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Henry Philip Tappan (Apr

Henry Philip Tappan (Apr

Appendix Gamma: The Halle Intellectual Line Connecting brothers of Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity at Cornell University, tracing their fraternal Big Brother/Little Brother line to tri-Founder John Andrew Rea (1869)

John Andrew Rea, tri-founder of Phi Kappa Psi at Cornell . . .  . . . was advised by , President of Cornell . . .

. . . . who was mentored by Henry Tappan, . . . who was influenced by Johann president of University . . . Gottfried von Herder. . .

. . . Tappan was inspired by the system of . . . von Herder, in turn was influenced by education employed at the University of . . . Halle, in the kingdom of . . .

. . . The Halle system was refined and . . . Hamann was influenced heavily by the brought into the by Wilhelm writings of . . . von Humboldt . . . 

. . . who based his theories on the liberal . . . Hume was influenced by Francis reforms of . . . Hutcheson who was influenced by Harrington . . .

. . . who was close friends and studied . . . Harrington was tutored by under Karl von Schlegel . . . Chillingworth, who was tutored by Laud . . .

. . . who was mentored by Johann Ludwig . . . Laud was an acolyte of Bilson, taught Tieck, who was schooled at Halle . . . by Wykenham and descendant of Wilhelm V, Duke of . . . 

. . . who partnered with close college friend . . . Wykenham was mentored by and confidante Wilhelm Heinrich Eddington, who was mentored by Orleton, Wackenroder . . .  a supporter of Mortimer who was mentored by Piers Gaveston.

Below we present short biographies of the Halle intellectual line of the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity at Cornell University.

“Who defends the House.”

We begin with John “Jack” Andrew Rea, Cornell Class of 1869 and one of the three founders of the Alpha Chapter of the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity at Cornell University.

 Jack only spent a year at Cornell, transferring in the summer before his Senior course of studies. Much of that year he spent founding the fraternity, and its predecessor, the Irving Literary . Jack was one (1) of nine (9) transfer students who were in the first Class of Cornellians. Three (3) of those nine (9) were the founders of Phi Kappa Psi. All three had Faculty advisors. Jack was assigned Andrew Dickson White, the first President of Cornell.

Mo Buchwalter was assigned visiting professor , the former Regis Professor of Modern History at Oxford University; and Joe Foraker was assigned visiting professor Theodore Dwight. These three (3) relationships, scholar-to-scholar in the Cornell tradition, form the tap root of the intellectual legacy within New York Alpha.

The founding of the Irving Literary Society was the common project of President White and his protégé Jack Rea; Jack then used the Irving as the vehicle to rush that first immortal Pledge Class of 1869, Phi Kappa Psi, the New York Alpha. The intellectual legacy of this relationship includes both the influences on Andrew Dickson White as a doctoral student (see Appendix Alpha and this Appendix Gamma) and the role model proffered to Jack Rea by the Cornell president (Appendix Beta).

2 As a doctoral candidate, Jack’s faculty advisor, President White, was mentored by Henry Tappan, president of the :

(Apr. 18, 1805, Rhinebeck, New York–Nov. 15, 1881, Vevey, ), an American philosopher, educator and academic administrator. Tappan is officially considered the first president of the University of Michigan. A pioneer in the transformation of American university curricula, he was instrumental in fashioning the University of Michigan as a prototype for American research universities, and has been called the "John the Baptist of the age of the American university."

His academic career was ultimately cut short by personality clashes with the university's Board of Regents, and he finished his life in self-imposed exile in Europe.

It was through Henry Tappan that Andrew Dickson White, while studying and teaching at Michigan with roommate (future President of Johns Hopkins), decided the future of American education lay along the lines of the Prussian university system. That was the program President White was implementing at Cornell when he Faculty advisor to New York Alpha’s founder, John Andrew Rea (1869).

Henry Philip Tappan was born on April 18, 1805 in the village of Rhinebeck, New York. His father was of Huguenot descent and his mother of Dutch descent. Accordingly, his presence in the intellectual lines of New York Alpha was broadly compatible with the mission of the Irving Literary Society, founded to foster attachment between Cornell scholars and the native traditions of New York State.

Like Phi Kappa Psi’s founder, Judge Charles Page Thomas Moore (Pa. Alpha 1852), Henry Tappan attended and studied under its president, Eliphalet Nott (q.v.), graduating in 1825. He graduated from Auburn Theological Seminary, north of Ithaca, two (2) years later and planned a career in ministry. He became associate pastor at the Dutch Reformed church in Schenectady, New York for one year, and was then pastor at the Congregational church in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He married Julia Livingston on April 7, 1828. A throat affliction prompted him to leave for a trip to the West Indies, and upon his return he joined the faculty of the University of the City of New York (now ) as a professor of .

3

Tappan embarked on writing a series of philosophical treatises that began to influence thinking in Europe. He received a Doctor of Divinity degree from Union College in 1845. He toured Europe between 1849 and 1851 and became increasingly convinced of the superiority of the "German model" (or Prussian model, as it was known at the time) of public education, in which a complete system of primary schools, secondary schools, and a university are all administered by the state and supported with tax dollars. This was in contrast to the English “collegiate” model then employed by American institutions such as , Yale College and Washington & Jefferson College.

The German model had first gained widespread attention through the 1835 translated publication of 's Report on the State of Public Instruction in Prussia, originally prepared for the French Minister of Public Instruction and Ecclesiastical Affairs in 1831. This model stood in direct contrast to the prevailing state of higher education in the United States, where virtually all institutions of higher learning were privately run with no official connection to any public school system, which were themselves rare. Principally due to the Cousin report's influence on two men—John Davis Pierce and Isaac Edwin Crary—the basic tenets of the German education model had made their way into the State of Michigan’s Constitution of 1836, which officially chartered the University of Michigan and was the first state constitution in the United States to truly embrace the German model.

The specific implementation outlined therein, however, proved unwieldy in practice, and for some time the Board of Regents made little progress in implementing the vision for the university, even postponing indefinitely the appointment of a Chancellor in favor of a rotating roster of professors who performed the day-to-day administrative duties.

In 1850, the state of Michigan adopted a new state constitution that created the office of President of the University of Michigan and directed the newly-elected Board of Regents to select someone for the office. They sent a representative to the East to solicit recommendations, and former Secretary of the Navy and New York Alpha’s first cousin, (q.v.), recommended Henry Tappan. Despite this recommendation, the regents first elected of Connecticut, who declined the offer. Although (then Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison) was also considered for the job following Barnard's refusal, Tappan was unanimously elected on August 12, 1852. His starting salary was $1,500 per year.

Tappan was also a strong proponent of the German model of university curriculum, which emphasized research, laboratory study, elective courses, and the increased importance of and engineering, rather than the "British model" of recitation in a core classical curriculum that typified most major American universities of the time. Shortly after his arrival, Michigan became the

4 second university in the country (after Harvard) to issue Bachelor of Science degrees. Tappan received a Doctor of Laws degree from Columbia College in 1854. But these efforts were essentially the grafting of the Prussian model on to an English collegiate root. The two institutions first built from the ground up using the Prussian model were led by Tappan’s doctoral candidates

Despite the success of the flourishing university, Tappan's aristocratic bearing and perceived tendency to magnify his own importance did not sit well with the new regents elected in 1858, many of whom came from rural areas and were without advanced education—only two of the ten members were college graduates themselves. One regent, Donald McIntyre, a strict prohibitionist, disapproved of Tappan's serving at dinner. Another, Ebenezer Lakin Brown, had a particular dislike for Tappan's lofty airs, and at the board's June 25, 1863 meeting, he introduced a resolution removing Tappan as president. It passed unanimously, after which the regents also fired Tappan's son John as university librarian and appointed as the new president.

Upon his removal, Tappan remarked, "This matter belongs to history; the pen of history is held by Almighty , and I fear not the record it will make of my conduct, whether public or private, in relation to the affairs of the University." He immediately left Michigan and moved his family to Europe, residing in , Paris, , Frankfort, Basel, and . He never returned to the United States. Andrew Dickson White and Daniel Coit Gilman were charged with advancing the Prussian model in later years.

Tappan's firing was unpopular with students and the broader community, as it came with no warning, at a time when the University was more successful than ever, for no wrongdoing other than personal friction with the regents. Henry Barnard, by then the editor of The American Journal of Education, called the dismissal an "act of savage, unmitigated barbarism" in light of Tappan's work being "without a precedent in the educational history of the country." At the suggestion of his supporters, Tappan himself wrote a lengthy response to his dismissal, generally praising the first Board of Regents and excoriating the second as incompetent, and also singling out certain faculty members for criticism. When the new Board of Regents took office in 1864, the flood of support for Tappan led them to consider re-hiring him, but in the end they felt it would be disruptive to the University, in light of Tappan's subsequent response.

Tappan, who had moved to Europe after his firing, expressed a desire to return, but twice deferred accepting the invitation, citing first his age and then the health of his daughter. He never returned to Michigan and died in his villa in Vevey, Switzerland on November 15, 1881, where he is buried overlooking Lake Geneva;

Before leaving Henry Tappan and inquiring into the nature of the University of Halle and its influences on his theories of education, we take stock

5 of his status as a descendant of the colonial Dutch who settled the Hudson Valley and became the source of inspiration to New York Alphan intellectual (q.v.).

Tappan’s hometown of Rhinebeck lies upland off the east bank of the Hudson River, north of the Westchester picket lines defended by (q.v.) during the American . The settlement was known as Ryn Beek after the Beekman family. The Intersection of King's Road (Route 9) and Wey Roard was the center of the original settlement of Rhinebeck. A commons, north of the church adjoins the property of Frans Neher. Frans paid quit rent to Robert G. Livingston, a Beekman descendant until 1762 when Ludwig Elseffer acquired the property.

The area was was part of thousands of acres which Henry Beekman, Senior obtained from the Indians. A patent was granted to him by the Crown in 1703. Henry planned to settle the patent with German Palatines then living near what is now Germantown, Columbia County, New York in 1710. Some located on Henry’s land by 1712, as shown in his early rent book. His property was surveyed and lots laid out by John Beatty. Records show a log church was constructed about 1716. The present cemetery near the corner of Wey Road and Route 9 is located to the rear of the church site. This church was used by both the German Reformed and the German Lutheran congregations which were formed by the early settlers when they took up residence here. Their community became known as Rhynbeck or Rhinebeck and was centered around the church. The site of the Losee house, so near this original church puts it near the center of this settlement.

Henry Beekman died in 1716 so it became necessary for his son Henry the Junior to make formal arrangements with the Palatines who settled here. Deeds were issued in 1718. Several of the originals survive. They were actually indentures or leases which required the settlers to pay an annual rent of bushels of wheat, fowl and days riding (work for the landlord).

By 1738, Henry Beekman’s land was divided between Henry Junior and his two sisters, Cornelia Livingston (Mrs. Gilbert) and Catharine Rutsen (who married second Albert Pawling). The land on which the church was located as well as the property for the Losee house fell to Cornelia and her husband Gilbert. Cornelia died in 1742 and her husband Gilbert died in 1746 at which time his eldest son, Robert G. Livingston inherited the land. He began a rent book in that year. This book is now in the manuscript collection at the New York Historical Society. It shows that Frans Neher (Near) lived on this land. He was listed as a shoemaker in Dutchess County Deeds Book 2. Records of a Rhinebeck miller, Henry Denker show that between 1752 and 1755 he made brass shoe buckles for the miller’s slave and also mended brass kettles. Records show that his lot was only 7 acres indicating that he earned his living as a tradesman, not as a farmer.

6 In 1762 Ludwig Elseffer (Ludowick Elsifer) took over the property from Frans Neher. He also took surrounding land to make a parcel of 48 ½ acres in total. Since he was married in 1758 to Susanna Reichert, a descendant of one of the early Palatine settlers, we may assume that at this time he made certain improvements to the dwelling which had been located there. It is believed that the house in which he lived was the section of the current house which is on the south.

Ludwig had been orphaned at approximately age four (4) after arriving from Europe. A half brother, Hendrick Shop, was his guardian until he became of age. They resided in Philadelphia, the the second largest city in the British Empire. Ludwig learned the trade of saddle and harness maker in Philadelphia but came to Rhinebeck as a young man, presumably because the family had some friends or relatives living here, fellow Palatine Germans. Since this was a tradesman's property where Frans Neher was a cordwainer (shoemaker), it seems likely that Ludwig Elseffer took over the property and plied his trade as harness maker.

A memorial window in the Rhinebeck Old Stone Church and his 1809 gravestone on the hillside near the church (Ludwig Elseffer died Jan 15, 1809 at 74 yr, 6 mo.& 10 da.) attest to Ludwig Elseffer's importance in the community. His descendants kept the house continuously in the family until the recent death of Catherine Losee who was his great-great-great granddaughter through marriages with the Cotting and Losee families.

The Henry Beekman who gave Henry Tappan’s Rhinebeck life was from an established Knickerbocker dynasty. When Gilbert Livingston fell in love with his daughter Cornelia Beekman in 1711, he had chosen the daughter of a wealthy landowner who was prominent in the local militia, as well as a popular and well-known politician who had represented the County of Ulster in the New York Assemblies for almost 40 years. Once you left Rhinebeck and cross the Hudson River to the future New York capital of Kingston, the Indian trail marking Rhinebeck’s cross roads entered the Catskills of Rip Van Winkle and wound through the Upstate hills on their way to Unadilla, the colonial frontier of New York. At Unadilla, the Chenango river could take you to the Susquehanna and the southern tier with Pennsylvania. All this was vast wilderness, and it would be another seventy-five years before Ithaca’s first settlers (actually squatters) would make this trip to Lake Cayuga. In 1711, the lands beyond Unadilla were the territory of the Six Nations.

Hendrick (Henry) Beekman would be at the height of his power for another five (5) years until his death in 1716. Politically, he was on the same side of the assembly as was his son-in-law Gilbert's father, Robert Livingston. Livingston Manor was on the west side of the Hudson River, southwest of the Beekman manor around Rhinebeck. Modern day Route 17 to Ithaca from New York City runs through the center of the old Livingston fiefdom. Both Beekman and

7 Livingson were representatives in the Assembly favoring large property owners. Both were anti-Leislerians, and both came back into strong favor with the arrival of Governor Cornbury, whose skirts, it might be said, they clung to. Though against Cornbury's interests, both were also strong adherents of the Dutch Reform Church.

But where Robert Livingston made waves and made enemies, Henry Beekman seemed able to find a middle ground for his political survival. And, if Henry Beekman never rose as high in wealth or reputation as Robert Livingston, he also didn't have to survive orders for his arrest or have to fight the confiscation of his estates.

In this new land continually filling with new immigrants, Henry Beekman already had long roots. He was born in the New York of 1651 into a prominent family; his father, William Beekman, having come to the city in 1647 with Peter Stuyvesant, then Director-General and later Governor. William Beekman became a large land holder in the city of New York. In 1658 he was appointed Governor of the Sweedish [sic] colony at Christina in Delaware. He subsequently resigned that office and returned to New York and was appointed Sherriff of Kingston across the river from the future Rhinebeck. He was mayor of New York in 1680. He married 5 Sept 1649 Catherine De Bough of New York, and had by her three sons and four daughters, and d. in 1717 at New York in the 95th year of his age.

His son Henry was a judge and a member of the first assembly under authority of the British Crown, meeting in New York City on April 9, 1691. The delegates from Ulster and Dutchess Counties were Henry Beekman and Thomas Garton. In 1697, Judge Beekman obtained a Royal Patent for the lands adjacent to Ryn Beck and by 1713, there was a mill, a church, a blacksmith shop, and William Traphagen's tavern. In 1766, Traphagen's Tavern was established as Beekman Arms, known as "America's Oldest Inn." The Beekman Arms is credited by the historians and the American Hotel Association as being the "Oldest Hotel in America" in continuous operation. The Inn was built at the intersection of the Sepasco Indian trail to the river and Post Road, the road from New York to Albany (Fort Orange), now Rhinebeck's West Market Street and Oak Street, Route 9.

In its beginning, the Beekman Arms was a one-story stone building constructed with a dual purpose in mind; to provide bed and board for the traveler, and to serve as a shelter for the local residents against Indian attack. Later, during the Revolutionary War, General Washington often watched his troops drilling in the square from a corner window while he awaited for his couriers to arrive with news.

Many other famous persons of past and present have also visited the old Inn, including General Montgomery, , Aaron Burr (q.v.),

8 DeWitt Clinton, , , Vice President Levi P. Morton and of more recent times, Franklin D. Roosevelt (a direct descendent of Wilhelmus Beekman through Gerardus Beekman.) Astronaut James Lovell, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, as well as many present personalities from the stage and screen. The restaurant in the Beekman Arms is one of the finest.

Here, at Rhinebeck, where Andrew Dickson White’s mentor was raised to a young man, we have many reminders of the culture which inspired Washington Irving, who, in turn, inspired the founders of Phi Kappa Psi at Cornell University.

Andrew Dickson White and Henry Tappan set young Jack Rea’s (1869) imagination down in the Hudson valley, and provided a tie to Europe in the fading light of a colonial era. Rea’s Irving Literary Society then dedicated twelve seats to in memory of Washington Irving’s friends, and through Irving and Tappan, they traced their own intellectual ties, across the Atlantic to England, and the Netherlands. Some of those ties moved up the Waal river, past the Beekman’s old homeplaces at Nimejin and Koln, and into the heart of the German intellect. That is where this narrative goes next.

9 Henry Tappan’s goal as an American educator was to replace the English, collegiate model of university management with the Prussian, research university model, represented by University of Halle, only recently absorbed into the :

 At this point, the “Halle” intellectual line of New York Alpha recognizes not an individual, such as Henry Tappan of Rhinebeck, but rather the institution which inspired him in his teaching of Jack Rea’s (1869) mentor, Andrew Dickson White. The turning- point in the history of German educational progress was the founding of the University of Halle, in 1694. It was Halle that would provide the model for Cornell University’s founding, which The University of Halle, a model for in turn became a turning point in the the new Cornell University history of American educational in 1868 progress.

The University of Halle, due to its entirely new methods of work, has usually been designated as the first modern university. A few forward-looking men, men who had been expelled from the University of because of their critical attitude and modern ways of thinking, found professorships at the University of Halle.

Their patron was Elector Friedrich III of the margravate Brandenburg, later the first King of Prussia. The King intended that the new institution should be representative of modern tendencies in education. To this end he installed as professors men who could and would reform the instruction in , law, medicine, and philosophy.

In consequence, the study of was displaced for the new scientific philosophy of Rene Descartes and , and in the classrooms for the German speech. The sincere pietistic of Francke (p. 418) was substituted for the Lutheran dogmatism which had supplanted the earlier Catholic theology. The instruction in law was reformed to accord with the modern needs and theoryof the State, rather than ecclesiastical notions of natural law. Medical instruction was now based on observation, experimentation and deduction, which also superseded instruction based on the reading of classical authorities such as Hippocrates and Galen.

10 The new , especially mathematics and , found a congenial home in the philosophical or arts faculty. Free scientific investigation and research, without interference from the theological faculty, were soon established as features of the institution, and in place of the fixed scientific knowledge taught for so long from the texts of Aristotle (Rs. 113-15) and other ancients, a new and changing science, that must prove its laws and axioms, and which might at any time be changed by the investigation of any teacher or student, here now found a home. Under the leadership of Christian Wolff, who was Professor of Philosophy from 1707 to 1723, when he was banished by a new King at the instigation of the Pietists for his too great in , and again from 1740 to 1754, after his recall by Frederick the Great, philosophy was "made to speak German" and the Aristotelian philosophy was permanently displaced. "No thing without sufficient cause" was the ruling principle of Wolff's teaching.

So the first modern nation to take over the school from the Church, and to make of it an instrument for promoting the interests of the State was the kingdom of Prussia, and the example of Prussia was soon followed by the other German States. The for this early action by the German States will be clear if we remember the marked progress made in establishing state control of the churches which followed the Protestant revolts in German lands. The kingdom of Wuertemberg, as early as 1559, had organized the first German state-church school system, and had made attendance at the religious instruction, compulsory on the parents of all children. The example of Wuertemberg was followed by Brunswick (1569), Saxony (1580), (1619), and Gotha (1642). In Weimar and Gotha the compulsory-attendance idea had even been adopted for elementary-school instruction to all children up to the age of twelve.

By the middle of the seventeenth century most of the German States, even including Catholic Bavaria, had followed the example of Wuertemberg, and had created a state-church school system which involved at least elementary and secondary schools and the beginnings of compulsory school attendance. Notwithstanding the ravages of the Thirty Years' War (1618- 48), the state-church schools of German lands contained, more definitely than had been worked out elsewhere, the germs of a separate state school organization. Only in British North America had an equal development in state- church organization and control been made. As state-church schools, with the religious purpose dominant, the German schools remained until near the middle of the eighteenth century. Then a new movement for state control began, and within fifty years thereafter they had been transformed into institutions of the State, with the state purpose their most essential characteristic. How this transformation was effected in Prussia, the leader among the German States, and the forces which brought about the transformation, it will be the purpose of this chapter to relate.

The German model generally followed then, by Henry Tappan (q.v.) at the University of Michigan when Andrew Dickson White was a graduate student, had

11 its roots in the European research university. These have a long history that arguably dates back to the founding of the University of Bologna in 1088, although the University of Paris and the University of Magnaura are other contenders for this position. In the 19th and 20th centuries, European universities focused on science and research, and their structures and have shaped the university as we now know it. The original medieval universities are thought to have arisen from schools in churches before developing into what can now be definitively considered the “university.” Aims of early universities included training professionals, investigating science, improving society, and teaching students to research and think for themselves. Many external influences, such as eras of , Enlightenment, Reformation, and revolution, shaped research universities during their development, and the discovery of the New World in 1492 added human and international law to the university curriculum.

By the 18th century, universities published their own research journals, and by the 19th century, the German and the French university models had arisen. The German, or Humboldtian model, was conceived by and based on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s liberal ideas pertaining to the importance of freedom, seminars, and laboratories in universities. The French university model involved strict discipline and control over every aspect of the university.

Universities concentrated on science in the 19th and 20th centuries, and they started to become accessible to the masses after 1914. Until the 19th century, religion played a significant role in university curricula; however, the role of religion in research universities decreased in the 19th century, and by the end of the 19th century, the German university model had spread around the world, finding its first footings in America at Michigan, Cornell and Johns Hopkins. The British also established universities worldwide, and higher education became available to the masses not only in Europe. In a general sense, the basic structure and aims of universities have remained constant over the years.

The first European university is often considered to be the University of Bologna, founded in 1088, although some dispute this statement based on the intangibility of the definition of “university.” In addition, the concept of the University of Bologna as the “mother of European Universities” was created as a symbol for ’s national unity, which detracts from the legitimacy of its being considered the first. If the term "university" requires that a single corporate body be made up of students and professors of different disciplines, rather than that a corporate body simply exists, the University of Paris, founded in 1208, can be considered the first university; however, the University at Magnaura Palace was founded much earlier, in the 9th century. The University of Magnaura can be defined as a university because it brought prominent scholars together to create a “focal point of medieval Greek science and culture”.

12 Traditional medieval universities are thought to have arisen from schools in churches, which began to require more structure as a result of their increasing popularity. This need, along with the advancing complexity of society, which required specialized training for administrators, lawyers, doctors, notaries, and ecclesiastics, and the rediscovery of ancient knowledge, such as new translations of Aristotle and Roman law, led to the development of student guilds, or universitates, and eventually the definitive university. Early universities, according to Professor of sociology and general editor of A History of the University in Europe Walter Rüegg, were meant to allow people to develop “knowledge for the sake of knowledge;” however, around the 16th century, knowledge was seen to be valuable as a part of the civil community.[5] Universities at this time aimed to train clergymen, lawyers, officials, and doctors. At the same time, according to Rüegg, people studied in order to further scientific investigation and attend to the demands of society. Science during the 16th century was an essential part of university curriculum, incorporating “openness to novelty” and the search for the means to control nature into the course of study.

The European University proliferated in part because groups decided to secede from the original universities to promote their own ideals; the University of Paris fostered many universities in Northern Europe, while the University of Bologna fostered many in the South. Some leaders also created universities in order to use them to increase their political power and popularity. For example, Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor founded the University of Naples in 1224 to train lawyers and administrators who could rival the University of Bologna's influence, which served the hostile Lombard League.

The structure of these early classes involved a master reading from texts and commenting on the readings, as well as students learning by teaching other students. Masters also offered disputed questions to their classes for discussion. Moving into the 18th century, professors became less focused on simply training university teachers and more focused on “forming the minds of the elite” of a larger society.

While humanistic ideas of the 14th-16th century Renaissance were slow to catch on, they eventually spread from France, to , to England during the 16th century Reformation. Under the influence of the increasingly popular humanist mode of thought, university education began to include the preparation of students for lives of civility, civilization, and culture, along with a response to social concerns. Important to the medieval university curriculum were the trivium and quadrivium, two classifications of the liberal arts intended to prepare students for further learning, usually in the areas of theology, law, or medicine. Trivium included the three verbal disciplines: grammar, rhetoric, and logic, while Quadrivium included the four mathematical disciplines: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The discovery of the New World in 1492 prompted additions to the European University curriculum, as subjects such as human

13 rights and international law became relevant to current times (Rüegg v.2, 22). Newly conquered Spanish territories raised questions about aboriginals’ rights, and discussion stemmed from the Bible, medieval natural law theories, and humanistic ideas of toleration. Rüegg links the idea of the ‘New’ World to the idea of ‘new’ knowledge as opposed to the old works of the ancients. In the mid- 16th century, scholarly and scientific journals became a popular way to “spread innovations among the learned,” and by the 18th century, universities were publishing their own research journals. Enlightenment in the 18th century also encouraged the transition from the “preservation and transmission of accepted knowledge” to the “discovery and advancement of new knowledge,” although newer universities more quickly adapted ideas of Enlightenment and Absolutism than older ones.

Moving into the 19th century, the objective of universities evolved from teaching the “regurgitation of knowledge” to “encourag[ing] productive thinking.” Two main university models, the German and the French, arose and gave rise to other models such as the British and Russian. The German model, conceived by Wilhelm von Humboldt, was also known as the Humboldtian model. In 1810, Humboldt convinced the King of Prussia to build a university in Berlin based on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s liberal ideas; the goal was to demonstrate the process of the discovery of knowledge and to teach students to “take account of fundamental laws of science in all their thinking, ” thus, seminars and laboratories started to evolve.

[ Freedom was an important concept in the German university model, and the system of professors was based on competition and freedom: although professors served as state functionaries, they had the freedom to choose between several states, and their identity and prestige arose from the specialization of scientific disciplines.

14 The model provided by the University of Halle was refined and brought into the 19th century for use by Henry Tappan, Andrew Dickson White and Daniel Coit Gilman by New York Alphan intellectual Wilhelm von Humboldt:

 Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt (June 22, 1767 – April 8, 1835), government functionary, diplomat, philosopher, founder of Humboldt Universität in Berlin, friend of Goethe (q.v.) and especially of Schiller (q.v.), is especially remembered as a German linguist who introduced a knowledge of the Basque language to European intellectuals and made important contributions to the and to the theory and practice of education. Humboldt was born in Potsdam, Margraviate of Brandenburg, and died in Tegel, The University of Province of Brandenburg.

His younger brother, , was an equally famous naturalist and scientist. After being educated at Berlin, Gottingen and Jena, in the last of which places he formed a close and lifelong friendship with Schiller (q.v.), he married Fraulein von Dacherode, a lady of birth and fortune.

Humboldt was a philosopher of note and published On the Limits of State Action in 1810, the boldest defence of the liberties of the Enlightenment. It anticipated 's essay On Liberty by which von Humboldt's ideas became known in the English-speaking world. He describes the development of liberalism and the role of liberty in individual development and in pursuit of excellence. He also describes the necessary conditions without which the state must not be allowed to limit the action of individuals.

As Prussian Minister of Education, Humboldt oversaw the system of Technische Hochschulen and gymnasien that made Prussia, and subsequently the German Empire, the strongest European power and the scientific and intellectual leader of the world.

As a successful diplomat between 1802 and 1819, Humboldt was plenipotentiary Prussian minister at from 1802, first as resident and then as minister plenipotentiary. While there he published a poem entitled Rom, which was reprinted in 1824. This was not, however, the first of his literary productions; his critical essay on Goethe's , published in 1800, had

15 already placed him in the first rank of authorities on , and, together with his family connexions, had much to do with his appointment at Rome; while in the years 1795 and 1797 he had brought out translations of several of the odes of Pindar, which were held in high esteem. On quitting his post at Rome he was made councillor of state and minister of public instruction.

He soon, however, retired to his estate at Tegel, near Berlin, but was recalled and sent as ambassador to in 1812 during the exciting period which witnessed the closing struggles of the French empire. In the following year, as Prussian plenipotentiary at the congress of Prague, he was mainly instrumental in inducing Austria to unite with Prussia and Russia against France; in 1815 he was one of the signatories of the capitulation of Paris, and the same year was occupied in drawing up the treaty between Prussia and Saxony, by which the territory of the former was largely increased at the expense of the latter. The next year he was at Frankfort settling the future condition of Germany, but was summoned to in the midst of his work, and in 1818 had to attend the congress at Aix-la-Chapelle. The reactionary policy of the Prussian government made him resign his office of privy councillor and give up political life in 1819; and from that time forward he devoted himself solely to literature and study.

During the busiest portion of his political career, however, he had found time for literary work. Thus in 1816 he had published a translation of the Agamemnon of , and in 1817 corrections and additions to Adelung's Mithridates, that famous collection of specimens of the various languages and dialects of the world. Among these additions that on the Basque language is the longest and most important, Basque having for some time specially attracted his attention. In fact, Wilhelm von Humboldt may be said to have been the first who brought Basque before the notice of European philologists, and made a scientific study of it possible.

In order to gain a practical knowledge of the language and complete his investigations into it, he visited the Basque country itself, the result of his visit being the valuable "Researches into the Early Inhabitants of Spain by the help of the Basque language" (Priifung der Untersuchungen fiber die Urbewohner Hispaniens vermittelst der vaskischen Sprache), published in 1821. In this work he endeavoured to show, by an examination of geographical names, that a race or races speaking dialects allied to modern Basque once extended through the whole of Spain, the southern coast of France and the Balearic Islands, and suggested that these people, whom he identified with the Iberians of classical writers, had come from northern Africa, where the name of Berber still perhaps perpetuates their old designation. Another work on what has sometimes been termed the metaphysics of language appeared from his pen in 1828, under the title of Ober den Dualis; but the great work of his life, on the ancient Kawi language of Java, was unfortunately interrupted by his death on the 8th of April 1835.

16 The imperfect fragment was edited by his brother and Dr Buschmann in 1836, and contains the remarkable introduction on "The Heterogeneity of Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind" (Ober die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues and ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts), which was afterwards edited and defended against Steinthal's criticisms by Pott (2 vols., 1876). This essay, which has been called the text-book of the philosophy of speech, first clearly laid down that the character and structure of a language expresses the inner life and knowledge of its speakers, and that languages must differ from one another in the same way and to the same degree as those who use them. Sounds do not become words until a meaning has been put into them, and this meaning embodies the thought of a community.

What Humboldt terms the inner form of a language is just that mode of denoting the relations between the parts of a sentence which reflects the manner in which a particular body of men regards the world about them. It is the task of the morphology of speech to distinguish the various ways in which languages differ from each other as regards their inner form, and to classify and arrange them accordingly. Other linguistic publications of Humboldt, which had appeared in the Transactions of the Berlin Academy, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, or elsewhere, were republished by his brother in the seven volumes of Wilhelm von Humboldt's Gesammelte Werke (1841-1852). These volumes also contain poems, on aesthetical subjects and other creations of his prolific mind. Perhaps, however, the most generally interesting of his works, outside those which deal with language, is his correspondence with Schiller, published in 1830. Both poet and philosopher come before us in it in their most genial mood. For, though Humboldt was primarily a philosopher, he was a philosopher rendered practical by his knowledge of statesmanship and wide experience of life, and endowed with keen sympathies, warm imagination and active interest in the method of scientific inquiry.

Wilhelm von Humboldt was an adept linguist who translated Pindar and Aeschylus and studied the Basque language.

Humboldt's work as a philologist in the Basque language has had the most extended life of all his other work. The result of his visit to the Basque country was Researches into the Early Inhabitants of Spain by the help of the Basque language (1821). In this work Humboldt endeavored to show, by an examination of geographical placenames, that a race or races speaking dialects allied to modern Basque once extended throughout Spain, southern France and the Balearic Islands; he identified these people with the Iberians of classical writers, and he further surmised that they had been allied with the Berbers of northern Africa. Humboldt's pioneering work has been superseded in its details by modern linguistics and archaeology, but is sometimes still uncritically followed even today.

17 Humboldt died while still preparing his greatest work, on the ancient Kawi language of Java, but its introduction was published in 1836 as The Heterogeneity of Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind. This essay on the philosophy of speech:

"... first clearly laid down that the character and structure of a language expresses the inner life and knowledge of its speakers, and that languages must differ from one another in the same way and to the same degree as those who use them. Sounds do not become words until a meaning has been put into them, and this meaning embodies the thought of a community. What Humboldt terms the inner form of a language is just that mode of denoting the relations between the parts of a sentence which reflects the manner in which a particular body of men regards the world about them. It is the task of the morphology of speech to distinguish the various ways in which languages differ from each other as regards their inner form, and to classify and arrange them accordingly." 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

He is credited with being the first European linguist to identify human language as a rule-governed system, rather than just a collection of words and phrases paired with meanings. This idea is one of the foundations of 's theory of language. Chomsky frequently quotes Humboldt's description of language as a system which "makes infinite use of finite means", meaning that an infinite number of sentences can be created using a finite number of grammatical rules. However, Chomsky's use of Humboldt has been criticized as being highly misleading.

In recent times, Humboldt has also been credited as an originator of the hypothesis (more commonly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), approximately a century before either Edward Sapir or Benjamin Whorf but Humboldt's view of the differences between languages was more subtle and less rigid.

18 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Wilhelm von Humboldt, relied, in part, on the liberal theories of Friedrich Schleiermacher, when he established the outlines of the modern university used by Andrew Dickson White and later by Jack Rea (1869), when he was a trustee at the University of Washington:

 Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleier-macher (Nov. 21, 1768 – Feb. 12, 1834) was a German theologian and philosopher known for his impressive attempt to reconcile the criticisms of the Enlightenment with traditional Protestant orthodoxy. He was also influential in the evolution of Higher Criticism. Because of his profound impact on Christian thought, he is often called "Father of Modern The University of Halle Protestant Theology."

The Neo-Orthodoxy movement of the twentieth century, represented most prominently by , was in many ways an attempt to overturn his influence. Schleiermacher was born in Breslau in Silesia, the son of a Prussian army chaplain in the Reformed church. He was educated in a Moravian school at Niesky in Upper Lusatia, and at Barby near Halle.

However, pietistic Moravian theology failed to satisfy his increasing doubts, and his father reluctantly gave him permission to enter the University of Halle, which had already abandoned and adopted the rationalist of Friedrich August Wolf and Johann Salomo Semler. As a theology student Schleiermacher pursued an independent course of reading and neglected the study of the Old Testament and Oriental languages. However, he did attend the lectures of Semler, where he became acquainted with the techniques of historical criticism of the New Testament, and of Johann Augustus Eberhard, from whom he acquired a love of the philosophy of and Aristotle.

At the same time he studied the writings of and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. He developed his characteristic habit of forming his opinions by patiently examining and weighing various positions with which he reconstructed his own thought. Indeed, as a student he began to apply ideas from the Greek philosophers to a reconstruction of Kant's system.

At the completion of his course at Halle, Schleiermacher became the private tutor to the family of Count Dohna-Schlobitten, developing in a cultivated and aristocratic household his deep love of family and social life. Two years later,

19 in 1796, he became chaplain to the Charité Hospital in Berlin. Lacking scope for the development of his preaching skills, he sought mental and spiritual satisfaction in the city's cultivated society and in intensive philosophical studies, beginning to construct the framework of his philosophical and religious system. It was now that Schleiermacher became acquainted with , literature, science and general culture. He was strongly influenced by German , as represented by his friend Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel. This interest is borne out by his Confidential Letters on Schlegel's Lucinde, as well as his relationship with Eleonore Grunow, wife of a Berlin clergyman.

Though his ultimate principles were unchanged, this impetus led Schleiermacher to place more emphasis on human emotion and the imagination. Meanwhile he studied Spinoza and Plato, both of whom were important influences. He became more indebted to Kant, though they differed on fundamental points, and finally remodelled his philosophy. He sympathised with some of Jacobi's positions, and took some ideas from Fichte and Schelling. The literary product of this period of rapid development was his influential book, Reden über die Religion (On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers) (1799, ed. Göttingen, 1906; Eng. trans., 1893) and his "new year's gift" to the new century, the Monologe (Soliloquies) (1800; ed. 1902).

In the first book Schleiermacher gave religion an unchanging place among the divine mysteries of human nature, distinguished it from what he regarded as current caricatures of religion, and described the perennial forms of its manifestation, thus giving the programme of his subsequent theological system. In the Monologe he revealed his ethical manifesto, in which he proclaimed his ideas on the freedom and independence of the spirit, and on the relationship of the mind to the sensual world, and sketched his ideal of the future of the individual and society.

From 1802 to 1804, Schleiermacher was pastor in the Pomeranian town of Stolp. He relieved entirely of his nominal responsibility for the translation of Plato, which they had together undertaken (vols. 1-5, 1804-1810; vol. 6, Repub. 1828). Another work, Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre (1803), the first of his strictly critical and philosophical productions, occupied him; it is a criticism of all previous moral systems, including those of Kant and Fichte — Plato's and Spinoza's find most favour. It contends that the tests of the soundness of a moral system are the completeness of its view of the laws and ends of human life as a whole and the harmonious arrangement of its subject-matter under one fundamental principle. Although it is almost exclusively critical and negative, the book announces Schleiermacher's later view of moral science, attaching prime importance to a Güterlehre, or doctrine of the ends to be obtained by moral action. The obscurity of the book's style and its negative tone prevented immediate success.

20 In 1804, Schleiermacher moved as university preacher and professor of theology to Halle, where he remained until 1807, quickly obtaining a reputation as professor and preacher; he exercised a powerful influence in spite of the contradictory charges of his being atheist, Spinozist and pietist. In this period he wrote his dialogue the Weihnachtsfeier (Christmas Eve: Dialogue on the Incarnation)(1806), a charming production, midway between his Reden and his great dogmatic work, Der christliche Glaube (The Christian Faith); the speakers represent phases of his growing appreciation of Christianity as well as the conflicting elements of the theology of the period. After the Battle of Jena he returned to Berlin (1807), was soon appointed pastor of the Trinity Church, and the next year married the widow of his friend Willich.

At the foundation of the University of Berlin (1810), in which he took a prominent part, Schleiermacher obtained a theological chair, and soon became secretary to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He took a prominent part in the reorganization of the Prussian church, and became the most powerful advocate of the union of the Lutheran and Reformed divisions of German Protestantism, paving the way for the Prussian Union of Churches (1817). The twenty-four years of his professional career in Berlin were opened with his short outline of theological study (Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums, 1811), in which he sought to do for theology what he had done for religion in his Reden.

While he preached every Sunday, Schleiermacher also gradually took up in his lectures in the university almost every branch of theology and philosophy — New Testament , introduction to and interpretation of the New Testament, (both philosophic and Christian), dogmatic and practical theology, church history, history of philosophy, psychology, dialectics (logic and metaphysics), politics, pedagogy, translation and aesthetics. His own materials for these lectures and his students' notes and reports of them are the only form in which the larger proportion of his works exist — a circumstance which has greatly increased the difficulty of getting a clear and harmonious view of fundamental portions of his philosophical and ethical system, while it has effectually deterred all but the most courageous and patient students from reading these posthumous collections.

In politics Schleiermacher supported liberty and progress, and in the period of reaction which followed the overthrow of he was charged by the Prussian government with "demagogic agitation" in conjunction with the patriot Ernst Moritz Arndt.

At the same time Schleiermacher prepared his chief theological work Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche (1821–1822; 2nd ed., greatly altered, 1830–1831; 6th ed., 1884). The fundamental principle is that religious feeling, the sense of absolute dependence on as communicated by Jesus through the church, and not the creeds or the letter of Scripture or the rationalistic understanding, is the source and law of dogmatic

21 theology. The work is therefore simply a description of the facts of religious feeling, or of the inner life of the in its relations to God, and these inward facts are looked at in the various stages of their development and presented in their systematic connection. The aim of the work was to reform Protestant theology by means of the fundamental ideas of the Reden, to put an end to the unreason and superficiality of both supernaturalism and , and to deliver religion and theology from a relation of dependence on perpetually changing systems of philosophy.

Though the work added to the reputation of its author, it aroused the increased opposition of the theological schools it was intended to overthrow, and at the same time Schleiermacher's defence of the right of the church to frame its own liturgy in opposition to the arbitrary dictation of the monarch or his ministers brought upon him fresh troubles. He felt isolated, although his church and his lecture-room continued to be crowded.

Schleiermacher progressed with his translation of Plato and prepared a new and greatly altered edition of his Christlicher Glaube, anticipating the latter in two letters to his friend Lucke (in the Studien und Kritiken, 1829), in which he defended his theological position generally and his book in particular against opponents on the right and the left.

The same year Schleiermacher lost his only son — a blow which, he said, "drove the nails into his own coffin." But he continued to defend his theological position against Hengstenberg's party on the one hand and the rationalists von Cölln and D. Schulz on the other, protesting against both subscription to the ancient creeds and the imposition of a new rationalistic formulary.

In the midst of such labours, and enjoying still full bodily and mental vigour, Schleiermacher died due to an inflammation of the lungs, on 12 February 1834.

Schleiermacher's psychology takes as its basis the phenomenal dualism of the ego and the non-ego, and regards the life of man as the interaction of these elements with their interpenetration as its infinite destination. The dualism is therefore not absolute, and, though present in man's own constitution as composed of body and soul, is relative only even there. The ego is itself both body and soul — the conjunction of both constitutes it; our "organization " or sense nature has its intellectual element, and our "intellect " its organic element. There is no such thing as "pure mind" or "pure body." The one general function of the ego, thought, becomes in relation to the non-ego either receptive or spontaneous action, and in both forms of action its organic, or sense, and its intellectual energies co-operate; and in relation to man, nature and the universe the ego gradually finds its true individuality by becoming a part of them, "every extension of consciousness being higher life." The specific functions of the ego, as determined by the relative predominance of sense or intellect, are either

22 functions of the senses (or organism) or functions of the intellect. The former fall into the two classes of feelings (subjective) and perceptions (objective); the latter, according as the receptive or the spontaneous element predominates, into cognition and volition.

In cognition being is the object and in volition it is the purpose of thought: in the first case we receive (in our fashion) the object of thought into ourselves; in the latter we plant it out into the world. Both cognition and volition are functions of thought~ as well as forms of moral action. It is in those two functions that the real life of the ego is manifested, but behind them is self-consciousness permanently present, which is always both subjective and objective — consciousness of ourselves and of the non-ego. This self-consciousness is the third special form or function of thought — which is also called feeling and immediate knowledge. In it we cognize our own inner life as affected by the non-ego. As the non-ego helps or hinders, enlarges or limits, our inner life, we feel pleasure or pain. Aesthetic, moral and religious feelings are respectively produced by the reception into consciousness of large ideas — nature, mankind and the world; those feelings are the sense of being one with these vast objects. Religious feeling therefore is the highest form of thought and of life; in it we are conscious of our unity with the world and God; it is thus the sense of absolute dependence.

Schleiermacher's doctrine of knowledge accepts the fundamental principle of Kant that knowledge is bounded by experience, but it seeks to remove Kant's scepticism as to knowledge of the Ding an sich or Sein, as Schleiermacher's term is. The idea of knowledge or scientific thought as distinguished from the passive form of thought — of aesthetics and religion — is thought which is produced by all thinkers in the same form and which corresponds to being. All knowledge takes the form of the concept (Begriff) or the judgment (Urteil), the former conceiving the variety of being as a definite unity and plurality, and the latter simply connecting the concept with certain individual objects. In the concept therefore the intellectual and in the judgment the organic or sense element predominates. The universal uniformity of the production of judgments presupposes the uniformity of our relations to the outward world, and the uniformity of concepts rests similarly on the likeness of our inward nature. This uniformity is not based on the sameness of either the intellectual or the organic functions alone, but on the correspondence of the forms of thought and sensation with the forms of being.

The essential nature of the concept is that it combines the general and the special, and the same combination recurs in being; in being the system of substantial or permanent forms answers to the system of concepts and the relation of cause and effect to the system of judgments, the higher concept answering to "force" and the lower to the phenomena of force, and the judgment to the contingent interaction of things. The sum of being consists of the two systems of substantial forms and interactional relations, and it reappears in the form of concept and judgment, the concept representing being and the judgment

23 being in action. Knowledge has under both forms the same object, the relative difference of the two being that when the conceptual form predominates we have speculative science and when the form of judgment prevails we have empirical or historical science. Throughout the domain of knowledge the two forms are found in constant mutual relations, another proof of the fundamental unity of thought and being or of the of knowledge. It is obvious that Plato, Spinoza and Kant had contributed characteristic elements of their thought to this system, and directly or indirectly it was largely indebted to Schelling for fundamental conceptions.

Schleiermacher's work has had a profound impact upon the philosophical field of Hermeneutics.

Next to religion and theology, Schliermacher devoted himself to the moral world, of which the phenomena of religion and theology were in his systems only constituent elements. In his earlier essays he endeavored to point out the defects of ancient and modern ethical thinkers, particularly of Kant and Fichte, Plato and Spinoza only finding favour in his eyes. He failed to discover in previous moral systems any necessary basis in thought, any completeness as regards the phenomena of moral action, any systematic arrangement of its parts and any clear and distinct treatment of specific moral acts and relations.

Schleiermacher's own moral system is an attempt to supply these deficiencies. It connects the moral world by a deductive process with the fundamental idea of knowledge and being; it offers a view of the entire world of human action which at all events aims at being exhaustive; it presents an arrangement of the matter of the science which tabulates its constituents after the model of the physical sciences; and it supplies a sharply defined treatment of specific moral phenomena in their relation to the fundamental idea of human life as a whole. Schleiermacher defines ethics as the theory of the nature of the , or as the scientific treatment of the effects produced by human reason in the world of nature and man.

As a theoretical or speculative science it is purely descriptive and not practical, being correlated on the one hand to physical science and on the other to history. Its method is the same as that of physical science, being distinguished from the latter only by its matter. The ontological basis of ethics is the unity of the real and the ideal, and the psychological and actual basis of the ethical process is the tendency of reason and nature to unite in the form of the complete organization of the latter by the former. The end of the ethical process is that nature (i.e. all that is not mind, the human body as well as external nature) may become the perfect symbol and organ of mind. Conscience, as the subjective expression of the presupposed identity of reason and nature in their bases, guarantees the practicability of our moral vocation. Nature is preordained or constituted to become the symbol and organ of mind, just as mind is endowed with the impulse to realize this end. But the moral law must not be conceived

24 under the form of an "imperative" or a "Sollen"; it differs from a law of nature only as being descriptive of the fact that it ranks the mind as conscious will, or Zweckdenken, above nature. Strictly speaking, the antitheses of good and bad and of free and necessary have no place in an ethical system, but simply in history, which is obliged to compare the actual with the ideal, but as far as the terms "good" and "bad" are used in morals they express the rule or the contrary of reason, or the harmony or the contrary of the particular and the general. The idea of free as opposed to necessary expresses simply the fact that the mind can propose to itself ends, though a man cannot alter his own nature.

In contrast to Kant and Fichte and modern moral philosophers, Schleiermacher reintroduced and assigned pre-eminent importance to the doctrine of the summum bonum, or highest good. It represents in his system the ideal and aim of the entire life of man, supplying the ethical view of the conduct of individuals in relation to society and the universe, and therewith constituting a at the same time. Starting with the idea of the highest good and of its constituent elements (Güter), or the chief forms of the union of mind and nature, Schleiermacher's system divides itself into the doctrine of moral ends, the doctrine of virtue and the doctrine of duties; in other words, as a development of the idea of the subjection of nature to reason it becomes a description of the actual forms of the triumphs of reason, of the moral power manifested therein and of the specific methods employed. Every moral good or product has a fourfold character: it is individual and' universal; it is an organ and symbol of the reason, that is, it is the product of the individual with relation to the community, and represents or manifests as well as classifies and rules nature.

The first two characteristics provide for the functions and rights of the individual as well as those of the community or race. Though a moral action may have these four characteristics at various degrees of strength, it ceases to be moral if one of them is quite absent. All moral products may be classified according to the predominance of one or the other of these characteristics. Universal organizing action produces the forms of intercourse, and universal symbolizing action produces the various forms of science; individual organizing action yields the forms of property and individual symbolizing action the various representations of feeling, all these constituting the relations, the productive spheres, or the social conditions of moral action. Moral functions cannot be performed by the individual in isolation but only in his relation to the family, the state, the school, the church, and society — all forms of human life which ethical science finds to its hand and leaves to the science of natural history to account for. The moral process is accomplished by the various sections of humanity in their individual spheres, and the doctrine of virtue deals with the reason as the moral power in each individual by which the totality of moral products is obtained.

Schleiermacher classifies the virtues under the two forms of Gesinnung and Fertigkeit, the first consisting of the pure ideal element in action and the second the form it assumes in relation to circumstances, each of the two classes

25 falling respectively into the two divisions of wisdom and love and of intelligence and application. In his system the doctrine of duty is the description of the method of the attainment of ethical ends, the conception of duty as an imperative, or obligation, being excluded, as we have seen. No action fulfills the conditions of duty except as it combines the three following antitheses: reference to the moral idea in its whole extent and likewise to a definite moral sphere; connexion with existing conditions and at the same time absolute personal production; the fulfillment of the entire moral vocation every moment though it can only be done in a definite sphere. Duties are divided with reference to the principle that every man make his own the entire moral problem and act at the same time in an existing moral society. This condition gives four general classes of duty: duties of general association or duties with reference to the community (Rechtspflicht), and duties of vocation (Berufspflicht) — both with a universal reference, duties of the conscience (in which the individual is sole judge), and duties of love or of personal association.

It was only the first of the three sections of the science of ethics — the doctrine of moral ends — that Schleiermacher handled with approximate completeness; the other two sections were treated very summarily. In his Christian Ethics he dealt with the subject from the basis of the Christian consciousness instead of from that of reason generally; the ethical phenomena dealt with are the same in both systems, and they throw light on each other, while the Christian system treats more at length and less aphoristically the principal ethical realities — church, state, family, art, science and society. Rothe, amongst other moral philosophers, bases his system substantially, with important departures, on Schleiermacher's. In Beneke's moral system his fundamental idea was worked out in its psychological relations.

Schleiermacher, like John Hick, held that an eternal hell was not compatible with the love of God. Divine punishment was rehabilative, not penal, and designed to reform the person. He was one of the first major theologians of modern times to teach Christian Universalism.

From Leibniz, Lessing, Fichte, Jacobi and the Romantic school Schleiermacher had imbibed a profound and mystical view of the inner depths of the human personality. His religious thought found its expression most notably in his magisterial The Christian Faith, a systematic effort considered by many to be one of the true classics of Christian theology.

The ego, the person, is an individualization of universal reason; and the primary act of self-consciousness is the first conjunction of universal and individual life, the immediate union or marriage of the universe with incarnated reason. Thus every person becomes a specific and original representation of the universe and a compendium of humanity, a microcosmos in which the world is immediately reflected. While therefore we cannot, as we have seen, attain the idea of the supreme unity of thought and being by either cognition or volition, we

26 can find it in our own personality, in immediate self-consciousness or (which is the same in Schleiermacher's terminology) feeling. Feeling in this higher sense (as distinguished from "organic" sensibility, Empfindung), which is the minimum of distinct antithetic consciousness, the cessation of the antithesis of subject and object, constitutes likewise the unity of our being, in which the opposite functions of cognition and volition have their fundamental and permanent background of personality and their transitional link. Having its seat in this central point of our being, or indeed consisting in the essential fact of self-consciousness, religion lies at the basis of all thought and action.

At various periods of his life Schleiermacher used different terms to represent the character and relation of religious feeling. In his earlier days he called it a feeling or intuition of the universe, consciousness of the unity of reason and nature, of the infinite and the eternal within the finite and the temporal. In later life he described it as the feeling of absolute dependence, or, as meaning the same thing, the consciousness of being in relation to God. In his Addresses on Religion (1799), he wrote:

"Religion is the outcome neither of the fear of death, nor of the fear of God. It answers a deep need in man. It is neither a metaphysic, nor a morality, but above all and essentially an intuition and a feeling. ... Dogmas are not, properly speaking, part of religion: rather it is that they are derived from it. Religion is the of direct relationship with the infinite; and dogmas are the reflection of this miracle. Similarly in God, and in personal immortality, are not necessarily a part of religion; one can conceive of a religion without God, and it would be pure contemplation of the universe; the desire for personal immortality seems rather to show a lack of religion, since religion assumes a desire to lose oneself in the infinite, rather than to preserve one's own finite self."

The marked feature of Schleiermacher's thought in every department is the effort to combine and reconcile in the unity of a system the antithetic conceptions of other thinkers. He is realistic and idealistic, individualistic and universalistic, monistic and dualistic, sensationalist and intellectualist, naturalist and supernaturalist, rationalist and mystic, gnostic and agnostic. He is the prince of the Vermittler (the takers of the middle ground) in philosophy, ethics, religion and theology. But he does not seek to reconcile the antitheses of thought and being by weakening and hiding the points of difference; on the contrary, he brings them out in their sharpest outlines.

His method is to distinctly define the opposing elements and then to seek their harmonious combination by the aid of a deeper conception. Apart from the positive and permanent value of the higher unities which he succeeds in establishing, the light and suggestiveness of his discussions and treatment of the great points at issue in all the principal fields of human thought, unsatisfactory as

27 many of his positions may be considered, make him one of the most helpful and instructive of modern thinkers. And, since the focus of his almost universal thought and inquiry and of his rich culture and varied life was religion and theology, he must be regarded as the classical representative of modern effort to reconcile science and philosophy with religion and theology, and the modern world with the Christian church.

28 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Friedrich Schleiermacher, was close friends and an intellectual soulmate of Karl von Schlegel:

 Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel (March 10, 1772 - January 12, 1829) was a German poet, critic and scholar. He was the younger brother of . Schlegel was born at . He studied law at Göttingen and Leipzig, but ultimately devoted himself entirely to literary studies. He published in 1797 Die Griechen und Römer (The Greeks and Romans), which was followed by Geschichte der Poesie der Griechen und Römer (The History of the Poetry of the Greeks and Romans) (1798). At the , he lectured as a University of Göttingen Privatdozent.

Von Schlegel co-founded Jena’s Athenaeum, contributing to that journal the aphorisms and essays in which the principles of the Romantic school are most definitely stated. Here also he wrote Lucinde (1799), an unfinished romance, which is interesting as an attempt to transfer to practical ethics the Romantic demand for complete individual freedom, and Alarcos, a (1802) in which, without much success, he combined romantic and classical elements.

In 1802 he went to Paris, where he edited the review Europa (1803), lectured on philosophy and carried on Oriental studies, some results of which he embodied in an epoch-making book, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of India) (1808). In the same year in which this work appeared, he and his wife Dorothea (1763-1839), a daughter of and the mother of , joined the Roman , and from this time he became more and more opposed to the principles of political and religious freedom. He went to Vienna and in 1809 was appointed imperial court secretary at the headquarters of the archduke Charles.

At a later period he was councillor of legation in the Austrian embassy at the diet, but in 1818 he returned to Vienna. Meanwhile he had published his collected Geschichte (Histories) (1809) and two series of lectures, Über die neuere Geschichte (On the New History) (1811) and Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur (On old and new literature) (1815). After his return to Vienna from Frankfurt he edited Concordia (1820-1823), and began the issue of his Sämtliche Werke (Collected Works). He also delivered lectures, which were republished in his Philosophie des Lebens (Philosophy of Life) (1828) and in his

29 Philosophie der Geschichte (Philosophy of History) (1829). He died on the 11th of January 1829 at .

A permanent place in the history of belongs to Friedrich Schlegel and his brother August Wilhelm as the critical leaders of the Romantic school, which derived from them most of its governing ideas as to the characteristics of the , and as to the methods of literary expression. Of the two brothers, Friedrich was unquestionably the more original genius. He was the real founder of the Romantic school; to him more than to any other member of the school we owe the revolutionizing and germinating ideas which influenced so profoundly the development of German literature at the beginning of the 19th century.

Friedrich Schlegel's wife, Dorothea, was the author of an unfinished romance, Florentin (180,), a Sammlung romantischer Dichtungen des Mittelalters (Collection of Romantic Writings of the Middle Ages) (2 vols., 1804), a version of Lother und Maller (1805), and a translation of Madame de Staël's Corinne (1807- 1808)--all of which were issued under her husband's name. By her first marriage she had a son, Philipp Veit, who became an eminent painter. According to Arvidsson, writers like Bernal have unjustly claimed that Schlegel was a racist.

Schlegel was born at Hanover, where his father, Johann Adolf Schlegel, was a Lutheran pastor. He was educated at the Hanover gymnasium and at the university of Göttingen. With his brother Friedrich, the principal philosopher of , he founded Athenaeum (1798-1800), the chief journal of the movement. Having spent some years as a tutor in the house of a banker at , he went to Jena, where, in 1796, he married Karoline, the widow of the physician Böhmer and in 1798 was appointed extraordinary professor. Here he began his translation of Shakespeare, which was ultimately completed, under the superintendence of , by Tieck's daughter Dorothea and Wolf Heinrich, Graf von Baudissin. This rendering is one of the best poetical translations in German, or indeed in any language. At Jena Schlegel contributed to Schiller's periodicals the Horen and the Musenalmanach; and with his brother Friedrich he conducted the Athenaeum, the organ of the Romantic school. He also published a volume of poems, and carried on a rather bitter controversy with Kotzebue.

At this time the two brothers were remarkable for the vigour and freshness of their ideas, and commanded respect as the leaders of the new Romantic criticism. A volume of their joint essays appeared in 1801 under the title Charakteristiken und Kritiken. In 1802 Schlegel went to Berlin, where he delivered lectures on art and literature; and in the following year he published Ion, a tragedy in Euripidean style, which gave rise to a suggestive discussion on the principles of dramatic poetry. This was followed by Spanisches Theater (2 vols, 1803/1809), in which he presented admirable translations of five of Calderon's plays; and in another volume, Blumensträusse italienischer,

30 spanischer und portugiesischer Poesie (1804), he gave translations of Spanish, Portuguese and Italian lyrics.

In 1807 he attracted much attention in France by an essay in the French language, Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d'Euripide, in which he attacked French from the standpoint of the Romantic school. His lectures on dramatic art and literature (Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, 1809-1811), which have been translated into most European languages, were delivered at Vienna in 1808. Meanwhile, after a divorce from his wife Karoline, in 1804, he travelled in France, Germany, Italy and other countries with Madame de Staël, who owed to him many of the ideas which she embodied in her work, De l'Allemagne.

In 1813 he acted as secretary of the crown prince of , through whose influence the right of his family to noble rank was revived. Schlegel was made a professor of literature at the in 1818, and during the remainder of his life occupied himself chiefly with oriental studies, although he continued to lecture on art and literature, and in 1828 he issued two volumes of critical writings (Kritische Schriften). In 1823-1830 he published the journal Indische Bibliothek and edited (1823) the with a Latin translation, and (1829) the Ramayana. These works mark the beginning of scholarship in Germany.

After the death of Madame de Staël, Schlegel married (1818) a daughter of Professor Paulus of Heidelberg; but this union was dissolved in 1821. He died at Bonn in 1845. As an original poet Schlegel is unimportant, but as a poetical translator he has rarely been excelled, and in criticism he put into practice the Romantic principle that a critic's first duty is not to judge from the standpoint of superiority, but to understand and to characterize a work of art.

31 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Karl von Schegal, was mentored by Johann Ludwig Tieck, particularly on the intellectual work which made Schlegal a force in the German Romantic movement:

 Johann Ludwig Tieck (May 31, 1773 – April 28, 1853) was a German poet, translator, editor, novelist, and critic, who was part of the Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Tieck was born in Berlin, the son of a rope-maker. He was educated at the Friedrich- Werdersche Gymnasium, and at the universities of Halle, Göttingen and Erlangen. At Göttingen, he studied Shakespeare and the Elizabethan drama. In 1794 he returned to Berlin, The University of Halle and attempted write for a living. He contributed a number of short stories (1795-1798) to the series of Straussfedern, published by the bookseller C.F. Nicolai and originally edited by J.K.A. Musäus, and wrote Abdallah (1796) and a novel in letters, William Lovell (3 vols. 1795-1796).

Tieck's transition to Romanticism is seen in the series of plays and stories published under the title Volksmärchen von Peter Lebrecht (3 vols., 1797), a collection which contains the admirable fairy-tale Der blonde Eckbert, and the witty dramatic satire on Berlin literary taste, Der gestiefelte Kater. With his school and college friend Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773-1798), he planned the novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (vols. i-ii. 1798), which, with Wackenroder's Herzensergiessungen (1798), was the first expression of the romantic enthusiasm for old .

In 1798 Tieck married and in the following year settled in Jena, where he, the two brothers August and Friedrich Schlegel and were the leaders of the new Romantic school. His writings between 1798 and 1804 include the satirical drama, Prinz Zerbino (1799), and Romantische Dichtungen (2 vols., 1799-1800). The latter contains Tieck's most ambitious dramatic poems, Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva, Leben und Tod des kleinen Rotkäppchens, which were followed in 1804 by the remarkable "comedy" in two parts, Kaiser Oktavianus. These dramas, in which Tieck's poetic powers are to be seen at their best, are typical plays of the first Romantic school; although formless, and destitute of dramatic qualities, they show the influence of both Calderón and Shakespeare. Kaiser Oktavianus is a poetic glorification of the Middle Ages.

32 In 1801 Tieck went to Dresden, then lived for a time near Frankfurt (Oder), and spent many months in Italy. In 1803 he published a translation of Minnelieder aus der schwäbischen Vorzeit, between 1799 and 1804 an excellent version of Don Quixote, and in 1811 two volumes of Elizabethan dramas, Altenglisches Theater. From 1812 to 1817 he collected in three volumes a number of his earlier stories and dramas, under the title Phantasus. In this collection appeared the stories Der Runenberg, Die Elfen, Der Pokal, and the dramatic fairy tale, Fortunat.

In 1817 Tieck visited England in order to collect materials for a work on Shakespeare (unfortunately never finished) and in 1819 he settled permanently in Dresden; from 1825 on he was literary adviser to the Court Theatre, and his semi-public readings from the dramatic poets gave him a reputation which extended far beyond the Saxon capital. The new series of short stories which he began to publish in 1822 also won him a wide popularity. Notable among these are Die Gemälde, Die Reisenden, Die Verlobung, and Des Lebens Überfluss.

More ambitious and on a wider canvas are the historical or semi-historical novels, Dichterleben (1826), Der Aufruhr in den Cevennen (1826, unfinished), Der Tod des Dichters (1834); Der junge Tischlermeister (1836; but begun in 1811) is an excellent story written under the influence of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister; Vittoria Accorombona (1840), the story of Vittoria Accoramboni written in the style of the French Romanticists, shows a falling-off.

In later years Tieck carried on a varied literary activity as critic (Dramaturgische Blätter, 2 vols., 1825-1826; Kritische Schriften, 2 vols., 1848); he also edited the translation of Shakespeare by August Wilhelm Schlegel, who was assisted by Tieck's daughter Dorothea (1790-1841) and by Wolf Heinrich, Graf von Baudissin (1789-1878); Shakespeares Vorschule (2 vols., 1823-1829); the works of (1826) and of Jakob Reinhold Lenz (1828). In 1841 Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia invited him to Berlin where he enjoyed a pension for his remaining years. He died on the 28th of April 1853.

Tieck's importance lay in the readiness with which he adapted himself to the new ideas which arose at the close of the 18th century, rather than in any conspicuous originality. His importance in German poetry is restricted to his early period. In later years it was as the helpful friend and adviser of others, or as the well-read critic of wide sympathies, that Tieck distinguished himself.

Tieck also influenced 's Tannhäuser. It was from Phantasus that Wagner based the idea of Tannhäuser going to see the Pope and Elisabeth dying in the song battle.

33 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Johann Ludwig Tieckl, was a close college friend and confidante of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder. Together, they launched the Romantic movement in the German states:

 Wilhelm Heinrich Wacken- roder (July 13, 1773 – February 13, 1798) was a German jurist and writer. With Ludwig Tieck, he was a co-founder of German Romanticism. Wackenroder was born in Berlin. He was a close friend of Tieck from youth until his early death. They collaborated on virtually everything they wrote in this period. Wackenroder probably made substantial contributions to Tieck's novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (Franz Sternbald’s Wanderings, 1798). Tieck also influenced Wackenroder's influential collection of essays, Herzen-sergiesungen eines The University of Erlangen kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar, 1797). Outpourings is a tribute to medieval literature and art, attributing to them a sense of emotion Wackenroder and Tieck felt was missing in German Enlightenment thought. These two intellectual brothers studied law together at Erlangen. At the time, Wackenroder was was profoundly influenced by the architectural and art treasures of Franconia, encountered during a joint visit which they describe in a programmatic Romantic work Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebendes Klosterbruders (1797), in which the aesthetic concept of synaesthesia is formulated. Wackenroder's other writings include the novels Die Unsichtbaren (1794) and Das Schloß Montford (1796), and a further work edited by Tieck, Phantasien über die Kunst, für Freunde der Kunst (1799) which is chiefly concerned with music.

Wackenroder died in 1798 of typhoid at the age of 24, in Berlin. His memory was treasured by Tieck for the rest of his days.

Both Tieck and Wackenroder were reacting against the strictures of the European “enlightenment”. The , in French, the “Siècle des Lumières” and in German, “Aufklärung” was an eighteenth century movement in European and — some classifications also include 17th century philosophy (usually called the Age of Reason).

The term can more narrowly refer to the intellectual movement of The Enlightenment, which advocated reason as the primary basis of authority.

34 Developed in France, Britain and Germany, it influenced the whole of Europe including Russia and Scandinavia. The era is marked politically by governmental consolidation, nation creation, greater rights for the common people, and a decline in the influence of authoritarian institutions such as the nobility and Church.

Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States were also influenced by Enlightenment-era ideas, particularly in the religious sphere () and, in parallel with liberalism (which had a major influence on its Bill of Rights, in parallel with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen), and in the political sphere.

Typically, The Enlightenment is said to end around the year 1800 at the beginning of the (1804–15). However, some historians argue that the revolution of knowledge commenced by Newton, and in a climate of increasing disaffection with repressive rule, Enlightenment thinkers believed that systematic thinking might be applied to all areas of human activity, carried into the governmental sphere in their explorations of the individual, society and the state. Its leaders believed they could lead their states to progress after a long period of tradition, , superstition, and tyranny which they imputed to the Middle Ages. The movement helped create the intellectual framework for the American and French , Poland's Constitution of May 3, 1791, Russia's 1825 Decembrist Revolt, the Latin American independence movement, the Greek national independence movement and the later Balkan independence movements against the Ottoman Empire, and led to the rise of , , and .

The Age of Enlightenment receives modern attention as a central model for many movements in the modern period. Another important movement in 18th century philosophy, closely related to it, focused on belief and piety. Some of its proponents, such as , attempted to demonstrate rationally the existence of a supreme being. Piety and belief in this period were integral to the exploration of and ethics, in addition to political theories of the age. However, prominent Enlightenment philosophers such as , , Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and David Hume questioned and attacked the existing institutions of both Church and State. The 19th century also saw a continued rise of empiricist ideas and their application to political economy, government and sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology.

The boundaries of the Enlightenment cover much of the seventeenth century as well, though others term the previous era the "Age of Reason." For the present purposes, these two eras are split; however, it is acceptable to think of them joined as one long period.

Europe had been ravaged by religious wars; when in the political situation had been restored, after the Peace of Westphalia and the English Civil

35 War, an intellectual upheaval overturned the accepted belief that and revelation are the primary sources of knowledge and wisdom—which was blamed for fomenting political instability. Instead (according to those that split the two periods), the Age of Reason sought to establish axiomatic philosophy and absolutism as foundations for knowledge and stability. , in the writings of and René Descartes, was based on extreme skepticism and inquiry into the nature of "knowledge." The goal of a philosophy based on self-evident axioms reached its height with Baruch (Benedictus de) Spinoza's Ethics, which expounded a pantheistic view of the universe where God and Nature were one. This idea then became central to the Enlightenment from Newton through to Jefferson. The ideas of Pascal, Leibniz, Galileo and other natural philosophers of the previous period also contributed to and greatly influenced the Enlightenment; for instance, according to E. Cassirer, Leibniz’s treatise On Wisdom "... identified the central concept of the Enlightenment and sketched its theoretical programme" (Cassirer 1979: 121–23). There was a wave of change across European thinking, exemplified by Newton's natural philosophy, which combined mathematics of axiomatic proof with mechanics of physical observation, a coherent system of verifiable predictions, which set the tone for what followed Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in the century after.

The Age of Enlightenment is also prominent in the history of Judaism, perhaps because of its conjunction with increased social acceptance of Jews in some western European states, especially those who were not orthodox or who converted to the officially sanctioned version of Christianity.

The Enlightenment occupies a central role in the justification for the movement known as modernism. The neo-classicizing trend in modernism came to see itself as a period of which overturned established traditions, analogously to the Encyclopaediasts and other Enlightenment philosophers. A variety of 20th century movements, including liberalism and neo-classicism, traced their intellectual heritage back to the Enlightenment, and away from the purported emotionalism of the 19th century. Geometric order, rigor and were seen as Enlightenment virtues. The modern movement points to reductionism and rationality as crucial aspects of Enlightenment thinking, of which it is the heir, as opposed to irrationality and emotionalism. In this view, the Enlightenment represents the basis for modern ideas of liberalism against superstition and intolerance. Influential philosophers who have held this view include Jürgen Habermas and .

This view asserts that the Enlightenment was the point when Europe broke through what historian Peter Gay calls "the sacred circle," whose dogma had circumscribed thinking. The Enlightenment is held to be the source of critical ideas, such as the centrality of freedom, democracy and reason as primary values of society. This view argues that the establishment of a contractual basis of rights would lead to the market mechanism and capitalism, the scientific

36 method, religious tolerance, and the organization of states into self-governing republics through democratic means. In this view, the tendency of the philosophes in particular to apply rationality to every problem is considered the essential change. From this point on, thinkers and writers were held to be free to pursue the truth in whatever form, without the threat of sanction for violating established ideas.

With the end of the Second World War and the rise of post-modernity, these same features came to be regarded as liabilities - excessive specialization, failure to heed traditional wisdom or provide for unintended consequences, and the romanticization of Enlightenment figures - such as the Founding Fathers of the United States, prompted a backlash against both Science and Enlightenment based dogma in general. Philosophers such as are often understood as arguing that the Age of Reason had to construct a vision of unreason as being demonic and subhuman, and therefore evil and befouling, whence by analogy to argue that rationalism in the modern period is, likewise, a construction. In their book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Theodor Adorno wrote a critique of what they perceived as the contradictions of Enlightenment thought: Enlightenment was seen as being at once liberatory and (through the domination of instrumental rationality) tending towards totalitarianism.

Yet other leading intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky, see a natural evolution, using the term loosely, from early Enlightenment thinking to other forms of social analysis, specifically from The Enlightenment to liberalism, anarchism and socialism. The relationship between these different schools of thought, Chomsky and others point out, can be seen in the works of von Humboldt, Kropotkin, Bakunin and Marx, among others.

37 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, was influenced by Johann Gottfried von Herder, below:

 Johann Gottfried von Herder (August 25, 1744 in Mohrungen (Morąg), Kingdom of Prussia - December 18, 1803 in Weimar) was a German philosopher, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the periods of Enlightenment, Storm and Stress, and . While Prussia was climbing to power in the later half of the 18th century, new thoughts were sweeping in from her eastern domains. Born in Mohrungen (Polish: Morąg) in Kingdom of Prussia, Herder grew up in a poor household, educating himself from his father's Bible and songbook. In 1762, an introspective youth of seventeen, he enrolled at the local The University of Königsberg University of Königsberg.

At Königsberg von Herder became a student of Johann Georg Hamann, a patriotic Francophobe and intensely subjective thinker who championed the emotions against reason. His choice of Hamann over such luminaries as Immanuel Kant was significant, as this odd figure, a needy hypochondriac, delved back into the German mysticism of Jacob Böhme and others, pronouncing obscure and oracular dicta that brought him fame as the "Magus of the North". Hamann's disjointed effusions generally carried subtitles such as Hierophantic Letters or A Rhapsody in Cabbalistic Prose.

Hamann's influence led Herder to confess to his wife later in life that "I have too little reason and too much idiosyncrasy", yet Herder can justly claim to have founded a new school of German political thought. Although himself an unsociable person, Herder influenced his contemporaries greatly. One friend wrote to him in 1785, hailing his works as "inspired by God." A varied field of theorists were later to find inspiration in Herder's tantalisingly incomplete ideas.

In 1764, now a clergyman, Herder went to to teach. It was during this period that he produced his first major works, which were literary criticism. In 1769 Herder traveled to the French port of Nantes and continued on to Paris. This resulted in both an account of his travels as well as a shift of his own self- conception as an author. By 1770 he went to Strassburg (Strasbourg), where he met the young Goethe.

38 This event proved to be a key juncture in the history of German literature, as Goethe was inspired by Herder's literary criticism to develop his own style. This can be seen as the beginning of the "" movement. In 1771 Herder took a position as head pastor and court preacher at Bückeburg under Count Wilhelm von Schaumburg-Lippe.

By the mid-1770s, Goethe was a well-known author, and used his influence at the court of Weimar to secure Herder a position as General Superintendent. Herder moved there in 1776, where his outlook shifted again towards classicism. Towards the end of his career, Herder endorsed the French Revolution, which earned him the enmity of many of his colleagues. At the same time, he and Goethe experienced a personal split. Herder died in 1803 in Weimar.

In 1772 Herder published Treatise on the Origin of Language and went further in this promotion of language than his earlier injunction to "spew out the ugly slime of the Seine. Speak German, O You German". Herder now had established the foundations of comparative philology within the new currents of political outlook. hroughout this period, he continued to elaborate his own unique theory of aesthetics in works such as the above, while Goethe produced works like The Sorrows of Young Werther — the Sturm und Drang movement was born.

Herder wrote an important essay on Shakespeare and Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über und die Lieder alter Völker (Extract from a correspondence about Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples) published in 1773 in a manifesto along with contributions by Goethe and Möser. Herder wrote that "A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their in his hand to lead them to that world." To him such poetry had its greatest purity and power in nations before they became civilised, as shown in the Old Testament, the Edda, and Homer, and he tried to find such virtues in ancient German folk songs and Norse poetry and mythology.

After becoming General Superintendent in 1776, Herder's philosophy shifted again towards classicism. Herder was at his best during this period, and produced works such as his unfinished Outline of a Philosophical History of Humanity which largely originated the school of historical thought. Herder's philosophy was of a deeply subjective turn, stressing influence by physical and historical circumstance upon human development, stressing that "one must go into the age, into the region, into the whole history, and feel one's way into everything". The historian should be the "regenerated contemporary" of the past, and history a science as "instrument of the most genuine patriotic spirit".

Along with Johann Fichte and others, Herder replaced the traditional concept of a juridico-political state with that of the "folk-nation" as organic in its historical growth, thus creating the Romantic nationalist school. Every nation was in this manner organic and whole, nationality a plant of nurture. He talked of the

39 "national animal" and of the "physiology of the whole national group" , which organism was topped by the "national spirit", the "soul of the people" (Volksgeist).

Herder gave Germans new pride in their origins, modifying that dominance of regard allotted to Greek art (Greek revival) extolled among others by Johann Joachim Winckelmann and . He remarked that he would have wished to be born in the Middle Ages and mused whether "the times of the Swabian emperors" did not "deserve to be set forth in their true light in accordance with the German mode of thought?". Herder equated the German with the Gothic and favoured Dürer and everything Gothic. As with the sphere of art, equally he proclaimed a national message within the sphere of language. He topped the line of German authors emanating from Martin Opitz, who had written his Aristarchus, sive de contemptu linguae Teutonicae in Latin in 1617. This urged Germans to glory in their hitherto despised language, and Herder's extensive collections of folk-poetry began a great craze in Germany for that neglected topic.

Along with Wilhelm von Humboldt, Herder was one of the first to argue that language determines thought, a theme that two centuries later would be central to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Herder's focus upon language and cultural traditions as the ties that create a "nation" extended to include folklore, dance, music and art, and inspired Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in their collection of German folk tales.

Herder attached exceptional importance to the concept of nationality and of patriotism — "he that has lost his patriotic spirit has lost himself and the whole worlds about himself", whilst teaching that "in a certain sense every human perfection is national". Herder carried folk theory to an extreme by maintaining that "there is only one class in the state, the Volk, (not the rabble), and the king belongs to this class as well as the peasant". Explanation that the Volk was not the rabble was a novel conception in this era, and with Herder can be seen the emergence of "the people" as the basis for the emergence of a classless but hierarchical national body.

The nation, however was individual and separate, distinguished, to Herder, by climate, education, foreign intercourse, tradition and heredity. Providence he praised for having "wonderfully separated nationalities not only by woods and mountains, seas and deserts, rivers and climates, but more particularly by languages, inclinations and characters". Herder praised the tribal outlook writing that "the savage who loves himself, his wife and child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity of his tribe as for his own life is in my opinion a more real being than that cultivated shadow who is enraptured with the shadow of the whole species", isolated since "each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself, as a bullet the centre of gravity". With no need for comparison since "every nation bears in itself the standard of its perfection, totally independent of all comparison with that of others" for "do not nationalities

40 differ in everything, in poetry, in appearance, in tastes, in usages, customs and languages? Must not religion which partakes of these also differ among the nationalities?"

He also predicted that Slavic nations would one day be the real power in Europe, as the western Europeans would reject Christianity, and thus rot away, and saying that the eastern European nations would stick to their religion and their idealism; and would this way become the power in Europe.

This question was further developed by Herder's lament that did not establish a national church, and his doubt whether Germany did not buy Christianity at too high a price, that of true nationality. Herder's patriotism bordered at times upon national , demanding of territorial unity as "He is deserving of glory and gratitude who seeks to promote the unity of the territories of Germany through writings, manufacture, and institutions" and sounding an even deeper call:

"But now! Again I cry, my German brethren! But now! The remains of all genuine folk-thought is rolling into the abyss of oblivion with a last and accelerated impetus. For the last century we have been ashamed of everything that concerns the fatherland."

Herder presented formal defiance of the age of reason and Enlightenment. In his Ideas upon Philosophy and the History of Mankind he even wrote "Compare England with Germany: the English are Germans, and even in the latest times the Germans have led the way for the English in the greatest things."

Herder, who hated absolutism and Prussian , but who was imbued with the spirit of the whole German Volk, yet as historical theorist turned away from the light of the eighteenth century. Seeking to reconcile his thought with this earlier age, Herder sought to harmonize his conception of sentiment with reason, whereby all knowledge is implicit in the soul; the most elementary stage is sensuous and intuitive perception which by development can become self-conscious and rational. To Herder, this development is the harmonizing of primitive and derivative truth, of experience and intelligence, feeling and reason.

Herder is the first in a long line of Germans preoccupied with this harmony. This search is itself the key to much in German theory. And Herder was too penetrating a thinker not to understand and fear the extremes to which his folk-theory could tend, and so issued specific warnings. While regarding the Jews as aliens in Europe, he refused to adhere to a rigid racial theory, writing that "notwithstanding the varieties of the human form, there is but one and the same species of man throughout the whole earth".

He also announced that "national glory is a deceiving seducer. When it reaches a certain height, it clasps the head with an iron band. The enclosed sees

41 nothing in the mist but his own picture; he is susceptible to no foreign impressions." And:

"It is the apparent plan of nature that as one human being, so also one generation, and also one nationality learn, learn incessantly, from and with the others, until all have comprehended the difficult lesson: No nationality has been solely designated by God as the chosen people of the earth; above all we must seek the truth and cultivate the garden of the common good. Hence no nationality of Europe may separate itself sharply, and foolishly say, "With us alone, with us dwells all wisdom."

Time was to demonstrate that while many Germans were to find influence in Herder's convictions and influence, fewer were to note his qualificatory stipulations.

Herder had emphasised that his conception of the nation encouraged democracy and the free self-expression of a people's identity. He proclaimed support for the French Revolution, a position which did not endear him to royalty. He also differed with Kant's philosophy and turned away from the Sturm und Drang movement to go back to the poems of Shakespeare and Homer.

To promote his concept of the Volk, he published letters and collected folk songs. These latter were published in 1773 as Voices of the People in Their Songs (Stimmen der Völker in ihren Liedern). The poets and Clemens von Brentano later used Stimmen der Võlker as samples for The Boy's Magic Horn (Des Knaben Wunderhorn).

42 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Johan Gottfried von Herder, above, was influenced by Johann Georg Hamann, below:

 Johann Georg Hamann (August 27, 1730, Königsberg - June 21, 1788, Münster) was an important philosopher of the German (Counter-)Enlightenment and a main proponent of the Sturm und Drang movement. He was Pietist Lutheran, and a friend (while being an intellectual opponent) of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. He was also a lutenist, having studied this instrument with Timofey Belogradsky (a student of ), a Ukrainian virtuoso then living in Königsberg. His distrust of reason and the Enlightenment led him to conclude that faith in God was the only solution to the vexing problems of philosophy. Hamann The University of Königsberg was greatly influenced by Hume's writings.

Hamann famously used the image of , who often proclaimed to know nothing, in his Socratic Memorabilia, an essay in which Hamann is critical of the Enlightenment's dependence on reason. Also known by the epithet Magus im Norden ("Magus of the North"), he was one of the precipitating forces for the counter-enlightenment with great effect. He was, moreover, a mentor to Herder and an admired influence to Goethe, Jacobi, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. devoted a monograph to Hamann in his volume, Studies in Theological Styles: Lay Styles (Volume III in the English language translation of The Glory of the Lord series).

His writings were known to be allusive, extremely difficult, and heavily involved. One such work, for instance, was called Golgatha and Scheblimini! By a Preacher in the Wilderness (1784), which was directed against Moses Mendelssohn 's Jerusalem, or on Religious Might and Judaism (1782). Brevity and responsive writing to others' works colored the pamphletary form of all his writings.

Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) lived and worked in Prussia, in the context of the late German Enlightenment. Although he remained outside ‘professional’ philosophical circles, in that he never held a University post, he was respected in his time for his scholarship and breadth of learning. His writings were notorious even in his own time for the challenges they threw down to the reader. These challenges to interpretation and understanding are only heightened today.

43 Nevertheless an increasing number of scholars from philosophy, theology, aesthetics and German studies are finding his ideas and insights of value to contemporary concerns. His central preoccupations are still pertinent: language, knowledge, the nature of the human person, sexuality and gender and the relationship of humanity to God. Meanwhile, his views, which in many respects anticipate later challenges to the Enlightenment project and to modernity, are still relevant and even provocative.

Johann Georg Hamann was born in Königsberg in 1730, the son of a midwife and a barber-surgeon. He began study in philosophy and theology at the age of 16, changed to law but mainly read literature, philology, and rhetoric, but also mathematics and science. He left university without completing his studies and became the governor to a wealthy family on a Baltic estate. During this time he continued his extraordinarily broad reading and private research. He took up a job in the family firm of a friend from his Königsberg days, Christoph Berens, and was sent on an obscure mission to London, in which he evidently failed. He then led a high life until he ran out of friends, money and support. In a garret, depressed and impoverished, he read the Bible cover to cover and experienced a religious conversion.

He returned to the House of Berens in Riga, where they evidently forgave him his failure. He fell in love with Christoph Berens' sister, Katharina, but was refused permission to marry her by his friend, on the grounds of his religious conversion; Berens was an enthusiastic follower of the Enlightenment and was nauseated by the more pious manifestations of Hamann's new-found religiosity. Smarting from this blow and its motivations, Hamann returned to his father's house in Königsberg, where he lived for the rest of his life until his final months.

In Königsberg, he never held an official academic post, nor an ecclesiastical one; this may in part have been due to his pronounced speech impediment, which inhibited him from either lecturing or preaching. Eventually, through the intercession of his acquaintance, Immanuel Kant, he found employment as a low-level civil servant working in the tax office of Frederick the Great; a ruler Hamann in fact despised. Nevertheless his principal activity was as an editor and a writer; he was considered one of the most widely-read scholars of his time (greatly aided by his fluency in many languages), as well as a notorious author. During this time, despite his committed Christianity, he lived with a woman whom he never married but to whom he remained devoted and faithful, having four children on whom he doted, and who occasionally feature in his writings (principally as unruly distractions to the author's scholarship).

At the end of his life he accepted an invitation to Münster from one of his admirers, Princess Gallitzin. He died in Münster in 1788.

Hamann had a profound influence on the German ‘Storm and Stress’ movement, and on other contemporaries such as Herder and Jacobi; he

44 impressed Hegel and Goethe (who called him the brightest head of his time) and was a major influence on Kierkegaard. His influence continued on twentieth century German thinkers, particularly those interested in language. His popularity has increased dramatically in the last few decades amongst philosophers, theologians, and German studies scholars around the world.

Hamann's writings are all short; he was not given to extensive treatises. They are also usually motivated by something very specific: someone else's publication, or particular circumstances and events. When responding to these, he presupposes considerable knowledge on the part of the reader; typically his responses to the work of others involves adoption of their terminology and style, blending into mimicry and parody as a rhetorical and argumentative device. Moreover, woven into these writings is an extraordinary breadth and quantity of citations and allusions; and by no means are these all clear and obvious. Thus, when he chooses, his essays are a tapestry of multicolored threads of the ideas, language, and imagery of thinkers, be they ancient, biblical, or contemporary. These are woven across a woof of a love of irony, which as ever adds a layer of interpretative complexity.

Hamann's writings also frequently appear under the name of various fanciful characters: Aristobolus, the Knight of the Rose-Cross, the Sibyl, Adelgunde. It cannot be assumed that such characters faithfully represent Hamann's own views; The opinions of Aristobolus, for example, are a device to deconstruct and drive to absurdity a number of views which Hamann opposes.

These factors combine to make Hamann's writings notoriously difficult to understand and interpret. Goethe observed that when reading Hamann, “one must completely rule out what one normally means by understanding” [Goethe, 550]. Even if one has – or painfully acquires, or borrows from other current scholars – the breadth of reference to understand the source of an allusion or citation, it is not always clear what the citation is doing there, and what Hamann means to suggest by referring to it. He delighted in sporting with his reader; preferring to present a balled fist and leave it to the reader to unroll it into a flat hand (to borrow one of his own images; cf. the end of the “Metacritique of the Purism of Reason”, 1780).

This impenetrability has been taken by some to signify an incapacity for clear expression on Hamann's part. Hegel remarked: "The French have a saying: Le stile c'est l'homme meme (“The style is the man himself”); Hamann's writings do not have a particular style but rather are style through and through" [Hegel, 209]. Others, however, have pointed to the clarity and concision of his letters, in contrast to the puzzling style he uses to address the public. They suggest that Hamann's challenging style forms are an important part of Hamann's hermeneutics and his understanding of the relationship between the writer and reader: two halves of a whole who must relate themselves to one another and unite for a common goal (“Reader and Critic”, 1762). The reader cannot be

45 passive and must work to reconstruct Hamann's meaning. As Hamann observed, “A writer who is in a hurry to be understood today or tomorrow runs the danger of being misunderstood the day after tomorrow.”

Consequently, Hamann is highly susceptible to misinterpretation. For example, one can find in recent English-language treatments the understanding of Hamann as an ‘irrationalist’, and one who simply opposed the Enlightenment with all his might; this however is not supported by the majority of Hamann scholars and is seen as a failure to understand the complexity of his thinking.

His principal writings include: Biblische Betrachtungen [Biblical Reflections], Gedanken über meinen Lebenslauf [Thoughts on the Course of my Life], Brocken [Fragments], Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten [Socratic Memorabilia], Wolken [Clouds], Kreuzzüge des Philologen [Crusades of the Philologian], a collection of essays including Aesthetica in Nuce, Versuch über eine akademische Frage [Essay on an academic question], and Kleeblatt Hellenistischer Briefe [Cloverleaf of Hellenistic Letters]; Schriftsteller und Kunstrichter [Author and Critic], Leser und Kunstrichter [Reader and Critic], Fünf Hirtenbriefe [Five Pastoral Letters], Des Ritters von Rosencreuz letzte Willensmeynung über den göttlichen und menschlichen Urprung der Sprache [The Knight of the Rose-Cross' Last Will and Testament on the divine and human origin of language], Philologische Einfälle und Zweifel [Philological Ideas and Doubts], Hierophantische Briefe [Hierophantic Letters], Versuch einer Sibylle über die Ehe [Essay of a Sibyl on Marriage], Konxompax, Metakritik über den Purismum der Vernunft [Metacritique of the Purism of Reason], Golgotha und Scheblimini [Golgotha and Scheblimini], Fliegender Brief [Flying Letter].

At the end of his life, Hamann chose to designate his authorship as “Metacritique”, a word he coined for his engagement with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Instead of creating a systematic theology, or an epistemology, he seems to have seen his work as one that examines the foundations and nature of philosophical and theological critique itself. Rather like the late Wittgenstein, his work was deconstructive; he belongs in the camp of philosophers whom Richard Rorty has described as “edifying and therapeutic” rather than “constructive and systematic” (Rorty, 5-6). He brings to any issue in philosophy not a constructive account, but an approach, a set of convictions, something akin to ethical principles. He anticipated Rorty's emphasis on the curative aspects of this task; at the end of his life, he wanted his collected works to be published under the title “Curative Baths” (“Saalbadereyen” — a reference to healing practices of the time and an allusion to his father's profession.) Each volume was to be called a ‘Tub’. This project was sadly never realized, not even under a more conventional title.

One abiding characteristic of Hamann's many responses to the philosophy of his time, therefore, is this ‘metacritical’ instinct: not to construct a rival account, but to go for the jugular; not to set up a rival critique, but to insist that critique itself must be subject to meta-critique, which concerns itself with the issues that

46 must be attended to in relation to the act of philosophical reflection itself. It consists of attention to the fundamental stance or position on issues or insights that must underlie any work on philosophy or theology. According to Hamann, often “the difficulties lie in womb of the concepts” (N III, 31, 21). Hamann's writing therefore is not so much ‘unsystematic’ as is sometimes said, but ‘presystematic’. He addresses issues that must be recognized in any self-critical reflection, matters that must be presuppositions for any system. Thus one of the most salient features of his “Metacritique of the Purism of Reason”, his unpublished response to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, was to focus on the question of language. Through a tissue of imagery, he suggests that a proper view of language implies that the alleged ‘purity’ of a priori reason is untenable.

These metacritical issues, for Hamann, principally include language, knowledge, and the nature of the human person. Hamann also, most urgently and most controversially (then as now), did not believe that any of these issues can be answered outside a theological perspective; that is, without reference to God as humanity's creator and dialogue partner.

A second feature of Hamann's approach is a tendency which Goethe saw as holism. This is perhaps not the best way to describe Hamann's insight, as Hamann characteristically emphasised the brokenness of human experience, and fragmentariness of human knowledge: “Gaps and lacks … is the highest and deepest knowledge of human nature, through which we must climb our way up to the ideal — ideas and doubts — the summum bonum of our reason” (ZH 3, 34:33-35). Hamann essentially disliked attempts to isolate the under consideration from other aspects with which he felt it to be intimately connected; this precludes a deep and true understanding of our existence. Taken as far as he did, this means that philosophy of language must include a discussion of God, and a discussion of God must make reference to sexuality and vice versa.

Thus in “Essay of a Sibyl on Marriage”, which he takes as an opportunity to write about sex, a proper understanding of human sexuality and erotic enjoyment cannot be understood without seeing humanity as the creature of God, made in God's image. He plays with the Christian idea of God as a Trinity to depict a trinity of woman-man-God in the moment of lovemaking; and reworks the account of the creation of Adam in Genesis to describe the act of coitus itself. The woman on perceiving her lover in his excitement sees ‘that rib’ and cries out in enthusiastic appropriation, ‘That is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!’ The man then ‘fills the hole of the place with flesh’ (as Genesis describes God doing with Adam after the creation of Eve). In doing so the lover also acknowledges that the origin of a man is in woman's body: the ‘Sibyl’ describes this moment of lovemaking as ”he entered in whence he once came forth.” Indeed, as Christ was born of a woman, the salvation of humanity proceeds from a woman's sexual body; the vagina is also described as the place that the Saviour came forth as the body's healer (the permits Hamann here to pun on ‘healer’

47 and ‘saviour’). This inclination to combine topics more often kept separate (such as ‘the concept of God’ and ‘having sex’) is salient throughout his work.

Hamann's tool for conceiving the interrelation of these dimensions of human life increasingly was the Principle of the Union of Opposites. He writes approvingly of this principle to his friends; particularly after his encounter with Kant's new epistemology, claiming to value it more than the principles of contradiction and of sufficient reason, and indeed more than the whole Kantian Critique (ZH 5, 327:12ff; ZH 4, 462:7-8). Contradictions and apparent oppositions fill our experience:

Yes, daily at home I have the experience that one must always contradict oneself from two viewpoints, [which] never can agree, and that it is impossible to change these viewpoints into the other without doing the greatest violence to them. Our knowledge is piecemeal — no dogmatist is in a position to feel this great truth, if he is to play his role and play it well; and through a vicious circle of pure reason skepsis itself becomes dogma (ZH 5, 432:29-36). (This is in the context of a discussion of Kant.)

Far from being a pre-condition for truth, the absence of contradiction is in Hamann's eyes a pre-condition for dogmatism. Knowledge must not proceed on the basis of unanimity and the absence of contradiction, but must proceed through the dialogue and relation of these different voices. (Hamann does not think in terms of Hegel's later dialectical synthesis.) When Hamann speaks of ‘opposition’ and contradictions, however, he does so in an ironic tone; for it is clearly his conviction that there is a fundamental unity in things, and the oppositions and contradictions that we perceive are chiefly of our own making. He insists that his perception is ‘without Manichaeism’ (ZH 5, 327:16-17). Body and mind, senses and reason, reason and passion are not truly opposed. These are contrasting elements of the same unified — unified but not homogenous — reality. Hamann tries to steer a course between Scylla and Charybdis: between the dogmatic, even tyrannical extermination of opposition and contradiction; and the elimination of contradiction through a false synthesis or fusion achieved by an apparent acceptance of antithetical realities.

The Principle of the Union of Opposites as a tactical tool, therefore, does not imply that Hamann sees the world in terms of divisions and dualism. It is his strategy for coping with the schematic antitheses abundant in Enlightenment philosophy.

Nothing seems easier than the leap from one extreme to the other, and nothing so difficult as the union to a center. … [The Union of Opposites] always seems to me to be the one sufficient reason of all contradictions — and the true process of their resolution and mediation, that makes an end to all feuds of healthy reason and pure unreason. (ZH 4, 287:5-17)

48 Hamann used the notion of ‘Prosopopoeia’, or personification, as an image of what can happen in philosophical reflection. In a medieval morality or mystery play, the experience of being chaste or being lustful is transformed from a way of acting or feeling into a dramatic character who then speaks and acts as a personification of that quality. So too in philosophy, Hamann suggests. The philosopher distinguishes differing aspects in the phenomenon under scrutiny and exaggerates their difference. These aspects are ennobled into faculties, and through ‘prosopopoeia’ are hypostasized into entities. Thus in the act of reflecting on something, ‘reasoning’ is distinguished from ‘feeling’, and turned from a verb or gerund into a noun — ‘reason’—which is then named as a constituent of our being. Reason then becomes a thing to which we can ascribe properties. (This shows perhaps a streak bordering on nominalism in Hamann.)

The best example of this, and of Hamann's response, is his treatment of the word ‘reason’. Since he handles it with a kind of skepticism or even distaste, he is often called an ‘irrationalist’. It is clear however that Hamann puts a high value on certain ways of being reasonable and of reasoning activity. “Without language we would have no reason, without reason no religion, and without these three essential aspects of our nature, neither mind [] nor bond of society” (N III, 231, 10-12).

Hamann's treatment of reason instead is a deconstruction, both of the prosopopoeic use of the word and the Enlightenment valuation of it. There is no such thing as reason — there is only reasoning. Reasoning, as something we do, is as fallible as we are, and as such is subject to our position in history, or own personality, or the circumstances of the moment. ‘It’ is therefore not a universal, healthy and infallible ‘faculty’ as Hamann's Enlightenment contemporaries often maintained:

Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it. (ZH 7, 165:7-11)

Hamann is sometimes portrayed simply as an opponent of ‘the Enlightenment’. This presupposes of course that ‘the Enlightenment’ constitutes a unified stance on a number of philosophical issues, an assumption which is questionable. The majority of Hamann scholars today see his position in a more complex way. Hamann opposed many of the popular convictions of his time. However, Hamann fought his contemporaries on many fronts; often with areas of considerable agreement with some of his opponents.

One example would be the way that he deployed Hume as a weapon against Enlightenment rationalism, not least against Kant (although Hamann was the one who introduced Kant to Hume's writings in the first place). Although Hamann, as a Christian, had profound disagreements with Hume's thought in its

49 atheistic aspects, nevertheless he used Humean skepticism in his own deconstructive writings. Hume's doubts about the reliability and self-sufficiency of reason were grist to Hamann's mill. Hume's insistence that ‘belief’ underlies much of our thinking and reasoning was adopted and deployed by Hamann, often with a linguistic sleight of hand. By using the word ‘Glaube’ (which in German includes both ‘belief’ in an epistemic sense and ‘faith’ in a religious sense), Hamann could assert that ‘faith’, not rational grounds, underlies his contemporaries' high valuation of reason. Thus even the enthusiastic advocates of impartiality and ‘reason’, who are also skeptics about ‘blind faith’, have ultimately only faith as the ground for their convictions.

In one sense, however, Hamann can certainly be seen as a critic—or metacritic—of the Enlightenment. The question of what ‘Enlightenment’ consists in was a challenge Hamann through down to his contemporaries, from his debut with Socratic Memorabilia (1759) to the end of his life. It is instructive to juxtapose Kant's famous essay “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784) with Hamann's response in a letter to his acquaintance Christian Jacob Kraus. Kant defines enlightenment as the exit from ‘self-incurred minority’ (or ‘immaturity’ or ‘tutelage’), which arises from laziness and cowardice. (The ‘entire fairer sex’ in particular is said by Kant to regard the transition to maturity and thinking for oneself as difficult and dangerous). ‘!’ (‘Dare to know!’), Kant instructs the reader. However, while Kant urges the ‘public’ use of reason (use of reason as a scholar), he nevertheless claims that ‘private’ (we would perhaps say, ‘professional’) use of reason must be circumscribed, for example, for the clergyman, soldier, or taxpayer; they must simply obey. Moreover, Kant heaps praise on their monarch, Frederick the Great, whom Hamann deemed immoral and despotic.

The irony of being instructed to think for oneself, and being told to have the courage to know, was not lost on Hamann. More painful is the irony in being told to appreciate the freedom to think, but “believe, march, pay if the devil is not to take you” (Hamann's depiction of Kant's insistence that clergymen, soldiers and taxpayers must just obey orders). “What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave's smock at home?” Hamann asks, referring to Kant's approval of public use of reason but ‘private’ requirement to obey. In Hamann's view, the scholarly freedom to reflect, which Kant commends, is a luxury compared to the ethical imperative to question and debate in the professional and political sphere, which Kant restricts. “Thus the public use of reason and freedom is nothing but a dessert, a sumptuous dessert. The private use is the daily bread that we should give up for its sake. The self-incurred immaturity is just such a sneer as he makes at the whole fair sex, and which my three daughters will not put up with.”

Most urgently, therefore, Hamann objects to the allegation that this immaturity is ‘self-incurred’, rather than imposed on the people firstly by a despotic monarch, and secondly by intellectuals like Kant, with the ‘prattle and

50 reasoning of those emancipated immature ones, who set themselves up as guardians’. ‘True enlightenment,’ Hamann concludes sarcastically, with an eye to the likes of Kant and Frederick, “consists in an emergence of the immature person from a supremely self-incurred guardianship.”

Language is one of Hamann's most abiding philosophical concerns. From the beginning of his work, Hamann championed the priority which expression and communication, passion and symbol possess over abstraction, analysis and logic in matters of language. Neither logic nor even representation (in Rorty's sense) possesses the rights of the first-born. Representation is secondary and derivative rather than the whole function of language. Symbolism, imagery, metaphor have primacy; “Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race” (N II, 197). To think that language is essentially a passive system of signs for communicating thoughts is to deal a deathblow to true language.

For all Hamann's emphasis in his earlier writings on passion and emotion, he does not equate language with emotional expression. This became clear in his engagement with the writing of his younger friend Herder on the origin of language. Language has a mediating relationship between our reflection, one another, and our world; and as it is not simply the cries of emotion of an animal, so too it is not a smothering curtain between us and the rest of reality. Language also has a mediating role between God and us. Hamann's answer to a debate of his time, the origin of language — divine or human?—is that its origin is found in the relationship between God and humanity. Typically he has the ‘Knight of the Rose-Cross’ express this in the form of a ‘myth’, rather than attempting to work out such a claim logically and systematically. Rewriting the story of the Garden of Eden, he describes this paradise as:

Every phenomenon of nature was a word,—the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas. Everything the human being heard from the beginning, saw with its eyes, looked upon and touched with its hands was a living word; for God was the word. (NIII, 32: 21-30)

This makes the origin of language as easy and natural as child's play.

By the end of his life, because of his engagement with Kant, the most urgent question among the relationships that constitute language is the relationship of language to thinking or ‘reason’. In his view, the central question of Kant's first Critique, the very possibility of a priori knowledge and of pure reason, depends on the nature of language. In a passage full of subtle allusions to Kantian passages and terms, he writes:

Indeed, if a chief question does remain: how is the power to think possible?—The power to think right and left, before and without, with and above experience? then it does not take a deduction to prove the genealogical priority

51 of language…. Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself. (N III, 286:1-10) Language is forced to take part in the ‘purification of philosophy’, as he describes it in his Metacritique of Kant: the attempt to expunge experience and tradition from rational reflection. Language itself is the final victim in this threefold ‘purification’. It is for this reason however that language can constitute the cure for philosophy. Language is the embodiment of experience and tradition; as long as the ability to think rests on language, neither ‘reason’ nor ‘philosophy’ can be pure of the empirical, of experience, and of the experience of the others to whom we relate. It itself, for Hamann, embodies a relation: it itself is a ‘union of opposites’, of the aesthetic and the logical, the bodily and the intellectual; it unites the divisions Kant's Critique creates.

For Hamann, in contrast to Kant, the question is therefore not so much ‘what is reason?’ as ‘what is language?’, as he writes in a letter. This is the ground of the paralogisms and antinomies that Kant raises in his Critique. Sharing Hume's and Berkeley's suspicion of universals and abstract terms, he concludes: “Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves” (ZH 5, 264:34-265:1). Language then has a fundamental role to play in unmasking the philosopher's tendency to ‘prosopopoeia’. The relation of language to reason he certainly did not feel had solved, however, as he wrote to a friend:

If only I was as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single word three times. Reason is language—Logos; I gnaw on this marrowbone and will gnaw myself to death over it. It is still always dark over these depths for me: I am still always awaiting an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss. (ZH 5, 177:16-21)

For Hamann, knowledge is inseparable from self-knowledge, and self- knowledge inseparable from knowledge of the other. We are visible, as in a mirror, in each other; “God and my neighbor are therefore a part of my self- knowledge, my self-love” (N I, 302:16-23). He writes in a letter: “Self knowledge begins with the neighbor, the mirror, and just the same with true self-love; that goes from the mirror to the matter” (ZH 6, 281:16-17). Sometimes this exploration of self-knowledge through interpersonal intimacy takes a sexual form, as in the Sibyl's Essay on Marriage (already discussed).

All forms of knowledge, of learning and development even of the most natural functions, require the help of another. (The ‘Knight of the Rose Cross’, while jesting with Hume, tells us ironically that even eating and drinking, and indeed excretion, are not instinctual or innate but require teaching.) (N III, 28:26- 28; N III, 29:7-10) This is conceived not only in such immediately interpersonal ways, but also more widely in the context of the community. The indispensability of ‘the other’ for knowledge is also the reason that Hamann gives the importance

52 he does to tradition in the formation of knowledge. “Our reason arises, at the very least, from this twofold lesson of sensuous revelations and human testimonies” (N III 29:28-30). Years before Kant's first Critique, Hamann attempts to relate the senses and the understanding and their roles in knowledge, using a characteristically concrete metaphor: the senses are like the stomach, the understanding like blood vessels. Not only do the blood vessels need the stomach to receive the nourishment that they distribute; the stomach also needs the blood vessels to function.

This insistence on the mutual dependency and interrelation of sense experience and understanding (as opposed to many Enlightenment views that plumped for either reason or the senses as the dominant party) was refined in his engagement with Kant's critique. Throughout his life, he was neither materialist, purely empiricist or positivist, nor idealist, rationalist or intellectualist in his epistemology. Rather, he is firmly against dividing knowledge or ways of knowing into different kinds. “The philosophers have always given truth a bill of divorce, by separating what nature has joined together and vice versa” (N III, 40: 3-5). With Kant's critique, the problem becomes still more urgent; Kant's treatment of the issue is a “violent, unwarranted, obstinate divorce of what nature has joined together”.

Revising Kant's metaphor of sensibility and understanding as two stems of human knowledge, he suggests we see knowledge as a single stem with two roots. Thus he rejects the division of what can be known a priori from what can be known a posteriori, and many of the consequences of such a stance. Here again he reaches for the ‘Principle of the Union of Opposites’ in his deployment of imagery to suggest a different approach. The relation of the senses and understanding is a ‘hypostatic union’, a ‘communicatio idiomatum’ (phrases borrowed from Christian theological discussion of how the two natures of divine and human are united in Christ). This mysterious union can only be revealed and understood by ‘ordinary language’. (In suggesting that the problems in philosophy can be cured by attending to ‘ordinary language’, he clearly anticipates the late Wittgenstein).

In this engagement with Kant, Hamann returns and deepens the lesson he had learnt much earlier in his reading of Hume: that belief or faith is an essential precursor for knowledge. Everything is dependent or grounded on faith; there is no privileged position for any kind or form of knowledge (a priori, scientific, etc.) In Hamann's epistemology, the hard division between ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’ or ‘faith’ becomes eroded. Both knowledge and faith rest on a foundation of trust; neither rest on a foundation of indubitability. “Every philosophy consists of certain and uncertain knowledge, of idealism and realism, of sensuousness and deductions. Why should only the uncertain be called belief? What then are— rational grounds?” (ZH 7, 165:33-37) ‘Sensuousness’ translates Sinnlichkeit (Kant's ‘sensibility’). Belief and reason both need each other; idealism and realism are a fantasized opposition, of which the authentic use of reason knows

53 nothing. The unity that lies in the nature of things should lie at the foundation of all our concepts and reflection (ZH 7, 165:7-17).

From his ‘debut’ work, Socratic Memorabilia, Hamann began to promulgate a particular view of what it means to understand something. From the beginning of that essay he emphasized the importance of passion and commitment in interpretation; undermining the more conventional assumption that objectivity and detachment are prerequisites of philosophical reflection and understanding. In Aesthetica in Nuce, wearing the authorial mask of the ‘kabbalistic philologian’, he provocatively maintained that initiation into orgies were necessary before the interpreter could safely begin the hermeneutical act. The idea that one must rid oneself of presuppositions, prejudices, and predilections in order to do justice to the subject matter he characterizes as ‘monastic rules’—i.e. an excessive asceticism and abstinence. He goes so far as to compare such individuals to self-castrating eunuchs (N II, 207:10-20).

Hamann's skepticism about neutrality and objectivity does not make him a ‘subjectivist’, however. The stance and disposition of the interpreter is integral, helpful, indeed, indispensable and must be acknowledged; but limitless subjectivity arouses Hamann's scorn. Those who ‘flood the text’ with glosses and marginalia, “dreaming up one's own inspiration and interpretation,” Hamann likens to the blind leading the blind (N II, 208:3ff).

The constraints which Hamann places on the interpreter's subjectivity are not those usually advocated, therefore: an avoidance of prejudice and pre- conceptions; an amnesia for one's own history, tradition and culture; an obedience to exegetical rules. The first restraint on subjective distortion is the interpreter's own common sense; the last is the reaction of the text itself: “what are you trying to make of me?” The interpreter's freedom is inextricable from the interpreter's respect and responsibility, in Hamann's view.

The responsible interpreter is conscious of standing within something larger than oneself: a tradition. The wise interpreter is a kabbalist, one who interprets an ancient text, and a rhapsodist—the original meaning of the latter being one who stitches something together from pre-existing materials. (In Ancient Greece the ‘rhapsodist’ was one who recited poems cobbled together from prior sources, usually bits of Homer.) In creating interpretations, the interpreter enjoys the freedom to create anew, as Hamann created his characteristic prose from pre-existing texts, while creating a new meaningful piece. Hamann's use of this genre itself makes the point: the demand that only one meaning may exist for a text arises from an impoverished notion of meaning and creativity; one that misunderstands the nature of composition and the nature of interpretation alike.

Hamann's rejected both exegetical ‘materialism’ and ‘idealism’, as he called them — literalism and excessive flights of fancy. In thus insisting on the

54 integrity of ‘the letter and the spirit’, he means to preserve the place of author, text and reader alike. Both meaning and interpretation rest in a three-way relationship.

For Hamann, the depth and meaning of a text go beyond the author's own contribution, and are the responsibility of the interpreter: “Few authors understand themselves, and a proper reader must not only understand his author but also be able to see beyond him” (ZH 6, 22:10-12). And yet this recognition that the author's opinions and intentions do not exhaust the possibilities of the text does not annihilate the place of the author. At the very least, the ‘beyond’ of the text includes a territory which, if unknown to the author, is not unrelated: that is, the author's own unconscious workings and meanings. It is not accidental that Hamann observes not that few authors understand their own text, but that few authors understand themselves. This suggests a picture of creation in which more of the author is expressed in a text and entrusted to the interpreter than the author's conscious intentions and opinions. This in turn suggests a picture of interpretation—of “understanding one's hero” as Hamann put it when writing about Socrates—in which greater sensitivity, insight, and fidelity is demanded of the interpreter than would otherwise be the case.

Above all, the interpreter must have the courage to be a kabbalist; that is, to say more than the text does, not to express oneself but to say what the author left unsaid. The fruits of such faithful creativity may be impossible to ‘justify’ or ‘verify’ to the demands of the objectivist, however.

Fundamentally, for Hamann hermeneutics consists in perceiving the underlying relationship beneath the phenomenon in question; at the least, of course, the relationship between the author and the interpreter which requires such fidelity. Given Hamann's religious views, this at once introduces a theological dimension. Ultimately, this means that for Hamann proper hermeneutics rests on one thing: perceiving God revealed within the phenomenon, whether that be nature or history (cf. Socratic Memorabilia and Aesthetica in Nuce for examples). Even the interpretation of ourselves is a revelation of God; a recognition of whose image solves all the most complicated knots and riddles of our nature (N II, 206:32-207:2; 198:3-5).

The topics examined so far all have their anthropological implications. Hamann's critique of the socio-political implications of Kant's vision of ‘enlightenment’ rests on a conviction about our social and political destiny. Hamann sees our socio-political vocation as consisting firstly in ‘criticism’ (or ‘critique’)—recognizing and appropriating, or hating and rejecting, the true vs. the false, good vs. evil, beautiful vs. ugly; and secondly in ‘politics’, which is increasing or reducing them. This is not the prerogative of the ruler; every one is at once their own ‘king’, their own ‘legislator’; but also the ‘first-born of their subjects’. It is our “republican privilege” to contribute to this destiny, “the critical and magisterial office of a political animal” (N III, 38-39).

55 The concepts of knowledge and language and their many facets also imply a particular anthropology: the diversity yet integration of the human being. For Hamann, the truest picture of humanity is of diversity in unity; a number of different, often contrasting aspects and features together composing the human person. Hamann consequently did not confine his attention to epistemology and reason when considering what human beings are, and passion, the thirst for vengeance, and sexual ecstasy form a part of his picture as well. (In response to the Enlightenment aesthetic of art as the imitation of ‘beautiful nature’, Hamann's ironic observation was: “The thirst for vengeance was the beautiful nature which Homer imitated” (ZH 2, 157:12).)

The theme of interdependence between human beings, which was emphasized in his epistemology, also has its roots in his understanding of what it is to be human. We are not self-sufficient; but for Hamann, even our lacks and failings have a positive thrust, this signifier of dependency making us all the more suited for the enjoyment of nature and one another.

If there is a fundamental key to his thinking on humanity, it is the idea that the human being is the image of God. This is admittedly more theological than philosophical, but is essential for understanding Hamann's philosophical anthropology. Hamann's treatment of this perennial theme is hardly conventional in the history of Christian thinking. While the experience of sinfulness and wickedness is a powerful theme, particularly in his earlier, post-conversion writing, the fundamental thrust of his thinking is the easy exchange between the human and the divine. In this exchange, language is “the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas” (N III, 32:21-24). Despite his reputation for being an irrationalist, reasoning too relates us to God; God, nature and reason are described as having the same relation as light, the eye and what we see, or as author, text and reader (ZH 5, 272:14-16).

One must also remember that Hamann confessed that he could not conceive of a Creative Spirit without genitalia; indeed, he was quite happy to assert that the genitals are the unique bond between creature and Creator. So sexuality in divine-human relations has two aspects. First, as paradigm of creativity, it is the way in which our God-likeness can most strikingly be seen. Secondly, as the point of the most profound unity, it is the locus for our union both with another human being and with the divine. Provocatively, Hamann sees original sin and its rebellion as embodied not in sexuality, but in reason. Overweening reason is our attempt to be like God; meanwhile, prudery is the rejection of God's image, while trying to be like God in the wrong sense (bodilessness). (See Essay of a Sibyl on Marriage and Konxompax.) One should therefore distinguish ‘likeness to God’ from ‘being equal to God’. In the Sibyl's essay, the male version of grasping at equality with God (cf. Phil. 2:6) is the attempt to be self-sufficient, to be the God of : the sole ruler, who possesses self-existence.

56 Instead, the encounter with the opposite sex should engender in the man an attitude of profound respect towards the woman's body, as the source of his own existence, from his mother. As the source of his own joy, lovemaking also is an acknowledgement of his own dependence, his lack of self-sufficiency and autonomy. But this dependence on another paradoxically is the Godlikeness of the Creator, the father, the one who humbles himself in self-giving (a favourite Hamannian theme in his discussion of God). Meanwhile, the woman's temptation is to an artificial innocence; a secret envy of God's incorporeality and impassibility. The defence of one's virginity is another cryptic attempt at self- sufficiency. Instead, the woman must brave the ‘tongues of fire’ in a ‘sacrifical offering of innocence’, in order to realize her Godlikeness; which is not to be found in bodilessness and the absence of passion, but in passionate creativity; in the willingness to be incarnate. Thus, if human beings are in the image of God, it is a trinitarian image of God, a mutual relation of love of ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’; found in creating, in saving, and in tongues of fire.

57 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Johann Georg Hamman, above, was greatly influenced by the writings of David Hume, below:

 Rather than track back through Hamman’s boyhood or other mentors, as is done in other appendices, the Halle line of New York Alpha’s intellectuals makes the jump to the , from Hamman to Hume. This is only appropriate due to Hamman and von Herder’s belief that the German states had lost some indigenious intellectual fire during the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. So they looked to Hume for a spark. The most important philosopher ever to write in English, David Hume (1711-1776) — the last of the great triumvirate of “British empiricists” — was also well-known in his own time as an historian and essayist.

Although many of Hume's contemporaries denounced his writings as works of scepticism and , his influence is evident in the moral philosophy and economic writings of his close friend .

A master stylist in any genre, Hume's major philosophical works — A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), the Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (1748) and concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), as well as the posthumously published Dialogues concerning (1779) — remain widely and deeply influential. Hume also awakened Immanuel Kant from his “dogmatic slumbers” and “caused the scales to fall” from 's eyes. Charles Darwin counted Hume as a central influence, as did “Darwin's bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley. The diverse directions in which these writers took what they gleaned from reading Hume reflect not only the richness of their sources but also the wide range of his empiricism. Today, philosophers recognize Hume as a precursor of contemporary cognitive science, as well as one of the most thoroughgoing exponents of philosophical .

Born in Edinburgh, Hume spent his childhood at Ninewells, the family's modest estate on the Whitadder River in the border lowlands near Berwick. His father died just after David's second birthday, “leaving me, with an elder brother and a sister under the care of our Mother, a woman of singular Merit, who, though young and handsome, devoted herself to the rearing and educating of her

58 Children.” (All quotations in this section are from Hume's autobiographical essay, “My Own life”, reprinted in HL.)

Katherine Falconer Hume realized that young David was “uncommonly wake-minded” — precocious, in her lowland dialect — so when his brother went up to Edinburgh University, David, not yet twelve, joined him. He read widely in history and literature, as well as ancient and modern philosophy, and also studied some mathematics and contemporary science.

Hume's family thought him suited for a career in the law, but he preferred reading classical authors, especially , whose Offices became his secular substitute for The Whole Duty of Man and his family's strict Calvinism. Pursuing the goal of becoming “a Scholar & Philosopher,” he followed a rigorous program of reading and reflection for three years until “there seem'd to be open'd up to me a New Scene of Thought.”

The intensity of developing this philosophical vision precipitated a psychological crisis in the isolated scholar. Believing that “a more active scene of life” might improve his condition, Hume made “a very feeble trial” in the world of commerce, as a clerk for a Bristol sugar importer. The crisis passed and he remained intent on articulating his “new scene of thought.” He moved to France, where he could live frugally, and finally settled in La Flèche, a sleepy village in Anjou best known for its Jesuit college. Here, where Descartes and Mersenne studied a century before, Hume read French and other continental authors, especially Malebranche, Dubos, and Bayle; he occasionally baited the Jesuits with iconoclastic arguments; and, between 1734 and 1737, he drafted A Treatise of Human Nature.

Hume returned to England in 1737 to ready the Treatise for the press. To curry favor with Bishop Butler, he “castrated” his manuscript, deleting his controversial discussion of , along with other “nobler parts.” Book I, Of the Understanding, and Book II, Of the Passions, was published anonymously in 1739. Book III, Of Morals, appeared in 1740, as well as an anonymous Abstract of the first two books. Although other candidates, especially Adam Smith, have occasionally been proposed as the Abstract's author, scholars now agree that it is Hume's work. The Abstract features a clear, succinct account of “one simple argument” concerning causation and the formation of belief. Hume's elegant summary presages his “recasting” of that argument in the first Enquiry.

The Treatise was no literary sensation, but it didn't “fall dead-born from the press,” as Hume disappointedly described its reception. And despite his surgical deletions, the Treatise attracted enough of a “murmour among the zealots” to fuel his life-long reputation as an atheist and a sceptic.

Back at Ninewells, Hume published two modestly successful volumes of Essays, Moral and Political in 1741 and 1742. When the Chair of Ethics and

59 Pneumatical (“Mental”) Philosophy at Edinburgh became vacant in 1745, Hume hoped to fill it, but his reputation provoked vocal and ultimately successful opposition. Six years later, he stood for the Chair of Logic at Glasgow, only to be turned down again. Hume never held an academic post.

In the wake of the Edinburgh debacle, Hume made the unfortunate decision to accept a position as tutor to the Marquess of Annandale, only to find that the young man was insane and his estate manager dishonest. With considerable difficulty, Hume managed to extricate himself from this situation, accepting the invitation of his cousin, Lieutenant-General James St. Clair, to be his Secretary on a military expedition against the French in Quebec. Contrary winds delayed St. Clair's fleet until the Ministry canceled the plan, only to spawn a new expedition that ended as an abortive raid on the coastal town of L'Orient in Brittany.

Hume also accompanied St. Clair on an extended diplomatic mission to the courts of Vienna and Turin in 1748. (“I wore the uniform of an officer.”) While he was in Italy, the Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding appeared. A recasting of the central ideas of Book I of the Treatise, the Philosophical Essays were read and reprinted, eventually becoming part of Hume's Essays and Treatises under the title by which they are known today, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. In 1751, this Enquiry was joined by a second, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. Hume described the second Enquiry, a substantially rewritten version of Book III of the Treatise, as “incomparably the best” of all his works. More essays, the Political Discourses, appeared in 1752, and Hume's correspondence reveals that a draft of the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion was also well underway at this time.

An offer to serve as Librarian to the Edinburgh Faculty of Advocates gave Hume the opportunity to work steadily on another project, a History of England, which was published in six volumes in 1754, 1756, 1759, and 1762. His History became a best-seller, finally giving him the financial independence he had long sought. (Both the British Library and the Cambridge University Library still list him as “David Hume, the historian.”)

But even as a librarian, Hume managed to arouse the ire of the “zealots.” In 1754, his order for several “indecent Books unworthy of a place in a learned Library” prompted a move for his dismissal, and in 1756, an unsuccessful attempt to excommunicate him. The Library's Trustees canceled his order for the offending volumes, which Hume regarded as a personal insult. Since he needed the Library's resources for his History, Hume remained at his post, but he did turn over his salary to Thomas Blacklock, a blind poet he befriended and sponsored. Hume finished his research for the History in 1757, and quickly resigned to make the position available for .

60 Despite his resignation from the Advocates' Library and the success of his History, Hume's work continued to be surrounded by controversy. In 1755, he was ready to publish a volume that included The Natural and A Dissertation on the Passions as well as the essays “Of Suicide” and “Of the Immortality of the Soul.” When his publisher, Andrew Millar, was threatened with legal action through the machinations of the minor theologian, William Warburton, Hume suppressed the offensive essays, substituting “Of Tragedy” and “Of the Standard of Taste” to round out his Four Dissertations, which was finally published in 1757.

In 1763, Hume accepted an invitation from Lord Hertford, the Ambassador to France, to serve as his Private Secretary. During his three years in Paris, Hume became Secretary to the Embassy and eventually its Chargè d'Affaires. He also become the rage of the Parisian salons, enjoying the conversation and company of Diderot, D'Alembert, and d'Holbach, as well as the attentions and affections of the salonnières, especially the Comtesse de Boufflers. (“As I took a particular pleasure in the company of modest women, I had no reason to be displeased with the reception I met with from them.”)

Hume returned to England in 1766, accompanied by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was then fleeing persecution in Switzerland. Their friendship ended quickly and miserably when the paranoid Rousseau became convinced that Hume was masterminding an international conspiracy against him.

After a year (1767-68) in London as an Under-Secretary of State, Hume returned to Edinburgh to stay in August, 1769. He built a house in Edinburgh's New Town, and spent his autumnal years quietly and comfortably, dining and conversing with friends, not all of whom were “studious and literary,” for Hume also found that his “company was not unacceptable to the young and careless.” One young person who found his company particularly “acceptable” was an attractive, vivacious, and highly intelligent woman in her twenties — Nancy Orde, the daughter of Chief Baron Orde of the Scottish Exchequer. One of Hume's friends described her as “one of the most agreeable and accomplished women I ever knew.” Also noted for her impish sense of humor, she chalked “St. David's Street” on the side of Hume's house one night; the street still bears that name today. The two were close enough that she advised Hume in choosing wallpaper for his new home, and rumors that they were engaged even reached the ears of the salonnières in Paris. Just before his death, Hume added a codicil to his will, which included a gift to her of “ten Guineas to buy a Ring, as a Memorial of my Friendship and Attachment to so amiable and accomplished a Person.”

Hume also spent considerable time in his final years revising his works for new editions of his Essays and Treatises, which contained his collected essays, the two Enquiries, A Dissertation on the Passions, and The Natural History of Religion, but — significantly — not A Treatise of Human Nature. In 1775, he added an “Advertisement” to these volumes, in which he appeared to disavow

61 the Treatise. Though he regarded this note as “a compleat Answer” to his critics, especially “Dr. Reid and that biggotted, silly fellow, Beattie,” subsequent readers have wisely chosen to ignore Hume's admonition to ignore his greatest philosophical work.

Upon finding that he had intestinal cancer, Hume prepared for his death with the same peaceful cheer that characterized his life. He arranged for the posthumous publication of his most controversial work, the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion; it was seen through the press by his nephew and namesake in 1779, three years after his uncle's death.

At the beginning of the first Enquiry, Hume maintains that we “must cultivate true metaphysics with some care, in order to destroy the false and adulterate” (EHU 12). But when he explains what “true metaphysics” is, it turns out not to be metaphysics at all. Hume is urging nothing less than the total reform of philosophy. A central part of his program is the profoundly anti-metaphysical aim of abandoning the a priori search for theoretical explanations that supposedly give us insight into the ultimate nature of reality, replacing these “hypothes[es], which can never be made intelligible” with an empirical, descriptive inquiry that answers questions about “the science of human nature” in the only way they can be intelligibly answered.

Understanding how and why Hume repudiates metaphysics will help us better understand the shape of his philosophical project. The best way to do that is to look at the places where Hume sets out his program for the reform of philosophy: the “Introduction” and the opening sections of A Treatise of Human Nature, and Section I of the first Enquiry. Looking afresh at these passages will not only clarify the nature of Hume's project, it will also help resolve several currently debated questions about it, including:

 the relation between the Treatise and the first Enquiry, and whether one work should be regarded as having interpretive priority over the other;  the relation between the negative and positive aspects of his project;  the nature of, and the proper relations among, his empiricism, his scepticism, and his naturalism.

These questions, especially the last, have generated increasingly complex responses in recent Hume scholarship.

Hume's apparent disavowal of the Treatise in his “Advertisement” raises a question as to how we should read his works. Should we take his “Advertisement” literally and let the Enquiries represent his considered view? Or should we take him seriously and conclude — whatever he may have said or thought — that the Treatise is the best statement of his position?

62 Both responses presuppose that there are substantial enough differences between the two works to warrant our reading them disjointly. This is highly dubious. Even in the “Advertisement,” Hume says that “most of the principles, and reasonings, contained in this volume, were published” in the Treatise, and that he has “cast the whole anew in the following pieces, where some negligences in his former reasoning and more in the expression, are…corrected” (EHU, “Advertisement”). Despite his protests, this hardly sounds like the claims of one who has genuinely repudiated his earlier work.

Hume reinforced this perspective when he wrote his friend Gilbert Elliot of Minto that “the philosophical principles are the same in both…by shortening and simplifying the questions, I really render them much more complete” (HL, I:158). And in “My Own Life,” he added that the Treatise's lack of success “proceeded more from the manner than the matter.” It is not unreasonable to conclude that Hume's “recasting” of the Treatise was primarily designed to address this point. The following brief overview of Hume's central views on method, epistemology, and ethics therefore follows the structure — “the manner” — of the Enquiries and emphasizes the content — “the matter” — they have in common with the Treatise.

In his “Introduction” to the Treatise, Hume bemoans the sorry state of philosophy, evident even to “the rabble without doors,” which has given rise to “that common prejudice against metaphysical reasonings of all kinds,” that is, “every kind of argument which is in any way abstruse, and requires some attention to be comprehended” (T, xiv).

Hume intends to correct this miserable situation. In An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, he says that he will “follow a very simple method” that will nonetheless bring about “a reformation in moral disquisitions” similar to that recently achieved in natural philosophy, where we have been cured of “a common source of illusion and mistake” — our “passion for hypotheses and systems.” To make parallel progress in the moral sciences, we should “reject every system…however subtle or ingenious, which is not founded on fact and observation,” and “hearken to no arguments but those which are derived from experience” (EPM, 173-175).

The “hypotheses and systems” Hume has in mind cover a wide range of philosophical and theological views. These theories were too entrenched, too influential, and too different from his proposed science of human nature for him just to present his “new scene of thought” as their replacement. He needed to show why we should reject these theories, in order to make space to develop his own.

Hume outlines his strategy in the first section of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Beginning by defining “moral philosophy” as “the science of human nature,” and thereby identifying his project with that of the Treatise,

63 Hume distinguishes two “species,” or “two different manners” in which moral philosophy may be treated. Although seemingly encouraging us to regard them as mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive, it is clear by the end of the section that Hume has rejected both species in favor of what he considers the proper way to pursue the science of human nature — a third species of philosophy.

The first species of philosophy looks at humans as active creatures, driven by desires and feelings and “influenced…by taste and sentiment,” seeking some things and avoiding others according to their perceived value. Since they regard virtue as the most valuable thing humans can pursue, these philosophers attempt “to excite and regulate our sentiments” in order to “bend our hearts to the love of probity and true honor.” They paint a flattering picture of human nature, easy to understand and even easier to accept. They make us feel what they say about our feelings, and what they say is so useful and agreeable that ordinary people are readily inclined to accept their views. This species of philosophy is easily recognizable as a generic characterization of positions defended in Hume's time by Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson.

In sharp contrast, the second species of philosophy seeks more to form our understandings than to cultivate our manners. These philosophers regard humans as reasonable rather than active creatures, and study human nature “to find those principles, which regulate our understanding, excite our sentiments, and make us approve or blame any particular object, action, or behaviour.” They seek to discover hidden truths that will “fix, beyond controversy, the foundations of morals, reasoning, and criticism.” In framing their theories, they move from particular cases to general principles, and continue to “push on their enquiries to principles more general,” until they arrive at “those original principles, by which, in every science, all human curiousity must be bounded” (EHU, 6). This view not only glorifies reason, but also appeals to it in its emphasis on rarefied speculation and abstract argument.

Hume is clear that “the generality of mankind” will always prefer the “easy and obvious philosophy” — his first species — over the “accurate and abstruse” second species. If they did so without “throwing any blame or contempt on the latter,” then perhaps no harm would be done. But repeating almost verbatim his point from the “Introduction” to the Treatise, Hume notes that “the matter is often carried farther, even to the absolute rejecting of all profound reasonings, or what is commonly called metaphysics” (EHU, 9).

Hostility to metaphysics, however, isn't entirely unjustified. It isn't merely obscure; it is also “the inevitable source of uncertainty and error.” This is “the justest and most plausible objection against a considerable part of metaphysics, that they are not properly a science.” Instead, these theories “arise either from the fruitless efforts of human vanity, which would penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to the understanding, or from the craft of popular superstitions,

64 which, being unable to defend themselves on fair ground, raise these entangling branches to cover and protet their weakness” (EHU, 11).

Metaphysics not only indulges in speculation that goes well beyond the bounds of sense, and so loses its claim to be a science, it also aids and abets the construction of metaphysical smoke screens as cover for “popular superstitions.” Since this garbage won't degrade by itself, philosophers should “perceive the necessity of carrying the war into the most secret recesses of the enemy.” And the only way to convincingly reject the “abstruse questions” of traditional metaphysics is to “enquire seriously into the human understanding, and show, from an exact analysis of its powers and capacity, that it is by no means fitted for such remote and abstruse subjects…[We] must cultivate true metaphysics with some care, to destroy the false and adulterate” (EHU, 12).

Thus a prominent part of Hume's approach to discovering “the proper province of human reason” is essentially negative and critical. The only way of ridding ourselves of speculative metaphysicians and their religious camp followers is to engage with them, which demands that we also engage in difficult and sometimes very abstract arguments:

Accurate and just reasoning is the only catholic remedy, fitted for all persons and all dispositions, and is alone able to subvert that abstruse philosophy and metaphysical jargon, which being mixed up with popular superstition, renders it in a manner impenetrable to careless reasoners, and gives it the air of science and wisdom (EHU, 12-3).

But “besides this advantage of rejecting…[this] uncertain and disagreeable part of learning,” engaging in “accurate and just reasoning” is not just a negative activity: “there are many positive advantages, which result from accurate scrutiny into the powers and faculties of human nature” (EHU, 13).

Hume proposes to replace the “airy sciences” of the metaphysicians with a descriptive “delineation of the parts and powers of the mind.” Traditional metaphysics went wrong in attempting to speculate about the “ultimate original principles” governing human nature, for in doing so, they went beyond anything that could have legitimate cognitive content, which is why their “hypotheses and systems” weren't properly sciences.

Hume makes the same point in the “Introduction” to the Treatise: “any hypothesis, that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature ought to be rejected as presumptuous and chimerical.” Once we see the “impossibility of explaining ultimate principles,” we can reject theories that pretend to provide them. And once we do, we can get clear about the proper way to study human nature: “The of the mind being equally unknown to us with that of external bodies, it must be equally impossible to form any notion of its powers and qualities otherwise than from careful and exact experiments, and the

65 observation of particular effects, which result from different circumstances and situations.” So the Treatise also recommends the repudiation of metaphysics, and outlines a positive program whereby “the only solid foundation” for the science of human nature “must be laid on experience and observation” (T, xvi- xvii).

When Hume spells out this same positive program in the Enquiry, he first calls his project “true metaphysics,” to mark the contrast with the “false metaphysics” he has rejected. But when he explains what “true metaphysics” is, it isn't metaphysics at all. It is an empirical inquiry, not an a priori one, and as such, is a genuine alternative to the contentless speculations of previous philosophies. His preferred terms for his project, “mental geography” and “anatomy of the mind,” are better characterizations of how he conceives of his descriptive anti-metaphysical alternative to traditional ways of theorizing about human nature.

Hume's program for reform in philosophy thus has two related aspects: the elimination of metaphysics and the establishment of an empirical experimental science of human nature. He shifts the focus of inquiry away from the traditional search for “ultimate original principles” in order to concentrate on describing the “original principles” that in fact govern human nature. He does so because claims to have found “ultimate principles” are not just false, they are incoherent, because they go beyond anything that can be experienced.

This combination of negative and positive aims is a distinguishing feature of Hume's particular brand of empiricism, and the strategy he devised to achieve these aims is revelatory of his philosophical genius. For Hume, all the materials of thinking — perceptions — are derived either from sensation (“outward sentiment”) or from reflection (“inward sentiment”) (EHU, 19). He divides perceptions into two categories, distinguished by their different degrees of force and vivacity. Our “more feeble” perceptions, ideas, are ultimately derived from our livelier impressions (EHU, Section II; T, I.i.1-2).

Hume begins both the Treatise and the Enquiry with an account of impressions and ideas because he thinks that all contentful philosophical questions can be asked and answered in those terms. Trying to go beyond perceptions, as metaphysics must, inevitably involves going beyond anything that can have cognitive content. No wonder the “hypotheses” that purport to give us the “ultimate original principles” that constitute traditional metaphysics turn out not to be incoherent.

Although we permute and combine ideas in the imagination to form complex ideas of things we haven't experienced, Hume is adamant that our creative powers extend no farther than “the materials afforded us by the senses and experience.” Complex ideas are composed of simple ideas, which are fainter copies of the simple impressions from which they are ultimately derived, to which

66 they correspond and exactly resemble. Hume offers this “general proposition” as his “first principle…in the science of human nature” (T, 7). Usually called the “Copy Principle,” Hume's distinctive brand of empiricism is often identified with his commitment to it.

Hume presents the Copy Principle as an empirical thesis. He emphasizes this point by offering “one contradictory phenomenon” (T, 5-6; EHU, 20-21) — the infamous missing shade of blue — as an empirical counterexample tto the Copy Principle. Hume asks us to consider “a person to have enjoyed his sight for thirty years, and to have become perfectly well acquainted with colours of all kinds, excepting one particular shade of blue…”(T, 6). Then

“Let all the different shades of that colour, except that single one, be plac'd before him, descending gradually from the deepest to the lightest; ‘tis plain, that he will perceive a blank, where that shade is wanting, and will be sensible, that there is a greater distance in that place betwixt the contiguous colours, than in any other. Now I ask, whether ‘tis possible for him, from his own imagination, to supply this deficiency, and raise up to himself the idea of that particular shade, tho’ it had never been conveyed to him by his senses? I believe there are few but will be of the opinion that he can; and this may serve as a proof, that the simple ideas are not always derived from the correspondent impressions; tho’ the instance is so particular and singular, that ‘tis scarce worth our observing, and does not merit that for it alone we should alter our general maxim” (T 6).

Hume's critics have objected that in offering this counterexample, he either unwittingly destroys the generality of the Copy Principle, which he needs, given the uses to which he will put it, or else his dismissive attitude toward the counterexample reflects his disingenuous willingness to apply the Copy Principle arbitrarily, while pretending that it really possesses the generality his uses of it require.

Hume's defenders, on the other hand, maintain either that he should have granted that the imaginative construction of the missing shade really produces a complex idea, or that he should have insisted that such counterexamples are exceedingly rare, and that the contentious metaphysical ideas, the cognitive content of which he uses the Copy Principle to critique, are not possibly ideas that could be generated by the imagination in the way the idea of the missing shade is supposedly generated.

Maintaining that the imaginatively constructed shade is a complex idea runs counter to what Hume actually says, however, and without some reason to convince us that philosophically contentious ideas couldn't also be constructed in

67 similar ways by the imagination, the claim remains unsupported and therefore unsatisfying.

Fortunately, there is a more satisfying resolution of the issue raised by the missing shade available to Hume. Once arranged in the way Hume describes, the simple ideas of the shades of blue that we have experienced bear a close mental resemblance to a paint store's familiar physical chips of the various shades, displayed on cardboard ordered by shade. Hume plausibly maintains that we would first notice that there is a gap where the shade is missing from our mental ordering of the shades of blue, just as we would also easily notice when a chip was missing from the physical array.

Even though each physical chip presents us with what for Hume is a simple impression of that shade, the paint store also has a formula for mixing paint of that shade. The formula gives the proportions of the component color pigments that are needed to create paint of that exact shade. Once mixed, however, when we perceive the newly mixed paint, we are now having a simple impression (ignoring the fact that the paint is spatially extended and therefore gives us a complex impression of many simple impressions of the shade) of the previously missing shade. We can't decompose the paint, once mixed, in the way that (say) we can take apart a car. In Humean terms, our idea of the shade of blue is simple, while our idea of the car is complex.

Now consider creating the missing physical shade by simply mixing the appropriate proportions of the shades on either side of the space where it should be. When we perceive the result of the mixing, we again have a simple impression of the no-longer missing physical shade of blue. So now imagine doing an analogous kind of “mental mixing” in the imagination: although the missing shade is now mentally mixed from two simple ideas, the result is a single shade of blue, and so should also be a simple idea, just like the ideas of each individual shade on either side of it in the array.

Although the missing shade has no direct antecedent in impressions, it is not totally independent of them, either. The two shades that were used to mentally mix the the formerly missing shade were caused by and resemble simple impressions in the usual way. We can also immediately see that there is an extremely limited number of ideas that could be caused in this or any other closely related manner, so the fear that admitting the creation of the missing shade would open the floodgates to a range of philosophical suspect ideas is not a realistic one. Besides, most of these theoretical notions would be complex, anyway. So Hume can retain the Copy Principle as an empirical principle, admit this harmless counterexample to it as genuine, and still use the Copy Principle as a way of determining cognitive content, or lack of it.

68 While Hume's empiricism is usually identified with the Copy Principle, it is his use of its reverse in his account of definition that is really the most distinctive and innovative element of his system.

As his diagnosis of traditional metaphysics indicates, Hume that “the chief obstacle…to our improvement in the moral or metaphysical sciences is the obscurity of the ideas, and ambiguity of the terms” (EHU, 61). However, Hume argues that conventional definitions — defining terms in terms of other terms — replicate philosophical confusions by substituting synonyms for the original and thus never break out of a narrow “definitional circle.” Determining the cognitive content of an idea or term requires something else.

To make progress, we need “to pass from words to the true and real subject of the controversy” (EHU 80) — the ideas involved. Hume believes he has found a mechanism that permits us to do so — his account of definition, which he touts as “a new microscope or species of optics” (EHU 62), predicting that it will produce as dramatic results in the moral sciences as its hardware counterparts have produced in natural philosophy.

This account of definition is a device for precisely determining the cognitive content of words and ideas. Hume uses a simple series of tests to determine cognitive content. Begin with a term. Ask what idea is annexed to it. If there is no such idea, then the term has no cognitive content, however prominently it figures in philosophy or theology. If there is an idea annexed to the term, and it is complex, break it up into the simple ideas that compose it. Then trace the simple ideas back to their original impressions: “These impressions are all strong and sensible. They admit not of ambiguity. They are not only placed in a full light themselves, but may throw light on their correspondent ideas, which lie in obscurity” (EHU, 62).

If the process fails at any point, the idea in question lacks cognitive content. When carried through successfully, however, the theory yields a “just definition” — a precise account of the troublesome idea or term. So, whenever we are suspicious that a “philosophical term is employed without any meaning or idea (as is too frequent), we need but enquire, from what impression is that supposed idea derived? And if it be impossible to assign any, this will serve to confirm our suspicion. By bringing ideas into so clear a light we may reasonably hope to remove all dispute, which may arise, concerning their nature and reality” (EHU, 22; Abstract, T, 648-9).

The Copy Principle accounts for the origins of our ideas. But our ideas are also regularly connected. As Hume put the point in his “Abstract” of the Treatise, “there is a secret tie or union among particular ideas, which causes the mind to conjoin them more frequently together, and makes the one, upon its appearance, introduce the other” (T, 662).

69 A science of human nature should account for these connections. Otherwise, we are stuck with an eidetic atomism — a set of discrete, independent ideas, unified only in that they are the contents of a particular mind. Eidetic atomism thus fails to explain how ideas are “bound together,” and its inadequacy in this regard encourages us, as Hume thought it encouraged Locke, to postulate theoretical notions — power and substance being the most notorious — to account for the connections we find among our ideas. Eidetic atomism is thus a prime source of the philosophical “hypotheses” Hume aims to eliminate.

Hume argues that, although “it be too obvious to escape observation, that different ideas are connected together; I do not find that any philosopher has attempted to enumerate or class all the principles of accociation” (EHU 24). His introduction of these “principles of association” is the other distinctive feature of his empiricism, so distinctive that in the Abstract he advertises it as his most original contribution: “If any thing can intitle the author to so glorious a name as that of an inventor, ‘tis the use he makes of the principle of the association of ideas” (T, 661-662).

The principles required for connecting our ideas aren't theoretical and rational; they are natural operations of the mind that we experience in “internal sensation.” Hume identifies “three principles of connexion” or association: resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect. Of the three, causation is the strongest:

there is no relation, which produces a stronger connexion in the fancy, and makes one idea more readily recall another, than the relation of cause and effect betwixt their objects. (T, 11)

Causation is also the only associative principle that takes us “beyond the evidence of our memory and senses.” It establishes a link or connection between past and present experiences with events that we predict or explain, so that “all reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded on the relation of cause and effect.” Causation is also the least understood of the associative principles, but “we shall have occasion afterwards to examine it to the bottom, and therefore shall not at present insist upon it” (T, 11).

Hume suggests that his identification of the principles of association is the equivalent, for the science of human nature, of Newton's discovery of the Law of Gravitation for the physical world, and like the inverse square law, the associative principles are “original.” Trying to account further for them takes one illegitimately beyond the bounds of experience:

Here is a kind of Attraction, which in the mental world will be found to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural, and to shew itself in as many and as various forms. Its effects are every where conspicuous; but as to its causes, they are mostly unknown, and must be resolv'd into original qualities of human nature,

70 which I pretend not to explain. Nothing is more requisite for a true philosopher, than to restrain the intemperate desire of searching into causes, and having establish'd any doctrine upon a sufficient number of experiments, rest contented with that, when he sees a farther examination would lead him into obscure and uncertain speculations. (T, 13)

Hume believes that the science of human nature can only be intelligibly and successfully pursued in terms of the “original principles” he has identified: impressions and the associative mechanisms:

Since nothing is ever present to the mind but perceptions, and since all ideas are deriv'd from something antecedently present to the mind, it follows, that 'tis impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an idea of any thing specifically different from ideas and impressions. Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible; let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appear'd in that narrow compass. This is the universe of the imagination, nor have we any idea but what is there produc'd. (T, 67-8)

Hume explains more about how “the universe of the imagination” works in Part iii, Book I, of the Treatise:

Belief or assent, which always attends the memory and senses, is nothing but the vivacity of those perceptions they present; and that this alone distinguishes them from the imagination. To believe is in this case to feel an immediate impression of the senses, or a repetition of that impression in the memory. 'Tis merely the force and liveliness of the perception, which constitutes the first act of the judgment, and lays the foundation of that reasoning, when we trace the relation of cause and effect. (T, 86)

“We form a kind of system” of these strong impressions of sense and memory ,“comprehending whatever we remember to have been present, either to our internal perception or senses; and every particular of this system, joined to the present impressions, we are pleas'd to call a reality” (T, 108). So although impressions are not, strictly speaking, capable of truth or falsity, the systematic character of the “universe of the imagination” gives us a means of accepting or rejecting impressions. The standard, roughly, is coherence:

As to those impressions, which arise from the senses, their ultimate cause is, in my opinion, perfectly inexplicable by human reason, and 'twill always be impossible to decide with certainty, whether they arise immediately from the object, or are produc'd by the creative power of the mind, or are deriv'd from the author of our being. Nor is such a question in any way material to our present

71 purpose. We may draw inferences from the coherence of our perceptions, whether they be true or false; whether they represent nature justly, or be mere illusions of the senses. (T, 84)

Impressions, like passions, pleasures and pains, are “original existences,” which “arise in the sould originally from unknown causes” (T, 7). Only ideas can represent something beyond themselves; they represent the impressions aht caused them, which they copy. Thus they are capable of truth or falsity, of accurate representation or misrepresentation. Impressions, however, are not representative and so they are not, strictly speaking, capable of truth or falsity.

Impressions are corrigible, however, and they can be measured by a standard. There is a distinction between the corrigibility of a perception and its being a representation of something external to itself. So denying that impressions are representative of something over and above other perceptions does not commit Hume to some version of subjectivism or idealism.

Hume's “system,” however, isn't complete when “the universe of the iamgination” is populated only with impressions of sense and memories. As he stated earlier, the senses and memory are only “the first acts of judgment.” For

the mind stops not here. For finding, with this system of perceptions there is another connected by custom, or, if you will, by the relation of cause and effect, it proceeds to the consideration of their ideas; and as it feels that 'tis in a manner necessarily determin'd to view these particular ideas, and that the custom or relation, by which it is determin'd, admits not of the least change, it forms them into a new system, which it likewise dignifies with the title of realities. The first of these systems is the object of the memory and senses; the second of the judgment. (T, 108)

With the addition of causation, Hume's “system” now extends beyond the immediate testimonies of our senses and the records of our memories, providing a much more extensive web of belief, and a more fine-grained mechanism for accepting or rejecting impressions on the basis of their coherence, or lack of it, with the whole. Causal inference, Hume maintains

peoples the world, and brings us acquainted with such existences as, by their removal in time and place, lie beyond the reach of my senses and memory. By means of it I paint the universe in my imagination, and fix my attention on any part of it I please. (T, 108)

Hume's “system” now incorporates all his beliefs:

All this, and every thing else which I believe, are nothing but ideas, tho', by their force and settlled order, arising from custom and the relation of cause and effect, they distinguish themselves from the

72 other ideas, which are merely the offspring of the imagination. (T, 108)

In saying that everything he believes is “nothing but ideas,” Hume is saying that everything he beieves can be traced back to perceptions. But the buck stops there. Speculating about the causes of perceptions, where those causes are supposed to be something over and above perceptions, is to engage in the kind of search for “ultimate principles” that he has rejected, along with traditional metaphysics, as incoherent. That is what he means by saying that perceptions are “original existences.”

This should not be read as claiming that Hume thinks of the observations a Humean scientist of human nature is supposed to carry out as a matter of “observing his Lockean ideas by introspection.” Rather, as Janet Broughton stresses,

we ought to think of the scientist of man as being perfectly entitled to observe people seeing, hearing (etc.) thingds, and perfectly entitled to discriminate between perceptions that are sensations (seeing, hearing, etc., something) and those that are not. (“What Does the Scientist of Man Observe?” Hume Studies 18.2 (1992): 155-68)

The testimony of others can lead me to revise my “system,” but receiving their testimony is a latter of my having certain experiences. These experiences consist of various complex perceptions, but constitute my experience of books, papers, table, chairs, and other people.

Here is a sketch of how Hume's “system” works:

When I wake up and hear certain familiar sounds, I come to believe that it is raining. My judgment is a representation because there are perceptions of the sight and feel of rain, perceptions that I will have if I go to the window and look, or if I go outside and feel the rain. These perceptions are the “facts” my judgment is about. My judgment is the result of a causal process: given my past associations between a certain kind of soud and the presence of rain, plus a present impression of that certain kind of sound, I expect that if I go to the window I will see it raining on my roses. My expectation is representative, and capable of truth or falsity. So if I go to the window to look at my roses, and see that Charlotte is hosing off the screen on our bedroom window, then my belief misrepresented the facts, and what I believed was false. But the facts that lead me to regard my judgment as true or false, as accurately representing or as misrepresenting those facts, are

73 themelves perceptions — impressions, and they are not representative of anything beyond themselves.

Just as individual impressions are corrigible, the system as a whole is fallible, and thus fallibility is at the heart of what Hume in the first Enquiry calls “mitigated scepticism.” Modifying and — it is to be hoped — improving the system is a process best described by Neurath's metaphor of the sailors who must repair their boat while keeping it afloat. Hume has shown that a system allegedly built on more secure “foundations” — “principles” that go beyond perceptions and are somehow supposed to validate them — is a metaphysical pipe-dream, not the legitimate basis of a coherent account of human nature, judgment, and belief.

But in rejecting the “ultimate principles” of traditonal metaphysics as incoherent, isn't Hume committing himself to an equally questionable picture of the ultimate nature of reality, one that says that there are only impressions, ideas, and the inferences we make from them? No. In choosing to restrict his discussion of questions about the nature of human nature in terms of perceptions, Hume is answering what he takes to be empirical questions in the only coherent way that they can be answered. Metaphysics tempts us to regard these answers as making claims about the ultimate nature of reality. Hume shows us how to resist that temptation. It is in this that the depth and originality of his project for the reform of philosophy consists.

The account we now have before us of the methodology and the basic elements of Hume's philosophy will go a long way toward resolving the questions of interpretation raised earlier. In particular, this account has shown that:

 Whatever the differences between the Treatise and the first Enquiry, the project Hume proposes is substantially the same in both works;  Hume's project clearly involves both a negative or critical phase, the elimination of metaphysics, as well as a positive or constructive phase of developing an empirical, descriptive science of human nature. The two aspects of his project are brought to together by the device he employs to carry out each phase — his account of definition as a way of accurately determining cognitive content, or the lack of it;  Hume's empiricism is defined by his treatment of the science of human nature as an empirical inquiry, rooted in experience and observation, and his naturalism is also closely related to his conception of his project as an empirical inquiry, to his limitation of investigation to “original principles,” and his repudiation of any attempt to discover “ultimate original qualities” in the study of human nature. Hume's scepticism has two aspects: the first is scepticism about the possibility of metaphysical theories, or any

74 Causation is not only the strongest associative relation, it is also the most important, since “by means of that relation alone we can go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses.” So causation is the basis of all our reasoning concerning matters of fact, and in our “reasonings … it is constantly supposed that there is a connexion between the present fact and that which is inferred from it” (EHU, 26-7).

The next question, then, is: What is the nature of this “connexion” and how is it established?

Hume proceeds first negatively, to show that our causal inferences are not due to reason, or any operation of the understanding. Reasoning concerns either relations of ideas or matters of fact. Hume quickly establishes that, whatever assures us that a causal relation obtains, it is not reasoning concerning relations between ideas. Effects are distinct events from their causes: we can always conceive of one such event occurring and the other not. So causal reasoning can't be a priori reasoning.

Causes and effects are discovered, not by reason but through experience, when we find that particular objects are constantly conjoined with one another. We tend to overlook this because most ordinary causal judgments are so familiar; we've made them so many times that our judgment seems immediate. But when we consider the matter, we realize that “an (absolutely) unexperienced reasoner could be no reasoner at all” (EHU, 45n). Even in applied mathematics, where we use abstract reasoning and geometrical methods to apply principles we regard as laws to particular cases in order to derive further principles as consequences of these laws, the discovery of the original law itself was due to experience and observation, not to a priori reasoning.

Even after we have experience of causal connections, our conclusions from those experiences aren't based on any reasoning or on any other process of the understanding. They are based on our past experiences of similar cases, without which we could draw no conclusions at all.

75 But this leaves us without any link between the past and the future. How can we justify extending our conclusions from past observation and experience to the future? The connection between a proposition that summarizes past experience and one that predicts what will occur at some future time is surely not an intuitive connection; it needs to be established by reasoning or argument. The reasoning involved must either be demonstrative, concerning relations of ideas, or probable, concerning matters of fact and existence.

There is no room for demonstrative reasoning here. We can always conceive of a change in the course of nature. However unlikely it may seem, such a supposition is intelligible and can be distinctly conceived. It therefore implies no contradiction, so it can't be proven false by a priori demonstrative reasoning.

Probable reasoning can't establish the connection, either, since it is based on the relation of cause and effect. What we understand of that relation is based on experience and any inference from experience is based on the supposition that nature is uniform — that the future will be like the past.

The connection could be established by adding a premise stating that nature is uniform. But how could we justify such a claim? Appeal to experience will either be circular or question-begging. For any such appeal must be founded on some version of the uniformity principle itself — the very principle we need to justify.

This argument exhausts the ways reason might establish a connection between cause and effect, and so completes the negative phase of Hume's project. The explanatory model of human nature which makes reason prominent and dominant in thought and action is indefensible. Scepticism about it is well- founded: the model must go.

Hume insists that he offers his “sceptical doubts about the operations of the understanding,” not as “discouragement, but rather an incitement…to attempt something more full and satisfactory” (EHU, 26). Having cleared a space for his own account, Hume is now ready to do just that.

Hume's negative argument showed that our causal expectations aren't formed on the basis of reason. But we do form them, and “if the mind be not engaged by argument…it must be induced by some other principle of equal weight and authority” (EHU, 41).

This principle can't be some “intricate or profound” metaphysical argument Hume overlooked. For all of us — ordinary people, infants, even animals — “improve by experience,” forming causal expectations and refining them in the light of experience. Hume's “sceptical solution” limits our inquiries to common life,

76 where no sophisticated metaphysical arguments are available and none are required.

When we examine experience to see how expectations are actually produced, we discover that they arise after we have experienced “the constant conjunction of two objects;” only then do we “expect the one from the appearance of the other.” But when “repetition of any particular act or operation produces a propensity to renew the same act or operation…we always say, that this propensity is the effect of Custom” (EHU, 43).

So the process that produces our causal expectations is itself causal. Custom or habit “determines the mind…to suppose the future conformable to the past.” But if this background of experienced constant conjunctions was all that was involved, then our “reasonings” would be merely hypothetical. Expecting that fire will warm, however, isn't just conceiving of its warming, it is believing that it will warm.

Belief requires that there also be some fact present to the senses or memory, which gives “strength and solidity to the related idea.” In these circumstances, belief is as unavoidable as is the feeling of a passion; it is “a species of natural instinct,” “the necessary result of placing the mind” in this situation.

Belief is “a peculiar sentiment, or lively conception produced by habit” that results from the manner in which ideas are conceived, and “in their feeling to the mind.” It is “nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain” (EHU, 49). Belief is thus “more an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures” (T, 183), so that “all probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation” (T, 103). This should not be surprising, given that belief is “so essential to the subsistence of all human creatures.” “It is more conformable to the ordinary wisdom of nature to secure so necessary an act of the mind, by some instinct or mechanical tendency” than to trust it “to the fallacious deductions of our reason” (EHU, 55). Hume's “sceptical solution” thus gives a descriptive alternative, appropriately “independent of all the laboured deductions of the understanding,” to philosophers' attempts to account for our causal “reasonings” by appeal to reason and argument. For the other notions in the definitional circle, “either we have no idea of force or energy, and these words are altogether insignificant, or they can mean nothing but that determination of the thought, acquir'd by habit, to pass from the cause to its usual effect” (T, 657).

Although causation is the strongest associative relation, as well as the most important, our philosophical understanding of causation and the ideas closely related to it is seriously deficient: “there are no ideas, which occur in metaphysics, more obscure and uncertain, than those of power, force, energy or necessary connexion” (EHU, 61-2). Hume wants to “fix, if possible, the precise

77 meaning of these terms, and thereby remove some part of that obscurity, which is so much complained of in this species of philosophy” (EHU, 62). This project provides a crucial experiment for Hume's account of definition, one designed to prove the worth of his method, to provide a paradigm for investigating problematic philosophical and theological notions, and to supply valuable material for these inquiries. In doing so, he accounts in his own terms for the necessary connection so many philosophers have taken to be an essential component of the idea of causation.

As we should expect from the preceding discussion, when we examine a single case of two events we regard as causally related, our impressions are only of their conjunction; the single case, taken by itself, yields no notion of their connection. When we go beyond the single case to examine the background of experienced constant conjunctions of similar pairs of events, we find little to add, for “there is nothing in a number of instances, different from every single instance, which is supposed to be exactly similar” (EHU, 75). How can the mere repetition of conjunctions produce a connection?

While there is indeed nothing added to our external senses by this exercise, something does happen: “after a repetition of similar instances, the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant, and to believe that it will exist.” We feel this transition as an impression of reflection, or internal sensation, and it is this feeling of determination that is “the sentiment or impression from which we form the idea of power or necessary connexion. Nothing farther is in the case” (EHU, 75).

Although the impression of reflection — the internal sensation — is the source of our idea of the connection, that experience wouldn't have occurred if we hadn't had the requisite impressions of sensation — the external impressions — of the current situation, together with the background of memories of our past impressions of relevant similar instances.

All the impressions involved are relevant to a complete account of the origin of the idea, even though they seem, strictly speaking, to be “drawn from objects foreign to the cause.”

Hume sums up all of the relevant impressions in not one but two definitions of cause. The relation — or the lack of it — between these definitions has been a matter of considerable controversy. If we follow his account of definition, however, the first definition, which defines a cause as “an object, followed by another, and where all objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second” (EHU, 76), accounts for all the external impressions involved in the case. His second definition, which defines a cause as “an object followed by another, and whose appearance always conveys the thought to that other” (EHU, 77) captures the internal sensation — the feeling of determination — involved. Both are definitions, by Hume's account, but the “just

78 definition” of cause he claims to provide is expressed only by the conjunction of the two: only together do the definitions capture all the relevant impressions involved.

Hume's account of causation provides a paradigm of how philosophy, as he conceives it, should be done. He goes on to apply his method to other thorny traditional problems of philosophy and theology: liberty and necessity, miracles, design. In each case, the moral is that a priori reasoning and argument gets us nowhere: “it is only experience which teaches us the nature and bounds of cause and effect, and enables us to infer the existence of one object from that of another. Such is the foundation of moral reasoning, which forms the greater part of human knowledge, and is the source of all human action and behaviour” (EHU, 164). Since we all have limited experience, our conclusions should always be tentative, modest, reserved, cautious. This conservative, fallibilist position, which Hume calls mitigated scepticism, is the proper epistemic attitude for anyone “sensible of the strange infirmities of human understanding” (EHU, 161).

The cautious attitude Hume recommends is noticeably absent in moral philosophy, where “systems and hypotheses” have also “perverted our natural understanding,” the most prominent being the views of the moral rationalists — , Locke, and William Wollaston, the theories of “the selfish schools” — Hobbes and Mandeville — and the pernicious theological ethics of “the schools,” whose promotion of the dismal “monkish virtues” frame a catalogue of virtues diametrically opposed to Hume's. Although he offers arguments against the “systems” he opposes, Hume thinks the strongest case against them is to be made descriptively: all these theories offer accounts of human nature that experience and observation prove false.

Against the moral rationalists — the intellectualists of moral philosophy — who hold that moral judgments are based on reason, Hume maintains that it is difficult even to make their hypothesis intelligible (T, 455-470; EPM, Appendix I). Reason, Hume argues, judges either of matters of fact or of relations. Morality never consists in any single matter of fact that could be immediately perceived, intuited, or grasped by reason alone; morality for rationalists must therefore involve the perception of relations. But inanimate objects and animals can bear the same relations to one another that humans can, though we don't draw the same moral conclusions from determining that objects or animals are in a given relation as we do when humans are in that same relation. Distinguishing these cases requires more than reason alone can provide. Even if we could determine an appropriate subject-matter for the moral rationalist, it would still be the case that, after determining that a matter of fact or a relation obtains, the understanding has no more room to operate, so the praise or blame that follows can't be the work of reason.

Reason, Hume maintains, can at most inform us of the tendencies of actions. It can recommend means for attaining a given end, but it can't

79 recommend ultimate ends. Reason can provide no motive to action, for reason alone is insufficient to produce moral blame or approbation. We need sentiment to give a preference to the useful tendencies of actions.

Finally, the moral rationalists' account of justice fares no better. Justice can't be determined by examining a single case, since the advantage to society of a rule of justice depends on how it works in general under the circumstances in which it is introduced.

Thus the views of the moral rationalists on the role of reason in ethics, even if they can be made coherent, are false.

Hume then turns to the claims of “the selfish schools,” that morality is either altogether illusory (Mandeville) or can be reduced to considerations of self- interest (Hobbes). He argues that an accurate description of the social virtues, benevolence and justice, will show that their views are false.

There has been much discussion over the differences between Hume's presentation of these arguments in the Treatise and the second Enquiry. “Sympathy” is the key term in the Treatise, while benevolence does the work in the Enquiry. But this need not reflect any substantial shift in doctrine. If we look closely, we see that benevolence plays much the same functional role in the Enquiry that sympathy plays in the Treatise. Hume sometimes describes benevolence as a manifestation of our “natural” or “social sympathy.” In both texts, Hume's central point is that we experience this “feeling for humanity” in ourselves and observe it in others, so “the selfish hypothesis” is “contrary both to common feeling and to our most unprejudiced notions” (EPM, 298).

Borrowing from Butler and Hutcheson, Hume argues that, however prominent considerations of self-interest may be, we do find cases where, when self-interest is not at stake, we respond with benevolence, not indifference. We approve of benevolence in others, even when their benevolence is not, and never will be, directed toward us. We even observe benevolence in animals. Haggling over how much benevolence is found in human nature is pointless; that there is any benevolence at all refutes the selfish hypothesis.

Against Hobbes, Hume argues that our benevolent sentiments can't be reduced to self-interest. It is true that, when we desire the happiness of others, and try to make them happy, we may enjoy doing so. But benevolence is necessary for our self-enjoyment, and although we may act from the combined motives of benevolence and enjoyment, our benevolent sentiments aren't identical with our self-enjoyment.

We approve of benevolence in large part because it is useful. Benevolent acts tend to promote social welfare, and those who are benevolent are motivated to cultivate the other social virtue, justice. But while benevolence is an original

80 principle in human nature, justice is not. Our need for rules of justice isn't universal; it arises only under conditions of relative scarcity, where property must be regulated to preserve order in society.

The need for rules of justice is also a function of a society's size. In very small , where the members are more of an extended family, there may be no need for rules of justice, because there is no need for regulating property — no need, indeed, for our notion of property at all. Only when society becomes extensive enough that it is impossible for everyone in it to be part of one's “narrow circle” does the need for rules of justice arise.

The rules of justice in a given society are “the product of artifice and contrivance.” They are constructed by the society to solve the problem of how to regulate property; other rules might do just as well. The real need is for some set of “general inflexible rules…adopted as best to serve public utility” (EPM, 305).

Hobbesians try to reduce justice to self-interest, because everyone recognizes that it is in their interest that there be rules regulating property. But even here, the benefits for each individual result from the whole scheme or system being in place, not from the fact that each just act benefits each individual directly. As with benevolence, Hume argues that we approve of the system itself even where our self-interest isn't at stake. We can see this not only from cases in our own society, but also when we consider societies distant in space and time.

Hume's social virtues are related. Sentiments of benevolence draw us to society, allow us to perceive its advantages, provide a source of approval for just acts, and motivate us to do just acts ourselves. We approve of both virtues because we recognize their role in promoting the happiness and prosperity of society. Their functional roles are, nonetheless, distinct. Hume compares the benefits of benevolence to “a wall, built by many hands, which still rises by every stone that is heaped upon it, and receives increase proportional to the diligence and care of each workman,” while the happiness justice produces is like the results of building “a vault, where each individual stone would, of itself, fall to the ground” (EPM, 305).

“Daily observation” confirms that we recognize and approve of the utility of acts of benevolence and justice. While much of the agreeableness of the utility we find in these acts may be due to the fact that they promote our self-interest, it is also true that, in approving of useful acts, we don't restrict ourselves to those that serve our particular interests. Similarly, our private interests often differ from the public interest, but, despite our sentiments in favor of our self-interest, we often also retain our sentiment in favor of the public interest. Where these interests concur, we observe a sensible increase of the sentiment, so it must be the case that the interests of society are not entirely indifferent to us.

81 With that final nail in Hobbes' coffin, Hume turns to develop his account of the sources of morality. Though we often approve or disapprove of the actions of those remote from us in space and time, it is nonetheless true that, in considering the acts of (say) an Athenian statesman, the good he produced “affects us with a less lively sympathy,” even though we judge their “merit to be equally great” as the similar acts of our contemporaries. In such cases our judgment “corrects the inequalities of our internal emotions and perceptions; in like manner, as it preserves us from error, in the several variations of images, presented to our external senses” (EPM, 227). Adjustment and correction is necessary in both cases if we are to think and talk consistently and coherently.

“The intercourse of sentiments” that conversation produces is the vehicle for these adjustments, for it takes us out of our own peculiar positions. We begin to employ general language which, since it is formed for general use, “must be moulded on some general views … .” In so doing, we take up a “general” or “common point of view,” detached from our self-interested perspectives, to form “some general unalterable standard, by which we may approve or disapprove of characters and manners.” We begin to “speak another language” — the language of morals, which “implies some sentiment common to all mankind, which recommends the same object to general approbation, and makes every man, or most men, agree in the same opinion or decision concerning it. It also implies some sentiment, so universal and comprehensive as to extend to all mankind, and render the actions and conduct, even of the persons the most remote, an object of applause or censure, according as they agree or disagree with that rule of right which is established. These two requisite circumstances belong alone to the sentiment of humanity here insisted on” (EPM, 272). It is the extended or extensive sentiment of humanity — benevolence or sympathy — that for Hume is ultimately “the foundation of morals.”

But even if the social virtues move us from a perspective of self-interest to one more universal and extensive, it might appear that the individual virtues do not. But since these virtues also receive our approbation because of their usefulness, and since “these advantages are enjoyed by the person possessed of the character, it can never be self-love which renders the prospect of them agreeable to us, the spectators, and prompts our esteem and approbation” (EPM, 234).

Just as we make judgments about others, we are aware, from infancy, that others make judgments about us. We desire their approval and modify our behavior in response to their judgments. This love of fame gives rise to the habit of reflectively evaluating our own actions and character traits. We first see ourselves as others see us, but eventually we develop our own standards of evaluation, keeping “alive all the sentiments of right and wrong,” which “begats, in noble natures, a certain reverence” for ourselves as well as others, “which is the surest guardian of every virtue” (EPM, 276). The general character of moral language, produced and promoted by our social sympathies, permits us to judge

82 ourselves and others from the general point of view, the proper perspective of morality. For Hume, that is “…the most perfect morality with which we are acquainted” (EPM, 276).

Hume summarizes his account in this definition of virtue, or Personal Merit: “every quality of the mind, which is useful or agreeable to the person himself or to others, communicates a pleasure to the spectator, engages his esteem, and is admitted under the honourable denomination of virtue or merit” (EPM, 277). That is, as observers — of ourselves as well as others — to the extent that we regard certain acts as manifestations of certain character traits, we consider the usual tendencies of acts done from those traits, and find them useful or agreeable, to the agent or to others, and approve or disapprove of them accordingly. A striking feature of this definition is its precise parallel to the two definitions of cause that Hume gave as the conclusion of his central argument in the first Enquiry. Both definitions pick out features of events, and both record a spectator's reaction or response to those events.

Hume's “Advertisement” for the first two books of the Treatise promised subsequent works on morals, politics and criticism, but his Political Discourses, “Of Tragedy,” and “Of the Standard of Taste” are our only hints as to what he might have said about those topics.

Hume's political essays range widely, covering not only the constitutional issues one might expect, but also venturing into what we now call economics, dealing with issues of commerce, luxury, and their implications for society. His treatments of these scattered topics exhibit a unity of purpose and method that makes the essays much more than the sum of their parts, and links them, not only with his more narrowly philosophical concerns, but also with his earlier moral and literary essays.

Adopting a causal, descriptive approach to the problems he discusses, Hume stresses that current events and concerns are best understood by tracing them historically to their origins. This approach contrasts sharply with contemporary discussions, which treated these events as the products of chance, or — worse — of providence. Hume substitutes a concern for the “moral causes” — the human choices and actions — of the events, conditions, or institutions he considers. This thoroughly secular approach is accentuated by his willingness to point out the bad effects of superstition and enthusiasm on society, government, and political and social life.

“Of the Standard of Taste” is a rich contribution to the then-emerging discipline of what we now call aesthetics. This complex essay contains a lucid statement of Hume's views on what constitutes “just criticism,” but it is not just about criticism, as some readers are beginning to realize. Though Hume's account of aesthetic judgment precisely parallels his account of causal and moral judgment, the essay also contains a discussion of how a naturalistic theory might

83 deal with questions of normativity, and so is important, not just as a significant contribution to Hume's overall view, but also for its immediate relevance for problems in contemporary empirical naturalism.

Hume's History of England, published in six volumes over as many years in the 1750s, recalls his characterization, in the first Enquiry, of history as “so many collections of experiments.” Hume not surprisingly rejects the theoretical commitments of both Tory and Whig accounts of British history, and offers what he believes is an impartial account that looks at political institutions as historical developments responsive to Britons' experience of changing conditions, evaluating political decisions in the contexts in which they were made, instead of second-guessing them in the light of subsequent developments.

The Natural History of Religion is also a history in a sense, though it has been described as “philosophical” or “conjectural” history. It is an account of the origins and development of religious beliefs, with the thinly-disguised agenda of making clear not only the nonrational origins of religion, but also of exposing and describing the pathology of its current forms. Religion began in the postulation, by primitive peoples, of “invisible intelligences” to account for frightening, uncontrollable natural phenomena, such as disease and earthquakes. In its original forms, it was polytheistic, which Hume regards as relatively harmless because of its tolerance of diversity. But eventually gives way to monotheism, when the followers of one deity hold sway over the others. Monotheism is dogmatic and intolerant; worse, it gives rise to theological systems which spread absurdity and intolerance, but which use reason to corrupt philosophical thought. But since religion is not universal in the way that our nonrational beliefs in causation or physical objects are, perhaps it can eventually be dislodged from human thinking altogether.

Hume's Natural History cemented his reputation as a religious sceptic and an atheist, even before its publication. Prompted by his own prudence, as well as the pleas of his friends, he resisted publishing the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, which he had worked on since the early 1750s, though he continued revising the manuscript until his death. An expansion and dramatic revision of the argument previewed in Section XI of the first Enquiry, the Dialogues are so riddled with irony that controversy still rages as to what character, if any, speaks for Hume. But his devastating critique of the argument from design leaves no doubt that — scholarly details about its enigmatic final section aside — the conclusions philosophers and theologians have drawn from that argument go far beyond any evidence the argument itself provides.

A fitting conclusion to a philosophical life, the posthumously published Dialogues would alone insure the philosophical and literary immortality of their author. In this magnificent work, Hume demonstrates his mastery of the dialogue form, while producing the preeminent work in the .

84 New York Alpha’s intellectual, David Hume, above, was influenced by the writings of Francis Hutcheson, below:

 Francis Hutcheson (Aug. 8, 1694 – Aug. 8, 1746) was a philosopher born in Ireland to a family of Scottish Presbyterians who became one of the founding fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment. He is thought to have been born at Drumalig, in the parish of Saintfield, County Down, Ireland. Hutcheson was educated at Killyleagh, and went on to Scotland to study at the University of Glasgow, where he spent six years at first in the study of philosophy, classics and general literature, and afterwards in the study of theology, receiving his degree in 1712 and obtaining his license to preach within the Presbyterian church in 1716.

However, facing suspicions about his "Irish" University of Glasgow roots.

His association with theologian John Simson (then under investigation by Scottish ecclesiastical courts) and his Irish ties made ministry in Scotland was unlikely to be a success so he left the church returning to Ireland to pursue a career in academia. He was induced to start a private academy in Dublin, where he taught for 10 years, studying philosophy on the side and producing his famous Inquiry (1725).

In Dublin his literary attainments gained him the friendship of many prominent inhabitants. Among these was Archbishop of Dublin, William King, who refused to prosecute Hutcheson in the archbishop's court for keeping a school without the episcopal licence. Hutcheson's relations with the clergy of the Established Church, especially with King and with Hugh Boulter (the archbishop of Armagh) seem to have been cordial, and his biographer, speaking of "the inclination of his friends to serve him, the schemes proposed to him for obtaining promotion," etc., probably refers to some offers of preferment, on condition of his accepting episcopal ordination.

While residing in Dublin, Hutcheson published anonymously the four essays by which he is best known: the Inquiry concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony and Design, the Inquiry concerning Moral Good and Evil, in 1725, the Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections and Illustrations upon the Moral Sense, in 1728. The alterations and additions made in the second edition of these Essays were published in a separate form in 1726.

85 To the period of his Dublin residence are also to be referred the Thoughts on Laughter (1725) (a criticism of ) and the Observations on the Fable of the Bees, being in all six letters contributed to Hibernicus' Letters, a periodical which appeared in Dublin (1725-1727, 2nd ed. 1734). At the end of the same period occurred the controversy in the London Journal with Gilbert Burnet (probably the second son of Dr Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury); on the "True Foundation of Virtue or Moral Goodness." All these letters were collected in one volume (Glasgow, 1772).

In 1729, Hutcheson succeeded his old master, Gershom Carmichael, in the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, being the first professor there to lecture in English instead of Latin. It is curious that up to this time all his essays and letters had been published anonymously, though their authorship appears to have been well known. In 1730 he entered on the duties of his office, delivering an inaugural lecture (afterwards published), De naturali hominum socialitate (About the natural fellowhip of mankind). He appreciated having leisure for his favourite studies; "non levi igitur laetitia commovebar cum almam matrem Academiam me, suum olim alumnum, in libertatem asseruisse audiveram." (I was, therefore, moved by no means frivolous pleasure when I had heard that my alma mater had delivered me, its one time alumnus, into freedom.) Yet the works on which Hutcheson's reputation rests had already been published.

In addition to the works named, the following were published during Hutcheson's lifetime: a pamphlet entitled Considerations on Patronage (1735); Philosophiae moralis institutio compendiaria, ethices et jurisprudentiae naturalis elementa continens, lib. iii. (Glasgow, 1742); Metaphysicae synopsis ontologiam et pneumatologiam campleciens (Glasgow, 1742). The last work was published anonymously. After his death, his son, Francis Hutcheson published much the longest, though by no means the most interesting, of his works, A System of Moral Philosophy, in Three Books (2 vols.. London, 1755). To this is prefixed a life of the author, by Dr William Leechman, professor of divinity in the University of Glasgow. The only remaining work assigned to Hutcheson is a small treatise on Logic (Glasgow, 1764). This compendium, together with the Compendium of Metaphysics, was republished at Strassburg in 1722.

Thus Hutcheson dealt with metaphysics, logic and ethics. His importance is, however, due almost entirely to his ethical writings, and among these primarily to the four essays and the letters published during his time in Dublin. His standpoint has a negative and a positive aspect; he is in strong opposition to Thomas Hobbes and Mandeville, and in fundamental agreement with Shaftesbury, whose name he rightly coupled with his own on the title page of the first two essays. Obvious and fundamental points of agreement between the two authors include the analogy drawn between beauty and virtue, the functions assigned to the moral sense, the position that the benevolent feelings form an original and irreducible part of our nature, and the unhesitating adoption of the

86 principle that the test of virtuous action is its tendency to promote the general welfare.

According to Hutcheson, man has a variety of senses, internal as well as external, reflex as well as direct, the general definition of a sense being "any determination of our minds to receive ideas independently on our will, and to have perceptions of pleasure and pain" (Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions, sect. 1). He does not attempt to give an exhaustive enumeration of these "senses," but, in various parts of his works, he specifies, besides the five external senses commonly recognized (which, he rightly hints, might be added to):

1. consciousness, by which each man has a perception of himself and of all that is going on in his own mind (Metaph. Syn. pars i. cap. 2) 2. the sense of beauty (sometimes called specifically "an internal sense") 3. a public sense, or sensus communis, "a determination to be pleased with the happiness of others and to be uneasy at their misery" 4. the moral sense, or "moral sense of beauty in actions and affections, by which we perceive virtue or vice, in ourselves or others" 5. a sense of honour, or praise and blame, "which makes the approbation or gratitude of others the necessary occasion of pleasure, and their dislike, condemnation or resentment of injuries done by us the occasion of that uneasy sensation called shame" 6. a sense of the ridiculous. It is plain, as the author confesses, that there may be "other perceptions, distinct from all these classes," and, in fact, there seems to be no limit to the number of "senses" in which a psychological division of this kind might result.

Of these "senses" that which plays the most important part in Hutcheson's ethical system is the "moral sense." It is this which pronounces immediately on the character of actions and affections, approving those which are virtuous, and disapproving those which are vicious. "His principal design," he says in the preface to the two first treatises, "is to show that human nature was not left quite indifferent in the affair of virtue, to form to itself observations concerning the advantage or disadvantage of actions, and accordingly to regulate its conduct. The weakness of our reason, and the avocations arising from the infirmity and necessities of our nature, are so great that very few men could ever have formed those long deductions of reasons which show some actions to be in the whole advantageous to the agent, and their contraries pernicious. The Author of nature has much better furnished us for a virtuous conduct than our moralists seem to imagine, by almost as quick and powerful instructions as we have for the preservation of our bodies. He has made virtue a lovely form, to excite our pursuit of it, and has given us strong affections to be the springs of each virtuous action."

87 Passing over the appeal to final causes involved in this passage, as well as the assumption that the "moral sense" has had no growth or history, but was "implanted" in man exactly in the condition in which it is now to be found among the more civilized races, an assumption common to the systems of both Hutcheson and Butler, his use of the term "sense" has a tendency to obscure the real nature of the process which goes on in an act of moral judgment. For, as established by Hume, this act really consists of two parts: one an act of deliberation, resulting in an intellectual judgment; the other a reflex feeling of satisfaction at actions which we denominate good, of dissatisfaction at those which we denominate bad. By the intellectual part of this process we refer the action or habit to a certain class; but no sooner is the intellectual process completed than there is excited in us a feeling similar to that which myriads of actions and habits of the same class, or deemed to be of the same class, have excited in us on former occasions.

Even if the latter part of this process is instantaneous, uniform and exempt from error, the former is not. All mankind may approve of that which is virtuous or makes for the general good, but they entertain the most widely divergent opinions and frequently arrive at directly opposite conclusions as to particular actions and habits. This obvious distinction is recognized by Hutcheson in his analysis of the mental process preceding moral action, nor does he invariably ignore it, even when treating of the moral approbation or disapprobation which is subsequent on action. Nonetheless, it remains true that Hutcheson, both by his phraseology, and by the language in which he describes the process of moral approbation, has done much to favour that loose, popular view of morality which, ignoring the necessity of deliberation and reflection, encourages hasty resolves and unpremeditated judgments.

The term "moral sense" (which, it may be noticed, had already been employed by Shaftesbury, not only, as suggests, in the margin, but also in the text of his Inquiry), if invariably coupled with the term "moral judgment," would be open to little objection; but, taken alone, as designating the complex process of moral approbation, it is liable to lead not only to serious misapprehension but to grave practical errors. For, if each man's decisions are solely the result of an immediate intuition of the moral sense, why be at any pains to test, correct or review them? Or why educate a faculty whose decisions are infallible? And how do we account for differences in the moral decisions of different societies, and the observable changes in a man's own views? The expression has, in fact, the fault of most metaphorical terms: it leads to an exaggeration of the truth which it is intended to suggest.

But though Hutcheson usually describes the moral faculty as acting instinctively and immediately, he does not, like Butler, confound the moral faculty with the moral standard. The test or criterion of right action is with Hutcheson, as with Shaftesbury, its tendency to promote the general welfare of mankind. He thus anticipates the of Bentham--and not only in principle, but even

88 in the use of the phrase "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" (Inquiry concerning Moral Good and Evil, sect. 3). Hutcheson does not seem to have seen an inconsistency between this external criterion with his fundamental ethical principle. Intuition has no possible connection with an empirical calculation of results, and Hutcheson in adopting such a criterion practically denies his fundamental assumption. Connected with Hutcheson's virtual adoption of the utilitarian standard is a kind of moral algebra, proposed for the purpose of "computing the morality of actions." This calculus occurs in the Inquiry concerning Moral Good and Evil, sect. 3.

Hutcheson's other distinctive ethical doctrine is what has been called the "benevolent theory" of morals. Hobbes had maintained that all other actions, however disguised under apparent sympathy, have their roots in self-love. Hutcheson not only maintains that benevolence is the sole and direct source of many of our actions, but, by a not unnatural recoil, that it is the only source of those actions of which, on reflection, we approve. Consistently with this position, actions which flow from self-love only are pronounced to be morally indifferent. But surely, by the common consent of civilized men, prudence, temperance, cleanliness, industry, self-respect and, in general, the personal virtues," are regarded, and rightly regarded, as fitting objects of moral approbation. This consideration could hardly escape any author, however wedded to his own system, and Hutcheson attempts to extricate himself from the difficulty by laying down the position that a man may justly regard himself as a part of the rational system, and may thus be, in part, an object of his own benevolence (Ibid),--a curious abuse of terms, which really concedes the question at issue. Moreover, he acknowledges that, though self-love does not merit approbation, neither, except in its extreme forms, did it merit condemnation, indeed the satisfaction of the dictates of self love is one of the very conditions of the preservation of society. To press home the inconsistencies involved in these various statement would be a superfluous task.

The vexed question of liberty and necessity appears to be carefully avoided in Hutcheson's professedly ethical works. But, in the Synopsis metaphysicae, he touches on it in three places, briefly stating both sides of the question, but evidently inclining to that which he designates as the opinion of the Stoics in opposition to what he designates as the opinion of the Peripatetics. This is substantially the same as the doctrine propounded by Hobbes and Locke (to the latter of whom Hutcheson refers in a note), namely that our will is determined by motives in conjunction with our general character and habit of mind, and that the only true liberty is the liberty of acting as we will, not the liberty of willing as we will. Though, however, his leaning is clear, he carefully avoids dogmatising, and deprecates the angry controversies to which the speculation on this subject had given rise.

It is easy to trace the influence of Hutcheson's ethical theories on the systems of Hume and Adam Smith. The prominence given to these writers to the

89 analysis of moral action and moral approbation with the attempt to discriminate the respective provinces of the reason and the emotions in these processes, is undoubtedly due to the influence of Hutcheson. To a study of the writings of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson we might, probably, in large measure, attribute the unequivocal adoption of the utilitarian standard by Hume, and, if this be the case, the name of Hutcheson connects itself, through Hume, with the names of Priestley, Paley and Bentham. Butler's Sermons appeared in 1726, the year after the publication of Hutcheson's two first essays, and the parallelism between the "conscience" of the one writer and the "moral sense" of the other is, at least, worthy of remark.

In the sphere of mental philosophy and logic Hutcheson's contributions are by no means so important or original as in that of moral philosophy. They are interesting mainly as a link between Locke and the Scottish school. In the former subject the influence of Locke is apparent throughout. All the main outlines of Locke's philosophy seem, at first sight, to be accepted as a matter of course. Thus, in stating his theory of the moral sense, Hutcheson is peculiarly careful to repudiate the doctrine of innate ideas (see, for instance, Inquiry concerning Moral Good and Evil, sect. I ad fin., and sect. 4; and compare Synopsis Metaphysicae, pars i. cap. 2). At the same time he shows more discrimination than does Locke in distinguishing between the two uses of this expression, and between the legitimate and illegitimate form of the doctrine (Syn. Metaph. pars i. cap. 2).

All our ideas are, as by Locke, referred to external or internal sense, or, in other words, to sensation and reflection. It is, however, a most important modification of Locke's doctrine, and one which connects Hutcheson's mental philosophy with that of Reid, when he states that the ideas of extension, figure, motion and rest "are more properly ideas accompanying the sensations of sight and touch than the sensations of either of these senses"; that the idea of self accompanies every thought, and that the ideas of number, duration and existence accompany every other idea whatsoever (see Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions, sect. i. art. I; Syn. Metaph. pars i. cap. 1, pars ii. cap. I; Hamilton on Reid, p. 124, note). Other important points in which Hutcheson follows the lead of Locke are his depreciation of the importance of the so-called laws of thought, his distinction between the primary and secondary qualities of bodies, the position that we cannot know the inmost of things ("intimae rerum naturae sive essentiae"), though they excite various ideas in us, and the assumption that external things are known only through the medium of ideas (Syn. Metaph. pars i. cap. I), though, at the same time, we are assured of the existence of an external world corresponding to these ideas.

Hutcheson attempts to account for our assurance of the reality of an external world by referring it to a natural instinct (Syn. Metaph. pars i. cap. 1). Of the correspondence or similitude between our ideas of the primary qualities of things and the things themselves God alone can be assigned as the cause. This similitude has been effected by Him through a law of nature. "Haec prima

90 qualitatum primariarum perceptio, sive mentis actio quaedam sive passio dicatur, non alia similitudinis aut convenientiae inter ejusmodi ideas et res ipsas causa assignari posse videtur, quam ipse , qui certa naturae lege hoc efilcit, Ut notiones, quae rebus praesentibus excitantur, sint ipsis similes, aut saltem earum habitudines, si non veras quantitates, depingant" (pars ii. cap. I). Locke does speak of God "annexing" certain ideas to certain motions of bodies; but nowhere does he propound a theory so definite as that here propounded by Hutcheson, which reminds us at least as much of the speculations of as of those of Locke.

Amongst the more important points in which Hutcheson diverges from Locke is his account of the idea of personal identity, which he appears to have regarded as made known to us directly by consciousness. The distinction between body and mind, corpus or materia and res cogitans, is more emphatically accentuated by Hutcheson than by Locke. Generally, he speaks as if we had a direct consciousness of mind as distinct from body, though, in the posthumous work on Moral Philosophy, he expressly states that we know mind as we know body" by qualities immediately perceived though the substance of both be unknown (bk. i. ch. 1). The distinction between perception proper and sensation proper, which occurs by implication though it is not explicitly worked out (see Hamilton's Lectures on Metaphysics, - Lect. 24).

Hamilton's edition of 's Works, v. 420),--the imperfection of the ordinary division of the external senses into two classes, the limitation of consciousness to a special mental facult) (severely criticized in Sir W Hamilton's Lectures on Metaphysics Lect. xii.) and the disposition to refer on disputed questions of philosophy not so much to formal arguments as to the testimony of consciousness and our natural instincts are also amongst the points in which Hutcheson supplemented or departed from the philosophy of Locke. The last point can hardly fail to suggest the "common-sense philosophy" of Reid.

Thus, in estimating Hutcheson's position, we find that in particular questions he stands nearer to Locke, but in the general spirit of his philosophy he seems to approach more closely to his Scottish successors.

The short Compendium of Logic, which is more original than such works usually are, is remarkable chiefly for the large proportion of psychological matter which it contains. In these parts of the book Hutcheson mainly follows Locke. The technicalities of the subject are passed lightly over, and the book is readable. It may be specially noticed that he distinguishes between the mental result and its verbal expression judgment-proposition, that he constantly employs the word "idea," and that he defines logical truth as "convenientia signorum cum rebus significatis" (or "propositionis convenientia cum rebus ipsis," Syn. Metaph. pars i. cap 3), thus implicitly repudiating a merely formal view of logic.

91 Hutcheson may further be regarded as one of the earliest modern writers on aesthetics. His speculations on this subject are contained in the Inquiry concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony and Design, the first of the two treatises published in 1725. He maintains that we are endowed with a special sense by which we perceive beauty, harmony and proportion. This is a reflex sense, because it presupposes the action of the external senses of sight and hearing. It may be called an internal sense, both in order to distinguish its perceptions from the mere perceptions of sight and hearing, and because "in some other affairs, where our external senses are not much concerned, we discern a sort of beauty, very like in many respects to that observed in sensible objects, and accompanied with like pleasure" (Inquiry, etc., sect. 1, XI). The latter reason leads him to call attention to the beauty perceived in universal truths, in the operations of general causes and in moral principles and actions. Thus, the analogy between beauty and virtue, which was so favourite a topic with Shaftesbury, is prominent in the writings of Hutcheson also. Scattered up and down the treatise there are many important and interesting observations which our limits prevent us from noticing. But to the student of mental philosophy it may be specially interesting to remark that Hutcheson both applies the principle of association to explain our ideas of beauty and also sets limits to its application, insisting on there being "a natural power of perception or sense of beauty in objects, antecedent to all custom, education or example" (see Inquiry, etc., sects. 6, 7; Hamilton's Lectures on Metaphysics, Lect. 44 ad fin.).

Hutcheson's writings naturally gave rise to much controversy. To say nothing of minor opponents, such as "Philaretus" (Gilbert Burnet, already alluded to), Dr John Balguy (1686-1748), prebendary of Salisbury, the author of two tracts on "The Foundation of Moral Goodness, and Dr John Taylor (1694-1761) of Norwich, a minister of considerable reputation in his time (author of An Examination of the Scheme of Amorality advanced by Dr Hutcheson), the essays appear to have suggested, by antagonism, at least two works which hold a permanent place in the literature of English ethics--Butler's Dissertation on the Nature of Virtue, and 's Treatise of Moral Good and Evil (1757). In this latter work the author maintains, in opposition to Hutcheson, that actions are -in themselves right or wrong, that right and wrong are simple ideas incapable of analysis, and that these ideas are perceived immediately by the understanding. We thus see that, not only directly but also through the replies which it called forth, the system of Hutcheson, or at least the system of Hutcheson combined with that of Shaftesbury, contributed, in large measure, to the formation and development of some of the most important of the modern schools of ethics.

92

New York Alpha’s intellectual, Francis Hutcheson, above, was influenced by the writings of James Harrington, below:

 James Harrington (or Harington) (January 3, 1611-September 11, 1677) was an English political theorist of classical , best known for his controversial work, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656). James Harrington was born in 1611 in Upton, Northamptonshire, eldest son of Sir Sapcote(s) Harrington of Rand, Lincolnshire (d. 1629), and great-nephew of the first Lord Harington of Exton (d. 1615). His mother was Jane Samwell (or Samuell) of Upton (d. 1619), daughter of Sir William Samwell. Knowledge of Harrington's childhood and early education is practically

non-existent; both, it seems, were conducted at the family manor in Rand. In Trinity College, Oxford 1629, he entered Trinity College, Oxford as a gentleman commoner and left two years later with no degree.

For a brief time, one of his tutors was the royalist High Churchman William Chillingworth. He entered then abruptly left the Middle Temple despising lawyers forever, an animus which later appeared in his writings. By this time, Harrington's father had passed away, and his inheritance helped pay his way through several years of continental travel.

He enlisted in a Dutch militia regiment (apparently seeing no service), before touring the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, France and Italy. Toland says while visiting the Vatican circa 1634-36, he "refused to kiss the pope's foot," and that a trip through Venice helped bolster his knowledge of the Italian republics. Harrington appears to have returned to England no later than 1636; the following decade, including his comings and goings during the Civil Wars, are largely unaccounted for by anything other than unsubstantiated stories of the ilk: that he accompanied Charles I to Scotland in 1639 in connection with the first Bishops' War; and that he came to Parliament's financial assistance with loans and solicitations in 1641-42 and in 1645. Otherwise, he appears to have simply "resided at Rand, an unmarried country gentleman of studious tastes."

Harrington's apparent political loyalty to Parliament interfered not all with a strong personal devotion to the King. Following his capture, Harrington accompanied a "commission" of MPs appointed to persuade Charles to move

93 from Newcastle to Holmby House, as to be nearer London. When a further attempt was made to forcibly transfer the King to the capital, Harrington successfully intervened. In May 1647, he became a gentleman groom of the royal bedchamber; we see him acting in that capacity through the end of the year and also in 1648 at Hurst Castle and at Carisbrooke. Sometime around New Year 1649, his attendance on the King was abruptly terminated by parliamentarians furious, it is said, over his refusal to swear to report anything he might hear of a royal escape attempt. At least two contemporary accounts have Harrington with Charles on the scaffold, but these do not rise above the level of rumor.

After Charles' death Harrington devoted his time to the composition of his The Commonwealth of Oceana, a work agreeable perhaps to no one but its author. By order of England's then Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, it was seized when passing through the press. Harrington, however managed to secure the favour of Cromwell's favourite daughter, Mrs Claypole; the work was restored to him, and appeared in 1656, newly dedicated to Cromwell. The views embodied in Oceana, particularly those bearing on vote by ballot and rotation of magistrates and legislators, Harrington and others (who in 1659 formed a club called the "Rota") endeavoured to push practically, but with no success.

Following the Stuart Restoration, on December 28, 1661, Harrington was arrested on a charge of conspiring against the government in the "Bow Street" cabal[4] and, without a trial, was thrown into the Tower. There, he was "badly treated" until his sisters succeeded in bribing his jailers to obtain a writ of habeas corpus. Before it could be executed, however, the authorities rushed him to St Nicholas Island off the coast of Plymouth. Other relatives won Harrington's release to the fort at Plymouth by posting a £5000 bond. Thereafter, his general state of health promptly plunged and quickly deteriorated, apparently from his ingestion on medical advice of the addictive drug guaiacum.[5] Harrington's mind appeared to be affected. He suffered "intermittent delusions;" one observer judged him "simply mad." He recovered only a bit, then slipped decidedly downhill. He proceeded to suffer attacks of gout and palsy before falling victim to a paralyzing stroke. In 1675, just two years before his death, he married "a Mrs Dayrell, his 'old sweetheart'," the daughter of a Buckinghamshire noble. The short-lived couple had no children. Following his death at Little Ambry, he was buried next to Sir Walter Raleigh in St Margaret's Church, Westminster.

Harrington has often been confused with his cousin Sir James Harrington, 3rd Baronet of Ridlington, MP, a member of the parliamentary commission which tried Charles I, and twice president of Cromwell's Council of State. He was subsequently excluded from the Indemnity and Oblivion Act which pardoned most for taking up arms against the King during the Civil Wars (1642-1646).

Harrington's manuscripts have vanished; his printed writings consist of Oceana, and papers, pamphlets, aphorisms and treatises, many of which are

94 devoted to its defence. The first two editions are known as the "Chapman" and the "Pakeman". Their contents are nearly identical. His Works, including the Pakeman Oceana and the somewhat important A System of Politics, were first edited with biography by in 1700. Toland's edition, with numerous substantial additions by Thomas Birch, appeared first in Dublin in 1737 and 1758, and then in England in 1747 and 1771. Oceana was reprinted in Henry Morley's Universal Library in 1883; S.B. Liljegren reissued a fastidiously-prepared version of the Pakeman edition in 1924.

Harrington's modern editor is J.G.A. Pocock, Professor of History Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. In 1977, he edited and published a thoroughly comprehensive, and what has become the definitive, compilation of Harrington tracts, along with a lengthy editorial/historical introduction. Harrington's prose was marred by what Pocock described as an undisciplined work habit and a conspicuous "lack of sophistication." He never attained the level of "a great literary stylist." For example, as contrasted with Hobbes and Milton, nowhere to be found are:

"important shades of meaning...conveyed [through] rhythym, emphasis and punctuation; ...He wrote hastily, in a baroque and periodic style in which he more than once lost his way. He suffered from Latinisms...his notions of how to insert quotations, translations and references in his text were at times productive of confusion."

95 New York Alpha’s intellectual, James Harrington, above, was tutored by William Chillingworth, below:

 William Chillingworth (Oct. 12, 1602 – Jan. 30, 1644) was a controversial English churchman. He was born at Oxford. In June 1618 he became a scholar of Trinity College, Oxford, of which he was made a fellow in June 1628. He gained a reputation as a skillful debater, excelled in mathematics, and also became known as a poet. The marriage of Charles I with Henrietta Maria of France had stimulated the propaganda of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Jesuits made the universities their special point of attack. One of them, "," who had his sphere at Oxford,

succeeded in converting Chillingworth, and persuaded him to go to the Jesuit college at Trinity College, Oxford Douai.

I Influenced by his godfather, , then Bishop of London, Chillingworth decided to make an impartial inquiry into the claims of the two churches. After a short stay he left Douai in 1631 and returned to Oxford. On rational and scriptural grounds he eventually decided on Protestantism, and wrote, in 1634, an unpublished work arguing against the ideas which had led him to Catholicism. This paper was lost; another was written on the same subject.

His theological sensitiveness appears in his refusal of a preferment offered to him in 1635 by Sir Thomas Coventry, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. He was in difficulty about subscribing the Thirty-Nine Articles. As he informed , then warden of All Souls College, Oxford, in a letter, he was fully resolved on two points--that to say that the Fourth Commandment is a law of God appertaining to Christians is false and unlawful, and that the damnatory clauses in the Athanasian Creed are most false, and in a high degree presumptuous and schismatical. To subscribe, therefore, he felt would be to “subscribe his own damnation."

At this time his principal work was far towards completion. It was undertaken in defence of Dr. Christopher Potter, provost of the Queen's College, Oxford, who had for some time been carrying on a controversy with a Jesuit known as Edward Knott, but whose real name was Matthias Wilson. Potter had replied in 1633 to Knott's Charity Mistaken (1630), and Knott retaliated with Mercy and Truth, which Chillingworth attempted to answer. Knott, hearing about this and hoping to prejudice the public, hastily brought out a pamphlet tending to

96 show that Chillingworth was a Socinian who aimed at perverting not only Catholicism but Christianity.

Laud, now , was anxious about Chillingworth's reply to Knott, and at his request, as "the young man had given cause why a more watchful eye should be held over him and his writings," it was examined by the vice-chancellor of Oxford and two professors of divinity, and published with their approval in 1637, with the title The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation. The main argument is a vindication of the sole authority of the Bible in spiritual matters, and of the free right of the individual conscience to interpret it. In the preface Chillingworth expresses his new view about subscription to the articles. "For the ," he there says, "I am persuaded that the constant doctrine of it is so pure and orthodox, that whosoever believes it, and lives according to it, undoubtedly he shall be saved, and that there is no error in it which may necessitate or warrant any man to disturb the peace or renounce the communion of it. This, in my opinion, is all intended by subscription."

In the following year (1638), he was promoted to the chancellorship of the church of Sarum, with the prebend of Brixworth annexed to it. In the English Civil War, he wrote a criticism of the Scots, and was in the king's army at the siege of Gloucester, inventing certain engines for assaulting the town. Shortly afterwards he accompanied Ralph Hopton, general of the king's troops in the west, in his march; and, being taken ill at Castle, he was captured by the parliamentary forces under Sir William Waller. As he was unable to go to London with the garrison, he was conveyed to Chichester, where he died. His last days were harassed by the diatribes of the Puritan preacher, Francis Cheynell.

Besides his principal work, Chillingworth wrote a number of smaller anti- Jesuit papers published in the posthumous Additional Discourses (1687), and nine of his sermons have been preserved. He was a zealous Royalist, asserting that even the unjust and tyrannous violence of princes may not be resisted, although it might be avoided in terms of the instruction, "when they persecute you in one city, flee into another." His writings long enjoyed a high popularity. The Religion of Protestants is characterized by much fairness and acuteness of argument, and was commended by as a discipline of "perspicuity and the way of right reasoning." The charge of Socinianism was frequently brought against him, but, as thought, "for no other cause but his worthy and successful attempts to make the Christian religion reasonable." His creed, and the whole gist of his argument, is expressed in a single sentence, "I am fully assured that God does not, and therefore that men ought not to, require any more of any man than this, to believe the Scripture to be God's word, and to endeavour to find the true sense of it, and to live according to it.

97 New York Alpha’s intellectual, William Chillingworth, above, was mentored by Archbishop William Laud, below:

 Born at Reading in Berkshire, William Laud was the tenth son of a prosperous clothier. He attended the grammar school at Reading, then studied divinity at St John's College, Oxford. His tutor was John Buckeridge, one of a group of theologians who led a reaction against Calvinism and who influenced Laud's later policies for the reform of Church liturgy. Ordained as a priest in 1601, Laud was ambitious and rose quickly through the hierarchy of the Church principally through the patronage of , , through whom he was introduced into the court of King James I. In 1617, Laud accompanied the King on a visit to Scotland as one his chaplains. He was appointed Bishop of St David's in 1621 and became chaplain to George Villiers, Saint John’s College, Oxford Marquis (later Duke) of Buckingham the following year.

Laud's career flourished on the accession of King Charles I in 1625. He officiated at Charles' coronation in place of Archbishop Williams, the Dean of Westminster, who had fallen from favour. Appointed to the Privy Council in April 1626, made Bishop of Bath and Wells, then Bishop of London in 1628, Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. King Charles admired Laud's learning and valued his advice. As well as his Church preferments, Laud became increasingly powerful in affairs of state. He was appointed to several important offices close to the King, but Laud was not a successful politician owing to his inflexibility and his over-sensitivity to opposition. However, he used his influence to secure preferments for his friends. Sir Francis Windebank was appointed Secretary of State in 1632 and , Bishop of London, was appointed in 1636.

Laud's theology was influenced by the teachings of the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius (1560-1609), who emphasised free will over predestination and an acceptance of ordered and uniform practices of worship. Laud's love of ceremony and harmonious liturgy — the "beauty of holiness" — was shared by King Charles, but it was loathed by Puritans, who regarded Laud's Arminianism as dangerously close to Roman Catholicism. During the eleven-year Personal Rule, Laud worked closely with King Charles in attempting to unify Church and State. His attempts to force uniformity of worship on every parish in England ran

98 contrary to all shades of Puritan opinion. Laud himself was intolerant of opposition and made full use of the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission to inflict savage punishments on his critics. In 1637, the religious radicals William Prynne, Henry Burton and John Bastwick were tortured and imprisoned for speaking and writing against Laud's policy, which succeeded in making them into Puritan martyrs. The rabble-rousing "Freeborn John" Lilburne was persecuted in 1638, provoking further popular outcry against Laud and his bishops.

Looking beyond England, Laud insisted upon conformity from congregations in Ireland and Scotland, and even from the American colonies. In Ireland, he collaborated with the Earl of Strafford's ruthlessly efficient "Thorough" policy, but his attempt to force an authorised Prayer Book in Scotland met with disaster. There were riots in Edinburgh which escalated into a national movement against interference by the King and bishops in Scottish affairs. United under the National Covenant of 1638, the Scots repulsed King Charles' attempt to enforce his authority in the Bishops' Wars (1639-40).

The Long Parliament was summoned in November 1640 in response to the crisis brought about by the Bishops' Wars. Amongst its earliest proceedings were moves against the King's "evil councillors", the Earl of Strafford and Archbishop Laud. On 18 December, Denzil Holles, by order of the House of Commons, impeached Laud for high treason at the bar of the House of Lords. On 26th February 1641, articles of impeachment were brought up by Sir Henry Vane. Laud was accused of assuming tyrannical powers in Church and State, of subverting the true religion with popish superstition and of causing the recent disastrous wars against the Scots.

Imprisoned in the Tower of London from 1641, Laud was finally brought to trial before the House of Lords in March 1644. The prosecution was led by William Prynne, whom Laud had persecuted in 1637. Although the Lords who remained at Westminster were unanimously prejudiced against him, Laud defended himself ably. Even his bitter enemy Prynne could not stretch the law enough to prove him guilty of treason. The Lords adjourned without coming to a vote. In November, the House of Commons abandoned its impeachment of Laud and resorted to a Bill of Attainder to condemn him by special decree. The bill was passed by the Commons on 15 November and by the House of Lords two months later. Archbishop Laud was beheaded on Tower Hill on 10 January 1645.

Laud was buried at All Hallows, Barking. After the Restoration, his body was reburied in a vault under the altar at the chapel of St John's College, Oxford.

99 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Archbishop William Laud, above, was mentored by Bishop , below:

 Dr. Thomas Bilson the great grandson of Wilhelm V, Duke of Bavaria, a major force in the Catholic Reformation. He descended from a line “bar sinister”, meaning it was illegitimate, but Dr. Bilson was proud of the association, nonetheless. Duke Wilhelm’s liaision produced a daughter, who married Albert Belsson, and the union of this marriage was Hermann Bilson, father of the Bishiop. Bilson was educated in the school of William de Wykeham. He entered New College, at Oxford, and was made a Fellow of his College in 15645. He began to distinguish himself as a poet; but, on receiving ordination, gave himself wholly to New College, Oxford theological studies.

He was soon made Prebendary of , and Warden of the College there. In 1596, he was made ; and three years later, was translated to the see of Winchester, his native place.

He engaged in most of the polemical contests of his day, as a stiff partizan of the Church of England. When the controversy arose as to the meaning of the so called Apostles’ Creed, in asserting the descent of Christ into hell, Bishop Bilson defended the literal sense, and maintained that Christ went there, not to suffer, but to wrest the keys of hell out of the Devil’s hands. For this doctrine he was severely handled by Henry Jacob, who is often called the father of modern Congregationalism, and also by other Puritans.

Much feeling was excited by the controversy, and Queen Elizabeth, in her ire, commanded her good bishop,

“neither to desert the doctrine, nor let the calling which he bore in the Church of God, be trampled under foot, by such unquiet refusers of truth and authority.”

Dr. Bilsons’ most famous work was entitled “The Perpetual Government of Christ’s Church,” and was published in 1593. It is still regarded as one of the ablest books ever written in behalf of Episcopacy. Dr. Bilson died in 1616, at a good old age, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. It was said of him, that he “carried prelature in his very aspect.” Anthony Wood proclaims him so “complete in divinity, so well skilled in languages, so read in the Fathers and Schoolmen, so

100 judicious is making use of his readings, that at length he was found to be no longer a soldier, but a commander in chief in the spiritual warfare, especially when he became a bishop!”

101 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Bishop Bilson, above, was the direct descendant of Wilhelm the Fifth, Duke of Bavaria, below:

 William V, Duke of Bavaria (Sept. 29, 1548 – Feb. 7, 1626), called the Pious, (German: Wilhelm V., der Fromme, Herzog von Bayern) was Duke of Bavaria from 1579 to 1597. He received a Jesuit education and showed keen attachment to Jesuit Counter Reformation tenets. His title 'the Pious' was given to him because he was one of the most Catholic rulers of Bavaria: he devoted his daily routine to masses (when possible, several times a day), prayer, contemplation, and devotional reading. He took part in public devotions, processions, and pilgrimages. His residence as crown prince was the ancient fortified seat in Landshut. Trausnitz’ upgrading from a Gothic fortification into a renaissance complex of truly representational proportions including an arcaded inner court were achieved in the House of Wittelsbach decade between 1568 and 1578. Like his Wittelsbach father and grandfather, William was a strong supporter of the counter-reformation. He secured the archbishopric of Cologne for his brother Ernest with his campaign in 1583, and this dignity remained in the possession of the family for nearly 200 years. Two of his sons also followed ecclesiastical careers: Philipp Wilhelm v. Wittelsbach became the Bishop of Regensburg and Cardinal, and Ferdinand became Archbishop of Cologne. During his reign non-Catholics were forced to leave, and the Geistlicher Rat, an ecclesiastical council was formed, independent of the traditional privy council or the treasury, which administered secular affairs. The Geistlicher Rat supervised and disciplined the duchy’s Catholic clergy through regular visitations; it controlled the Catholicism of all state officials by issuing certificates documenting annual confession and communion; it funded new Catholic schools, new Catholic colleges, new houses of religious orders, especially the educational ones, such as the Jesuits and Capuchins for men and the Ursulines for women.

The Jesuit Michaelskirche was built in Munich between 1583 and 1597 as a spiritual center for the counter-reformation. William's spending on Church- related projects, including funding missionaries outside Bavaria— as far away as Asia and America— put tremendous strain on the Bavarian treasury, and was one of the reasons William in 1597 abdicated in favour of his son Maximilian I.

102 William retired into a monastery, and died in 1626 in the Schleissheim Palace. He is buried in the Michaelskirche.

103 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Bishop Bilson, above, was also tutored at the school of William Wykenham, below:

(1320 – September 27, 1404) was , Chancellor of England, founder of Winchester College and of New College, Oxford, and builder of a large part of . William was born to an undistinguished family, in Wickham, Hampshire. He was educated at Winchester Grammar School, became secretary to the constable of Winchester Castle, through whom he came under the notice first of the bishop (Edington) and then of King Edward III, into whose service he passed at the age of about twenty- three, in the capacity of architect and surveyor. He was appointed Justice in Eyre south of the Trent along with Peter Atte New College, Oxford Wode in 1361, a position he held until about 1367.

He became secretary to the constable of Winchester Castle and in that capacity learned a lot about building. This led to architectural work for King Edward III, for whom he reconstucted Windsor Castle whilst residing at Bear's Rails in Old Windsor. He superintended much important building. William was paid for these services by being given the incomes of various churches, and eventually, in 1362, he was ordained.

Between 1357 and 1361 rectories, prebends, canonries, an archdeaconry, and a deaconry were conferred on him, as well as the keepership of a dozen royal castles and manors. It was not, however, until Dec., 1361, that he received minor orders from Bishop Edington, who ordained him priest in the following year. At the same time he became warden of the royal forests in the south of England, and advanced rapidly in the favour of the king, who gave him his entire confidence, consulted him in everything, and named him, in 1364, keeper of the privy seal, an office which so increased his power and influence that, according to Froissart, he "reigned in England, and without him they did nothing". In Oct., 1366, he was elected, on the king's recommendation, to succeed Edington as Bishop of Winchester. The election was, after some delay, confirmed by Pope Urban V, and Wykeham was consecrated on 10 Oct., 1367, having been, a month previously, appointed chancellor of the kingdom.

Raised thus in a few weeks to the richest bishopric and the highest civil office in England, Wykeham was unfortunate in the coincidence of his

104 chancellorship with the serious reverses sustained in the war with France. A cry for the removal of the great offices of state from the hands of clerics led to Wykeham resigning the great seal in 1372, and gave him more leisure for his episcopal duties. In 1373 he personally visited every church and monastery in his diocese, reformed abuses at Selborne Priory, the hospital of St. Cross, and other religious houses, and made plans for the great educational foundations which were to be the glory of his episcopate.

In 1376, however, his work was interrupted by the troubles brought on him by the hostility of John of Gaunt. He was impeached for misgovernment and for misappropriate of state funds; and though only a single minor charge was said to be proved against him, the temporalities of his see were seized, and not released until the death of Edward III.

The accession of Richard II saw Wykeham restored to favour; a full pardon was granted to him both by king and parliament, his revenues were restored to him, and he was able to resume the project of founding his college at Oxford. The charter was issued, with royal and papal licence, in 1379; the foundations were laid in 1380; and six years later the college (New College, Oxford) was solemnly inaugurated, the buildings and the being on a scale equally magnificent, and the total number of members on the foundation amounting to no less than a hundred.

Side by side with this splendid institution, and closely connected with it, grew up the equally famous grammar school of St. Mary at Winchester, the foundation of which was authorized by papal Bull in 1378, and the charter issued in 1382, providing for the education of seventy-four scholars in preparation for their entering the founder's college at Oxford.

This union of grammar school and university was alsoimitated by Henry VI when founding Eton and King's College, Cambridge; and there are other examples of it. Wykeham was the first founder of a college in which the chapel was an essential part of the design; and his statutes provided for stately and elaborate services, including the daily performance of the Divine office "with chant and note", and the daily singing of seven Masses at the high altar. Every detail of the studies and of the scholastic discipline was regulated by himself; and probably, of all the pre-Reformation colleges of England, Winchester is the one in which (in spite of the change of religion) the original statutes are most closely observed, and the memory of the founder is most deeply venerated. Wykeham's collegiate buildings, finished about 1375, are still in use, but there have been extensive modern additions, and the college still ranks with the greatest of English public schools.

Another important work undertaken by Wykeham was the rebuilding of the nave of his cathedral, or rather its transformation from Norman to Perpendicular. This work, begun by him in 1394, was completed by his successors Cardinal

105 Beaufort and Wayneflete. Meanwhile the bishop, after some years of non- interference in state affairs, had for the second time (in 1389) been appointed chancellor, and discharged the office to the satisfaction of Richard II. In little more than two years, however, he finally resigned the position, and from that date until his death took no active part in politics, although his ability and integrity caused him to be frequently included in committees of he upper house and in royal commissions. He spent the last three years of his life in retirement at his palace of South Waltham, and in 1402 found it necessary to appoint to coadjutor bishops, both fellows of New College.

He made his will in July, 1403, bequeathing large sums for charitable purposes and for Masses and suffrages for his soul. Fourteen months later, after several days spent in uninterrupted prayer, he passed peacefully away. According to his own wish he was buried in the chantry built by himself on the south side of the nave of his cathedral, on the site of an altar of the Blessed Virgin. A beautiful altar-tomb, with a recumbent figure, perpetuates the memory of a prelate who, if not specially distinguished as a statesman or a man of learning,was certainly one of the most zealous, generous, and magnanimous occupants of the historic See of Westminster.

106 New York Alpha’s intellectual, William Wykenham, above, was mentored by , below:

 William Edington (d. October 6, 1366) was an English bishop and administrator. He served as bishop of Winchester from 1346 until his death, keeper of the from 1341 to 1344, treasurer from 1344 to 1356, and finally as chancellor from 1356 until he retired from royal administration in 1363. Edington’s reforms of the administration — in particular of royal finances — had wide- ranging consequences, and contributed to the English military efficiency in the early stages of the Hundred Years' War. As bishop of Winchester he was responsible for starting an extensive rebuilding of , and for founding Edington Priory, the church of which still stands today. Oxford University, perhaps

His parents were and Amice of Edington near Westbury, Wiltshire. Though it has been claimed that he was educated at Oxford, there seems to be no support for this. His first patron, however, was the Oxford chancellor Gilbert Middleton, who was also a royal counsellor. When Middleton died in 1331, Edington entered the service of Middleton’s friend, , bishop of Winchester. Through Orleton, Edington’s abilities were brought to the attention of King Edward III, and in 1341 the king named him keeper of the wardrobe. The position was an important one; the wardrobe functioned as the treasury while the king was on campaign, and Edward strongly resisted any attempts to limit this royal prerogative.

The king must have been impressed by Edington’s performance, because in 1344 he made him treasurer of the realm, a position he held for the exceptionally long period of twelve years. This was a job fraught with problems, as the nation was in serious financial difficulties by the mid-1340s. The treasury was in great debt from the heavy demands of the early stages of the Hundred Years' War. By then reneging on his debts, the king had lost public confidence, and struggled to obtain new loans. Edington saw the need to bring all royal expenditure under the oversight of the exchequer. This did not entail controlling the king’s use of his resources — a move Edward would have resented greatly — but simply attempting to budget all revenues and expenses. By the early 1360s this was largely achieved; a testimony to the capabilities and energy of Edington as an administrator. In 1356 he was named chancellor, a post he held until his retirement from the national scene in 1363, possibly for health reasons.

107 While serving in these positions, Edington also held ecclesiastical benefices. In 1335 Orleton collated him to the rectory of Cheriton, Hampshire, and from 1335 to 1346 he was master of St Cross Hospital in Winchester. Also the king was eager to reward his capable servant; in 1341 he was given the prebend of Leighton Manor (Lincoln), by 1344 he also held that of Netheravon (Salisbury), and by 1345 that of Putston (). This level of pluralism was not unusual at the time. His greatest preferment, however, came with his papal appointment – on the king’s request – to the see of Winchester in 1345. This was the richest see in England, considered second only to the archbishopric of Milan.

The monks of Winchester had already elected one of their own numbers, but this was overruled, and Edington was consecrated in 1346. As a bishop he was necessarily much absent, even with the relatively short distance between Westminster and Winchester. He was not entirely detached from his episcopal duties, however. He used the see as a source for extensive nepotism, yet he also initiated wide-ranging building works on the nave of the cathedral. Meanwhile, in 1351, he founded an Augustinian priory at his birthplace of Edington. Although most of the priory has been demolished, the church still stands, as a good example of the transition between the decorated and perpendicular style of church-building.

In May 1366, as a final sign of royal gratitude, King Edward had Edington elected archbishop of Canterbury. Edington, however, declined on the grounds of failing health. Five months later, on October 7, 1366, he died at Bishop's Waltham. He is buried in Winchester Cathedral, where his effigy can be seen in the chantry chapel he himself had built in the nave.

108 New York Alpha’s intellectual, William Eddington, above, was mentored by Adam Orleton, below:

 Adam Orleton, was nominated on May 15, 1317, and consecrated on May 22, 1317. He was translated to be bishop of Worcester on September 25, 1327, and lastly to the position of bishop of Winchester on December 1, 1333. The diocese that Adam held came into existence in 635 when the great missionary Diocese of Dorchester, founded by St. in 634 for the Kingdom of Wessex, was subdivided into the Sees of Sherborne and Winchester. The two dioceses were ruled by one bishop until 676, when a real separation was effected. The then consisted of Hampshire, Surrey, and Sussex; but Sussex was afterwards formed into the See of Chichester, and the Isle of Wight was added to Winchester. The church at Winchester, which became the cathedral of the new diocese, had been founded and endowed in 634 by King Cynegils, whose son Coenwealh added Bishop of Winchester more lands to its possessions.

When Wessex gradually assumed the supremacy the importance of the see greatly increased. After the metropolitan Sees of Canterbury and York, it ranked first among all English bishoprics till the reformation; this position the Anglican see still enjoys. It gained increased honour by the episcopate and subsequent canonization of Saint Swithin, its seventeenth bishop. When his relics were enshrined there the cathedral, which had been under the patronage of St. Amphibalus, was dedicated to Saint Swithin. It occupied the site of an earlier edifice dating from the Roman occupation, which had been converted into a pagan temple by the Saxons.

A new cathedral was built by Cynegils, and three hundred years later was enlarged by Bishop Aethelwald, who replaced the secular canons by Benedictine monks and built a large monastery. After the conquest the first Norman bishop, , built a cathedral n the Norman style on a site near by; much of his work remains in the present edifice. To this new building (consecrated in 1093) the relics of St. Swithin were solemnly transferred, 15 July. Within its walls took place the burial of William Rufus (1100), the coronation of Richard I (1194), the marriage of Henry IV (1401), and the marriage of Queen Mary (1554). During the

109 Middle Ages the building was gradually transformed from Norman to Gothic; the nave especially affords an interesting example of the way in which such changes were effected. This work, began by Edington, was continued by the great bishop, William of Wykeham, and his successors. In 1378 Wykeham obtained the pope's license of the foundation of his great school at Winchester, and in 1387 he began the buildings which were opened in 1393. The original foundation provided for a warden, ten fellows, three chaplains, seventy scholars, and sixteen choristers.

New York Alpha’s intellectual Adam Orleton, as bishop pf Winchester, was a supporter of Queen Isabella, known as the “She-Wolf” and Roger Mortimer against Edward II of England, playing a significant role in the events of 1326.

One assessment:

“Bishop Adam, wary, but at the same time vigorous and of unusual ability, played a great part in politics to the end of the wretched King's life. Some historians still believe that he recommended the murder; he certainly supported the deposition in Parliament, and went to Kenilworth as one of the commissioners to force the King's resignation. If thus interested in secular politics, he was no less watchful and vigilant in the affairs of his bishopric and the cathedral.”

In 1327 he briefly held the office of Lord High Treasurer, from January through March. He died on July 18, 1345.

110 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Adam Orelton, above, was a supporter of Roger Mortimer, below:

 Roger de Mortimer, 1st Earl of March (25 April 1287 – 29 November 1330) an English nobleman of the fourteenth century, was for three years de facto ruler of England, after leading a successful rebellion against Edward II. He was himself overthrown by Edward's son, Edward III. Mortimer was also the lover of Edward II's wife, , who assisted him in the deposition of her husband. Mortimer, grandson of Roger Mortimer, 1st Baron Wigmore, was born at Wigmore Castle, Herefordshire, England, the firstborn of Edmund Mortimer, 2nd Baron Wigmore and his wife, Margaret de Fiennes. Edmund Mortimer had been a second son, intended for clerical work, but on the sudden death of his elder brother, Edmund was recalled from Oxford House of Mortimer University and installed as heir. As a boy, Roger was probably sent to be fostered in the household of his formidable uncle, Roger Mortimer of Chirk. It was this uncle who had carried the head of Llywelyn the Last to King Edward I in 1282.

Like many noble children of his time, Roger was married young, to Joan de Geneville, the daughter of a neighbouring lordship. They were married in 1301, and immediately began a family. Through his marriage with Joan de Geneville, Roger not only acquired increased possessions on the , including the important Ludlow Castle, which became the chief stronghold of the Mortimers, but also extensive estates and influence in Ireland. However, Joan de Geneville was not an "heiress" at marriage. Her grandfather, Geoffrey de Geneville conveyed most, but not all, of his Irish lordships at age 80 in 1308, to Roger Mortimer, and then retired, notably alive - he finally died in 1314.

Geoffrey also conveyed much of his legacy, such as Kenlys, during his lifetime, to his younger son (the older son Piers having died in 1292), Simon de Geneville, who had meanwhile become Baron of Culmullin, through marriage to Joanna FitzLeon. Roger Mortimer therefore succeeded to the Lordship of Trim

111 (which later reverted to the Crown). He did not succeed however to the Lordship of Fingal, which descended firstly to Simon de Geneville (whose son Laurence predeceased him), and thence through his heiress daughter Elizabeth to her husband William de Loundres, and next through their heiress daughter, also Elizabeth, to Sir Christopher Preston, and finally to the Viscounts Gormanston.

Roger Mortimer's childhood came to an abrupt end when Lord Wigmore was mortally wounded in a skirmish near Builth in July 1304. Since Roger was underage at the death of his father, he was placed by King Edward I under the guardianship of Piers Gaveston, and was knighted by Edward in 1306. In that year also Roger was endowed as Baron Wigmore, and came into his full inheritance. His adult life began in earnest.

In 1308 he went to Ireland in person, to enforce his authority. This brought him into conflict with the de Lacys, who turned for support to Edward Bruce, brother of Robert Bruce, king of Scotland. Mortimer was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland by Edward II. In 1316, at the head of a large army, he drove Bruce to Carrickfergus and the de Lacys into Connaught, wreaking vengeance on their adherents whenever they were to be found.

He was then occupied for some years with baronial disputes on the Welsh border until about 1318.

In 1318, Mortimer joined the growing opposition to Edward II and the Despensers, and he supported Humphrey de Bohun, 4th earl of Hereford, in refusing to obey the king’s summons to appear before him in 1321.

Forced to surrender to the king at Shrewsbury in January 1322, Mortimer was consigned to the Tower of London, but escaped to France in August 1324. In the following year Queen Isabella, wife of Edward II, anxious to escape from her husband, obtained his consent to her going to France to use her influence with her brother, King Charles IV, in favour of peace. At the French court the queen found Roger Mortimer; she became his mistress soon afterwards, and at his instigation refused to return to England so long as the Despensers retained power as the king’s favourites.

The scandal of Isabella’s relations with Mortimer compelled them both to withdraw from the French court to Flanders, where they obtained assistance for an invasion of England. Landing in England in September 1326, they were joined by Henry, Earl of Lancaster; London rose in support of the queen, and Edward took flight to the west, pursued by Mortimer and Isabella.

After wandering helplessly for some weeks in Wales, the king was taken prisoner on 16 November, and was compelled to abdicate in favour of his son. Though the latter was crowned as Edward III on January 25, 1327, the country

112 was ruled by Mortimer and Isabella, who were widely believed to have arranged the murder of Edward II in the following September at Berkeley Castle.

Rich estates and offices of profit and power were now heaped on Mortimer. He was made constable of Wallingford Castle, and in September 1328 he was created Earl of March. However, although in military terms he was far more competent than the Despensers, his ambition was troubling to all. His own son, Geoffrey, mocked him as "the king of folly." During his short time as ruler of England he took over lordship of Denbigh, Oswestry, and Clun (all of which previously belonged to the Earl of Arundel). He was also granted the marcher lordship over Montgomery by the Queen.

The jealousy and anger of many nobles was aroused by Mortimer's use of power but no action was taken. Then, in March of 1330, Mortimer ordered the execution of Edmund, Earl of Kent, the half-brother of Edward II. After this execution Henry Lancaster prevailed upon the young king, Edward III, to assert his independence. In October 1330, a Parliament was called in Nottingham (just days before Edward's 18th birthday) and Mortimer and Queen Isabella were seized by Edward and his companions from inside Nottingham Castle. In spite of Isabella’s entreaty to her son, "Fair son, have pity on the gentle Mortimer," Mortimer was conveyed to the Tower.

Accused of assuming royal power and of various other high misdemeanours, he was condemned without trial and hanged at Tyburn on 29 November 1330, his vast estates being forfeited to the crown. Mortimer's widow, Joan, received a pardon in 1336 and survived till 1356. She was buried beside Mortimer at Wigmore, but the site was later destroyed.

113 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Adam Orelton, above, was also mentored by Piers Gaveston, below:

 Piers Gaveston, 1st Earl of Cornwall (c. 1284 – 19 June 1312) was the favourite, and possibly lover, of King Edward II of England. A Gascon by birth, Piers was the son of Sir Arnaud de Gabaston, a soldier in service to King . Arnaud had been used as a hostage by Edward twice; on the second occasion, Arnaud escaped captivity, and fled to England with his son. Both then entered the royal household, where Gaveston behaved so well and so virtuously that the King declared him an example for his own son, Prince Edward, to follow, making him a companion of Prince Edward in 1300. Prince Edward was delighted with Gaveston, who was noted for his wit, rudeness, and House of Gaveston entertaining manner, and gave him many honours and gifts.

The Prince also declared that he loved Gaveston 'like a brother.' Gaveston was also a close friend of Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, Gaveston being awarded the wardship of Mortimer's property after the death of Roger's father – this was a great honour for Gaveston, since the wardship of such an estate would normally be awarded to a nobleman, and is thus an indication of the regard both the King and his son held for Gaveston.

Whilst King Edward I liked Gaveston, he strongly disapproved of the close relationship between the knight and the Prince, which was felt to be inappropriate due to Gaveston's rank. He became especially enraged with Gaveston when he, along with twenty-one other knights (including Sir Roger Mortimer), deserted the English army in Scotland after the 1306 campaign and went to a tournament in France. Furious, the King declared the estates of all the deserters forfeit, issued orders for them to be arrested, and declared them traitors. Gaveston and his companions therefore asked Prince Edward to intercede with the King on their behalf; the Prince accordingly enlisted the support of his stepmother, Queen Margaret, who pleaded with the King to forgive the young men.

Most, including Mortimer, were forgiven in January of 1307 and returned their estates. Gaveston, however, remained disfavoured: the King had learned that Piers and the Prince were sworn brothers-in-arms, who had promised to fight together, protect each other, and share all of their possessions. To the King, this

114 was unthinkable: not only was it monstrous for a future King to be shackled by oath to a commoner, unable to be adequately secure against potential plots; but the oath threatened to share the government of England itself with Gaveston, and that was simply intolerable. His displeasure with Gaveston and the young man's friendship with Prince Edward only continued to increase.[1].

The Prince, determined to maintain his oath and companionship with Gaveston, next resolved to ennoble the other man by granting him the County of Ponthieu (one of Prince Edward's own Counties). He sent an extremely unwilling Treasurer William Langton to the King with this news. Langton announced it on his knees: "My lord King, I am sent on behalf of my lord the prince, your son, though as God lives, unwillingly, to seek in his name your licence to promote his knight Piers Gaveston to the rank of the Count of Ponthieu."

Unsurprisingly, the King was not pleased. Reportedly, he shouted back at Langton, "Who are you who dares to ask such things? As God lives, if not for the fear of the Lord, and because you said at the outset that you undertook this business unwillingly, you would not escape my hands!" The King then summoned the Prince before him, demanding to know why he had sent Langton before him. The Prince replied that he wished for the King's permission to grant Ponthieu to Gaveston. According to historian Ian Mortimer, on hearing these words spoken by the Prince, the King flew into a rage, exclaiming, "'You wretched son of a whore! Do you want to give away lands now? You who have never gained any? As God lives, if not for fear of breaking up the Kingdom, I would never let you enjoy your inheritance!' As he spoke, the King seized hold of the Prince's head by the hair and tore handfuls of hair out, then threw the Prince to the floor and kicked him repeatedly until he was exhausted." [2].

King Edward then summoned the Lords gathering for the Parliament at Carlisle, and before them declared Gaveston banished. It appears to have been more a punishment of the Prince than of Gaveston – Gaveston's conduct having been largely irreproachable, the King granted him a pension to be enjoyed whilst abroad. He also forced Prince Edward and Piers to swear an oath never to see one another again without his permission. Gaveston then set sail for France, loaded down with many rich gifts from the Prince. But as soon as Edward I died in July 1307, the new King recalled his "Brother Perrot" and endowed him with the County of Cornwall (which had been intended for Thomas of Brotherton, Edward I's young second son).

Soon after his recalling, Edward II arranged the marriage of Gaveston to Margaret de Clare, a granddaughter of King Edward I, and sister of the Earl of Gloucester, another friend of both Edward and Gaveston. The marriage was held soon after the funeral of the old King: held at Berkhampstead, the Manor of Queen Margaret, it proved an excuse for the first in a string of feasts and hunts, being followed by similar entertainments at Kings Langley in Hertfordshire, and a tournament held by the King in honour of Gaveston at Wallingford Castle, which

115 had been presented to Gaveston by Edward. It proved an embarrassment for many of the older lords present: Gaveston's young and talented knights easily won against the older knights fighting for the Earls of Warenne, Hereford, and Arundel. This led to the enmity of these Earls.

When Edward II left the country in 1308 to marry Isabella of France, he appointed Gaveston Regent in his place, horrifying the Lords; they had expected Edward to appoint a family member or an experienced noble. By this appointment of his favorite, Edward demonstrated his faith in Gaveston, but in the process increased his friend's unpopularity. Gaveston himself did little during his Regency, however; the only thing he did of note in his two weeks of rule was to take a proud attitude to those who came before him.

Gaveston also proved unpopular with the new queen consort. The two men, who were of approximately the same age, may have had a homosexual relationship, and Edward's preference for the company of Gaveston over that of his wife, whatever the motives, is generally agreed by historians as having created early discord in the Royal marriage.

Gaveston's behaviour at the coronation feast is of especial note: he appeared in royal purple instead of an Earl's cloth of gold, spent the evening chatting and joking with Edward (who ignored his bride, her brother and her uncles in favour of Gaveston), and was eventually discovered to have been given all of the gold and jewellery Edward had received as wedding gifts.

Having been forced by his lords to banish Gaveston following the embarrassment of the coronation, Edward instead appointed him Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, a job which allowed Gaveston much authority, honour and dignity. Gaveston may have also fought with Sir Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, who was also in Ireland at that time. By the summer of 1309 he had garnered a reputation as a sound military administrator, having strengthened Dublin and secured English rule there. After manipulations by Edward in England, Gaveston left Ireland on 23 July 1309 and made his way to Stamford via Tintagel, arriving at Parliament in Stamford in late July.

Unfortunately, Gaveston swiftly made more enemies: the moderate Aymer de Valence, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, whom Gaveston offended by referring to him as 'Joseph the Jew'; and Thomas Plantagenet, 2nd Earl of Lancaster, a cousin of the King and the most powerful Lord in the land after the King. He swore to destroy Gaveston when, after having already provoked the Earl many times, Gaveston persuaded Edward to dismiss one of Lancaster's retainers. Led by Lancaster, a powerful group of Earls demanded that he be banished again. Few stood by the King. Of those who did, the Earl of Surrey had sworn eternal hatred of Gaveston. After a failed Scottish campaign in 1310-11, Edward was forced by his Earls to banish Gaveston once again.

116 When Gaveston returned in 1312, he was faced with hostility. Thomas Plantagenet, 2nd Earl of Lancaster raised an army against Gaveston and the King, and on 4 May attacked Newcastle, where Edward and Gaveston were staying. They were forced to flee by ship to Scarborough Castle, leaving behind all of their money and soldiers, where they were appropriated by Lancaster. Edward then went south to raise an army, leaving Gaveston in Scarborough. Lancaster immediately brought his army up to threaten Gaveston and to cut him off from the King. Fearful for his life, Gaveston was forced to surrender to Aymer de Valence, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, who swore an oath to surrender his lands and titles to protect Gaveston. However, in Oxfordshire, Gaveston was captured and taken to Warwick Castle by Guy de Beauchamp, 10th Earl of Warwick. He was held there for nine days before the Earl of Lancaster arrived; Lancaster then judged, "While he lives, there will be no safe place in the realm of England." Accordingly, on 19 June, Gaveston was taken to Blacklow Hill (which belonged to the Earl of Lancaster), and killed by two Welshmen, who ran him through with a sword before beheading him as he lay dying on the grass.

He was survived by his wife and a baby daughter, Joan. The Earl of Pembroke, who had sworn to protect him, was mortified by the death, having attempted to raise an army to free him, and having even appealed to the for aid. (The University, not known for its military strength in any case, had not the slightest interest in assisting either Gaveston or de Valence.) Edward II, on hearing of the murder, at first reacted with utter rage; later, this would become cold fury, and a desire to destroy those who had destroyed Gaveston. Ten years later, Edward II avenged Gaveston's death when he had the Earl of Lancaster killed. Much later, Gaveston would be replaced in the King's affections by Hugh le Despenser.

Gaveston’s demise brings us full circle, back to the early 1980s in England. All Universities were in retreat, away from their students, between 1969 and 1979. By 1980, undergraduate life in America and England had shed supervision by older administrators. Not since the German schools of the nineteenth century had students had this much power over their own affairs. At Oxford, The Piers Gaveston Society blossomed in this environment. It is an exclusive dining club with membership limited to twelve (12) undergraduates. It is named in honour of Piers Gaveston, favourite and supposed lover of King Edward II of England. Its members have a reputation for indulging in bizarre entertainments and sexual excess. Words most often associated with this society are "decadence" and "debauchery." Prominent members of the PGS include:

 Hugh Grant, the successful-yet-tormented British actor;

 Darius Guppy, who was convicted of fraud in 1993, he was best man at the wedding of his friend Charles Spencer, the brother of Diana, Princess of Wales;

117  Count Gottfried von Bismarck, the descendent of Otto von Bismarck who died at age 44 of a drug over-dose in his London flat;

 Tom Parker Bowles, the stepson of Prince Charles.

The PGS was launced in a youth-driven a golden age, post-old Labor Party rule and pre-AIDS. When Andy Warhol told British youth that, in the future, they would all be famous for fifteen minutes, the cry from Oxford went up in unison, ‘Why only 15 minutes?’ They same cry could have been heard across the pond in America, where events such as the Phi Psi 500 at Cornell University had assumed a monumental form. The dining clubs at Oxford, whose parties would famously go on record via film in the early 1980s — the Piers Gaveston Society, the Assassins, the Vile Bodies, the George Club—were indeed to produce future celebrities by the score. Warhol himself pitched up at Oxford for a party given in his honour by the George Club in February 1981, and he was impressed. “Decadent, original, sexy, ” Warhol pronounced Oxford as even more fun than the lunch party Marquerite Littman had given for him in Chester Square earlier that day, where guests had included Bianca Jagger and Nicky Haslam, and pink drinks and fishcakes served by a butler called Quaalude, The Bright Young Things (BYTs) of Oxford were on the right track.

Cornell in the 1980s was no Oxford, but its student population did push the social norms farther and faster than the University administration predicted. Soon it became apparent that greater student freedom, sexual and social, would come through a reduction of the University’s ability to move forward with its global agenda. So by 1984, the thermidor began, slowly at first but escalating to fever pitch by the early 1990s, when Day Hall stopped just short of full Prohibition. But in that pull back, the University administration left matters in a tantalizing equipoise: Cornell neither dry nor wet, something in between. And so it remains at the beginning of the 21st century.

What of the PGS in the new century? That is probably best summed up by the demise of one of its alumni, Gottfried Alexander Leopold Graf von Bismarck-Schonhausen, born in 1962 and educated in Germany and Switzerland before attending Oxford University. As an undergraduate, he was known for his extravagant appearance – which at times involved dressing in fishnet stockings or traditional Bavarian lederhosen – and his lavish parties. At one, guests were greeted by a pair of severed pigs’ heads on the dinner table. He was a member of the Bullingdon Club, a dining society known for its raucous upper-class membership, and the Piers Gaveston Society, with its reputation for drunken excess and sexual shenanigans.

Intent on living up to Christ Church’s reputation for binge drinking, he took his place alongside the sozzled toffs at the notorious Bullingdon and Loders clubs. He entered energetically into the spirit of the Piers Gaveston Society, noted for its predilection for rubber wear and whips, which he embellished with

118 his androgynous apparel and lipstick. No one could ignore his lineage and he let no one forget it. He later boasted of his name’s influence: If I apply for a job and the list says Meyer, Muller, Schmidt and von Bismarck, I think I’d get the job.

At Oxford, he joined the Piers Gaveston Society, indulging in vaguely debauched behaviour, sometimes in drag. Not too much should be read into this. Former members of the club, reported that while adventurous dress codes were encouraged at parties, it was done more to portray members as extrovert thespians than for any more biographically illuminating reason. The Baron died of a drug overdose in his London apartment in 2006, never having dried out from the roll of the 1980s. His failure in life, given all that was placed at his disposal, is a testament to the challenge that faces all collegiate candidates when they arrive at their Alma Maters. Education is a boon for many, a bust for some.

119 Conclusion of the Halle intellectual line

So what is the lesson of the Halle line’s intellectual legacy within New York Alpha?

The roots of the Halle line courts the conservative line of Western religious thinking, the aspects of the English Reformation that sought High Church over Low Church. In the Halle line, brothers of the Roman rite and the Anglican rite’s high catholic tradition find common cause. In its base at Piers Gaveston, there also lies a telling story of campus social life, and how norms are not fixed in time or place.

But Halle tells us more about our place at Cornell, in New York State, and within a tradition of education reform established by Cornell’s second founder, Andrew Dickson White. The Halle line runs through the very influences White sought to focus on his students at Cornell: the success of the Prussian university model and the intensity of the German romantic movement which so powerfully influenced the American man of arts and letters, Washington Irving. This portion of the Halle line makes good our mission to remember Washington Irving and his literary friends in our work on the Hill, and to recall how they are connected with the University system of the German states.

The Halle intellectual line is part of New York Alpha’s local Chapter lore, first recorded by brother Cadwalader E. Linthicum (1885)(1889) and preserved by Walter Sheppard (’29)(’32) and Fred E. Hartzch (’28)(’31).

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