The Collected Works of Samuel Alexander

Introduction

Samuel Alexander is one of the most revered figures in the history of British philosophy. Everyone who has written about him from personal knowledge has presented us with a man of many virtues and almost no faults, and the faults that have been recorded are of the harmless variety, such as an indifference to dress and personal appearance. His favourite form of locomotion was a bicycle, and he was known to ride great distances - from Manchester to Liverpool, say - to keep appointments. Once, so the story goes, he arrived, after a long bicycle trip during which he was caught in a storm, wet and muddy at the home of friends who had invited him to dinner. When the maid answered his knock, he asked if he might have a bath. Since he looked every inch a tramp, the maid curtly turned him down and shut him out. Only after he knocked again and explained who he was, was he admitted. His students and his colleagues in Manchester University, where he spent most of his career, were prepared to overlook such matters as his dress, because he was such an important asset to the university. A superb teacher and an untiring colleague, Alexander contributed greatly to the transformation of Owens College into the University of Manchester. The University honoured him by commissioning Jacob Epstein to sculpt a bust of him, which is still prominently displayed there. After Epstein had completed the bust, Alexander wrote an article, 'The Creative Process in the Artist's Mind',¹ describing what it was like to sit for him. In 1930 Alexander was honoured by King George V with induction into the Order of Merit, a very select society limited to twenty-four living persons. Other philosophers who have shared this honour are Isaiah Berlin, G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead.

Samuel Alexander was born in Sydney, Australia, on 6 January 1859. His father having died before he was born, he, along with two brothers and a sister, was raised by his mother with the considerable help of her family. Although neither she nor her family were rich, she commanded sufficient resources to engage governesses and tutors for her children. When one of these tutors decided to establish a school for boys, Samuel was sent to it, but the man proved to be 'quite mad' - touting Samuel in a poster advertising his school as a boy 'who wrote like the Muses and did other wonderful things'² - causing Samuel's mother to withdraw him from the school. In 1871 he entered Wesley College, which proved to be an excellent choice for a boy with his talents. Its headmaster, Martin H. Irving, had been educated at Balliol College, where Benjamin Jowett had been his tutor; he had emigrated to Australia to take up a position as Professor of Classical Comparisons and Philosophical Logic in the University of Melbourne, a chair he resigned after a few years to accept the position at Wesley. Wesley College, Alexander later wrote, 'was a very good one, giving us a broad education in Classics, Mathematics, English (which was made a point of), French, and some science'. Irving, who was 'rather stern but very kind', set its tone of 'efficiency and many-sidedness'.³

Irving was the son of Edward Irving (1792-1834), a Scottish clergyman, who was tried and convicted of heresy in 1830 for preaching that Christ shared a sinful nature with his fellow men. After his death his teachings were taken up by Henry Drummond (1851-97) and his circle, and in 1835 this group founded the Catholic Apostolic Church, whose adherents were known as 'Irvingites'. A chief tenet of this sect was their belief that the Second Coming was close at hand, and that the church should revert to its ancient offices of apostles, prophets and evangelists to prepare itself for this momentous event. Martin Irving himself was a high official in this sect, but he never tried to convert his students. When he retired he returned to England to live in an Irvingite settlement, and visited his old pupil in Manchester.

From Wesley College Alexander went to the University of Melbourne where his performance was outstanding, but after just two years and no degree, his mother was persuaded to send him to England, where it was hoped - indeed, expected - that he would win a scholarship to either Oxford or Cambridge. He chose to sit the scholarship examination for Balliol College, Oxford, and was successful, beating out George Curzon - later Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary - who had trained at Eton. Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol and Regius Professor of Greek, was then in his prime, and Alexander took his essays to him. Alexander later recalled that Jowett found his style 'too flowery. The Chinese like a flowery style. We don't.'⁴ Alexander must have taken this criticism to heart, since his mature style can hardly be described as flowery.

Little is known for certain about the rest of Alexander's education at Balliol. We know that he studied with A.C. Bradley, a brother of F.H. Bradley, whose speciality was English literature. Both T.H. Green and R.L. Nettleship were tutors in philosophy at Balliol during the years Alexander was a pupil, but no evidence has come down to us that he wrote papers for either of them. Of course he may have done so, but our information about his Oxford education is so sketchy that no stronger statement is possible.

After gaining his Bachelor of Arts degree, with Firsts in both Classical Honour Moderations and Greats and Mathematical Moderations, he decided to try for a fellowship at Oxford, and, for reasons unknown, he chose Lincoln College, rather than Balliol, for his attempt. In 1882 he was elected a fellow, a position he was to hold for the next eleven years. His election made history, for he was the first Jew to obtain a fellowship at any Oxford college. The Test Act of 1870 did away with all religious restrictions in higher education and thus made it possible for dissenters, Roman Catholics and Jews to matriculate and to be awarded degrees, as well as to compete for fellowships. The reform legislation did not extend to women, a flaw that Alexander campaigned to rectify during his years at Manchester.

The year following his election as a fellow Alexander spent in Germany where he attended university lectures but did not work towards a degree. Upon his return he took up an appointment as a philosophy don in both Lincoln and Oriel Colleges, where he taught until 1888. During these years he worked on the problems of ethics, writing a dissertation that was awarded the Green Prize in Moral Philosophy in 1887. T.H. Green had died in 1882 at the early age of forty-six and the prize had been established to honour his memory. During the next couple of years, Alexander turned his dissertation into a book, Moral Order and Progress: An Analysis of Ethical Conceptions (1889), which was very well received by the critics and was reprinted twice during the next several years. When continued demand led his publisher to propose a fourth impression in 1912, Alexander vetoed the proposal, giving as his reason that the argument of the book had been superseded by recent developments in ethical theory.

As its title suggests, Alexander developed an ethical theory that was firmly based on the theory of evolution, especially on the doctrine of natural selection. T.H. Green's thoughts on ethics, first made public in his lectures and then in his book, Prolegomena to Ethics (1883), edited by A.C. Bradley the year after Green's death, served as Alexander's starting point. But he was no slavish follower of Green and firmly but respectfully criticized his views, rejecting those he found wanting. While working on it, Alexander worried that his dissent from the master of fresh and lamented memory would lead his expected audience to dismiss his book, so he was relieved when F.H. Bradley, who read proofs for him, voiced no objection to his treatment of Green's views. Where Alexander departed from Green was in his application of the idea of natural selection to the sphere of human conduct. Both Herbert Spencer and Leslie Stephen had attempted something similar, but Alexander, who had the benefit of their works to draw on, produced a more fully developed system than either of his predecessors had done. His ethical theory was very much in tune with the spirit of the times, and consequently had a wide readership.

Before his book came out, Alexander had taken a leave from Oxford to live in London. Most of his time there was devoted to private study, but he did teach a course in elementary psychology at Toynbee Hall and he presided over its philosophical society. One of the principal aims of Toynbee Hall, the Universities' settlement in East London founded in 1884, was to provide educational opportunities for London's poor. In its early years, many recent graduates of Cambridge and Oxford put in a few years teaching under the auspices of Toynbee Hall before taking on permanent employment. At that time it was considered fashionable to teach there. Not surprisingly, Alexander found his pupils too ill-prepared to absorb what he had to teach them. They had a long way to go before they would reach the level of his Oxford undergraduates.

His work on ethical theory had led him to study both biology and psychology, and he continued to read in these subjects in London. C. Lloyd Morgan (1852-1936), who was then just beginning to develop his theory of emergent evolution, gave Alexander's book a very favourable review, which led to a life-long friendship between the two men. The doctrine of emergence plays a central role in Alexander's later metaphysical work. Alexander also became fascinated with recent developments in experimental psychology - at that time not taught at all in England - and in 1890-91 he went to Germany to work in the psychological laboratory of Hugo Münsterberg at Freiberg. When he returned to Oxford in 1891 he offered a course of lectures in psychology in each of the next two years, and while he was professor at Manchester, he recruited T.H. Pear (1886-1972) to inaugurate a course of study in experimental psychology.

Upon his return, Alexander continued to feel dissatisfied with his Oxford post, so he decided to apply for vacant professorships. Despite strong letters from many prominent intellectual figures, including Bernard Bosanquet, A.C. Bradley, F.H. Bradley, Benjamin Jowett, Gilbert Murray, Leslie Stephen and J. Cook Wilson, he was unsuccessful in his first three applications. Given the times, religious prejudice may have been a factor, but there is no way of knowing whether it was or not. On his fourth attempt, in 1893, he was elected Professor of Philosophy in Owens College, later to be transformed into the University of Manchester, and he taught there until his retirement in 1924. The budget at Manchester allowed him an assistant and in the course of his tenure he gave a number of men, who later gained prominence, a start in the profession. Alexander was an outstanding teacher, and he devoted much of his energy to that task. In his reading he continued to prepare himself for writing what would be his magnum opus, Space, Time, and Deity, which was not published until 1920.

Space, Time, and Deity is an extraordinary work of synthesis. There are elements in it of neo-Hegelianism, the new realism, Bergsonianism, Kantianism, relativity theory, emergent evolution and experimental psychology. Little wonder then that its gestation took so many years. Indeed, the book might never have been written at all if the University of Glasgow had not invited Alexander to deliver two sets of Gifford Lectures while the First World War was raging. Once he had committed himself, the necessity to deliver forced him to formulate the thoughts suggested by his wide reading into a system. Over the years he had published a number of articles which gave his readers hints of the direction of his thinking, but they were only hints and the full scope of his system did not become public until after he had delivered his lectures.

Alexander's book was one of the last attempts by a British philosopher to advance a fully developed speculative world-view. Only two of his contemporaries, John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (1866-1925) and Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), were later to publish competing systems. McTaggart's The Nature of Existence (1921, 1927) took its inspiration from Hegel, but followed its own path, especially in its treatment of time. Whitehead's Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929) arose out of a background very similar to that of Alexander's book. Indeed, when Whitehead's book was announced Alexander, according to Dorothy Emmet, 'thought that his work would be superseded by Whitehead's. He remarked that he could say, as Dr. Johnson said of himself with regard to Burke, that he had "rung the bell" for him.'⁵ When Alexander read Whitehead's work, he realized that they had very different approaches to the problems of metaphysics. Whitehead, he thought, had taken a Leibnizian path, whereas he had followed Spinoza. Their different approaches, plus Whitehead's bewildering neologisms and his unusual uses of ordinary terms, make comparison of the two systems nearly impossible. Thus Alexander's book stands quite alone in the history of twentieth-century philosophy.

Alexander was not a philosopher who sought disciples, nor would he have been happy had acolytes come and asked to sit at his feet. Almost certainly, he would have said something designed to shock them out of their intellectual servitude. In a letter to Susan Stebbing in 1930 Alexander put the matter this way: 'The fact is I believe I am rather provocative than anything else; and I've made up my mind that my business is to make people think, even if their reflections condemn me. I'm very deficient in soundness and thoroughness. And you know what W. James said, that any fool can be original.'⁶ Alexander's provocative speech was never uncivil, and few, if any, ever felt offended by anything he said. In his speech at the unveiling of the Epstein bust he remarked: 'though I shall be glad if it is said of me "He was known for a certain gaiety of speech," I prefer to have it said of me, "He contrived for some years to persuade people that he could think." For, my Lord, in spite of appearances to the contrary, I am really and truly and fundamentally a very serious man; it is only that I find it difficult to be dull.'⁷ Very, very few people can make such a claim about themselves. In the same speech, he attempted to account for the great affection shown him during his lifetime: 'I cannot tell how I have won this affection; unless it be that I possess a fair stock of affection myself, which extends to all children and to dogs and cats and other animals. Apart from that, after careful self- examination, I can only conclude that there must be something in me which in the 18th century they used to call a je ne sais quoi.'⁸ Those of us who never had the pleasure of meeting Alexander cannot comprehend this mysterious quality to which he refers, but we can read the works he wrote and in that way share in the fruits of an intellect bold enough to set down a systematic account of everything there is or ever will be.

John G. Slater
University of Toronto, 2000

NOTES

1 The British Journal of Psychology, vol. 17 (1926-7), pp. 305-21.
2 Quoted in 'Memoir' by John Laird in Philosophical and Literary Pieces by Samuel Alexander (London: Macmillan, 1939), p. 2.
3 Laird, op. cit., p. 2.
4 Laird, op. cit., p. 6.
5 'Foreword to the 1966 Reprint Edition' by Dorothy Emmet in volume 1 of Space, Time, and Deity (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), p. xvii.
6 Laird, op. cit., p. 73n.
7 Laird, op. cit., p. 73.
8 Laird, op. cit., p. 72.

© John Slater, 2000.