The following two articles commemorate the distinguished British Hegelian philosopher and scholar, who died last year. The first is the text of the Address given on 6 October 1979 at the Memorial Service for G.R.G. Mure in the Chapel of Merton College, Oxford (the College where he was first Tutor in Philosophy and Fellow, and then Warden). The author, Lord Trend, was a pupil of Mure at Merton and ended a distinguished career in the civil service as the Secretary to the British Cabinet. He is now Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford.
The second article was specially written for the Bulletin by W.H. Walsh, who succeeded Mure as Tutor in Philosophy at Merton. W.H. Walsh has kindly agreed to prepare a bibliography of Mure's writings for the Autumn/Winter issue of the Bulletin.
I had left Oxford a good many years before Geoffrey Mure became the Warden of Merton; and he had retired before I returned to the University. During his Wardenship I was able to see much less of him, and of the College, than I would have wished; and I am far less qualified than many others to speak of the debt which Merton owes him for the sixteen years in which he presided over its fortunes. I know that the debt was very great, no less great than the pride which he himself felt in discharging the Warden's office; but I must leave it to others, at other times and in other ways, to bear witness in detail to the nature, and the scope, of the many services which he, and his wife Molly, rendered this House. I want now simply to try to pay a tribute, of love, admiration and gratitude, to the man himself, a man to whom I, in common with so many others, owe so much, a man from whom I learned, genuinely learned, as from nobody else in my life. Inevitably, this must be largely a matter of personal recollection. But everybody will have brought his own memories of Geoffrey to this memorial service; and, if my words help to quicken those memories into fresh life, perhaps the picture which we shall construct between us will be the memorial which he himself would have most wished to have.
