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The Metaphysical Society
(1869-1880) Intellectual
Life in Mid-Victorian England
Edited by Catherine
Marshall, Bernard Lightman and Richard England
Oxford:
University Press, 2019 Hardcover.
xii+282 p. ISBN 978-0198846499. £70
Reviewed
by Peter Mandler Gonville
and Caius College, Cambridge
The re-discovery by Richard England of the
lost minute book of the Metaphysical Society has led to a surge of publication
on the Society, culminating in a three-volume critical edition of the 95 papers
given at the Society’s meetings across the 1870s and now this collection of
scholarly essays. It is no longer the case that the Society is viewed, as it
may have been in A.W. Brown’s 1947 monographic treatment, as some kind of
executive committee of Victorian liberalism. Although these theologians,
scientists, philosophers and political theorists no doubt set themselves up as,
in Paul White’s words, ‘joint authorities of culture’, our understandings of
culture and liberalism are both now too capacious to be so easily hegemonized
by a small group of scribblers, however elevated. Nor can we assume any longer – as
Brown might have done – that the Society proved the crucial battlefield in the
war between science and religion. It’s partly that we know better how many such
battlefields there were, with non-elite as well as elite actors. But it’s partly
also that we know better now that such a battle is never won outright by any
party, still less at one time. As the essays in this volume amply demonstrate,
though the Society was created for the discussion – and presumably resolution –
of the major epistemological questions raised by conflicts between science and
religion, it never met its founders’ highest expectations; in any case, no such
resolution was possible or even desired. Not many of the participants had
appetite for a fight. Even T.H. Huxley, not shy of fights, went out of his way
to praise Christ’s moral perfection in his January 1876 paper, as Gowan Dawson
points out. Fitzjames Stephen proved rather exceptional in tilting head-on at
the Catholics present, as Bruce Kinzer shows. But the mainstream position in
the Society, or at least the balancing point between Huxley and Stephen on the
one hand and the Catholics on the other, was a decidedly theistic one adopted
by Unitarians like W.B. Carpenter. And here we can see the emergence of what
Stephen Jay Gould called the consensus of ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ – the
Unitarians’ conviction that science and religion could not conflict –
led to a wider acceptance that practically speaking they just didn’t. This may
have required more ceding of ground by the pious than by the impious, but it
proved mutually convenient. But it also rendered the Metaphysical Society’s
purpose moot. Why argue?, was many participants’ ultimate conclusion. While this conclusion may have
truncated the Society’s life, it does not vitiate its significance. The essays
in this volume do an excellent job of inserting the Society into a wealth of
relevant contexts in late Victorian intellectual and cultural life. Debates
within Catholicism, ethics, and evolutionary science are all covered. The
histories of journalism and the book are highlighted, naturally because many of
the Society’s impresarios were cultural mediators and so many of its papers
ended up in published form in influential journals edited by members, almost a
third of them in the Contemporary Review,
carefully tracked by Catherine Marshall. But the real significance of the
Society, it seems to me, lies somewhat paradoxically in the way it points to
the eclipse of journals like the Contemporary,
which had assumed that its readers
and writers were the ‘joint authorities of culture’, and indeed of all human
thought. For the work the Society did in ushering in the ‘non-overlapping
magisteria’ was one factor in persuading some of its key contributors that they
would make more progress speaking to narrower groups of specialists than trying
to engineer an impossible consensus among too diverse a body of thinkers. In particular, the short life of the
Society gave a major impetus to more specialist publication in – and thus the
professionalization of – philosophy. Philosophers at the Society expressed
impatience at having to waste time on the relatively trivial or unrevealing
question of the reliability of the Apostles’ testimony on miracles or the
crucifixion. There were surely better and more generalizable ways of discussing
belief and evidence and knowability. Kant seemed a better guide to
understanding the relation of intuition and experience than Aquinas. As Anne
DeWitt shows in her chapter, many participants again concluded that rather than
seeking ‘a common (high) ground. . .a shared intellectual calling and moral
intuition’ (Paul White’s words again, quoted at 160), it was easier and more
productive to fall back on multiple distinct communities of expertise. For
these purposes philosophers like Shadworth Hodgson and W.K. Clifford needed to
separate themselves from both the scientists and the theologians. It began to
make more sense to them to publish in the Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society than in the Contemporary
or the Fortnightly. And as W.J.
Mander shows in his chapter, their successors amongst the British Idealists
were more ‘successful’ as philosophers in conceptualizing the relation between
science and religion, both intellectually and also ironically in their wider
cultural influence, precisely because they were mostly full-time ‘university
men’ and not polished amateurs. Perhaps the Metaphysicals revealed more about
themselves in their death than in their life – but that may be too metaphysical
a note to end a review of a meticulous and thoughtful volume of essays. ☞ Illustrated version on The Victorian Web : http://victorianweb.org/religion/reviews/mandler.html .
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