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Home , Australian philosophy, Charles Strong, David Stove

Chapter 6 and Empire

When the hysterical vision strikes The facade of an era it manifests Its insidious relations. — Ern Malley1

OW far can diverge from common sense? This is a question, of course, for philosophy, and one that has pro- Hduced a range of divergent opinions.2 Some regard the deliverances of common sense as data that philosophy can explain, but not deny. Others dismiss common sense as so much Stone Age , incorporating the confusions of the Cave Man in the street in much the same way that ordinary language includes antique science like ‘The sun rises in the east.’ Now, if departures from common sense are allowed, how far can you go? Surely there is a limit. David Armstrong’s first year lectures on Descartes included this joke: A philosophy lecturer noticed one of his students looking more and more worried as the course progressed. The student was absent for a while, then staggered in unkempt, dirty, obviously unslept. ‘Professor, Professor,’ he said, ‘You’ve got to help me. Do I really exist?’ The Professor looked around and said, ‘Who wants to know?’

1 Ern Malley, Collected Poems (Sydney, 1993), p. 36. 2 K. Campbell, ‘Philosophy and common sense’, Philosophy 63 (1988): pp. 161–74; cf. P. James, ‘Questioning the evidence of commonsense’, Journal of Politics 14 (1982/3): pp. 46–57; J. Kennett & M. Smith, ‘Philosophy and common sense: The case of weakness of ’, in M. Michael & J. O’Leary-Hawthorne, eds, Philosophy in Mind: The Place of Philosophy in the Study of Mind (Dordrecht, 1994), pp. 141–57. 112 Corrupting the Youth

The point of Descartes’ dictum, ‘I think, therefore I am’ is that, if you really try, you can doubt the of everything outside your own mind at least in principle. But there is no denying the existence of yourself, at least if ‘yourself’ means only the thinking that you directly . The most determined school of philosophy in pushing doubt to this theoretical limit is idealism. The best-known version of idealism is that of George Berkeley, the eighteenth-century Irish bishop who maintained that there were no physical objects outside the mind at all. Instead, he thought, God causes directly the play of (apparent) per- ceptions on our psyches. Hector Monro’s Sonneteer’s History of Phi- losophy, one of the shorter introductions to the subject, summarises Berkeley’s position as follows: ‘The scientific cosmos’, grumbled Berkeley, ‘Is, once you penetrate beneath the patter, Made up of something mystical called Matter. It’s not just that you see it through glass darkly, You cannot see the stuff at all. It’s starkly Devoid of scent and sound and colour, flatter And duller than a garden party’s chatter. We’re all bamboozled by the learned-clerkly Romantic balderdash. Is surely what we touch and hear and see. If what our senses yield is in the mind, Then so’s Reality.’ At once maligned, Good Berkeley’s universe, because it’s mental Is labelled thin, ethereal, transcendental.3 Needless to say, it is not a widely held opinion. Indeed, it invites jokes about why anybody who holds it should be concerned to ex- press it: who does he think he is talking to? The significance of Berkeley lies actually more in his arguments than in his conclusions. The colonial poet Charles Harpur wrote: His puzzles so, it don’t convince. So wide his arguments, we half suspect them Of aberrations though we can’t detect them.4

3 D.H. Monro, The Sonneteer’s History of Philosophy (Melbourne, 1981), p. 20; also in Philosophy 55 (1980): pp. 363–75 (repr. with permission of Dugald and Gordon Monro); comments on the causes of such opinions in H. Caton, ‘Pascal’s syndrome: as a symptom of depression and mania’, Zygon 21 (1986): pp. 319–52. 4 Quoted in Between Two Worlds: ‘Loss of Faith’ and Late Nineteenth Century Australian Literature, ed. A. Clark, J. Fletcher & R. Marsden (Sydney, 1979), p. 18.

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This is quite wrong, as Berkeley has an exceptional ability to make gross mistakes clearly, and is therefore in regular use as target practice for philosophy undergraduates — as David Stove said, an undergradu- ate course without Berkeley is like a zoo without elephants.5 He is important not only for students: David Armstrong’s early works, in which he refined the rigorous style of argumentation that became his hallmark, are on Berkeley.6 The only sign of Berkeleian idealism being taken seriously in Aus- tralia was an in 1936, when the Sydney Anglican Church wheeled out the Lord Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ire- land, the Most Reverend C.F. D’Arcy, to give a talk at Sydney Uni- versity. The Archbishop said that Berkeley’s doctrine, although it had been attacked severely, had not, in his opinion, been overthrown. ‘The principles of his philosophy supplied a great spiritual need at the present time.’ 7 No doubt there was a spiritual need, especially with John Anderson firmly in the chair of philosophy, but Berkeleian ide- alism is a cure surely at once worse than the disease, and necessarily ineffective. The Primate’s suggestion that the point of idealism is to pervade the universe with a general tone of moral uplift, amenable to religion, is even more evident in the other variant of the theory, Absolute Ide- alism. This is a late Victorian construction with some resemblance to the wedding-cake architecture beloved of the period. It is possibly too alien a thought-world to understand at this distance, but the gen- eral idea is that, while the physical world may exist, its nature is es- sentially mental rather than (what we take to be) material. Everything is interconnected, and is a manifestation of the Absolute, which is something like God, but less crudely personal, and also less distant from oneself.8 in its heyday — around the 1890s — became the first and only philosophy to be accepted as orthodoxy in

5 D.M. Armstrong, Course submission for 1974. 6 D.M. Armstrong, Berkeley’s Theory of Vision (Melbourne, 1960); Berkeley’s Philosophical Writings, ed. with an introduction by D.M. Armstrong (New York, 1965); Berkeley, the Push and Australian painting in H. McQueen, Suburbs of the Sacred (Ringwood, 1988), pp. 29–31. 7 SMH 12/6/1936, p. 10; some parallels in Christian Science: R. Dessaix, A Mother’s Disgrace (Sydney, 1994), pp. 79–81. 8 J. Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (London, 1957), chs 3–4; S. Candlish, ‘The status of idealism in Bradley’s metaphysics’, Idealistic Studies 11 (1981): pp. 242–53; S. Candlish, ‘Idealism and Bradley’s logic’, Idealistic Studies 12 (1982): pp. 251–9; S. Candlish, ‘Bradley, F.H.’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 1 pp. 857–63; J. O’Leary-Hawthorne, ‘Anti- realism, before and after Moore’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 12 (1995): pp. 443–67.

114 Corrupting the Youth the whole learned world (Paris, Heidelberg, Edinburgh, Peking, Adelaide ...). Then it simply evaporated. John Anderson always re- garded idealism as the prime enemy, but by his time there were hardly any live idealists left to devour — in the philosophical world, at least, though as we saw in chapter 1, there were some in the New South Wales Parliament. The importance of idealism for Australia is that all of the first philosophers in Australian universities were adher- ents, including, for example, Australia’s only philosophical knights, Sir Francis Anderson at Sydney and Sir William Mitchell at Adelaide.9 In his memorable attack, ‘Idealism: A Victorian horror story’, David Stove writes, Nineteenth-century idealism, accordingly, provided an important hold- ing-station or decompression chamber, for that century’s vast flood of in- tellectual refugees from Christianity; or at any rate, for the more philoso- phically inclined among them. The situation of these people was truly pitiful. The burden of their biblical embarrassments had become intoler- able ... The problem was how to part with the absurdities of Christianity, while keeping cosmic consolation: no one dreamt of parting with the lat- ter as well (it should hardly be necessary to say), or at any rate no philoso- pher did.10 An idealist, he says, is one of a philosophical turn of mind, who can no longer stomach the raw barbarisms of popular religion, but ‘in whom, nevertheless, the religious determination to have the universe congenial is still sovereign.’ This was a period in which a wide variety of remedies were tried by the less philosophical, including the Wis- dom of the East, theosophy, , and so on,11 as well as relig-

9 S. Grave, A History of Philosophy in Australia (St Lucia, 1984), ch. 2; J. Passmore, ‘Philosophy’, in The Pattern of Australian Culture, ed. A.L. McLeod (Melbourne, 1963), pp. 131–69; obituary of Mitchell in AJP 40 (1962): pp. 261–3; W.M. Davies, A Mind’s Own Place: The Life and Thought of Sir William Mitchell, (Lewiston, NY, 2003); account of Francis Anderson’s philosophy in G. Melleuish, Cultural Liberalism in Australia (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 87–95; W.M. O’Neil, ‘Francis Anderson’, in ADB, vol. 7 pp. 53– 5; obituary in AJPP 19 (1941): pp. 97–101; ‘Francis Anderson: Professor and citizen’, Hermes 27 (3) (Nov 1921); Francis Anderson’s papers in Sydney University Archives listed at www.usyd.edu.au/arms/archives/anderson.htm ; a late example of idealism in G. James, Philosophy: A Synopsis (Brisbane, 1957). 10 D.C. Stove, The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies (Oxford, 1991), pp. 87–8. 11 Jill Roe, Beyond : Theosophy in Australia, 1879–1939 (Kensington, 1986); R. Dixon, Writing the Colonial Adventure (Cambridge, 1995), ch. 6; H. Green, Ulysses Bound (Canberra, 1973), pp. 355–6, 528–41; ‘Spirit- rappin’’, in Henry Lawson: Autobiographical and Other Writings, ed. C. Roderick (Sydney, 1972), pp. 260–1; J. Curtis, Rustlings in the Golden City:

6. Idealism and Empire 115 ion substitutes like the ‘religion of humanity’, and Australian nationalism,12 and attempts to find a non-dogmatic common core of Christianity. As the Catholic Archbishop Vaughan said, ‘the troubled air resounds with Pan-Christianities, Pantisolatries, Eirenica, the frat- ernization of Churches, and the amalgamation of sects.’13 And as one of those he attacked was happy to admit, ‘our thought is eclectic, our method is elastic.’14 But for those who demanded philosophy, there could be only one possible answer, idealism. ‘That is,’ (Stove says) something like Berkeley’s pan-spiritualism, as long as it could be freed from its embarrassing implication of universal hallucination. If Berkeley’s too gaseous world could be solidified (so to speak), or at least ‘jellied’, by being passed through a strong field of Kant-Hegel radiation; that would be the very thing. Let the refugees from Christianity be told, on the highest possible philosophical authority, that Nature is Thought, that the Uni- verse is Spirit, that the Absolute is experience, that the dualism of matter and mind, like the related dualism of fact and value, is a superficial one, and ‘ultimately’ (as the Hegelians loved to say) even a self-contradictory one. That should buck them up, as nothing else could.15 Stove’s diagnosis is confirmed by the poet Christopher Brennan’s reaction to Francis Anderson’s lectures at Sydney University. After leaving the Jesuit Riverview College, the undergraduate Brennan experienced the doubts customary in these cases. ‘Religion began to worry me in my 19th year ... The next Christmas I experienced a sudden collapse of all the barriers and entered the philosophy class in March 1890 a ripe agnostic, already beginning to elaborate a special of the Unknowable, which was the Absolute. The year

Being a Record of Spiritualistic in Ballarat and Melbourne (Ballarat, 1890?) 12 P. Morgan, ‘Australian nationalism as a religion substitute’, in Between Two Worlds, ed. Clark, Fletcher & Marsden, pp. 53–72; F.S. O’Donnell, ‘Socialism and religion’, Austral Light 6 (1905): pp. 352–61; cf. J.E. Poole, ‘Marcus Clarke: “Christianity is dead”’, Australian Literary Studies 6 (1973): pp. 128–42; R.D. Jordan, ‘Adam Lindsay Gordon and the religion of Australia’, Westerly 43 (2) (Winter 1998): pp. 27–42. 13 R. Vaughan, Hidden Springs (Sydney, 1876), p. 38. 14 A.B. Camm, Phases of Unitarianism, Orthodoxy and Freethought in Sydney (Sydney, 1885), p. 2; also A.B. Camm, Liberal Religion in the Higher Current Literature (Sydney, 1883); D. Scott, The Halfway House to Infidelity: A History of the Melbourne Unitarian Church, 1853–1973 (Melbourne, 1980); S. Magarey, Unbridling the Tongues of Women (Sydney, 1985), ch. 3; R. Ely, ‘The tyranny of amenity and distance: The religious liberalism of Andrew Inglis Clark’, in An Australian Democrat, ed. M. Haward & J. Warden (Hobart, 1995), pp. 98–118. 15 Stove, The Plato Cult, pp. 88–9; some primary evidence in J.G. Stewart, ‘The ’, Victorian Review 7 (1883): pp. 29–36.

116 Corrupting the Youth

I spent in open conflict with F.A.’16 Brennan has caught on to one of the defining tics of Absolute Idealism, its plague of Capital Letters. The caricature some still have of philosophers, as men spouting vapid and implausible generalities about and Wisdom and the Abso- lute, is perhaps the last vestige of the reign of Absolute Idealism. In Melbourne, idealism actually constituted itself as an institutional religion, in the Reverend Charles Strong’s Australian Church. Strong took and science to have rendered outmoded the myths of the Old Testament, and to have shown the way forward to ‘the idea of a universe that lives and moves and has its being in God ... Ultimate Reality is not to be found outside but inside us, in our own minds and natures.’17 The Church, formed after Strong’s persecution by his own Presbyterian Church, was a success for some years. A typically idealist project was Strong’s leadership of the Mel- bourne Peace Society; he believed that Australia could lead the way towards the resolution through arbitration of conflict between nations, as it had for the conflict between labour and capital.18 Francis Anderson was assistant minister in the Church before leaving for Syd- ney University,19 and and the poet Bernard O’Dowd were staunch supporters.20 Idealism also had its political significance, arising from its tendency to reify abstract concepts and endow them with claims on people. History and Progress were favourites. The Mind that permeates the world ought to express itself in History, which is thus a cosmic proc- ess with a direction rather than a statistical result of individual human actions or just one damned thing after another. The universe, Francis Anderson said, was in constant evolution, a never-ending progressive unfolding towards a higher stage of development; ‘History is a great

16 C. Brennan, ‘Curriculum vitae’, in Christopher Brennan, ed. T. Sturm (Brisbane, 1984), p. 177; Brennan’s version of idealism in ‘Fact and idea’ (1898), in Sturm, pp. 187–96; discussion in Melleuish, Cultural Liberalism, pp. 97–101; selections from Brennan’s dissertation ‘The Metaphysic of Nescience’ reprinted in R.B. Marsden, ‘New light on Brennan’, Southerly 31 (1971): pp. 119–35. 17 ‘The Immanent God of modern philosophy’, sermon of 1898, in C.R. Badger, The Reverend Charles Strong and the Australian Church (Melbourne, 1971), pp. 271–7. 18 M. Saunders, ‘The origins and early years of the Melbourne Peace Society, 1899–1914’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 79 (1993): 96– 114; cf. C. Strong, ‘The tercentenary of George Fox’, AJPP 2 (1924): pp. 283–5. 19 See The Australian Church: Report MDCCCLXXXVII and sermons preached by Chas. Strong and Francis Anderson (Melbourne, 1887). 20 See B. O’Dowd, ‘To ’, in The Poems of Bernard O’Dowd (Melbourne, 1944), p. 166.

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Professor (later Sir) Francis Anderson, c. 1902 (National Library of Austra- lia) adventure in which man sets out to discover himself and the secret of his personality.’21 Religion, of a non-sectarian sort, was also approved of, as promoting an ‘advance to a further and higher phase of

21 F. Anderson, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity (Sydney, 1922), p. 22, quoted and discussed in Melleuish, Cultural Liberalism, p. 88 and G. Melleuish, ‘Liberal intellectuals in early twentieth century Australia’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 35 (1989): pp. 1–12, at p 3; D.C. Band, ‘The critical reception of English neo- in Britain and America, 1914–1960’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 26 (1980): pp. 228–41; J. Docker, `The origins of Paddy McGuinness’, Arena Magazine 3 (Feb/Mar 1993): pp. 21–24.

118 Corrupting the Youth development, under the guidance of the spirit of Truth.’22 One of the leading British idealists was Sir Henry Jones, John Anderson’s main teacher in philosophy; the pupil’s views on the state, religion, and technical philosophical questions are diametrically opposite to Sir Henry’s. Jones visited Francis Anderson in Sydney in 1908, giving a series of lectures later published as — note the title — Idealism as a Practical Creed. His farewell lecture concluded with a marvellously Edwardian piece of orotund condescension towards the colonials: I cannot forget the greatness, and the difficulties of your enterprise — a new people amidst the lonely silence of a vast continent. Material pros- perity you will attain, I have no doubt; and it is worth attaining. Perhaps power among the nations of the world awaits you, which is also worth attaining. But a kingdom founded upon righteousness, a life amongst yourselves sanctified in all its ways by this faith in man, in the world and in God, is greater far than all these things. I can form no higher wish for you than that it may be your destiny to try by actual experiment how far this faith of the Idealists will stand the strain of a nation’s practice.23 John Anderson later recalled with a degree of horror Jones forcing himself to spell out the optimistic idealist faith of Robert Browning while suffering the pains of advanced cancer.24 The incident does something to explain the tremendous emotional force behind John Anderson’s reaction to anything that smelt of a sentimental attach- ment to another world, or of consolation or uplift. If Sydney was only mildly responsive to such ‘practical idealism’, Melbourne saw one of its boldest experiments. There, the unique Australian scheme for the settlement of industrial disputes by an Arbitration Court was undertaken under the presidency of the idealist

22 F. Anderson, ‘The present religious situation’, AJPP 1 (1923): pp. 216, 219–22, also in Melleuish, ‘Liberal intellectuals’. 23 H. Jones, Idealism as a Practical Creed: Being the Lectures on Philosophy and Modern Life Delivered Before the (, 1910), pp. 298– 9, quoted and discussed in B. Kennedy, A Passion to Oppose (Melbourne, 1995) pp. 76; similar in F. Anderson, ‘A modern philosopher — Green of Balliol’, Union Book of 1902 (Sydney, 1902), see Melleuish, Cultural Liberalism, p. 88; ‘Philosophy and modern life’, Hermes 14 (3) (July 1908): pp. 54–6; more generally, M. Sawer, ‘The ethical state: Social liberalism and the critique of contract’, Australian Historical Studies 31 (2000): pp. 67–90 . 24 [G. Munster], ‘Prophet in a gown’, Nation no. 9 (17/1/1959), pp. 10–13, at p. 10; for Jones on Browning see H. Jones, Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher (Glasgow, 1891); for Browning as an answer to Darwin, M.W. MacCallum, Browning after a Generation (Sydney, 1924), pp. 8–13; cf. D. Stove on ‘horror Victorianorum’ in Against the Idols of the Age (New Brunswick, 1999), pp. 25–32.

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Henry Bournes Higgins. He wrote of the purpose of arbitration in typically idealist prose: Though the functions of the Court are definite and limited, there is opened up for idealists a very wide horizon, with, perhaps, something of the glow of a sunrise ... Give them [the workers] relief from their materi- alistic anxiety; give them reasonable that their essential material needs will be met by honest work, and you release infinite stores of hu- man energy for higher efforts, for nobler ideals, when ‘Body gets its sop, and holds its noise, and leaves soul free a little’.25 The quotation is from Browning, on whose thought Higgins had written. 26 To appreciate fully the victory of idealism in its day, one needs to understand that a student would not avoid it simply by failing to take philosophy. At the time Francis Anderson was serving as Sydney University’s first professor of philosophy, the occupants of the new chairs of Modern Languages and of History were giving their students much the same message. Mungo MacCallum had studied the same idealist philosophy at Glasgow as Francis Anderson, and had produced a long idealist interpretation of the Arthurian legend.27 And George Arnold Wood in History proclaimed a similar optimistic doctrine of progress driven by spiritually active men28 — demonstrated, he thought, nowhere better than in the history of Australia, from its foundation by noble convicts to its apotheosis at Gallipoli and Flan- ders.29 A secular version of these notions appears in What Happened in History?, a work of immense worldwide popularity written by Francis Anderson’s student, V. Gordon Childe. It is resolutely about the Pro- gress of Man: ‘history may still justify a belief in progress in days of

25 H.B. Higgins, A New Province for Law and Order (London, 1922, repr. London, 1968), pp. 37–8; see P.S. Callaghan, ‘Idealism and arbitration in H.B. Higgins’ New Province for Law and Order’, Journal of Australian Studies 13 (1983): pp. 56–66. 26 H.B. Higgins, Robert Browning: His Mind and Art (Melbourne, 1906); also H.B. Higgins, ‘Australian ideals’, Austral Light 3 (1902): pp. 9–19. 27 M. MacCallum, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Arthurian Story from the XVIth Century (Glasgow, 1894); Melleuish, Cultural Liberalism, pp. 82–5; L. Dale, The English Men (Toowoomba, 1997), pp. 27–32. 28 R.M. Crawford, A Bit of a Rebel: The Life and Work of George Arnold Wood (Sydney, 1975), pp. 135–42; B.H. Fletcher, ‘History as a moral force: George Arnold Wood at Sydney University, 1891–1928’, in The Discovery of Australian History, 1890–1939, ed. S. Macintyre & J. Thomas (Melbourne, 1995), pp. 10–27; Melleuish, Cultural Liberalism, pp. 85–7. 29 G.A. Wood, ‘Convicts’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 8 (1922): pp. 177–208.

120 Corrupting the Youth depression.’30 Something similar occurred in Melbourne, where the idealist views of history of the philosophy professor W.R. Boyce Gibson had an impact on the overblown style of history associated with Melbourne University.31 At their best, doctrines of historical evolution towards a better world could inspire reasonable projects of reform. Francis Anderson himself spent a great deal of effort on re- forms of the public education system and mental health services, and wrote controversial pamphlets on such subjects as ‘The Root of the Matter: Social and Economic Aspects of the Sex Problem’. ‘The end of teaching’, he said, ‘is to produce self-active pupils’,32 and unlike some who have expressed similar opinions, he meant it. ‘An inspirer of youth to action in the interests of daring and adventure’, 33 he had an impact on, among other students, H.V. Evatt (who gained a Uni- versity Medal in philosophy and tutored in the subject), the anthro- pologist and architect of policy on Aborigines, A.P. Elkin, and Ernest Burgmann, the ‘Red Bishop’.34 And since the idealists had taken charge of reforms of the school curriculum as well, it was not just the small number of university- trained intellectuals who were being fed idealism. Donald Horne is here describing his primary school education:

30 Melleuish, Cultural Liberalism, pp. 126–36; G. Melleuish, ‘The place of Vere Gordon Childe in Australian intellectual history’, in Childe and Australia, ed. P. Gathercole, T.H. Irving & G. Melleuish (St Lucia, 1995), pp. 147–161. 31 D. Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick: A Radical Life (Sydney, 1979), pp. 14–15. 32 F. Anderson, On Teaching to Think (Sydney, 1903), p. 4; recollections of his teaching in G.V. Portus, Happy Highways (Melbourne, 1953), pp. 62–7, 176–8; A.R. Chisholm, Men Were My Milestones (Melbourne, 1958), pp. 41– 2; on his work on education reform, A.R. Crane & W.G. Walker, Peter Board (Melbourne, 1957), pp. 13–19, 153–4, 286–7 and J. Roberts, Maybanke Anderson: Sex, Suffrage and Social Reform (Sydney, 1993), ch. 6. 33 E. Morris Miller, ‘The beginnings of philosophy in Australia and the work of Henry Laurie. I’, AJPP 7 (1929): pp. 241–51, at p. 250; on Morris Miller and his idealism, M. Roe, Nine Australian Progressives (St Lucia, 1984), ch. 10 (Miller got his start by working his way up through the ranks of the Moonee Ponds Mental Improvement Society); J. Reynolds and M. Giordano, Countries of the Mind (Hobart, 1985); also E.M. Miller, ‘McKellar Stewart: a contemporary’s appreciation’, AJP 32 (1954): pp. 169–84. 34 T. Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character (Malmsbury, Vic, 1978), ch. 2; P. Crockett, Evatt: A Life (Melbourne, 1993), pp. 46, 49; K. Buckley, B. Dale & W. Reynolds, Doc Evatt (Melbourne, 1994), pp. 10–12; T. Wise, The Self-Made Anthropologist: A Life of A.P. Elkin (Sydney, 1985), pp. 18–20; P. Hempenstall, The Meddlesome Priest: A Life of Ernest Burgmann (Sydney, 1993), pp. 43–6; also G. Barwick, A Radical Tory (Sydney, 1995), p. 12.

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We were offered a view of life based on an optimistic belief in inevitable progress, a progress that would proceed of necessity, without our doing anything in particular about it. It was the officially expressed belief of the New South Wales Department of Public Instruction that there was a natural ‘sense of growth and development’ in human affairs, and that ‘the human race ... was developing towards better and happier conditions of life’. This meant that one of our schoolroom views of mankind was opti- mistic, progressive and radical. We were on the side of revolution, ex- ploration and innovation. We were for the barons against King John; for Wat Tyler against Richard II; for Sir Thomas More against Henry VIII, and for Henry VIII against the Pope ... Human history was a predictable progress of discovery and reform; innovation served the welfare of the ordinary people in a sure evolution from serfdom to having a good time playing tennis at Muswellbrook.35 Horne is speaking of 1933, at the end of the twenty years from the Somme to the Depression. Also given a capital letter and endowed with moral standing were the State and the Empire. The State was not adored in the way it was in some European countries, if only because Australia had barely established itself as a nation. The Empire certainly was. As an entity to inspire loyalty, the Empire had several useful and remarkable proper- ties. On the one hand, it was abstract, but on the other, it was right where you were. In fact, you were part of it. Its ability to be in many places at once, and to unite the emotional high points of all of them, made it the sort of entity the Absolute Idealists were proud of. It was itself not a mere person, but was strengthened by personal devotion to the monarch. All creeds could unite in praying for its welfare. And its successful defence against its many enemies made for stirring sto- ries. All in all, it was a perfect focus for loyalty in the armed forces and for idolatry in schools.36 Those who had charge of its implementation in schools were careful to avoid making the Empire an excuse for simple jingoism. Something morally superior was aimed at. A circular from Peter Board, Francis Anderson’s chief ally in school reform, on the celebration of Empire Day in 1906 instructs: ‘It is not intended that there should be any encouragement of an exag- gerated sentiment arising out of a mere glorification of the British

35 D. Horne, The Education of Young Donald (2nd ed, Ringwood, 1988), p. 67. 36 S.G. Firth, ‘Social values in the New South Wales primary school 1880– 1914’, Melbourne Studies in Education 1970 (Melbourne, 1971): pp. 123–59; N. Townshend, ‘ in the School Magazine of New South Wales, 1916–1922’, Journal of Australian Studies 11 (1982): pp. 36–53; B. Bessant & A. Spaull, Politics of Schooling (Melbourne, 1976), ch. 1; hostile philosophical comment in D.H. Monro, ‘The concept of myth’, Sociological Review 42 (1950): pp. 115–32.

122 Corrupting the Youth races by the disparagement of other peoples, but that the interest in the Empire should rest on a of what it is, and on an ap- preciation of the higher qualities that have played a part in its pro- gress. By this means, also, pupils may be encouraged to become worthy citizens of their own native country, feel a pride in its pro- gress, and an obligation to advance its interests.’37 During the rest of the year, the Empire and its occupied a large part of the syllabus, especially in history. As to the particular higher qualities for which the Empire was to be admired, the view of a typical textbook is that of A Story of the English People, by K.R. Cramp, later the historian of the New South Wales Freemasons.38 ‘For British rule, in spite of a mistake here and there, has brought peace, , liberty and prosperity in its train wherever it has been established. And the size, wealth and population of the Empire is a kind of guarantee that those ideals of Peace, Justice, Liberty and Pros- perity must be respected. For they endear British rule to the native races.’39 Between the Wars, Empire Day retained a place alongside Anzac Day, and became an occasion for student practice in giving talks on the moral destiny of the Empire.40 Though not as deeply significant as Anzac Day, students were told, it was celebrated more widely. On that day, in almost every school in the Empire, children are reminded, not so much of the greatness and wealth of the Empire, but of the need to

37 P. Board, ‘Empire Day Celebration’, circular, Public Instruction Gazette (N.S.W.) 1 (1905–7): p. 78; F.B. Boyce, Fourscore Years and Seven (Sydney, 1934), ch. 10. 38 On the author see ‘K.R. Cramp OBE, BA, FRAHS’, NSW Freemason 46 (1951): pp. 446–7; ADB vol. 8 p. 135. 39 K.R. Cramp, W. Lennard & J.H. Smairl, A Story of the English People: Issued by the Department of Public Instruction for Use in Schools (Sydney, 1919), p. 408; at greater length in Walter Murdoch, The Australian Citizen: An Elementary Account of Civic Rights and Duties (Melbourne, 1912), ch. 8. also ch. 27 on ‘liberty’; L. Alston, The White Man’s Work in Asia and Africa (London, 1907), esp. ch. 2, ‘Christian and philosophy in relation to the lower races’; further in Partington, Australian Nation, pp. 162–4; G. Souter, The Idle Hill of Summer (Sydney, 1972), pp. 46–7; on the moral aspects of university history teaching, see One Hundred Years of the Faculty of Arts (Sydney, 1952), pp. 65–8; Irish Catholic scepticism about British ‘freedoms’ in ‘The struggle for freedom’, Austral Light 10 (1909): pp. 687– 701. 40 R. Hall, The Real John Kerr (Sydney, 1978), p. 12; R. Cracknell, A Biased Memoir (Melbourne, 1997), p. 10; H.L. Rubinstein, ‘Empire loyalism in inter-war Victoria’, Victorian Historical Journal 70 (1) (June 1999): pp. 67–83; M. French, ‘The ambiguity of Empire Day in New South Wales, 1901–21’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 24 (1978): pp. 61–74.

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Empire Day, Coopers Glen Public School, near Bega, 1913 (Bicentennial Copying Project, State Library of NSW)

keep it bound together by ties of good will and love. This can be done by helping one another, and being fair to one another... In a small way, even a boy may become an Empire builder, for so long as he works honestly, strives for the right, and keeps his mind clean, he is adding something to the greatness and glory of our Empire.41 There is no point in trying to force a naturalistic interpretation on this passage. An Empire which is bound together by ties of love and can be benefited by a boy’s keeping his mind clean is an idealist en- tity. It is the same language as used by a real idealist, Sir Francis Anderson, who spoke of the ‘moral bonds of union’ which, with the person of the King, unified the Empire more than economic self-in- terest or military fears.42 Sir Henry Jones, too, said that in performing

41 G.T. Spaull, New Syllabus English and Australian History for Fifth Classes, with Civics and Moral Stories (Sydney, 1937), pp. 214–5; on Spaull’s enthusiasm for Francis Anderson and Peter Board’s reforms, S.H. Smith & G.T. Spaull, History of Education in New South Wales (Sydney, 1925), pp. 195–200. 42 F. Anderson, The Empire and the League (League of Nations Union, Leaflet series no. 7, Sydney, 1937?); more religious aspects in R. Ely, ‘The forgotten nationalism: Australian civic protestantism in the Second World War’, Journal of Australian Studies 20 (1987): pp. 59–67; R. Frappell, ‘Imperial

124 Corrupting the Youth his duty to the state an individual was building his own character, ‘at the same time he is a humble hod-bearer on the walls of a greater and more permanent edifice than his own character; he is building the State.’43 Even the very young John Anderson took some part in this, at the very time when the Great War was beginning to make it look as though History might have lost the plot.44

HE ideology of Empire was not simply imposed on an unwilling Tmass of children, either. Boys were spending their own pennies freely enough on English magazines full of Public School ripping yarns. The Melbourne University archivist recalled how common it was to find among the papers left by a distinguished scientist or judge copies of the Magnet or Gem, tucked furtively away.45 These were not simply entertaining stories, but models that encouraged imitation of a certain ideal. Donald Horne says, ‘At other times I miserably contem- plated how I was not living up to the standards of the Billy Bunter stories or acting like the son of a trooper in the Australian Light Horse.’46 How this ideal could appear to one who absorbed it fully is perfectly expressed by one of the Empire’s personifications in later life, Robert Menzies: To many people the British Commonwealth is a curious machine that has worked; looking to the outsider rather like a Heath Robinson invention; but relied upon by mankind twice during this century, to their great de- liverance. But what does it mean to you? I think I know what it means to me. May I break through our usual polite reticences and tell you? To me it means (and here you will find a curious jumble in both time and place) a cottage in the wheat lands of the North-West of the State of Victoria, with the Bible and Henry Drummond and Jerome K. Jerome

fervour and Anglican loyalty 1901–1929’, ch. 4 of Anglicanism in Australia: A history, ed. B. Kaye (Melbourne, 2002). 43 H. Jones, Principles of Citizenship (London, 1919), quoted and discussed in J. Morrow, ‘, “” and the First World War’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 28 (1982): pp. 380–90. 44 J. Anderson, essay ‘Is the state a moral agent?’ (1916), discussed in Kennedy, A Passion to Oppose, pp. 57–59; A.J. Baker, ‘Anderson’s intellectual background and influences’, Heraclitus 33 (Oct 1993): pp. 4–12. 45 I. Britain, ‘In pursuit of Englishness: Public School stories and Australian culture’, University of Melbourne Library Journal 1 (4): (1994/5): pp. 11–17, at pp. 13–14; also M. Lyons & L. Taska, Australian Readers Remember (Melbourne, 1992): pp. 92–3; J. Redrup, Banished Camelots (Sydney, 1997), p. 203; for girls: A Woollacott, ‘“All this is the Empire, I told myself”: Australian women’s voyages “home” and the articulation of colonial whiteness’, American Historical Review 102 (1997): pp. 1003–29. 46 D. Horne, Education of Young Donald, p. 87.

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and The Scottish Chiefs and Burns on the shelves. It means the cool green waters of the Coln as they glide past the church at Fairford; the long sweep of the Wye Valley above Tintern, with a Wordsworth in my pocket; looking north across the dim Northumbrian moors from the Roman Wall, with the rowan trees on the slope before me, and two thousand years of history behind; old colour and light and soaring stone in York Minster. It means King George and Queen Mary coming to their Jubilee in Westminster Hall as Big Ben chimed out and Lords and Com- mons bowed, and, as they bowed, saw beyond the form of things to a man and a woman greatly loved ... It means, at Canberra, at Wellington, at Ottawa, at Cape Town, the men of Parliament meeting as those met at Westminster seven hundred years ago; at Melbourne the lawyers practis- ing the Common Law first forged at Westminster. It means Hammond at Sydney, and Bradman at Lords ... It means the past ever rising in its strength to forge the future. Is all this madness? Should I have said, as clever, modern men are wont to do, that the British Commonwealth means an integral association of free and equal nations, whose mutual rights and obligations you will find set out in the Balfour Formula, the Statute of Westminster, and later docu- ments: Or should I have watered it down, as some would have us do and define it in terms of friendship, or alliance, or pact, as if we were discuss- ing an Anglo-Portuguese treaty? A plague take such notions. Unless the Commonwealth is to British peo- ple all over the world a spirit, a proud memory, a confident prayer, cour- age for the future, it is nothing.47 Menzies had unfortunately to eulogise here not the Empire, which undoubtedly did exist, but the British Commonwealth, whose actu- ality was by no means obvious. This was despite some fancy footwork and play with mirrors by Arthur Balfour — no mean philosopher, though a prime minister. (John Anderson’s first piece in the Austral- asian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, printed shortly after his arri- val in Sydney in 1927, was a dismissive note on one of Balfour’s books.48) Balfour had been one of the first English statesmen to appreciate that the dominions could no longer be regarded as colo- nies, and had urged the attendance of the Duke of York, later George V, at the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia to cement a necessary personal bond in place of the constitutional one.49 Some thought Balfour’s attempt to define the essence of the British Com-

47 R. Menzies, lecture of 1950, in R.G. Menzies, Speech is of Time (London, 1958), pp. 3–20, at pp. 19–20; cf Menzies’s diary of his first visit to Britain, in M. Davie, Anglo-Australian Attitudes (London, 2000), pp. 121–7. 48 J. Anderson, note on A.J. Balfour, Familiar Beliefs and Transcendent Reason, AJPP 5 (1927): p. 233; see also D.C. Stove, The Plato Cult (Oxford, 1991), p. 107. 49 K. Young, Arthur James Balfour (London, 1963), p. 194, cf. pp. 450–2.

126 Corrupting the Youth monwealth in words was a mistake, and it would have been better to muddle through with implicit understandings in the fashion of Brit- ain’s unwritten constitution. Menzies succinctly explained why the inarticulateness of tradition is a positive : One of the great current difficulties of creating a happy, mutual under- standing between the British and the other great Powers arises from the fact that our intellectual tradition is inductive — trial, error, trial, success, a precedent — so that we sometimes appear to the onlooker to have no principles; while deductive minds elsewhere sometimes seem to us to be so occupied by pure syllogisms that common sense and human values seem to disappear. Perhaps it was because of our instinctive reluctance to write things down that the Balfour formula, which seemed in the first enthusiasm to solve everything, ended up by leaving most things un- solved.50 But the Empire had itself left a number of problems unsolved, most notably the moral justification of its own existence. Its elevated rhetoric on the Liberty of Peoples was its undoing. The Empire that survived Hitler had no answer to Gandhi. There was to be no British Dien Bien Phu. Its success in justifying the existence of its servants, or providing them with meaning for their lives, was more mixed. One might die alone and unknown, but one could still enjoy the satisfaction of knowing one had been of some service to the Empire — been with Younghusband to Lhasa, brought law to the Barotse, or stood firm against Nasser over Suez — one had been part of some greater Whole. Not many of the secular ideologies that have succeeded the Empire can say as much.

T THEIR worst, doctrines of the inevitable evolution of historical Aforces led to the deportation to Siberia of millions believed to be standing in the way of the March of History. Marx’s ‘dialectical ma- terialism’ was a kind of reversal of Hegel’s idealism, and meant that the moral restraints of idealism were discarded but the inevitability of historical development retained. As a result, orthodox Marxism was always on the lookout for ‘Idealist’ deviationism. The results included grave suspicion in the Soviet Union over quantum mechanics and relativity; locally, the Party leader Kavanagh, in a bizarre misunder- standing of John Anderson’s position, reported to the Central Com- mittee:

50 R. Menzies, ‘The ever-changing Commonwealth’, The Times, 1956, repr. in Menzies, Speech is of Time, pp. 21–32, at p. 24; again pp. 38–9; further on Menzies’ view of Empire in J. Brett, Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People (Sydney, 1992), pp. 129–55.

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In 1929 I had an argument with him over this very question, in 395 Sus- sex Street. He denied that his ideas of things were the result of sense im- pressions. I asked him if a table that was in the hall was on the floor or in his mind. He said that the table was in his mind and not an impression of it. I pointed out that if that was the case there must be two tables because it was also in my mind.51 That is all many years ago. Is idealism as dead as it seems? Another point of interest in Stove’s attack is his identification of an argument at the bottom of idealism, which is at once so bad and so pervasive as to encourage despair in the philosophical enterprise. Stove calls it the ‘Gem’,52 and exhibits it in all its appalling simplicity in Berkeley. The argument is: You cannot think of trees-outside-the-mind, without having them in mind. Therefore, trees cannot be outside the mind. Stove finds this argument many times in the nineteenth-century Brit- ish idealists whose followers founded philosophy in Australia. A gen- eral version of the argument is the winner of Stove’s Competition to Find the Worst Argument in the World. Here is his ‘Judge’s report’ on the ‘competition’: Ten candidate-arguments were submitted. All of them had some merit, and some of them were very interesting indeed. But none of them is worse than the argument I had in mind when I started the competition. Consequently none of them wins the prize. Three dimensions, it will be recalled, entered into overall degree-of-bad- ness as here understood: (a) the intrinsic awfulness of the argument; (b) its degree of acceptance among philosophers; (c) the degree to which it has escaped criticism. The argument — really a family of arguments — which I had in mind as the worst, was the following: We can know things only: • as they are related to us • under our forms of perception and understanding • in so far as they fall under our conceptual schemes, etc So, we cannot know things as they are in themselves. If there is a worse argument than this, I am still to learn of it. This argu- ment has imposed on countless philosophers, from Kant to the present hour, yet it is very hard to beat for awfulness ...53

51 Kennedy, p. 89; Anderson’s true views on the question in ‘’, in J. Anderson, Studies in Empirical Philosophy (Sydney, 1962), pp. 292–313, at pp. 299–300. 52 Stove, Plato Cult, p. 140. 53 D.C. Stove, ‘Judge’s report on the competition to find the worst argument in the world’, January 1986, repr. in D.C. Stove, Cricket versus Republicanism (Quakers Hill, 1995), pp. 66–7.

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As we will see in chapter 15, ‘to the present hour’ is no exaggera- tion, as the argument underpins the modern form of linguistic ideal- ism known as postmodernism. Stove, idiosyncratic in so many of his views, was typical of Austra- lian philosophy at least in his defence of realism, the view opposed to idealism which admits that reality exists in the way we ordinarily believe it does. Work in favour of realism is even something of an Australian specialty. Michael Devitt wrote, ‘I have always been a realist about the external world. Such realism is common in Australia. Some say that Australian philosophers are born realists. I prefer to attribute our realism to nurture rather than nature.’54 (‘Nurture’ means, of course, in large part John Anderson, however oddly the word applies to him.) John Passmore writes in similar vein; Australian philosophy, broadly considered, is direct, clear, forceful, blunt, realist, naturalistic, secular, interested in the world rather than in language and certainly unprepared to identify the two, respectful of science, un- willing to draw a sharp distinction between the conceptual and the em- pirical, not conspicuous for its subtlety.55 It is true that ‘broadly considered’ means here ‘except for those who disagree with myself’, and that it is an old Andersonian speaking, but outsiders say much the same thing, at least regarding realism. According to a survey paper on realism, ‘Australia, out of the loop evolutionarily, continues as stronghold of realists and marsupials.’56 A long line of graduate students going from Australian universities to the top American philosophical schools have experienced more than a little culture shock at the anti-realist tendencies they have found themselves expected to take seriously. There is also a British school of anti-realism, one of whose mem- bers wrote (under the impression that Australia was discovered in

54 M. Devitt, Realism and Truth (Princeton, 1984), p. vii; also M. Devitt, ‘Aberrations of the realism debate’, Philosophical Studies 61 (1991): pp. 43–63; J. Wright, Realism and Explanatory Priority (Dordrecht, 1997); something less realist in H. Price, Facts and the Function of Truth (Oxford, 1988); H. Price, ‘Metaphysical pluralism’, Journal of Philosophy 89 (1992): pp. 387–409; R. Sylvan, ‘Language, thought and representation of “the” world’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 41 (1987): pp. 64–96. 55 J. Passmore, ‘Australian philosophy or philosophy in Australia?’, in Essays on Philosophy in Australia, ed. J.T. Srzednicki & D. Wood (Dordrecht, 1992), pp. 1–18, at p. 13. 56 J. Heil, ‘Recent work in realism and anti-realism’, Philosophical Books 30 (1989): pp. 65–73, at p. 65; cf. H. Putnam, ‘Reflections on Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking’, Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979): pp. 603–18, at p. 611; L. Reinhardt, ‘Anti-anti-realism’, Quadrant 44 (1–2) (Jan-Feb 2000): pp. 44– 7.

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1683) that, ‘I can allow no sense to the idea of the existence of Aus- tralia before 1683’.57 This should be a joke, something along the lines of the one perpetrated by Oxford linguistic philosophers in 1958 (‘Now it is clear that “Australia” is not a real place; or better, that “Australia” is not a name. The words “in Australia” are used simply to signify that the contradictory of what is stated to be the case “in Australia” is in fact the case. Thus we say “In Australia there are mammals that lay eggs” (meaning that there are none in reality); “In Australia there are black swans” (meaning that all real swans are some other colour) …’58). But it is not a joke. That is not exactly to say that the average American, British or French philosopher literally thinks the physical world does not exist. But somehow, it seems that few in those places are prepared to say so bluntly. Or if there are in fact many realists, the climate of thought in the academic world they inhabit hides their views behind those who take every opportunity to class anything they can as a ‘construction’. has a century-old tradition of self-indulgence in this area,59 which puts a premium on enormous books about the power of ideas, words and things starting with ‘soc’. It is questionable whether one should attempt to argue against ide- alism. It might be thought that idealism denies so much that there is no place left to argue from, and that there is nothing to be done but to say: knowing that the world is there is where I start from; what could be more basic? But there is another possibility. Devitt argues that realism about any entity, including the whole ‘external’ world, can be supported by showing it gives the best explanation of experience.60 There are possibilities in the argument, but it does have an air of con- ceding too much to the opponent. Berkeley has an explanation of experience, and it may be a tough business showing it is not as good as the realist hypothesis.61

57 M. Luntley, Language, Logic and Experience (London, 1988), p. 249; further shocking quotes in Devitt, Realism and Truth, 2nd ed, ch. 13, and Stove, The Plato Cult, ch. 2. 58 L. Sturch, in Why?, quoted in D. Armstrong, ‘Black swans: The formative influences in Australian philosophy’, in and Irrationality, ed. B. Brogaard & B. Smith (Vienna, 2000), pp. 11–17, text at www.ditext.com/armstrong/swans.html . 59 Stove, Plato Cult, p. 31; on the earlier American tradition, P.H. Partridge, ‘The social theory of truth’, AJPP 14 (1936): pp. 161–75. 60 Devitt, Realism and Truth, especially 2nd ed (Oxford, 1991), p. 108. 61 J. Franklin, ‘Healthy scepticism’, Philosophy 66 (1991): pp. 305–324; ‘Scepticism’s health buoyant’, Philosophy 69 (1994): pp. 503–4; other views in S.C. Hetherington, Knowledge Puzzles (Boulder, 1996), ch. 18; S.C. Hetherington, Epistemology’s Paradox (Savage, Md, 1992), ch. 2.

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Some more detailed Australian realist work, concerning the reality of particular kinds of entities, will be discussed in chapter 12 on the .