 113.

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3 Daniel Cory, Santayana, The Later Years: A Portrait with Letters, ed. William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr (New York: Braziller, 1963), 304. For a different interpretation of what happened during Santayana’s final minutes, see John McCormick, George Santayana: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 502–4; cf. Timothy L.S. Sprigge, Santayana: An Examination of His Philosophy, 1st ed. (1974), 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1995), 28–9. McCormick’s evidence is based on an interview he had with Cory’s widow in 1980. 4 A Philosophical Novelist: George Santayana and The Last Puritan (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), ix. 5 Edited with an Introduction and Lotze Bibliography by Paul Grimley Kuntz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971). 6 Animal Faith and Spiritual Life, ed. John Lachs (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1967); The Birth of Reason and Other Essays, ed. Daniel Cory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968); Physical Order and Moral Liberty: Previously Unpublished Essays of George Santayana, ed. John Lachs and Shirley Lachs (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969). 7 Sprigge, Santayana. 8 Essays in Literary Criticism of George Santayana, ed. Irving Singer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956); The Complete Poems of George Santayana: A Critical Edition, ed. William G. Holzberger (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979). 9 To date, four works have been published in this project, all edited by William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr, including Persons and Places (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), and The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 10 For more on Santayana’s relationship to academic philosophy, see Timothy Sprigge, Santayana, Preface to the Second Edition, xv–xx. 11 ‘Some Meanings of the Word ‘Is,’’ Journal of Philosophy 21 (3 July 1924): 365– 77; reprinted in Obiter Scripta: Lectures, Essays and Reviews, ed. Justus Buchler and Benjamin Schwartz (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 200. 12 Reprinted with a foreword by Philip Rice Blair (New York: Random House, 1955), 47. 13 New York: Dover Publications, 1923 (republished 1955), 129–30. 14 For Santayana’s critique of British idealism, see ‘The British Hegelians,’ Soliloquies in England (1922), reprinted with a New Introduction by Ralph Ross (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 201–7; and ‘Fifty

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15 16 17 18

19 20

21

22

Years of British Idealism,’ New Adelphi, n.s., 2, no. 2 (December 1928), reprinted in Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933), 48–70. (This is a review of the second edition of Bradley’s Ethical Studies [1927].) Santayana does mention Bosanquet very briefly in his article ‘The Mutability of Aesthetic Categories,’ The Philosophical Review 34 (1925): 281–91; reprinted in Animal Faith and Spiritual Life, 418– 29. Here, as elsewhere in treating British idealism, Bosanquet is not his primary concern, however. For Santayana’s extended critiques of German and American idealism, including his analysis of the genteel tradition in America, consult the relevant listings in the ‘Bibliography of the Writings of George Santayana,’ compiled by Shohig Terezian, The Philosophy of George Santayana, The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 2, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp, 1st ed., 1940; 2nd ed. (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1951), 611–78. Bernard Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic, 1st ed., 1892; 2nd ed. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1904), 4–5. Bosanquet, Three Lectures on Aesthetic (London: Macmillan, 1915), 68; ed. Ralph Ross (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 37. Ibid., 61; ed. Ross 34. According to Croce, beauty is for the mind and in the mind. A physical thing, supposed unperceived and unfelt, cannot be said in the full sense to possess beauty. Bosanquet devoted several of his publications to analysing Croce’s philosophy and aesthetics, including Three Lectures on Aesthetic, 3, 37ff., 55ff.; ‘The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce,’ Quarterly Review, 231 (1919): 359–77; ‘Croce’s Aesthetic,’ Proceedings of the British Academy, 9 (1919–20): 261–88, reprinted in Science and Philosophy and Other Essays by the Late Bernard Bosanquet, ed. J.H. Muirhead and R.C. Bosanquet (London: Allen and Unwin, 1927), 407–37; and ‘Croce’s Aesthetic,’ Mind, n.s., 29 (1920): 212–15. For Santayana’s critique of Croce, see ‘Croce’s Aesthetics,’ The Journal of Comparative Literature, 1 (April 1903): 191–5, reprinted in The Idler and His Works and Other Essays, ed. Daniel Cory (Freeport, NY: Books for Library Press, 1957), 108–115. (This is a review of Croce’s Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale.) ‘On My Friendly Critics,’ Soliloquies in England, 257. See The Life of Reason V; Reason in Science (1906), vol. 5 of the Triton Edition of The Works of George Santayana (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 151–216. ‘The Philosophy of Mr. Bertrand Russell,’ in Santayana, Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinions (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1913), 110–54. The section on ‘Hypostatic Ethics’ appears on 138–54. The Realm of Truth (1938), Book Third of Realms of Being, vol. 15 of the Triton

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24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33

34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42

43

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Edition of The Works of George Santayana (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), 73–83. Milton K. Munitz, The Moral Philosophy of Santayana (New York: Humanities Press, 1939), 5–6. Munitz’s book is the classic examination of Santayana’s moral philosophy broadly construed. The Sense of Beauty, 29. Ibid., 215. Ibid., 216–17. Reason in Science, 171. Scepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Dover, 1955), 283. Introduction to The Life of Reason, vol. 3 of the Triton Edition of The Works of George Santayana (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 17. The Sense of Beauty, 215. Introduction to The Life of Reason, 15. This is not the time to examine Santayana’s treatment of pre-rational morality, rational ethics, and post-rational morality in Reason in Science. Suffice it to say that rational ethics asks people to discover what they really esteem by applying dialectic to any estimation they sincerely make (173). The social dimension of realization in the life of reason permeates all its aspects, including common sense, society, religion, art, and science, but is especially evident in society. For Santayana’s treatment of this, see The Life of Reason II; Reason in Society (1905), vol. 3 of the Triton Edition of The Works of George Santayana (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 227–375. The Sense of Beauty, 54. Ibid., 32–3. Introduction to The Life of Reason, 18. The Life of Reason I; Reason in Common Sense (1905), vol. 3 of the Triton Edition of The Works of George Santayana (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 173–4. Introduction to The Life of Reason, 17. ‘A General Confession,’ Part I, The Philosophy of George Santayana, 20. Ibid. Ibid. ‘The Mutability of Aesthetic Categories,’ in Animal Faith and Spiritual Life, 421–2n.2. This note is repeated in Santayana’s article ‘An Aesthetic Soviet,’ The Dial (May 1927); reprinted in Obiter Scripta, 249–264. It appears on 253– 4n.1. The Realm of Essence, Book First of Realms of Being (1927), vol. 14 of the Triton Edition of The Works of George Santayana (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), 10.

144 Philip MacEwen 44 Ibid. 45 Santayana, Platonism and the Spiritual Life (1927), vol. 10 of the Triton Edition of The Works of George Santayana (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), 170. 46 Ibid., 179. 47 Ibid., 181. 48 Ibid., 184. 49 Ibid. 50 Realm of Essence, 13. 51 Ibid., 10. 52 Platonism and the Spiritual Life, 188. 53 Realm of Essence, 10. 54 Ibid., 10. 55 For Santayana’s critique of Plato, see Platonism and the Spiritual Life, passim, but especially sections II–VIII. For Santayana’s critique of Russell, see ‘The Philosophy of Mr. Bertrand Russell,’ especially section IV, ‘Hypostatic Ethics.’ 56 History of Aesthetic, 1. 57 Ibid., 1. 58 Ibid., 6–7. 59 Three Lectures on Aesthetic, Editor’s Introduction, ed. Ross, vii. 60 London: Macmillan, 1918; 2nd ed. 1919. 61 Three Lectures on Aesthetic, 61; ed. Ross, 34. 62 Ibid., 75; ed. Ross, 40. 63 Ibid., 6; ed. Ross, 7. 64 Ibid., 8; ed. Ross, 8. 65 Ibid., 7n.1; ed. Ross, 8n.2 66 Ibid., 17; ed. Ross, 12. At this point, Bosanquet’s attention begins to focus more on the creative rather than the observing side of the aesthetic attitude. Hence the change in terminology. 67 Ibid., 21; ed. Ross, 14. 68 Ibid., 17–18; ed. Ross, 12. 69 Ibid., 21; ed. Ross, 14. 70 Ibid., 19; ed. Ross, 13. 71 Ibid., 54; ed. Ross, 31. 72 Ibid., 56; ed. Ross, 32 73 Ibid., 35; ed. Ross, 20. 74 Ibid., 71; ed. Ross, 39. 75 Ibid., 62; ed. Ross, 34. 76 Ibid., 61; ed. Ross, 34. 77 See Genesis 2.7.

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7 The Balance of Extremes: Metaphysics, Nature, and Morals in the Later Philosophy of Bernard Bosanquet LESLIE ARMOUR The Search for Balance In his last complete1 book, The Meeting of Extremes in Contemporary Philosophy, Bosanquet struggled to sustain what he took to be the philosophical centre against forms of realism and idealism which he believed would plunge us into irrationality. He also struggled against what remained of the simplistic progressivism of the blissful Edwardian world that collapsed on the outbreak of the First World War, as well as against those who proposed to go back to the fantasies of an ideal ancient or medieval world. Those who thought the current view of the world must always be the best met with his scorn, as did those who thought the right view of the world was established in some forgotten age and only needed to be restored. The conflict that forms the surface of the book is between realism and idealism, and yet Bosanquet, ahead of his time as so often happened, asked the question made fashionable in our time by Michel Foucault: What do the disputants have in common that they do not discuss? It turns out that it is – very often at least2 – the ultimate reality of time and the notion that ‘the end is progress’ and that there is ‘progress to infinity.’3 The idea of a centre between the extremes is not immediately clear. Bosanquet wanted to insist the world is intelligible and objectively knowable. That meant resisting on one side positions which held that the world is wholly independent of mind in a way which would make knowledge conjectural and on the other the position that reality is to be understood solely as the activity of a subject, whether that subject be one or more individual minds, or unified spirit, or the Absolute proposed by philosophers like Giovanni Gentile.

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There were competing systems whose authors shared Bosanquet’s aims, especially the system of Samuel Alexander.4 Bosanquet saw an easy defence against realists like G.E. Moore and some of his American contemporaries for whom realism involved a fragmentation of knowledge and an insistence that we cannot put the bits together to make a single, all-embracing system. He believed that he could show that all claims to knowledge break down if one believes that one is left only with bits of a jigsaw puzzle whose whole cannot be grasped even in principle. His younger friend and steady correspondent Samuel Alexander was another matter. Bosanquet regarded Alexander as one of the great minds of the time. Alexander has largely been forgotten now, along with the other leading philosophers of temporal process, John Elof Boodin5 and Conwy Lloyd Morgan. Henri Bergson has fared slightly better, perhaps, but those who took his ideas seriously – C.E.M. Joad and H. Wildon Carr, for instance – have not. Perhaps this is because Alfred North Whitehead was assumed to have taken ‘the philosophy of process’ to greater glory. Alexander thought so himself, but he was an unduly modest man.6 When Bosanquet wrote, Alexander had already been a Gifford Lecturer and was a Fellow of the British Academy. In due course he would be one of the three philosophers of his time to be named to the Order of Merit. Only one has been named since. Alexander was a close student of Spinoza, whose system he admired almost above all. Yet Spinoza’s eternal world seemed incompatible with the reality of time and evolution upon which modern science insisted. Alexander located the perfected world not just in the future, but even beyond the limits of any possible future. It is something at which the world aims – the achievement of an instance of the characteristic of deity.7 Deity is the characteristic that represents a higher order than anything imaginable in our world. But if we were to achieve that characteristic another characteristic would appear to be a still higher characteristic. The world would aim at this. Nevertheless, the world and our knowledge of it can be unified by an understanding of the thrust toward deity. At what seemed the opposite extreme were the Italian idealists. There was Gentile, whose romantic purity as an idealist and stubborn absolutism led him into the arms of Mussolini, and Croce, whose notion of philosophy as history influenced H. Wildon Carr, J.A. Smith, and R.G. Collingwood. Gentile’s absolutism proved logically empty in

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Bosanquet’s view, though he would not have been surprised by its utility as a vehicle for the expression of emotional claims about fascism. Croce and his friends threatened to turn philosophy-as-history into the view that all our notions of reality are the products of the historical imagination, though in England such ideas were tempered by J.A. Smith’s doubts and by Collingwood’s unending fascination with the ontological argument. What, then, is really meant by ‘the meeting of extremes’ in philosophy? One kind of meeting is a meeting in negation. Gentile’s absolutism leads to an ultimate reality, which is like Hegel’s: a pure, undifferentiated Absolute is empty. The same might have been said of Bradley’s Absolute, but Bosanquet saw it as objectively finding expression in a plurality of limited realities,8 whereas ‘the subject of which we read so much in Gentile – the subject which can never be an object’ separates mind from its objects and leads to a final ‘agnosticism.’9 The Crocean idealists also impose the subject on the object in a way that makes objectivity impossible. So idealists and realists meet in a kind of agnosticism about the world. Another meeting point is the focus on time. The Crocean idealists, along with the Alexandrian and many American realists, agree about the reality of time and progress. Yet even Alexander had to concede that we cannot really know the unity of the world until the quality which is beyond mind or spirit emerges in a far distant future. We may know more then, but the final unity will always appear as a distant prospect for yet another emergent quality. Realist belief in progress in fact tends to be undermined by epistemologies, which necessitate a large dose of scepticism. Bosanquet believed that there was a solid middle ground which would prevent our claims to knowledge from collapsing into a cloud of unknowing. Our minds are, indeed, part of a system which extends beyond the individuals who figure in our immediate world. We must go beyond ourselves to find its nature, as Alexander thought. But we do know enough to grasp that the system in which we live is continuous, rational, and, within certain limits, orderly. In Bosanquet’s view, the property of mentality which we find in ourselves is a reflection of the deepest nature of that reality. Our science and what remains of our religion after we have stripped away superstition both testify to this unity. But they must be reconciled, and their final status can only be determined by careful philosophical analysis. The notion of a centre of balance can only emerge from such an analysis.

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Realism and Idealism Bosanquet’s picture of the clash between realism and idealism is of a confrontation between two theses, the pure forms of which, if taken literally, are absurd. One position insists on thought as the ‘creator, condition, and only genuine type, of reality.’10 About this, Bosanquet tends to agree with G.E. Moore.11 Insofar as what is ultimately involved is a kind of subjective idealism, it is very different from what Bosanquet calls ‘speculative philosophy.’12 Although Bosanquet makes much of such positions – and has a case against Giovanni Gentile, who much admired Bishop Berkeley13 – philosophers who take this kind of subjectivist view were (and are) quite rare. Perhaps the strongest expression of one sort of idealism as a thesis that reduces everything to mind or spirit can be found in the opening pages of the second series of J.A. Smith’s unpublished Hibbert Lectures for 1915–16. Smith first insists that ‘spirit’ must be a unity from which nothing is excluded and which has no opposite. But this is not the position Smith held. In the same lectures he quickly argues that this position must be understood in a way which permits its expression in a plurality of instances.14 Though Croce is mentioned by Bosanquet explicitly along with Gentile, Gentile criticized Croce for not being thorough enough.15 It is true that Croce’s view of philosophy and history turns reality into a phenomenon which has to be seen through the medium of an unfolding mind,16 but he insisted that mind organized raw data which were beyond the reach of the rational consciousness.17 Indeed, he saw this as the basis of art. It is this kind of ‘neoidealism’ which Bosanquet thinks shows ‘a remarkable agreement,’18 ‘a really startling’19 convergence (despite its differences) with what he calls ‘critical realism,’ a theory which he associated with ‘the Six’ in America, and with ‘the Seven,’ who included Roy Wood Sellars and James Bissett Pratt.20 Croce makes Bosanquet think of Kant and of the oddity of claiming to know that something exists when one has cut off all access to it. But all the forms of ‘neo-idealism’ seem to him to end in subjectivity of a kind which makes it impossible to give adequate weight to our scientific knowledge. Most kinds of realism of the period ended in the same way. Russell’s praise of science was unending, and he did not like the notion of a reality which exists apart from any systematic knowledge. His fabled ‘sensa’ could be independent but they also could be known. Still, there is an inherent mystery about them. They just ‘are’ and have no explanation. ‘The Six’ held the stronger doc-

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trine that there are objects which are real and which transcend our consciousness. Successful philosophical theories must avoid two disastrous positions. One is the view that takes subjective mind as we know it and inflates it into the universe of reality. This is the subjective mind writ large, and it obliterates, as Moore and others thought, just the distinctions on which objective knowledge depends. The other philosophical thesis has it that in order to avoid this view, we must postulate entities that are independent of mind altogether. Bosanquet’s solution – and this is the heart of his vision as well as the source of his greatest problems – is to insist that there is a ‘general or universal character’ in mind.21 He does not want an Absolute that is an inflated individual mind, but an individual mind that expresses the universal mind. This inevitably raises questions about individuals – questions which are always troubling in his writing – and gives rise to Alexander’s most pressing criticism of Bosanquet’s theory of the Absolute. Alexander said ‘according to that doctrine ... finites though real are not real in their own right but are real appearances of the one Absolute.’22 Alexander refuses to accept the idea of a general or universal character of mind – a mind which in Bosanquet’s view is a characteristic which expresses itself in and through the whole of reality – though he does accept that there can be a collective mind.23 It is not mind which unites reality; it is a principle expressed as a process – emergent evolution. Alexander’s universe starts out as a place in which mind is not apparent, yet it has a direction and it turns out that time is the mind or soul of space in that it gives reality a direction. As minds emerge in this process they are capable of grasping the principle of evolution and of seeing themselves involved in the past and future of the universe. Mind can render the universe intelligible and in that sense take possession of it without supposing that mind is itself the sole principle. Indeed mind will in due course be superseded by another character. Alexander is able to hold that nothing is really closed to mind. We can see where we have come from; we can even get a sense of where we are going. There is a necessary ceaseless ‘progress.’ The universe is unending, for there is no principle which brings it to an end in such a system,24 and in Bosanquet’s view contradictions emerge because mind is both assumed to be more powerful than it can be and less powerful than it needs to be for the task to be done. That is to say that the finite mind, after all, lacks the power to get beyond itself.

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If there is no mind beyond our minds, the scientific theories which finite mind proposes to itself must be only its own projections. It can no more transcend its own limitations than a cow can understand the difference between Jackson Pollock and Millais. But in any case, if it is purely finite, how can it grasp the infinite at all? How can it come to understand some characteristic like ‘deity,’ which is clearly beyond it? Bosanquet sees Alexander’s theory as powerful and intelligent, but it takes on an undue plausibility from the Zeitgeist. The Limits of Science Certainly, Alexander’s philosophy at once raises puzzles. It was inspired by the evolutionary view of the world which had settled in the European imagination since Buffon and Lamarck and become embedded in western science since Darwin and Wallace. Clearly, too, it had something to do with the scientific preoccupation with revisionary views of space and time. But it must be supposed that it had more to do with Edward Caird’s philosophy of religion than with either of these. This mixture of science and philosophy is puzzling and one needs to search a little to see how it figures in Bosanquet’s account of the ways in which extremes meet. Philosophers with a passion for science – Russell, and, later, C.D. Broad – figured strongly in the ‘realist’ lists. In the years after Bosanquet’s book, works like Broad’s The Mind and Its Place in Nature25 sought a realist philosophy in accord with science. Yet Sir Arthur Eddington (who was to become, like Alexander, a member of the Order of Merit) and Sir James Jeans thought they could infer an idealist metaphysics from the same science. Whitehead stood between the two groups – as did Conwy Lloyd Morgan – but the role of science in such philosophies remains troubling. The philosophical books were not contributions to the sciences nor likely to figure as scientific textbooks. There was something odd going on, and Bosanquet, in a very gentlemanly way, tried to sniff it out. Even philosophers like Russell, who clung to some form of a ‘sensedata’ theory about the objects of knowledge, wanted to think of the objects of knowledge as ‘sensa,’ that is, as something neutral to the distinction between mind and matter. In Russell’s theory sensa were inert in the sense that they did not and could not respond to the activity of knowing. Science has to account not just for the objects it studies, but for the fact that knowing is possible. It must therefore integrate mind

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into its theorizing. But there is always a clash. In the realist account, ‘knowing’ becomes at one extreme the transfer of physical patterns from one place to another. James Bissett Pratt, one of ‘the Seven,’ said that ‘knowledge is not a relation between a knowing subject and an object known. It is merely a special relation between objects.’26 On this view, when I ‘know’ that Belgrade is in Serbia, a physical pattern is detected in an atlas and data are transferred to my brain. But all sorts of questions arise about the pattern which is produced in my brain. These can be circumvented by a behaviourist account of knowledge. I may mean by ‘knowing where Belgrade is’ that when I take off from Gatwick airport I set my course toward the east rather than toward the west. When I land I behave as if I were in Belgrade and my affairs are seen to flow smoothly in a way which suggests that I know where I am and that others act as if they thought I knew where I was. But all this could be carried out by a clever robot without any consciousness awareness. If, though, I mean by ‘know’ in the scientific context something like ‘having a theory which explains some phenomena by ordering them in intelligible law-like ways’ then, clearly, something characteristic of what is usually meant by ‘mental activity’ enters in. The practice of science is certainly concerned with intelligible theorizing. The effect, therefore, of an extreme and literal realist position – one that refuses to admit any picture of the world in which subject and object at least intermingle to form the genuine reality – is to remove the elements of theory and understanding from science and to reduce knowledge to information transfer in the special sense in which ‘information’ (literally perhaps the input of forms) is independent of questions about consciousness. Science is then justified only because it works for certain ends (e.g., getting to Belgrade or making a cruise missile work). There is no reason to believe that we have any grasp of ‘reality’ in this process. Does Alexander do better than the American realists? Alexander’s world has a history and it is headed toward a manifestation of deity – not the manifestation of deity because deity is a variable quality and has no single, definitive manifestation. This squares with our present belief that the universe was once lifeless, now has life, and has developed beings with minds who can make the idea of deity a meaningful feature on their horizons. It allows us to make sense, for instance, of the longstanding Judeo-Christian tradition which says that the world appeared without life, but developed hints and manifestations of God,

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and will finally be redeemed in some way. It does so without appeal to the knowledge which might be gained in religious practice – the life of ritual and prayer, and the recognition of miracles and other divine manifestations. But Bosanquet argues that unless the mind which understands and takes satisfaction in understanding has some connection with the rest of reality – unless everything shares in some way in the ‘universal’ character of mind – it is all just a pretty story which sounds plausible because it accords with our ordinary beliefs, ancient and modern.27 Theories which deny the universality of mind end in contradiction because they insist both that our understanding reaches through to reality and that it cannot do so because mind itself is merely an emergent characteristic which is a rather late arrival on the scene. Mind stands alone and puzzled. Deity does not yet exist – and, in the final sense, it never can exist. It is logically incompatible with the occupation of a moment of future time. If the realists fail, would the friends of the notion that subjective mind is everywhere and is all there is fare better in the search for knowledge? Alas, science as theory and as the search for the kind of understanding which produces explanation is, on these views, just what it is on the realist view: it is the unfolding of what is in our own minds. Collingwood would later argue that science in each age rests on absolute presuppositions which are beyond argument, and J.A. Smith in his unpublished Gifford Lectures28 says that philosophy itself is largely a business of suppositions. Do such theories preclude – as Bosanquet thought – objective knowledge? One must be careful. Smith and Bosanquet at one point converged around an important idea about time, value, and individuality, and we should remember the theoretical debates that came after Bosanquet. Collingwood’s ideas about civilization and his passion for the logic of the ontological argument both provided routes to objectivity even though they changed the notion of objectivity. In the later Collingwood, objectivity is not so much in our findings about the world as in the common values which animate our search for knowledge and in pervasive concepts which structure genuine claims to knowledge. But on such a view it is difficult to make the notions of objectivity and reality mesh. Only a view of reality which links science and the objective world to our own activities will really work if we want to sustain the notions of objectivity which most people take for granted. These notions imply

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that there is something really there about which we can have indisputable knowledge in principle if not in practice. Science itself may give us clues as we see how theories in physics, for instance, are actually related to the processes of discovery. Bosanquet argues that relativity theories give us a hint that mind enters into all reality. The Logic of Metaphysics To get much further we must explore the logic of our questions. Bosanquet’s metaphysics is built step by step. He sees the human mind constantly in search of unity and never satisfied with fragments. But he does not see the course of inquiry as undermining the legitimate independence of the fragments in the search. His predecessor Thomas Hill Green and his contemporary F.H. Bradley both sought for single and quick solutions. Both proceeded from the idea of relation, but they went in dramatically different directions.29 Green asked questions about Hume and relations. Are there impressions of relations or only relations of impressions? He insisted that there were really only the latter and that, therefore, the activity of relating is something which must be done by the mind – ours or the mind of the Absolute. Bradley argued that the idea of relation is itself ‘infected.’ If we think of relations which are represented by the form aRb, where a and b are terms and R is a relation, then we have a problem. What relates the relations to the terms? If we try to put them together we have unsatisfactory choices. R, the relation, might be a quality of one term or of the other. By then there is still a gap to be filled. Or the whole, aRb, might be a unity. But then there is no relation. On this view reality must be a seamless whole and this whole is Bradley’s Absolute. Green is a constructivist whose idealism rests on his account of the subject. The relating subject participates in all nature and reality is a joint construct, the work which we share with the Absolute. Bosanquet does not think of Green as a subjectivist,30 probably because the subjects interact and there is a difference between us and the Absolute. The right term, perhaps, would be inter-subjectivist. Bradley is an objective idealist. It is in the object we know that idealism appears as true. In Bosanquet’s terms he is a ‘speculative idealist.’ But Bradley’s idealism comes all in one swoop, and the rest of his work consists very largely of coping with the paradoxes which a seamless and all-absorbing Absolute generates.

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Bosanquet admired Bradley, but through all his work his tactics are different. Bosanquet’s theory and his method are certainly not entirely new. Medieval philosophers – Bonaventure is a good example – very often insisted that if God created the world, then he must appear in everything, and the test of the theistic hypothesis as a philosophy is whether he can be found in every element of reality. Finding God is a complicated business. But the notion that all the avenues down which we must travel to sustain our claims about reality must appear on the same map is very Bosanquetian too. Bosanquet’s Absolute may seem more puzzling than Bonaventure’s God. Everything is part of the Absolute, but the fundamental character of the Absolute must appear in everything. This is the meaning of the claim that there must be universal general characteristics of mind.31 Bosanquet wants to see mind and its objects in a single context in which the concepts will work together. The ‘extremes’ cannot achieve this. One extreme – ‘realism’ – offered two versions of the relation of mind to the world. One (for example the realism of C.D. Broad) gave us two maps, one of mind and one of the world. The world became mysterious and the mind isolated. The other (the Pratt version) substituted information transfer for knowing and left us with one map which could not explain our theorizing. ‘Neo-idealism’ absorbed the map of the world into the map of the mind. The map became a work of art. Was it really a map? Would it render knowledge too subjective or make art too objective? Fitting together, though, is a difficult notion in many idealist systems, especially those like Bradley’s in which the reality of relations has been denied. And Bosanquet says in The Meeting of Extremes that ‘about space, time, change and relation,’ he will take ‘a line’ which ‘is in harmony with that which I believe Mr. Bradley consistently to have maintained.’ But he adds that what he means is that there are ‘relational wholes ... apart from which absolutism has always maintained both relations and terms to be inconceivable.’ He adds rather darkly that ‘unities contain relations, but unities are not relations, nor constituted by relations.’32 Bosanquet’s own best account is in his Logic: Relations are true of their terms ... I do not understand relations to be adjectives of their terms. They are not adjectives because they involve other terms which are as substantive as any of which we might be inclined to pronounce them adjectives ... Relations are just the way in which discursive thought represents the unity of terms ... [t]hey are a modus vivendi between terms in the same universe.33

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In a later essay he says much the same thing.34 There he says ‘if you cannot do with relations, no more can you do without them.’35 As I said in an earlier paper,36 I can only understand this in the following way: In Bosanquet’s own view reality is ultimately a seamless whole. Yet the component parts – or aspects – of his universe must indeed be distinct. They have relational properties, properties which bind them to other things. But relational properties arise out of the nature of the particulars with which they are associated and can exist without implying the kind of order which troubled Bradley. Bradley’s relations seem somehow to tie things together. This makes them seem like additional sorts of ‘things’ in the world. But if you think of Norway, say, as being to the west of Sweden, then ‘being to the west of’ is not something that ties Scandinavia into a neat parcel. It follows from their other properties. Norway and Sweden are two regions of the surface of the earth, two cultures, two linguistic groups. Their ‘relations’ are the concomitants of their various properties. The best way to put the matter is this: What it is to ‘be something’ (if one is to speak in the language of properties and relations) is to be the instantiation of two or more properties. Redness is not a thing. A red box is. ‘Boxiness’ provides a form which limits the expression of ‘redness,’ and ‘redness’ specifies a form of the occupation of a spatial surface which a box must have. Nothing is just ‘red.’ Nothing is just ‘a box’ either. A box must have a determinate form. That is to say that when qualities are expressed in the world they intersect so as to provide limits which make it possible to ‘be something.’ To speak of ‘relations’ is just to speak of these qualities of intersection. The ‘relations’ are not something additional. The system Bosanquet needs will only generate Bradley’s problem if for some reason relations have to be ‘something added.’ This may well be the case if one takes Green’s position, which entails that things are made by a specification of ‘relating’ which seems to add ‘relations.’ The relational properties overlap but each property belongs to one and only one individual. Such properties are the expression of an individual and the individual simply consists of such expressions. Bosanquet’s world thus does not consist of distinct things in the sense of ‘substances’ which ‘have’ the properties, but of properties which form natural links which can be articulated as ‘relational properties.’ When Bosanquet speaks of unities which ‘contain relations’ he can be taken to mean that the wholes of which he speaks are composed of properties some of which can be understood as assemblies, and that sentences expressing relations can be true of them, since the relational

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language has as its essential function, on such a theory, the designation of relational properties. This solution really does make reality a single unity expressible as a set of properties and relational properties but never adequately expressible as less than the whole. We shall see, however, that such a whole may well have many facets and more than one kind of relational property even though no element is wholly autonomous. If there were intelligible sub-parts which were wholly autonomous there would be relations which were not expressible as relational properties. This is just what autonomy means – that there is something which has no natural or necessary connection to anything else. Any sensible theory along these lines involves organic wholes, more than one of them, and sets of properties which do not all belong to them in the same way. By an organic whole I mean one, some or all of whose parts are essentially bound up with its existence, such that a change in them would change the nature of the whole in such a way as to make it a significantly different whole in the context of certain explanations. This is the weakest notion of ‘organism.’ It is difficult to say what makes for a ‘significant difference.’ Any change to any whole makes a different whole. It seems too strong to say that an organic whole is one in which a change in any part is a change in every part, and it also seems to be trivial, since any change changes the relational properties of every part as well. What I mean by such change is one which would constitute a difference to the role of an entity in explanations in which its role is important. If a man is changed into a bear by a witch, he may be excused, perhaps, for doing bearlike things and his behaviour will have different explanations. If a woman is dead she cannot commit crimes. Organic wholes become important when we are explaining actions. So much behaviour by a human being has its explanation simply within the organism. I also therefore mean a whole such that the concept of it forms an essential ingredient in any complete knowledge of reality. The concepts of such wholes cannot be analysed out into concepts of the sets of their component parts without changing the truth-value of some significant proposition. An ‘organic’ relational property must be a feature of the unity within which it is found. Logically, there can be relational properties which are not parts of such wholes and are not, either, completely autonomous. If they exist, they seem to be only arbitrarily associated with the subjects to which they are attached. Within organic wholes relational properties are analogues of internal relations. They must be ‘internal’ in the sense that

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something which possesses them is genuinely different because it possesses them. It seems very likely that there are both sorts of relational properties. ‘Brotherhood’ seems to be a property found within a whole. It is organic in this sense. One can hardly think that brothers would be just the same if they were not brothers. The kind of unity which is involved may even be significant in some moral contexts. But there are some relational properties which seem quite different. The sentence ‘Mr Joseph was sceptical about relational properties’ expresses the same proposition and the same reality whether it is written in English and printed in Cheltenham Bold or translated into Romanian and printed in Times Roman. It is arbitrarily associated with the language in which it happens to be expressed, though it must be expressed in some language. Not all sentences can be translated at all, but this one can be, at least in the rough sense in which we understand that English and Romanian readers will both understand that Mr Joseph has reservations about relational properties. Other properties like the ‘coolness’ imagined by the young and supposed by Mr Blair to attach to Great Britain may be wholly chimerical. If they are beyond the real, they are externally related. And yet they are not fully autonomous, either. For, to be chimerical, a thing must have a reality to contrast it with. But this need not trouble Bosanquet. Bosanquet need not hold that all relational properties are manifested through organic wholes, whatever the American realists – ‘the Six’ and ‘the Seven’ – whose arguments Bosanquet does not directly address, may have thought. Their complaint37 seems to be based on the belief that their opponents supposed all relations to be internal. They make much of logic and mathematics where external relations may well be the order of the day. But all this may be unproblematic if one takes careful note of what is required by Bosanquet’s thesis. In fact, one may argue more strongly. There is a sense, as I said, in which there is one whole within which all ascribable properties have their place. Bosanquet wants to talk about that whole, and one cannot talk about everything38 without solving the problem of the class of all classes. I have argued39 that one cannot do this unless one accepts the distinction between those properties which are parts of organic wholes and those which are arbitrarily associated with other members of the clusters. In talking about this situation, one can use the language of ‘internal’ and ‘external.’ The solution to the Russellian puzzle has to allow that classes and class members are always associated organically

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– the class of yellow things would be a different class if any of its members were to turn purple. Yet the terms of association between the members to each other may be quite different. If one member becomes purple it is not a member of the class, but the other members are still yellow. There is no class of all classes which are not members of themselves because there is no class which can determine the necessary organic association. There appears to be such a class, but it is an illusion. If the parts of this illusory class are not internally conjoined properties they do not necessarily form a class at all. In answer to the ‘new realists’ one can point out that class members – considered merely as members of a class – are associated in a way which means that some changes in one member need not entail changes in all. But class-defining properties and the members of the class are so associated that a change in one is a change in all. The members are indeed internal parts of the unity when they are considered as expressions of the class-defining property. This gives us a sense of ‘unity’ and ‘plurality,’ but what did Bosanquet and people like him mean by unity? They certainly meant more than the kind of unity given by class membership, but less than the unity of the Absolute, which swallows everything into undifferentiated unity. That notion has been attacked from McTaggart in Bosanquet’s time to Lévinas in ours. There is an organic form, for instance, which unites badgers and their environments. Indeed, one way of talking about the whole world is to talk about badgers-and-their-environment. This focuses the world in a way which makes all the relations internal. This is a serious matter, but it does not swallow everything into one whole. If you plug the badger holes and leave no possible escape, the badgers die just as surely as if you cut off their heads. Badgers also depend on the stability of the solar system and the continued radiation of the sun – all the elements of the universe. Yet, if some badgers turn up with their fur dyed green and if the badgers are colour-blind and the chemical change in making their fur green has no other effect on them, this may make no difference to them. Each whole, like a class property, governs some feature or features of each of its members, but not all of them. Even if Spinoza is right and there is one substance, God, whose nature determines the most important shape and order of each member, it need not – indeed cannot – determine every property of everything. If there are genuine individuals, each one has some property which makes it what it is. Such a property is singular and cannot be inferred from any other

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property. There must be something in each unique thing which makes it unique. To be unique is to be distinct and non-repeatable. But what is determined by something else is always an instance of some rule or act of determination which can in principle be repeated. To say that something is determined by something is to say that there is some rule by which this fact can be found out. If one thinks of the world as divided into a set of perspectives – the badger-and-environment, a person and her environment, even a chair and its environment – then each individual uniquely determines the element of the perspective from which it is the focus. Bosanquet’s views make most sense if relational properties are primary. If there are relational properties rather than relations, this merely means that each set of such properties is determined by whatever has the set. But there cannot be only one such set if there are unique things. And if there is a complexity in the system there will be unique things. In such a universe, every logically possible individual is a way of focusing the whole of reality from a particular perspective – so that one gets something like ‘badger-and-environment.’ When such perspectives are realized as self-conscious beings, each constitutes an apparent universe. But to be aware of such a perspective is to be aware of the possibilities of other ways of focusing the whole. Individuality depends on the contrast between perspectives so that we get our identities from others, and Bosanquet would agree with Emmanuel Lévinas that we always have a moral obligation to the others. Such a view solves many problems, though the status of such individuals as genuine continuants remains, as we shall see, questionable. Bosanquet’s World Though we have seen that Bosanquet is always suspicious of attempts to build a metaphysics out of physics (or any other science), it is true that he always had one eye on the things that appear in nature, and some scientific issues (especially relativity) are mentioned in The Meeting of Extremes. His understanding of experience makes him insist that the world has parts which are interlocking. It is neither the world of absolutely discrete things nor the world of Bradley’s seamless unity. The main arguments are philosophical. In what sense, then, might science offer the support Bosanquet sought from it? Physics has taught us to accept the inter-relational participation of everything in one system, and chaos theory reminds us that a butterfly

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flapping its wings in Boston can cause a tornado in Ohio. We know that if the earth were a little nearer to or just a little farther from the sun, life as we know it would likely be impossible unless, perchance, there had developed an equally unlikely phenomenon such as the ice sheets which may keep some of the moons of the distant planets warm. The world of contemporary physics is a world of forces and fields governed by general laws expressed as mathematical formulas, which in turn are particular instances of logical formulas. The simple world of hard lumps of matter, beloved of the Greek atomists and perhaps of nineteenth-century chemists, is long gone, although there are many cases in which we can optionally view phenomena such as light either as streams of particles or as fields. This seems far from ‘common sense,’ and philosophers have long been sceptical of the old distinction between the ordinary world of tables, chairs, donkeys, and people, and the sophisticated world described in the physics of subatomic particles. More plausibly, one can hold that such ‘worlds’ are interpretations of experience, and it is no doubt reasonable to say that both worlds are real. For Bosanquet, each is an interpretation of the presented data in the light of theories, linguistic customs, and the need for shared experience. Thus we can think of them as two readings of the same thing, and some reading is a necessary part of any claim to knowledge. The things themselves are not, however, something over and above the interpretations. They are the sorts of things which are expressed through interpretations. This further development of the thesis is consistent with Bosanquet’s theory, though he does not seem to have worked it out fully. There are places, certainly, where he seems to suggest that the universe is likely to have one single correct interpretation, though I think he meant to suggest that all the correct readings must be coherent within themselves, and also evidence of the same Absolute. In The Meeting of Extremes, he talks about legitimate inferences from ideas to existence.40 There he recalls the book he published a year earlier, Implication and Linear Inference. He says that one must consider ‘experience in all its forms’ and urges that we no longer infer ‘linearly’ from simple principles. In this process we discover phenomena which need to be ‘read.’ Bosanquet says ‘so with religion; you can explain it wrongly, what you cannot do is explain it away.’41 Religion is a feature of the world, but it can be given a wrong reading. In the paragraph which precedes this he says that there are ideas about which you can make mistakes without being mistaken that the central idea has validity. If the world is something which needs to be read and must have many different readings, then we have right away a clear sense of what

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it would mean to say that mind is pervasive and that everything exhibits a facet of the universal or general mind. Mind runs through the universe because the universe is, indeed, something to be interpreted. I would argue that the data which are to be read are like the words on the page in the sense that they have more than one meaning and in the sense that we would say that words are not something over and above all the interpretations that can be given to them. On this view, to say that a word is a ‘mound of ink’ is just to give it one more interpretation, one which has interesting connections to all the readings of it, but which is not somehow metaphysically primary. Bosanquet does not really want to go this far. But I think that this is where the argument forces him. For such a view would also give us a sense of how it is that science is related to other readings. To be a material object is to be a set of data which have one sort of readings. To be an active spirit is to be a state of affairs which requires another reading of most of the data which we understand as a material object. I use the phrase ‘active spirit’ rather than ‘mind’ here because ‘mind’ in its broadest sense is being used by Bosanquet for whatever it is that is present in some form or other whenever intelligibility is present. Like the Muggletonians of the seventeenth century, Bosanquet wanted nothing to do with ‘vague spirits.’ The two readings of the data probably require one another, and any attempt to make one metaphysically or epistemologically prior is likely to end in paradoxes of realism and ‘neo-idealism.’ Philosophers’ Questions There is, however, something else at issue here. Philosophers ask some questions which physicists do not, and some of these questions seem to be about the world in a puzzling sort of way. We have just seen the most obvious case in our discussion of relations. Philosophers talk about whether the world should be conceived of as a set of substances, qualities, and relations, or regarded as simply the expression of a set of qualities. They also argue about whether reality should be thought of as a set of continuants or simply as a set of occasions which are sometimes called events. This is not a scientific question and, indeed, when Alexander, for instance, spoke of emergent properties like mind, and of a universe marching through time to deity, he was invoking issues which do not form part of biology or physics as such. I was once driving through the little town of Lisbon, Ohio, and I came across the sign ‘Ohio Substance

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Abuse Center,’ but it turned out that this was not a place where Whiteheadians quarrelled with Aristotelians. The substances were bits of grass and white powder. When the term ‘substance’ is used at all in physics or chemistry it is just to designate one of the ‘elements’ like iron or to designate something on which a chemical analysis might be carried out, like that white powder. If these are not scientific questions, how does one settle them? Bosanquet’s tactic was to ask how we can have a conceptual framework within which the bits of knowledge form a coherent whole. We have seen how it is possible to have the kinds of unity which Bosanquet wanted while still being able to talk about individuals in the world and how one can tie such unities to experience. The experienced unities Bosanquet talks about will be something like the experience described in Bradley’s unfinished essay on relations.42 So the logic of relations contributes to our decision about the philosophical questions. It may indeed help us deal with the part-whole situation and show us how to cope with what seems to be an inevitable dose of pluralism. The Demands of Morality This picture of the world does not conflict with science or, in the end, with common sense. But what about morality? Bosanquet’s account of interlocking experience is a good basis for the idea of community. But there is a question about how experienced unities, which are expanding perspectives on the whole of reality, can function as continuing moral agents. Some specimens of the two ‘extremes’ seemingly do better. Moral agents may seem to be lost souls, but they are continuing centres of judgment and a Berkeleyan idealist has little trouble with this question. Bosanquet was morally and politically perceptive. With respect to much of his critique, history proved him right. Gentile’s all-embracing pure Spirit turned out to be all too close to Mussolini’s corporate state. Only at the very end – but not in time to avoid assassination – did he break free.43 The logical implication of his philosophy certainly seemed to be that the ultimate good existed only in the whole. Individuals did not count or, at an rate, did not count enough. The good did not reach through to the individual in a way that could provide genuine autonomy. But Bosanquet complained – as did J.A. Smith in his unpublished Hibbert Lectures – that Alexander’s notion of deity and of the good demands a progress ad infinitum which never reaches its goal.44

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Bosanquet says there is for Alexander ‘no community between God and man.’45 He spells this out: ‘There is no universal mind; no common mind ... in family, society, State, or the religious experience, such as the facts of a general will, or a will shared in religion by God and man.’46 The effect is the same in one sense as that of Gentile’s philosophy. The good does not come through to us in a way which makes intelligible the difference between a good and a bad social order. Alexander certainly believed that ‘the world is the body of God,’ but the nature of deity is as far beyond us as is the Spirit of Gentile. Alexander’s philosophy seems to leave us rudderless as well, for we do not know where the world is supposed to be headed, only that there is inevitable progress. Gentile was for a time at least a serious fascist. Alexander was the gentlest of men and saw his philosophy as a defence against every sort of bigotry. But in fact modern totalitarianism has played on notions which might be found in both of Bosanquet’s ‘extremes.’ The idea of invincible progress implies that all change is good. Our uncertainty about what really is good has been used to justify what seems inevitably atrocious in the name of some distant future good. And the idea of a vague, all-embracing unity has been used to submerge the individual. Bosanquet is aware of this, though, as we have seen, his struggles with individuality are serious. In our effort to grasp the current of Bosanquet’s ideas, it is interesting to watch J.A. Smith struggling across this boggy land in the same direction as Bosanquet and eventually, if only momentarily, I think, reaching solid ground. Despite the opening pages of his Hibbert Lectures, Smith insists on the undifferentiated unity of Spirit and quickly comes to the view that Spirit must postulate itself in the world or be nothing. It is true that ‘Value or Good’ are ‘names of things always in the making, never made,’ yet they are not changing in their nature, only in their instantiations. He means by this that Spirit is not a thing but a value. And he thinks there is some sense in the religious belief that ‘the good need not wait upon us.’47 A little later in the Hibbert Lectures Smith says ‘Mr. Andrew Bradley and Mr. Bosanquet have recalled to our attention a remarkable passage in the letters of Keats where the poet ... protests against the ‘little circumscribed notion of this world as a vale of tears’ and bids us better call it a ‘vale of soul making or better a vale of spirit creation.’ He notes that Keats goes on to compare the universe to an infant school, though he himself says it is better compared to a university – a French university rather than a British one.48 That is, there really is something there and beyond time though it is a

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value and not a thing. There is an argument which can be made – I have made it myself – to the effect that ultimate explanations have to be in terms of values rather than things, since values, as such, do not have explanations and things do, and therefore the final answer to the question ‘why is there anything at all?’ had to be in terms of values which in some way struggle to emerge in the world.49 By the time of his Gifford Lectures Smith had become more and more sceptical about the knowledge involved and had turned to the philosophy of ‘supposition,’ which leads on to Collingwood’s later philosophy. But notice what Bosanquet says in the passage to which Smith refers: Justice, of course, may mean that the best should be done for every body and soul ... and, as a rule for our action, is in this sense obviously right. But to the popular pessimist it means ‘The world is all askew if anyone suffers, except by his own fault;’ and this principle, the root of bad individualism, would make man’s life as cheap as a beast’s – nay, very much cheaper; for the beasts will on occasion suffer for each other. We should rather think of the great idea which, as Professor Bradley tells us, occupied the mind of Keats, that the world is a place for the making of souls; and consider what part the suffering not by one’s own fault may play in that. Our conclusion, then, so far, is this: Idealism is not the power or habit of escaping from, or, in a customary sense of the words, raising oneself above reality.50

The effect of this view is that the world is to be seen as a place of active struggle to realize values which really do exist now and about which something can be known through the study of Spirit and the modes of its individuation. The Idea of Religion This view also has the ring of a new religion, and it has often been argued that the idealism of Bosanquet’s time, and especially the idealism of the two generations before The Meeting of Extremes, was an attempted substitute for religion. The claim is that idealism was to religion as methadone is to heroin. It served as a substitute while the addict still had his craving. But it also tended to become unnecessary as that craving ceased. Bosanquet was not a militant atheist like McTaggart, but, like Brad-

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ley, he abandoned conventional religion. He hoped to see the churches turned into museums and cultural centres.51 He thought that religion filled a need but he noticed with a kind of gentle irony the continuing involvement of the ‘neo-idealists’ and the ‘realists’ with religious concepts. The Spirit admired by Gentile is nothing like a human spirit and not much like a Christian spirit. Just what is it? And Alexander’s future deity is quite cut off from us. What we are offered then by both ‘extremes’ is like a desert mirage. One can never get close to it. The followers of Gentile have separated us from the ordinary, amiable concrete world. Alexander placed his hopes in his (to Bosanquet doubtful) ability to foresee the future. Bosanquet wants to keep us in touch with the plain and ordinary. His Absolute does go beyond what we immediately know, but we get to it by quite conventional methods of reasoning. No one supposes that the world ends at the boundary of his or her immediate experience, because what is framed within that boundary is always unintelligible in itself. The Absolute is what would be completely intelligible. It is therefore not unlike the ordinary at least in crucial respects. The idea that reality must be intelligible and that the Absolute must be the source of this intelligibility is what survives from the critiques of more puzzling notions (like Bradley’s notion of the Absolute) and more perilous notions (like that of Gentile). The new faith of Alexander and the ‘neo-idealists’ in time and progress worried Bosanquet. He wrote to Alexander: ‘I have just sent to the printers a book on The Meeting of Extremes in Contemporary Philosophy, a small book, like Implication. I have made a great fuss in it about Bradley’s position that the Absolute includes motion, but does not itself move, i.e. go from being of one nature to being of another.’52 Bosanquet doubts indefinite necessary progress. The infinite is expressed through us and we share in it. But our present lives are imperfect. Perfectibility would mean sharing in the life of God or the Absolute. But for Bosanquet the Absolute has no life in this sense. The Absolute’s life is our life. We can make this better, and we have communal responsibilities. He says we must not ‘confuse the Absolute and the Absolute in time.’53 He insists that the question is whether ‘time is in the Absolute, [or] the Absolute in time.’ The latter is true. He explains that though the appearance of the Absolute in time must change – for it is forever incomplete – the Absolute as that which appears in time cannot change.54 For there to be time and change, something must change and something must stand still and permit a measurement. The whole cannot be such a thing. The biggest mystery

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in Bosanquet’s philosophy is about how to characterize the timeless Absolute as opposed to the Absolute expressed in time. The Finite and the Infinite Throughout The Meeting of Extremes there is, as we might expect, a constant tension: The Absolute is much more in the background than it was in Bosanquet’s earlier works, especially the two volumes of the Gifford Lectures. But it is still there. The individual mind is now much more in the foreground but is still the manifestation of the general, universal mind. The temporal world is still to be seen in the context of something that is beyond it in a sense that is difficult to determine. This in fact is clearer than it was in the Gifford Lectures, where the Absolute is often seen as something that we approach as our experience expands, and it is not always clear whether it is eternal there. Most simply, in The Meeting of Extremes, the eternal is beyond the temporal because it is a logical precondition for the existence of the temporal. Yet the Absolute is not transcendent in the sense of being something truly separable from the world. Bosanquet’s argument is that whenever one moves from the finely balanced centre of these ideas one ends in disaster, and indeed that the proponents of the two extremes – various kinds of neo-idealists and various kinds of realists – end in the same disaster. The disaster is an unintelligible world in which there is no rational account by which we may steer our course through life. It is this that Collingwood thought threatened civilization. Gustavus Watts-Cunningham insisted that there was only one really good argument for the Absolute – Bosanquet’s argument a contingentia mundi55 – which held that the intelligibility of the world must come from the fact that the world forms a complete system which is a manifestation of the Absolute.56 The Absolute cannot be a simple extrapolation from the world because the intelligibility of each part depends on the whole. And we can see how this notion might be reinforced by what seems to be the only possible solution to the problem of relations. Yet we have here two major problems. One of them is to identify the nature of Bosanquet’s ‘universal’ or general mind. The other may be the problem in all idealist systems. Of just what does the distinction between Absolute Mind and particular minds consist? In what sense are particular minds real continuants? And, if there is an Absolute, why should it take such a long time to show itself and make such a mess of its appearances in the universe? How to get the Absolute into

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the world without destroying everything by making all its appearances trivial and making individual minds mere minor appearances puzzles everyone.57 Bosanquet’s insistence that the Absolute is really just the ‘high water mark’58 of ordinary experience is very much in the spirit of The Meeting of Extremes, yet he also insists that time is not all. There is an Absolute beyond time. Let us consider those questions in order. Bosanquet’s general mind is not literally a thing, but a characteristic which all things share. It is really, the text strongly suggests, the characteristic of intelligibility. It is one and it is unchanging. Yet it is not unchanging in the way in which the Rock of Gibraltar, much less the Rock of Ages (in which Bosanquet did not much believe) are imagined to be unchanging. It was this kind of problem which prompted philosophers of the next generation to have another glass of port and change the subject. Yet the matter is not as dark as they thought. The germ of the idea which I think is central in Bosanquet goes back to the thirteenth century. We lose sight of this idea at our peril. When the medieval philosophers began to talk about transcendental truth, the first of them, Philip the Chancellor, around 1226, really meant that transcendental truth is the property which things in the world must have in order that there might be true (and false) propositions about them. Truth, being, and goodness were seen as ‘convertible’ properties; to have one was to have the other. A few years later, in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, this view of truth was associated with God and God’s mind in a different way. This almost inevitable shift suggests part of Bosanquet’s problem, too. Still, mind is in things, and, according to Bosanquet, the Absolute is not to be understood as a close relative even of that most idealistic of supreme beings, Archbishop Temple’s God. What is the Absolute? If Bosanquet is taken – and I think it wrong to do so – to insist that the system of relational properties forges the universe into the sort of organic whole in which every relational property makes a difference to every other property, then the world must indeed be One Great Mind and a set of its appearances. But I have already suggested that, whatever the American realists thought, Bosanquet had no reason to take such a position and nothing in his system commits him to it. Still, when Bosanquet speaks of time in the Absolute, he is suggesting something more and his transcendental truth becomes more like that of St Thomas, and his Absolute, more like Aquinas’s God. Clearly this is a development he would not really find attractive if he thought about it.

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It is at this point that J.A. Smith’s ruminations as he went on with his Hibbert Lectures of 1915–16 become relevant. We can see a mind struggling a bit in these lectures. Smith says: ‘If in us spirit shows itself as self-consciousness it thereby shows itself as being a nature capable of indefinite expansion and indefinite contraction.’ Initially, he adds, ‘Our nature is but a phase, a stage through which it [Spirit] passes in its ceaseless progress from itself to itself.’59 But much later in the discussion he notes that what seems to be implied in every act of knowing is that there is a self and a ‘correlate.’ By this he means that an object known on a particular occasion is always uniquely identifiable with some knowing self. But the possibility of knowing it in any serious sense involves at least a degree of systematization and depends on there being an intelligible correlate – an intelligible system within which the object appears.60 This implies a sort of fragmentation which neither Smith nor Bosanquet finds acceptable if it is taken to be ultimate. Smith says it is not ultimate. What it suggests is an ‘experience which contains within it all befores and all afters, and has no befores and afters outside of it, as it has all places, situations and positions within it and none outside.’61 It is this in the end that he calls ‘Spirit.’ He associates it with Bergson’s durée réelle. Perhaps, however, it is more easily understood under its street name – Bosanquet’s ‘high water mark’ of ordinary experience. At any rate, for Smith and for Bosanquet, I think, it is the real. Smith says ‘it is within this doctrine that I propose to entrench myself.’62 The implication is that the Absolute would be identical with fully developed self-consciousness. But evidently in some sense no such thing really exists. Smith uses a curious locution: ‘Self-consciousness’ is ‘always actual, but never factual.’ If it did really exist in the fullest sense it would be an occasion of ‘Joy, Bliss or Blessedness.’ But these things are names of something always in the making, never made. What the Absolute ‘really is’ is ‘Value or Good,’ in a sense ‘the Only Value or Good.’63 He thus returns to the doctrine that Spirit must free itself of itself in order to come to know itself and it is this process which is the world. Spirit therefore turns out not to be a thing but a value, Plato’s form of the good. The value expresses itself with difficulty as a world. There is an implication, of course, that as it expresses itself there is agency involved – an agency which though it appears in the end through human beings is not merely human agency, for the world existed before us and the experience through which we find it goes beyond our own experience. Perhaps the logic of the argument takes Smith and Bosanquet closer to William Temple’s God than they would

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have liked to acknowledge, but that is a matter beyond the scope of this paper. The sense in which the Absolute is infinite, as Bosanquet claims, is then the sense that it cannot be exhausted by any of its manifestations. But the subjective correlate must also be infinite in this sense and a reality is a kind of tension between a set of infinities and their manifestations.64 The infinite Absolute and what Smith calls its ‘correlate’ would be nothing without their expressions in the world. And they would be unintelligible without it. The upshot of such a doctrine is, of course, Bosanquet’s theories of morals and politics. The community is the clearest expression of the correlate of subjectivity – the Absolute which is needed to make individuality intelligible. But it is always through the individual that the Absolute is manifested. The issue is slippery. There is a sense in which Bosanquet never departed from the position of his 1917–18 Aristotelian Society paper: The conclusion I advocate [is that] the spiritual individual has a solid claim to substantive being only indirectly, and through an admission and recognition that his immediate self is of a nature which, to speak in terms of the antithesis before us cannot be called substantive and must by preference be set down as adjectival.65

But the ‘solid’ claim to substantivity follows from the fact that the Absolute in our world is expressed through the things of this world. The Absolute is not to be invited to tea and does not whisper strange messages in the ear of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but the mind of the Absolute illumines each mind and the intelligibility of the world is available everywhere. From the metaphysics of balance emerges a politics of balance. For there to be real values expressed in the world there have to be real individuals. Goodness must become a good something somewhere. The continuity of individuals, then, is the continuity of the expression of particular values. You can acquire a liver, new lenses in your eyes, new hair, new teeth, and new skills and be the same person. But a complete discontinuity of aim and expressed values would cause you to be ‘born again’ in a real sense. Summing Up The logic of Bosanquet’s case is just this: The Absolute as pure undifferentiated unity, more real than the world in which we find ourselves,

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ends in empty nonsense. The world devoid of mind is an unintelligible collection of fragments. There is no truth about things if there is no connection between them and the minds in which they become intelligible. This suggests a middle ground in which mind is somehow found throughout nature, not in the pan-psychist sense in which Whitehead found it, but nearer, no doubt, to the sense in which more recently Timothy Sprigge has found mind spread throughout nature.66 Still, the idea we need is not simple. Actuality, as Smith’s argument seems to suggest, demands determinateness and determinateness requires a structured world. Smith’s first suggestion – that our minds are somehow just a ‘phase’ through which spirit ‘passes’ – will not do, for spirit in this view is not more real than the things in which it finds itself. Bosanquet is not always certain about it, but surely each of the centres of experience has about it its own infinity – for the infinity of the Absolute is rendered intelligible through it. One must think, therefore, that each such centre has its own continuing story. The role of such centres in time is something that Smith and Bosanquet never quite came to terms with. In a letter to Samuel Alexander on 18 February 1926, Smith said that he was lecturing on Alexander and ‘stood with [Alexander] against Bosanquet and Bradley’ on the question of the ultimate reality and priority of time. ‘The universe is essentially a history.’ But he says, in an obvious reference to MECP, ‘I have alarmed Joseph’67 and ‘I admit Bosanquet has shaken me.’68 On the issue hangs the question of whether the Absolute is a real timeless entity – albeit one which is always expressed through temporal events – or rather a value, the good itself which may well be beyond being and non-being. Either thesis will serve to hold the ‘middle ground’ that Bosanquet so much wanted to hold, and so there we must leave our story.

NOTES 1 Three Chapters on the Nature of Mind was left unfinished at Bosanquet’s death in 1923, edited by Helen Bosanquet, and published later that year by Macmillan, London. Science and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1927) was edited by J.H. Muirhead and R.C. Bosanquet and contains essays published between 1894 and 1919. 2 Bosanquet is a little too sweeping. ‘Progressivism’ was a doctrine held literally by Samuel Alexander and implicitly by those American realists who staked their thought on the progress of science, and perhaps by Russell in his optimistic moods. However, it would be wrong, I think, to ascribe it to

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7

8 9 10 11

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G.E. Moore, and certainly wrong to ascribe it to C.D. Broad and some others. Belief in the reality of time was even more widespread. The Meeting of Extremes in Contemporary Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1921), viii. Expressed in his Gifford Lectures for 1916–18 and published as Space, Time, and Deity (London: Macmillan, 1920). Bosanquet read Boodin and mentions him in Meeting of Extremes, 124n. In a letter to Alexander on 13 February 1935, R.G. Collingwood praises ‘the mastery’ of Whitehead’s Process and Reality but says Whitehead ignores real novelty, which Alexander insists on. Collingwood says ‘I am in this respect an Alexandrian.’ Much earlier, on 3 September 1921, Whitehead wrote to Alexander to say they were ‘in fundamental agreement,’ and on 25 May 1925 he wrote to invite Alexander to come to Harvard to teach summer school. (From Letters from the John Rylands Library archives, Manchester.) This awkward locution – ‘an instance of the characteristic of deity’ – results from Alexander’s claim that from any occasion of experience the next ‘level’ will appear as deity (Space, Time, and Deity, 2: 349). But there is an inclusive notion of ‘infinite deity’ (2: 365). It does not, however, exist. The significance of this will appear later. Meeting of Extremes, 4–7. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 1. The reference is to Moore’s ‘The Refutation of Idealism,’ which was published in Mind, n.s., 12 (1903): 433–53, and reprinted in Philosophical Studies (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1922), 1–30. In his Manchester lectures, published as The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects (Manchester: The University Press, 1913), in the same year as his second Gifford Lectures, Bosanquet offered his decisive response to the sorts of critiques mounted by Moore and his friends, who believed that idealists conflated the process of perception and its objects. In fact he had developed the basic idea at least by 1897. In The Psychology of the Moral Self (London: Macmillan, 1897, 1904), 40, Bosanquet refers to G.F. Stout’s Analytic Psychology, 2 vols (London: Muirhead Library of Philosophy, Swan Sonnenschein, 1896), and uses Stout’s argument to make the basic distinction between the activity of perception and ‘the new element’ which ‘a mental system appropriates.’ Meeting of Extremes, 1. It is not clear what the sense of ‘speculative’ is here. Three years later Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), uses speculum in its literal Latin sense, the sense in which Bosanquet’s philosophy is a speculum mundi, a mirror of the world. At the other extreme ‘speculative,’ as in ‘speculative venture,’ means something chancy. But Bosanquet more likely means speculative in the sense of a construction

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13

14

15

16

17

18 19 20

21

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in which a logic, which is in some important sense objective, plays a crucial role and in which the mind is able to get beyond its own perspective. This, if it can be done, is something very far from Moore’s ‘idealism’ in which the distinction between perceiving and the objects of perception is obliterated. Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro, 3rd ed. (Bari: Laterza & Figli, 1920), 1–4. Trans. as The Theory of Mind as Pure Act by H. Wildon Carr (London: Macmillan, 1922), 1–6. Magdalen College, Oxford archives, Ms. 6206, Box I-3 contains the second series of the Hibbert Lectures. The first series has not been found. The lectures were delivered at Manchester College (now Harris Manchester College) in 1915–16. The minute-book entry survives as do some notes of R.G. Collingwood on the lectures. See the two long footnotes in Teoria generale, 184–6 and 227–8. One concludes chap. 13, which deals with the nature of history; the other appears at the opening of chap. 18, the discussion of mysticism. This is a subtle notion best set out, perhaps, in the chapter headed ‘Il concetto della filosofia come storicismo assolut,’ which opens Il carattere della filosofia moderna (Bari: Laterza & Figli, 1941; repr. Naples: Bibliopolis, 1991). Gentile was talking about positions raised in Croce’s Nuovi saggi di estetica (Bari: Laterza & Figli, 1920). He says ‘intende bene che ci – che è fondamentale nel pensiero non precede cronologicamente’ (‘It must be intended that what is fundamental to thought does not precede it chronologically’) (185–6). Meeting of Extremes, 1. Ibid., viii. ‘ The Six’ were E.B. Holt, W.T. Marvin, W.P. Montague, R.B. Perry, W.B. Pitkin, and E.G. Spaulding, whose program was laid out in ‘The Program and First Platform of Six Realists’ in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 7 (1910): 393–401, and reprinted in New Realism, Cooperative Studies in Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 471–86. Just before the publication of Meeting of Extremes appeared the work of ‘the Seven’: Durant Drake, James Bissett Pratt, Arthur O. Lovejoy, Arthur K. Rogers, George Santayana, Roy Wood Sellars, and C.A. Strong, Essays in Critical Realism (London and New York: Macmillan, 1920). I use here the formulation from page 7 of Meeting of Extremes, and not that of the summary on page xv, which speaks of a ‘general or universal’ mind. The issue is a subtle one. Minds may share a universal character without there being a universal mind, but what Bosanquet actually believes, as we shall see, is that what is real in the individual mind is what is universal, and this is a problem for him. Space, Time, and Deity, 2: 369. Meeting of Extremes, 7.

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24 In Space, Time, and Deity, Alexander holds that the being who would possess the infinitely rich concept of deity – a sort of final concept of deity – ‘does not exist.’ He adds ‘if it did [exist], God ... would cease to be infinite God and break up into a multiplicity of finite Gods, which would be merely a higher race of creatures than ourselves with a God beyond.’ He concludes: ‘God as an actual existent is always becoming deity but never attains it’ (2: 365). This should be understood, though, in the light of another Alexandrian notion: ‘We are ... finitely infinite; while deity is infinitely finite. We are finite because our minds ... are limited pieces of Space-Time. We are infinite because we are in relation to all Space-Time’ (2: 358). 25 London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1925. 26 Pratt, ‘Critical Realism and the Possibility of Knowledge,’ in Essays in Critical Realism, 89. Pratt seems to have meant this literally. But such phrases are not always to be taken that way. Collingwood remarked in the Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), 177, that Alexander also believed that knowledge was ‘the mere ‘compresence’ of a mind with an object.’ 27 There may be many different legitimate accounts of ‘deity.’ What they must have in common is to employ a characteristic which sustains the values of mind or spirit with its attendant notions of a common characteristic in all human beings. This makes for a basis for ‘civility,’ without requiring everyone to worship the same god. 28 Magdalen College, Oxford archives, Ms. 1026, Box II-27, Series 2 (lectures, etc.). The first series of lectures were given in Glasgow, 2 December 1929–14 January 1930; the second series in 1930–1. 29 Bradley’s position is laid down in chap. 3 of Appearance and Reality (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893; 2nd ed., 1897, reprinted extensively from 1930 on, with corrections, Oxford: Clarendon Press). But the issue of relations runs all through the book. Green stakes his claim that relations are the work of the mind and the essence of reality in sections 19 and 20 of Book 1 of Prolegomena to Ethics, ed. A.C. Bradley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883). 30 Meeting of Extremes, 3. 31 Bosanquet may have intended to develop his theses in Three Chapters on the Nature of Mind (London, Macmillan, 1923), which remained unfinished at his death. The unfinished text includes an essay on mind in biography and fiction, one on Brentano and Meinong, and one on Russell. The last sentence begins ‘I shall have more to say ...’ (159). There is some interesting wrestling with Russell’s notion that universal ideas cannot be realized in actual mental processes. 32 Meeting of Extremes, xii–xiii. 33 Logic, or The Morphology of Knowledge, 2 vols, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 2: 278–9.

176 Leslie Armour 34 Science and Philosophy, 15–33. 35 Ibid., 29. 36 ‘The Absolute, the Infinite and Ordinary Experience,’ Bradley Studies, 5 (1999): 62–86. 37 New Realism, 165ff. (from the chapter by Edward Gleason Spaulding). 38 Not the sense in which ‘totality’ is anathema to Emmanuel Lévinas and his followers, but we shall see more of that in due course. See Totalité et infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961). 39 See Leslie Armour, Being and Idea: Developments of Some Themes in Spinoza and Hegel (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1994), 79–81. There I spoke simply of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ relations. But the necessary changes, mutatis mutandis, enable us to speak appropriately of relational properties and to speak of organic and arbitrary wholes. 40 Meeting of Extremes, 76–8. 41 Ibid., 79. 42 Collected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 2: 630–76. Since Bradley worked on that essay literally in the last days of his life, it had to be written in part after The Meeting of Extremes, though Bosanquet could have been aware of Bradley’s developing thought. 43 Of course Gentile did not begin as a menacing figure. He was an earnest educational reformer, frequently compared to John Dewey for his concern to free children from the straitjackets of regimented curricula and to introduce them humanely to the real world. He achieved major reforms in Italian universities while he was Mussolini’s minister of education. The New York Times of 26 September 1926 spoke of ‘this round, humorous professor.’ They praised him then for putting group interests ahead of individual interests, but did not grasp that his philosophy would provide no defence of the individual when Mussolini got into his full stride. 44 Meeting of Extremes, 172–4. 45 Ibid., xxiii. 46 Ibid., 170. 47 Smith, Hibbert Lectures Second Series, Magdalen College, Oxford, Archives, Ms. 1026, Box I-3, 125–33: ‘In the making, never made,’ 125; ‘Good need not wait,’ 133. 48 Ibid., 166. 49 See Leslie Armour, ‘Values, God and the Problem about Why There Is Anything at All,’ Journal of Speculative Philosophy, n.s., 1, no. 2 (1987): 147–62. 50 ‘Idealism and Social Work,’ Charity Organisation Review 28 (1910): 146–56, reprinted in The Philosophical Theory of the State and Related Essays, ed. William Sweet and Gerald F. Gaus (South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press, 2001), 364.

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51 See Bosanquet’s ‘The Future of Religious Observance’ in Civilisation of Christendom (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893). 52 Archives of the John Rylands Library, Manchester, 1 August 1921. 53 Meeting of Extremes, 126. Bosanquet has several long discussions of this issue. 54 Ibid., 176–7. 55 Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value (London: Macmillan, 1912), 246 and 269–70. 56 Watts Cunningham, The Idealistic Argument in Recent British and American Philosophy (New York: Century, 1933). 57 My own wrestlings with this problem can be found in Being and Idea. 58 Principle of Individuality and Value, 378. 59 Smith, Hibbert Lectures Second Series, 26–7. 60 Ibid., 100. 61 Ibid., 111. 62 Ibid., 112. 63 Ibid., 125. 64 It is this ‘equality of the subjective correlate’ which Bosanquet seems to deny in his Gifford Lectures and again in the essay on ‘Life and Finite Individuality’ in Science and Philosophy (89–112). The Science and Philosophy essay was an Aristotelian Society paper in 1918 and so is quite close to the time of The Meeting of Extremes. But The Meeting of Extremes seems to me more open to the idea of the ‘equality of the subjective correlate.’ If it is not, Bosanquet’s political theory will fall into the same trap as that of Gentile. The Meeting of Extremes takes a different stance, I suspect, because Bosanquet had been studying Gentile. 65 ‘Do Finite Individuals Possess a Substantive or an Adjectival Mode of Being?’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s., 18 (1917–18): 480. 66 T.L.S. Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983). 67 E.W.F. Carritt in ‘Fifty Years a Don,’ his unpublished memoir now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, reports that Smith, H.W.B. Joseph, and Samuel Alexander had long discussions about the nature and soundness of idealist doctrines. Smith took the idealist position, Alexander the realist side. Joseph tended to be in the middle. Joseph’s own attempt to sketch a position not very far from the one Bosanquet wanted to defend can best be seen in his 1929 Henriette Hertz lecture, A Comparison of Kant’s Idealism with That of Berkeley (London: The British Academy, 1909, reprinted New York: Haskell House, 1975). There is a large body of unpublished Joseph material in the archives at New College, Oxford. 68 Alexander papers, John Rylands Library, Manchester, 1–2.

8 Bosanquet and Religion T.L.S. S PR IG GE

1. Preamble In his valuable study of Bosanquet’s religious thought Kia Tcheng Houang distinguishes two periods in its development. According to Houang, in his writings of 1889 and 1893 (when he was in his early forties) Bosanquet was more of a humanist than an absolute idealist. But by 1911, so Houang says, when he was sixty-three he was an absolute idealist. Somewhere in the intervening years, therefore, his position shifted,1 and Houang sees the main cause of this in the publication of Bradley’s Appearance and Reality in 1893.2 I cannot quite go along with Houang on this, and I am glad to say that William Sweet also thinks the contrast exaggerated. Certainly as early as The Essentials of Logic (1895) Bosanquet writes as though he were a long-committed idealist, though more of the anthropocentric variety than the cosmocentric. This suggests that the change was not a shift from a non-idealist position to an idealist one but from a humanistic idealism to a more cosmic one.3 What is true, indeed, is that if we based our position simply on the three essays on religion which Bosanquet wrote before 1893 which I shall be discussing in this paper, it might well never occur to us that Bosanquet was any kind of idealist at all. But the same is true, actually, of large chunks of the Gifford Lectures of 1911–12, as McTaggart complained. The truth may be rather that his type of idealism changed over the years, but that both types of idealism existed in a kind of tension with sheer naturalism. A related change, especially important for our topic, is that Bosanquet seems to have been much more sympathetic to Christianity in the

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first stage of his thought than he was later. I shall endeavour to chart his attitude to religion, and in particular to Christianity, both in the earlier phase and in the later phase of his philosophical authorship. 2. Two Early Essays on Christianity In his Essays and Addresses (1889)4 Bosanquet presents himself as committed to the essentials of Christianity as he interprets them, while discarding everything ‘supernatural’ in its teachings as antiquated or childish lumber. Three of his talks expound a form of Christianity in which everything supernatural is dropped as so much lumber hiding what should still engage our allegiance.5 I shall examine the second and third of these addresses given to the [London] Ethical Society, which, as Bosanquet describes it, was ‘a small association in London’ intended to ‘contribute by precept and in practice to spreading moral ideas and strengthening moral influences on a non-dogmatic basis.’6 The aim of these addresses was to interpret Jesus’ and Paul’s teaching concerning the kingdom of God or Heaven, at least so far as this teaching remains of value, as drawing ‘a distinction which falls within the world which we know, and not between the world we know and another which we do not know.’7 3. ‘How to Read the New Testament’ Let us look first at the talk called ‘How to Read the New Testament.’8 Bosanquet says that in reading the New Testament, the modern reader should dismiss the idea that it is an inspired work in which God has taught us a consistent body of religious truth as the basis for a church. If we want to learn from what remains valuable in it we must first consider these writings as they were intended ‘at the time of their origin, before anyone thought of them as an official revelation or as the charter of a new religion.’9 In particular we should not see the Epistles of Paul as a kind of commentary upon the Gospels, as they were, so Bosanquet is confident, written before these. The true order of composition of the main works was rather (1) Paul’s epistles, (2) Revelation, (3) the Gospels. However, if we are to understand the early development of Christianity, we must see its vital phases as these four: (1) Jesus’ teaching centring on the message, directed primarily at the Jews, that the kingdom of God is within us; (2) Paul’s application of this teaching in which it is extended to humanity generally; (3) the development of the

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divine ideal, by which Bosanquet seems to mean the doctrine of the incarnation; and (4) the development of the church as a worldly organization and power. Bosanquet has something to say about each of these in turn, but more especially about phases one and two, which are those which he thinks important for his day (late nineteenth century). 3.1. First Phase in the Development of Christianity: The Teaching of Jesus Bosanquet considers how the evidence allows us to grasp what Jesus as a historical person was actually teaching. Here the main evidence must come from Matthew, especially the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus’ primary purpose was to preach the gospel of the Kingdom. And in trying to understand this We must clear away from our minds all such ideas as that the kingdom of Heaven means a future life in Paradise, that salvation means being saved from eternal punishment, that eternal life means living for ever in another world, or that forgiveness of sins means the doctrine of the atonement by the merits of Christ.10

It is indeed possible that Jesus did hold some such ideas, which by our lights are altogether unreasonable and to be utterly rejected. And the key to the real meaning of these sayings is, according to Bosanquet, the words ‘The kingdom of God is within you’ or ‘is already among you’ (Luke 17.21). This was intended as a corrective of current Jewish notions of ‘the kingdom of heaven’ or ‘Kingdom of God.’ This kingdom was generally thought of, among the Jews, as an event due to occur on earth. It was the idea that there was a good time coming. For some of them this was to be an era of greatness and glory for the Israelites; for others it was to be a time of widespread reform and righteousness. In either case it is conceived of as a future event to occur on this earth, not in some supernatural realm. So far so good, for Bosanquet, who detested ideas of a supernatural realm. But what Jesus did was teach that this good time was already there for us as long as we live according to the precepts of righteousness which he taught. When Jesus says, ‘Thou are not far from the kingdom of God,’ it is just like saying, You have very nearly obtained salvation or eternal life, or forgiveness of sins. You have nearly brought yourself to the true will to be

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righteous, which is eternal life. And consequently the world to come does not mean a life in heaven; it means the whole good time which had begun with Christ’s coming.11

At this point Bosanquet tells us that it is impossible to know whether Jesus expected a second coming, in which he would establish a righteous order, but that the important thing is that it consists in moral regeneration upon this earth, and that his followers were already on the way to this. (This was essentially the way of looking at the Gospels which Albert Schweitzer criticized in his The Search for the Historical Jesus, though it has had something of a comeback recently.)12 This moral regeneration has two aspects, one of which is the theme of the Sermon on the Mount, the other of which is expressed in the parables that deal with the kingdom of Heaven, especially the parables of corn and the mustard seed (Mark 4, Matthew 13). The first of them is that the good time coming is to consist in righteousness of heart and life, in genuine human morality, in putting away the selfish will. ‘He that loseth his life shall find it.’ And it is to consist, for this very reason, on the one hand, in a purification of human society, and the formation of a righteous community not restricted to any nation, rank or creed ... [For] if human righteousness and love are the one thing needful, then all the barriers of class and of caste and rank and creed are condemned already, and must go.13

Or at least this is the logic of what Jesus was saying, though it is unclear how far Jesus may have continued to think exclusively of a righteous community for the Jews, or whether he realized that his ideals demanded an end to their separateness, a question which, of course, ‘split the Apostolic society to its foundation, and the tradition of what Jesus did and said flatly contradicts itself.’14 At any rate, while it is unclear how far Jesus intended his teachings to be addressed to Jew and non-Jew alike, he was preaching a moral doctrine the logic of which required its universalization. But the second aspect of the coming righteousness is a radical change in religious observance. For Jesus continually expresses his indignation at all the outward shows of religion. His message is clearly that a spiritual religion, which demands rightness of heart and character as the only law, can make no truce with idle forms and ceremonies, or

182 T.L.S. Sprigge with the orthodoxy of a priestly cast, or with the selfishness of classes, or the exclusiveness of nations. The kingdom of heaven, which is a kingdom of the heart and mind, must also, and for that reason, be founded on freedom, and be as wide as humanity.15

In this connection Bosanquet quotes such sayings as ‘The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.’16 So far Bosanquet finds a message from Jesus that he thinks inspiring and civilizing. But now he turns to something with which he is dissatisfied in the teaching of Jesus and which he calls, a bit oddly, his ‘sentimentalism.’ This is Jesus’ attack on worldliness, for example, on taking no thought for the morrow. Certainly, says Bosanquet, it is brilliantly true that to be overcome with care and worry about mundane matters is damaging, as also is concern with the trappings of ‘respectability.’ But Jesus is dangerously close to attacking the whole notion of good citizenship, so dear to Bosanquet: It is a perilous position to go about telling people to take no thought for the morrow, and to sell off all they have and give to the poor. The spirit of it is that they should give themselves and all that they have to the good cause; but here as elsewhere, the letter killeth.17

In fact, Bosanquet comments, Jesus could have learned a thing or two from Pericles’ famous oration on the virtues of the Athenians. Historically, this is a somewhat bizarre remark, but the point that Jesus’ teaching must be substantially modified, if the Christian is to be a good citizen, is clearly important, whatever we think of it. Jesus’ remark that one should render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s exhibits a divorce between spiritual values and political engagement which was anathema to Bosanquet.18 Bosanquet ends his discussion of Jesus’ teaching by saying that Jesus had no idea of founding a new religion, but was rather reforming Judaism, in a spirit which suggests that he was moving towards the notion of ‘a religion for the world.’ 3.2 Second Phase of Christianity: Paul Bosanquet now moves to the second phase of early Christianity.19 This second phase consisted of the struggle between those who wished Christianity to remain simply a sect of Judaism and those who thought

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that they had learned a true universal religion from Jesus and set out to convert the world. The victory of the latter was above all the work of St Paul. After deciding rather hesitantly that the struggles going on in Paul’s mind must have produced a vivid hallucination on the road to Damascus, Bosanquet insists that what matters is not how he arrived at his views, but what these views were. And these essentially were two: the gospel of humanity, by which, I take it, Bosanquet means loving one’s neighbour as oneself, and the doctrine of justification by faith in the risen Christ and in his Divinity ... [and in] the spiritual oneness of all believers in and with Christ ... [This b]eing one in the risen Christ means that the society of believers form what Paul calls the ‘body of Christ,’ that is, a spiritual unity which is Divine and yet human, and as wide as humanity ... This great comparison of the relation between human beings in society to that between the parts of a living body was introduced into moral thought by Plato, and has been, perhaps the most fruitful of all moral ideas.20

Thus Bosanquet is able to enthuse about Pauline teaching as insisting that salvation consists in playing our role in what Josiah Royce was to call ‘the beloved community.’21 But in relating Paul to Plato, Bosanquet shows himself moving to a position which was certainly not Jesus’, and not really Paul’s – that the individual only matters as an organ of his community, conceived as an organism, and that since different organs have different roles, social egalitarianism is misconceived. Thus, for Bosanquet, Pauline doctrine, via assimilation with Plato, is called in the service of a view of the state which is upon the whole quite inimical to that privileging of the individual over earthly powers which is more reasonably taken as the message of Jesus, and perhaps Paul. We will see how this led to a philosophy which seems extraordinarily weak on compassion, as instanced by Bosanquet’s thorough dislike, rather than mere rejection, of the idea that there is a recompense after death for those who suffer in the cause of righteousness. 3.3. Third Phase in the Development of Christianity: The Incarnation The third phase of early Christianity is represented mainly by John’s gospel. Here superstition and magic have increased painfully. The mir-

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acles become more extreme and all the nonsense of the doctrine of the Trinity is coming into action. Its only saving feature for Bosanquet is that the universality of Christianity, as directed at all men, is now set beyond doubt.22 3.4. Fourth Phase in the Development of Christianity: The Church The fourth phase is that of elaborate theology and church organization. Jesus and Paul would have been horrified at anything but an organizational distinction, at most, between cleric and laity. For Bosanquet it is only phases (1) and (2) in the history of Christianity which are of continuing significance; phases (3) and (4) were aberrations. 4. ‘The Kingdom of God on Earth’23 In this companion essay or address Bosanquet asks the question, ‘What did Jesus mean by the kingdom of God (or of Heaven) on Earth?’ There are many sayings of Jesus which imply that there is a life after death when God will ‘right the wrongs’ and ‘compensate the injustices of this world,’ and that in the life after death each of us will be rewarded or punished in a way appropriate to the righteousness or wickedness of the life we have lived on earth. These were the old convictions about heaven and the kingdom of God, – that it was an invisible future world, in which wrong was to be righted, and good and bad men rewarded and punished. These fancies have not in reality a great place in the New Testament; but they were known to the Greeks and many other nations.24

This notion of a moral government of the world is so much childish nonsense in Bosanquet’s opinion, and though it may have had some good effects on human behaviour it has also done a good deal of harm. Mature people now must utterly reject such ideas. But though these ‘fancies’ are present in the sayings of Jesus, they are secondary to matters of far more importance. To anyone with eyes to see, today, all such ideas as compensation, rewards and punishments, God’s commands in the Bible, the authority of the clergy ... are all fancies that men have had, just as though they were children, and being children, know that they must be

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treated like children ... And so men have had to learn to behave themselves, only they had to fancy that there was a parent or schoolmaster looking after them. They naturally invented the only sort of instruction they could receive.25

Thus we should set aside all such ideas as belonging to the infancy of civilization. What we should concentrate on are certain other ideas mixed with those which we have been speaking of. The kingdom of God is within you (or perhaps ‘among you’); it is like leaven; it is like a seed; it is not of this world. This might mean it is in heaven, but I do not think it does.26

Bosanquet then develops the following points: (1) primarily the kingdom of God means a morally regenerated life on earth, a regeneration which had already started with Jesus’ preaching and his following; (2) initially after Jesus’ death it was expected that he would come again and the regeneration would occur all at once and immediately; (3) in ‘thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven’ this expectation was mixed up with the really irrelevant superstition that there was another world in which everything is just as it should be and which is the model for the regeneration of this world; (4) in fact, the kingdom of God is here on earth already so far as God’s will is being done among us. Bosanquet’s aim, in effect, is to rescue (1) and (4) from (2) and (3). But now, asks Bosanquet, if we are to do God’s will, how shall we know what his will is, and why, for that matter, should we do it? There are two answers which belong to the childhood of the human race: that we may learn it from the scriptures and that we should do it in order to be rewarded rather than punished supernaturally after death. In fact, says Bosanquet, [t]here is only one true way of answering these questions. We must know what is right, what we call God’s will, by finding it in our own will. And we must do what is right, what we call God’s will, because we find that it is our own will.27

And ‘if we are decent people’ and we scrutinize what it is we really want to do, as our own main settled purpose, we will realize ‘that it mostly comes back to our station in life, and the duties [and rights]28

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that are recognized by ourselves and by others as belonging to it.’29 So, for Bosanquet, doing God’s will consists in filling our position in the social whole properly. Thus this address, as Bosanquet says in a note, is designed to popularize the famous chapter five of Bradley’s Ethical Studies and apply it to the present question. Bosanquet explains further that all legitimate talk of an invisible world of the spirit concerns all those ‘ties and relationships, all those rights and duties, purposes, feelings and hopes’30 which are indeed not revealed to sight but to the moral intelligence: All that we mean by the kingdom of God on earth is the society of human beings who have a common life and are working for a common social good. The kingdom of God on earth is there in every civilized society where men live and work together, doing their best for the whole society and for mankind. When two or three are gathered together, cooperating for a social good, there is the Divine Spirit in the midst of them.31

But is not a church (a denomination) better called the ‘Kingdom of God’ rather than a secular community? Well, a visible church, like the Anglican or Roman Catholic denomination, is a portion of the kingdom of God just so far as it assists in promoting the good life. ‘But a family, or a nation like the English nation, is a far more sacred thing than any Church, because these are what prescribe our duty and educate our will.’32 And a social unity like a nation is invisible, as the Kingdom of God is supposed to be, because it is bound together not by buildings, doctrines, or a book, but by ‘the great achievements and purposes which form the life of mankind.’33 Bosanquet now considers what religion adds to mere ethics. If we are to be moral, he says, we must believe that there is such a thing as the good. It must be a reality which exists in the world and which we can engage with. Morality, however, of itself gives no guarantee that it is fundamental to reality and that its cause will therefore always prosper in the end. Religion provides this guarantee. For, while morality requires the belief that the good is a reality, religion is the faith that it is the only reality ‘that nothing but good is a reality.’34 We would be paralyzed morally if we did not see the good forces acting within ourselves as acting more generally in the world, through others and the community. But religion goes a stage further and says that good is the only reality.35 And in teaching that evil is not real, we do not diminish our energy to fight it, for ‘[n]othing gives such confi-

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dence in a battle as thinking that your enemy is only a sham.’36 Bosanquet knew no more of battle than I do, but I doubt that he is right that armies do best in war if leaders and men believe that their enemy is a sham. Surely many battles have been lost because the enemy was not taken seriously enough. Bosanquet concludes his sometimes bizarre account of what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God on Earth by quoting at length from the vow with which the eighteen-year-old Athenian youth was sworn in as a citizen soldier and with a long quotation from Kant. Christianity deepened the Athenian concept of loyalty to the city-state by making it the birthright of humanity, each, I take it, finding his good in his own most significant social whole whether family, nation, or humanity at large.37 Bosanquet seeks to clarify his own position further by praising Kant for rescuing rational religion from superstition, through conceiving it as the attempt to live by the moral law which man dictates to himself and which is ‘the will of the Ruler of the world, presented to man by his own reason.’38 There is no need, however, from Bosanquet’s point of view, to retain Kant’s residual and quite unnecessary belief in God as divine ruler of the world nor his belief in a future life. How Kant fits in here is a little problematic. It is, in any case, not surprising that Bosanquet became less keen on Christianity as time went on, since his attempt to identify its ethic with that of good citizenship as the be-all and end-all of life is highly dubious. 5. ‘The Future of Religious Observance’ Let us see how Bosanquet’s view on religion developed in the next few years by taking a look at his talk to the Progressive Society, called ‘The Future of Religious Observance’ and published in 1893 in the collection of essays entitled Civilization of Christendom and Other Studies. In this paper, Bosanquet raises the question of the future of religious observance in connection with the English Sunday. Even for those of us who have no religious grounds for treating Sunday as a special day, rather than merely a weekly bank holiday, the dominant sabbatarianism, says Bosanquet, still influences our idea of how it is appropriate to spend it. Bosanquet associates this question with what will happen to our churches as buildings. At the moment they still provide a special social focus, where the great events of life are solemnized. But if the Church were disestablished,

188 T.L.S. Sprigge [t]he fabric would then belong, I imagine, to an exasperated sect, whose members would have to maintain it. For a long time its old prestige would continue, and wealthy persons would be found to meet the cost of maintenance. But one day the actual situation would exert its influence; many would abandon the sect in possession, which would become narrower and still more exasperated, and an apple of discord would have been planted in the centre of the village, many of whose inhabitants would feel themselves ousted from the old church at their doors.39

However, another possibility is that churches would cease to be the home for a declining religious denomination and be maintained instead by the ratepayers as ‘a valuable centre of their [the villagers’s] social life and religious observance.’40 And by ‘religious’ here Bosanquet says that he means ‘something generally and obviously taken as symbolic of the best we know.’ This is what has been called ‘disestablishment of the clergy and not of the Church.’41 This would be better than allowing these fine old buildings at the centre of the villages to fall into neglect and disrepair. Indeed, could they not become a place where youth were initiated into their role as citizens? Here again we see Bosanquet valuing what he imagines to have been the life of the Athenians above that of Christians: And if the Athenian made his oath of service to the community on becoming of age to bear arms, I do not see why we should not have a rational confirmation ceremony, at which the individual should accept for himself the vows and intentions which, whether in church or out of church, his parents have surely conceived on his behalf.42

The problem is somewhat worse in cities. For here there is not the local community which could still enjoy some sort of non-doctrinal coming together in the service of universal ideals; what is more, the churches are generally architecturally hideous, at least the ones with the largest following, the Non-conformist ones. These bring together working men and women to focus on their highest values. What will happen to such people when doctrinal belief commands little assent? ‘Will something analogous to our own Ethical lectures serve as a meeting point for them, and as a means of guiding and concentrating their ‘cosmic emotion?’’43 Against this background Bosanquet puts forward some ideas of his

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own. He would like to see Sunday retain some distinctive feel, in particular that it should not be a day of money-making. According to his ideal, putting on shows or sports for profit on Sundays would be illegal, but wholesome cultural events performed for the love of them should be encouraged: Thus I should hope that before our Sabbatarianism is destroyed we may have utilised it to found a new kind of Sunday – an English Sunday, not a Puritan nor yet a Parisian Sunday. We have a great and grave responsibility in this matter. We are working to destroy superstition. Are we or are we not aiming at such a result that the Derby will be run ... or the Oxford and Cambridge boat race rowed on Sunday ... [or] the huge machinery of Lord’s and the Oval ... set in motion?44

However, if he had a choice between the Puritan Sunday and the Bank Holiday Sunday he would prefer the latter. But, ideally, Sunday should be a time for quiet family reunion and openness to ‘art, music, and literature and ... the beauties of Nature.’45 We can imagine that Bosanquet would not have been too happy with our own Safeway Sundays: What is to be hoped is that a tradition will form itself of Sunday being a day for social reunions and for renewing our hold ‘on those works of man and nature which best typify to us [personally] the unity of the world.’ If we cannot follow the suggestion [of Matthew Arnold] that it is a duty to hear or read or see something very good each day, we may at least attempt to do so each week – on Sunday.46

Bosanquet sums up these ideas by saying that it seems quite possible, that in spite of a sound tradition as to the use of the weekly holiday ... we may in course of generations cease to possess or to recognise any general external symbol of our common human relation to the reality of what is best.47

If dropping the symbols meant dropping the reality, that would indeed be tragic. And there is a real risk of this, a risk which, if it materialized, would mean that the ‘world would not be worth living in’ and would become a ‘baser thing that it ever has been before.’ But if we

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abandon the symbol because we have taken hold of the ‘actual spiritual world in all its various reality, then, surely, life will be nobler than it ever has been before.’48 We have now before us a fair picture of Bosanquet’s early outlook on religion. He believes in a civilization in which all people, in their various stations and with their various aptitudes, participate in high culture and learning.49 We must retain, he says, a general sense of man’s unity with the cosmos, but there need be no communal way of expressing this sense of union. In the earlier of these addresses Bosanquet clings to some way in which he can still identify himself with Christianity. By the later address it seems that he has abandoned this attempt. Not only does he discard the whole supernatural aspect of Christianity, but he dislikes what he sees as its underlying psychological motivation, the wish that goodness should never go without a handsome reward nor wickedness without its due punishment. But it is not just the supernatural side of Christianity from which Bosanquet distances himself. For surely what must be central to a desupernaturalized Christianity is an ethic based upon compassion and a belief in human equality as an ideal. Bosanquet has not exactly opposed compassion and human equality, but nor has he done anything to celebrate them. Compassion, at any rate, is notably absent, and in his later thought we will see him standing quite opposed to it. As for his idea that our commitment to the best needs little if anything by way of community expression and celebration, this is doubtful. While in many ways our society, here in Britain, is much better than it was in Bosanquet’s day, there is a universal tawdriness in our cultural world which Bosanquet would certainly deplore but which is partly a result of the lack of communal forms of identification with the good. But let us see how Bosanquet’s thought on religion developed, and in particular how his reading of Bradley’s Appearance and Reality changed things. 6. The Gifford Lectures: Appearances of Materialism I turn now to Bosanquet’s Gifford Lectures of 1911 and 1912: The Principle of Individuality and Value and The Value and Destiny of the Individual. On one important subject, the place of consciousness in reality, Bosanquet appears in turn as the exponent of two apparently quite contrary

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views: the one a naturalistic, almost materialist, view, the other an idealist, indeed an absolute idealist, view. Let us examine the naturalistic strand first. According to Bosanquet consciousness arises at a climactic stage in a process whereby unconscious nature produces physical wholes with a special kind of internal complexity and sensitivity to the world outside them. For physical reality, taken as purely physical and without reference to mind, acts always under the control of certain wholes and with a tendency to produce further wholes. All laws of nature are really a matter of a whole with a certain sort of overall character which the parts sustain. In those parts of physical nature which require no kind of scientific study except physics, the whole in question is simply the totality of physical nature. However, as a result of the operation of the laws of physics, individuals are generated whose parts act so as to sustain them individually (rather than just nature as a whole) in their overall character. So where then does consciousness come in? Bosanquet suggests that at a certain point the representation of the environment and the mechanisms for reacting to it at a certain ‘centre’ within an organism give that environment such an intense inward unity that the universe so to speak requires that it lead on to a more intense kind of inwardness which only consciousness can supply.50 But once consciousness is present does it operate as a causal agent? Is the behaviour of the conscious organism now such that much of it can only be explained in any satisfactory way by reference to it? Upon the whole Bosanquet tends to an affirmative answer. However, for someone known (rightly) as an idealist, he is remarkably tolerant of the possibility that the answer is negative: There is nothing in the contact of men with their machines to show ... that the human consciousness is not mechanically constituted; there is certainly no observable point in the construction or control of a machine at which anything but mechanical interconnection takes place between the producer and his product.51

If so, if we drop into teleological terms for a moment, the point of consciousness would be not to produce results in the physical world but to be a locus for the appreciation of what has been achieved by the nisus of the physical to form more and more intensive wholes. It would be a ‘supervenient perfection’52 rather than a causal agency.

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7. The Gifford Lectures: The Idealist Background But how does this materialistic-sounding view of the generation of consciousness by purely physical processes cohere with Bosanquet’s commitment to two fundamental principles of absolute idealism on which he explicitly allies himself with Bradley – that ultimately nothing exists except experience and that all finite experience pertains to a single, unified experience, known as the Absolute? In The Essentials of Logic of 1895 Bosanquet sometimes seems to be suggesting the view that the physical world is only really there for a community of finite minds whose shared construction is based on their suitably congruent perceptual fields. At this point he says nothing about the Absolute, and his idealism looks more subjective than absolute or objective. But, with or without the Absolute, this view of the physical world as a construction by finite minds implies that Bosanquet’s elaborate account of how finite consciousness emerges from a purely physical world seems more a convenient fiction than a contribution to fundamental metaphysics. Another view which he might have taken was the panpsychist thesis, which states that the reality of all real physical things consists in the experience each has of its own existence and relations to other things. But this Bosanquet rejects with unambiguous distaste, partly on the teleological ground that consciousness requires what he calls ‘genuine externality’ if it is to achieve anything of value. A third view which Bosanquet might have taken is that the Absolute is, or includes, the inner consciousness which the natural world as a whole has of itself but that it is only in human and animal brains that a consciousness develops sufficiently individual to constitute the conscious states of one particular organism. Thus the rest of nature would be individually unconscious though experienced by the Absolute. Upon the whole it is the first view (of the world as a kind of social construction) which seems closest to what Bosanquet actually says. However, I think that the third view (the Absolute as the soul of the universe) fits best with his account of finite consciousness as only emerging when a special kind of unitary physical complex is produced by the ordinary functionings of physical nature. But whichever of these ways of looking at nature we ascribe to Bosanquet, the universe as a whole, for him, ultimately consists of one great cosmic experience in which every finite thing is an element.

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Either way, this cosmic experience is in some sense perfect, and each bit of the finite world makes its own little contribution to its perfection. 8. Teleological Interpretations of Reality This understanding of the universe suggests that the world of finite things can be interpreted teleologically. And this is Bosanquet’s view, provided that we do not interpret teleology as implying that some things in the world are there merely as means to other things. In fact, the whole division between instrumental and intrinsic value is misconceived. Rather, everything is doing its bit in constituting the perfect whole. There are, then, two questions which the idealist philosopher must ask of the world as it is known to us empirically. First, is there anything general, but not too abstract, which can be said about the point of things in general? Second, why, if the universe is perfect, does so much of it seem to be so nasty? Bosanquet’s answer to the first question is that the universe is above all a vale of soul-making; that is, it exists for the production of souls in possession of excellences of various sorts. The answer to the second question is that souls cannot be of any great excellence unless there is a good deal of discord and suffering in their lives. Bosanquet’s assertion that the world (or at least the world of human life, for he occasionally admits that nature may have other values too) is valuable as a vale of soul-making suggests that what matters most is the quality of the individuals, as individuals, in it. But there is a contrary message to this which is a famous, perhaps infamous, part of Bosanquet’s philosophy, namely that what really matters is not the fate or the excellence of individual human beings, but the holistic character of the societies they form, together with those achievements in the form of beauty, truth, and goodness53 which are essentially transpersonal. This makes it look as though it is not really as a vale of soulmaking that human life is mainly of value but as the origin of the great achievements of civilization. It is worth noting in this connection the contrast between Bosanquet’s notion of the world as a vale of soul-making and that of Keats, from whom the expression is borrowed. For Keats meant that the meaning of life was to make souls who would live a glorious life together in a realm beyond death (perhaps after some previous further

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processes of perfectioning for the stragglers). But Bosanquet wanted to divest this notion soul-making from an association with hopes for a future life. In fact, Bosanquet glories in what he takes to be the fact that there is no compensation for good people who have suffered horrible fates, and that there will be no compensation for them hereafter. For one of the few things he still likes about Christianity in his old age (so he tells us) is its notion of vicarious atonement, or, more generally, of one person suffering for the good of others.54 This provides the rather grim details of his answer to our second question, why there is so much of what seems bad. However, we must pull ourselves up short if we think that suffering and so forth are a means to great goods, for the Absolute is not like a human artificer who has to do the best he can with limited materials. No, somehow the suffering itself must be a good – good, that is, as what it really is, an element in the perfect whole of the Absolute, conceived outside of which it is always to some extent misconceived.55 Human life, then, is a vale of soul-making, which is compatible with the thesis that it is not so much individuals as their great joint accomplishments which matter. So what is the main character of the means (the word seems necessary, in spite of Bosanquet’s strictures on it) to this end? Bosanquet’s answer is natural selection and, at a later stage, social selection. As Bosanquet points out, the traditional problem of evil does not arise for the absolute idealist, since he does not believe that the world was created by a god with good or benevolent designs.56 However, since absolute idealists of Bosanquet’s kind do believe that the universe is somehow perfect, and that everything in it plays its part in making it so, some version of the problem of evil certainly remains, as Bosanquet himself allows. Bosanquet’s answer is an elaboration of the following remark: the troubles and adventures of the finite arise from one and the same source as its value; that is, from the impossibility of its finding peace otherwise than as offering itself to the whole.57

The thesis states that all finite individuals are seeking completion in the Absolute,58 where the internal and external contradictions which are of their essence are resolved in a perfect experience which requires them for its perfection. But the parts of the Absolute which are our

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finite selves contain more of the contradictions than their resolution, as a consequence of which life for us must be full of struggle, pain, and yearning, alleviated to a greater or lesser extent by the religious experience of devotion to and unity with the Perfect Whole. There are two mistakes which lead to pessimism about the character of the world. The first is that we judge it on the basis of a crude hedonic theory of value when what really matters is not pleasure or happiness but greatness of soul and of institutions. The second is that we think in terms of rights and suppose that we each have a right to a better life than most of us have. But the ethics of rights belongs to ‘a world of claims and counter-claims’59 which, though this ethics has a certain role in the legal organization of society, is not the right basis for judging the universe, resting, as it does, on the fallacious claim of the self to be a genuine individual. It is, in fact, one of the troubles with theism that it includes the notion that the ruler of the world is bound morally to reward or punish us according to our deserts. But this is a feeble basis for morality, and still more for religion, which should in the end lead us not to care too much about our own fate. ‘Ask not,’ so Bosanquet might have said, ‘what the universe can do for you but what you can do for the universe.’ So for Bosanquet all ideals of equality, or even fairness, are fraught with contradictions, and it is neither possible nor desirable that the world should conform to them. What each person should have, and ultimately will have, is what he needs for the peculiar role it is for him to play in constituting the ultimate and perfect whole. It is, indeed, to be expected that the best will suffer most, and this is what they should welcome without any hope of future recompense. We feel that to make a great poet, say, the richest man in his community, would be irrelevant and self-contradictory. It is not what he wants, and would probably choke his work and do enormous social mischief.60

In a world of soul-making there must be a considerable amount of suffering, and suffering will occur where great souls are to be made rather than where it is ‘deserved.’ In this connection Bosanquet tells us61 that he has been reading ‘the terrible story of certain campaigns in the American Civil War.’ And he remarks: I might be challenged: Would I maintain that such things could exist in a just universe? I am not going to answer the challenge, but to point out what

196 T.L.S. Sprigge I hold to be an absurd implication in it. Am I, an elderly gentleman almost tied to his arm-chair, to be asked to dictate the limits of heroism and suffering necessary to develop and elicit the true reality of finite spirits?62 I venture these remarks because I seem to observe an extraordinary eclecticism in the toleration of pain and trouble, as if Marathon and Salamis were somehow obviously fine and desirable events, while modern battles of a less picturesque type, and attended no doubt by miseries on a more enormous scale in the way of neglected wounds and the like – not to speak of the thousand-fold horrors of our civilisation in its grimmer and dirtier parts – were obviously and self-evidently to be ruled out as intolerable.63

This was written in 1913. Was Bosanquet still at ease with this view from 1914 to 1918? Like most civilians then, he probably had no idea of the horrors of trench warfare, but perhaps he would have stomached them with the same aplomb. And how many great souls did that war create? For Bosanquet, suffering, injustice, and accident are essential features of, and even contributory to, the perfection of a world in which there is going to be great value, and he is full of examples which he thinks point up this fact. 9. The Gifford Lectures: Religion So where does all this leave religion? First, the Absolute in which he, like Bradley, believed was not a God who created the world but one infinite, unitary, and somehow perfect cosmic experience which includes everything which in any sense is.64 Is the Absolute identified with God by Bosanquet as it was not by Bradley but was by such other absolute idealists as the Caird brothers, Green, and Josiah Royce? Well, occasionally Bosanquet seems to use the word ‘God’ to stand for the eternal perfect whole of which we are all constituents, but his more considered position is that if we continue to use the word ‘God,’ it should stand for the force for good which is an essential aspect of the Absolute, not for the Absolute itself, this being rather the scene in which good and evil struggle and good is eternally victorious. The answer then to the question ‘Did Bosanquet believe in God?’ is that he believed in something which he did not object to others referring to by that name. In any case, religion for him was not a matter of

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believing in the existence of something. But what then is religion as he conceives it? Ethics and religion are not very far apart for Bosanquet.65 And ethics for Bosanquet is a matter of ‘my station and its duties.’ Each of us has some kind of station in the world and there are tasks proper to each station which constitute our duties.66 But religion is not exhausted by ethics on Bosanquet’s view. So what is religion, then, as he conceives it? His answer is much the same as Bradley’s in Ethical Studies,67 that the essential difference between mere morality and morality united with religion is that in morality the good is simply something to be sought, whereas religion adds to this the belief, sense, or faith that it is somehow already eternally there as a component of reality. 10. The Chief Constituents of Religion for Bosanquet Concretely considered, religion has, for Bosanquet, three main components: good citizenship, high culture, and personal courage, all bathed in what one might call cosmic contentedness (or as a hostile commentator might say, cosmic complacency). 10.1 Good Citizenship The good citizen loves his state or country more than he loves himself, perhaps more than he loves anything. Fate, or his own fate-determined efforts, has made him a soldier, a statesman, a professor, a stonemason, a rich man, a poor man, a spouse, a parent. Each of these positions in society imposes its own special duties and determines his associated rights (in the sense just explained). 10.2 High Culture The religious man, or at least the modern religious man, either will be a highly cultured man or will be doing his best to make himself one. He will enjoy the great classics of literature, painting, and music. Here again Matthew Arnold’s phrase will come in: of our duty (to use that word) to read some of the best that has been written every day, and likewise to be engaged with all the other arts. These arts (one may be sure) will be primarily celebrations of human life and of nature, rather than denigrations of it (Margaret Gillies rather than Francis Bacon). And in the background of their enjoyment will be

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a general sense of the greatness of the universe which has brought them forth. To a great extent Bosanquet stuck with his early statement that civilization was his highest value and, so far as he could see, that of the Universe too.68 Bosanquet does, however, in his later work lay some stress on the love of nature (in the usual sense of the less humanized places of the globe and what is to be found there). In particular, enjoyment of the beauties of nature will both cause and be caused by one’s cosmic contentment. 10.3 Personal Courage One will not be a pleasure seeker, and wish no more for one’s own happiness than the sense that one is playing one’s own proper role in a greater whole, that is, most immediately in one’s own community or humanity at large, and beyond these in the great spiritual cosmos of which we are each a fragmentary manifestation or component. And one will put up with whatever sorrow comes one’s way as providing an opportunity for an ennoblement of one’s character or the better performance of one’s duties. 10.4 Cosmic Contentment Cosmic contentment is the faith, based perhaps on ‘religious experience’ (presumably feelings of something ‘far more deeply interfused’) and, in the case of intellectuals, strengthened by a satisfactory philosophy, that the whole great thing is perfect, that it includes both good and evil, but that the good is eternally victorious over the evil. There will also be some more or less distinct realization that time is unreal and that all is eternally there in the Absolute. And there will be acceptance that it is the role of the finite to contain imperfections and often painful struggles as essential elements in the eternal. Under this heading comes what Bosanquet on occasion calls ‘cosmic emotion,’ perhaps what others call ‘the oceanic feeling,’ though more integrated into the busy side of life than that is typically conceived as being. The three headings of good citizenship, high culture, and courage both nourish and are nourished by this cosmic contentment. The citizen knows that the state to which he is loyal has something unique to contribute to the whole and loves it as such. The man of high culture sees great art as a specialized revelation of the Absolute’s perfection.

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And the courageous man is able to be so because he is sustained by his confidence that what he values most will be preserved eternally by the whole. 11. Bosanquet’s Last Testament: What Is Religion? What may be regarded as Bosanquet’s final testament on religion comes in his meditative little book What Religion Is (1920). The only real change is that it presents Bosanquet in a gentler mood than do any of his other discussions of religion. The essential themes are: 1. The duties of religion are the same as those of morality but undertaken in the redeeming knowledge that ultimately only the good is real. 2. Religion is not a theoretical belief but the experience of ‘oneness with the supreme good in every facet and tissue of heart and will.’69 3. Whatever may or may not happen after death is quite inessential to religion. What matters is that I can live in the eternal in my day-today life. 4. Merely historical facts or claims are irrelevant to religion. 5. Evil is an essential ingredient of this perfection. The eternal must actualize itself in the finite and temporal, and the finite is necessarily full of struggle and frustration. Serious attempts to imagine a better world than this are vacuous.70 It may be remarked that Bosanquet’s discussion of evil in this work is entirely of the deprivations and suffering which ennoble those who rise above them. There is not a word in this book about evil men. Thus, through Bosanquet’s somewhat Panglossian spectacles, everyone is really doing his best in circumstances designed to call it out from him. Suffering is inevitable and not really bad, and here at any rate real moral evil is not discussed. ‘And if anyone speaks of ‘slum-life’ as a whole and treats it as not worth living, he writes himself down as a victim of class prejudice and conventional superstition.’71 6. Prayer and worship and all sorts of religious institutions matter only as techniques for sustaining religious faith and are of no ultimate religious significance. The religious consciousness of modern man probably no longer needs any sort of institutional expression. All this is extremely interesting and in some ways very far-sighted. But Bosanquet’s form of absolute idealism has too much of the Dr Pangloss about it for me to be quite comfortable with it. As an absolute idealist

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myself, I can answer the problem of evil only through the supposition that everything in the world is so tied up with everything else that there could not have been any of it, without there being all of it, and that all of it is better than none of it. But this is far from implying that the bad in reality is not really bad, or even that its presence somehow contributes to the goodness of what is good.

NOTES This paper draws on material that will appear in my The God of Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 1 François (Kia Tcheng) Houang, De l’humanisme à l’absolutisme: l’évolution de la pensée religieuse du neo-Hegelian anglais, Bernard Bosanquet (Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin, 1954), 61. 2 The change is shown, says Houang (De l’humanisme à l’absolutisme), by some added notes in the second edition of his Logic, and becomes more manifest in his Gifford Lectures published in 1912 and 1913. A passage in the Logic which Houang thinks particularly significant is one in which (in the first edition) Bosanquet makes the surprising remark that a serious earthquake in London seems most improbable, and would seem monstrous on the part of Nature, the implication being that London civilization is too important a component in reality for us to accept this is as a possibility, though he stops short of claiming that this rules it out. In the second edition, according to Houang, he continues to defend his initial remark but from a point of view deliberately less anthropocentric and more cosmocentric. However, if Bosanquet did think when he first wrote his Logic that Nature had some special respect for the peaks of civilization, that does not sound like humanism, as we tend to use the expression now, for which there are no purposes outside those humanity freely decides to work for. It suggests rather a view of the world in which the production of human civilization was something at which Nature was intrinsically directed, while the later view still sees Nature as teleological but humanity as only one of these purposes. Indeed, in a rather broad sense of idealism they both sound quite idealist, though the former a more anthropocentric type of idealism than the latter. 3 The change in fact is one which Bradley describes himself to have had to make from the ‘no transcendence’ views he imbibed as a young man to his own less anthropocentric position. See letter from Bradley to James, 15 October 1904, published in the appendix to T.L.S. Sprigge, James and Brad-

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13 14 15 16

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19 20

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ley: American Truth and British Reality (Chicago: Open Court, 1993) and in Collected Works of F.H. Bradley: Selected Correspondence, ed. Carol A. Keene (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1999), 4: 292–3. Essays and Addresses (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1889). ‘On the True Conception of Another World’ (92–107), ‘The Kingdom of God on Earth’ (108–30), and ‘How to Read the New Testament’ (131–61). Essays and Addresses, v. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 131–61. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 143. See, for example, James P. Mackey, Jesus: The Man and the Myth (London: SCM Press, 1979), Douglas A. Templeton, The New Testament as True Fiction (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), and the writings of D.Z. Phillips and Don Cuppitt. For a relevant discussion of Bosanquet’s relation to the modern anti-realist view of religion of the last two, see William Sweet, ‘Bernard Bosanquet and the Nature of Religious Belief,’ in Anglo-American Idealism, 1856–1927, ed. W.J. Mander (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000). Essays and Addresses, 144 Ibid., 144. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 146. Interestingly Bosanquet suggests that when Jesus spoke of destroying the Temple, he meant ‘that the Temple service was doomed’ and that it was because of his disrespect for the whole ceremonial and ritual aspects of Judaism that the rabbis wished him dead. Incidentally Bosanquet suggests that Jesus’ indignation at priests and pedants implies that he made no claim to be God, for indignation is incompatible with divinity: a divine being would have himself been responsible for such behaviour. Bosanquet does not reflect on the fact that Christian believers in free will would claim that God permitted rather than produced this behaviour, and that Calvinists will think that God produced it precisely in order to exhibit his righteousness in punishing it. Essays and Addresses, 146. However, I doubt that Bosanquet would have been more enthusiastic if he had thought Jesus the social revolutionary which some now think him. Indeed, it is not clear what Bosanquet’s view was or would have been on how the Jews should have regarded Roman rule at that time. Essays and Addresses, 147–53. Ibid., 151.

202 T.L.S. Sprigge 21 Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 2 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 1: 345. 22 So it represents, for Bosanquet, a mixture of decline and progress. Certainly we must not follow those who read the simple, sensible main message of the synoptic gospels to be misled by interpreting the synoptics in the light of John. 23 Essays and Addresses, 108–30. 24 Ibid., 112. 25 Ibid., 114. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 116. 28 ‘I may say that I make no distinction, morally, between rights and duties. That which our station demands of us is a duty, if the difficulty in doing it is in ourselves, and a right if the difficulty is in someone else.’ Ibid., 117. For a modern discussion of Bosanquet’s theory of rights see William Sweet, Idealism and Rights: The Social Ontology of Human Rights in the Political Thought of Bernard Bosanquet (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997). 29 Essays and Addresses, 116 30 Ibid., 118. Bosanquet’s text uses ‘these’ rather than ‘those’ here. 31 Ibid., 121. 32 Ibid., 123. 33 Ibid., 124. 34 Ibid. It is obviously open to question what can possibly be meant by saying that only good is real. Was Hitler, or whoever Bosanquet might have regarded as evil, unreal? Presumably it means that the general drift of things is always in the end good, and that what goes wrong is a necessary element in the development of the good. 35 My bad self, for example, is not the real me and presumably the bad society of state is not the real society or state (not, e.g., the real England or Britain). For a much earlier treatment of evil by Bosanquet see his article ‘On Our Right to Regard Evil as a Mystery’ in Bernard Bosanquet: Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 1883–1922, ed. William Sweet (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2003), 1: 11–14, originally published in Mind, o.s., 8 (1883): 419–21. Put roughly, the claim is that if there were no evil there would be no possibility of doing good in the world just as there could be no inquiry if there was no ignorance. 36 Essays and Addresses, 124. 37 Ibid., 121, 126. 38 Ibid., 128. See Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen

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50

51 52 53 54 55

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Vernunft (1793); the translation here is likely Bosanquet’s. See Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. T.M. Greene and H.H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 112. The Civilization of Christendom and Other Studies (London: Swann Sonnenschein, 1893), 5–6. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 22–3. Ibid., 24–5. Ibid., 26. ‘My faith is in civilisation and I require no further creed,’ quoted by Houang, De l’humanisme à l’absolutisme, 49. Houang mistakenly gives the source as Social Problems [sic], whereas in fact it is from Bosanquet’s The Civilization of Christendom (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893), 63. This is, indeed, a move to the existence of a fresh kind of reality which could not possibly be inferred from, or reduced to, the physical inwardness of the organism which reproduces it. It is simply a law that when physical inwardness is sufficiently intense it produces this still stronger form of inwardness. However, since consciousness is a more extreme version of something which was already growing stronger and stronger in the stages which led up to it, it is not, so to speak, a mere eccentricity of the universe to produce it at this point, so that if in a sense it is an inexplicable fact, it is more than merely a brute fact. The Principle of Individuality and Value (London: Macmillan, 1912), 143. Ibid., 202. I am glad to say that in one of his late works Bosanquet puts ‘kindness’ for ‘goodness.’ See The Value and Destiny of the Individual (London: Macmillan, 1913), 147. We see here how Bosanquet’s insistence that the kingdom of God is already among us, in his early essay ‘The Kingdom of God,’ is still very important in his developed metaphysical system. Similarly, although one may sometimes get the impression that for Bosanquet all that really matters is European civilization, consistently with his view that everything is ultimately good, he does at one point show what one may find touching or alarming sympathy with what he supposes to be the life of a primitive chief (his slaves are not mentioned!), which may come out with quite high marks

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56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65

even from a hedonistic point of view. ‘I should have said that prima facie the poor and the benighted heathen were more light-hearted – we are now speaking of facts and not of ‘oughts’ – than the well-to-do, cultivated, and respectable Christian ... If ... you go, without moral prejudices, to pleasure merely, you must remember that, say, a savage or barbarian chief, whose life, if I had to live it, would be to me prolonged hardship, terror, and remorse, probably enjoys his existence as much as I do mine, or more. And he would certainly prefer to be shot a dozen times rather than, well warmed and well fed, to sit in my arm-chair and try to read Hegel.’ The Value and Destiny of the Individual, 218–19. Ibid., 218. Ibid., 18. For ‘every fragment yearns towards the whole to which it belongs,’ Principle of Individuality and Value, 340 (reference to Phaedo, 75B). Ibid., Lecture 5. The Value and Destiny of the Individual, 155. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 158. It is necessarily an experience of a complexity beyond our conception but it is a systematic, harmonious and satisfactory experience, not like the consciousness of a finite individual whose mind is in a whirl, but more like someone who is enjoying an immensely rich aesthetic experience. The relation of its components to the total absolute experience is of the same generic sort as is that of my various sensations, feelings, and thoughts as they occur in a human being within one pleasing present moment. I believe that this account of what the Absolute is specifies the concept which each of Bradley, Bosanquet, and Royce have of it, but there are various disagreements, especially between Bradley and Bosanquet on the one side and Royce on the other in answer to a variety of questions which arise about the character of the Absolute. Let me note here that I shall follow these thinkers on occasion in speaking of the Absolute as what has this experience, as that is the most convenient form of words to use at times, but it must be realized that more strictly the Absolute is this experience rather than something which ‘has’ it. At times one might almost say that he went along with Matthew Arnold’s account of religion as morality tinged with emotion. To this Bradley objected that it must be morality tinged with religious emotion, which leaves the meaning of ‘religious’ unsettled. Bosanquet would say (as indeed did Bradley, at least in his early work Ethical Studies) that the essential difference between mere morality and morality united with religion, is

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67 68

69 70

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that in morality the good is something to be sought, whereas religion adds to this that what is to be sought is in some manner eternally there as a component of reality. Rights play no great part in Bosanquet’s ethics. One’s duties consist in what one must do oneself to fulfill one’s special task; one’s rights are what other people must do or refrain from to allow one to fulfill it. However, for a sympathetic and excellent account of Bosanquet’s theory of rights see Sweet, Idealism and Rights. F.H. Bradley, ‘Concluding Remarks,’ Ethical Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927; 1st ed., 1876). The Philosophical Theory of the State and Related Essays, ed. William Sweet and Gerald F. Gaus (South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press, 2001), 143; 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1923), 123. What Religion Is (London: Macmillan, 1920), 32. I have changed ‘issue’ to ‘tissue’ suspecting a misprint. We cannot know that some life which seems full of deprivation might have been better if it had been less troubled. ‘You may rightly try to hinder what you think hardship or defect. But it is far beyond the facts to say: This or that privation or deprivation is abnormal, an injustice, a necessary spiritual loss. The man, say, is blind. Is he so far less than a man should be. Would Mr Fawcett have been less or more if he had had his sight? Who can tell? And Mr Kavanagh, if he had had his limbs? One has a bad wife, a bad son. How can we say what he will make of the burden? We are not entitled to judge that the unique being and equipment which the universe lays upon each individual is such as to impart and defeat the possibilities of good. We must not assume that things would be better if we could make him and his conditions over to suit our smoothed conception of what a man and his life should be.’ What Religion Is, 56. The Value and Destiny of the Individual, 219–21.

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Moral and Political Philosophy

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9 Bosanquet and State Action PETE R NI CHO LSO N

Introduction My aim is to understand Bosanquet on the subject of the proper extent of action, legislative and other, by the state or its agencies, on behalf of society, that unavoidably involves at some stage what Bosanquet, in The Philosophical Theory of the State, calls ‘force and menace.’1 I find Bosanquet’s writings in this whole area difficult, and some of his conclusions counter-intuitive and, at first sight, less adequate than T.H. Green’s. Even though Bosanquet often claims that he is following Green, and indeed is frequently very close to Green when he formulates general principles, when the principles are applied in particular cases he appears far less positive than Green and much less sympathetic to the plight of the poor and other vulnerable members of society. It seems all too obvious why he was often condemned by his contemporaries for being hard-hearted, and why some recent writers have endorsed that verdict. Perhaps one is tempted to react to Bosanquet in this way because economic, social, and political conditions have changed so much that it is hard to think oneself back into his situation. Or perhaps it is because one has not quite understood his position. I explore the latter possibility. I conclude that there are dimensions to Bosanquet’s ideas about state action which are often ignored, and that once they are taken into account those ideas are less vulnerable to criticism and may even be judged to have an acceptable face. I do not start in the obvious place, Bosanquet’s main theoretical discussion of his ‘principle’ of state action in The Philosophical Theory of the State. That principle is by its very nature general and abstract; more-

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over in that book Bosanquet deals with ‘the fundamental ideas of a true social philosophy’ and deliberately abstains from ‘practical applications, except by way of illustration,’ in order to avoid the distraction of ‘practical issues about which a fierce party spirit has been aroused.’2 We need to know in concrete detail how Bosanquet reaches the principle, what he bases it on, and how he himself applies it, if we are to grasp correctly what he means by it. Consequently, I defer consideration of the principle until I have looked at his own approach to social reform. After a short career as fellow and tutor of University College, Oxford (1871–81), Bosanquet moved to London. While he continued his philosophical work and began to publish prolifically, he also entered practical social work. He was on two of the district committees of the Charity Organisation Society; and he was (from 1887) on the committee of the London Ethical Society and did much lecturing for it.3 Accordingly I draw my material principally from Essays and Addresses (1889), which collects some of his early public lectures belonging, probably, to the years 1886–9. This is one of his best-written works, usually accessible, and most informative about his fundamental ideas and approach. My strategy is to bring a selection of views from Essays and Addresses to bear on the principle of state action of The Philosophical Theory of the State, claiming that the former can illuminate the latter. Thus I concentrate on Bosanquet’s earlier thoughts on state action up to the end of the 1890s. Subsequently, his views at the level of concrete detail shifted with the passage of time and changing circumstances, as contemporary ideas about social reform changed and new laws were passed (particularly concerning public assistance), but at the level of theory there was hardly any change.4 I begin by considering the moral ideal that Bosanquet set himself to pursue in his life and that constituted his goal in social reform. The Ideal of Reform: The Noble Life for All Four of the nine pieces in Essays and Addresses are lectures to the London Ethical Society, which aimed ‘to contribute by precept and in practice to spreading moral ideas and strengthening moral influences on a non-dogmatic basis.’5 The Society set out to bring university learning within the reach of those less educated, including working men. Elsewhere he is explicit that the teaching of moral philosophy should never

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be confused with preaching. The object of the Ethical Society, he declares in a leaflet he issued to its members, ought to be not moral suasion – which one may compare to medicine – but new resources in life, intellect, and feeling – which one may compare with wholesome food – not so much to help our hearers as to put them in a position to help themselves. A man is what he is made of, and he is not made of what he hears once a week [lectures were on Sundays], but of what habitually goes into him. It is this that in my judgment we ought to aim at transforming, by organising the material of noble life, so as to bring it within the reach of all.6

I stress the connected ideals of enabling others ‘to help themselves’ and of bringing the highest ideals of life ‘within the reach of all.’ So far as Bosanquet is concerned, as will become clear, this is not an exercise in social control, training one’s social inferiors in the duties of their station as one sees it and as suits oneself; it is a genuine democratic aspiration to offer those less fortunate than oneself as much as possible of the same opportunities one has enjoyed. One of the fascinating features of Bosanquet’s writings is the easy way he moves from abstruse metaphysics to concrete issues. Essays and Addresses is no exception. Even though most of its contents were popular lectures, there is a strong connecting philosophical thread. ‘[A]ny man with open and attentive eyes,’ he writes, ‘and with confidence in his own impartiality, as based upon a rational view of life, does no wrong in uttering the best reflections he can make on the way in which things are going, or the way in which he thinks they should go.’7 Recommendations concerning social reform and the state’s role in it, then, are justified if they are based on a ‘rational view of life.’ Of course for Bosanquet that view is Hegel’s, suitably updated (of the collection’s three strictly philosophical papers, two are on Hegel). Most of the Preface deals with a misconception about the revival of philosophical idealism. Bosanquet emphasizes that Hegel’s is not a remote philosophy but originated in ‘a human enthusiasm,’ and that its permanent value is his ‘recognition of the human spirit as the highest essence of things.’8 Hegel’s declared great aim was to build on Kant’s achievement in elevating man to preeminence, and ‘to form a higher estimate of man’s dignity, and to recognise his capacity of freedom, which places him on a par with any spiritual being.’9 Hegel is further quoted as writing as a young man:

212 Peter Nicholson I think that there is no better sign of the times than this, that humanity is represented as so estimable in itself; it is a proof that the halo round the heads of the oppressors and gods of this world is disappearing. The philosophers will prove man’s dignity, the people will learn to feel it, and will – not demand, but – simply appropriate their trampled rights. Religion and politics have played each other’s game; religion has taught what despotism desired, contempt for the human race, its incapacity for good, its powerlessness to be anything in its own strength.10

Bosanquet is focusing on the radical dimension of Hegel’s thinking. We recall that Hegel underlines the essential freedom of all human beings as spiritual persons and the need for equality before the law and for other institutions for the mutual recognition of one another’s humanity. Green, recently dead and surely at the front of Bosanquet’s mind, had noted the growth of equality in the modern world and emphasized its moral significance – even contending that in practice ‘the essential thing for [a man’s] right guidance has been that, whatever might be the definition of good which he would accept, he should admit the equal title of all men to it in the same sense.’11 Bosanquet basically agrees when he tries to identify the direction of the changes occurring in his own time, finding it ‘pretty plain’ that ‘all through Europe the great business of this century has been to arrange society in a more human way than before ... so that every man should be treated as a human being capable of doing a man’s work.’12 He continues, invoking Carlyle, that every change in society ‘is really a change in men’s minds and characters.’ Men get new ideas of what they ought not to put up with, or what they might expect to do, and social arrangements require remaking in response: when there are a new set of ideas and new circumstances, when you have enormous masses of people, and these people have quite new claims and ideas in their minds, then there must be a time of great change, until their minds are suited to new arrangements, and new arrangements suited to their minds.13

It is a time of great change, both in ideas about people’s rights and in economic conditions, as small workshops are displaced and an industrial class is created. A stable and successful society is possible only if its members individually hold ideas of their place and role in it (their rights and duties) which fit together harmoniously, and if the society is

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arranged institutionally so that they are able to exercise their rights and perform their duties. ‘Character’ is central for Bosanquet because he means by it, not a person’s peculiarities and idiosyncrasies (as in ‘being a character’), but people’s self-conceptions – their expectations for themselves and of themselves, and of others and for others. This self-identity should be more or less fixed, so that we can predict and depend on their actions. He assumes that which ideas individuals hold, and what the institutions are, are matters which we can and should arrange. In particular, they should not be left to God: Bosanquet forcefully rejects the view that ‘God ... will look after those who are ill-off on earth, and therefore we need not trouble ourselves about them,’ insisting that ‘injustice must be redressed ... here on this earth of ours.’14 The aim is that individuals’ expectations harmonize, and that the society is so organized that all individuals can act on their expectations; then everyone benefits. Bosanquet is clear that the existing arrangements are not adequate, particularly for the poor, and he is explicit that in revising them to accommodate recent social and economic changes, the guiding criterion is that everyone must be treated as a human being, capable of and deserving of the noblest life that any of us can conceive.15 The noble life is not usually portrayed in detail in Essays and Addresses. In a lecture on ancient Athens, Bosanquet asserts in general terms that ‘we,’ today, ‘demand ... a human or Christian Hellenism; a Hellenism which shall realise the true freedom of every human being.’16 This appears to mean that the ideal of citizenship, that every citizen should be ‘able to exercise the essential functions of a citizen, and ... share in the essential culture and recreations of a citizen,’ which in Athens was restricted to native males, should be extended to everyone in a modern society.17 But he does not explain how this would be done in the hugely different conditions of modern society, beyond hinting that ‘the organisation of municipal duties’ and the introduction of a system of public service in rotation might be ways in which we could regain the ‘intensity of direct relation’ the Athenian citizen had to his city and its achievements.18 However, exceptionally, he goes into detail on one of his pet projects at this time: educating people, particularly working people, to enjoy beauty in art and nature. This was the object of the Home Arts and Industries Association, founded in 1885. The lecture ‘Artistic Handwork in Education’ recounts the aims and the work of that association at length. Here he affirms that ‘the enjoyment of beauty is a good thing ... one of the best things in life’ and

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‘eminently wholesome for everybody,’ and ‘the birthright of a civilised being.’19 Plainly he assumes that everyone in a civilized society has the potential to develop as a civilized being, and that a society which truly is civilized provides all its members with the opportunity to develop their potential. It might be argued that the real test of the depth and sincerity with which Bosanquet holds his ideal of ‘the noble life for all’ is the extent of the practical measures he is prepared to take to achieve it. This is my next topic, which will also give further illustration of the ideal. Practical Steps towards the Ideal The central issue is how far the steps towards the ideal should be left to the private action of individuals, and how far there should be legislation and other public action. Essays and Addresses confirms Bosanquet’s reputation as an ardent proponent of voluntary action by individuals to effect social reform. But there is also massive evidence to substantiate his assertion elsewhere of the ‘right and duty of civilised society to exercise initiative through the State with a view to the fullest development of the life of its members.’20 It is not the case that Bosanquet always favours private action over state action. Both are needed. Some state action is necessary, but sometimes private action is better; some private action is necessary, but sometimes state action is better; and sometimes a combination of private and state action is best. Private action and public action has each its place: the danger is for either to be out of its place. How much public action should be taken, and on what grounds? One can begin to answer these questions by considering two of the many examples in Essays and Addresses, education and housing. The teaching of the Home Arts and Industries Association was initiated by the private action of one woman. But Bosanquet does not insist that it must remain private action. On the contrary, he urges that public action should be added. He would like all the citizens of every locality to exercise their powers and responsibilities to control the administration of the state schools. He quotes Matthew Arnold to make the point that unless they do, schools established for the benefit of the working classes will not actually be run in the most beneficial way but as ‘what the political and governing classes ... think that such a school ought to be.’21 Thus the importance of the private action then being undertaken by the Association is that it can ‘create in every quarter of our large

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towns, and in every country district, a circle of men and women of the wage-earning class, who have had something of a humanising and formative training, and who are, as is always the result of such a training, enthusiasts for education in the largest sense.’22 Clearly Bosanquet anticipates that if such working-class people play their part in local government they will see to it that art education is on the curriculum in the popular (i.e., state) schools. And he stresses how vitally important it is that the schools for the working class should provide the best education, the same kind of education that private schools provided for the rich: ‘no other equality of chances has a tenth part of the importance that belongs to equality in education.’23 He adds that this ‘equality of chances’ can only be secured through the proper management of the popular schools, that is, through state action. Then, still looking to the future, he pinpoints the distinguishing mark of social equality as ‘identity of enjoyments.’24 His vision and hope are that museums, picture galleries, and public libraries will become popular with all classes and ‘an important feature of our holiday life’: when our common education gives us a little more feeling and insight for the human side of art and craftsmanship, then I think we shall care more to become acquainted with the history and fortunes of arts and crafts, the products of which are the direct outcome and record of the lives and feelings and labours of unnamed millions of our race ... This would be the beginning of a great social change, because all sensible people would more and more tend to spend their Sundays and holidays in the same way, and the rich people might lose something of their vulgar exclusiveness, and the poorer people something of their enforced narrowness of outlook. And a certain pride, in a citizenship that means a common life worth living, will grow up, and replace the brutal exclusiveness of classes. We should all feel that the best things were now for all, and not for the few, and that this was enough to prove that they were really the best things, because it is only the best things that can be for all.25

Municipalities, Bosanquet recommends, should ‘maintain and subsidise first-rate public orchestras under really skilled direction.’26 The second example is the improvement of the condition of the housing of the wage-earning class, a subject on which he thought his own social work gave him some special knowledge.27 He traces the previous forty years of legislation in this area, noting two general

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developments. First, there has been a widening of the problem, which ‘shows itself in the advance from legislation directed to removing a nuisance, an annoyance, or danger to the neighbours, to legislation directed to clearing whole areas that were unhealthy, and rebuilding on them to the best advantage; that is to say, recognising the provision of dwellings as a matter of public policy.’ This is a move from a negative to a positive idea of the remedy. Second, there has been a tendency ‘to rely increasingly upon local authorities.’28 Bosanquet then explains the principal private action there has been. Individuals and groups of individuals have set out to build model dwellings and act as decent landlords; though by 1881 these constituted only a tiny fraction of the housing stock in London.29 Notably, Octavia Hill devised a system of managing property under which the landlord assumed a moral duty to the tenants and helped them, ‘with a good deal of individual supervision,’ to live decently. This, Bosanquet believes, ‘is absolutely indispensable for the houses of people who have lost the habit of living in comfort and cleanliness’; without it ‘no house that can be built would remain sanitary for a month’ whereas with it the tenants tend to improve.30 Again, this system was in use only for a small fraction of the housing. With this private action, Bosanquet compares what local authorities have the power to do. They can inspect houses, and require those that need improvement to be improved, at the owners’ expense; they can require the demolition, without compensation, of unimprovable houses; and they can regulate the building of new houses. Bosanquet fully approves of these powers; indeed, he wants local authorities to exercise them more than they do.31 However, he is much more cautious about building new housing: local authorities ‘should have power to construct and manage dwellings for the working class,’ but should use it only in ‘extreme cases ... in order to disconcert anything like a ring or combination against the public interest.’32 His reasons are revealing. First, if the public authority constructs much of the new housing it will drive out private enterprise. But private enterprise can build high-class houses just as well, and it can do ‘the hard part of the work – housing the classes who require Miss Hill’s system – much better.’ So if local authorities build houses, they both take on a needless burden and they destroy a useful work. The second reason is that municipal building would disrupt supply and demand, and in particular ‘if you build on a large scale at an artificially lowered rent, you actually subsidise employers of labour by building barracks for their employees.’33 Other

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considerations are apparent in his following remarks. Clearing sites and rebuilding can be very expensive, and the money might be spent better on rehousing families in the country. Extensive supply of houses under cost price will lower wages, and aggravate congestion. Six-storey blocks quadruple the density of population ‘to the verge of possible existence.’34 Bosanquet admits there are limits to what one can say ‘in general,’ and that some of his statements are ‘hard to prove.’ But he appeals to experience in Glasgow (successful improvements without exercising the power to build) and Chelsea (municipal failure to use powers to control private development).35 Bosanquet concludes that appropriate private and public action dovetail and can solve the housing problem better than public action trying to do everything. Private builders and workmen’s building societies can provide enough new houses. Model dwellings and the Hill system can extirpate the worst existing housing, ‘because they attend to the needs of the class too troublesome for the private builder, and build on sites too awkward for the private builders.’ Local authorities can demolish the unimprovable houses and force improvement of the improvable houses.36 There are two comments to make here. First, Bosanquet is being very pragmatic. He makes no absolute or dogmatic case for private as against public action, or for a set proportion for each or a fixed boundary between them. He simply looks, in the particular case, to see what is most effective. I shall return to this. Second, he has a theoretical basis for this pragmatism, carefully brought to our attention: private and public action spring from the same source. The efforts by individuals to effect social reform, and social reform affected by the power of the state are not alternatives which are separate and exclusive, so that more of one means less of the other. They are two aspects of reform, inseparable and identical. State action ‘consists in ratifying by the sanction of the public power certain expressions and resolutions of the public mind; and the public mind is the mind of individuals, so far as they co-operate for social judgment or for social action.’37 These acts of the public power, in turn, ‘strengthen and support the life of a people.’38 The crucial point is that the process of interaction between the private and public aspects of reform is ‘a single movement and development, which takes the shape of a law, or of public opinion, or of individual initiative, according to the needs of the moment.’39 Neither with private action extending artistic education, which should lead to public action in addition, nor with public action to improve the housing conditions of the working classes, which should be supplemented by

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private action, can the line be drawn between the individual and the social character of the reform. In both cases ‘we are really dealing with a thoroughgoing advance in the mind and character of the people.’40 In a democracy, individuals have great scope for bringing about major social changes; while legislation is useless unless there are individuals to put it to work. It all comes back to individual members of the community expressing its spirit and purpose. When it is necessary to move from private action to public is ‘a matter of degree’ which can only be determined case by case.41 Hence Bosanquet’s ideal, which is ‘practical and practicable,’ is ‘a society organised in convenient districts, in which men and women, pursuing their different callings, will live together with care for one another, and with in all essentials the same education, the same enjoyments, the same capacities.’ They ‘will work together in councils and on committees; and while fearlessly employing stringent legal powers in the public interest, yet will be aware, by sympathy and experience, of the extreme flexibility and complication of modern life, which responds so unexpectedly to the most simple interference.’42 Achieving this ideal requires ‘the habituation of the English citizen to his rights and duties, by training in organisation, in administration, in what I may call neighbourly public spirit ... Such as the citizen is, such the society will be; and the true union of social and individual reform lies in the moulding of the individual mind to the public purpose.’43 We are all responsible for our society: its quality depends on how far we measure up to the high and hard standard set by the duties of our station. Everyone is ‘responsible for the tone of the society in which he moves, and for the influence which he spreads round him, hour by hour.’44 Bosanquet’s analysis of society as a union of individual wills sharing ideas thus lies behind, and supports, his pragmatism over the use of state action. Very much the same pragmatic attitude and total absence of dogmatic or ideological commitment is apparent in his reaction to socialism. He is not simply anti-socialist, as one might expect from the caricatures of Bosanquet the ‘conservative’ and ‘individualist.’ On the contrary, looking forward to the ideal organization of society, he says that it would be ‘a mere question of practical efficiency how far the organisers of labour should be salaried servants of the state, or, as they are now, its moral trustees,’ though he expresses his fear that socialism stifles individual initiative.45 However, he adds, ‘of practical Socialism, i.e., of the workman’s ownership of the means of production, we cannot have too much.’46 In a lecture at a workmen’s club in London he is

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happy to recommend profit-sharing among the workers as a way of organizing a business, outlining Jean Leclair’s scheme and its merits at length.47 This receptivity and openness are especially prominent in his lecture, given by invitation to the Fabian Society in 1890, on ‘The Antithesis between Individualism and Socialism Philosophically Considered,’ where he takes a pragmatic view of socialism and is prepared to use its methods on occasion.48 As he once put it: ‘If Socialism means the improvement of society by society, we are going on that track more or less to-day, as civilised society has always gone, and the collective organisation of certain branches of production is a matter open to discussion with a view to its consequences.’49 At this point it might be objected that nonetheless Bosanquet is not wholly serious about putting his ideal of the noble life for all into practice. Specifically, it might be felt that he accepts poverty too readily. Instead of educating the poor in artistic appreciation, or training them in sanitary living, would it not be preferable to make them better off so that they could improve themselves? Surely poverty, bringing deprivation and suffering, should be relieved or eliminated. At one level Bosanquet cannot deny this. For him, as for Hegel, pauperism – debilitating poverty – is a huge problem because it prevents a person from participating fully in the institutions of society which are the media through which persons recognize one another as human beings: pauperism is a bar to moral development and human freedom. Now, there are hints that Bosanquet would welcome less inequality of wealth. He notes that in ancient Athens ‘there was a far greater equality in the means of existence than there is to-day,’ with property ‘widely distributed, and regular wages or salaries ... tolerably uniform through society,’ and he describes this as ‘a healthy state of things,’ but he says that we cannot secure it, ‘except by a more enlightened public opinion.’50 Again, he sometimes refers to certain disadvantages to being rich, such as having a narrow and class-prejudiced outlook; and he accepts that the rich are as capable as the poor of living empty and idle lives, and that ‘an absolutely secured material position, such as that of the wealthy class, is not favourable, on the whole, to productivity in the interests of society.’51 But Bosanquet mentions no plans to help the rich by reducing their wealth, as Hobson sneers in his critique of Aspects of the Social Problem.52 Overall, it seems that Bosanquet’s stress on the limitations of state action holds him back from endorsing any major reform to alleviate poverty, such as extensive welfare provisions or a policy of significant redistribution of income.53

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This, however, is not altogether a fair assessment. Bosanquet is not saying, ‘do nothing for the destitute, leave them to suffer, or die.’ On the contrary, he condemns laissez faire as a reactionary fallacy, and urges that the reformer’s watchword should be ‘Not less but more.’54 The key is the kind of action which is taken. Faced with poverty, he urges people to relieve immediate suffering, but to take great care in how they do that (and always with the proviso that the state already provides, through the Poor Law, that everyone has the right to subsistence). They should be especially careful in how, and how far, they go beyond that – beyond that go they should, but only in the right, delicate way, which deals with those in need as the equal citizens they are and supports or restores their independence. I shall not go into the specifics of his views of charity, and charity organization, which are dealt with elsewhere in this collection,55 but they are so pertinent that I must refer to them briefly. Providing charity is a very complicated business and is all too often done badly and makes matters worse. Then there is material damage to the pauper, who is not helped enough to be put back on his feet; and moral damage, too, because he is taught to be reckless and dependent on alms, and do nothing to help himself. There is material damage to the poor in the industrious class above the paupers, as one side-effect of misdirected charity is to lower wages; and moral damage, as the industrious become demoralized because their own hard efforts and sacrifices seem pointless. Rich, well-meaning, but ignorant philanthropists with muddled and patchy ideas have failed to rise to the duties of their station. In this way, Bosanquet insists, the problems of poverty are largely our fault and not those of the poor.56 So, individuals can do something: and they have a duty to do the right thing, such as themselves paying decent wages and treating their employees as human beings, or helping to organize a trade so that employment in it is regular.57 Bosanquet is not saying that no longerterm public action should be taken about poverty: as has been seen, he approves of legislation concerning education and housing, for example, and encourages everyone to make it effective. Nor does he think the poor should simply be left to get on with improving their position: society can help them, by its support including enabling legislation, to help themselves through savings clubs and banks, Friendly and other provident societies, building societies, trades unions, temperance organizations, and profit-sharing and cooperative schemes.58 Nevertheless, Bosanquet is asking far less of the state than we are used to. Moreover, he is making an assumption which may not be widely shared now, that

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such steps are sufficient in themselves, without further state action, to ameliorate the problem of poverty. He thinks those steps, taken together and above all with the cessation of misguided philanthropy, can deal with the problem of the ‘residuum’ (the bottom layer of society, formed of those completely destitute and so degraded they have become incapable of self-reliance) because that ‘is not a true self-propagating class; it is a mass of social wreckage, and must necessarily cease to exist, insofar as the causes are arrested which are perpetually renewing it.’59 I think Bosanquet’s protestations that he is not the hardhearted one are genuine, and plausible.60 But he was over-optimistic. To sum up this section, I have argued that Bosanquet’s approach is very pragmatic and that he is happy to mix private and state action (which are seen as interdependent in source and potency). He is no advocate of minimal government. He expressly repudiates ‘administrative nihilism’ and recognizes that ‘there is little ... with which the State must not in some sense busy itself.’61 At the same time, although he accepts some socialist ideas, he rules out the maximal approach of socialist collectivists. He adheres to a moderate collectivism, in tune with his advanced Liberal politics. The Principle of State Action Having outlined Bosanquet’s view that the noblest life imaginable should be open to all, and that much action both private and state is necessary in order to put the ideal within the reach of the poor, I turn to the principle of state action offered in The Philosophical Theory of the State. On the face of it, the theoretical position is straightforward. The ultimate end of the state, as of all its individual members, is the realization of the best life by every member.62 The theoretical problem concerning state action is also straightforward and, as Bosanquet acknowledges, already set out clearly by Green.63 State action, by definition, uses force and can only produce a course of behaviour by enjoining or prohibiting external acts. But the object of employing state action is different in kind, namely, to promote a moral end, the best life. Compulsion can produce the external act but it cannot make the actor perform it for the right reason. When a person acts under compulsion, the value of the action as an element in the best life is destroyed.64 The state, then, simply cannot promote the best life directly. Sweet expresses this neatly: the state ‘exists in order to carry out certain tasks, and it is the very nature of these tasks that imposes limits on the

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state.’65 Nevertheless, state action can ‘remove obstacles ... destroy conditions hostile to the realization of’ the best life, and the state is ‘in its right when it forcibly hinders a hindrance to the best life.’66 The state does not merely enforce standard legal rights to the protection of life, liberty, and property; it takes positive action. For instance, ‘it may try to hinder illiteracy and intemperance by compelling education and by municipalising the liquor traffic.’67 Bosanquet stresses that these acts, while positive in that they do something and that they have a moral purpose, are necessarily at the same time negative because they use force. This sets the limit to state action. ‘On every problem the question must recur, “Is the proposed measure bona fide confined to hindering a hindrance, or is it attempting direct promotion of the common good by force?” ’68 Bosanquet is explicit that ‘no general principle will tell us how in particular to solve this subtle question.’69 All ‘hindering’ is negative. That must be outweighed by the positive moral benefits resulting from the action: ‘We ought, as a rule, when we propose action involving compulsion, to be able to show a definite tendency to growth, or a definite reserve of capacity, which is frustrated by a known impediment, the removal of which is a small matter compared to the capacities to be set free.’70 In one of his rare examples, Bosanquet approves of the state providing a financial inducement to ship-masters to take on apprentices because statistics proved that boys and their parents were eager for the boys to become seamen and that all that prevented them was the lack of adequate training.71 I assume this is because the state is not seeking to sway the wills of the boys or the parents, or directing labour, but is removing an obstacle to the way some members of society can pursue a desired career. It is enabling the boys and parents to achieve what they already want to do but (if they are poor) are powerless to effect: so a state subsidy helps them to help themselves. This example illustrates state action which ‘liberates resources of character and intelligence greater beyond all question than the encroachment which it involves.’72 Bosanquet hints, on the other hand, that hindering unemployment through state provision of ‘universal employment’ and hindering overcrowding by ‘universal house building’ would not be justified.73 ‘Simply to do in every case what you desire to see done is a policy that frustrates itself.’74 All that Bosanquet lays down as necessary truths are that state action and private action are distinct, and that there is a limit to what state action can achieve. He never stipulates the amount or location of

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state action. Quite the opposite – he claims that the application of the principle of state action must be a matter of judgment, intrinsically hard to make and even harder for individuals to agree upon. Loss of moral motivation is balanced against gain of moral opportunities: neither is measurable, nor is there an indisputable calculation through which one can lead someone else. What may seem worrying is that it appears to be only a moral judgment, when one might feel that some account should also be taken of material gain in such a case as the public provision of good housing. However, that is a misunderstanding. The material improvement is already part of the judgment, because it is the moral gain which the material improvement can be expected to bring, which is the positive side. Bosanquet contends that material improvement is not of itself moral gain. For example, moving people from bad into good housing is beneficial only if they already have the state of mind (character) to make good use of it. The state can provide houses, but not character: ‘unless there was a better life struggling to utter itself, and the deadlift of interference just removed an obstacle which bound it down, the good house will not be an element in a better life.’75 Thus material improvement itself appears to be irrelevant on Bosanquet’s account. Equally, what is reckoned on the negative side, as moral loss, is any consequent moral cost. Bosanquet rightly excludes material considerations as such from the judgment, because then the judgment would be not hard but simply impossible: how could moral and material factors be balanced out against one another? Obviously the counter-considerations limiting state action are close to those against misjudged philanthropy. This kind of state action, as Bosanquet conceives it, is philanthropy on the largest scale possible. It is state charity. There is a place for it, but it is hazardous and should only be undertaken in full awareness of the inherent dangers, drawbacks, and limitations; and only when other social action (i.e., voluntary, private charity) has proved inadequate. It might be objected that private charity and public assistance are distinct. But here I think that Bosanquet has a convincing response. His theoretical justification for putting private charity and state action on a par is of course his claim that they are different forms of the same social action: and this claim, and the analysis it rests on, seems to me to be essentially correct. What we find in The Philosophical Theory of the State is not a principle of state action in the sense of a criterion to deliver decisions in particular cases, but a principle that tells us that there must be a limit to state action and that we must always judge whether a case falls inside or

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outside the limit. Applying the principle – that is, making the particular judgment – ‘will really be, when aided by special experience, in some degree a valuable clue to what ought to be done.’76 So Bosanquet is making an appropriately modest claim for the practical use of his theoretical position. The theory fits well with what we have already seen in Essays and Addresses. Both books offer the same set of considerations to weigh up and hold that the best judgment will be made by the person who acts in good faith and with specialist knowledge of politics and social life. The ‘principle’ of state action, Bosanquet writes, ‘only put[s] in other words the rule of action followed by all practical men, in matters of which they have genuine experience.’77 Conclusion What I have done by going first to Essays and Addresses is to restore some of the detail and concrete illustration Bosanquet deliberately minimizes in his more philosophical treatment. The Philosophical Theory of the State adds very little that is new, apart from the references to other theoretical statements of the position in Green and Kant. It provides no further principle, but simply summarizes in one formula the considerations previously deployed in particular cases. Bosanquet confronts problems which, though reshaped by technological advances, are still with us. Has he left a legacy which provides any help? Three points may be noted. The first two are obvious and not really contentious at a general level (though they are as soon as one gets down to specifics). The last is less obvious and very contentious, yet probably the most important. The first point which can be learned from Bosanquet is that we must be clear what social ideal is aimed at. He, like Hegel and Green, insists that it is a moral ideal, and that it must be a universal ideal, that is, a common good for the benefit of all; and in today’s world he would accept that ‘all’ means all human beings – although I suspect he would argue that preferential treatment of the members of one’s own society is still sometimes justified. The past century has seen significant moves towards inter-relations between societies, and some institutions have been established which are a basis from which a general will of humanity may grow. Yet there is still nothing comparable to the extensive network of institutions which Bosanquet sees relating the members of a state to one another, so that in some respects he would still see one’s state as one’s moral world and consequently exerting prior moral claims.78

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The second, equally obvious point is that we must know the facts, we must put ourselves in possession of the relevant ‘specialist knowledge.’ This of course is no simple matter; it is extremely hard to investigate social problems, especially on a global scale, and even harder to reach agreement on causes and remedies. The two points might perhaps be summed up by saying that we must take a ‘rational view,’ that we must have the right ‘theory.’ And for Bosanquet the crux is that we should hold the right ideas about ourselves, our relation to others, and our place in society. We should be of good ‘character.’ It is precisely this requirement that the right philosophy enables us to meet. In all of this, Bosanquet directs his attention primarily at individuals. Crucially, he looks first to the individual, not to the state. He assigns individuals responsibility for taking the best action in their own lives and, as citizens, in public life. This is the third lesson. To the extent that we now tend to look first to the state and to leave it to act for us, Bosanquet provides an indispensable corrective, one which chimes in with current efforts to revitalize democracy and participatory citizenship. That is no easy task, particularly if we ask individuals to do as much as Bosanquet demands. It may sound easy to be told to perform the duties of one’s station, but it is not, or at least not in the way that Bosanquet means. He never suggests that one’s duties are always clear, or that there are no difficulties in doing them. On the contrary, his examples in Essays and Addresses seem chosen to demonstrate emphatically what hard work it is to see what your duty is and to carry it out in the best way possible. That is symbolized in his contrast between the two philanthropists whose lives he analyses at length: George Moore, who gives away a good deal of money but without thinking through why and how to do so, and who does much less good, and more damage, as a result; and Jean Leclair, who ‘had the right object before him and went to work in the right spirit,’ and showed extraordinary singleness of purpose, patience, and foresight in treating his employees as human beings, including educating them to take a better view of their lives.79 It is Jean Leclair and others like him, whose extraordinary selfunderstanding of the duties of their station transform those duties, who are the spring of moral progress. This is so, whether they are formulating their duties as private individuals or as citizens; whether they do their duty through private action or through public action. If we set aside substantive questions such as how best to ensure the poor have decent housing, the formal structure of Bosanquet’s approach remains sound and fruitful. He is correct that social and

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political ideals, including the ideal of the best life, are in constant evolution. They need constantly to be restated and upgraded; correspondingly, no version of them can be dogmatic or doctrinaire but must be expressed in a way which acknowledges that it is subject to revision and improvement. The ideals must also match the present circumstances of the society. In both ways, ideals must be open-ended. They must be applied pragmatically. The progress of society, and of mankind, is in our own hands and must be kept under continual review. The true reformer continually monitors society’s ideals, checking whether it is moving in the right direction and whether the ideals might not be developed further or extended more widely. Bosanquet echoes Hegel: ‘To discriminate the ... accidental from the essential, is the highest task of theoretical as of practical judgment.’80 That seems still a sound and solid objective.

NOTES 1 The Philosophical Theory of the State, in The Philosophical Theory of the State and Related Essays by Bernard Bosanquet, ed. William Sweet and Gerald F. Gaus (South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press, 2001, 180; The Philosophical Theory of the State, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1923), 171. 2 Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 1; 4th ed. vii. 3 According to Gustav Spiller, he became ‘the principal leader of the Society’ until its dissolution in 1897, The Ethical Movement in Great Britain: A Documentary History (London: printed for the author, 1934), 10. J.H. Muirhead describes Bosanquet as the Society’s ‘directing spirit and mainstay,’ Reflections by a Journeyman in Philosophy on the Movements of Thought and Practice in His Time (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1942), 86. The Society was formed in 1886 by a group in London, many of them former Balliol men deeply influenced by Green, including Muirhead himself (Muirhead, Reflections, 74). 4 See the additions to Philosophical Theory of the State: addition 1910, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 17–27 (4th ed., xxvii–xxxix); addition 1920, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 4–5 (4th ed., xi–xiii). See also the the writings 1898–1922 collected by William Sweet in Part 2 of Bernard Bosanquet: Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 1883–1922, ed. William Sweet, 3 vols (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2003), vol. 3: Essays on ‘Aspects of the Social Problem’ and Social Policy, also published as vol. 14, The Collected Works of Bernard Bosanquet, 20 vols (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1999).

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5 Essays and Addresses (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1889), v. 6 Quotations from the leaflet appear in both Helen Bosanquet, Bernard Bosanquet: A Short Account of His Life (London: Macmillan, 1924), 45, and J.H. Muirhead, ed., Bernard Bosanquet: Letters Illustrating the Sources and the Development of His Philosophical Opinions (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1935), 48–9. 7 Essays and Addresses, vi. 8 Ibid., vii, viii. 9 Ibid., x. 10 Ibid. 11 A.C. Bradley, ed., Prolegomena to Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883), sect. 332; Green uses ‘man’ generically, elsewhere explicitly including women. See generally sects 206–17 (the widening of the range of persons whose good is sought) and 329–32 (the practical good done by Utilitarianism thanks to its stress on equality). Of course, it is not only the idealists who placed this heavy emphasis on human equality; indeed, part of their case for implementing the ideal of equality is how widespread it has become. 12 Essays and Addresses, 2–3. 13 Ibid., 3. 14 Ibid., 108–9. For a full discussion of Bosanquet’s views on religion, including those expressed in Essays and Addresses, see Timothy Sprigge’s paper in this volume. 15 At the end of his life, Bosanquet still believed that wage-earners, ‘the larger half of the community,’ did not ‘have a fair show ... in consultation and cooperation with the whole community, to make of life – well, the best that [they] had it in [them] to make of it’: ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 326; originally published in Charity Organisation Review, 49 (1921): 209. 16 Essays and Addresses, 52. 17 Ibid., 61. 18 Ibid., 61, 63. 19 Ibid., 76, 78. 20 ‘Socialism and Natural Selection’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 92; originally published in Aspects of the Social Problem (London: Macmillan, 1895), 290. 21 Essays and Addresses, 27–8. 22 Ibid., 28. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid.

228 Peter Nicholson 25 Ibid., 29–30. 26 Ibid., 68. 27 ‘Character in Its Bearing on Social Causation,’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 83; originally published in Aspects of the Social Problem, 111. 28 Ibid., 35. 29 Ibid., 37. 30 Ibid., 37–8. 31 Ibid., 35–41. 32 Ibid., 41. Immediately after the Great War, Bosanquet was prepared to make an exception, ‘justified by arrears incurred during the war, and by the public demand that has been awakened.’ The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 191n.22; 4th ed., 185 (added 1920). 33 Essays and Addresses, 42. 34 Ibid., 42–3. 35 Ibid., 41–3. 36 Ibid., 44–5. 37 Ibid., 24. 38 Ibid., 25. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 33. I believe this is why, having in Essays and Addresses contrasted ‘individual’ with ‘social reform,’ subsequently Bosanquet corrects his language to ‘social action’ contrasted with ‘state action,’ noting that by ‘individual’ he meant ‘pure social’ and by ‘social’ he meant ‘social mixed with compulsion.’ The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 25n.23; 4th ed. xxxvii n.4 (added 1910). 41 Ibid., 39. 42 Ibid., 45. 43 Ibid., 46–7. 44 Ibid., 119. 45 Ibid., 45. 46 Ibid., 46. 47 Ibid., 16–23. 48 The Civilization of Christendom and Other Studies (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893), 304–57. 49 ‘Natural Selection’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 105; originally published in Aspects of the Social Problem, 306. 50 Essays and Addresses, 65–6. At the end of his life Bosanquet chided the ‘wellto-do’ for grudging higher wage levels: ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,’ Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 327, originally published in Charity Organisation Review (1921): 210–11.

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51 ‘Duties of Citizenship’ in Science and Philosophy and Other Essays by the Late Bernard Bosanquet, ed. J.H. Muirhead and R.C. Bosanquet (London: Allen and Unwin, 1927), 274, originally published in Aspects of the Social Problem, 6–7; ‘Character and Causation’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy: 1883–1922, 3: 85, originally published in Aspects of the Social Problem, 113; ‘Natural Selection’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 100, originally published in Aspects of the Social Problem, 300. 52 J.A. Hobson, ‘The Social Philosophy of Charity Organisation,’ Contemporary Review (1896), reprinted in his The Crisis of Liberalism: New Issues of Democracy (London: King, 1909), 192–217. Bosanquet protests he is misrepresented by Hobson: see ‘Charity Organisation. A Reply,’ Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 141–6, originally published in Contemporary Review, 71 (1897): 112–16. Whether or not Bosanquet was sensitive to jibes that he himself lived off inherited property, his wife sets out to defend him in her memoir. She stresses three points: (1) he had an ‘inveterate habit’ of lending or giving money to others, which ‘steadily diminished his resources’; (2) ‘he liked to think that he owed his independence in part at least to the hard work at Oxford by which he had earned and saved money’; and (3) ‘he considered that the fact that he was not obliged to earn his living made it incumbent on him to do more rather than less work.’ H. Bosanquet, Bernard Bosanquet, 38. 53 For an excellent recent discussion of this aspect, see Geoffrey Thomas, ‘Philosophy and Ideology in Bernard Bosanquet’s Political Theory,’ in W.J. Mander, ed., Anglo-American Idealism, 1865–1927 (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2000), 112–19. 54 The Social Criterion, in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 215–21; 227–8 (original publication: Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1907: 7–18, 28–29). 55 See in particular chap. 1 by Sandra den Otter in this volume. 56 Essays and Addresses, 1–47; ‘In Darkest England’ On the Wrong Track, in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 23–48 (originally published London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1891); ‘The Principles and Chief Dangers of the Administration of Charity,’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 61–72 (original publication: H.C. Adams, ed., Philanthropy and Social Progress [New York: Crowell, 1893], 249–68); and ‘Character in Its Bearing on Social Causation,’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 80–89 (originally published in Aspects of the Social Problem, 107–17). Much of what Bosanquet says is the standard Charity Organisation Society line. See for example the statement of the Society’s position by his older half-brother, Secretary of the Society, Charles B.P. Bosanquet, A Handy-Book for Visitors of the Poor in London with Chapters on Poor Law, Sanitary Law, and Charities (London: Longmans, Green,

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57

58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

1874). The Handy-Book makes plain how complex were the arrangements for the relief of the poor, both under the Poor Law and by the numerous private charities, and makes more intelligible the constant complaints about uninformed and damaging attempts at philanthropy. ‘Duties,’ Science and Philosophy, 277–8 (Aspects of the Social Problem, 10–11); ‘Character and Causation,’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 86–8 (Aspects of the Social Problem, 114–16). On these extensive working-class organizations, through which the poor can be provident and cope with or rise above their poverty, see, e.g., ‘In Darkest England’ On the Wrong Track, 16–23, 29–30 (Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 29–31, 33); ‘The Principles and Chief Dangers of the Administration of Charity,’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 64 (original publication in H.C. Adams, ed., Philanthropy and Social Progress, 255); ‘Character and Causation’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 81 (Aspects of the Social Problem, 108); ‘The English People: Notes on National Characteristics,’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 194–8 (original publication: International Monthly, 3 [1901]: 95–100); and The Social Criterion in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 220–21 (original publication: 1907, 16–18). ‘Character and Causation,’ in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 88 (Aspects of the Social Problem, 116). See, e.g., ‘In Darkest England’ On the Wrong Track, in Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 3: 34, 43 (original publication, 31–3, 62–3). The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 25, added 1910; 4–5, added 1920 (4th ed., xxxvi, added 1910; xii, added 1920). Ibid., 178–9 (4th ed., 169, 170). Ibid., 184n.10 (4th ed., 176n.2, 180). Ibid., 178–84 (4th ed., 169–77). William Sweet, Idealism and Rights: The Social Ontology of Human Rights in the Political Thought of Bernard Bosanquet (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 172; see pp. 171–7 generally on Bosanquet and state action. Ibid., 185 (4th ed., 177, 178). Ibid., 186 (4th ed., 178). Ibid., 186 (4th ed., 178). Ibid., 186 (4th ed., 179). Ibid., 186 (4th ed., 179). Ibid., 186n.15 (4th ed., 179n.3). Ibid., 187 (4th ed., 180). Ibid., 186 (4th ed., 178). Ibid., 25, added 1910 (4th ed., xxxvii).

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75 Ibid., 191 (4th ed., 185). 76 Ibid., 189 (4th ed., 182). 77 Ibid., 189 (4th ed., 182) Relevant here is Bosanquet’s distinction between practical ethics and moral philosophy, on which see the very helpful discussion by W. Sweet, ‘Social Policy and Bosanquet’s Moral Philosophy,’ Collingwood Studies, 6 (1999): 127–46. 78 For the extent and complexity of the institutional arrangements of the state, see John Morrow’s ‘Community, Class and Bosanquet’s ‘New State,’’ History of Political Thought, 21 (2000): 485–99. 79 Essays and Addresses, 1–23. 80 Ibid., 54.

10 Bosanquet, Perfectionism, and Distributive Justice KEV IN S U LLIVA N

In his book Perfectionism, Thomas Hurka claims that Bernard Bosanquet is ‘the most important perfectionist defender of the free market.’1 This remark assumes at least two things about Bosanquet: first, that he is an adherent to what Hurka and others refer to as the moral theory of perfectionism; and second, that Bosanquet is a staunch supporter of laissezfaire capitalism and perhaps the inequalities that such a system generates. Although I am in complete agreement with Hurka’s first assumption about Bosanquet, I have some reservations about his second. In this paper, then, I wish to show how Bosanquet’s ethical theory is indeed a version of perfectionism, but then demonstrate how his theory only offers qualified support for private property and the free market. Now there is little doubt that Bosanquet’s moral philosophy falls under the category of perfectionism. The latter is a normative ethical theory that purports to answer the central question, ‘What is the highest good or supreme value in human life?’ Two theories have provided answers to this question in the course of Western philosophy: the first is known as welfarism; the second, perfectionism. Welfarism is the view that the ultimate good in life is an individual’s welfare or happiness. Various interpretations have been offered as to what constitutes a person’s happiness, ranging from momentary pleasurable states to a felt contentment about one’s life as a whole. Despite these differences, however, one thing welfarists agree upon is that a subjective factor is essential to the theory, this being that the good should be determined by individual choices and not by some objective or external standard. As Wayne Sumner, a contemporary exponent of welfarism, puts it, ‘Welfare is subjective because the prudential value of a life is the value it has for its subject, and the subject’s hierarchy of attitudes and con-

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cerns defines her evaluative point of view.’2 Whatever the conception of a person’s welfare or happiness may be, this, according to welfarism, should be given the priority when moral judgments are made. The other theory of the highest good is perfectionism. In its simplest form, perfectionism proposes that the ultimate goal of our lives should be to realize and express our inherent human nature. Certain essential properties or attributes compose our nature, and these, according to perfectionism, should be developed to the highest degree possible. Debates have flourished concerning what these central properties are, with thinkers such as Aristotle opting for rationality, and others, such as Nietzsche, backing willful creativity. But whatever the view, perfectionism conceives of these essential human properties as being objective in nature and thus acting as an external standard of excellence where the good life is defined in terms of human nature rather than in terms of individual decisions as in welfarism. And it is when these essential properties of human nature have been developed and expressed to the fullest that one can be said to have achieved the highest good. In this sense perfectionism extols an ethics of self-realization where the self to be realized is our innermost or true nature. As Burton Porter explains it, ‘According to the self-realizationist the purpose of living is the full realization of our potentialities’ where ‘a complete, integrated, and unified self is brought into being.’3 Given this characterization of perfectionism as encompassing an ethics of self-realization, it is not hard to fathom how Bosanquet, and indeed other British idealists such as Green and Bradley, can be classified as perfectionists regarding moral philosophy. This can be grasped more clearly once we have described the specifics of Bosanquet’s theory. Bosanquet grounds his ethics of perfectionism in an idealist theory of metaphysics or the nature of reality. This is most transparent in his idea, borrowed from Hegel, of the concrete universal, a difficult concept to grasp though crucial to understand if one is to adequately comprehend his view of self-realization. The notion is best approached by briefly contrasting it to the idea of an abstract universal. The classic example of an abstract universal is a Platonic Form, which can be construed as an objective property that different individual things share in common such as ‘red’ or ‘justice.’ A variety of pens can be red and a number of institutions can be just. These properties are described as being universal because they apply to all things that have them; and they can also be described as being abstract because we can think about them independent of, or separate from, their instantiations.

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Metaphysically speaking, the notion of an abstract universal can lead to a full-blown ontological dualism as in Plato’s philosophy, where there is the realm of the eternal Forms or Reality and the realm of changing things or appearance. Of course Plato attempts to relate these two realms through his notions of copying and participation, but the Forms, unlike the appearances, remain self-existent. Both Hegel and British idealists like Bosanquet criticize this metaphysical dualism and the whole notion of the abstract universal that it rests upon. They contend that Platonism fails miserably in linking the universal to the particular. The Hegelian solution, which Bosanquet and the other idealists endorse, is to deny the problem altogether by insisting that the universal, or the realm of reality, and the particular, or the realm of appearance, are not two separate spheres of existence that need to be related externally. Rather, reality is an all-inclusive system that contains a vast array of universals and particulars, all relating to one another internally to form a unified whole. The concrete universal refers to this all-inclusive reality. By concrete is meant the number of elements that something has, so that the more elements that a thing contains the more real it is thought to be. A whole can contain many parts, and this whole in turn can be encompassed by an even larger whole. But the whole that contains all other wholes, the macrocosm that embraces all microcosms, is the most concrete universal and thus the most real; and this Bosanquet terms the Absolute. Reality, therefore, is nothing but the Absolute, the concrete universal par excellence. From the perspective of finite human minds, the parts contained in the Absolute appear in opposition and conflict; ergo the problem of the relation between the universal and the particular in Plato’s thought. But from the standpoint of the Absolute itself, there are no conflicts because there are no dualisms. Reality is all-inclusive and complete; and in being complete, it is devoid of contradictions and so is utterly self-consistent. This is why Bosanquet characterizes reality as being teleological in nature; not in the sense of fulfilling a subjective purpose through time, but in the sense of being a complete or harmonious whole, which gets expressed in and through each of the Absolute’s parts to varying degrees. This expressed unity is what Bosanquet calls ‘individuality.’ In this context, the individuality of a thing does not refer to its individually unique nature, but to what it expresses of the Absolute itself. A thing’s individuality, then, is proportional to the degree in which it manifests the completeness and unity of the whole system or Absolute. This implies a scale to reality, things being consid-

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ered more real as they more fully realize the non-contradictory and allinclusive nature of the Absolute. Consequently, the Absolute for Bosanquet is not a blank void but a seething identity-in-difference where the Absolute exists in and through its parts and where the parts are motivated to express the intrinsic unity of the Absolute to the fullest degree possible. The idea of the Absolute as the overall concrete universal, as the unity-within-diversity, provides the foundation for Bosanquet’s ethics of perfectionism as the ideal of self-realization. In being the all-inclusive whole, the Absolute is the standard of all value. The good is defined in reference to reality’s complete or non-contradictory nature – in short, to the Absolute’s perfection. As finite beings develop towards this perfection, they become closer to obtaining the highest good. On the individual level this goal is referred to by Bosanquet as ‘the best life’ in The Philosophical Theory of the State,4 while on the collective level he calls it ‘the common good.’5 What it amounts to is a continuous process of greater and greater self-realization, the self to be realized consisting of our individuality or that part of ourselves that embodies the essential unity and non-contradictory nature of the Absolute. This is, or at least should be, the goal of all human striving and the standard used to judge the actions of all individuals and even states. Indeed, the perfectionist strain in Bosanquet’s thought is never more apparent as when he says the ultimate end is ‘the perfection of human personality.’6 According to Bosanquet, the process of human perfecting or selfrealization specifically involves the development of our rational nature (logos). The reason for this is that within human beings the self-consistent and all-inclusive nature of the Absolute is more fully manifested in rational activity. Reason is principally concerned with the unification of life and the overcoming of contradictions, both of which reflect a tendency towards synthesizing things and achieving a sort of identity-in-difference. And this reveals, at least on a limited scale, what the Absolute is all about. Moreover, Bosanquet believes that the essential part of human self-realization is the unfolding of the different levels of rational activity, from lower to higher, each expressing a different aspect of our nature and thus, in a sense, a different self. In fact, he adumbrates several levels of rational activity, the higher ones incorporating yet transcending the lower levels in a movement towards allinclusive wholeness. Since for Bosanquet rationality is a self-conscious thinking activity, it involves standards of reflection in which individuals are able to pro-

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vide reasons for their actions and evaluate their conduct. In this process of reflection the different aspects of one’s self or nature become realized so that the different standards of reflection correspond to different selves and levels of rational activity. At the lowest level, individuals judge their actions in terms of technical efficiency. This means one looks at a certain end and then determines whether one’s actions are conducive to achieving that end. This technical standard then gives way to an economic one in which a person attempts to realize competing ends and has to figure out the best way of allocating resources for attaining them all. This perspective both includes and supersedes the merely technical one because individual agents realize that they have many goals, not just one. But the implicit standard in both technical and economic reasoning is the instrumental one of choosing the appropriate means for achieving a goal or a variety of goals. Thus at this level the self that is realized is a prudential self, one concerned with satisfying individual wants and demands. The instrumental standard or prudential self gets incorporated into another standard of reflection, which involves contemplating the ends themselves. Here the emphasis is not on choosing the appropriate means but on doing something for its own sake. In other words, one discovers the inherent value and importance of certain activities, and this represents a further development of the prudential self, though one in which rational activity is still tied to individual self-satisfaction. Eventually a person moves to the next level, where there is a realization that one is simply not an isolated individual with specific goals, but a social being living in a community with other persons. It is no longer simply a matter of asking what means are the most efficient and economic, or what ends are worthwhile for their own sake, but whether what one is doing is compatible with one’s social responsibilities. Can agents fulfill their goals while meeting their obligations to others? In learning to live in society, individuals soon discover that they are social beings with responsibilities and not isolated, instrumental rational agents. The prudential self becomes enclosed and usurped by a moral self. For Bosanquet, the moral self’s first standard of critical reflection involves recognizing and obeying social conventions. From the perspective of the rational agent, morality exists externally in the established rules and customs of a community. Agents use these rules to judge their own and other people’s behaviour. In so doing individuals expand their horizons and become more other-directed. But this kind

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of moral reasoning is insufficient because of its arbitrary nature. One can still question whether the rules themselves are justifiable. This can lead the moral conventional self to the higher standard of moral selfresponsibility. By this time the individual is engaged in many spheres of rational activity including work, leisure, personal relationships, study, and civic service. Individuals begin to view themselves in relation to all these activities and perceive a unity-within-diversity. The underlying purpose and general significance of the different spheres is apprehended and individuals must work out what their specific responsibilities are. Social rules and customs are no longer seen in the abstract, but are scrutinized in light of the different spheres of activity that the agent is engaged in. In this way, individuals move beyond blind conformity to social convention to a more rational engagement with others. They are not content with established customs, but are more personally responsible for their behaviour within society. There is thus a shift to a more expansive and all-inclusive standard of reflection involving a morally autonomous self which judges its responsibilities in relation to the different forms of rational activity. At this level the moral self widens and one begins to see one’s life as consisting of concentric circles of activity, all coming together to form a coherent whole. In sum, Bosanquet’s ideal of self-realization consists of a continuous movement from a lower, less inclusive rational self (i.e., the prudential self) to a higher, more inclusive rational self (i.e., the autonomous moral self), in which one’s individuality, or unity of the Absolute, becomes more fully expressed. As mentioned previously, Bosanquet believes the Absolute to be the standard of all value. At the human level, this takes the form of a perfectionist ethic of self-realization. It is the ideal of self-realization, then, that Bosanquet uses as the standard to judge the activities of individuals and of the state. This is the reason behind Bosanquet’s support of private property and a free market economy. Both help foster the process of self-realization and thus the achievement of the best life. Such a justification differs from the one articulated in classical liberalism. Locke, for instance, bases his argument for private property on a labour theory of value. If people, Locke argues, have exclusive rights over their own selves, it follows that they have an exclusive right to the product of their own labour, to what they have personally created. Property rights are therefore rooted in the idea that objects mixed with human labour are the

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exclusive property of the labourer. Bosanquet, in his article ‘The Principle of Private Property,’ rejects this view because it is unclear on what basis one has a right to be master of one’s own self, the idea that is used to warrant property rights in Locke’s theory. However, if the former is without rational foundation, so is the latter. As Bosanquet expresses it in Aspects of the Social Problem, ‘Or, it is said, ‘Property arises from labour’ (Locke), i.e. because a man’s person is his property, therefore the work of his hands is his property. But this, again, is no explanation. It suggests that property is recognized on the same ground as a man’s right to be his own master, but does not say what that ground is.’7 Bosanquet further dismisses Adam Smith’s justification for laissezfaire capitalism. Smith argued for the superiority of the free market over any command-type economy because it serves the public interest by creating economic wealth and thus satisfying the desires of producers and consumers alike. Bosanquet is critical of this argument because of its inherent subjectivistic and hedonistic assumptions as well as the impoverished view of human nature it rests upon. For Bosanquet, the good cannot be determined by an individual’s wants and choices because individuals may be easily mistaken, deceived, or ignorant about what their best interests really are. There is often a huge chasm between what we perceive our true interest to be and the real situation. In addition, Bosanquet points to the problem of basing a standard of value on the idea of the individual since each person is part of a network of social relations in which the line between self and others becomes easily blurred. Lastly, neither Smith nor any other classical liberal thinker offers a satisfactory explanation for why an individual’s desire and decisions should be adopted as the criterion of value. This of course is what welfarism believes, though Bosanquet would reject it completely. Bosanquet also argues that supporters, like Smith, of laissez-faire capitalism have a very narrow view of what constitutes the public interest. They connect it to economic gain and so to a hedonistic ethic of satisfying one’s material desires. But Bosanquet insists that humans are more than pleasure-seeking creatures, and that this goal just corresponds to the lower levels of self-realization involving the prudential self. The classical liberal defence of the free market, then, relies on a bogus conception of the highest good. According to Bosanquet, both subjectivism and hedonism are inadequate justifications for laissez-faire capitalism because they are

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grounded in an impoverished view of human nature. On this scheme, humans are nothing but atomistic, self-aggrandizing machines or isolated units of demand engaged in constant consumption and appropriation. This view woefully neglects the richness and depth of human experience as seen in our capacity to realize a moral self and to engage in such self-transcending activities as art, philosophy, religion, and social morality. Thus, an excessively individualistic conception of human nature, as found in classical liberalism, could never succeed in bolstering the argument for a free market economy. Bosanquet’s criticisms should not be taken to mean that he completely repudiates the idea of private property or laissez-faire capitalism. In fact, he supports them but for different reasons. And his support is qualified; it all depends on how far they go in helping or hindering the process of self-realization and thus the achievement of the best life or the highest good. Any institution or arrangement in society is considered worthwhile by Bosanquet if it significantly contributes to realizing our human nature, that is, our capacity for allinclusive rational activity. On the whole, Bosanquet believes the institutions of private property and the free market perform this function well. His argument has to do with his conception of the nature of private property. Following Hegel and T.H. Green, Bosanquet defines private property as the embodiment of personality. In his ‘Principle of Private Property’ in Aspects of the Social Problem he asserts, ‘The point of private property is that things should not come miraculously and be unaffected by your dealings with them, but that you should be in contact with something which in the external world is the definite material representation of yourself.’8 Owning property forces us to see ourselves as persisting in time and going through stages of our lives that form a unity. A modicum of property allows us the material security to pursue long-term projects and other rational activities. Indeed, it is property that permits the predictable access to resources required to fulfill a life plan. Ownership of property also allows us to witness the development of these plans and so the course of our self-realization. It is in this connecting of past, present, and future that property serves to unify our life, a crucial point since for Bosanquet ‘the inward or moral life cannot be a unity unless the outward life – the dealing with things – is also a unity.’9 Actions by the state that seriously curtail or abolish property rights would prove unacceptable because it would restrict us to the lower-

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level life of the prudential self. Bosanquet expresses this by saying that such actions would relegate us to the life of a child, a slave, or an animal. The reason for this is that these beings live only for the moment, solely focused on the short-term gratification of their immediate desires. As such, they have no long-term objectives, no social responsibilities, no widespread rational activities that would help them realize different aspects of their nature. In short, they are prudential selves, cut off from experiencing the unified life of a rational moral agent. This disunified state of existence, so Bosanquet argues, would also be our fate if the state jettisoned our right to private property; for owning property compels us to organize our lives, plan for the future, and deal with things in a responsible way: Private property, then, is the unity of life in its external or material form; the result of past dealing with the material world, and the possibility of future dealing with it; the general or universal means of possible action and expression corresponding to the moral self that links before and after, as opposed to the momentary wants of a child or an animal.10

Thus private property goes a long way in assisting the development of our rational nature and in facilitating the movement towards unity, which is the nature of reality. A possible objection to Bosanquet’s argument for private property is that instead of aiding the development of our rational moral capacities, it in fact thwarts them. His description of property as a way of dealing with things in the world and of gaining access to resources could lead to a very calculating, even controlling mentality. If people see their lives in and through their possessions, then they will become obsessed with holding on to them at any cost and perhaps with accumulating as many possessions as possible, thus creating an unequal distribution of wealth. Moreover, the accumulation of private property could allow the rich to exploit and oppress the poor. (That is one reason why the French anarchist Proudhon claimed that ‘property is theft.’) So, instead of leading to the realization of a deeper, fuller moral self, property ownership would only reinforce the narrow-minded experience of the prudential self. The only form of rationality realized in this situation would be instrumental and self-serving. Though compelling, this objection misses the mark. Bosanquet himself is sensitive to the criticism about possible exploitation and explicitly states that the principle of private property, as he understands it,

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‘does not demand unlimited acquisition of wealth.’11 He also claims that accumulated property used for personal consumption alone undermines the positive developmental possibilities of property ownership by generating selfish behaviour. ‘Not all property,’ he insists, ‘is the pure expression of this social and spiritual necessity’; in pursuing consumption alone, ‘man’s true purpose and calling are metamorphosed into self-seeking.’12 One must remember that for Bosanquet any human behaviour or institution is judged acceptable or unacceptable on the basis of whether it helps or hinders the process of greater self-realization. In many respects, the institution of private property can do this, but not always. It can be perverted and used only to express the aspirations of the lower, prudential self. When this occurs, as it does in the situation of massive inequality, then setting limits on property rights would be justifiable. Bosanquet’s main reason for supporting a free market system is that it can engender self-reliance, which for him is an important ingredient in higher rational functioning. Thomas Hurka sums up Bosanquet’s argument nicely: Because perfection is active, Bosanquet argues, it is best achieved when people are self-reliant and find material well-being through their own work and initiative. They take thought for their future and themselves do what will make it secure. The free market encourages self-reliance by making people responsible for their own fate; if they do not work, they suffer; if they fail to protect against illness or old age, they will pay a price later. These incentives, however, are undermined by egalitarian redistribution. A guaranteed income frees people from the need to be active, and state pensions make unnecessary that prudential foresight that binds a life into a unity. Where free competition encourages rational self-direction, redistribution makes for dependent lives that never look beyond the present.13

The free market mechanism for distributing economic resources is upheld by Bosanquet because it facilitates the realization of higher levels of rational activity, of which self-reliance is one crucial element. This explains Bosanquet’s favourable attitude towards the 1834 Poor Law in Britain, which forced those on relief in the workhouses to labour. It also explains his work with the Charity Organisation Society, whose guiding principle was assistance without creating dependency. Bosanquet held to the view now common that government assistance

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is not going to solve the problems of poverty and economic inequality. What is needed is for the poor themselves to cultivate certain character traits like self-reliance in order to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Having governments just throw money at the problem will only create dependence and irresponsibility. The poor then will be like children or slaves, primarily concerned with the satisfaction of immediate wants and needs, expecting handouts, and stuck on the level of prudential selfhood. Participating even minimally in a free market economy will better assist the poor for they will be developing their capacity for self-reliance and thus realizing an aspect of their real nature. Hurka advances a number of criticisms against Bosanquet’s argument for a free market economy. In general, he argues that Bosanquet is very naive and overly optimistic about the effects of free market distribution and unduly pessimistic about the effects of state-sponsored redistribution. Regarding the first line of criticism, Bosanquet wrongly assumes that work is available for all who want it. Certainly the high levels of unemployment in Victorian England, and during the Great Depression and the countless recessions in the twentieth century, tell a different story. Capitalism will always require a reserve army of unemployed, and thus a substantial number of people will always find it difficult to realize their higher self. The market is also inherently unstable, so that even a person with a job and property now can be deprived of these any time in the future. Such an unpredictable situation undermines the benefits of private property mentioned earlier, particularly the establishment of long-term projects that help give structure and unity to one’s life. Bosanquet erroneously assumes that character is more important than socioeconomic conditions. Some decent standard of living is essential to realize the higher activities that Bosanquet wants us all to realize like art and philosophy. One would have little time for creative and intellectual pursuits if he or she were constantly malnourished and scavenging for food. This reminds one of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in which the basic needs for survival and safety must be sufficiently met before the advanced needs of knowledge and self-actualization can be realized. Somehow Bosanquet failed to grasp this fundamental insight. He also wrongly assumes that people will respond to state-sponsored assistance by abandoning the virtues of self-reliance and personal responsibility. But why is this inevitable if people are provided with resources by the state, like income or free

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education, which can be used to realize these kinds of traits? In other words, why can’t the state take care of people’s basic needs so that they can be liberated from the dominance of their prudential self and left to pursue higher forms of rational activity? Another major criticism is that Bosanquet’s moral philosophy of perfectionism or self-realization is at odds with his economic philosophy, that is, with his commitment to the free market or laissez-faire capitalism. This can be seen in the negative effects that free market distribution has on people and on society in general, effects that end up sabotaging the prospects for self-realization. The emphasis on the profit motive and competition in a free market economy would lead more to reinforcing the negative aspects of the prudential self, like selfishness and greed, than to fostering the higher traits of the rational moral self. For one thing, the free market promotes a consumerist lifestyle in which people are more concerned with gratifying immediate wants, like a child or animal, rather than with developing higher goods. It can also undercut social morality or our capacity to develop deep, trusting ties with people, which is an important characteristic of the moral self. The social aspects of our being get downplayed in the market in favour of competitive advantage. In short, laissez-faire capitalism proves antithetical to the ideal of self-realization. These are powerful objections to Bosanquet’s arguments for a free market distribution of economic goods and services. But they are all in a sense beside the point. Bosanquet would acknowledge that the market could have these negative effects. It’s a mixed bag. Some things about the market are conducive to self-realization, other things are not. The point is that in any situation one judges the action in terms of whether it generates self-realization or not. Many factors, including massive state intervention, can facilitate the development of our higher nature depending on the circumstances. In fact, Bosanquet believed the state to be a positive force in human life for it represents the General Will, which is the real will of the individual. The real will, in contrast to the actual will, aims at the common good or the best life. And this of course is a life of continuous self-realization. The state, then, like all other things, should be judged in relation to how well it serves to bring about greater self-realization. And it can do this, according to Bosanquet, by ‘hindering the hindrances,’ that is, by preventing and removing any obstacles to self-realization. Since Bosanquet found the state to be apt for this task in non-economic matters,

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there is no reason to believe that his theory would exclude the state completely from the economic sphere. His support, therefore, for both private property and the free market was qualified and not uncritical. This explains why he supported some liberal economic reforms and why he was even sympathetic towards the Labour Party after the First World War. He thus cannot be labelled a reactionary or a progressive outright. On some positions, he was more of a conservative; on others, more of a liberal. His ethics of self-realization allowed him some room to manoeuvre. Whether this inherent flexibility in his system is a blessing or a curse must, however, remain an issue for future exploration.

NOTES 1 Thomas Hurka, Perfectionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 185. 2 L.W. Sumner, ‘Two Theories of the Good,’ in The Good Life and the Human Good, ed. E.F. Paul, F.D. Miller, Jr, and J. Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5. 3 Burton Porter, Reasons for Living: A Basic Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 175. 4 The Philosophical Theory of the State and Related Essays by Bernard Bosanquet, ed. William Sweet and Gerald F. Gaus (South Bend, IN: St Augustine's Press, 2001, 193 (see The Philosophical Theory of the State, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1923), 188). 5 Ibid., 255; 4th ed., 265. Though it should be noted that for Bosanquet the individual good is in harmony with the common good as a part is in harmony with a whole. 6 Ibid., 194; 4th ed., 189. 7 Bosanquet, ‘The Principle of Private Property,’ in Bernard Bosanquet: Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, 1883–1922, 3 vols, ed. William Sweet (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003), 3: 109; originally published in Aspects of the Social Problem, ed. B. Bosanquet (London: Macmillan, 1895), 308. 8 Ibid., 3: 113; Aspects of the Social Problem, 313. 9 Ibid., 3: 111; Aspects of the Social Problem, 310. 10 Ibid., 3: 111; Aspects of the Social Problem, 311. 11 Ibid., 3: 112; Aspects of the Social Problem, 311. 12 Ibid. 13 Hurka, Perfectionism, 185.

Legacy

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11 A New Leviathan among the Idealists: R.G. Collingwood and the Legacy of Idealism JAMES CONNEL LY Introduction R.G. Collingwood is often labelled an ‘idealist’ and thereby dismissed or accepted according to philosophical taste. And yet he has a philosophical reputation independent of this idealist connection.1 This raises the issue of his precise relation to the British idealist tradition, which in turn raises the issue of the unity of that tradition itself. In the first part of this paper I shall make some general remarks concerning Collingwood’s place in the tradition whose leading members included T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, H.H. Joachim, and J.A. Smith; in the second part I shall examine his critique of an argument in the political philosophy of Green and Bosanquet. The Legacy of Idealism Collingwood was trained as a realist under the tutelage of E.F. Carritt and his realist master, John Cook Wilson. This label he was, for a time, happy to use, and his first book was written under its influence.2 After the First World War he became increasingly unhappy with realism, and under the influence of Croce, Gentile, and de Ruggiero he moved towards an Italian-inflected idealism. Although Collingwood began to see himself as an idealist, there are at least two reasons to be extremely wary of the appellation. The first is that, although he in some sense inherited the tradition associated with Green, Bradley, Bosanquet, Joachim, and Smith, he was at the same time highly critical of their work. Again, he was never content with received interpretations and sometimes his reading of leading philosophers went against the

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orthodox grain. Bradley, for instance, is in philosophical myth the great ‘idealist,’ denying the reality of time and relations and denouncing everything as ‘mere appearance.’ But, for Collingwood, Bradley’s work was, on the contrary, profoundly realistic in spirit.3 Some recent scholars agree with this assessment: for example, Mander states that Bradley’s work ‘Though at first sight idealist and Hegelian ... is also essentially realist and in the British tradition of philosophy.’4 Collingwood frequently complained of being typecast as an idealist, and, although there was a time when he did not mind the label, by the mid-1930s he firmly resisted it: it had become a philosophical hindrance. Further, the battleground had shifted and the controversy between realism and idealism had ended in ‘a kind of stalemate.’5 Still, labels were (and are) used in philosophy. To what extent was the label ‘idealist’ appropriate in describing Collingwood? And to what extent does it identify a unified philosophical tradition? If there is a unified tradition or school, what is the basis of that unity? To answer that the school is unified by its idealism begs the question, and we therefore need to look for subtler connections. Were the idealists united through their indebtedness to Plato and Aristotle? Perhaps, but this is not enough to unite them as a school. Did they all adhere to Berkeleian arguments for immaterialism? Surely not: the British idealists were not subjective idealists; and (leaving McTaggart to one side) they often displayed an acute interest in the material world and the material conditions of existence. Was it their indebtedness to Kant and Hegel? Collingwood argues that they took much from Kant, whose influence on Green, for example, is clear; they had also read Hegel – but did this make them Hegelians? Collingwood thought not, as did Bradley.6 Bosanquet was perhaps the purest Hegelian, accusing Bradley of deviating from the true path. For Collingwood ‘Hegelianism’ was a term principally employed not by the ‘idealists’ themselves, but by their opponents.7 Perhaps the idealists shared a common position in logic, epistemology, or metaphysics. Bosanquet and Bradley wrote extensively on logic and were frequently at odds, the latter constantly being chided by the former for divergence from Hegelian orthodoxy. In epistemology, Green’s eternal consciousness was not adopted by Bradley or Bosanquet.8 The idealists were interested in metaphysics, but their metaphysical ‘systems’ ranged from the full-blooded rationalism of McTaggart’s Nature of Existence, regarded by Collingwood as a form of

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neo-scholasticism, to Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, which is notable as much for its scepticism as for its constructive metaphysics. Indeed, Bradley expressly stated that ‘neither in form nor extent does it carry out the idea of a system,’ and in responses to critics he referred to ‘the system of metaphysics ... which I have not tried to write.’9 Another potential unifying candidate is adherence to the coherence theory of truth. However, although the idealists tended towards epistemological holism, and were sceptical of truth as correspondence, it does not necessarily follow that they all wholeheartedly adopted the idea that truth lay in coherence. While they certainly tended to accept coherence as the test or criterion of truth, there was much less agreement on its being the nature of truth. Perhaps unity is to be found in choice of subject matter. The idealists wrote extensively on ethics and political philosophy, and it can be plausibly argued that the ethics of Green, Bradley, and Bosanquet is broadly convergent. The political philosophy of Green and Bosanquet is virtually identical, although Bradley leaves the company at this point, as he wrote little on political philosophy per se and differed sharply on the relationship of theory and practice. Most of the idealists took an interest in religion, although it would be hard to argue directly that their work converged on a common theological doctrine. Some, such as Bradley, wrote on the problems of historical knowledge, but this was not typical, and for Bosanquet the claims of historical knowledge were the object of sarcastic suspicion. In the next generation, Collingwood and Oakeshott took the problem of historical knowledge seriously. Again, the idealists (with the partial exception of Bosanquet) wrote little on aesthetics. The picture is one of loose affinities rather than strong identities; however, despite this, the idealists were united in their opposition to positivism, naturalism, and empiricism. They argued for an a priori element in knowledge; they had a preference for holistic explanations and rejected various forms of atomism; and they repudiated the claims of formal logic. In broad terms, then, they tended to oppose the same things, shared some common interests, and shared some positive doctrines. How does Collingwood stand in relation to these concerns? He defended metaphysics, insisted on the a priori element in knowledge, and showed a profound interest in ethics and political philosophy which in many ways owed more to Hegel than the other idealists did. In his middle period he produced a phenomenology of experience in

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Speculum Mentis,10 which was more obviously Hegelian in spirit than anything else produced by the idealists, except perhaps for Michael Oakeshott’s Experience and Its Modes.11 He also shared with Hegel a concern for understanding different forms of experience and understanding: the range of his later writings demonstrates this. By the 1930s he eschewed phenomenological and system-building ambitions, but continued to concern himself with art, religion, science, history, and philosophy, preferring to address each on its own terms rather than placing it in a hierarchy of experience. By this time he had become an independent thinker who knew that, because of the prevailing intellectual atmosphere, he was precluded from relying on his idealist predecessors if he was to persuade a contemporary philosophical audience. From this point on he addressed each philosophical issue afresh without recourse to antecedent authority or philosophical terminology. Throughout this period Collingwood was aware that adherence to idealism would not see him through; he was not prepared to use the label in self-description, and he responded vigorously to Ryle’s characterization of him as an idealist in an article in Mind in 1935.12 In his later writings he scarcely mentioned the idealists by name. In private it was different. For example, he read both M.B. Foster’s The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel and G.R.G. Mure’s Introduction to Hegel for the Clarendon Press and made extensive and generous suggestions for revision; he also encouraged T.M. Knox in translating Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. He retained his sympathy for his idealist predecessors but he knew that invoking their names would cut no philosophical ice with those he wished to engage in public philosophical debate. The argument of An Essay on Metaphysics exemplifies this approach. Collingwood approached the matter tactically. The role of presuppositions in systems of thought was a familiar idealist theme. However, his task was not to convert the converted, but to take issue with those attacking the very possibility of metaphysics, and he could not do this by simply reasserting the claims of the great metaphysicians. He therefore adopted the tactic of showing that, even granted the assumptions of logical positivism as expounded by A.J. Ayer, metaphysics (understood as the science of absolute presuppositions) was inescapable. The argument has affinities with idealism and Kant, and perhaps also with pragmatism, but the point is that he tried to argue independently for conclusions he thought worth preserving. As can be seen by, for example, Gutting’s recent book13 on liberal pragmatism, some of the conclu-

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sions for which Collingwood argued are more readily acceptable today, but they were not at the time he was writing. The lonely and at times awkward figure of Collingwood is best understood as a bridging figure between the older generation of idealists and later generations of analytical philosophers. He could not rest content with the legacy of an idealist tradition, the identity of which he doubted, and identification with which he considered a philosophical handicap as his career progressed into the age of analysis and logical positivism. His explicit indebtedness, both philosophical and personal, to his idealist predecessors was subordinated to the task in hand. He forged new weapons with which to join battle, and in this he achieved considerable originality. This explains, in part, his freshness and interest for today’s readers; it also explains why we cannot characterize him simply as a ‘British idealist.’ Having raised some general questions concerning Collingwood’s affinity with the idealist tradition, I shall now turn to an examination of a particular issue in which, arguing within a broadly idealistic conception of political activity, he criticized and modified doctrines associated primarily with Green and Bosanquet. An Issue in Political Philosophy The Political and the Moral In ‘Political Action’ and elsewhere Collingwood distinguished the political from the moral good and asserted that the role of the state was to secure the political good. The good secured by ‘political action is essentially regulation, control, the imposition of order and regularity upon things ... the political good is order as such.’14 The moral good differed from the political good in its concern with the externalities of action: ‘The moral good ... is not different from the moral action that realizes it. Nothing has moral value ... except the will of a moral agent. If that is so, the moral good and moral activity are not related as means to ends: they are identical. To do good and to be good are the same.’15 Collingwood agreed with Green and Bosanquet that state action cannot as such make people moral, because it can secure only the outward performance of actions. However, he criticized their formula of ‘hindering hindrances’ and developed a view of the nature of political action, right, and duty which both challenged and supplemented their account of justified state intervention.

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The Hindrance of Hindrances Because of the distinction they drew between enforced and moral action, both Green and Bosanquet argued for limitations on state action; but, in Collingwood’s view, they saw the consequences of only one side of this distinction and not the other. They did not realize that if you cannot promote the good life you cannot hinder it, nor yet hinder hindrances to it, either. The reason they failed to see this, he argued, was that they did not possess a proper understanding of moral as distinct from regularian action; in short, they confused right with duty. I shall present Collingwood’s arguments against Green and Bosanquet and conclude by suggesting that reconciliation of their positions is possible through consideration of the idea of degrees of moral agency.16 In his Prolegomena to Ethics, Green argued that no one can convey a good character to another and that every one must make his character for himself. ‘All that one man can do to make another better is to remove obstacles, and supply conditions favourable to the formation of a good character.’17 This is also true of the state. Indeed, both Green and Bosanquet went further than this and claimed that state action as such cannot directly make a person moral, and that acts done under compulsion have a tendency to lose their character as moral acts. For Green, any direct enforcement of outward conduct interferes ‘with the spontaneous action of those interests, and consequently checks the growth of the capacity which is the condition of the beneficial exercise of rights. For this reason the effectual action of the state ... for the promotion of habits of true citizenship, seems necessarily to be confined to the removal of obstacles.’18 Bosanquet claimed that: Sometimes the maintenance of external conditions of good life, well within the power of the state, is forbidden on the same grounds as the direct promotion of morality, which is impossible to it. In other cases the enforcement of moral obligations is taken to lie within the functions of the state, although not only is the enforcement of moral obligations per se a contradiction in terms, but almost always, as in the cases in question, the attempt to effect it is sure to frustrate itself, by destroying the springs on which moral action depends.19

To paraphrase Ritchie, the direct legal enforcement of morality is impossible because the morality of an act depends on the state of will

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of the agent, and an act done under compulsion ceases to have the character of a moral act.20 Bosanquet amplified and qualified this point: the state is unable to determine that the action shall be done from the ground or motive which alone would give it immediate value or durable certainty as an element in the best life. On the contrary, in so far as the doing of the action is due to the distinctive mode of operation which belongs to the state, due, that is to say, to the hope of reward or the fear of punishment, its value as an element in the best life is ipso facto destroyed, except in so far as its ulterior effects are concerned. An action performed in this sense under compulsion is not a true part of the will. It is an intention adopted from submissiveness or selfishness, and lacks not only the moral value, but what is partly the same thing, the reliable constancy of principle, displayed in an action which arises out of the permanent purposes of a life. The state, then, as such, can only secure the performance of external actions. That is to say, it can only enforce as much intention as is necessary to ensure, on the whole, compliance with requirements stated in terms of movements affecting the outer world. So far from promoting the performance of actions which enter into the best life, its operations, where effective, must directly narrow the area of such actions by stimulating lower motives as regards some portion of it.21

The clear implication was that there should be limits to state intervention because ‘enforcement of an outward act, the moral character of which depends on a certain motive and disposition, may often contribute to render that motive and disposition impossible: and from this fact arises a limitation to the proper province of law in enforcing acts.’22 More precisely: Those acts should be matter of legal injunction or prohibition of which the performance or omission, irrespective of the motive from which it proceeds, is so necessary to the existence of a society in which the moral end stated can be realised that it is better for them to be done or omitted from that unworthy motive which consists in fear or hope of legal consequences than not to be done at all.23

For both Green and Bosanquet, then, the tendency for state action to undermine character led to the conclusion that acts of state intervention should be few in number and justified only by reference to an

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overwhelming public good: ‘every act done by the public power has one aspect of encroachment ... It can, therefore, only be justified if it liberates resources of character and intelligence greater beyond all question than the encroachment which it involves.’24 Hence Green’s principle for deciding on the justifiability of state action: since the end consists in action proceeding from a certain disposition, and since action done from apprehension of legal consequences does not proceed from that disposition, no action should be enjoined or prohibited by law of which the injunction or prohibition interferes with actions proceeding from that disposition, and every action should be so enjoined of which the performance is found to produce conditions favourable to action proceeding from that disposition, and of which the legal injunction does not interfere with such action.25

Nicholson comments that Green’s principle might appear to rule out any state action by any law whatsoever. Every law, he writes, obtains obedience by force from some people – that is, those who would not otherwise do what it prescribes. However, Green recognizes this and allows for it: Green’s principle amounts to saying that certain actions contribute so much to the state’s moral end that the moral disadvantage of their being enforced on some people is outweighed by the moral advantage of their being generally performed. Those who have to be forced to do these actions do not exercise their moral capacity in the desired way, but act from the wrong motive and are not good (with respect to this action); nonetheless their actions are good because their effects are good in the sense that they promote or are necessary for the development of the true moral disposition in other people (and, indirectly, in themselves). Thus Green’s concern is with the overall moral result of state action. His principle forbids laws which generally interfere with the development of the moral disposition, laws whose prescriptions are not directed at promoting the true moral disposition (for there is nothing to offset the moral loss of some men being coerced), and laws where the check to the moral dispositions exceeds the promotion of the moral disposition resulting from that enforcement. At the same time, the principle permits, or in some cases enjoins, laws which on balance secure the conditions of freedom and morality.26

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The conclusion that state action should be restricted to the ‘hindrance of hindrances’ follows from the premise that compulsion produces a tendency to moral heteronomy. Laws, it would seem, cannot make people good, but perhaps they can make them bad. The issue is this: what, in an act performed under compulsion, weakens or destroys the moral capacity of the agent? Why cannot an act performed under compulsion be performed, by those who so will it, with the right moral intention? It is on this point that disagreement emerges between Collingwood and Green and Bosanquet.27 Collingwood’s view was that if laws cannot make people good they cannot make them bad either. Morality can be neither promoted by force nor hindered by force. He did not object to the idea of state intervention, nor to the assertion that the state can only secure the performance of external actions. He did, however, object to the suggestion that by commanding a certain action the state is thereby depriving those thus commanded of the opportunity of performing the action morally. This was simply not so: there is nothing whatever stopping those who wish from performing the action from a moral motive. Thus he remarked that ‘when people are commanded to do things which it is their duty to do, they may be said to be deprived of the opportunity of doing them for the right reason, and thus the state is morally degrading them – making them immoral by wrongly trying to make them moral.’ This commonplace of arguments against state interference in moral questions is, he claims, a sophism: ‘If motives alone make my acts moral, and if the state bids me maintain my children decently, I cannot blame the state for my own immorality if, not recognizing that I ought to maintain them, I do so only through fear of punishment.’ The state does not dictate my motive: it leaves me free to maintain my children through a sense of duty.28 At this point Collingwood turns to the principle of the hindrance of hindrances. Consider Bosanquet’s famous statement: The State is in its right when it forcibly hinders a hindrance to the best life or common good. In hindering such hindrances it will indeed do positive acts. It may try to hinder illiteracy and intemperance by compelling education and by municipalising the liquor traffic. Why not, it will be asked, hinder also unemployment by universal employment, overcrowding by universal house building, and immorality by punishing immoral and rewarding moral actions? Here comes the value of remembering that,

256 James Connelly according to our principle, State action is negative in its immediate bearing, though positive both in its actual doings and its ultimate purpose. On every problem the question must recur, ‘is the proposed measure bona fide confined to hindering a hindrance, or is it attempting direct promotion of the common good by force?’ For it is to be borne in mind throughout that whatever acts are enforced are, so far as the force operates, withdrawn from the higher life. The promotion of morality by force, for instance, is an absolute self-contradiction.29

How can the state, Collingwood asks, hinder hindrances to the good life when it cannot of itself affect the moral quality of an act as such? Surely anything the state does in securing outward conformity cannot possibly touch the wellspring of moral action – that is, intention or the good will. He does not disagree that actions achieve their moral character through the unaided moral consciousness of the agent, but, as we saw above, he denies that state action necessarily hinders an action from being properly moral. He concluded that the view that the state exists to promote moral life indirectly by removing hindrances to it was untenable: ‘If you cannot promote morality in another, for the same reason you cannot hinder it in another, and therefore the conception of hindrances to morality which can be removed by political action, is baseless and self-contradictory.’30 In summary, for Collingwood, moral worth depends not on circumstances but on how we deal with them; and the moral value of our actions depends on the intrinsic motivation of the action itself, not on its outward conformity to rule. He further maintains that the intervention of the law can in no way deprive people of the opportunity of acting morally, and that if morality can be neither furthered nor hindered by political action, hindrances to morality likewise cannot be hindered. The state can do no more than secure the performance of external acts, and a hindrance to morality, in Collingwood’s view, cannot be an external thing: just as external circumstances cannot promote morality, so external circumstances cannot hinder it; it is therefore false to suppose that the state can ‘hinder hindrances’ when, as both Green and Bosanquet admit, it can penetrate no further than external acts and circumstances. Character, Free Will, and Education How far is Collingwood’s criticism justified? Were not Green, Bosanquet, and Ritchie overstating the case in claiming that an act ceases to

R.G. Collingwood and the Legacy of Idealism 257

be (or tends to cease to be) a moral act simply because it is enjoined by the state? But surely they are concerned with something which is a common feature of moral experience and political debate. Debates over welfare reform commonly turn on beliefs concerning individual responsibility and character. State action, it is commonly held, has to avoid creating incentive structures which undermine character. Doing for people what they should do for themselves, or forcing them to do something they would otherwise not choose to do, corrupts character and saps individual moral responsibility: hence such interventions should be kept to a minimum. Is Collingwood really denying that character can be affected by external circumstances, both political and non-political? It appears that he is, but surely his reasoning belongs more in the realms of logic than everyday moral experience. Although logically it is always possible to act from a certain motive whatever the external inducements, psychologically, however, the claim that habitually doing for someone what they could be doing for themselves might be deleterious to their moral character cannot be dismissed so lightly. The key here lies in the word ‘habitually.’ The person who will always act according to the appropriate motives, whatever the external pressure or inducement, must be a person with a fully formed moral character and thus habituated to act in this way. Such a person would be mature and cognitively competent; for a free agent like this nothing can detract from their moral independence. Outward circumstances will not touch them. However, society comprises more than free rational agents; many members are not free rational agents; many others are in the process of becoming free rational agents. This introduces the idea of degrees of mental competence and degrees of freedom, together with the associated role of education in converting people from members of what Collingwood terms the ‘non-social community’ into members of ‘society.’ Free will is a matter of degree; those with a fully developed free will are unaffected by rewards or punishments;31 reward, punishment, and the use of force belong to the theory of the ‘non-social community’; that is, they apply not to the relations holding between free people in a society but to those holding between a society and a non-social community. ‘Political life contains an indispensable element of force. This marks off the life of a body politic from the life of a society ... so far as the ruled are not yet capable of ruling and therefore not yet able to rule themselves they must be ruled ... by those who are capable of it.’32 Force for Collingwood was a matter not of physical strength, but of

258 James Connelly

mental and emotional strength; the task of society, as an association of individuals possessing free will, is to act on those in the non-social community in such a way as to bring them into a condition of mental maturity, that is, to develop their own free will. The state and the family are essentially educative, ‘the latter handing down the practical and theoretical heritage of civilization, while the former is endowed with the responsibility of ensuring the continuous and smooth transition of its members from mental immaturity to mental maturity for the purpose of becoming active participants in, and contributors to, the political and social life of a community.’33 Thus the state has a role to play in helping people to become fully fledged moral agents; once they achieve this it can neither help nor hinder them. Bosanquet makes a similar case: We make a great mistake in thinking of the force exercised by the state as limited to the restraint of disorderly persons by the police and the punishment of intentional law breakers. The state is the fly-wheel of our life ... All individuals are continually reinforced and carried on, beyond their average immediate consciousness, by the knowledge, resources, and energy which surround them in the social order, with its inheritance, of which the order itself is the greater part. And the return of this greater self, forming a system adjusted to unity, upon their isolated minds, as an expansion and stimulus to them, necessarily takes the shape of force, in so far as their minds are inert.34

If Green and Bosanquet are, in their account of the hindrance of hindrances, presupposing that it refers to fully fledged moral agents, Collingwood’s criticisms are pertinent. If, however, their account does not make this presupposition, the state has a role in the promotion of moral and political character. Geoffrey Thomas makes this point: The moral value of an action depends on its motive, which in turn depends on the agent’s character. It is to character that moral responsibility ultimately relates ... Since motives cannot be compelled, morality cannot be enforced. I can make you return my favourite Rick Nelson album. I cannot, in any sense relevant to morality, make you want to do so. I cannot ... compel you to display that unforced concern for my interests which morality here involves ... If ... the moral value of an action depends on its unenforceable motive, social conditions might appear equally irrelevant to the moral life. If the state cannot enforce action from a particular

R.G. Collingwood and the Legacy of Idealism 259 motive, how can social conditions prevent action from that same motive. How can ‘the social order’ foster or impede the play of moral motivation? It seems that I can be unforcedly concerned about the interests of others in virtually any social context, from a concentration camp to a California beach. The problem with this line of questioning is that it assumes the full-fledged moral agent. Green’s account of practical rationality centres on an inquiry into the kind of person I might become in order to achieve ‘self-satisfaction.’ Moral agency emerges from the consequent organization of my desires into systematic interests; and social conditions can evidently play a major part in determining the imaginative possibilities open to me and the practical possibility of forming systematic interests.35

Free Will and Mental Maturity Insofar as a mind is active and competent, external pressure takes the form of force only in requiring action we would perform independently; insofar as a mind is immature or inactive, external pressure acts upon it as forceful. Force is not and should not be necessary with a mature mind, and for that reason it should be avoided if possible; but in other circumstances it has the character not of ignoring an individual’s mental competence but of bolstering it by pointing the right path to that individual. In this sense, it hinders hindrances. Nothing can do this for a fully free person, but for anyone less than fully free the hindrances to moral action and development lie in their own lack of selfcontrol and understanding, and in these cases, by reinforcing the direction of their action, external action or force can be for the good. Civilization, for Collingwood, consists in the progressive removal of force from our interactions with others, but this is an ideal which can never be fully realized. Those in the non-social community will always be in process of conversion into the social community (or society) and there will always be those who revert back to the condition of the non-social community. In both these cases force as construed by Collingwood is a powerful influence for the good. What is unnecessary for the free person is necessary for the person in the process of attaining freedom. It is only for the former that the actions of the state cannot affect the moral quality of their actions. Nothing can hinder hindrances for these people. For the latter hindering hindrances is a positive good: but the point is that because freedom is a matter of degree we can encourage self-respect by appealing to the moral disposition they already possess in the hope and expectation of supporting and developing it. That is

260 James Connelly

why there must be a limit to external action. Not everything should be done for people or required of them. If they were all cognitively incompetent and destined always to remain so then the conclusion would be that everything should be done for them. But this is not the case. Collingwood offers a developmental understanding of the acquisition of cognitive competence in which we should do for people only what is required to enable them to progress further in their individual development. And, as a society, we recognize that there will always be some people ready to lapse into the non-social community. Collingwood suggests that the state’s ‘relation to duty is, roughly, expressed by such phrases as respecting the liberty of conscience: that is, laws do not usurp the function of conscience but provide a basis upon which the moral life of the individual may freely develop.’36 Laws as such do not inhibit or usurp the function of conscience or duty, yet a well-governed and well-administered society provides the conditions in which the moral life of the individual may flourish. What does he mean by this? Given that he rejected the idea of political action promoting morality either directly or indirectly by the removal of hindrances, how can it be said to provide a basis upon which the moral life of the individual may freely develop? To have free will is to have self-control, that is, to be capable of selfgovernment and of rational action. ‘The freedom of the will is, positively, freedom to choose; freedom to exercise a will; and, negatively, freedom from desire; not the condition of having no desires, but the condition of not being at their mercy.’37 The activities of the state can do nothing to a person who is free and mentally mature: in a properly constituted democratic state where laws are the expression of the general will, they will show obedience to law because they understand the purpose both of individual laws and of law as such. However, if freedom is a matter of degree, we may be free and able to decide a course of action rationally and freely in some circumstances or times of life, but not in others. This is the key. People are not born free; freedom is a process; freedom, if achieved, may be only a temporary possession. The state can neither promote nor hinder morality in a free person: but in an unfree person or in a person only relatively free, both possibilities are open. Further, although to a free person the fact of something’s being enjoined by law is no hindrance to the performance of his or her duty, it might very well be so to a person who is relatively unfree, and therefore in the latter case laws might be made which check the development of the moral disposition. The point is that Green and

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Bosanquet were considering not already free and mature individuals, but those in the process of becoming so. On this point Collingwood agrees with them. The state cannot remove hindrances to the moral life of the free and mature person, but it can remove hindrances to the moral life of someone whose self-control is as yet precarious, who has not yet attained that degree of free will that enables him to be a strong and dependable member of society. The higher the scale is ascended, the less external acts and circumstances can hinder or promote it. Force of itself, although acting directly on the emotions, is not sufficient to bring those on whom it operates up to the level of free will. However, if freedom is a matter of degree, we can perhaps make people more free and rational by appealing to the level of freedom and rationality they have already attained. Where faced with someone who has achieved the state of mental maturity, but who for one reason or another is not aware of having done so, we should ‘arouse his selfrespect.’ What this means is to make him conscious of the freedom he was unaware he possessed. What does this imply? It implies that we treat the person as mentally adult, as no longer a member of the nursery or non-social community; and that therefore we will treat him as capable of making his own decisions. In which case we will free him from the rules and regulations necessary for the well ordering of the non-social community; and the grounds on which we will do this will be that it is insulting to a mature and free person to be constantly told what and what not to do; and further, what our action will thus imply is that these rules and regulations, the enjoining of actions which a person is capable of doing freely, will actually be debilitating to his free will, will hinder his moral progress by depriving him of responsibility for his own conduct. A person who, having a degree of freedom, is never allowed to make a decision, will find that his freedom atrophies and that he becomes incapable of making a decision at all. We free the person from the rules and regulations appropriate only to a member of a non-social community and thereby introduce him to the life of the social community. An essential part of this life is sharing in the maintenance of its suum cuique, and such sharing contributes not only towards the maintenance of the society but also towards the maintenance of the man’s social consciousness, towards the strength of his will. Thus Collingwood wrote that: Law and order mean strength. Men who respect the rule of law are by daily exercise building up the strength of their own wills; becoming more and

262 James Connelly more capable of mastering themselves and other men and the world of nature. They are becoming daily more and more able to control their own desires and passions and to crush all opposition to the carrying out of their intentions. They are becoming day by day less liable to be bullied or threatened or cajoled or frightened into courses they would not adopt of their own free will by men who would drive them into doing things in the only way in which men can drive others into doing things: by arousing in them passions or desires or appetites they cannot control.38

Right and Duty Finally we need to consider Collingwood’s conception of duty. He sharply distinguished duty from rule-following or regularian action. He developed a view in which the pinnacle of full moral agency was to be able to formulate, understand, and act one’s duty. Duty is a matter of unique, individual, voluntary willing by an agent. It cannot, therefore, be commanded by the state. For Sweet, Bosanquet sees the state as participating in moral development in a relatively direct way, because the state is constantly reminding us of our duties. It blocks the bad will and, through the use of punishment, brings us to our senses and makes us aware of our errors.39 For Collingwood there is a limit to this. The state can, at most, tell me that I am under an obligation; it cannot tell me what the obligation is.40 And it can certainly require me to obey laws or rules; that is, according to Collingwood, its primary purpose as an instrument of political, that is, regularian, action. To think otherwise is to confuse right with duty or political action with moral action. Right is action according to a rule; politics is regularian action; it is a matter of making and obeying rules. As such it is not a matter of duty. Duty is a unique response by an individual to his own situation as he understands it. It is not a matter of rules, and its moral goodness depends on motive. What, then, is meant by the term ‘duty’? ‘A man’s duty on a given occasion is the act which for him is both possible and necessary: the act which at that moment character and circumstance combine to make it inevitable, if he has a free will, that he should freely will to do.’41 Thus conceived, a duty springs from motive and recognition of circumstance and presupposes a cognitively competent mature individual. Duty is individual and unique. It is related to a person and his or her character and requires self-consciousness. When faced with a conflict of rules Collingwood suggests the resolution lies in asking ‘what

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kind of a man you intend to be.’42 The state can remind people of the rules and of the obligations associated with them, but it cannot penetrate to the uniqueness of an individual’s duty nor to the intention or motive or state of will lying behind it. I can regard doing any action as my duty, irrespective of whether that action is action according to a rule enjoined by the state. Nothing can prevent me from recognizing such an action as my duty.43 Conclusion Collingwood’s criticisms of the role of the state in hindering hindrances are, then, modified by the introduction of a theory of moral and political education in raising people to full moral agency. Collingwood wove a concern for moral and political education in making citizens into a modified conception of the social contract seen as a continuous process of conversion from the non-social to the social community. At the same time he developed a conception of duty in which it was clearly distinguished from right. He found a clear distinction between right and duty, together with the associated distinction between moral and political action, to be lacking in both Green and Bosanquet. That is why, in his view, their account of the principles of state intervention tended to confuse the issue of the relation between politics and morals. This example shows how Collingwood’s relation to his idealist predecessors and contemporaries combined affinity and difference with engagement and distance. Tactically, he sought to avoid identification with them; philosophically he developed and modified their doctrines; politically he endorsed Green and Bosanquet in their advocacy of a strong link between theory and practice. Hence his urgency and frequent subordination of academic niceties to the demands of the occasion: but in so doing he thereby revealed an underlying affiliation with some of the very thinkers he tactically chose to ignore.

NOTES I would like to thank William Sweet, Stamatoula Panagakou, and Maria Dimova-Cookson for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The readers for the University of Toronto Press also made helpful suggestions on an earlier draft.

264 James Connelly 1 This sometimes leads to a more subtle form of ‘labelism’ in which he is praised for the valuable philosophical work he achieved in, for example, aesthetics, despite the handicap of being encumbered with ‘an impressive amount of philosophical baggage.’ See A. Ridley, R.G. Collingwood: A Philosophy of Art (London: Phoenix, 1998), 2. 2 R.G. Collingwood, Religion and Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1916). 3 This claim is developed most extensively in an essay on The Metaphysics of F.H. Bradley, Bodleian Library, Collingwood Papers (1933). 4 W. Mander, An Introduction to Bradley’s Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 2. 5 Collingwood, A Notebook on Cosmology, Bodleian Library, Collingwood Papers, 10. 6 F.H. Bradley. The Principles of Logic, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), Preface. 7 An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), 15. 8 It could be argued that the eternal consciousness foreshadowed the Absolute of Bradley, Bosanquet, and others. However, if we examine the arguments for the existence of the eternal consciousness and the Absolute a gap opens up again. For example, Green’s derivation of the eternal consciousness from reality as a system of relations is at odds with Bradley’s view that relations are mere appearance. 9 F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), ix, and Collected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 2: 685. For discussion of Bradley’s unwritten metaphysics, see L. Armour, ‘Bradley’s Other Metaphysics,’ in Perspectives on the Logical and Metaphysics of F.H Bradley, ed. W.J. Mander (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996) and J. Connelly, ‘Bradley, Collingwood and the ‘Other Metaphysics,’’ Bradley Studies, 3, no. 2 (1997): 89–112. 10 R.G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924). 11 M.J. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1933). 12 ‘Mr. Collingwood and the Ontological Argument,’ Mind, 44 (1935): 137–51. Collingwood’s reply is in the Collingwood-Ryle correspondence deposited in the Bodleian Library. 13 Gary Gutting, Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For example, Gutting argues that not only do we not possess philosophical foundations for humdrum beliefs but also we do not need them: all knowledge and discussion must begin from beliefs that are themselves unjustified. These include ‘primary basic beliefs,’ which we all share and without which human life is impossible, and ‘secondary basic beliefs,’ which we hold contingently and ‘which are

R.G. Collingwood and the Legacy of Idealism 265

14 15 16

17 18

19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

neither justified nor refuted by any considerations to which we have access’ (168). Philosophical analysis does not reveal fundamental foundational truths, but ‘simply makes relatively explicit the de facto norms that govern the practices of our epistemic, moral, and aesthetic communities.’ We are forced to see these intuitions, or ‘spade-turning’ beliefs, as basic in the search for philosophical truth: ‘we have no alternative to beginning with our own de facto intuitions, even though they have no certification beyond our inability to get past them’ (183). R.G. Collingwood, ‘Political Action,’ in Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. D. Boucher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 100. Ibid., 95. I treat Green and Bosanquet as presenting a united front. There are two reasons: first, that is how Collingwood treats them; second, Bosanquet in The Philosophical Theory of the State largely follows Green. T.H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890), 332. T.H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Writings, ed. P. Harris and J. Morrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), sect. 209; my emphasis. The Philosophical Theory of the State and Related Essays by Bernard Bosanquet, ed. William Sweet and Gerald F. Gaus (South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press, 2001), 96; see The Philosophical Theory of the State, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1923), 64; my emphasis. D.G. Ritchie, The Principles of State Interference, 4th ed. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1891), 147. The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 183–84 (4th ed., 176–7); my emphasis. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, ed. Harris and Morrow, sect. 10. Ibid., sect. 15. The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 186–7 (4th ed., 180). Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, ed. Harris and Morrow, sect. 16. Peter Nicholson, The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990), 161. A criticism of Green and Bosanquet’s view, similar in some respects to Collingwood’s, was published by Hastings Rashdall in his The Theory of Good and Evil (London: Oxford University Press, 1924 [first published 1907]), 297–300. R.G. Collingwood, ‘Notes towards a Theory of Politics as a Philosophical Science,’ Bodleian Library, Collingwood Papers (1925–8), 6–7.

266 James Connelly 29 The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 185–6 (4th ed., 178–9). 30 R.G. Collingwood, ‘Notes towards a Theory,’ 8. 31 R.G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, rev. ed., ed. D. Boucher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), sect. 20.62, 21.74. 32 Ibid., sect. 27.1 & 27.13. 33 Ibid., editor’s introduction, xv. 34 The Philosophical Theory of the State, ed. Sweet and Gaus, 157–8 (4th ed., 141– 2). 35 G. Thomas, The Moral Philosophy of T.H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 337–8. 36 R.G. Collingwood, Lectures on Moral Philosophy, Bodleian Library, Collingwood Papers (1933), 100. 37 R.G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, sect. 13.25. Boucher also discusses the issues of freedom of choice in his contribution to D. Boucher and A. Vincent, eds, British Idealism and Political Theory (Edinburgh: University Press, 2000), 187–92. 38 Collingwood, New Leviathan, sect. 39.92. 39 W. Sweet, Idealism and Rights: The Social Ontology of Human Rights in the Political Thought of Bernard Bosanquet (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 167. 40 R.G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, sect. 17.58. 41 Ibid., sect. 17.8. 42 Ibid., sect. 16.72. 43 For extended treatment of Collingwood’s conception of duty, see D. Boucher, The Social and Political Thought of R.G. Collingwood (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 93–109, and J. Connelly, Metaphysics, Method and Politics: The Political Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003), 189–204.

12 Bosanquet on the Ontology of Logic and the Method of Scientific Inquiry FRED WI LS ON

Bernard Bosanquet developed his views on logic in a number of works, and in particular in his Logic.1 This work contains, alongside its own account of philosophical logic, a series of criticisms of empiricism. Among these are criticisms of the empiricist account of laws of nature and of the logical nature of inquiry into them. Bosanquet in particular criticizes the doctrine that laws are mere regularities. In making this criticism, he has been echoed by more recent philosophers, including Fred Dretske and David Armstrong. I shall argue, however, that Bosanquet develops the position much more convincingly: he faces squarely, and solves, certain problems that they simply ignore. We can conveniently begin with an example that Bosanquet uses to illustrate the role, as he analyses it, of negative instances in scientific inference. The example is drawn from biology, concerning whether a certain plant, the Bee Ophrys, is self-fertilized or fertilized through insects. Darwin’s hypothesis was that the plant is self-fertilized through the action of wind blowing the pollen masses until they strike the stigma. To verify this hypothesis, he isolated a spike of flowers in water in a room. In this situation there was an absence of insects (not-i). This ensured that fertilization by insects was impossible. It also ensured the absence of wind. In this context the pollen masses did not come in contact with the stigma. Thus, in this situation we have both the absence of wind (not-w) and the absence of contact (not-c). From this one concludes that the Bee Ophrys self-fertilizes through the action of wind. Bosanquet says of this example that we have here left the ground of formal logic, in which ‘not-w is not c’ could only rest on knowledge that ‘c is w.’ In the process now considered

268 Fred Wilson ‘c is w’ actually rests on the knowledge that ‘not-w is not c.’ The corroborative power of the negative instance in induction depends on the fact that it has a positive content within the same ultimate system as c and w, and, within that system, related by way of definite negation to them.2

He is arguing, then, that formal logic cannot account for Darwin’s inference. But this is not so. There is in fact a way in which formal logic can deal with the example. Indeed, it is precisely the way in which David Hume and John Stuart Mill dealt with such examples. Except that there are differences. By examining the example from the empiricist viewpoint, we can bring out some important features of Bosanquet’s view of logic. As Bosanquet understands the statement ‘not-w is not c,’ we have Free caddices without wind give no contact. From this he infers his conclusion that c is w [ = contact is by wind] In the first place we have to recognize that, for the empiricist, the conclusion is not so much ‘c is w,’ as Bosanquet claims, but rather that Wind produces contact or, to put it in the regularity terms favoured by the empiricist, Whenever wind then contact. That is, the conclusion to be drawn is that wind is a sufficient lawful condition for contact. The way Bosanquet states the matter implies that the inference proceeds by contraposition: from ‘not-w is not c’ we infer ‘c is w.’ But in fact the inference, at least from the point of view of formal logic, is more complicated. Indeed, we can see that it must be more complicated. For what is observed are particular things, single instances, where what we want to conclude is a generalization. As Bosanquet notes,3 Darwin also ensured that in the presence of wind (w) in the absence of insects (i) one has the presence of contact (c). He did this by placing a similar spike of Bee Ophrys in the open air in the presence of wind but covered by a net, which ensured the absence of

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insects. Bosanquet’s actual account of the inference, as going from ‘notw is not c’ to ‘c is w,’ omits this piece of information. But it is crucial for the empiricist analysis of the example. Upon the empiricist account of this inference, there are in fact two pieces of evidence: in both insects are absent while in one both wind and contact are present and in the other both wind and contact are absent. We can summarize these results in a small table, with ‘a’ indicating absence and ‘p’ indicating presence:

event one: event two:

i a a

w p a

c p a

And now by a simple application of the method of difference, we can infer that Whenever w then c. Or at least, we can do so provided that we have grounds for accepting both the principle of determinism, that there is at least one sufficient condition, and the principle of limited variety, that this condition is among a certain determinate set: (1) There is a property f such that whenever f then c, and it is in the set consisting of w and i. This is a law; after all, it asserts a general truth. But it also asserts the existence of a property of a certain sort. Because this law also makes an existence claim, it includes the particular quantifier. In fact, it is of mixed quantificational form. Moreover, since it asserts the existence of a property of a certain sort, it makes an abstract generic claim, rather than a specific one: it asserts that there is a property of a certain generic sort and this property is sufficient for the presence of the conditioned property c. This law (1) guides the researcher. It asserts that there is a specific law, there to be discovered, and that this law will have a certain generic form. The task of the researcher – Darwin, in this case – is to find the law that (1) asserts to be there. As for (1) itself, one generally can infer the truth of such an abstract generic law from some background theory of this sort:4

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(2) For all systems g of generic sort G, there is a property f such that, if it is of generic sort F and such that whenever f then g.

From a law of this sort, together with the premises c is of sort G F = {i, w} one can deduce the law (1) that guides research. What (2) asserts is that for all systems of a certain generic sort there are for those systems specific laws of some other generic sort. The justification for accepting (2) is past experience: we have in fact been successful, so far as we can tell, when we have looked at systems of the relevant generic sort, at discovering laws of the sort that (2) would lead us to believe are there. Taken in its most generic form, (2) is of course what J.S. Mill referred to as the Principle of Universal Causation; it is the fourth of Hume’s ‘rules by which to judge of causes and effects.’ By virtue of our accepting (2), we can infer a law of the sort (1) for the systems in which we are interested, in Darwin’s case the Bee Ophrys. The law (1) tells us not only where to look but that if we do look carefully enough then we shall be successful in discovering a law of the relevant sort for those systems. Our prior knowledge of (2) and therefore of (1) thus provides a teleology for the research process. One has on the one hand the cognitive interest in discovering laws of nature; this cognitive interest provides the end. On the other hand one has the abstract generic law (2) to direct the process towards that end; it provides a form as it were for the directed activity of research. The goal or telos of this directed activity is achieved through the observational data recorded in the chart of presence and absence. The empiricist draws a sharp line between the statements of individual fact, positive and negative, that are recorded in the chart of presence and absence, and statements of law or regularity. The statements of individual fact do not by themselves imply the statement of law or regularity that is the conclusion. To be sure, they confirm that law, but it is not they that give it its strongest support. That support comes, rather, from the workings of the eliminative mechanisms, which serve to show that possible alternatives could not be true, that is, show that given these observational data none other than the conclusion could possibly be true.

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Bosanquet, however, has a different account of the logic of the process. He considers only the event that we have labelled event two. This event he records as ‘not-w is not c’ from which he then infers the contrapositive ‘c is w.’ The latter he takes to be the causal conclusion of Darwin’s inference. The sharp distinction that the empiricist draws between the statements of individual fact in the premises and the law that is the conclusion is no part of Bosanquet’s account. Nor does Bosanquet interpret the example in terms of the eliminative mechanisms. Where the statements of absence do not for the empiricist by themselves imply any law, for Bosanquet in contrast the statement of absence becomes the statement that ‘not-w is not c’ and from this alone the causal conclusion that ‘c is w’ is inferred. Bosanquet as it were discovers the causal claim in the particular events themselves. Nor, I shall now argue, is this at all accidental; Bosanquet is in fact pursuing a point that many have thought to be a fatal criticism of the empiricist account of laws and of scientific inference. Let us look at something that he has said earlier. John Stuart Mill argued that a universal judgment All A are B is a statement of individual facts a is A & a is B, b is A & b is B, ... As he put it, ‘a general truth is but an aggregate of particular truths; a comprehensive expression, by which an indefinite number of individual facts are affirmed or denied at once.’5 In fact, it itself is an inference: the form of language is such that it enables us to record in one statement ‘all that we have observed, together with all that we infer from our observations.’6 On this account, a syllogism such as All humans are mortal Socrates is human ______________________ Hence, Socrates is mortal does not provide new knowledge in the conclusion beyond what is contained in the premises. Or rather, insofar as it does provide new

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knowledge, it does only by inferring the facts of the minor premise and the conclusion from the observed facts that are among those facts recorded in the major premise. What the deductive connections do is guarantee that our thought is consistent; they prevent us from once inferring that all humans are mortal and then denying of the human, Socrates, that he is mortal. As Mill puts it, deductive logic in itself is a logic of consistency, not a logic of truth. It is inductive inference that constitutes the logic of truth. Bosanquet takes up this point.7 He considers the inference from particulars to particulars: a is B, b is B, c is B, d is B; hence, e is B For example, a is a good book, b is a good book, c is a good book, d is a good book, and so e is a good book. This, he rightly points out, is not a good inference. In contrast, however, the inference Ivanhoe, Waverley, and Rob Roy are good books; hence, Guy Mannering is a good book is reasonable. It is reasonable because ‘there is a self-evident passage by means of the identity of authorship, which is too obvious to be expressed, but which would form a premise in any explicit statement of the inference.’8 Bosanquet notes that it is impossible to state an inference [to particulars from particulars] in a shape that will even appear to be convincing, unless we supply by a second premise the element of unity between the particulars, always operative in the mind, which is necessary to bind the particular differences into the differences of a universal.9

Note the point: what one needs is ‘the element of unity between the particulars, always operative in the mind, which is necessary to bind the particular differences into the differences of a universal’: there is an element of unity; this binds differences, that is, different differences, into differences within a universal; and this element of unity is operative in the mind. We shall return to these points. In any case, accepting this, we see that the inference that is supposed to be to particulars from particulars really is

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All novels written by Scott are good books Guy Mannering is a novel written by Scott ____________________________________ Hence, Guy Mannering is a good book where the major premise is justified by the inference Ivanhoe, Waverley, and Rob Roy are novels written by Scott (3) Ivanhoe, Waverley, and Rob Roy are good books _________________________________________ Hence, All novels written by Scott are good books. So far this looks fairly close to Mill’s view. In fact, however, Bosanquet qualifies the conclusion of the inference (3) in an important way. Here is one of Bosanquet’s examples: a, b, c, d are rational a, b, c, d are men __________________________ Hence, Are all men rational? or, Men may be rational.10 The conclusion of the inference (3) is to be taken as a conjecture rather than as something demonstrated. Bosanquet notes that there is a teleology here: Speaking generally, the coincidence of several attributes in one or more objects ... is the starting-point of conscious conjecture and investigation. And this starting point is all that the present form of inference embodies. Conjecture or pure ‘discovery’ differs only in degree from proof.11

Again, this does not sound very different from what Mill might say. But as it turns out the teleology is in fact very different. Bosanquet comments on (3) as follows: The ground of argument being the characteristic unity of the unanalysed individual object or event, naturally takes the place of the subject in judgment – of the concrete individual which is taken as real – and therefore gives rise to that syllogistic form in which the middle term is the subject of both premises.12

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Here he again emphasizes the unity that one finds in the argument. Only now it is a unity that is in the ‘unanalysed individual object’ rather than, as before, ‘operative in the mind.’ Or, rather, the element of unity is at once in the subject which the inference is about and operative in the mind of the person making the inference. This unity is the ground of the argument. As for the notion of a ground, Bosanquet has earlier explained what this is. He has distinguished merely collective judgments from those that are genuinely universal. The former deal with an aggregate that arises from an enumeration.13 From these are distinguished quasi-collective judgments that are truly general and apply to an indefinite number of individuals, an open class as one would now say. These cannot arise from a mere enumeration, and must therefore ‘derive [their] meaning from some other source.’14 Among these judgments are those such as ‘All men are mortal,’ that is, the sort we have just been considering. These judgments are falsifiable by a single counter-example; as Bosanquet puts it, they are ‘helpless in the face of the most trivial exception.’15 Beyond these are the genuinely universal judgments such as ‘Man is mortal.’ In practical terms, they are equivalent to propositions like ‘All men are mortal.’ However, it is obvious that the affirmation of universal connection which we feel in such an instance to be all but warranted is not approached from the side of the individual units, but from the side of the common or continuous nature which binds them into a whole.16

Because this sort of universal judgment is warranted by the connection among the attributes it is abstract and therefore hypothetical.17 The hypothetical judgment contains a consequent and a ground; the latter warrants the former. It does so by virtue of being connected to it. Ground implies a consequent other than, though fundamentally one with, itself.18 The two are related as parts in a whole which establishes the connection between them. The content of a hypothetical judgment is composed of ground and consequent, each referring to something other than itself, and hence essentially a part ... It is only a question of detail how far the system in and by which the nexus subsists, is itself made explicit as a content within the hypothetical judgment.19

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These nexus are themselves facts within the world. Every set of relations within which certain nexus of attributes hold good, is itself ultimately a fact or datum, relative no doubt within some further totality, but absolute relatively to the inferences drawn within it.20

Hence, ‘all hypothetical judgment rests on a categorical basis.’21 Thus, Bosanquet proposed that the conclusion of the inference a, b, c, d are rational a, b c d are men _________________ Hence, ....... was not All men are rational but Are all men rational? or, Men may be rational. The inference from particulars to particulars in effect forms a hypothesis, which is not ready for warranted affirmation until it is grounded in a categorical basis. At the level where the empiricist stops, that of ‘Men may be rational,’ we are, according to Bosanquet, still at a level of ignorance as to the genuine structure of reality. The empiricist would have us stop at the point where genuine inquiry would have to continue. In effect, then, Bosanquet is arguing that Mill goes wrong in his view of general propositions when he treats them all as quasi-collective judgments. To the contrary, the warrant for truly universal propositions, propositions which cannot be overturned or falsified by a single instance, lies in a nexus that holds between the attributes. In making this point, Bosanquet has been echoed by later thinkers. One of these is Fred Dretske. In his essay on ‘Laws of Nature,’22 he argues that mere regularities – generalizations of the sort Bosanquet referred to as quasi-collective judgments – cannot, contrary to Hume or Mill, explain anything. To say that a law is a universal truth having explanatory power is like saying that a chair is a breath of air used to seat people. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, not even a very good sow’s ear; and you

276 Fred Wilson cannot make a generalization, not even a purely universal generalization, explain its instances. The fact that every F is G fails to explain why any F is G, and it fails to explain it, not because its explanatory efforts are too feeble to have attracted our attention, but because the explanatory attempt is never even made. The fact that all men are mortal does not explain why you and I are mortal; it says (in the sense of implies) that we are mortal, but it does not suggest why this might be so ... Subsuming an instance under a universal generalization has exactly the same explanatory power as deriving Q from P & Q. None.23

The important point is that laws, that is, generalizations that genuinely explain, ‘tell us what (in some sense) must happen, not merely what has and will happen (given certain initial conditions).’24 Mere matter-of-fact regularities do not explain: this claim is the substance Dretske’s argument. Statements of such generalizations amount logically to nothing more than conjunctions. And conjunctions do not explain their conjuncts. If a generalization is to explain, then it must show how the events in question were necessitated, not merely record their occurrence. In some sense, causal laws must be necessary; they must be such that an event that violates them is impossible. This argument is of a piece with that of Bosanquet. Dretske’s argument is that a matter-of-fact regularity is nothing more than a conjunction. No doubt it is indeed that, on the standard logic. In a universe of three objects, a, b, and c, then the statement that everything is F is materially equivalent to a conjunction: (x)(Fx) ≡ (Fa & Fb & Fc) But the empiricist has a reply. In the first place, this is a material, not a logical, equivalence. And, in the second place, as Hume argues, the pragmatics concerning mere regularities are different from the pragmatics of those regularities that function as statements of law. It is this difference that leads us to treat laws as explanatory where conjunctions and merely accidental regularities are not so treated.25 Nonetheless, Dretske proposes, alternatively, that in order to account for the necessity of laws, one ought to think of laws in terms of relations among attributes. A lawlike statement, he suggests, ‘is not a statement about the extensions of its constituent terms, but about the intensions,’26 that is, ‘the properties that these predicates express.’27 We might represent laws so understood as having the form

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F-ness → G-ness where the relation in question is represented by ‘→.’28 This is taken to be a singular statement about the universal properties F-ness and G-ness. It can therefore be understood more perspicuously as N2(F, G) This relation establishes the necessity of the extensional statement All F are G = (x)(Fx ⊃ Gx) In any case, Dretske’s suggestion has been taken up by several other recent critics of the Humean position. These include D.M. Armstrong,29 M. Tooley,30 and J. Brown.31 Unfortunately, there is a fatal flaw in the position that these philosophers have advocated. Consider (4) N2(F, G) If this is to necessitate (5) (x)(Fx ⊃ Gx) rendering it immune to falsification, then it has to guarantee its truth. But it can necessitate its truth only if the implication (6) N2(F, G) ⊃ (x)(Fx ⊃ Gx) is itself a necessary truth. But the logical form of (6) is not that of a logical truth, as a little reflection shows: the antecedent is an atomic statement (of the second order), and no atomic statement ever logically implies or entails a general truth.32 This criticism was first developed by G. Bergmann,33 and has been developed by others also.34 Bergmann gave the criticism originally in response to C.D. Broad, who had argued Dretske’s thesis in his commentary on McTaggart,35 who had also defended a version of Dretske’s thesis. The point is that the defenders of the thesis that laws are relations among universals provide no clear account of entailment such that a statement of such a relationship entails a generalization about the particulars that exem-

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plify those universals. Thus, though Dretske & Co. all assert that the connection (6) is an entailment relation, they make no effort to indicate the logical form that provides the ground of the necessitation. The antecedent of (6) is a relation among properties, and therefore in some sense a necessary truth, at least in the sense of being timeless. However, on any standard account of entailment, there is no reason to expect a non-general relational fact about properties to entail a generalization about the particulars which have those properties. Whatever else a law is, it is a regularity. The concern is whether there is anything more to laws. Dretske & Co., insouciantly following Bosanquet, McTaggart, and Broad, argue that there is something more, to wit, the relation among universals. But if that is to make sense, then the relation among universals does indeed have to entail the matter-of-fact regularity, as they quite rightly see. But, alas! They provide no account of that entailment relationship. To assert that one exists is hardly to explain it. What precisely is the logical form that is the ground of the necessity alleged to hold between the antecedent and the consequent, between the relational fact about universals and the generalization about the particulars falling under those universals? In the absence of any reasonable account of logical form that would show the necessity of (6), the notion that we can construe laws as relations among universals is simply a non-starter. This indicates the central problem for those views that begin by construing the regularities that we observe in the world as reflecting structural relations among properties. This is the fact that there must be some guarantee that the relations among the properties are reflected in the regularities that hold among the particulars having those properties. Dretske & Co. claim to find it in the supposed entailment relation (6), but until they explain their very special notion of entailment, they have not solved the problem. There is yet another problem which must be faced if the necessity of the causal regularity is to be secured. The necessity of the regularity (5) (x)(Fx ⊃ Gx) is supposed to be secured by the relational fact (4) N2(F, G) guaranteeing its truth. As we have argued, it can necessitate its truth only if the implication (6)

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N2(F, G) ⊃ (x)(Fx ⊃ Gx) is somehow necessary, which it isn’t on standard empiricist accounts of logic. But the inference by way of (6) can necessitate (5) only if the relational fact (4) is itself necessary. After all, a conclusion drawn from a contingent premise may be necessary but need not be so: one can guarantee that a conclusion is necessary only if the premise is itself necessary. The problem is that the relational fact that is supposed to guarantee the necessity of the causal regularity is itself an atomic fact and therefore only contingently true. The view that we are considering, then, does not succeed in establishing that there is some sort of ontological necessity attaching to the causal regularity (5). To be sure, the relational state of affairs (4) is a fact about kinds or universals. The individuals which exemplify these kinds are in time – they stand in temporal relations one to another – but the kinds themselves, being universals, are not in the same way in time. The fact (4) is therefore timelessly true, or, what amounts to the same, true everywhere and everywhen. This would seem to imply that – provided that (contrary to fact) the principle (6) is necessary – the causal regularity is also true everywhere and everywhen. Thus, once we somehow know the fact (4) to be true, we also know that whatever the future might bring it is not going to bring us a particular that will falsify the regularity (5). In that sense, the relational fact (4), given (as we are not) the principle (6), will ensure that the causal regularity (5) is immune from falsification. Nonetheless, this immunity from falsification is not a matter of some sort of casual necessity: the causal regularity remains contingent. Thus, if the aim of this proposal to ground the truth of laws in relations among kinds is to make causal laws somehow necessary, then the proposal fails. Thus, even if one solves the epistemological problem of our knowledge of the relation or relations among universals in which the truth of causal regularities is supposed to be grounded, the necessity of those regularities remains to be established. Here there is the problem, first, of the contingency of the relational fact itself, and, second, the problem of contingency of the connection between the relational fact on the one hand and the causal regularity on the other. Among the recent philosophers who have defended the view that laws are to be construed as relations among universals, D.M. Armstrong alone has faced up to this problem, or, what amounts to the same, the problem why the structural relation (4) should somehow

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imply that the regularity (5) among particulars should also hold.36 We have N2(F, G) Armstrong is concerned to understand how it is that this fact about universals can lead to there being a regularity All F’s are G among the particulars that exemplify F and G. He proposes that N2(F, G) is [itself] a universal, instantiated in the positive instances of the law If we accept this view, he suggests, then ‘it will be much easier to accept the primitive nature of N2. It will be possible to see clearly that if N2 holds between F and G, then this involves a uniformity at the level of first-order particulars.’37 We have, therefore, certain facts about particulars exemplifying the (funny) universal ‘N2(F, G).’ These facts Armstrong understands38 to be perspicuously represented by something like (N2(F, G)) (a’s being F, a’s being G) which we might equally well write as (7) (N2(F, G)) (Fa, Gb) which makes clear that what we have is a relation holding between states of affairs. It is the ‘causal relation,’ but because it holds between states of affairs rather than particulars, its status is rather more like that of a connective than it is like an ordinary first-order relation among ordinary particulars. This is the first feature of the causal relation that we should notice. Second, we should notice this connective is not truth-functional; the sentences ‘Fa’ and ‘Gb’ that occur in (7) do not by themselves determine the truth-value of that sentence. In particular, third, the complex sentence (7) will be true only if the simple sentences appearing in it mention kinds that are causally related to each other. Finally, fourth, it is worth recalling that the nature of the causal relat-

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edness will vary from case to case. These are the four crucial features of the nomological connective.39 These four crucial features give rise to two philosophical problems. The first of these is the fact that when one introduces a nomological connective such as that which appears in (7), one challenges the traditional empiricist’s analytic/synthetic distinction, which presupposes a language in which the only connectives are truth-functional. This problem amounts to saying in another way that there is a real question of the entailment relation that is supposed to hold between N2(F, G) and All F's are G or, what is the same, the notion of logical form that is supposed to make Dretske’s and Armstrong’s (4) a necessary truth. The second philosophical problem concerns how it is that we know that the non-truth-functional nomological connective actually holds between two facts or states of affairs. This has been called the ‘epistemological problem.’ Now, I have previously suggested that Bosanquet defends a position similar to that of Dretske and Armstrong: one solves the problem of the necessity of laws by introducing relations among properties. What I want to argue is that, unlike these later philosophers, Bosanquet has seen and has attempted to address these problems. Bosanquet argues that all judgments have a certain form: The content of a judgment is always a significant idea, that is to say, a recognised identity in differences. The varieties of judgment correspond to the forms which identity in difference is capable of assuming.40

This identity in differences has a certain specific form: they are parts within a whole. ‘An identity in relation to its differences may always be regarded as a whole in which they are parts.’41 Bosanquet gives as an example the judgment that ‘Caesar crossed the Rubicon.’ Caesar is a whole and crossing the Rubicon is part of this whole:

282 Fred Wilson This is a clear case of exhibiting an identity in difference ... On the one hand, I analyse the individual whole that is called Caesar by specifying one of the differences that may be considered as a part within it; on the other hand, I construct or make synthesis of the individual whole in question, by exhibiting it as a part that pervades, and absorbs in itself, each of all of its differences.42

This already addresses one of the problems facing the view that one explains regularities among things in terms of relations among the properties exemplified by those things. The first of the philosophical problems that we noted with this position was that it challenged the traditional empiricist distinction between the analytic and the synthetic. Bosanquet challenges the validity of this distinction. On his account of judgment, every judgment is both analytic and synthetic. It is analytic insofar as it involves a distinction between a whole and part. It is synthetic insofar as the part is synthesized into a whole. This is not to say that Bosanquet gives up entirely the sort of distinction that the empiricists were defending. But he relativizes it. Judgments, on his view, become more ‘stable’43 during the process of inquiry. Quasi-collective judgments of mere matter-of-fact regularity are not stable; they can be overthrown by a single counter-example. They become more stable when the relation among properties that explains the regularity comes to be known; the regularity is then recognized to be necessitated by the structural relation. Instead of a sharp analytic/synthetic distinction, Bosanquet provides a continuum of categories, the degrees, greater and less, of stability. But there is still the issue of the logical relation between the relation among the properties on the one hand and, on the other, the regularity among the particulars exemplifying those properties. That the problem is not the same for Bosanquet as it is for an empiricist is clear: that is the point of denying the sharp analytic/synthetic distinction. To say this, however, is not yet to have a positive picture of Bosanquet’s view. We shall return to this directly. To move toward this, we should first begin to look at the teleology of the process of inquiry, as Bosanquet sees it. Bosanquet introduces, as we have seen, degrees of stability. These degrees of stability are related to his non-empiricist teleology of inquiry. This teleology has a beginning in sensuous perception. It is reality which is given to me in perception. It is structured into a whole, but of course in ordinary sensuous perception only a part of the full

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reality is given. So far as I am concerned this further reality is not given in perception but in judgment. Reality is given for me in present sensuous perception, and in the immediate feeling of my own sentient existence that goes with it. The real world, as a definite organised system, is for me an extension of this present sensation and self feeling by means of judgment, and it is the essence of judgment to effect and sustain such an extension.44

The first sort of judgment that is made is what Bosanquet calls a ‘perceptual judgment’: In making the judgment, ‘That is my home,’ I extend the present senseperception of a house in a certain landscape by attaching to it the ideal content of meaning of ‘home’; and moreover, in doing this, I pronounce the ideal content to be, so to speak, of one and the same tissue with what I have before me in my actual perception. That is to say, I affirm the meaning of the idea, or the idea considered as a meaning, to be a real quality of that which I perceive in my perception.45

In these judgments I distinguish within the perceptually given whole a difference; this is the analysis. But in the judgment I identify it as part of a whole; this is the synthesis. This sort of basic judgment conforms to the general pattern of all judgment, that it is ‘primarily the intellectual act which extends a given perception by attaching the content of an idea to the fact presented in the perception.’46 It is important to recognize that the given and its extension are not absolutely different. The extension is an extension of the given, and related to it. As Bosanquet puts it, ‘The given and its extension differ not absolutely but relatively; they are continuous with each other.’47 Thus, the whole to which the quality or property is related is reality as such, the whole of it. ‘The ultimate subject of the perceptive judgment is the real world as a whole, and it is of this that, in judging, we affirm the qualities or characteristics.’48 In fact, it is the real world that is the ultimate subject of all judgments. We think of these in somewhat evolutionary terms, as the complex judgments evolving out of the simpler perceptual judgments. Although the ultimate Subject extends beyond the content of the judgment, yet in every judgment there is a starting-point or point of contact

284 Fred Wilson with the ultimate subject; and the starting-point or point of contact with reality is present in a rudimentary form in the simplist perceptive judgment, and it is explicitly in the later and more elaborate types.49

We shall have to say more about this. However, it is clear already that Bosanquet has an answer to the second philosophical problem that we noted above, what we called the epistemological problem. This problem was the issue of how we know the structural relations that underlie the regularities we find in the world. Recent advocates of this position, such as Dretske and Armstrong, have not really dealt with this problem – other, at least, than by providing the inadequate suggestion that the relevant structural relations are ‘theoretical entities.’ Bosanquet, in contrast, has a clear answer. All judgment begins with, and grows out of, a reality given in perceptual awareness. Judgment extends our awareness of this reality. Within this reality we thus become cognizant of the structural relations that explain mere regularities. I ... regard the normal and central evolution of judgment as categorical from beginning to end, and as gaining, not losing, in this characteristic as it passes from perception and history to the more complete forms of science. The implication of real existence which attaches to the content of ordinary generic and universal judgments seems to me to be of the same kind as the implication of existence – for it is no more – which accompanies the demonstrative ‘this,’ ‘here,’ or ‘now,’ or its expansion by a significant idea, or a proper name, or the significant name of any actual, even if not in the full sense individual, totality, such as the English nation, or the Natural Order Rossaceae.50

Thus, the relational structures are in fact made present to us in experience and judgment. As we saw earlier, Bosanquet insisted that they are data: Every set of relations within which certain nexus of attributes hold good, is itself ultimately a fact or datum, relative no doubt within some further totality, but absolute relatively to the inferences drawn within it.51

This is brief, but it is sufficiently clear to make it evident that, if it holds, then Bosanquet has solved the epistemological problem. The linguistic expression of a judgment involves the concatenation

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of names. In naming a thing or quality I indicate first that it is something known. When I name something, ‘It is ... characterised as an object of knowledge.’52 This is to identify it, pick it out, from among other things, things different from it. ‘This – an identical element which enters into and is entered into by differences – is what we might call the logical significance, the significance which must be postulated in all cases, of a name as such.’53 However, ‘mere distinction is not the essence of naming.’54 Whatever is identified is related to other entities. This is true even of the simplest judgments in which one identifies some particular quality. The Qualitative Judgment proper affirms a nearly simple content directly of present Reality. An absolutely simple content is indeed an impossibility; every ‘red’ or ‘sweet’ or ‘pleasant’ belongs to some context and includes some differences.55

Naming as it were strips the thing named from its context, proposing that it is an individual thing, separable from and independent of anything else, where in fact it is related to, and therefore dependent upon, other things. Naming abstracts things from their context, and insofar as it indicates an independent individual which is in fact related, it falsifies the way reality is. That which is individual or absolute claims to be self-sufficing; that is to say, to be an Identity which determines and is determined by its own differences, but is not dependent on anything outside itself. Every content partakes of this character in so far, but in so far only, as it has a unity or an interest for its own sake or in itself ... On the other hand, every judgment may also be regarded under an aspect of relativity or necessity. In so far as a content is necessary it is not self-sufficing, but is a consequence of something else, and in so far as it is relative it fails to explain itself, and refers to something else for explanation.56

The falsification of reality that comes from naming is reduced in judgments, where what is named is related to some other thing that is also named. In the judgments, subject and predicate are joined as the latter is located as a difference within the unity of the former. But to identify this whole in the judgment is again to imply an absoluteness which in reality does not obtain. To the extent that the subject is not absolute but

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is related to other things, this judgment, too, falsifies the way reality is. To remove this falsification of the way reality is, the judgment must be taken not absolutely but relatively, recognized to be not separable from but dependent upon other aspects of reality. We can now see Bosanquet’s solution to the first of the philosophical problems that we have identified. This is the problem of how structural relations among properties guarantee the truth of regularities among the individuals exemplified by those properties. But to state the problem this way is to see that from Bosanquet’s view it is wrongly stated. The individuals among which the regularities hold are in fact not genuine individuals: they are related to, and therefore inseparable from and dependent upon other individuals and things. To say (a) This is F and (b) This is G is in each case to locate F and G as differences within the ‘this.’ Here ‘F’ and ‘G’ are taken to be separate and therefore independent. If we stick with data at this level, then the two facts are independent and bringing them together yields nothing more than a mere conjunction. A series of judgments of this sort, about other ‘this-es,’ will yield a conjunction, a regularity of the sort that Bosanquet calls a quasi-collective judgment. This is the regularity of the empiricists. But we also have the relation of causal necessitation among properties: N2(F, G) This judgment locates a whole in which F and G are identified as differences. They are parts that are identified within a conveyance or causal connection. Thus, instead of (a) we have (a1) This is F qua necessitator of G and instead of (b) we have (b1) This is G qua necessitated by F or, still better,

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(c) This is a necessitator of F to G. Now recall what we referred to as the four crucial features of the nomological connective. The first is that it holds between states of affairs rather than particulars; its status is rather more like that of a connective than it is like an ordinary first-order relation among ordinary particulars. Second, this connective is not truth-functional. In particular, third, the complex sentence will be true only if the simple sentences appearing in it mention kinds that are causally related to each other. Finally, fourth, the nature of the causal relatedness will vary from case to case. These are the four crucial features of the nomological connective. And now look at (c). The properties F and G are within the ‘this’and are therein related by the relation of necessitation. In this respect the first crucial feature is captured. Second, the sentences ‘This is F’ and ‘This is G’ occur in a way in (c), at least in the sense that we recognize in (c) the truth (though limited truth) of (a) and (b). But they do not by themselves determine the truth-value of (c); insofar as (c) is true its truth also depends upon the relation of conveyance or, rather, of necessitation. Thus, (a) and (b) appear in (c) related by a non-truth-functional connective. In this respect the second crucial feature is captured. As for the third crucial feature, that the sentences in it mention kinds that are causally related, it is clear that this is so in (c). A little reflection will show that the fourth crucial feature is also captured in Bosanquet’s account. As for the first of the philosophical problems, the problem of how structural relations among properties guarantee the truth of regularities among the individuals exemplified by those properties, we see how (c) necessitates the pair (a) and (b): the former is a whole of which the latter are parts. The statements (a) and (b) of individual fact that the empiricist argues when taken together constitute the regularity are, if Bosanquet is correct, incomplete, or, more correctly, inconsistent with reality: they make statements which claim certain facts to be independent or separable which are in reality not independent or separable. The judgment that eliminates the inconsistency with regard to (a) and (b) by locating them in a larger context at the same time reveals the structure that necessitates these facts and renders them in reality to be inseparable parts of a greater whole. Bosanquet thus solves both the philosophical problems with the position that structural relations among properties account for regularities among the individuals exemplifying those properties. These

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are problems that more recent advocates of the position have failed to solve. Bosanquet does this at a price, however. The price is his account of the relational structure of reality and the account of judgment which that implies. On this account, the relations in which some entity stands determine the reality of that entity. ‘In thinking of something without more guidance than a significant name, we find ourselves involuntarily thinking not merely of it, but about it’57 – involuntarily because the relations which determine its being, what it intrinsically is, render it inseparable from the other entities to which it is related.58 Be that as it may, this position determines Bosanquet’s views of all kinds of judgment and not just those of the form ‘All A are B.’ Thus, take the case of disjunctive judgments. It is judgments like this that Bosanquet considers to be genuine disjunctive judgments: Any triangle must have its three sides equal, or two only equal, or all three unequal. or, what is the same: Any triangle is either equilateral, isosceles, or scalene. The subject is a whole distinguished from other wholes, an individual in other words. This individual is ‘a whole or system in itself.’59 But this whole is a unity of mutually exclusive parts which exhaust the whole: The predication made of this real and quasi-individual subject is peculiar ... The individuality is exhibited in the different forms which it is capable of assuming as a whole, and which consequently it cannot unite in itself under a single set of conditions.60

The whole, in other words, forms a relational structure that determines the being of the parts, which in turn constitute the being of the whole: this sort of judgment is such that the ‘alternatives falling under a single identity are enumerated, and are known in virtue of some pervading principle to be reciprocally exclusive, and to be exhaustive.’61 To these disjunctions Bosanquet contrasts disjunctions in which the alternatives are merely enumerated. These are disjunctions like ‘He is either a knave or a fool,’ where the alternatives purport to be exhaustive but

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where they are not mutually exclusive, that is, where it is possible that both alternatives obtain.62 Next, there are disjunctions like ‘She has either measles or scarlet fever,’ where the alternatives are mutually exclusive, but perhaps not exhaustive. Disjunctions of this sort represent doubt and ignorance rather than knowledge as in the case of a perfect disjunction. In this latter sort of case, What operates is something we know, and know to contain the specified alternatives. We do not however specify our knowledge in detail – it may consist in a content hard to define – and we merely point to the concrete individual, in whom it is embodied and from whom it takes its interest.63

In this case the predication is made of a concrete individual rather than a quasi-individual as in the case of the perfect disjunction. In these cases we do not know that quasi-individual that characterizes the concrete individual, and so we cannot fully discern the structure of the mutually exclusive and exhaustive parts. Recall now Bosanquet’s discussion of the fertilization of the Bee Ophrys. It is done either by insects or by wind. This is a disjunctive judgment of the last sort, a disjunction of ignorance. It is this ignorance which creates the research problem, and initiates the inquiry. The problem to be solved is that of discovering which of the alternatives is true of the individual Bee Ophrys. According to the empiricist, these are the alternatives that are put to the test because it is they that are determined by the relevant principles of determinism and limited variety. But these are just regularities; they therefore cannot provide any stability to the claim that we have two genuine alternatives here. To say that a flower is self-fertilized by the wind does not by itself guarantee that it is not cross-fertilized by insects. At least this is so in the formal logic to which the empiricist is limited, where the affirmation of one attribute can have no influence on the affirmation of another about the same subject unless an explicit contrariety between the two affirmations is within our knowledge.64

For the empiricist, difference does not imply negation. However, for Bosanquet, any attribute is part of a system of attributes which are not only different but are intrinsically contrary: difference in such a relational system does imply negation.

290 Fred Wilson In science every content claims to be treated as a system, and every attribute must either quarrel with any other attribute suggested of the same subject, or must make peace with it on definite terms.65

We affirm the disjunction of attributes as the relevant alternatives, then, because we can discern them as part of a system of alternatives which mutually exclude one another. To be sure, we do not discern fully the structure of the system. That is why we use a disjunction of ignorance. It is this not fully discerned relational structure that justifies the claims to limited variety and determinism, not simply additional conjunctions of background data as the empiricist claims. The empiricist proceeds by elimination. But as we saw, this is not how Bosanquet construes the inference to the cause of the fertilization. The empiricist appeals to two events and applies the method of difference. Bosanquet, in contrast, ignores one of the events (the statement of presence) and appeals only to the other (the statement of absence). This event he records as ‘not-w is not c’ from which he then infers the contrapositive ‘c is w.’ The latter he takes to be the causal conclusion of Darwin’s inference. The sharp distinction that the empiricist draws between the statements of individual fact in the premises and the law that is the conclusion is no part of Bosanquet’s account. Where the statements of absence do not for the empiricist by themselves imply any law, for Bosanquet in contrast the statement of absence becomes the statement that ‘not-w is not c’ and from this alone the causal conclusion that ‘c is w’ is inferred. Bosanquet as it were discovers the causal claim in the particular events themselves. Here we must turn to what Bosanquet says about negation. When we say of something that it is not so and so, then the reality of which that statement is made is itself something positive: ‘The matter which is invested with the attribute of being such as to be known – which is thus ‘objectified’ – must be something positive, something, so to speak, of affirmative nature.’66 The negation denies something of this reality. ‘Negation ... is the exclusion of a suggested qualification of reality.’67 But note that what we affirm can be given as a fact or datum in perception, where negation cannot: we do not experience mere absences. In contrast to the affirmation, negation ‘has to be made, and made by setting an ideal reality over against real reality and finding them incongruous.’68 Negation excludes something from reality. Such exclusion may seem to be a bare denial, as in ‘Virtue is not square.’69 In such a case, the denial is a ‘bare denial’ since it merely asserts a difference.70 It has as such no more significance that the bare

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affirmation that ‘Virtue is virtue.’ Propositions of this sort make significant assertions about reality only to the extent that, in the case of apparently bare denial, some identity is implied, or, in the case of apparently bare affirmation, some difference is implied. Thus, for example, we might have in the case of ‘Virtue is not square’ the suggestion that virtue is something spiritual which excludes it from being an attribute of something merely extended; or, for another, we might have in the case of ‘Virtue is virtue’ the suggestion that virtue is something characterized by certain moral principles. Significant negation, then, is not bare denial. In this sense, ‘significant negation must convey something positive.’71 To put it another way, if we attempt to predicate a bare negation of reality, then we are as it were saying that a portion of reality lacks positive content. But there is no reality that is not positive. A significant negative predication must therefore, like other judgments, have a categorical basis. To be sure, negation is contradiction: denial implies an inconsistency between an attribute and reality. The point is that this is done not within a context of mere absence, but within a context of definite relations of contrariety. ‘Mere contradiction ... is given in the nature of negation from the first ... its development consists in filling this unmeaning form with significant opposites.’72 Negation is of significance only when the attribute negated is part of a positive whole, however vague, determining relations of contrariety. ‘Significant negation, then, like hypothesis, is intelligible within and with reference to a system judged to be actual.’73 For the empiricist, a statement to the effect that ‘not-w is not c’ has no positive content. If we are to affirm it, then we must first affirm on the basis of the data in sensuous experience that justify us in asserting ‘c is w.’ But Bosanquet analyses Darwin’s inference as proceeding from ‘not-w is not c’ to ‘c is w.’ This is, as he indicates, contrary to what the empiricist must claim. To be sure, as we have seen, the empiricist will not in fact argue from ‘not-w is not c’ alone to the causal conclusion that ‘c is w.’ Rather, the empiricist will appeal to the more complicated inference of the method of difference. That, however, is not the present point. What we are concerned with now is Bosanquet’s own account of the inference. What he is claiming is that, unlike the empiricist, he can begin with the proposition ‘not-w is not c’ even though it is negative, a denial. He can start from this point because he can take it as a fact or datum obtained through our sensuous perception of reality. It can be a datum because it is not merely negative but has itself positive content. Thus, in our sensuous perception of reality we can recover this positive

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content. This positive content in fact then converts directly into the causal proposition that ‘c is w.’ In discerning the positive content of the negative judgment in reality we are in fact discerning the datum that warrants the affirmation of the causal proposition itself. We thus see that there is nothing particularly puzzling in the suggestion made above that Bosanquet as it were discovers the causal claim in the particular events themselves. On the one hand, his whole account of reality and judgments makes it reasonable to suppose that in perception we do have insight into the causal structures that shape reality. On the other hand, his account of negation makes it clear that we can discern these structures within those positive structures that justify denials and exclusions. Where the empiricist has elimination do the work of arriving at the causal judgment, Bosanquet has the work done by direct insight into the casual structure of reality. This is not to say, however, that there is no place for elimination in Bosanquet’s scheme. To the contrary, discovering that the casual relation is given by ‘c is w’ eliminates the second alternative of the disjunctive judgment ‘w or i’ (wind or insects). This was a disjunctive judgment of ignorance, and it is this ignorance that moved the inquiry to better determine the structure of reality. The discovery that ‘c is w’ eliminates the disjunct ‘i,’ which in turn eliminates the ignorance that the disjunction expresses. We can draw several conclusions about Bosanquet’s account of the logic of inquiry. First, it endeavours to begin with sensuous perception. Second, it attempts to isolate parts of what is given and then render these judgments certain by locating them as aspects of relational structures within the given. Third, the process of locating relational structures consists of finding structures that make more and more determinate our knowledge of the parts of the sensuous given and their relations to other parts. In developing this philosophical account of scientific inference, Bosanquet succeeds in the attempt to reply to the empiricist account of lawful or causal necessity where more recent critics of empiricism have serious gaps in their position.

NOTES 1 B. Bosanquet, Logic, or the Morphology of Knowledge, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1888; 2nd ed., 1911).

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2 Ibid., 2: 126. I have changed Bosanquet’s notation slightly. 3 Ibid. 4 For a discussion of the role of such laws of this logical form in science and in scientific explanation, see F. Wilson, Explanation, Causation and Deduction (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1985) and Empiricism and Darwin’s Science (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1991). See also F. Wilson, The Logic and Methodology of Science and Pseudoscience (Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2000). 5 John Stuart Mill, System of Logic, 8th ed. (London: Longmans, 1872), Bk. II, chap. 3, sec. 3. 6 Ibid. 7 Logic, 2: 51ff. 8 Ibid., 2: 51. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 2: 52. 12 Ibid., 2: 51. 13 Ibid., 1: 211. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 1: 212. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 1: 234. 18 Ibid., 1: 239. 19 Ibid., 1: 238. 20 Ibid., 1: 241. 21 Ibid. 22 F. Dretske, ‘Laws of Nature,’ Philosophy of Science, 44 (1977): 248–68. 23 Ibid., 262. 24 Ibid., 263. 25 Cf. F. Wilson, Hume’s Defence of Causal Inference (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). 26 Dretske, ‘Laws of Nature,’ 263. 27 Ibid., 253. 28 Ibid. 29 D.M. Armstrong, What Is a Law of Nature? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 30 M. Tooley, ‘The Nature of Laws,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 7 (1977): 667–98. 31 J. Brown, The Laboratory of the Mind (London: Routledge, 1991). 32 There is another problem that is perhaps worth noting. Consider laws of the form

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33

34

35

36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45

(x)[Fx ⊃ (Gx & Hx)] There will have to be necessitated by the second-order fact N2(F, G, H) Thus, ‘N2’ represents a relation that in some contexts is two-termed, in other contexts is three-termed, and so on for other forms that laws have. It is unusual, to say the least, to have a relation that can change the number of terms it relates. The logic of such a relation is obscure. G. Bergmann, ‘On Non-Perceptual Intuition,’ in his Metaphysics of Logical Positivism (New York: Longmans Green, 1961). See also his ‘The Ontology of Edmund Husserl,’ in his Logic and Reality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964). The same point is developed by H. Hochberg, ‘Natural Necessity and Laws of Nature,’ Philosophy of Science, 48 (1981): 386–99. John Earman has put the point already made by Bergmann and Hochberg in this way – no doubt too cautiously: ‘What remains to be worked out [on the view that causal relations are relations among universals] is the formal semantics of the entailment relation [that holds between the statement about universals and the matter of fact regularity]; whether this can be done consistently ... remains to be seen.’ ‘Laws of Nature: The Empiricist Challenge,’ in D.M. Armstrong, ed. R.J. Bogdan (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1984), 221n.21. I have previously developed the following criticism of these philosophers in F. Wilson, Laws and Other Worlds (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1986). See also F. Wilson, Logic and the Methodology of Science in Early Modern Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), Study Two. C.D. Broad, Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 1: 223. J.M.E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), 1: 275. D.M. Armstrong, What Is a Law of Nature? 88–93 Ibid., 88. Ibid., 91. See F. Wilson, Explanation, Causation and Deduction, sec. 3.6, for an extended discussion of another, rather different, defence of the idea of a primitive nomological connective. See also F. Wilson, Logic and the Methodology of Science in Early Modern Thought, Study Two. Logic, 1: 90. Ibid. Ibid., 1: 92–3. Ibid., 2: 45ff. Ibid., 1: 72. Ibid., 1: 71.

The Ontology of Logic and the Method of Scientific Inquiry 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

295

Ibid., 1: 84. Ibid., 1: 72. Ibid., 1: 73. Ibid., 1: 76. Ibid., 1: 143. Ibid., 1: 246. Ibid., 1: 19. Ibid., 1: 14. Ibid., 1: 21. Ibid., 1: 98. Ibid., 1: 135–6. Ibid., 1: 13. This criticism is developed by Bertrand Russell in his Philosophical Papers (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990). See also F. Wilson, ‘Acquaintance, Ontology and Knowledge,’ The New Scholasticism, 54 (1970): 1–48; and ‘Empiricism: Principles and Problems,’ in Approaches to Metaphysics, ed. with an introduction by William Sweet (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004), 265–300. Logic, 1: 327. Ibid. Ibid., 1: 323. Ibid., 1: 324. Ibid., 1: 325. Ibid., 2: 129. Ibid. Ibid., 1: 17–18. Ibid., 1: 281. Ibid., 1: 280. Ibid., 1: 282. Ibid. Ibid., 1: 283. Ibid., 1: 293. Ibid., 1: 289.

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Index

Absolute, 18–21, 133–4, 147, 149, 151, 155–6, 160, 162, 167–71, 192, 194, 196, 198, 234–5, 237 a contingentia mundi, 18 168 Actual Will, 243. See also Real Will. aesthetics, Bosanquet and, 11–14, 136–40 Alexander, Samuel, 4, 20, 148–9, 151–3, 163–5, 167, 172, 174, 177 Allard, James, 9, 73 appercipience, 17, 63 Aristotle, 12, 17–18, 74, 233, 248 Armour, Leslie, 19–20, 22, 147 Arnold, Matthew, 5, 37, 189, 197, 214 art, 12, 113, 117–21, 129–33, 137–40, 150, 156, 197–8, 213, 215, 218–19, 239, 250. See also aesthetics associationism, 17, 55 atomist, 34, 37, 41, 45, 55, 162, 239, 249 beauty, 12–13, 24, 121, 128–30, 135–6, 198. See also aesthetics Bee Ophrys, used as example of scientific inference, 267–8, 270, 289 Bentham, Jeremy, 5, 14 Bergmann, G., 277

Bergson, Henri, 148, 170 body-and-mind, 12, 138, 140 Boodin, J.E., 148 Booth, Charles, 10, 33, 36 Bosanquet, Helen, 6, 7, 10, 33, 35, 36, 38, 43–4, 45, 46 Boucher, D., 66, 265, 266 Bradley, F.H., 4–5, 7–8, 16, 18, 21–2, 25, 41, 74, 77–8, 149, 155–7, 161, 164, 166–7, 178, 186, 190, 192, 196– 7, 233, 247–9 Bradley, James, 48 Broad, C.D., 8, 152, 156, 277–8 Caird, Edward, 5, 106, 152, 196 Calvinists, 201n16 Carritt, E.F., 177, 247 causation, 52, 57, 59, 83, 90–2, 131, 198 character, importance of individual, 10–11, 14, 16, 18, 22–4, 33, 36, 38– 45, 54, 59, 62, 82, 113, 115, 119, 121, 134, 137, 151, 154, 156, 181, 191, 193–5, 198, 204, 212, 213, 218, 223, 225, 242, 252–4, 256–9, 262, 285 Charity Organisation Society (COS), 5–6, 10–11, 33–46, 210

310 Index Christianity, 10, 21–2, 37, 115, 153, 167, 178–80, 182, 183–4, 187–8, 190, 194, 213, 215 Church, 131, 167, 179, 180, 184, 186–8 class, 36–7, 42–3, 45, 159, 160, 181–2, 197, 199, 212, 214–17, 219, 220–1, 274 coherence, 8, 41, 79, 114, 249, Collingwood, R.G., 4, 22, 23 247–66 Collini, S., 48 communitarianism, 23, 35, 46, 52 community, 10–11, 23, 35–7, 40–2, 44–5, 164–5, 171, 183, 186, 188, 190, 192, 195, 198, 218, 236, 257–61, 263 compulsion, 116, 221, 222, 252–3, 255 Comte, Auguste, 60, 64, 69 Concrete Universal, 18, 77–8, 82–4, 233–5 conjecture, 125, 273 creativity, 139, 140, 233 Croce, Benedetto, 4, 13, 19–20, 125, 130, 139–40, 142, 148–50, 247 Cunningham G.W., 22, 168 Cupitt, D., 21, 24, 201 democracy, 15, 41, 218, 225 Dendy, Helen. See Bosanquet, Helen Dewey, John, 13, 62 dominant ideas, 65 Dretske, F., 23, 267, 275–8, 281, 284 durée, 170 Durkheim, Émile, 4, 11, 50–1, 53–64 duty, 14, 16 Eddington, A., 152 education, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120–2 Emmet, D., 13, 22, 27 equality, 190, 195, 212, 215, 219, 241–2

Fabians, 11, 33, 37, 219 falsification, 277, 279, 285, 286 family, 4, 23, 33, 38, 165, 186, 187, 189, 285 feelings: and cosmic contentment, 198–9; and creativity, 129, 130, 136–40; and values, 58, 115 Foster, M.B., 250 freedom, 8, 14, 18, 35, 41, 182, 211–13, 219, 254, 257, 259, 260–1 function, 13–14, 16, 22, 25, 40, 42, 44, 52, 101–2, 109, 158, 164, 192, 213, 239, 241, 252, 260, 276 Gaus, G., 23, 46–9, 66–9, 176, 205, 226, 228, 230–1, 244, 265–6 General Will, 14, 41, 44, 165, 224, 243, 260 Gentile, Giovanni, 4, 19, 20, 147–50, 164, 165, 167, 176, 247 Gifford (lectures), 6, 17–19, 109, 148, 154, 166, 168, 172, 178, 190, 192, 196, 200 Greek (philosophy), 5–6, 15, 24, 136, 162, 184 Green, T.H., 4, 5, 8, 14, 21–3, 25, 33–5, 37–8, 40, 47, 105, 155, 157, 196, 209, 212, 221, 224, 233, 239, 247–9, 251–60 group, social, 53–6, 59–60, 62, 216 Gutting, G., 250, 264 Haldane, R., 19, 88, 106 handicrafts, and moral and aesthetic education, 114, 118, 119–20, 212 Hegel, G.W.F., 3, 5–6, 8–9, 12, 14–15, 24–5, 50, 73–4, 79, 93–6, 100, 130, 149, 211–12, 219, 224, 233–4, 239, 248–50

Index Hegelian, 6, 33, 41, 47, 60, 131, 141, 248, 249 Hetherington, H.J.W., 66, 69 Hill, O., 48, 216–17 hindrance, 14, 22, 40, 222, 243, 248, 251–2, 255–6, 258–61, 263 history, 3–4, 12–13, 25, 38, 41, 47, 64, 105, 119, 126, 136, 138, 148–50, 153, 164, 184, 215, 250, 284 Hobhouse, L.T., 14, 41, 48, 51 Hobson, J., 34, 41, 46, 51, 219, 229 holism, 50, 55–6, 63, 249 Houang, F., 178, 200 housing, 43, 214–17, 220, 223, 225 Hume, David, 9, 17, 90–3, 95, 134, 155, 268, 270, 275–7 Hurka, Thomas, 16, 232 Hurrerl, Edmund, 4 hypnotism, 54 hypocrisy, 114 identity, 55–6, 78, 95–8, 213, 215, 235, 251, 272, 281–2, 285, 288, 291 imitation, 53–5 induction, 8–9, 81–2, 90–2, 94–8, 101, 106–7, 125, 268 inference, 8–10, 23, 73–86, 90–1, 95, 100, 105, 125, 162, 267–9, 271–5, 279, 284, 290–1 intelligence, 114, 123n26. See also knowledge James, William, 17, 62, 127 Jesus, 179–85, 187 Joachim, H., 247 Joad, C.E.M., 22, 148 Jones, Sir Henry, 66 Joseph, H.W.B., 177 justice, 16, 57, 115, 166, 184, 196, 205, 213, 232–3

311

justification, 9, 14, 16, 42, 80–1, 90–1, 94, 101, 105, 183, 223, 237, 238, 270 Kant, Immanuel, 5, 9, 14–15, 24, 40, 58, 60, 62, 68, 74, 87, 91–5, 102, 106, 126, 150, 187, 211, 224, 248, 250 Kingdom of God, 10, 15, 179, 180, 184, 185, 186, 187, 201, 203 knowledge, 7–9, 12–13, 18, 20, 45, 53, 58, 60–1, 73, 75–81, 84–90, 93, 96, 98–109, 114–21, 124, 126, 139, 147–56, 158, 162, 164, 166, 174–5, 199, 215, 224–5, 242, 249, 258, 264, 267–8, 271–2, 279, 285, 289, 292, 295 Labour Party, 15, 34, 244 laissez-faire, 16, 232, 238–9, 243 Laski, Harold, 4, 22 LeBon, G., 55 Leclair, Jean, 219, 225 Lévinas, E., 160–1, 175 libraries, 47, 142, 172–3, 176, 215, 264, 266 Locke, John, 9, 24, 86, 237–8 Lotze, R., 3, 8, 128, 141 MacIntyre, A., 23 Mackenzie, J., 49 Mander, W.J., 201, 229, 248, 264 Manser, A., 88 map, mind and world, 156 maturity, 102, 258–9, 261 McBriar, A.M., 3, 47 McTaggart, J.M.E., 4, 7, 160, 166–7, 178, 248, 277–8, 294–5 Mill, J.S., 3, 5, 9, 14, 17, 74–6, 86–7, 270–3, 275, 293 Moore, G.E., 3–4, 10, 19, 148, 150–1, 172–3, 225 Morrow, John, 47–8, 231, 265

312 Index Mowat, C.L., 47 Muggletonians, 163 Muirhead, J.H., 7 murder, 42, 82 Nettleship, R.M., 37 Nicholson, P., 10, 15, 254 nisus, 105, 191 nomological, 281, 287, 295 Norway, 157 Oakeshott, Michael, 4, 22–3, 249–50, 264 obligation, 14, 16, 40, 41, 45, 60, 114, 118, 122, 132, 134, 161, 236, 252, 262–3, 265 organicism, 45, 47 organism, 14, 44, 52–4, 134, 158, 183, 191–2, 203 panpsychism, 18 Paul, Saint, 184 perfectionism, 16, 232, 233, 235, 243–4 Perry, R.B., 20, 174 Phelps, W., 127, 140 Plato, 3, 6, 12, 14, 17, 42, 114, 116, 124–5, 135, 144, 170, 183, 233–4, 248, 250 postulates, 9, 60, 95–6, 98–101, 103–5 poverty, 10, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46, 133, 138–9, 148, 151, 153, 155, 162, 191–2, 194, 217, 219, 220–1, 235–7, 239 pragmatism, 62, 68, 217–18, 250 Principle of Universal Causation, 270 Pringle-Pattison, A. Seth, 19, 88, 106 process, 8, 17–8, 20, 54, 64, 77, 80–1, 84–6, 91, 97, 100, 119–21, 133, 138–9, 148, 151, 153, 155, 162,

191, 192, 194, 217, 235–7, 239, 241, 257, 260–1, 263, 267, 270–1, 282, 292 profit, 189, 219–20, 243 progress, 10, 19–20 property, 8, 16; private, 237–8, 239–40 prudential self, 236–8, 240, 241–3 psychologism, 74, 77, 85, 129–30 psychology, 3–4, 6, 14, 17 punishment, 14, 116–17, 119, 212, 180, 184, 190, 253, 255, 257–8, 262 Rashdall, H., 266 realism, 4, 8, 10, 19, 20, 148–9, 152–4, 159–60, 167–8, 169, 172–3, 174–5, 201, 247–8 Real Will, 14–15, 47, 65, 243 recognition, 13, 22, 24, 58, 97, 108, 15, 117–19, 154, 171, 211, 212, 262 relations, 17, 28, 97, 118, 120, 126, 130, 135, 155–61, 163–4, 168, 175, 182, 224, 238, 248, 257, 264, 275, 276–82, 284, 286–8, 291–2, 294 relativism, 62 religion, 3, 4, 17, 20–1, 23, 57, 60, 122, 143, 178–205, 239 Renouvier, Charles, 60, 68 Ritchie, D.G., 3, 7, 41, 252, 256, 265 Rock Hall (estate), 4, 44–5 Ross, Ralph, 136, 141–2, 144 Rousseau, J-J, 14, 41 Royce, J., 4, 22, 127, 183, 196, 204 Russell, Bertrand, 4, 9, 10, 23–4, 51, 73–4, 79, 88, 130, 135, 142, 150, 152, 159, 172, 175 Ryle, George, 250, 264 Santayana, George, 4, 13, 127–36, 140–4, 174 Schell, E., 117, 124, 126

Index self-realization, 16, 40, 122, 132, 233, 235, 237–9, 241, 243–4 Settlement Movement, 35, 37 ‘Seven, the’ (group of philosophers), 150, 153, 159, 163, 174 Sittlichkeit, 15 ‘Six, the’ (group of philosophers), 150–1, 174 slave, 131, 134, 204, 242 Smith, Adam, 16, 238 Smith, J.A., 20, 22, 148–9, 150, 154, 164–6, 170–1, 177, 247 Smith, W. Cantwell, 21, 24 Social Contract, 263 social facts, 54–6, 58, 61, 64 socialism, 15–16, 218–9 social ontology, 202, 231, 219 Space-Time, 175 Spencer, Herbert, 14, 53 Spinoza, Baruch, 148, 160, 175 Sprigge, T.L.S., 20–1, 24 station, social, 14, 16, 185, 190, 197–8, 202, 211, 218, 220, 225 Stebbing, L.S., 89 Stout, G.F., 19, 173 stupidity, 12, 112–15, 117–18, 121–2 Sumner, Wayne, 232–3 supernatural, 179, 180, 185, 190 Sweet, William, 3, 46–9, 66–9, 87–89, 108, 178, 201–3, 205, 221, 226, 228,

313

230, 231, 244, 262–3, 265–6, 285, 295 Tarde, G., 53–5, 63 Taylor, Charles, 23, 69n69 teleology, 16, 69, 104–5, 191–3, 200, 234, 270, 273, 282 Temple, W., 169, 170 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 82 Thomas, G., 266 Toynbee, Arnold, 5, 37 unemployment, 222, 242, 255 unity, 13, 20, 22 utilitarianism, 23, 73–86, 90–1, 95, 100, 105, 125, 162, 277, 267–9, 271–5, 279, 284, 290–1 Vincent, A., 11, 34, 47, 50, 65–6, 266 Wallace, W., 87, 106, 152 war, 6, 15, 34, 39, 41, 43, 147, 187, 195, 228, 244, 247 Watson, J., 22, 106 Webb, Beatrice, 10, 33, 34, 36, 38, 45, 46 Webb, Sydney, 10, 38, 46 Weber, Max, 69n69 Whately, R., 76, 87 Whitehead, A.N., 10, 148, 152, 164, 173