Henry Longueville Mansel, a pupil of Hamilton’s, and joint editor of his lectures along with John Veitch, afterwards Professor of Logic in Glasgow University, was the ablest exponent of the Hamiltonian philosophy in England. Mansel’s power of acute and lucid reasoning was shown in his Prolegomena Logica (1851), and afterwards in his Philosophy of the Conditioned (1866). Both were developments of Hamilton’s principles, and they have suffered from the general discredit of the Hamiltonian school. Mansel is better known now, by name at least, on account of his Limits of Religious Thought, (constituting the Bampton lectures for 1858), which was the occasion of a controversy between him and Maurice.
Harriet Martineau
(1802-1876).
The other philosophical writers of the period were, with one exception, of minor importance. Harriet Martineau was a woman of varied activity. She wrote political economy, history and fiction; and her story, Deerbrook (1839), is among the best and freshest of her works. She is however most memorable, not as an original thinker, but as a translator and expounder. She translated and condensed the philosophy of Comte, and did as much as anyone to make it known in England. She had the great merits of unshrinking courage, perfect sincerity and undoubting loyalty to truth.
George Henry Lewes
(1817-1878).
Another miscellaneous writer of the Comtist school was George Henry Lewes, who has been elsewhere mentioned in connexion with George Eliot. He was an active-minded, energetic man, whose life touches literature at many points. He too wrote novels, but they did not succeed. He was a critic of no mean power. He took great interest in and possessed considerable knowledge of science, and in 1859-1860 published a popular scientific work, The Physiology of Common Life. But his best known book is the Life of Goethe (1855). It is an able biography and pleasant to read, though perhaps, considering the calibre of the subject, rather lacking in weight. It is however no small compliment to Lewes’s work that it was for many years accepted, both in Germany and in England, as the standard biography of Goethe. Lewes’s principal contributions to philosophy were A Biographical History of Philosophy (1845-1846), Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences (1853), and Problems of Life and Mind (1873-1879). In all of them Lewes shows himself an unswerving Positivist. He accepts and reiterates his master’s doctrine that the day of metaphysics is past, so that his philosophy is, in a sense, the negation of philosophy.
Sir George Cornewall Lewis
(1806-1863).
In the sphere of political science, the man next in power to Mill was Sir George Cornewall Lewis. As Chancellor of the Exchequer in the first administration of Lord Palmerston, Lewis had the opportunity of making a practical acquaintance with his subject; but his theories were formed earlier. Extensive knowledge, combined with clearness of intellect and independence of judgment, gives value to his work. His Inquiry into the Credibility of Early Roman History (1855) was remarkable for its attack upon the theories of Niebuhr, which were in those days accepted with an almost superstitious reverence. But previous to this Lewis had written his most important book, The Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion (1849), a well reasoned and well written argument, worthy of attention in these days when there seems to be a disposition to forget the limits beyond which the influence is illegitimate. Lewis teaches the wisdom and even the necessity of submitting to ‘authority’ where we cannot investigate for ourselves, and where all who are competent to form an opinion are agreed; but he is careful not to set up any absolute and indefeasible authority which might dictate to reason and against reason.
Towards the close of the period there are noticeable traces of a new school superseding both Utilitarianism and Positivism. This school, nourished upon German idealism, had its centre at Oxford, and the men who have done the principal work in it were pupils of Jowett. They belong however to the later period and come within our present scope only as an indication of tendency.
Herbert Spencer
(1820-1903).
The root of thought in all these men is the idea of development, the great formative idea of the present century. This idea however had an English as well as a German growth. In England it is best known through Darwin. But while Darwin shows its scientific side, the most celebrated of recent English philosophers, Mr. Herbert Spencer (1820), makes it the basis of a philosophy. The Synthetic Philosophy, just completed, is distinguished for the vastness of its design, the accomplishment of which gives Mr. Spencer a place among the few encyclopædic thinkers of the world. His philosophy is interesting also because it concentrates and reflects the spirit of the time. No other thinker has so strenuously laboured to gather together all the accumulations of modern knowledge and to unite them under general conceptions. The alliance between the Spencerian philosophy and physical science is unusually close; and Mr. Spencer in his illustrations shows an all-embracing range of knowledge, which becomes minute in those branches of science bearing directly upon the phenomena of life. The future only can determine the exact value of this knowledge, for there are grave differences of opinion between Mr. Spencer and some of the leading biologists, like Weismann; but it may at least be said of him that he is the first philosopher since Bacon (‘who wrote on science like a Lord Chancellor’), or at latest Leibnitz, who has met men of science on something like equal terms within the domain of science. Mr. Spencer’s unique interest is that he has attempted an exhaustive survey of all the facts relating to the development of life and of society. He does not go beyond that, to the origin of all things; for it is one of his cardinal principles that behind the Knowable there is dimly visible a something not only unknown but unknowable. We are compelled to regard every phenomenon as the manifestation of an infinite and incomprehensible Power. In this the philosopher finds the reconciliation of religion with science; a reconciliation for which the religious have seldom shown much gratitude, because they are forbidden to say anything specific about the Power whose existence they may, and indeed must, assume. On this point there is a quarrel between Mr. Spencer and the metaphysicians, who dispute the right of any man to assert the existence of an Unknowable. If we can assert its existence surely we know it at least in part; and if so may we not by investigation come to know it better?