Shadworth Hollway Hodgson and William Kingdon Clifford

Following on from a brief consideration of the Metaphysical Society, this chapter considers two highly original empiricist thinkers who used their membership as an opportunity to develop bold new metaphysical schemes. The chapter begins by outlining Hodgson’s unique methodology of descriptive empiricism, whose consequences are then explored via his theory of causality (or ‘real conditions’), his construction of external material reality, and his position about things-in-themselves. Lastly it is considered how his strict empiricism nonetheless leads him to embrace the curious notion of a ‘unseen universe’ of significance for both immortality and religion. The discussion of Clifford examines his empiricism, his phenomenalism, and his views about causation and religion, before examining in detail his paper ‘On the Nature of Things-in-themselves’, which (it is argued) brings him to another form of unseen reality.

Hodgson, Clifford, and the Unseen Universe

The Metaphysical Society debates were largely between those espousing religious commitment to the transcendent and those defending scientific naturalism. However, this paper highlights a third strain of thought to be found among the Society’s proceedings, one which regarded philosophy – and especially metaphysics – as an autonomous discipline with its own method and authority. To this way of thinking the proper project of the Society was precisely to use such independent and constructive philosophy to seek for reconciliation between the opposed views of religion and science. The paper focuses on the pair of Society members who most strongly embody this point of view, Shadworth Hodgson (1832–1912) and William Kingdon Clifford, (1845–79) analysing their several contributions and, in particular, comparing their different responses to the theory set out in Peter Guthrie Tait and Balfour Stewart’s influential work, The Unseen World. (1875) Both thinkers see merit in the idea of an unseen realm. However, both relativize this ‘unseen’ to a point of view, thereby ruling out of court that which is utterly and completely unknowable. In this respect they are linked together in common opposition to one further widespread philosophy of the day, agnosticism. From an historical perspective neither Hodgson nor Clifford met with much popular or lasting success in their attempts at finding a philosophical reconciliation between religion and science, and the paper concludes by contrasting their efforts with those of the British Idealists who, seemingly, were able to achieve much greater recognition in what was in many respects a similarly motivated ambition.

Evolution, Ethics, and the Metaphysical Society, 1869–1875

This chapter seeks to chart the lively debate about the evolutionary origins and development of morality as it occurred at the Metaphysical Society, a debate that began with the first paper delivered at the Society in 1869 and, after the intervention of several subsequent papers on the topic, came to an end in 1875. Proponents of an evolutionary ethics included the Darwinians John Lubbock and William Kingdon Clifford, while the critics included the journalist and editor Richard Holt Hutton, the classicist Alexander Grant, and the moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick. Much of the debate focused on competing interpretations of the historical record and the nature of historical evidence itself. For the critic of an evolutionary morality, the evidence for the origins and development of morality had to be sought in written records; for the proponent, the evidence needed to be sought much further back in time, in the era known as ‘prehistory’. This important distinction brought to the fore a related area of contention, namely the relationship between civilized European and contemporary aboriginal societies, and what that relationship meant for understanding the deep history of human moral development. The debate largely came to an end when Sidgwick challenged the unjustifiable normative claims that were often embedded in evolutionary descriptions of the origins and development of morality. He showed that a supposedly naturalist account of ethical principles was just as fraught as was the intuitionist account it sought to critique.

‘The ethics of belief’ and belief about ethics: William Kingdon Clifford at the Metaphysical Society

As a member of the Victorian-era Metaphysical Society, W. K. Clifford contributed to debate about the prospects for morality in the absence of religion. Clifford thought its chances good. He presented a paper offering a ‘scientific’ approach to moral theory. In my discussion, I explore his proposal, using it to gain interpretative leverage on a paper he delivered before the Society only a year later, ‘The ethics of belief’. I set aside the quarrel with religion so prominent in this influential essay and discount its evidentialist epistemology, the better to reveal it for what it is: a powerful exercise in moral suasion.

De scheepseigenaar en de gelovige: William Clifford over God, bewijs en doxastische verantwoordelijkheid

At the end of the nineteenth century, in his famous essay ‘The Ethics of Belief’ the well-known mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford offered a powerful argument against religious beliefs. This article first gives an extensive analysis of Clifford’s evidentialist argument by placing it against the background of his evidentialist epistemology. Second, some arguments of William James, Clifford’s most famous critic, are expounded and criticised. Although there is some plausibility to these arguments, they are insufficient to refute Clifford’s evidentialism. Third, the author presents some problems for Clifford’s evidentialism, having to do with evidentialism as a moral thesis and with doxastic involuntarism, and offers some new arguments against Clifford’s evidentialist argument. Clifford’s argument against belief in God, as it stands, turns out to be untenable.