Orthodox Oxford was at that time under the sway of the great philosophic Trinity of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel, which was supposed somehow to be concordant with or at least allied to the theological Trinity, and therefore fit food for the souls of innocent young men. The third person of the philosophic Trinity was kept much in the dark, because the tutors generally were not fond of reading German. They knew still less of science and apparently did not suspect that Darwin and his evolution might prove to have some bearing upon philosophy.
Schiller took his First Classes at Oxford, although he was given to asking awkward questions and was known to be reading "out of bounds." One of his examiners complained that he used such queer terms in his papers, "solipsism" and "epistemology" for instance.
The years 1893-1897 Schiller spent as instructor at Cornell University, and at the end of that period an amusing incident occurred, though what it was and how it came about I don't know; possibly because I never thought it best to inquire of any of the few who were in the room at the time. The bare fact is interesting enough, that a young man who had written one of the most brilliant volumes of the times on metaphysics, "Riddles of the Sphinx", and who carried in his pocket a call to teach philosophy at a leading college of Oxford, was flunked in Cornell on his oral examination for Ph.D. in philosophy! Anybody who is curious can pick up half a dozen inconsistent versions of this famous episode on almost any campus. One is, that being fortified by the crinkle of the above mentioned letter over his heart and knowing that an American degree would have no value in England, Schiller did not take the examination seriously and neglected the necessary cramming. Another version of the story is that he turned tables upon his examiners by bringing into action for the first time the pragmatic arguments so much to their discomfiture and bewilderment that he was penalized for these foul blows. But probably the details, if one knew them, would prove to be quite commonplace compared with either of these versions or the more picturesque legends that are in circulation, so it is better to remain in ignorance and file it in the envelope with such cases as John Henry Newman, who got only a Third Class; F. H. Bradley, who got a Second; Gustave Doré, who failed in drawing; Darwin who was called a stupid student, Grant who was graduated in the lower half of his class, Mendel who was never allowed to graduate at Vienna, and the like, good material all for some one who wants to investigate the psychology of students—and examiners.
The chief benefit that Schiller got out of his American sojourn was an acquaintance with William James. It was a case of love at first sight and of lifelong devotion. Schiller dedicated his "Humanism" "To my dear friend, the humanest of philosophers, William James, without whose example and unfailing encouragement this book would never have been written."
In 1897 Schiller was called back to England to become tutor in Corpus Christi College. The president of that college, the late Thomas Fowler, belonged rather to the pre-Hegelian Oxford generation of the Mill-British-empiricism school of thought: He liked things to be made intelligible, and he was so much struck by the lucidity of Schiller's "Riddles of the Sphinx" that he called him from Cornell to Oxford.
Here then he has for twenty years lived the quiet, sheltered, contemplative life of the Oxford don, varied only by such daring adventures as his hunt for the hidden fallacies of formal logic, his single combats with Mr. Bradley, and his ascent of the bleak heights of speculative philosophy, where the Absolute is supposed to dwell in solitude. Our American universities are putting up some very fair imitations of Oxford architecture now. Some have transplanted ivy and it is growing. Some have transplanted tutors and they are growing. But one Oxford custom has not yet been introduced into our universities, the custom of giving the professors time to think. In Oxford all the men have time to think and some of them do. In America if a man shows a tendency to become absorbed in thought he is made a dean or put on the committee of accredited high schools, which cures him.
In the British "Who's Who" Mr. Schiller's recreations are ordinarily put down as "mountaineering, golf, etc." But in one edition of that handy volume of contemporary autobiography it is stated that his chief recreation is "editing Mind!" Thus was revealed the secret of the mysterious appearance at Christmas, 1901, of a periodical which in looks resembled one of the regular numbers of that staid blue-covered review of philosophy, Mind, but with most startling contents. The frontispiece is a "Portrait of Its Immanence, the Absolute." This is followed by an article on "The Place of Humour in the Absolute, by F. H. Badley"; "The Critique of Pure Rot, by I. Cant"; "A Commentary on the Snark"; "More Riddles from Worse Sphinxes", and the like. The advertisements were likewise unusual—"A Dictionary of Oxford Mythology, in six volumes, containing a complete account of the stories told in the Common Rooms and the men to whom they have from time to time been attached"; "A fine consignment of assorted Weltanschauungen just received from Germany"; phonograms of all the lectures, jokes extra, with colored cinematographs of the most famous professors in action, for armchair study, etc. The history of philosophy in fifty-one limericks, covering all systems from Thales to Nietzsche, would be useful on examination time by students of "Philosophy Four."
We hedonists, said Aristippus,
Discomforts detest when they grip us,
So wealth we adore,
The moment live for
And take what the rich 'Arries tip us.
The infinite self-absorbed Brahma
Was dreaming the World-Panorama:
He groaned and he snored,
Till at length he grew bored,
And woke up, and broke up the Drama.
"To multiply beings", said Occam,
"Is needless, 'tis better to dock 'em."
So he seized on his razor,
This pestilent phraser,
And ran out to bloodily block 'em.
A pessimist, great Schopenhauer,
Found living exceedingly sour,
At Hegel he cursed,
His grievances nursed,
And poured forth his wrath by the hour.
As will be seen from the above, Mind! reads much like the Junior Annual of an American college, but at Oxford the students are deficient in journalistic enterprise, so the duty of keeping things cheerful devolves upon their betters. According to its cover Mind! was "edited by a Troglodyte" but as there was only one philosopher in England who would have the cheek to do it and who could parody the style and expose the weak points of the regular contributors to Mind, the troglodyte was soon tracked to his cave. The author of a similar jeu d'esprit, "The Joysome History of Education", which surreptitiously circulates about Columbia University, has so far as I know never been disclosed to the public.
But Schiller has not been able to confine his humor to that uniquity, Mind! He allows it to creep into his contributions to Mind-without-the-exclamation-point and other serious journals. He is a keen debater and does not follow the ordinary rules of fencing, but frequently disconcerts his antagonists by parrying their thrusts with a pun or a personality. He is, so far as I know, the first philosopher to find room for jokes in his formal philosophy, as the following passage shows: