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Edward Caird

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

Robert Mark Wenley
Robert Mark Wenley
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

The career of a man who devotes his life to reflection upon philosophy and religion, whose active work consists in teaching these subjects and in writing about them, is little likely to furnish incidents meet for flamboyant biography. But it may well be a source of profound influence, destined to affect the culture of a people or an age long after events that splash noisily upon the momentary surface have sunk into oblivion. Now Caird constituted an exceptional force, particularly in that native home of English-speaking philosophy and religion, Scotland; as such he merits memorial in these pages. Moreover, we must remember that, although, to his great regret, expressed to me often, he never visited the United States, his spirit has wrought strongly on this continent. Years ago, when I was a young Fellow at Glasgow, I received a letter from an American philosopher which concluded with words that have always stuck in my memory, “We look to Glasgow for light and leading.” Here Glasgow happened to be a synonym for the brothers Caird.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , April 1909 , pp. 115 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1909

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References

1 See Addison, W. Innes, The Snell Exhibitions from the University of Glasgow to Balliol College, Oxford, 1697–1900. (New York, Macmillan Co., 1901.)Google Scholar

2 Cf. Articles by me: “The Gifford Lectureships” (in The Open Court, February, 1900); “Philosophy of Religion and the Endowment of Natural Theology” (in The Monist, 10 1901).

3 The slum district of the city, in which the university buildings were situated then.

4 Salvation Here and Hereafter. (Macmillan & Co., 1877.)

5 David Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer, I, 87 (American edition).

6 Cf. Deontology, I, 39.

7 Cf. Dictionary of National Biography, XLVIII, 270–271.

8 William Knight, Memoir of John Nichol, p. 154.

9 William Knight, Memoir of John Nichol, pp. 148–149.

10 Professor Saintsbury, “Caird at Merton” (Glasgow Herald, November 6th, 1908).

11 Many would agree, I think, that high tide was marked by the publication of Essays in Philosophical Criticism (1883); see bibliography, p. 137.

12 This delicate situation has been discussed with an admirable combination of tact and firmness by Prof. J. H. Muirhead, of Birmingham, in “The Oxford Chairs of Philosophy,” in the Contemporary Review, LXXIV, 724 f. (1898). This article contains much information that cannot fail to interest the cisatlantic academic world; I suggest, however, that it would hardly be wise to proceed to thank God that we are not even as this publican! For there is an exceedingly strong tradition in Oxford against the appointment of the ‘Head of a House’ to a professorship, although a professor who is elected ‘Head of a House’ is under no obligation to resign his chair.

13 Cf. my article “Some Lights on the British Idealistic Movement,” in the American Journal of Theology, January, 1901.

14 Cf. Memoir by R. L. Nettleship, in Works of Thomas Hill Green, vol. III (1888). A remarkable piece of biography “from the inside out.”

15 Cf. E. Abbott and L. Campbell, Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, passim.

16 Cf. Biography (by Caird), in W. Wallace, Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology and Ethics (1898).

17 Cf. Biographical Sketch, A. C. Bradley and G. R. Benson, in The Philosophical Lectures and Remains of R. L. Nettleship, 2 vols. (1907).

18 Cf. Memoir (by Jowett), in Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England (Rivingtons, 1884).

19 This decline received striking emphasis at the time of Caird's death from the jaunty nonchalance evidently deemed the proper attitude towards the event by a London weekly. One may hazard the remark, it is well for the Mother Land that she produces Scottish philosophers sometimes. Otherwise cockney journalists might delude her into the belief that the sound of Bow Bells coincides with the music of the spheres.

20 Pages 35–36.

21 The same thing holds always. To take a contemporary case: I find my advanced students of philosophy of religion puzzled constantly by the strong protestant note sounded so frequently in the works of German writers, Pfleiderer and Harnack, for example. We do not need to strike it—and thereby hangs a most important tale.

22 Hegel, pp. 223, 224.

23 The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, I, xiv.

24 Cf. Blackwood's Magazine, March, 1840. It should be noted that Coleridge exerted much director influence upon philosophy in this country than in Britain; witness James Marsh, Hickok, Tappan, Shedd, Bushnell, and Bascom, to name no others. Some American scholar ought to elucidate this movement thoroughly. Perhaps it may not be too presumptuous in a foreigner to say that, after Edwards, Marsh and Tappan are the most original minds in philosophy that the United States has produced so far.

25 E. Caird, Essays, I, 248.

26 Cf. The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, I, lxvii.

27 E. Caird, Essays, I, 256.