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⁹ The Italian pragmatist Giovanni Papini distilled Schiller's contribution to thought in precisely these terms. Schiller's philosophy, wrote Papini, was apposite to the “new spiritual age,” since Schiller had discovered that Protagoras' famous saying—“man is the measure of all things”—alone can capture the logic underlying the radical shifts that society was undergoing in the modern era. Philosophy needed to provide a statement making sense of the fact that natural processes could be “sped up” by science, and that the natural order could be manipulated by the wills and desires of humans using scientific methods. Schiller, according to Papini, provided such a contemporary statement by revealing the “plasticity of speculative organisms,” and the character of truth as “changeable, plastic, dynamic.” See Giovanni Papini, “F. C. S. Schiller,” in Papini, Four and Twenty Minds: Essays by Giovanni Papini, selected and trans. by Ernest Hatch Wilkins (New York, 1922), 82–9, at 87–8, 86, 85.

¹⁰ Schiller quoted in Slosson, Edwin E., Six Major Prophets (Boston, 1917), 194.Google Scholar

¹¹ My interpretation does not obviate the casting of pragmatism as a liberal-democratic political philosophy, which grew out of pragmatism's anti-foundationalism and its view of social and political life as an open-ended rational and public inquiry, but it does question the view that pragmatism is inherently liberal-democratic. For liberal-democratic readings of pragmatism, see Shalin, Dmitri N., Pragmatism and Democracy: Studies in History, Social Theory, and Progressive Politics (New Brunswick, 2011)Google Scholar; Dryzek, John, “Pragmatism and Democracy: In Search of Deliberative Publics,” Journal of Speculative Politics, 18/1 (2004), 72–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Knight, Jack and Johnson, James, The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism (Princeton, 2011)Google Scholar; Bernstein, Richard J., The Pragmatic Turn (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar; Anderson, Charles W., Pragmatic Liberalism (Chicago, 1994).Google Scholar

¹² Noel Annan has shown that Jowett, who was one of the first dons to introduce Hegelian idealism to Britain, was a consummate eccentric. See Annan, Noel, The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses (London, 1999).Google Scholar

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¹⁵ Timbs, John, English Eccentrics and Eccentricities (London, 1875)Google Scholar—this book came out in new editions until the end of the nineteenth century.

¹⁶ Bluemel, Kristin, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London (New York, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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¹⁸ Skorupski, John quoted in Matar, Anat, Modernism and the Language of Philosophy (London and New York, 2006), 1.Google Scholar

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²⁰ Ibid., 368, original emphasis.

²¹ Rainer Emig, in a study on Carlyle as an eccentric, usefully suggests that the eccentric ought to be understood as on the fringes of conventional society and intellectual traditions, while never transgressing their boundaries. Emig, Rainer, “Eccentricity Begins at Home: Carlyle's Centrality in Victorian Thought,” Textual Studies, 17/2 (2003), 379–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Eccentrics, in other words, were half-hearted in their attacks on conventions. They can thus be viewed as aspiring to save conventions by radically modifying them in light of modernity, rather than replacing them with entirely different kinds of conventions.

²² George J. Stack has made a compelling case for the Nietzschean influence on Schiller concerning this aspect, and indeed very many other aspects, such as an emphasis on the aesthetic, social, and psychic origins of seemingly pure scientific and logical concepts. See Stack, George J., “Nietzsche's Influence on Pragmatic Humanism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 20/4 (1982), 369–406.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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²⁷ Matar, Modernism, 1.

²⁸ For an intellectual history of British socialism see Mark Bevir, The Making of British Socialism (New Haven, 2011).

²⁹ Schiller, F. C. S., Cassandra or the Future of the British Empire (London, 1926), 34–5.Google Scholar

³⁰ Ibid., 38–9.

³¹ Ibid., 65–66.

³² Ronald Hyam, “The British Empire in the Edwardian Era,” in Brown, Judith M. and Roger Louis, W. M., eds., The Oxford History of the British Empire , vol. 4, The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), 47–64, 48Google ScholarPubMed

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³⁴ See e.g. Freeden, Michael, Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought (New Haven, 2005)Google Scholar, especially chaps. 1 through 7.

³⁵ There were many differences, even on the strictly scientific level: Donald Mackenzie, “Sociobiologies in Competition: The Biometrician–Mendelian Debate,” in Charles Webster, ed., Biology, Medicine and Society 1840–1940 (Cambridge, 1981), 243–89, at 262.

³⁶ The “fit and unfit biological stocks” were, typically, conceptually rendered in an incoherent hierarchy comprising, from the bottom up, African, Asian, and European races. The European race, in turn, was typically divided into its own national hierarchy, where the nation to which the eugenicist who was constructing the hierarchy happened to belong came out on top: Britain if the eugenicist was British (and English if he was English), German if he was German, and so on. Within the nation, a hierarchy was constructed typically comprising, again from the bottom up, the physically “degenerate,” the “feeble-minded,” the urban working classes, the middle classes, and the aristocracy.

³⁷ Searle, Eugenics, 27.

³⁸ Schiller, F. C. S, Riddles of the Sphinx: A Study in the Philosophy of Humanism (London, 1910), 114 Google Scholar, see also 225.

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⁴² See the essays in Charles Webster, ed., Biology, Medicine and Society 1840–1940 (Cambridge, 1981).

⁴³ Schiller, Eugenics, 1.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 207.

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⁴⁶ Freeden, “Eugenics,” 666–7.

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⁴⁸ Schiller, Humanism, ix.

⁴⁹ Abel, The Pragmatic Humanism of F. C. S. Schiller; McDermid, The Varieties of Pragmatism; Pietarinen, “Remarks”; Putnam, Pragmatism; John R. Shook, “F. C. S. Schiller and European Pragmatism,” in John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis, eds., A Companion to Pragmatism (Oxford, 2006), 44–54; Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, 1982).

⁵⁰ Schiller, F. C. S., Formal Logic: A Scientific and Social Problem (London, 1912).Google Scholar

⁵¹ See e.g. Dewey, John, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York, 1939)Google Scholar. For a critical exposition of Dewey's logic see Thayer, H. S., The Logic of Pragmatism: An Examination of John Dewey's Logic (New York, 1952).Google Scholar

⁵² Passmore, John, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (London, 1966)Google Scholar, in particular chap. 7: “Some Critics of Formal Logic,” at 156–73.

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⁵⁴ Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 350. See also Porrovecchio, F. C. S. Schiller.

⁵⁵ Schiller, Riddles of the Sphinx, 142.

⁵⁶ Schiller, “Axioms as Postulates,” 57. Though I do not mention it in this article, advances in physics and biology were important in persuading Schiller to take this stance. Concepts such as “matter,” “force,” “causality,” “origin,” and “substance” took on whole new meanings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and these meanings allowed for a belief in the essential indetermination of entities such as facts or values. See especially Schiller, Riddles of the Sphinx.

⁵⁷ Schiller, “Axioms as Postulates,” 61, original emphasis. For an intriguing theoretical–historical attempt to trace the overdetermined and contradictory structure of the subject of modernity see Cascardi, Anthony J., The Subject of Modernity (Cambridge, 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁶⁰ Schiller, F. C. S., Logic for Use: An Introduction to the Voluntarist Theory of Knowledge (London, 1929), 99.Google Scholar

⁶¹ Ibid., 50.

⁶² Ibid., 54, original emphasis.

⁶³ Ibid., 63, original emphasis.

⁶⁴ Schiller, Riddles of the Sphinx, 132–133.

⁶⁵ Schiller, “Are All Men Mortal?”, 207.

⁶⁶ Mark. K. Porrovecchio, “The Curious Case of F.C.S Schiller,” Society for Psychical Research, at www.spr.ac.uk/main/article/curious-case-f-c-s-schiller, last accessed 8 March 2014.

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⁶⁸ Thakur, S. C., ed., Philosophy and Psychical Research (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Oppenheim, Janet, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar; James, William, Essays in Psychical Research (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar; René Haynes, The Society for Psychical Research, 1882–1982: A History (London, 1982); Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago, 2004).

⁶⁹ Schiller, “The Progress of Psychical Research,” 372–3, 387.

⁷⁰ Ibid., 376.

⁷¹ Ibid., 376–7.

⁷² Ibid., 374.

⁷³ H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society (New Brunswick, 2002); Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (New York, 2012).

⁷⁴ Schiller, Formal Logic, all quotes from 397–8, original emphasis.

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⁸³ Schiller, Logic for Use, 105–106.

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⁸⁸ This was a common theme in European aristocratic revivalism, but justified in different, sometimes radically different, ways. One of these ways was that of Oscar Levy, a Jewish German intellectual who successfully introduced Nietzsche into England. See Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool, 2002). Others include reactionary intellectuals of fin de siècle Vienna, who, in the words of Carl Schorske, “utilized aristocratic style, gesture, or pretension to mobilize a mass of followers still hungry for a leadership that based its authority on something older and deeper than the power of rational argument and empirical evidence.” Schorske quoted in Joseph Mali, Mythistory: The Making of Modern Historiography (Chicago, 2003), 17.

⁸⁹ Schiller quoted in Slosson, Six Major Prophets, 226.

⁹⁰ Schiller, Tantalus, 59.

⁹¹ Schiller, Eugenics, 60, original emphasis.

⁹² Schiller, F. C. S., “Review of Social Pathology ,” Eugenics Review, 4/3 (1912), 317–19Google Scholar, at 317–18, original emphasis.

⁹³ Schiller, Eugenics, 29.

⁹⁴ Freeden, “Eugenics.'” Eugenics, moreover, was a transnational movement, but one differentiated by national and disciplinary particularities. See Schuster, Edgar, “The First International Eugenics Congress,” Eugenics Review, 4/3 (1912), 223–56Google Scholar.

⁹⁵ Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London, 2005), 72 Google Scholar.

⁹⁶ Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Ina, “Building a British Superman: Physical Culture in Interwar Britain,” Journal of Contemporary History, 41/4 (2006), 595–610 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 596.

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⁹⁹ A similar point is made by Freeden, Michael, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1976), 11.Google Scholar

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