Memorials of Thomas Davidson, The Wandering Scholar

[admin]

Memorials of Thomas Davidson, The Wandering Scholar
Collected and Edited by William Knight
Boston and London, Ginn and Company, Publishers, 1907
© 1907 by William Knight

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

-- The History of the Fabian Society, by Edward R. Pease
-- Pantisocracy, by Wikipedia
-- Critias, by Plato
-- The Heroic Enthusiasts: An Ethical Poem by Giordano Bruno
-- Monism, by Wikipedia
-- The Story of Sigurd the Volsung, by William Morris, et al.
-- Triumph of the Will, directed by Leni Riefenstahl
-- On the Constitution of the Church and State, According to the Idea of Each; With Aids Toward a Right -- Judgment on the Late Catholic Bill, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
-- The Prophets of Israel and Their Place in History to the Close of the Eighth Century, B.C., by W. Robertson Smith, LL.D.

Table of Contents:

• Preface
• 1. Introductory
• 2. The Man: a Sketch and an Estimate
• 3. Formation of the Fellowship of the New Life
• 4. The Occasion, Principles, Rules, Creed, and Organization of the New Fellowship as drawn up by Thomas Davidson
• 5. Development of the Society
• 6. Estimates of Davidson by Percival Chubb and Felix Adler
• 7. Letters to Havelock Ellis
• 8. Reminiscences by Havelock Ellis
• 9. The New York Branch of the New Fellowship
• 10. The Summer Schools of the Culture Sciences at Farmington and Glenmore
• 11. Recollections of Glenmore by Mary Foster
• 12. Charlotte Daley's Retrospects of Davidson's Teaching
• 13. Lectures to the Breadwinners
• 14. Letters from Davidson in Reference to his Work on Medievalism
• 15. Professor William James's Reminiscences and Estimate
• 16. Recollections by Wyndham R. Dunstan
• 17. The Moral Aspects of the Economic Question
• 18. Letters to Morris R. Cohen
• 19. Rousseau, and Education according to Nature
• 20. Intellectual Piety
• 21. Faith as a Faculty of the Human Mind
• APPENDIX

[H]e was, as wise men are, both gnostic and agnostic; gnostic as to the root ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good; agnostic as to the terra incognita [Google translate: unknown land] which lies behind them, and the ultimate principle of things. In this he was essentially Hebraic and profoundly Christian. I think that he believed the real and the ideal to be one, and that they are known together in perpetual synthesis, — " the real apprehended through its ideality, and the ideal grasped in its reality," as I once put it to him.

***

I have said that he had no elaborated system to offer and to teach; but he had many resting-places in his forward journey. One of them, and perhaps the most important, was the philosophy of Rosmini, in which pantheistic monism is met by an individualism proclaiming the inherent and intrinsic value of every unit in the race. According to this teaching each one of us is an impenetrable unit, cut off from every other by the boundaries which limit, form, and determine his individuality. But each of the units resembles every other one: all have points of contact, and can disclose their individualities to others. Each is the heir of all the ages, not only by unconscious inheritance, but because the gains of the past, all ancestral possessions, can be entered into a fresh, reappropriated by culture, and lived over again in new experience; while that experience, after receiving its own enrichment from the past, is destined to give place to a larger and fuller one. Every individual yearns for new development and fresh environments, but what it is possible for each to realize is met by the discernment of what it is good for others to experience. The worth of particular states, however, cannot be known, a priori, in the abstract. It can only be known through the experiences themselves. Thus Davidson's philosophy was both individualistic and pluralistic. When experience is analyzed we find a unity within the plurality; and in that unity is found, and out of it may be deduced, a theism of which the evidence is clear and the outcome stable.

The psychological, metaphysical, and ethical teaching of Thomas Davidson is well known to those who heard him teach. It is with its results that I have chiefly to do in this volume; especially with the outcome of his ethical teaching. Very early in life he saw that "man's chief end" (as his Scottish catechism put it) was the attainment of knowledge, insight, and freedom, — the realization of what is true, and beautiful, and good; but he also saw that this had to be conjoined with the realization of an equally supreme good or "chief end" by others, that is to say, by the community. It was this double or twin conviction, more than anything else, that dominated his whole life. The chief good for each, and the summum bonum for all, were not theoretically antagonistic; and they did not practically conflict. But, how were they to be realized and harmonized? It was his prolonged pondering and revolving of this problem that led him to his "Fellowship of the New Life." The very name "fellowship," rather than "society" or "organization," meant a great deal. It carried its small band of devotees back to the Pythagorean, the Socratic or Platonic, and the Epicurean brotherhoods. Even the manual labor called for from each member was significant. But Davidson soon saw that he could not realize his ideal in England. It was Utopian to his British contemporaries. Hence he sought for it in the New World, "the unexhausted West."

As, however, his aim has been a good deal misunderstood, it is desirable again to state that the "New Fellowship," the realization of which he sought for, was based not upon uniformity of opinion or belief, not on mere camaraderie, or sympathy in pursuing ends which are not ideals; but on the realization of the highest possible life, the broadest and most varied culture, altruistic in every sense from first to last. To Thomas Davidson culture was not a selfish pursuit that could be followed out in solitude. It was only attainable in a community established and knit together by disinterested social bonds, the varied knowledge sought being obtained with a view to the elevation and betterment of society around. His aim was to present to the world a new example of "plain living and high thinking" by the courageous pursuit and advocacy of truth when freed from the trammels of convention, and by the realization of the beautiful in Art and of the good in Life. If a parallel to this may be found in earlier efforts, it is to be sought, not in the phalanstery [Merriam Webster: a Fourierist cooperative community; French phalanstere dwelling of a Fourierist community, from Latin phalang, phalanx + French stere (as in monastere monastery) schemes of the eighteenth-century economists, but in the pantisocracy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his friends, and their projected settlement on the banks of the Susquehanna. The "Fellowship of the New Life," however, was wider in its original programme, much fuller and richer in its ideals, although not more realizable in the world of the actual.

***

It was his intellectual and social ambition to find a set of men and women who could be bound together in the freemasonry of a common thirst for that knowledge which leads to useful work and fruitful life....As an intellectual missionary, his aim was to get at the truth of things, with a view to the regeneration of society. He wished the elimination of error to lead to, and insure, the eradication of evil from human life. His unique advocacy of the philosophy of Religion, his defence of dualism against the monistic system of Spinoza, his glorification of individualism — dualistic yet socialistic — were notable amongst other efforts of his countrymen....he has left the memory of a mediaevalist panoplied in the guise of a nineteenth-century crusader.

***

Except in the domestic circle there is to be no distinction between the sexes.... All authority in the society, except that which is constituted by the society itself, is null and void.

***

"He was a remarkable man, intellectually and emotionally; intense in his convictions and in his likes and dislikes, large-hearted and recklessly generous of time and strength to those who sought his help. He was especially attracted by promising young men, for whom he had a romantic feeling that was in the best sense Hellenic. There was scarcely a period of his life when he did not lavish upon some hopeful and needy youth the best of his intellectual powers and stores, often money from his none too copious supply, always an ebullient childlike affection and loyalty, an unselfish and delicate thoughtfulness.

Intellectually Mr. Davidson always bore the marks of his Scottish origin. He was modern in his equipment and in his outlook; but with this modernness was mingled a touch of the scholasticism and the sectarian fire, the parti pris, of a John Knox. He was almost fiercely affirmative of his own convictions; they were the bread of life to him. He boasted that he was sectarian; he always believed that his philosophy was the supreme way to salvation; and he was at all times an ardent, fearless, outspoken missionary in its behalf. What that philosophy was it would be difficult to formulate, for it underwent many changes. He remained a devout Aristotelian, and an arch-enemy of the Spenceriacs (as he called them) and Hegelians. He owed much to the mediaeval men, — Aquinas and Bonaventura and Dante; and among his more modern devotions were those to Giordano Bruno, Leibnitz, Goethe, and Tennyson....

But nothing was more admirably characteristic of the man than the labors which during the last two years of his life he carried on at the Educational Alliance on the lower East Side of New York. Here he had gathered about him, in peculiarly close bonds, a body of young Russian Hebrews, whom he endeavored to help to get culture in the broadest, manliest sense of the term. More important, we are led to believe, than any actual results in scholarship achieved was the powerful, transforming, personal influence exerted over these young boys and girls by a man who could show in such relationships a magnetic charm, a sympathy and tenderness of interest, a whole-souled devotion which will undoubtedly have left a deep mark upon many lives. The labor was a labor of love. The man's whole soul was in it.

***

[T]he want of a spiritual light, the childish prejudice against 'metaphysics,' the absence of whole-heartedness, the fear of ridicule. Kant and Comte have done their work, taken the sun out of life, and left men groping in darkness. A recent German book opens with the sentence, 'Kant must be forgotten,' and this I cordially echo. The present crude notions about metaphysics must be put away, and the fact clearly brought to light that without metaphysics even physics are meaningless, that that which appears also is, that beneath all seeming is that which seems. To me it is puerile to question this; but reactionary philosophies have brought many men to a different conclusion with what I cannot but consider a miserable result. You miss a positive basis in our little programme. The fact is there never can be any positive basis for anything but a metaphysical one, for the simple reason that all abiding reality is metaphysical; that is to say, lies behind the physical or sensuously phenomenal.

***

The good things ... To me they are the enjoyment of the eternal, and continual sacrifice of the temporal self to the eternal self. Morality means that, and nothing but that. But we must be careful not to fall into Buddhism and suppose that we are to sacrifice an eternal self to a monistic self in which all distinction is lost, and in which sacrifice of self would cease to be possible. Hinton continually falls into this grave error. The eternal is not the formless, and the unindividuated. It is the individuated, and eternally formed. You and I are eternal forms, whose inexhaustible taste with reference to each other is to penetrate each other through inexhaustible love and knowledge. 'God is love.' God is the loving, knowing interpretation of eternal forms. He is joy, life, light, 'letizia che trascende ogni dolzore.' We must never forget that. He is the ideality of which we are the reality. But if the reality should cease, so likewise would the ideality. He is the object to which we are subjects, infinite in multitude. As I have said often, He is the 'law of being,' and in that law we live and move and have our being.... When a man has realized his eternity, flesh and blood are only obstacles to him.

***

That this world is the only actual and eternal one is so plainly not true that I cannot imagine any serious man maintaining that it is. Either he is talking paradox intentionally, or else he does not know the meaning of the word he is using. Mr. Hinton plainly was in the latter predicament. . . . The truth is 'this world,' — the world of phenomena and change — is not actual at all, much less is it eternal. . . . We must distinguish the actual from the real, the eternal from the continuous. ... To say that 'everything of real spiritual value may be attained in this world' is to use words without meaning. The only thing of spiritual value is eternal self-possession, and to say that this can be attained in time is as untrue as anything can be. What is the use of an attainment that is lost the instant it is attained? For whom, or for what, is it attained? Are we mere rockets whose aim is to rise to a certain brilliant height, only to fall back instantly, like a stick into the dark? Those who say so are utterly and totally blind to the true life of the soul.

***

That the moral law is 'Act with reference to the eternal' is to me the deepest and most momentous of all truths. . . . We must withdraw into the eternal, and work from that into endless time. For eternity is by no means endless time. Eternity is that in which there is no succession possible: endless time is the form of infinite succession. I do not see how two things could be more different, or how any difference could be more clear.

***

His doctrine — at this time at all events — may be stated in a few words, as the absolute necessity of founding practical life on philosophical conceptions; of living a simple, strenuous, intellectual life, so far as possible communistically, and on a basis of natural religion. It was Rosminianism, one may say, carried a step further.

***

It so happened that William Morris was coming to read portions of his Sigurd at one of the meetings of a sort of ethical society, in which I was interested. Davidson admired Morris, and we asked him to preside at the meeting.

***

The Purposes of the Fellowship shall be the cultivation of character in the persons of its members, and the attainment of whatever follows from high character. The ideal of character shall be perfect purity or holiness, including perfect intelligence, perfect love and freedom — that freedom which springs from perfect obedience to the divine laws of the spirit. Truth and love alone shall have authority in the Fellowship, and in all cases the material and fleshly shall be subordinated to the spiritual.

***

The Fellowship of the New Life is essentially a religious society, that is, a society whose members seek to order their lives in accordance with the Supreme Will (by whatever name it may be called — God, Holiness, Intelligence, Love), in so far as that can in any way be ascertained. Its religion, however, in contradistinction to other religions, is purely one of attitude; attitude of the whole human being, mind, affections, will. It seeks, through the persons of its members, to be receptive toward all truth, whatever its mediate source, responsive with due love toward all worth, and active toward all good.

***

In endeavoring to know well, the members of the Fellowship, far from depending solely on individual reason or experience, seek light and aid from every quarter; from every age and people; from religion, science, and philosophy; from nature and art; from reason and faith. Knowing that their own mental and moral status, the very conceptions by which they interpret experience, and the thought by which they unite them into a known world, as well as the language by which they express all this, are not their own products, but are the outcome of a process of mental unfolding dating back far beyond the dawn of recorded history, and are to be understood only through a knowledge of this process, they can look only with pity upon those persons who, having no comprehensive acquaintance with the history of human conceptions, rashly undertake, with their crude notions, to pronounce upon the great problems of life and mind. They are, therefore, neither dogmatists, skeptics, nor agnostics, but reverent students of the world of nature and of mind, seeking to supplement their own experience and conclusions with the experience and conclusions of the serious men and women of all time. Inasmuch as they are not called upon to accept any special beliefs, but only to be honest and circumspect with themselves in accepting any belief whatever, it follows that no honest belief or unbelief need prevent any one from being a member of the Fellowship. The man who finds cogent reasons for believing in the doctrines of transubstantiation and the immaculate conception, and the man who finds it impossible to attach any definite meaning to the word God, are equally in their place in the Fellowship, provided they are equally sincere. But sincerity is not possible apart from a living desire for ever deeper insight, and a sympathy with those who sincerely hold opinions different from our own.

***

Such wrong emphasis we see in all those philanthropic movements whose chief aim is men's physical comfort and the indiscriminate removal of that powerful natural corrective, suffering. With such movements the Fellowship, realizing how beneficial suffering may be, has no sympathy. Better to suffer and be strong, than to be comfortable and weak.

***

The way to begin the New Life, I believe, is to try to forget oneself, one's sorrows, one's annoyances; to count oneself happy, if he can have the approval of a good conscience and the sense of having furthered the good. The New Life, as I conceive it, is a new attitude of the intelligence, the feelings, the will — a desire to lay aside all prejudice and to know the absolute truth, a wide, sweet sympathy, recoiling at no sin, no suffering, no hardness of heart, but only at selfishness and meanness and lying, a firm resolution to do the best, as far as that is known, in the spirit of love. Such a life, I know, is worth living. It is a life in which all wounds soon heal, and all scars are but brands of victory — legal tender for future blessedness.

***

And what if it be true that all great attainment calls for suffering, that such is the law of our being? Shall we slink back and tremble, and drug ourselves, like craven cowards? Never! The pure metal rings when it is struck, and the true soul finds itself and its own nobility often only in the throbs of pain and utter self-sacrifice. One true act of will makes us feel our immortality: alas! that we so seldom perform an act of will. In the face of an act of real will, heredity counts as nothing. What makes heredity tell is our own cowardice and sluggishness in not forcing children to conquer it, and also in not conquering it in ourselves. Heredity, like corruption, acts only when the soul is gone. It is utterly debasing to be bullied by heredity. The belief in its power "shuts the eyes and folds the hands," and delivers the soul in chains to the demon of unreality. The reason why people doubt about the freedom of the will is because they never exercise it, but are always following some feeling or instinct, some private taste or affection. How should such persons know that the will is free? Our time is dying of sentimentality — some of it refined enough, to be sure, but sentimentality — which destroys the will.

We are on our way to all that heart ever wished or head conceived. But the greater gods have no sympathy with anything but heroism. When we will not be heroic they sternly fling us back to suffer, saying to us: Learn to will! The kiss of the Valkyre, which opens the gates of Valhalla, is sealed only upon lips made holy by heroism even unto death.

-- Memorials of Thomas Davidson, The Wandering Scholar, Collected and Edited by William Knight

[admin]

Thomas Davidson

TO THE MANY FRIENDS OF THOMAS DAVIDSON WHOM HE INFLUENCED FOR GOOD THESE PAGES ARE INSCRIBED

PREFACE

Since the following pages were written a book entitled The Education of the Wage-Earners, a Contribution toward the Solution of the Educational Problem of Democracy, by Thomas Davidson, has been edited by his student-friend, Professor Charles M. Bakewell of Yale University, and published by Messrs. Ginn & Company. It is a distinctive memorial of Davidson's work, especially in the closing years of his life; but it does not render the present volume inopportune, nor does it in any way supersede it. Both have the same end in view, namely, the memorialization of the life and work of a very remarkable man, — rare at any time, and more especially rare as the years advance, — a unique teacher of the nineteenth century, who sowed seed which is even now yielding a rich harvest.

Companions, the creator seeketh, and fellow-reapers: for everything is ripe for the harvest with him. But he lacketh the hundred sickles: so he plucketh the ears of corn and is vexed....

To be sure we have harvested: but why have all our fruits become rotten and brown? What was it fell last night from the evil moon?...

Is he a promiser? Or a fulfiller? A conqueror? Or an inheritor? A harvest? Or a ploughshare? A physician? Or a healed one?

-- Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche

It may be well to state in a paragraph what Mr. Bakewell has done in his little book for the memory of our common friend. He first gives a comprehensive introductory sketch of Davidson and his philosophy. He then inserts an address on "The Task of the Nineteenth Century," given by Mr. Davidson before the Educational Alliance of New York in 1898, and first published in the International Journal of Ethics in October, 1901. His third chapter contains a very interesting statement, also by Mr. Davidson, on "The Educational Problem which the Nineteenth Century hands over to the Twentieth"; while the fourth contains "The History of the Experiment." His fifth chapter is, however, by far the most valuable in the volume. It is entitled "The Underlying Spirit (of the experiment) as shown by the Weekly Letters to the Class." From May, 1899, to August, 1900, the teacher wrote to this class, from his temporary home at Hurricane in Essex County some thirty letters, in which he discussed many a problem in the philosophy of Ethics, Sociology, and kindred subjects with almost conversational ease, full of genuine insight and instructiveness. They are remarkable letters, many of them composed when the writer was a great sufferer.

I have prepared this volume on lines somewhat parallel to the biographies or memoirs of others with whose lives it has fallen to me in past years to deal; namely, Wordsworth, Principal Shairp of St. Andrews, Professor Nichol of Glasgow, and Minto of Aberdeen, as well as other nineteenth-century Scotsmen. The method adopted in the volumes devoted to these men is even more necessary in the case of this wandering scholar and peripatetic teacher. I think it is impossible for any one man to deal adequately with a character so complex, an individuality made up of many various elements, if he merely collects estimates, and mingles them together into an olla-podrida of his own. I have, therefore, given a number of estimates, or characterizations, by friends from opposite points of view — a series of mental photographs or appraisals of the man — and have allowed these, in their separateness, to tell the story of his life and work.

As I have had occasion to remark elsewhere, critical biographies — in which the biographer obtrudes — are objectionable, while those in which he dominates are unnecessary; and so in this volume the letters of the author, his essays and papers, with the estimates of those who knew him in various relationships — in many cases curtailed, and their superfluities removed — are left to speak for themselves. It is my belief that this plan will be more useful than a formal biography would be, and quite as interesting to those who read it. The reminiscences of various friends, and estimates taken from different points of view, often give a much more vivid idea of a man and his life work than a continuous narrative of events could do; and, although there may be a few repetitions in these sketches as they refer to different periods and occasions, a substantial unity will be discernible underneath the variety that is inevitable.

Many have wondered why Thomas Davidson remained so long a wanderer, the travelling teacher-friend, instead of settling down within university precincts as the honored instructor of an existing school. I believe that in this he followed the guidance of an inward instinct, which directed him from his earliest years. There was a curiously independent element in him, which found its symbol in the national Scottish thistle, Nemo me impune lacessit.

He could not work in the prescribed rule or routine of other minds; and so, perhaps, he could never have submitted to academic fetters which were not of his own creation. With superabundant energy ever welling up within him, he preferred to be not exactly a free lance, but a ubiquitous inspirer of the lives of other people in many various directions; and so he became a puzzle alike to his liberal and to his conservative friends. He was not more of a mystery to those he occasionally met in his travels than he was to his coadjutors in public social work, whom he could not bring into complete sympathy with his own ideals. A curious story is told of his once being at Domodossola in the company of three men, a Frenchman, a German, and an Italian, and of his speaking all three languages so fluently and easily that each man mistook him for a fellow-countryman. If this was a sign of wide culture, it did not imply any lack of concentration in thought. Davidson saw the best things in all the systems that had been evolved, but indiscriminate mental wandering was distasteful to him.

In a brief preface I can say little more of the man whom I had long ago to address in the old pathetic words, Frater ave, atque vale [Google translate: Brother Hail and farewell]; it is enough to leave this memorial volume as it now stands to tell its own tale as best it may. [1]

W. K.
________________

Notes:

1. As originally written this book contained chapters giving a full analytic synopsis of Thomas Davidson's books on The Parthenon Frieze and Prolegomena to Tennyson's "In Memoriam" his letters to the Breadwinners' College in New York, a detailed account of his teaching at Glenmore, and extracts from some of his forgotten contributions to newspapers and magazines. In deference to the opinion of my publishers that it was inexpedient to include abstracts of works which were in print and might be consulted by those interested," I have agreed to suppress the greater part of these chapters, although my judgment was in favor of their appearance. They have been preserved, however, in their original form, and I shall be glad to send them to any readers who may wish to know more of the life and work of the "Wandering Scholar." — W. K.

[admin]

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTORY

The issue of this memorial volume on Thomas Davidson, the "wandering scholar," teacher, philanthropist, and friend, has been unfortunately delayed from causes beyond my power to control. When I undertook, in response to several requests, to collect material for it, I had already written a short notice of him for a volume entitled Some Nineteenth-Century Scotsmen [1]; and I have had no materials, then or since, voluntarily offered to me from any quarter, and placed at my disposal for biographic use. Everything included in the book as it now appears had to be collected by me from various sources. Some of Davidson's friends and pupils have been most kind in writing down their reminiscences, when asked to assist. Others who promised to send contributions have not been able to do so; although, in the hope of receiving them, I have delayed the issue of the volume as long as possible.

In the nature of the case, as well as from the circumstance just mentioned, it is not in any sense a biography. There are no data for an extended memoir. It is a miscellany of facts, reminiscences, letters, estimates, and memoranda of various kinds, all casting light on the man and his work; with appendices containing some of his lectures, essays, and addresses. These, however, may be found as useful to posterity, if not so interesting, as a more elaborate memoir would be. The incidents in Davidson's career were few, but their significance was great; and the influence of what he did survives, and is more powerful even than the teaching of his books.

He was one of those men whose magnetic personality had a charm which it is difficult to define. It is almost a commonplace to say that our greatest, as well as our most strenuous and subtle, characters are those whose influence it is hard to describe, and impossible to reproduce in words. Memory may supply the look, the tone, the non so che [Google translate: something] of personality to the spirit that remembers it; but that is often as dull and colorless to others as a faded photograph which has been preserved from distant years.

The story of Davidson's life is the record of a very remarkable influence. He educated others by a personality in which lay the slumbering fire of genius, a volcanic energy which was sometimes for long periods latent, and when active was sometimes slightly erratic in its mode of working. Continuity, or even consistency, was not possible to him in practical affairs. He chafed under constraint ab extra [Google translate: from outside], while his whole being was alive and working out ideals ab intra [Google translate: from within].

Testimony is borne from every quarter to the range of his learning, his marvellous memory, his knowledge of the ultimate problems of human thought, his mastery of many languages, his large humanity and affability, his loyalty as a friend, his unceasing toil in behalf of every pupil who came within the circle of his friendship, his hatred of superficiality and still more of all pretence, with his wonderful gift of appraising merit, or goodness of character, behind the ordinary shows of life. These things are well known to those who came in contact with him.

And yet, as the great always are, he was a very humble man. He had no vanity, and was not ambitious of fame or recognition. For himself he "coveted earnestly the best gifts" of culture, but he understood "the more excellent way" of "spending and being spent" for others. No one knew better than he did the truth embodied in the motto, "What I spent I had; what I saved I lost; what I gave I have." And yet it was not because he coveted possession that he thus spent himself in efforts for those whom he taught and helped. Some men have founded schools of disciples who have afterwards adored them, and the wish to be surrounded by such groups has been the mainspring of their endeavor. It was not so with Davidson; and perhaps it was because he had no system to bequeath, no dogmas which he wished to see introduced into a school, and all-dominant there, that he was so altruistic in his endeavors. It is not as a doctrinaire philosopher that he will be remembered in Europe and America, but as the helpful comrade, who led many pupils out of the shallows of tradition and the back-water eddies of conventional belief, who made them think for themselves, reverently sifting the inheritances they had received from others, and carefully cross-examining every theory set before them for adoption. He was the friend who helped them day by day to get quit of illusions, not one who vicariously aided them by removing rubbish heaps out of their path, but a guide who taught them how to clear their own way; and, having swept aside the sand of mere opinion, to build upon the universal reason of the race a new fabric that would last with them and for them securely.

As to his own convictions, — so far as I can speak from personal knowledge, — he was, as wise men are, both gnostic and agnostic; gnostic as to the root ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good; agnostic as to the terra incognita [Google translate: unknown land] which lies behind them, and the ultimate principle of things. In this he was essentially Hebraic and profoundly Christian. I think that he believed the real and the ideal to be one, and that they are known together in perpetual synthesis, — " the real apprehended through its ideality, and the ideal grasped in its reality," as I once put it to him. We had been talking of the correlation, and the cooperation, of analysis and synthesis; but he would not follow me in the further proposition that the true, the beautiful, and the good — as the several subsections of knowledge — may be also known together or synthetically in their germ, while a subsequent analysis brings out their distinction and difference.

My own correspondence with him was chiefly on the subject of the book I asked him to write for a series of projected works on Philosophy in its National Developments. [2] His letters to me are printed in this volume; and I have purposely placed them together in a series because they form a unity, and in combination illustrate his character. The development of his mind on the subject he undertook to deal with will be apparent in these letters. At first he thought he could condense the whole story of mediaevalism into a volume of the size of those in the Philosophical Classics for English Readers, — some two hundred or three hundred pages. But, as he pursued the study of it in detail, the subject grew in magnitude before him; and even after I gave him — alone amongst the contributors — two volumes instead of one for his work, he found it, as so many others have done, too vast for compression.

The Aberdeen school at which he was first trained in classics, and his subsequent course of tuition in our University of the North, did much for him, and he loved the intellectual discipline he had gone through in Scotland. Even in his later years he said that if he were young again and were offered his choice, he would elect to go through it all once more rather than experience a different upbringing. But after his undergraduate work was over, subsequent life in the old country did not satisfy him; and the instinct of the wandering scholar led him to travel from country to country in Europe (as will be seen in the following pages), and then to migrate to America. When across the Atlantic he went from New York to Boston, thence to Canada, next to St. Louis, and afterwards back to New York. The fetters of university life in America were not relished by him any more than those in England. He preferred the freedom of the peripatetic, who, calling no man master, could gather round him disciples as he went; and, having sown some seed of influence, pass on to continue the sowing elsewhere. The raw material for tuition provided at our universities — young men and women who were preparing to enter the various professions, and were therefore to a large extent tied to ancient methods, some of them with already definitely formed opinions, and who sought at college merely an outfit for professional success — was not the material on which he could hope to work successfully. I think it was the quest for a wider and more genuine sphere of influence and a field for more profitable work (i.e. one in which he could do more good) that led him to wander as he did; and the three stages of learning, of travel, and of mastership, — Lehrjahre, Wanderjahre, and Meisterjahre, — which have been consecutive in the experiences of so many, from Plato to Descartes and onwards, were combined in him all along. He was, at one and the same time, scholar, wanderer, and teacher; and this continued almost from first to last.

As learner and instructor, and as a high-souled missionary of education, he carried out four notable experiments, and achieved success in all of them. They were the founding (1) of the New Fellowship in London, (2) of the New Fellowship in New York, (3) of the Glenmore School of the Culture-Sciences, and (4) of the New York settlement for Russian Jews, the "Breadwinners' College." He was not completely satisfied with any of them; and, having started one, felt it his duty to pass on and organize another. But in carrying out this mission he had, as already said, no finished system to unfold. He abjured finality, and rejected dogmas imposed on him, both ab ante [Google translate: from front] and ab extra [Google translate: from outside], until they were reconstructed anew within his own inner consciousness. He felt that he was "conscript and consecrated" to be a reformer of abuses of the intellect and the heart. An intense philanthropic passion urged him onward in this work; and intellectual culture pursued selfishly, or in isolation, was abhorrent to him. He desired to enrich his fellow-creatures by all he thought and felt and did. To a certain extent a socialist, he was a Fabian of a very cautious type. Exceedingly conservative in his socialism, he held that the end of human existence was the freedom, the education, and the perfection of the individual, when his fetters were broken and all trammels withdrawn.

The London Fabian Society, an offshoot from the one he founded, did not continue to satisfy him, because it seemed to tend toward an external, rather than an inward, ideal. He preferred his "Fellowship of the New Life," because its explicit aim was the development of the individual spirit, the evolution of a new and higher, although a much simpler life. But neither of these socialistic experiments fully corresponded to his ideal; and the progress of his mind and character through them to a farther step in the western world is one of the most interesting episodes in the history of an inquiring spirit, and an ever-expanding and maturing character.

I have said that he had no elaborated system to offer and to teach; but he had many resting-places in his forward journey. One of them, and perhaps the most important, was the philosophy of Rosmini, in which pantheistic monism is met by an individualism proclaiming the inherent and intrinsic value of every unit in the race. According to this teaching each one of us is an impenetrable unit, cut off from every other by the boundaries which limit, form, and determine his individuality. But each of the units resembles every other one: all have points of contact, and can disclose their individualities to others. Each is the heir of all the ages, not only by unconscious inheritance, but because the gains of the past, all ancestral possessions, can be entered into a fresh, reappropriated by culture, and lived over again in new experience; while that experience, after receiving its own enrichment from the past, is destined to give place to a larger and fuller one. Every individual yearns for new development and fresh environments, but what it is possible for each to realize is met by the discernment of what it is good for others to experience. The worth of particular states, however, cannot be known, a priori, in the abstract. It can only be known through the experiences themselves. Thus Davidson's philosophy was both individualistic and pluralistic. When experience is analyzed we find a unity within the plurality; and in that unity is found, and out of it may be deduced, a theism of which the evidence is clear and the outcome stable.

The psychological, metaphysical, and ethical teaching of Thomas Davidson is well known to those who heard him teach. It is with its results that I have chiefly to do in this volume; especially with the outcome of his ethical teaching. Very early in life he saw that "man's chief end" (as his Scottish catechism put it) was the attainment of knowledge, insight, and freedom, — the realization of what is true, and beautiful, and good; but he also saw that this had to be conjoined with the realization of an equally supreme good or "chief end" by others, that is to say, by the community. It was this double or twin conviction, more than anything else, that dominated his whole life. The chief good for each, and the summum bonum for all, were not theoretically antagonistic; and they did not practically conflict. But, how were they to be realized and harmonized? It was his prolonged pondering and revolving of this problem that led him to his "Fellowship of the New Life." The very name "fellowship," rather than "society" or "organization," meant a great deal. It carried its small band of devotees back to the Pythagorean, the Socratic or Platonic, and the Epicurean brotherhoods. Even the manual labor called for from each member was significant. But Davidson soon saw that he could not realize his ideal in England. It was Utopian to his British contemporaries. Hence he sought for it in the New World, "the unexhausted West."

As, however, his aim has been a good deal misunderstood, it is desirable again to state that the "New Fellowship," the realization of which he sought for, was based not upon uniformity of opinion or belief, not on mere camaraderie, or sympathy in pursuing ends which are not ideals; but on the realization of the highest possible life, the broadest and most varied culture, altruistic in every sense from first to last. To Thomas Davidson culture was not a selfish pursuit that could be followed out in solitude. It was only attainable in a community established and knit together by disinterested social bonds, the varied knowledge sought being obtained with a view to the elevation and betterment of society around. His aim was to present to the world a new example of "plain living and high thinking" by the courageous pursuit and advocacy of truth when freed from the trammels of convention, and by the realization of the beautiful in Art and of the good in Life. If a parallel to this may be found in earlier efforts, it is to be sought, not in the phalanstery [Merriam Webster: a Fourierist cooperative community; French phalanstere dwelling of a Fourierist community, from Latin phalang, phalanx + French stere (as in monastere monastery) schemes of the eighteenth-century economists, but in the pantisocracy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his friends, and their projected settlement on the banks of the Susquehanna. The "Fellowship of the New Life," however, was wider in its original programme, much fuller and richer in its ideals, although not more realizable in the world of the actual.

I may be allowed to express the final cause of the whole by the office and purpose of the greater part -- and this is, to form and train up the people of the country to obedient, free, useful, organizable subjects, citizens, and patriots, living to the benefit of the state, and prepared to die for its defence.

-- On the Constitution of the Church and State, According to the Idea of Each; With Aids Toward a Right Judgment on the Late Catholic Bill, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Like many utopian societies, the Pantisocracy envisioned by Coleridge and Southey owed its origins to Plato's ideal commonwealth, envisioned in the later books of The Republic and in Critias. More modern examples for the Pantisocrats included Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas Solis, and the accounts of Cotton Mather.

-- Pantisocracy, by Wikipedia

And so, Glaucon, we have arrived at the conclusion that in the perfect State wives and children are to be in common; and that all education and the pursuits of war and peace are also to be common, and the best philosophers and the bravest warriors are to be their kings?

That, replied Glaucon, has been acknowledged.

Yes, I said; and we have further acknowledged that the governors, when appointed themselves, will take their soldiers and place them in houses such as we were describing, which are common to all, and contain nothing private, or individual; and about their property, you remember what we agreed?

Yes, I remember that no one was to have any of the ordinary possessions of mankind; they were to be warrior athletes and guardians, receiving from the other citizens, in lieu of annual payment, only their maintenance, and they were to take care of themselves and of the whole State.

-- The Republic, by Plato

_______________

Notes:

1. Oliphant, Anderson, & Ferrier, 1903.

2. See Some Nineteenth-Century Scotsmen, page 354.

[admin]

CHAPTER 2 [1]: THE MAN: A SKETCH AND AN ESTIMATE

Thomas Davidson was born in 1840 in the parish of Old Deer, at Drinies, a croft situated a little to the north of the coach stables of Pitfour, now attached to the farm of Toux. After the death of his grandfather the family removed to the village of Fetterangus, about a mile distant, where the widowed mother with her two daughters occupied a house. His mother, Mary Warrender, and her sister Margaret toiled industriously to support their aged mother and themselves, with a laudable pride, now less common, in order to be independent of public charity or parochial aid. In fine weather Mary wrought at outdoor labor, chiefly on the home farm of Pitfour, assisting in spring by gathering weeds, hoeing turnips, shearing sheep, at the latter of which she was an adept, being able to shear forty to fifty a day. In harvest she gathered the corn cut by a reaper with his scythe, and in winter was often employed lifting turnips for the cattle, or other homely agricultural work. On bad days she plied her needle or knitting pins in untiring assiduity, and always managed to keep the household clean and tidy.

When a boy Thomas Davidson was of a blonde complexion, with hair inclining to yellow, hazel eyes, and an open smiling face. He was a great reader, and being of a lively and happy disposition, as well as docile, he was a general favorite with young and old. His mother was desirous that her two boys, — Thomas, and another younger by two years, who afterwards became a well-known man, John Morrison Davidson, barrister at law, political and social journalist, — should receive a good education, and be brought up to be pious and reverent.

The first school that Thomas attended was the girls' school in the village of Fetterangus, taught by Elizabeth Grant, under whom the boy made rapid progress. When about ten years of age he was sent to the parish school of Old Deer, then presided over by Mr. Robert Wilson, who soon saw that there was the making of a scholar in the lad. [2] The number of pupils who attended the parish schools of those days varied considerably in summer and in winter. Whilst the summer attendance at the Old Deer school was about eighty, in winter there were from one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and thirty pupils on the roll. As one man single handed was unable to do anything like justice to such a number — especially if any were learning the higher branches — he was obliged to have recourse to a practice commonly adopted by parish schoolmasters in those days; namely, the employment of monitors to assist in teaching the junior classes for a part of the day. Young Davidson was thus employed, and from his knowledge and good humor he soon became a favorite alike with pupils and teacher.

As time went on and the lad advanced in learning, more time was needed for his school work. The master then took him to board in his house, and helped him in his studies for a couple of hours each evening in payment for his teaching work through the day. Young Davidson was exceedingly fortunate in his landlady, Mrs. Wilson, a person of unobtrusive piety, common sense, and kindliness of heart, who treated him in all respects as one of her sons. While the master taught him Latin, Greek, and mathematics, his wife initiated him in French, so that he was soon able to read that language with ease.

At the age of sixteen he left Deer School (October, 1856) to attend the Bursary Competition at King's College, Aberdeen, and came out sixth in the list of honors, gaining a scholarship of fifteen pounds a year for four years. At the end of his first session he took the second prize in Greek, and carried off the Simpson Greek prize of seventy pounds at the close of his curriculum. In his second year he took the first prize in senior Greek, and Principal Geddes, then professor of Greek, spoke of him one day in his class as the best linguist he had ever taught. In his fourth year he was second in senior humanity, and fourth in logic and in moral philosophy. Toward the end of his college course he became acquainted with a youth, James Macdonell, at that time a young exciseman at Old Deer, afterwards a brilliant literary man. The two friends, Davidson and Macdonell, exercised a strong mutual influence, to the intellectual benefit of both.

Mr. George King writes to me:

"I saw much of Thomas Davidson while I was a student of medicine, and he rector of the old Aberdeen grammar school. We were not fellow-students. He was my junior in years, though senior in the university. He graduated in arts at King's College while I was still a student of medicine at Marishall College. I first got to know him through a man named Webster, a brilliant but flighty youth, who was not a university student but a great reader, and a wonderfully subtle and appreciative critic, especially of poetry. Davidson used to give simple suppers (the fare being coffee, bread, and butter) in his lodgings in Don Street, old Aberdeen, on Sunday evenings after church. The men who attended these meetings were John Macdonell (now Sir John, a master in chancery), and occasionally his brother James (subsequently on the staff of the Daily Telegraph, and then the Paris correspondent of the Times), the aforesaid William Webster, William Wallace (brother of Robert Wallace the Presbyterian minister, professor, journalist, and member of Parliament), Davidson's younger brother John, and myself. We were all regular attendants at the evening service of the Reverend George Mee, then a Baptist preacher in Aberdeen, but a native of Wales. Mee was a man of high attainments, and many of his sermons were brilliant literary performances. The conversation at these delightful suppers at first usually turned on the sermon we had all listened to, but afterwards it was likely to wander into discussion of the books and political events of the day, chiefly the former. One book that gave occasion for much talk was Gervinus's Lectures on Shakespeare. Another was Max Midler's Chips from a German Workshop. Carlyle and Tennyson afforded material for much animated talk. Davidson admired Carlyle less than the others did. In appreciating the more subtle beauties and suggestions of both Tennyson and Carlyle he fell short of Webster and James Macdonell, and they excelled him also in facility of expression. But Davidson surpassed us all most notably in scholarship. He was an admirable classic, and his knowledge of German was considerable. He had read more than any of us; although he had no knowledge of, or sympathy with, biological science.

His was a bright, kindly, and most lovable spirit; and I have often deeply regretted having got out of touch with my old friend. I went to India in 1866, and from that time our intercourse practically ceased, my exile abroad lasting for thirty-two years."

Davidson graduated at the University of Aberdeen in 1860, carrying off, as stated, the Simpson Greek prize. That same year, after three months' absence, — when he taught in a boys' school at Oundle, Northamptonshire, — he went back to Aberdeen as rector of the old-town grammar-school, and session clerk of Old Machar parish. These posts (or rather this post, for they were joined together) he held for about three years. The school did not flourish under him, and he disliked the work of registering births, deaths, and marriages. He therefore resigned in August, 1863, "in consequence," he said, "of having received a situation requiring my immediate presence in England." This was at Tunbridge Wells, where he taught; but nothing that is authentic can now be gathered of these days.

It was virtually a farewell to Aberdeen, although he revisited the Granite City two years later, in 1865, with Dr. Theodore Benn; again in 1870, and finally in 1882.

After resigning the Aberdeen grammar school, and finding that he could do no better at Tunbridge Wells, Davidson went to Canada. He taught at Toronto, went thence to St. Louis (U.S.A.), and afterwards to Boston, where he met Longfellow. Through Longfellow's influence he was appointed to an examinership at Harvard University. He spent a year in Greece, chiefly at Athens, where he met Dr. Schliemann, the topographer and German explorer, from whom he received a bit of ancient ware found by the excavator in Agamemnon's tomb at Mycenae, which he facetiously called Clytemnestra's teapot. At Rome he was introduced to his Holiness the Pope, and had an hour's conversation with him in Latin in the Vatican garden, an honor rarely granted to any except intimate friends. He also spent a year in the north of Italy, while writing The Philosophical System of Antonio Rosmini-Serbati.

Davidson has been written of by one who knew him well [3] as within the circle of the twelve most learned men in the world. His learning was encyclopedic, and his culture almost universal. A great linguist, he had a knowledge of Philosophy in all its branches that was amazing. He was one of the distinguished students of the subject whom the University of Aberdeen sent out during the last quarter of the nineteenth century; but he was so humble and altruistic that very few of his friends and acquaintances knew what treasures were stored within his brain and heart. More than any of the nineteenth-century thinkers known to fame, he lived and toiled for other people, and from first to last had no thought of himself. His modesty and generosity were monumental features of an outstanding personality. It might have been thought that after finishing his undergraduate career he would pursue the vocation of a university teacher of Philosophy, but the paths available to him were few and crowded. No vacancy occurred which tempted him to become a candidate for a Scottish university chair.

Besides, in these years he was rejoicing in his newly found freedom as a teacher; and he was, from first to last, a peripatetic, an intellectual free-lance, stimulating many minds in many lands, while waiting for the possibilities of future and larger work. He deeply loved and profoundly honored the mediaeval universities of Europe, — those cradles and nurseries of learning founded in the so-called dark ages, — but he had little sympathy with a belated mediaevalism, stationary, crystallized, and dominating our western ideals of progress. He thought that the students of some of our universities, no less than these institutions themselves, were occasionally indifferent to new light and progressive leading; and so he became a wanderer, like many of the ancient scholars, travelling from country to country in Europe. His modern instincts, however, drew him chiefly to America. It was his intellectual and social ambition to find a set of men and women who could be bound together in the freemasonry of a common thirst for that knowledge which leads to useful work and fruitful life. And it must be admitted, when all the errant elements in his career are eliminated, that he succeeded in inaugurating a "new fellowship" of the true, the beautiful, and the good.

Like Socrates, he never cared about rewards for instruction. Also, like Socrates, he had "many scholars, but no school" with entrance examinations, and well-fenced traditional avenues to success. His was an educative rather than an academic ideal. As an intellectual missionary, his aim was to get at the truth of things, with a view to the regeneration of society. He wished the elimination of error to lead to, and insure, the eradication of evil from human life. His unique advocacy of the philosophy of Religion, his defence of dualism against the monistic system of Spinoza, his glorification of individualism — dualistic yet socialistic — were notable amongst other efforts of his countrymen. But, as already said, he was a born wanderer. You met him, talked with him, were inspired by him; and next day you found that he had fled! He was like Browning's Waring, or the "one true poet whom he knew"; also like Matthew Arnold's scholar-gipsy. He felt, as very few have ever done, that he was matriculated as a continuous student in the great peripatetic university of the world. Taking up philosophy after philosophy, although he did not indorse any, he never dropped one. He assimilated the teaching of each and passed on; but, above all things, he wished to make his speculative knowledge fruitful for subsequent work, and a stimulus to good fellowship and camaraderie. The very last to think himself an "angel of light," he was — without quite knowing it — an instinctively inspiring personality in every circle into which he came; and he has left the memory of a mediaevalist panoplied in the guise of a nineteenth-century crusader. He lived to revivify some of the ideals of the Middle Age. An intellectual cosmopolite, as well as a teacher of those ethical truths to which our modern world has attained, and caring nothing for what is ordinarily considered success, he went on his way rejoicing — if possible to conquer — but careless whether he succeeded or failed, if only he taught.

_______________

Notes:

1. Part of this chapter was contributed by me to the volume entitled Some Nineteenth-Century Scotsmen.

2. Mr. Wilson still lives and flourishes, and it is from him that I have received these facts as to Davidson's boyhood.

3. William Clarke in The Spectator.

[admin]

CHAPTER 3: FORMATION OF THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE NEW LIFE

It may perhaps be said without exaggeration that at the meetings held in Thomas Davidson's rooms at Chelsea in 1881-1883 we find the fons et origo [Google translate: source] of the later nineteenth-century ethical socialism of England. He was undoubtedly its pioneer, and for a time its center. He had returned from Italy, full of interest in the philosophy of Rosmini; but the formation of a small society of like-minded persons for the reorganization of individual life, and thereby the gradual uplifting of society to higher levels, was a much more intense desire with him than the prosecution of speculative study. He gathered round him more than a dozen sympathizers in these Chelsea rooms, where they held meetings for the discussion of problems and the realization of their aims; but, as time went on, inevitable differences arose within the group. There was a political section, and another that was more purely ethical. One of Davidson's aims had been to carry out the ideal of the "Institute of Charity." The political section — influenced by Karl Marx, and the social democratic federation — broke away from this, and ultimately formed a new organization which they called "The Fabian Society."

Mr. Maurice Adams writes an interesting letter to me from Purley, Surrey, giving particulars as to the initiation of the Fellowship of the New Life, from which I extract the following:

"In the September of 1882, Mr. Davidson, being in London, gathered together a number of people interested in religious thought, ethical propaganda, and social reform, among whom I may mention the names of Messrs. Frank Podmore, Edward R. Pease, Havelock Ellis, Percival Chubb, Dr. Burns Gibson, H. Champion, the late William Clarke, Hubert Bland, the Reverend G. W. Allen, and W. I. Jupp, Miss Caroline Hadden, Miss Dale Owen, and Mrs. Hinton. After many meetings he proposed the formation of a society for the cultivation of character, a complete education, and social regeneration.

The inclosed [1] draft of principles, rules, and regulations, which he drew up in November for the guidance of the meetings in his absence, will give you a good idea of the objects he had in view.

The meetings held in Mr. Pease's rooms in Osnaburgh Street and elsewhere were rather indefinite in character, till Dr. Burns Gibson proposed the inclosed resolutions.

This led to a breach in the society, as you will see from Mr. Podmore's letter to Mr. Chubb, and the resolutions which he drew up forming the 'Fabian Society.'

The nine supporters of Dr. Burns Gibson's resolutions formed the nucleus of the Fellowship, which gradually grew in numbers.

The first manifesto was entitled 'Vita Nuova.' I inclose a copy, and also one of the enlarged manifestoes, a printed letter from Thomas Davidson (who was then in New York), with the manifesto and list of lectures of the New York Fellowship. The English Fellowship published a quarterly journal entitled Seedtime, which (as you will see from the final number) lived for eight years.

Thomas Davidson was one of the most interesting men I ever knew. Intellectually alive to the finger-tips, he had a fervid nature, and habitually lived in an atmosphere of elevated emotion. Nor was he, like so many intellectual men, lacking in will-power. On the contrary, his strong, earnest, and self-confident nature made him occasionally somewhat dogmatic, overbearing, and intolerant of opposition.

In the early days of the Fellowship the members rather feared being so dominated by him as to have their own personalities dwarfed. In consequence, they vigorously asserted their own views; and at length, as you will gather from his letter, Davidson felt that the English Fellowship was not quite what he had hoped for.

He was so thoroughly individualistic that, in spite of his sympathy with the poor, and his burning desire for justice, he could never sympathize with the socialistic views of many of the English members, cherishing the idea that it was possible to remove social evils by individual remedies alone, or, at most, by voluntary cooperation.

He contended boldly for the necessity of a philosophic basis for religion, ethics, and social reform; but his philosophy was also individualistic and pluralistic, a kind of monadology. He was always full of ideas, and stimulating to the highest degree intellectually and morally.

Above all he was sincere and enthusiastic, hating compromises and the interpretation of creeds and formulas in a non-natural sense. 'Intellectual honesty ' was his watchword, and what he had perhaps most at heart."

Mr. Podmore's letter to Mr. Chubb, referred to by Mr. Adams, was as follows:

"December 16, 1883.

Some of us, after talking the matter over, find that we cannot subscribe to the resolution moved by Dr. Gibson. At the same time we wish to have a society, only on more general lines. We are anxious not to have any discussions of any kind; and I shall therefore propose at the next meeting to leave to the subscribers to the new resolution the name 'Fellowship of the New Life,' and that a second society be organized — which will not necessarily be exclusive of the 'Fellowship' — on somewhat broader and more indeterminate lines, ... it being open to any to belong to both societies."

This "next meeting" was held on January 4, 1884, at which the above proposals were substantially agreed to; the old name retained by those who originally devised it, and a new organization constituted under the title of "The Fabian Society." The difference between them was mainly this, — that the latter was more of a socialist movement, while the former was ethical and individual; although it was individualistic only as the majority of the new "Ethical Societies" were, or became. Its aim and outcome were social, but its basis and starting point were individual; and all its aims concentrated on the elevation of individual life.

The following was its original basis, as drawn up by Mr. Maurice Adams, and adopted on November 16, 1883:

We, recognizing the evils and wrongs that must beset men so long as our social life is based upon selfishness, rivalry, and ignorance, and desiring above all things to supplant it by a life based upon unselfishness, love, and wisdom, unite, for the purpose of realizing the higher life among ourselves, and of inducing and enabling others to do the same.

And we now form ourselves into a Society, to be called the Guild of the New Life, to carry out this purpose.

And so the two societies went to work, on independent but friendly lines.

At a meeting of the Fellowship, a constitution, or programme — the "Vita Nuova" — was drawn up and adopted, which is worthy of transcription here, as it was undoubtedly better in its first simple draft than it became in its subsequent enlargements in detail.

Vita Nuova

Object. The cultivation of a perfect character in each and all.

Principle. The subordination of material things to spiritual things.

Fellowship. The sole and essential condition of fellowship shall be a single-minded, sincere, and strenuous devotion to the object and principle.

Intercourse. It is intended in the first instance to hold frequent gatherings for intimate social intercourse, as a step towards the establishment of a community among the members.

Designs. The promotion, by both practice and precept, of the following methods of contributing toward the attainment of the end: (i) The supplanting of the spirit of competition and self-seeking by that of unselfish regard for the general good; (2) simplicity of living; (3) the highest and completest education of the young; (4) the introduction, as far as possible, of manual labor in conjunction with intellectual pursuits; (5) the organization, within and without the Fellowship, of meetings for religious communion, and of lectures, addresses, classes, and conferences for general culture, and for the furtherance of the aims of the Fellowship.

So far the original programme, or manifesto, as at first adopted; but as the conductors of this Fellowship did not date their prospectuses, it is somewhat difficult for an outsider, supplied with them now, to follow its development. It is Mr. Davidson's relation to it, however, that chiefly concerns us; and it may therefore be desirable to print the draft of its principles and aims, which was drawn up by him but set aside in favor of the above shorter and simpler form. Although never adopted, it casts much light on the mind and character of the writer. It is therefore printed in a chapter by itself.

_______________

Notes:

1. See page 21.

[admin]

CHAPTER 4: ORGANIZATION OF THE NEW FELLOWSHIP AS DRAWN UP BY THOMAS DAVIDSON

I. The Occasion

Whereas, the end of all life is happiness, and the free development of all our faculties;

And whereas, this end can be attained only by bringing about an order of things in which there is harmony, depending upon insight into the nature of things, and a willingness to bring about that harmony;

And whereas, no system hitherto devised has accomplished this end, failing either through neglect to obtain the highest insight, or from a want of force to act in accordance with it;

And whereas, therefore the world — notwithstanding the great advance in experience, knowledge, and appliances — is still as regards the majority of its people sunk in ignorance, superstition, sin, and suffering;

It seems desirable to a small number of persons to see whether the experience, insight, and moral force — accumulated and transmitted by the ages — could not be so formulated and applied as to bring about the desired harmony, and hence the conditions of a noble and happy life. They therefore set before themselves the following aims.

II. The Principles

1. Unsparingly to put aside all prejudice.

2. Through experience and study to acquire insight and knowledge.

3. To live openly.

4. To banish all selfishness.

5. To be helpful and charitable as far as may be, intellectually, morally, and materially.

6. To make no compromise with evil.

7. To form a union on these principles and for their propagation, with a view to the realization of the highest ideal life, and to bring about the same conditions for others, and especially children, to do the same.

The immediate aims are brotherhood and education, to combine the greatest possible amount of personal liberty — every man a law to himself — with all the advantages of intimate society, a monasticism of families. The members of the society enter it with the distinct understanding that the previous possession of such aims constitutes the condition of membership, which shall at all times be voluntary; and these shall be the chief aims in the life of each member, and shall rule the conduct of his life. While the society purposes ultimately to live in community, with a view to the bringing about the necessary conditions of education, the members at present propose to follow these aims as their avocations will allow. During this interval each member shall use every effort to realize in his own person the ideal proposed by the society, and — though it may be separated by distance — to live a common life of intercourse and mutual help. With this view it is proposed that each one should regulate his life in accordance with the following rules.

III. Rules for the Guidance of Life

1. To have as the aim of all free action; some portion of the aim of every member of the society being to maintain this, especially in the way of study.

2. To introduce regularity into his daily life, having a programme for each day.

3. To review each day at its end, and to see with what success the programme has been carried out, and the purity of the motives of all actions performed.

4. To keep a record of each day, with all its incidents and valuable thoughts.

5. To communicate freely with all other members, when either intellectual and moral aid or encouragement is needed.

6. To take sedulous care of health, avoiding all unnecessary exposure, stimulation, or excitement, and in all ways to husband strength.

7. To avoid all gossip, evil speaking, and all societies having no serious aim.

8. To endeavor by positive efforts to obtain the enthusiastic approval of conscience.

9. In speech to be sparing of praise or blame.

10. In life to aim at absolute truthfulness, simplicity, and chastity, in thought, word, and deed.

11. To be uniformly courteous in word and deed.

12. To avoid all impure and doubtful literature and companionship.

IV. The Creed

1. All that truly is, is eternal: such is every soul.

2. God is the Law of Being, which is Love.

3. The welfare of every soul depends upon its own action.

4. Blessedness is perfect accord with the Law of Being, which accordingly is reached by insight, and action in accordance therewith.

5. Hence the aim of science is to discover the laws of being, of art to embody them, and of morality to live in agreement with them.

6. It should therefore be the aim of each individual to develop himself in all these directions, never losing sight of life as a whole.

7. All life must be religion; that is, action in view of the totality of conditions: this only is holy.

8. Prayer is silent meditation, and the direction of the soul upon the infinitude and grandeur of Being.

9. Public worship shall consist of all those means whereby the soul is stirred to enthusiastic sense of the omnipresence of Divine Law.

10. Life is of infinite value, and pessimism is intellectual blindness.

11 . All work that contributes to human well-being is honorable.

12. The only title to property is labor.

13. In marriage, more than in all things, regard shall be had for the highest ends, and it shall never be a means to the indulgence of the flesh. Monogamy is the law.

14. No one shall marry without the material resources necessary for such a step and its consequences.

15. Neglect of children is a crime of the first rank, and the society should see that the crime is prevented.

16. The greatest freedom of intercourse between the sexes is to be aimed at as conducive to these ends.

17. Every man during his lifetime shall have the right to the results of his labor; but these at his death shall fall to the society, except so much as is necessary to fulfill the responsibilities which he has undertaken by marrying.

18. All titles, social inequality, and family prestige shall be abolished.

19. Character and action, not wealth, are the grounds of distinction.

20. Every effort in the way of teaching and writing by members shall be undertaken in the name, and with the approval, of the society.

21. Simplicity, combined with good taste, is the rule of dress.

22. Except in the domestic circle there is to be no distinction between the sexes.

23. Principles, not persons, are to be authoritative. Great men are to be imitated, not worshiped.

24. All authority in the society, except that which is constituted by the society itself, is null and void.

V. The Organization and its Stages

The society shall date from January 1, 1883, but shall not be organized until a meeting of members can take place.

The society shall develop through the following four stages: (1) The tentative or novitiate stage for the first members, in which they try to live the new life; (2) the life of full members not yet living in community; (3) the life of the members living in community, but not independent; (4) the life of the members living in an independent community.

All new members must undergo a novitiate sufficient to satisfy the executive of their ability to live the life of the community.

Nothing in this programme except the main principles and purposes shall be exempted from change, if such a change is seen to be desirable.

[admin]

CHAPTER 5: DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOCIETY

As time went on the idea of a cooperative settlement for industry and education was mooted, and a somewhat elaborate scheme for "the establishment of an industrial, educational, and residential settlement in the neighborhood of London, on cooperative principles," to be carried out by the Fellowship, was drawn up and circulated. This was followed by "proposals for the establishment of a school" to promote the same ends.

The thirty-four numbers of Seedtime, — the organ of the New Fellowship, — ably written and edited, are a valuable memorial of its work. Like every other pioneer magazine, it was but for a time; but it did its work while it lived, and the seed it sowed is springing still, and will yield future harvests. Part of a characteristic letter from Mr. Davidson to its editor may be given here.

"237 West 105TH Street, New York,

November 25, 1889.

... I like your Seedtime, although it is not up to the mark of The Sower. You haven't a definite enough programme, and are too much carried away by the temporary reform wave of socialism. You are in the surge, not on the rock — the Rock of Ages.

-- I suppose, tells you everything but the facts of his own popularity. All the same, he is very popular. Everybody loves him, and he will be a success here. I hope he will in time rise above his somewhat morbid ide'e fixe of state socialism into simple independence of thought, and be himself, not a paper wad in the tail of a popular kite. It is inexpressibly funny to find an admirer of Thoreau professing socialism. I shall expect soon to hear of a monk advocating the luxuriousness of Solomon. But, despite these inconsistencies, will make his way, and be very helpful to us all. His personality, which is a great deal bigger than socialism, or any other ism, will be his guardian angel till he reaches the heights of vision. . . ."

There was a curious element of exactingness in Davidson, amounting in some instances to a quasi-tyranny, towards the friends who differed from him in opinion or policy, which led to transient friction. He was so anxious to have his ideals wrought out, and to have work done on the lines that commended themselves to him, that he could not complacently brook opposition. It was perhaps for this reason that his influence was stronger at times over the women students whom he taught than over the men.

He certainly wished the work of the movement which he started and organized in London to be carried out in his own special way; and he regretted the introduction, or at all events the prominence in it, of those who, as he put it, had "no motives higher than those of economic utility." He even wrote that if their voices prevailed, those "who desired something higher ought to secede and begin all over again for themselves." When he was wintering at Rome (1883— 1884), and received from London a fresh programme of the New Fellowship, he thought it good so far as it went, but found it "meager and indefinite." "It seems," he wrote "to be settling down into a kind of quietism, which, in my opinion, bodes ill." He was deeply grieved that some of its members wished "to discontinue him, on the ground that he had tried to set himself up as the 'prophet' of the Fellowship." He wrote that he was "quite willing to withdraw from anything but a sympathetic connection," as his work in the future would lie across the Atlantic. He wished all who knew of his relation to the society at its inception not to wound the feelings of those who had entered it since by any mention of those earlier years. "It has always been my earnest and expressed desire," he wrote, "that the society should feel itself to be without founders and without 'prophets.'" He hoped, however, to find a duplicate of the Fellowship in the land of his adoption, and promised to send accounts of it to the old society.

Mr. Percival Chubb writes:

"Our differences never altered my fundamental feelings of admiration, respect, and gratitude, which he inspired from the first. I was and am more deeply indebted to him than to almost any man I have known. I can never repay the debt. ... I knew him from the time when he was living at Domodossola, and pursuing his Rosminian studies, i.e. just after the publication of his book on Rosmini's philosophical system. I was very close to him in the attempt to write out a new type of life ('Vita Nuova,' we used to style it), and through this association became the secretary of the Fellowship of the New Life, and also for a time of the offshoot society, the Fabian. His letters record pretty fully the phases of impulse and conviction through which he went at this time. I was at his summer school at Farmington and in the Adirondacks for two summers. I also know something of his last labors with the Breadwinners, because I continued a little of the work with one of his classes after he died."

[admin]

CHAPTER 6: ESTIMATES OF DAVIDSON BY PERCIVAL CHUBB AND FELIX ADLER

The previous chapter concluded with a letter from Mr. Chubb; and as he wrote a memorial notice of his friend after Davidson's death, in The Ethical Record (of which he is editor), part of this estimate is now placed in a sequel chapter (although it anticipates some of his teacher's later work), so as to bring separate parts of Mr. Chubb's appreciation together as a whole.

Mr. Chubb wrote:

"He was a remarkable man, intellectually and emotionally; intense in his convictions and in his likes and dislikes, large-hearted and recklessly generous of time and strength to those who sought his help. He was especially attracted by promising young men, for whom he had a romantic feeling that was in the best sense Hellenic. There was scarcely a period of his life when he did not lavish upon some hopeful and needy youth the best of his intellectual powers and stores, often money from his none too copious supply, always an ebullient childlike affection and loyalty, an unselfish and delicate thoughtfulness.

Intellectually Mr. Davidson always bore the marks of his Scottish origin. He was modern in his equipment and in his outlook; but with this modernness was mingled a touch of the scholasticism and the sectarian fire, the parti pris, of a John Knox. He was almost fiercely affirmative of his own convictions; they were the bread of life to him. He boasted that he was sectarian; he always believed that his philosophy was the supreme way to salvation; and he was at all times an ardent, fearless, outspoken missionary in its behalf. What that philosophy was it would be difficult to formulate, for it underwent many changes. He remained a devout Aristotelian, and an arch-enemy of the Spenceriacs (as he called them) and Hegelians. He owed much to the mediaeval men, — Aquinas and Bonaventura and Dante; and among his more modern devotions were those to Giordano Bruno, Leibnitz, Goethe, and Tennyson. His interests were centered in the greatest minds of history; and he had the distinguished amplitude, the large bearing, that came of daily converse with them.

He brought to the support of his views a surprising wealth of detailed knowledge, of which his marvelously tenacious memory gave him ready command. He was a master of many tongues, and read and spoke ancient and modern Greek with almost as great a facility as German and Italian. He had traveled much, and enjoyed converse with many distinguished Europeans. It was the very richness of his mental acquisition and the complexity of his nature — compounded as it was of both rationalistic and mystic elements — that stood in the way of a thoroughly clarified, consistent, and stable philosophy. He had an immense power of work, although the printed output of his life is not large, and does not do justice to his scholarly capacities. Some translations of verse and prose; a volume on the Parthenon frieze and other Greek themes; a presentation of Rosmini's philosophy, of which he may be said to be the discoverer for English-speaking people; volumes on Aristotle and Greek education, on the education of the Greek people (his best book, we think), on Tennyson's In Memoriam, and on Rousseau; some articles in Warner's Library of the World's Best Literature; and A History of Education, — these are his inadequate legacy. He left many lectures in manuscript, and it is to be hoped that the best of these will be published, with a memoir of his interesting life and personality.

He touched the ethical movement mainly on the side of its regard for practical well-doing, and was especially attracted by what he considered to be its sincere, undisguised, fearless, and yet courteous attitude towards conventional religion. Scholar and thinker as he was preeminently, he was always aiming, nevertheless, at practice, — dreaming Utopian dreams, and moving toward their realization. This gave him a vivid interest in reform and in modern sociology. He was the prime mover in starting the Utopian schemes of the Fellowship of the New Life in England and America. He nursed the hope at one time that his own beautiful acres at Keene, in the Adirondacks, might become the summer home of a band of idealists vowed to new, simpler, and nobler ways of living. Here he had his Summer School of the Culture Sciences, a quite unique establishment, that at one time carried a strong suggestion of such a Utopia.

But nothing was more admirably characteristic of the man than the labors which during the last two years of his life he carried on at the Educational Alliance on the lower East Side of New York. Here he had gathered about him, in peculiarly close bonds, a body of young Russian Hebrews, whom he endeavored to help to get culture in the broadest, manliest sense of the term.

More important, we are led to believe, than any actual results in scholarship achieved was the powerful, transforming, personal influence exerted over these young boys and girls by a man who could show in such relationships a magnetic charm, a sympathy and tenderness of interest, a whole-souled devotion which will undoubtedly have left a deep mark upon many lives. The labor was a labor of love. The man's whole soul was in it. His feeling in regard to it is well indicated in a recent remark of his to a friend that the whole of his long life had been a preparation for just this. He died, leaving not only these young people, but others, youthful and aging, under obligations for all kinds of chivalrous service done to them. Their gratitude will assuredly follow him with their sorrow for his all too early death.

The mortal part of Thomas Davidson — no one, be it said, had a more impassioned, invincible faith in personal immortality than he — was buried at Glenmore in the Adirondack forest, where he sought summer peace while he lived. At the burial Dr. Felix Adler, always his good friend, delivered the following address:

'It is very still, and beautiful, and solemn here. The first premonitory pang of the frost has thrilled the trees, but has served only to deck them with an added if evanescent glory. The grand panorama of mountain and valley that opens out on every side, as we stand on this noble plateau, has never revealed itself, it seems to me, in more crystalline clearness than on this perfect day. The sunlight shines upon this bier covered by loving hands with autumn foliage and flowers. And, in the midst of this peace and beauty, in this grove, near to the house in which he dwelt all these years, you have selected the spot where shall rest the earthly part of Thomas Davidson, whom many of you revered as a master and loved as a friend, and whom all admired as a superior and exceptional man.

This is not the occasion to attempt, even in outline, an exact estimate of him as a thinker, as a scholar, and as a humanitarian. Doubtless an opportunity will be offered later on for competent judges to do justice to him in all these particulars, and to pay to his memory an adequate and discriminating tribute worthy of the contributions which he made to literature, to philosophy, and to the cause of practical beneficence. I speak here as a neighbor, as a friend, and as one who serves, for the time being, as a mouthpiece to voice the sentiments of hundreds of men and women who cannot be present with us, but who, in spirit and from a distance, mingle their tender farewells with ours. A man's thought is assayed by inexorable chemists, and the quantum of gold it contains is determined according to undeviating standards. The value of a man's work, too, on the whole, is tested by expert fellow-workers. But what a man is, as distinct from what he thinks and from what he does, — his character, the best part of him, — reflects itself somehow, with immediate, almost photographic distinctness, upon all who live with him and deal with him, be they lettered or unlettered, his equals or his inferiors in mental attainments. And it is of this generic impression, which every one received and could not fail to receive from Thomas Davidson, that I would lovingly speak.

There was a certain air of elevation, a certain tone of distinction, about him, which even the most ordinary could not but feel on coming into touch with him, like that which one observes among the high-born who are accustomed to move in the society of the great; only that, in his case, the great with whom he associated were the everlasting princes, the lords of wisdom, the prophets, the seers, the sages, and the saints. With them he kept company in his study, and when he emerged from it and entered into ordinary society and engaged in ordinary converse, the manners which he had acquired in that elect circle did not desert him, and somehow the afflatus of great ideas was about him even in the routine of daily intercourse. Justice, freedom, perfection, immortality; these words and what they stand for were as close to him as the thought of his daily wage is to the laborer, or of his hay is to the farmer.

(Wisdom is by far the major part of well-being). This line of the Greek tragedian applies to his life. To think wisely, to try to think so, was the greater part of his happiness. And this "trying" is to be understood in a severe and thoroughgoing sense. His scholarship was admired by all who knew him. His vast command of languages and literatures, ancient and modern, — Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, German, etc., — his minute acquaintance with the recondite learning of the Middle Ages, all this was astonishing. But still more astonishing was it how lightly he carried this heavy baggage, how entirely he forbore to intrude or make parade of his great erudition, how completely he converted into the tissue of his own thinking the elements he absorbed from elsewhere. He explored the storehouses of the ancients in order to find therein the treasure which he could appropriate, and turn to account in the endeavor to live better, and to enable others to live better. He tracked his way through the wilderness of scholasticism in order to trace to their sources the streams of error which he believed to be still vitiating the life of to-day. To be honest with himself, to be sure that he had a right to an opinion, was the stringent rule to which he subjected himself. His scholarship, and the use he made of it, was the outcome of intellectual honesty.

The second quality which seems to me to have adorned his character to an exceptional degree was the plain-spokenness, the free and fearless avowal of his convictions. He did not fail, I think, in due respect for beliefs held sacred by others, but he esteemed it a right and a duty to express his own with no uncertain sound, without any truckling show of conformity or timid apology. He believed that the progress of mankind depends on the acceptance of true ideas, and the rejection of false; and he rightly thought that the inherent strength and truth of ideas can be fairly tested only if all earnest thinkers shall freely and courageously state the results of their thinking, without fear of the social or material penalties that may follow such avowal. In a world where inner convictions are so often veiled in timorous and guarded generalities, in a world in which the partial suppression rather than the full expression of the thoughts that relate to the highest interests of man is so often commended both by precept and example, his courage, his boldness, his perfect sincerity, his readiness to sacrifice interest to truth, appears to me to be one of his fairest titles to the respect of right-thinking men.

He had something of the Greek genius for friendship. He was attached to his friends, especially his younger friends, with a passionate devotion. His attitude toward guests and visitors was something unique. Who of us shall forget the radiant look of pleasure in his face, the hearty ring in the voice, the extended arms with which he welcomed those who came to share his ever generous hospitality?

But, above all, his charity was remarkable, a charity dictated by magnanimity; for his feelings toward the poor were such as only a great soul could be capable of. What he pitied in their lot was not merely and not chiefly their material want, though he was generous in supplying that also; but his heart went out to them because of their lack of the mental and spiritual goods which make life large and fine. And this need he sought to fill and did fill without stint out of his own affluence, seeking to awaken the dormant soul in others, to draw them to his elevation; or, rather, when at his best, to quicken in them the power of rising through their own effort. And so we find that his last years were spent in dispensing this rich intellectual aid to those who eagerly craved for it and who so gratefully appreciated it. And in the concluding chapter of his last book — a book written in the anguish of the terrible disease that was to terminate his career — he left as a legacy the idea of establishing this sort of charity on a grand scale; the idea of a college for bread-winners, intended to open to the toiling millions the world's best culture and to help to redeem them by quickening in them the springs of mental and spiritual power.

He loved these hills, whether it was that they reminded him of his native Scotland, or whether his soul, being attuned to the sublime, found a certain kinship in these large vistas, and his free spirit rejoiced in the freedom, the wild beauty, and the purity of nature here about him. He loved his Glenmore, and it is fitting that here at Glenmore the earthly part of him should find its rest. The eternal procession of the stars will pass nightly over his silent grave; the storms of winter will sweep over this plateau; and the snow doubtless will drift, and heap itself high above this mound; then the spring will come, and cover it again with verdure and flowers. The seasons will come, the seasons will go; but he who once was the life of this place, emanating life, will appear amongst us no more. Yet in no sense can we think of him as wholly vanished. He himself believed strenuously that man is "an eternal being with an infinite task." And the thought of immortality seems to have been as certain to him almost as existence itself. But even from us who survive him he cannot entirely vanish. He has sown thought seeds that will flourish in many hearts. He has helped to shape lives that will never entirely lose the nobler imprint he has given them. He has kindled the torch of ideals that will never wholly be extinguished.'

Dr. Adler then read the following poem by Swinburne:

Whoso takes the world's life on him and his own lays down,
He, dying so, lives.

Whoso bears the whole heaviness of the wronged world's weight
And puts it by,
It is well with him suffering, though he face man's fate;
How should he die?

Seeing death has no part in him any more, no power
Upon his head;
He has bought his eternity with a little hour,
And is not dead.

For an hour, if ye look for him, he is no more found,
For one hour's space;
Then ye lift up your eyes to him and behold him crowned,
A deathless face.

On the mountains of memory, by the world's wellsprings,
In all men's eyes,
Where the light of the life of him is on all past things,
Death only dies."

[admin]

CHAPTER 7: LETTERS TO HAVELOCK ELLIS

Mr. Havelock Ellis, who knew Davidson intimately while both were members of the New Fellowship in London, writes me from Carbis Water, Lelant, Cornwall, and sends me all the letters he received from him. Though they were thrown together for only a short period, Mr. Ellis saw a very characteristic aspect of Davidson, when he was making a valiant effort to affect the life of his time. He considered him a unique and magnetic personality rather than a great writer.

I have put together some extracts from these letters to Mr. Ellis, and add to them a chapter of reminiscences which the latter has sent to me. He wrote in April, 1903: "I was one of the three young men whom Thomas Davidson gathered around him in London twenty years since, constituting the nucleus from which, indirectly, the Fabian Society sprang. ... I have always considered him one of the most remarkable men I have known, though my own relationship with him was brief."

To Mr. Ellis, Davidson wrote from Chelsea on October 3, 1883:

"I do not know how you were affected by the discussion of last evening. As for me, it at once confirmed me in my belief in the need of a community, and showed clearly some of the most formidable difficulties in the way of such a thing; the want of a spiritual light, the childish prejudice against 'metaphysics,' the absence of whole-heartedness, the fear of ridicule. Kant and Comte have done their work, taken the sun out of life, and left men groping in darkness. A recent German book opens with the sentence, 'Kant must be forgotten,' and this I cordially echo. The present crude notions about metaphysics must be put away, and the fact clearly brought to light that without metaphysics even physics are meaningless, that that which appears also is, that beneath all seeming is that which seems. To me it is puerile to question this; but reactionary philosophies have brought many men to a different conclusion with what I cannot but consider a miserable result. You miss a positive basis in our little programme. The fact is there never can be any positive basis for anything but a metaphysical one, for the simple reason that all abiding reality is metaphysical; that is to say, lies behind the physical or sensuously phenomenal.

I hold that we know the metaphysical more clearly and more directly than the physical, and indeed know the physical only through it. I think, moreover, after last night's experience, we had better take the bull by the horns, and boldly say we accept the metaphysical basis. We gain nothing by compromise in this matter. You doubtless know that even J. S. Mill in his last days was forced to admit that without metaphysics we should never find a ground for anything. You are entirely right in saying that any attempt to build a system without new forces, that is, new metaphysical entities, is like building a house out of nothing. The religious basis which — whatever you may call it — you occupy, must, it seems to me, be metaphysical. Let us not, however, misunderstand this term by making it mean fantastical. It means simply the unchanging amid change, that which makes change possible. Change is utterly impossible except on the supposition that there is an unchanging subject of change. Let us say this, and then inquire what we know of this unchanging. I think we shall find that it is necessarily of the nature of spirit.

Would you be vexed if I recommended you to study Rosmini's works? Leaving out the dogmatic part of them, I think they are the gospel of future thought. With your freedom from prejudice, your desire to do the best you know, and your human sympathy, you would, I am certain, find great satisfaction in them, and be able to free yourself from the last remnant of that terrible monism from which hardly any English thinker escapes. In return, I shall read Hinton with the utmost care. As is often the case with a man who changes his position in midlife, he seems not to have seen the whole truth at any one time, but to have seen it in two pieces without the connecting bond. Is not this so?

I have heard of men not daring to call their souls their own, but I never knew a man before Mr. W. who openly professed that he did not. I think it is vain to try to work with men, however good, who have lost the religious sentiment."

"October 4. Since I wrote the above, I have had two most encouraging talks, one with Mr. Clarke, and one with Mr. Champion. Mr. Clarke is one of the thorough men, perfectly honest and simple, and he is with us. Mr. Champion was delightful, took the matter seriously, and promised to encourage his friends to go into the matter. Curiously enough, he and they have been thinking of the same thing. Champion is full of native religious feeling, and has some very practical notions. He took away my paper, the old programme, and your 'First Principles' to show to his friends, and will tell us shortly what is the result. As soon as I hear I shall arrange a meeting here, omitting the men of little faith. I am anxious to see you, and to bind again the broken threads of our progress." . . .

In another undated letter written from Chelsea shortly afterwards, the following occurs:

"It is all in vain to imagine that we can have correct practice without correct thinking, and correct thinking implies correct metaphysics. ... A life in which the deepest and highest thought was indifferent in relation to practice would be a life without intellectual endeavor, and without poetry. ... Is not the deepest of all bonds, and the purest intellectual sympathy, community of insight?"

Writing as one about to leave England and the circle of friends he had made in the New Fellowship, he said he "disdained all pretentions to leadership." Of one of the members he wrote: "There is a power of soul deep down in him, an infinite human tenderness that almost fascinates me. If you will work with him, you will find him a hero."

On October 20, 1883, he wrote:

"Since I saw you I have read most of Hinton's Man, and his Dwelling-place. Hinton was plainly a man of genius, and of a great soul; but he lacked analytical power, at least when that book was written. He insisted upon the eternity of the spirit, but could not see what was involved in that admission. He seemed to think that something might 'happen' to the eternal at death.

You think, and rightly, that your 'action must be true,' but you are wrong in thinking that that is synonymous with 'must be determined by things as they are now.' In the true there is no now. Your action can be true only when it relates to things as they are in their eternal nature. There is no 'true,' except with reference to the eternal. I would give much if I could make you see that. 'Is' itself has no meaning except as applied to the eternal. This is the reason why I keep repeating that we must build all moral and spiritual life upon the eternal and the metaphysical, and not upon the now or the then. Will you study Rosmini for a year or two? Will you give your spare time to him? If you do, I think you will see that he can reveal to you the 'unknown God' of Hinton. I have a note to-day from Mr. Channing, in which he speaks of Rosmini as 'the grandest, wisest, and profoundest philosopher of our age'; and he is right, Rosmini's analytical power was never equalled.

You can now guess my answer to your second query. I say the habits of every one, children as well as others, are to be regulated with reference to their eternal essence, and not merely with reference to an abstract now, a word which can have no meaning except in relation to eternity. And by eternity I mean not endlessness, but the correlate condition of time, that which makes time possible. The moral law reads, 'Act with reference to the eternal.'

I agree most cordially with you when you say that the recognized things are not the good things; but I am curious to know what you think the good things to be. I suspect you think they are the enjoyment of each passing 'now,' and entire self-forgetfulness. Here I cannot agree with you. To me they are the enjoyment of the eternal, and continual sacrifice of the temporal self to the eternal self. Morality means that, and nothing but that. But we must be careful not to fall into Buddhism and suppose that we are to sacrifice an eternal self to a monistic self in which all distinction is lost, and in which sacrifice of self would cease to be possible. Hinton continually falls into this grave error. The eternal is not the formless, and the unindividuated. It is the individuated, and eternally formed. You and I are eternal forms, whose inexhaustible taste with reference to each other is to penetrate each other through inexhaustible love and knowledge. 'God is love.' God is the loving, knowing interpretation of eternal forms. He is joy, life, light, 'letizia che trascende ogni dolzore.' [Google translate: joy that transcends all dolzore.] We must never forget that. He is the ideality of which we are the reality. But if the reality should cease, so likewise would the ideality. He is the object to which we are subjects, infinite in multitude. As I have said often, He is the 'law of being,' and in that law we live and move and have our being. These are the convictions that inspire me: they are my life. Without them I should not care to live at all; indeed I could not, in any wise sense, live at all. And if I can fully realize my eternity in this life, death will be of no consequence to me; indeed it is of very small consequence to me now. When a man has realized his eternity, flesh and blood are only obstacles to him, to his best efficiency. . . ."

"75 Via Nazionale, Roma,
November 30, 1883.

. . . That this world is the only actual and eternal one is so plainly not true that I cannot imagine any serious man maintaining that it is. Either he is talking paradox intentionally, or else he does not know the meaning of the word he is using. Mr. Hinton plainly was in the latter predicament. . . . The truth is 'this world,' — the world of phenomena and change — is not actual at all, much less is it eternal. . . . We must distinguish the actual from the real, the eternal from the continuous. ... To say that 'everything of real spiritual value may be attained in this world' is to use words without meaning. The only thing of spiritual value is eternal self-possession, and to say that this can be attained in time is as untrue as anything can be. What is the use of an attainment that is lost the instant it is attained? For whom, or for what, is it attained? Are we mere rockets whose aim is to rise to a certain brilliant height, only to fall back instantly, like a stick into the dark? Those who say so are utterly and totally blind to the true life of the soul. . . .

That the moral law is 'Act with reference to the eternal' is to me the deepest and most momentous of all truths. . . . We must withdraw into the eternal, and work from that into endless time. For eternity is by no means endless time. Eternity is that in which there is no succession possible: endless time is the form of infinite succession. I do not see how two things could be more different, or how any difference could be more clear.

If the New Life means the destruction of habits then I have no desire to live it. My great aim in life is to form habits, permanent habits; e.g. habits of kindliness, habits of truthfulness, habits of openness, habits of painstaking, habits of breaking up habits when they are no longer useful. . . .

Life is not mere emotion, nor is there in emotion anything moral or immoral, else the lower animals would be as moral or immoral as man. There is an intellectual life as well as an emotive one, and it is the former alone that is distinctively human. I know how strong the tendency is, in these sentimental dallying days of ours, to lay stress upon emotion, and all forms of passivity, to the detriment of intelligence, insight, and all forms of heroic activity. This is even the curse of our time. . . . We cannot see what is essential without metaphysics. Without metaphysics there is no knowledge of essence, and we float upon a sea of unanalyzed sentiment and unrecognized tradition, without helm or compass. . . ."

On February 18, 1884, he wrote from Rome that "to confound the eternal with the phenomenal is to me the worst of heresies."

Some reminiscences of his friend furnished by Mr. Havelock Ellis follow in the next chapter.

[admin]

CHAPTER 8: REMINISCENCES BY HAVELOCK ELLIS

It was in the autumn of 1883, when I was a medical student, that my friend Percival Chubb spoke to me with enthusiasm of the approaching visit to London of one Thomas Davidson, who had just published a book containing a new interpretation of the Parthenon, and was now arriving from Italy where he had been spending the summer in a house he had taken in Capri. A little while before, Chubb had spent some time with Davidson, and at this period regarded him as destined to become the moral regenerator of the modern world. It appeared that Davidson was willing — even eager — to gather around him a few young men in London, and to expound his ideas of "the new life." I soon met him at Chubb's rooms, and this proved the first of a series of meetings at which Davidson met various young men, — seldom more than one or two at a time, — many of whom afterwards became better known. Davidson was most at his ease in the presence of two or three young men whose attitude he believed to be sympathetic and receptive, and to whom he could set forth his views with a chance of finding active and intelligent disciples. His doctrine — at this time at all events — may be stated in a few words, as the absolute necessity of founding practical life on philosophical conceptions; of living a simple, strenuous, intellectual life, so far as possible communistically, and on a basis of natural religion. It was Rosminianism, one may say, carried a step further. He appeared to advantage on these occasions; his vivid personality, his intense earnestness, restrained eloquence, and personal magnetism were all brought to the service of his convictions concerning the necessity for a metaphysical basis to life. I use the word "conviction" deliberately. At bottom he, consciously and avowedly, based his metaphysical theory on an emotional conviction; and I still recall the fervor with which he would solemnly assure us that the universe answered to his description of it.

It was on his conviction, not on his knowledge, that Davidson asked us to rely. Of his learning he never made any parade; and I do not think it even occurred to me, at that time, that he possessed any unusual degree of learning. I noticed, indeed, that he was always interested in every subject I chanced to bring before him. I was at that time giving much attention to the writings, published and unpublished, of James Hinton; he was also interested in Hinton, and anxious to read a paper I had written on him, a paper which he pronounced — and I am not sure that there was not here a touch of deprecation — "very judicial." I chanced to refer to my friend and neighbor Roden Noel. "I am always hearing about Roden Noel," he said; "tell me about Roden Noel." Again, I had made an analysis of In Memoriam a few years previously. That poem, he declared, had been a profound study of his own; and contained, indeed, the whole of his philosophy.

It so happened that William Morris was coming to read portions of his Sigurd at one of the meetings of a sort of ethical society, in which I was interested. Davidson admired Morris, and we asked him to preside at the meeting. I well remember the characteristically earnest and fervid way in which Davidson told how he had first read Morris's Earthly Paradise in a remote district of America; and the singular impressiveness of an incidental but very characteristic passage, in his remarks concerning the depths of misery to which he has sunk who has become "aweary of the sun." There was no affectation in this; it was merely an aspect of Davidson's eager, devouring interest in all the manifestations of life. I failed then to realize that had my own interests been different, or wider, I should still have found Davidson equally well-informed, and equally anxious to learn more.

Doubtless he was not a scholar in the scientific sense of the term. He recalls, rather, those men of the Renaissance of whom Giordano Bruno was the supreme type, wandering philosophers who spent their lives in going from one great center of thought to another, devoured by intellectual passion, equally eager to learn and to teach. . . .

I met him at a later date when passing through London on one of his mysterious missions, this time to Constantinople; and I remained associated with the Fellowship of the New Life, — a movement for putting social life so far as possible on an ethical basis, — which had grown out of Davidson's meetings with young men already mentioned. From the Fellowship of the New Life there split off, soon after Davidson left London, — as an attempt to be more practical, and more definitely socialistic, — the Fabian Society, which was destined to have a much more vigorous public life than the smaller parent association. There was no antagonism between the two societies, but with the Fabian Society Davidson himself had little or no sympathy, although he was, indirectly, the founder of it.

He failed to make me a disciple, but he taught me a lesson I have never since unlearned. Before I met him I thought that philosophical beliefs could be imparted, and shared; that men could, as it were, live under the same metaphysical dome. Davidson enabled me to see that a man's metaphysics, if genuinely his, is really a most intimate part of his own personal temperament; and that no one can really identify himself with another's philosophy, however greatly he may admire it, or sympathize with it. This was a valuable lesson to learn, though it was not the lesson that Davidson desired to teach.

Davidson was never able to estimate accurately the inherent obstacles to the progress of his own schemes, nor to realize how they appeared to other minds. It was thus inevitable that he should meet with frequent disappointments and disillusions, although his energetic temperament enabled him to preserve an attitude of optimism. I can well believe — though I have no definite personal knowledge — that this characteristic of his sanguine temperament sometimes led to misadventures. But, while he was never accurately adjusted to his environment, and constantly liable either to shock or to be shocked by it, he had no deliberate love of freedom. When he startled the peaceful school of philosophy at Concord by his comparison of the irony of Zola to the irony of Christ, he was himself surprised at the commotion he produced. He probably conceived that he was giving expression to an obvious verity.

It was as a personal force, rather than as a profound intellect, that Davidson made his mark on his time. It was this temperamental character that gave a curious, almost unique, imprint to his personality. He was well aware of his own emotional tendencies: I remember that he once referred to the attraction that mysticism had for him, as an attraction he had to guard against. Many of his characteristics were doubtless due to a certain struggle with his own exuberant emotionalism. His sense of the immense importance of education, training, and discipline, was rooted here. Doubtless, also, a certain formality in his literary work showed that he wished to keep a curb on himself. But the result was that Davidson never reached self-expression in literature. His personality — with that specially perfervid Scottish quality, which he possessed in so high a degree — was much more potent than his works indicate. The enthusiasm and conviction, with which he advocated more or less impossible and unfamiliar ideals, could not fail to exert a stimulating influence on all those who came near him. He helped to teach those who listened to him to think, even though it were to think that he was wrong, and to think why he was wrong. Few men, indeed, of his time were permitted to play a part so like to that of those early Greek philosophers whom he loved so greatly.