Hodgson, Clifford, and the Unseen Universe

The Metaphysical Society debates were largely between those espousing religious commitment to the transcendent and those defending scientific naturalism. However, this paper highlights a third strain of thought to be found among the Society’s proceedings, one which regarded philosophy – and especially metaphysics – as an autonomous discipline with its own method and authority. To this way of thinking the proper project of the Society was precisely to use such independent and constructive philosophy to seek for reconciliation between the opposed views of religion and science. The paper focuses on the pair of Society members who most strongly embody this point of view, Shadworth Hodgson (1832–1912) and William Kingdon Clifford, (1845–79) analysing their several contributions and, in particular, comparing their different responses to the theory set out in Peter Guthrie Tait and Balfour Stewart’s influential work, The Unseen World. (1875) Both thinkers see merit in the idea of an unseen realm. However, both relativize this ‘unseen’ to a point of view, thereby ruling out of court that which is utterly and completely unknowable. In this respect they are linked together in common opposition to one further widespread philosophy of the day, agnosticism. From an historical perspective neither Hodgson nor Clifford met with much popular or lasting success in their attempts at finding a philosophical reconciliation between religion and science, and the paper concludes by contrasting their efforts with those of the British Idealists who, seemingly, were able to achieve much greater recognition in what was in many respects a similarly motivated ambition.

Introduction: The Metaphysical Society in Context

The introduction covers a history of the Metaphysical Society, including its aims and membership, role and legacy. After reviewing the previous scholarship on the Society, it lays out the structure of the volume, and introduces some of the figures who formed the membership of the Society, and their widely divergent views on such matters as, miracles, determinism, evolutionary ethics, liberalism. empiricism, intuitionism, and even metaphysics itself. It also discusses how the collection moves beyond past scholarship and draws directly on the papers presented at the Society, detailing the major concepts examined by the contributors, and offering a more detailed analysis of the Society’s inner dynamics and its wider impact on British society and culture. The contributors to this collection include scholars from different fields and different countries.

Between Intuition and Empiricism

William Benjamin Carpenter was a central figure in the Metaphysical Society. Aware of the tensions between the theists and the scientific naturalists in the Society he offered a middle ground. Although his early work in physiology had led him to doubt his own Unitarian faith, his mentor James Martineau had reassured him. However, as his studies in science developed, Carpenter found physiological evidence to underpin his faith. Although Carpenter failed to convince the most extreme among his friends in the Society; namely, Richard Holt Hutton and Thomas Huxley, or his lifelong mentor, Martineau, his ideas were attractive to many others. Henry Edward Manning adopted Carpenter’s ideas in defence of his own theism, for instance, and his ideas were publicized and appreciated in the wider scientific community.

Cause, Nature, and the Limits of Language

James Martineau and Frederick Maurice sought to show that naturalism was philosophically incoherent by showing the inadequacy of its fundamental terms, such as ‘force’, ‘cause’, and ‘nature’. Maurice argued that historical and contemporary uses of ‘nature’ rested on assumptions that required an agency beyond nature. Martineau claimed that the phenomena that suggested ‘cause’ to observers ultimately rested on that which is beyond the senses. Both claimed that the study of nature alone is insufficient to an understanding of the basic language of scientific investigation, and that there must be a realm beyond the physical. These papers show the importance to theists of Kantian categories and an idealist approach to nature. While Maurice and Martineau used epistemological arguments against naturalistic metaphysics, they did not claim that there were additional intuitions that granted access to truths beyond nature.

Liberalism and the Metaphysical Society

The initial scholarly and, in fact, only comprehensive study of the Metaphysical Society was by Alan Willard Brown, The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis 1869–1880 in 1947. For Brown, the central unifying theme of the Society was an underlying robust sense of liberalism. This chapter examines the diverse conceptions of liberalism within the membership of the Society in the 1870s through the lens of illustrative papers by members. These diverse conceptions encompass ideas of, for example, utilitarianism, evolutionary theory, intuitionism, rationalism, Whiggism, and idealism. Contra Brown’s reading, it is argued that there is no one singular accepted narrative on liberalism in the Society debates. Further, the decade of the 1870s—the heyday of the Metaphysical Society—is seen to coincide with a moment of cultural turbulence particularly over issues such as the rise of both natural science and democracy. In consequence, the diverse liberalisms and labyrinthine metaphysical debates of the Society are seen to both embody and reflect a broader sense of crisis in conceptual and social meanings in Victorian society.

Postscript

This chapter deals with the last meeting of the Society and why the Society came to an end. The goals of the Society were being met in other ways and the divisions between different groups, such as the scientific naturalists and the conservative Christians, were too great to bridge. There is also a discussion of the legacy of the Metaphysical Society through the founding of other intellectual associations, in the publications of its members, and in the creation of a more open public space for discussion of controversial ideas. The papers of the Society were preserved by librarians despite many obstacles. This chapter concludes with a brief discussion of how the papers still speak to us today in a post-truth age witnessing a revival of interest in metaphysics.

Evolution, Ethics, and the Metaphysical Society, 1869–1875

This chapter seeks to chart the lively debate about the evolutionary origins and development of morality as it occurred at the Metaphysical Society, a debate that began with the first paper delivered at the Society in 1869 and, after the intervention of several subsequent papers on the topic, came to an end in 1875. Proponents of an evolutionary ethics included the Darwinians John Lubbock and William Kingdon Clifford, while the critics included the journalist and editor Richard Holt Hutton, the classicist Alexander Grant, and the moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick. Much of the debate focused on competing interpretations of the historical record and the nature of historical evidence itself. For the critic of an evolutionary morality, the evidence for the origins and development of morality had to be sought in written records; for the proponent, the evidence needed to be sought much further back in time, in the era known as ‘prehistory’. This important distinction brought to the fore a related area of contention, namely the relationship between civilized European and contemporary aboriginal societies, and what that relationship meant for understanding the deep history of human moral development. The debate largely came to an end when Sidgwick challenged the unjustifiable normative claims that were often embedded in evolutionary descriptions of the origins and development of morality. He showed that a supposedly naturalist account of ethical principles was just as fraught as was the intuitionist account it sought to critique.

Catholics and the Metaphysical Basis of Science

During the 1870s, the decade during which the majority of the meetings of the Metaphysical Society took place, Catholics were grappling with the new environment created by the growing conservatism of their Church. The Catholic members of the Society such as Henry Manning, William Ward, and St. George Mivart adopted dissimilar strategies for dealing with Rome’s conservative turn. In their papers all three were eager to demonstrate that Catholicism was in no way antagonistic to science while they attempted to undermine the metaphysical basis of scientific naturalism. But whereas Manning defended Catholicism by emphasizing the debt of contemporary science to scholastic philosophy, Ward believed that scientific naturalism had to be confronted on its own terms using more modern philosophical weapons. Both Manning and Ward were staunch defenders of ultramontane conservatism, which advocated supreme papal authority. Since Mivart was a liberal Catholic, as well as a highly regarded scientist who accepted a version of evolutionary theory, it is not surprising that he differed from both Manning and Ward in his approach to critiquing scientific naturalism. Mivart not only argued that science must be conceived of as being within the framework of theism, he also drew attention to the emptiness of Huxley’s and Tyndall’s conception of religion as a matter of emotion. This chapter will discuss how these differences in strategy between Catholic religious figures and intellectuals played out within the meetings of the Metaphysical Society.

Intuitionism, Religious Belief, and Proof in the Papers of the Metaphysical Society

An issue frequently discussed by members of the Metaphysical Society concerned whether and how belief and believing can be justified. This exchange has been regarded as one between ‘empiricists’ and ‘intuitionists’. Here, I examine the responses to the issue of the justification of belief—particularly, religious belief—provided by those called ‘Christian intuitionists’. Little attention, however, has been given to what is meant by this intuitionism, or to the complexities of the Christian intuitionist position. I focus, therefore, on one of the founding members of the Society, the ecclesiastic and theologian, Henry Edward Manning, who arguably provides the most developed account of this view. Determining what Manning understood intuitionism to mean, allows one to see better what these intuitionists took religious belief to be, and how religious belief can be true and, as appropriate, reasonable or justifiable. In doing so, the so-called ‘Christian intuitionist’ position is made clearer.

Expertise in the Miracles Debate

This chapter analyses debates about miracles at the Metaphysical Society, arguing that members claimed authority to speak on this topic by positioning themselves as experts in their disciplines. The essay begins with debates about miracles in the public sphere of the 1860s and 1870s, showing how these debates raised questions about who was qualified to speak on the subject. These questions were taken up in a series of papers at the Society. As speakers focused on witnesses to alleged miracles and what kind of testimony could be relied on, they asserted their own reliability on the basis of their disciplinary training. These assertions cut across the different positions on miracles taken by the Society’s members and across the disciplines they represented. Still, these commonalities do not show that the Society’s members were unified as participants in elite culture, since they presented competing claims about what constituted expertise and who possessed it.