This post completes our two-part essay tracing the early reception of Hegel in Britain back to the influence of James Mylne.
Mylne’s Theological Legacy in Glasgow and Idealism
We have shown that James Mylne's philosophy contained elements of Christian doctrine and a high view of reason similar to those of his contemporary Hegel, though on a basis of the belief that knowledge derives from sense experience. In addition to the future businessmen and academics who were students of his moral philosophy class at Glasgow University, local clergymen who attended Mylne’s classes were another conduit of German ideas.
Amongst these were Robert Candlish (1806-73), later the principal of New
College, Edinburgh and a leading influence in the Free Church of Scotland. Candlish studied at Glasgow University for
five years from 1818 and attended Mylne’s ordinary class (“ethica juniores”) in
1821-22, winning essay prizes on “the controversy between nominalists and
realists” and “the Roman Dictatorship”. [1]
He addressed theological concerns of Mylne’s lectures in his books An
Inquiry into the Completeness and Extent of the Atonement (1845) and Reason
and Revelation (1864). We may perhaps trace in part the feeling Robert
Rainy identifies in him for “the significance which detailed beliefs must have
as springs of action and conditions of life” [2]
to Mylne’s philosophy.
John McLeod
Campbell, author The Nature of the Atonement (1856), in whose work
theistic rationalism is modified by a strain of Wordsworthean and Scriptural
visions, was a transitional figure between the era of Mylne and the work of the
later Glasgow idealists. [3] The Glasgow idealists John and Edward Caird publicly honoured McLeod Campbell late in his life.
John Morell Mackenzie (d1843) won top prize in
Mylne’s class in 1831 and after practicing as a minister taught at Wardlaw’s
Congregationalist Academy in Glasgow. George Gilfillan thought Mackenzie’s
knowledge of German philosophy would have suited him for teaching moral
philosophy, but Mackenzie died young in the Pegasus
shipwreck. [4]
Another Glasgow student, Norman MacLeod (1812-72), later a prominent church
minister in Barony parish in Glasgow and a journalist who toured in America,
also passed through Mylne’s class as part of the Arts curriculum at Glasgow. [5]
According to JS Blackie, MacLeod wrote “classical Gaelic prose that shines
above the rest as the moon above the lesser lights”. [6]
In 1834, he travelled in Germany, where he caught up with the class reading of
Mylne, Cicero’s De Officiis, [7]
before returning to Glasgow in 1835 to study theology, having become acquainted
with German theology. [8]
He was involved in restoring the Christian year to the Scottish church, an
example of the “catholicity” of outlook he brought to the Established Kirk. He is another personal link between Mylne and
the Glasgow Idealists, John Caird having spoken a eulogy of him at the Barony
Church. [9]
The influence of Victor Cousin
 |
| Victor Cousin |
Despite widespread interest,
the interpretation of German philosophical texts was universally acknowledged
to be a challenge. Several
Scottish-influenced observers thus looked to the leading French historian of philosophy Victor Cousin for
preliminary evaluations of German philosophy.
For example, Hamilton’s first article for the Edinburgh Review was cast as a
review of Cousin. Cousin was a
charismatic orator and for many years virtually a philosophical dictator in
France. He was important, though not
alone, in introducing German philosophy to a French-speaking audience. For this
reason, his limitations as a historian are of importance. Cousin dismisses the constructive empiricism
of Condillac, [10]
whose principles he identifies with the philosophes
whose views led to the French revolution.
He sees western philosophy developing in national traditions, of which
Reid’s common sense and Kant’s critical philosophy are the Scottish and German
expressions and France, particularly his own classroom, the crucible of a new
eclectic synthesis. The expulsion of
Hume from the Scottish philosophical Pantheon was thus the work, not of Dugald
Stewart, but of Cousin, later followed by James McCosh and John Veitch. [11]
In Scottish terms, Cousin’s constraining views of national tradition could only
contribute to the neglect of Mylne, who associated himself with Condillac and the moderate
Republican tradition of Destutt de Tracy. However, as late as 1870, a French
guest of newly appointed Professor of Logic John Veitch related the surprising
neglect of Reid in Glasgow to the influence of French philosophical ideas
mediated by Mylne. [12]
The British historian of philosophy JD Morell, whom we have seen attended Glasgow,
travelled on to Germany where he listened to lectures and “spent some months in
reading the standard works of the great masters”, which he felt “gradually
became intelligible”. However, unable to
relate them to his own satisfaction to the Scottish and English thought he
knew, he turned to eclecticism. He continues:
to gain light therefore,
upon these points, I turned my attention to France, where I found, or thought
that I found, in the writings of Cousin, and others of the modern eclectics,
the germs of certain great principles, upon which a comparison of all the
philosophical systems of the present age could be advantageously instituted. [13]
As we shall see, a similar path may have been trod by one of Mylne’s colleagues in Glasgow, John Pringle Nichol.
John Pringle Nichol (1804-59)
 |
| John Pringle Nichol |
The journey from Mylne to the Glasgow Idealists
passes through Professor of Astronomy at Glasgow College, John Pringle Nichol
who was said to have been “thoroughly versed in all the phases and disputes of
Scotch philosophy”. [14]
He knew Mylne’s philosophy well, having offered at one point to conduct Mylne’s
moral philosophy class. [15]
JP Nichol received students in his home and his ideas would have percolated
down through him or his son, who was one of the leading idealists. Contemporaries spoke too of his influence on
public opinion, comparing his oratory to that of Thomas Chalmers, particularly
when he spoke on their shared theme of astronomy. [16]
Like Mylne, Nichol had studied for the ministry.
Nichol also shared Mylne’s reformist views and his
interests in political economy and popular education, though his studies of
political economy preceded his encounter with Mylne. Some of his observations reflect Mylne’s
views. He wrote, for example:
It needs not, for instance, that one live long amid any energetic society, to witness the fall, one after one, of systems of thought [...] Beliefs pass away, merely through effect of a fresher and more piercing glance at their first principles. [17]
Although Reid does not deny intellectual progress,
Nichol’s view is that of Mylnean inquiry rather than Reidian common sense.
Nichol similarly criticises mathematics as an educational exercise, owing to
the fixity of its first principles, and moral theory in abstraction from factual
investigation. John Stuart Mill
expressed agreement with Nichol on philosophical method on the basis of
unpublished letters from Nichol, [18]
which indicates the latter’s empiricist position.
Nichol knew sufficient German to read the
contemporary German astronomical journals [19]
and he had an interest in Kant and Herder whom he read in translation. [20]
Nichol had travelled in Germany and clearly had some knowledge of German
philosophy. [21]
In this, he was said to have “gone farther” with “the Coleridgean and German
metaphysics” than John Stuart Mill, [22]
whilst disapproving of Coleridge politically more than did Mill. [23]
His better knowledge of French and relationship with
the Strasbourg philosopher, theologian and educational theorist Joseph Willm
(1790-1853) make it likely that Nichol’s interest in German thought was
mediated by French sources. Nichol
endorsed the educational views of Willm, whose book on The Education of the
People (1843) he translated in 1847 with a long introduction. [24]
Willm was also associated with Victor Cousin. [25]
Nichol certainly wrote what is virtually a condensed history of philosophy in
the form of contributions to the Cyclopaedia
of Biography (1854), [26]
in which his views of Condillac and Hegel mirror those of Cousin. Willm was amongst the first to introduce
Hegel to a French audience in his Essai sur la Philosophie de Hegel
(1836). [27]
His other principal works are an essay on nationality and philosophy prefaced
to his translation of Schelling’s Judgement on Cousin (1835) [28]
and a four volume History of German Philosophy from Kant to Hegel
(1847-48). [29]
In the former, he presents Descartes and Condillac as the archetypal French
philosophers from whom Cousin had created his ‘eclecticism’; and he reproaches
Scottish writers with neglect of the continent. We may illustrate the
contemporary importance of Willm by his influence on the French socialist Pierre
Joseph Proudhon (1809-64) from Besançon in Franche-Comté, for Proudhon’s early
work was already influenced by a basic knowledge of Hegel, as was his Philosophy
of Poverty, or System of Economic Contradictions (1846). [30]
Proudhon said:
My real masters, I mean those who give rise to the most fruitful ideas in me, are three in number: the Bible first of all, then Adam Smith, and lastly Hegel.” [31]
He also said that he relied on French commentaries
for his knowledge of Hegel and of these he singles out Willm’s work. [32]
It may thus be that Willm, based in Strasbourg, the capital city of bilingual
Alsace, inadvertently played a role in awakening Nichol’s interest in German
thought and hence, through Nichol’s son, in the origins of the Glasgow idealist
movement. [33]
In an expansive introduction, Nichol endorses Willm’s
view that there is a general education of the citizen, whose aim is “to draw
out man into freedom” [34]
and which is distinct in its object from professional training. The effect of this education on the on the
mind, he supposes, should be “so to inform it of the various activities around
it that – as it passes into adolescence and mingles, as a co-agent, with those
activities – it may do so freely, and without any feeling to being repressed.” [35]
To this end, he advocates that school discipline be enforced without personal
anger on the part of the teacher. A
sense of the unity of the mind is also apparent when Nichol writes that: “the
structure of the human Spirit is of a kind too delicate to permit of any
sundering or suppression of its separate parts”, [36]
instancing the calming moral effects of viewing a sunset or a mountain. In these respects, he continued Mylne’s
advocacy of popular education as a precondition for democracy.
Nichol was a noted astronomer following publication
of his The Architecture of the Heavens (1838), which ran through seven
editions by 1845. Nichol believed in an
expanding universe (the “nebular hypothesis”) and – in contrast to Chalmers -
his social concepts were also progressive.
He wrote:
The elevation of Man is the most visible among the existing scheme of things: to speak in the language of philosophy, it is the world’s most determinate Final Cause. [37]
Like Mylne, he believed this occurred without state
interference through “the presence of conservative energies in societies that
live and act without the aid of statesmanship”. [38]
Nichol thus considered social as well as cosmic progress “prepared for by all
the arrangements of Providence”. [39]
Such conclusions were supported by extensive reading in British theology and
German religious literature in the 1830s. [40]
He concludes that the educator is thus to be wary of dictating the ends of
education by reference to transient social purposes, for “the mind was formed
by the ETERNAL, for purposes stretching into infinite ages”. [41]
Such combination of liberalism and religion makes Nichol a mediating figure
between early and late Victorian Glasgow.
The Glasgow Idealists
Mylne’s commitment to rational piety and social
reform thus makes him a distant precursor of the liberal wing of British
Idealism, which was rooted to an otherwise surprising extent in Glasgow. [42]
The Idealist movement dominated British philosophy from the 1860s to the First
World War. [43]
Although abandoned in favour of successive versions of analytic philosophy from
around 1900, it has begun to attract renewed attention in England, at least for
its social thought. [44]
In Glasgow, idealism fought on until the 1950s in the work of CA Campbell
(1897-1973), with its insights preserved in realist form in Edinburgh by the
powerful synthesis of John Macmurray (1891-1976). [45]
Mylne’s philosophy is thus part of the intellectual
archaeology of the later idealist movement, not only directly, but in terms of
religious development. In approaching
the work of the Glasgow idealists, we find the same distinctive agenda of
religious rationalism and social reformism as in Mylne. [46]
The idealists were educated by Mylne’s ex-students and colleagues and grew up
in an atmosphere permeated by the social and religious ethos reflected in his
thought. In the final part of his
course, Mylne places religion at the centre of his ethics. In this respect, Christianity is at the heart
of his thought, though it is a Christianity informed by the European
“Enlightenment”. [47]
Edward Caird’s rationalism thus has a precursor in Mylne.
James Hutchison Stirling (1820-1909)
 |
| James Hutchison Stirling |
James Hutchison Stirling, later known as the “father
of British Hegelianism”, studied at Glasgow University. Late in life, he confirmed JD Morell’s
impression that Mylne was a figure to be reckoned with there. He recalled that:
“old Mylne” was certainly spoken of in the college courts as something more than usual in his place. But I know not that Destutt Tracy as the authority he set up, and the consequently advocated Sensualism, could have even approached in truth and knowledge Reid and Common Sense . [48]
The term “Sensualism” is Cousin’s derogatory term for
the empiricism of the French philosophes,
which he blamed for the French revolution.
The faint praise for Reid (implied in “even” above) indicates Stirling’s
belief that the problems of societies governed by empiricist social theory
required an idealist solution. Whilst
Stirling considered German Idealism since Kant to have surpassed the opposition
between empiricism and common sense, he confirms the enduring importance of
Humean empiricism rather than Reid when he writes in The Secret of Hegel (1865):
Europe - Germany as Germany is itself no exception - has continued to nourish itself from the vessel of Hume, long after the Historic Pabulum [torch] had abandoned it for another and others. Hence all that we see. Hume is our Politics, Hume is our Trade, Hume is our Philosophy, Hume is our Religion, - it wants but little that Hume were even our Taste. [49]
The sense of the assertion is uncertain, but
Stirling’s statements suggest that empiricism was of living philosophical
concern and seen by him, as by Victor Cousin, as part of a larger social and
cultural project. In terms of pure philosophy,
with the key exception of religion (on the most popular interpretation of
Hume), Mylne could be substituted for Hume.
Stirling in a later work focuses on one aspect of Hume’s work as of
particular importance. He says:
[I]n the whole history of philosophy there is, probably, not one single circumstance more astonishing than the belief in regard to causality that seems, in a few years after the death of Hume, to have obtained in Scotland in consequence of that philosopher’s peculiar findings in his discussion of that problem. [50]
This result was the result of Stewart’s role in the
Leslie controversy in Edinburgh in 1805 and Mylne’s endorsement of Hume’s view
of causality in his lectures in Glasgow.
We find him addressing causality in terms closer to Scottish debates in
the book that accompanied the first edition of the Secret, namely Sir William
Hamilton: The Philosophy of Perception (1865). This addresses external perception, one of
the central themes of Mylne, and takes issue with Hamilton’s endorsement of
Thomas Reid’s concept of immediate perception, concluding that reason emerges
as the principal faculty at work: surely a Mylnean conclusion.
Charles Badham (1813-84)
One of Mylne’s pupils, Charles Badham, played a role
in introducing Stirling’s interpretation of Hegel to Australia. The outspoken Australian Churchman and polemicist John Dunmore Lang (1799-1878) helped found a predecessor body to Sydney University. Some of Lang’s later views may draw from the theoretical background of Mylne’s lectures, for example his advocacy of Australian independence based on an economy of independent farmers and his defence of aboriginal rights. Another student of Mylne, Charles Badham (1813-84) was Sydney's first Professor of Classics and Logic from 1867-84. His father, Charles Badham senior (1780-1845) had been Mylne’s colleague as Professor of the Practice of Medicine at Glasgow from 1827-41, after publishing a pioneering Essay on Bronchitis (1808) that was responsible for significant advances in the classification of chest diseases. Badham matriculated under Mylne for the 1830/31 session, where he maintained literary connections, before attending Wadham College, Oxford from 1831-36. A friend in Australia commented “I know he had no admiration for the way in which the classics were then studied and taught at Oxford.” Badham studied thereafter at Cambridge and Leyden, and was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1848.
It is apparent that Mylne’s influence, if present, must be diluted by his other studies, but a case to this effect can still be made for Mylne's influence. Amongst literary and religious works, Badham wrote a Life of James Deacon Hume (London, 1859), an “unacknowledged statesman” on free trade whose daughter he had married; Thoughts on Classical and Commercial Education (Birmingham, 1864); partial editions of Plato, including the Philebus (London, 1855), with a long introduction reminiscent of Mylne’s analyses of mental phenomena; and Speeches and Lectures delivered in Australia (1890). There are Mylnean echoes in Badham's concern with education and the combination of religious, philosophical and commercial interests also brings Mylne to mind.
Sydney University where Badham taught had a first
edition [51]
of Stirling’s Secret of Hegel (1865)
and in 1870 we find Badham introducing Hegel’s historical ideas to the Sydney
public through a humorous comparison with the local haberdashery:
It is an art which reminds me somewhat of the last phase of German metaphysics – this continual self-development of the great idea of dress precisely follows the order of that system. There is the self-asserting, then the self-contradicting, then the self-resuming – in fact, all the moments of development according to the true Hegelian philosophy, and not a bit of that Hegelian rhythm but is faithfully responded to in New South Wales. [52]
Badham’s humour about fashion, which hints at
pointless circularity rather than development, indicates at least a
sceptically-minded curiosity. Followed by Francis Anderson from 1888 and John Anderson as
teachers of philosophy in Sydney, he forms a link in a long chain of influence
between Glasgow and Sydney that goes well beyond passive assimilation of the
Scottish School of Common Sense.
To some extent though, Stirling’s work on Hegel is
subject to George Davie’s accusation of bibliolatry. The main argument of the Idealists was taken
forward by the circle of John Nichol and Edward Caird in Glasgow.
John Nichol (1833-94)
Amongst the later group of idealists born in the
1830s, JP Nichol’s son, John Nichol, the first professor of English literature
at Glasgow, was well placed to observe changes of intellectual fashion in the
growing city. Like his father, Nichol
had absorbed the Germanophile thought of Thomas Carlyle. [53]
Nichol sums up impressionistically the movement of literary and political
culture around him, he writes:
The present times are, in many respects, an aftermath of the first quarter of the [19th] century, which was an era of doubt, of revolt, of storm. There succeeded an era of exhaustion, of quiescence, of reflection. The first years of the third quarter saw a revival of turbulence and agitation, and more than our fathers we are inclined to sympathise with our grandfathers. [54]
In this respect, the idealist movement challenged the
social conservatism of mid-Victorian Scotland, according to John Nichol. Nichol
then, looks back in time for inspiration to renew the cause of social
reform. Mylne can be seen, politically
and even philosophically, as an unrecognised link in this chain.
Edward Caird (1835-1908)
 |
| Edward Caird |
Edward Caird succeeded William Fleming as Professor
of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow in 1866.
He probably knew of Mylne only indirectly from his teachers at Glasgow
and perhaps from old student notes. [55]
However, the indirect influence of the Mylnean ethos on Edward Caird is
suggested by his reference back to Old College at the time of the move to
Gilmorehill:
We, as students of philosophy, are leaving behind us [in the Old College] work as nobly done as in any other faculty. There have been within these old walls in former days men, who showed how the mother-wit and shrewdness of Scotchmen, with all its honest self-restraint, can give rise to insight, by which men of genius change the world. Much progress has been made, however, since their time. We will not be their equals if we do not carry our science somewhat beyond the point at which they left it. [56]
Caird’s reference is probably to Thomas Reid rather
than Mylne, but his wish to go beyond Reid is common ground with Mylne. The direction in which he thought the science
of mind should be carried in indicated in his first book on Kant, where Caird
thinks through the relation of first principles to the unity of the mind:
I have a number of principles in the mind which seem to carry with them necessity, - geometrical axioms, causality, substance and quality, etc. Now, if I take all these as being as clear and distinct as the belief in my own existence, I give up all notion of the unity of truth. I find in my mind a number of valuable articles which have no sort of connection with one another. You cannot, as they are primary, go beyond them, and reduce them to unity. To suppose that the mind has such ideas in it, primary and unconnected, would almost destroy the mind’s unity. [57]
In philosophy, the unity of reason and consciousness
are worked out by Mylne on the basis of empiricism. It is true that Caird looked to Germany and
to his friend from Oxford Thomas Hill Green (1836-82) to reinterpret the unity
of the mind by rejecting the empiricist assumptions of passive reception of
discrete sensations and the workings of association. However, the concept of judgement as both
unifying and sui generis in relation
to other mental phenomena was already present in Mylne. In terms of the transmission of this idea, it
should be noted that Caird was a student of Mylne’s pupil and colleague Robert
Buchanan, whose lectures on psychology bears comparison with Mylne. [58]
In addition, Caird participated in the reformist movement in Glasgow, with
which Mylne had previously identified himself.
Whilst Caird’s relation to his Scottish predecessors is sometimes
treated as mere rejection [59]
or regarded with incomprehension, [60]
knowledge of Mylne and his philosophy begins to reintegrate it into the
intellectual life of the country.
Looking at the overall course of events, Mylne
and his followers contributed to the transformation of the thought of Hume and
Reid into the premisses from which the early idealists began. [61]
In turn, Caird’s unity of experience became a basis of the rejection of
‘dualist’ accounts of society and the philosophical concept of ‘unity in
difference’ as a mark of the personal that reappears in the work of John
Macmurray.
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[1] Wilson and Rainy, Memorials of Robert Smith Candlish
(Edinburgh: Black 1880), 11.
[2] Rainy: Memorials of Robert Smith Candlish, 606.
[3] I have discussed the connections in my article ‘John MacLeod
Campbell and the Philosophers’ (Theology in Scotland, Vol XIII – 1,
Spring 2006.) Tulloch writes: “After a
career of promise at Glasgow College [...] he spent the intervening time [...]
in reading and further study, chiefly of a philosophic kind. [...] He delighted
in the study of Tillotson and Samuel Clarke.”
(Tulloch, Movements of Religious Thought in Britain during the 19th
Century, lecture 4, 146. Clarke
features prominently in Mylne’s lectures.
[4] George Gilfillan Remoter
Stars in the Church Sky (London, 1867), 123-24; GU Matriculation Albums: entry 12426.
[5] Donald MacLeod, Memoir of Norman MacLeod (London: Daldy,
1876), 29. MacLeod travelled to Weimar in 1834 (vol 1, chapter 4).
[6] James MacLehose, Memoirs and Portraits of 100 Glasgow Men (Glasgow:
MacLehose, 1886) “Norman MacLeod”.
[9] MacLehose, Memoirs and Portraits of 100 Glasgow Men
(Glasgow: MacLehose, 1886) “Norman MacLeod”.
[10] For example, Cousin, Philosophie Sensualiste du XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, 1856), chs2-3. However, Cousin also edited the works of Maine de Biran, whose works demonstrate that Condillac’s thought is sufficiently rich to give rise to a range of interpretations.
[11] This is observed in the case of McCosh by James Somerville in his
article “The Trojan Horse of the Scottish Philosophy” in Philosophy 82,
2007. He concludes his article: “Thus
did McCosh come to write what proved to be the obituary of the Scottish
philosophy.” (257).
[13] Morell History (1846), iv.
[15] Coutts, 388. Previous to his
appointment as professor of Astronomy in 1836 he had taught science at the
college.
[16] J MacLehose Memoirs and Portraits of 100 Glasgow Men
(Glasgow: MacLehose, 1886) “John Pringle Nichol”.
[17] Introduction to Willm, xxix.
[18] Letter 96 of 17/1/34 to Nichol in The Earlier Letters of John
Stuart Mill 1812-1848 (Collected Works, Vol XII) Toronto: Routledge,
1963: “I was prepared for our agreeing
in the main, as I think we always shall, on questions of philosophical method.”
211.
[19] The Astronomische Nachrichte
and Jahrbuch.
[20] GUL: Professors’ Receipt book 135.
[21] See J MacLehose Memoirs and Portraits, “John Pringle Nichol”, where Nichol is said to be
“as familiar with the speculations of the Continent as was possible for a
master of Latin and French imperfectly acquainted with German” and a trip to
Munich is mentioned.
[22] Letter 109 of 30 August 1834 to Nichol in The Earlier Letters of
John Stuart Mill 1812-1848 (Collected Works, Vol XII) Ed. F E Mineka. Toronto: Routledge, 1963, 231.
[23] Letter 102 of 15 April 1834 to Nichol in The Earlier Letters of
John Stuart Mill 1812-1848 (Collected Works, Vol XII) Routledge: Toronto,
1963, 363 et seq.) mentions Nichol’s views on Coleridge (“as a
politician he seems unprincipled”), 221.
Mill suggests Nichol read Coleridge’s work on Church and State. See also William Knight “Unpublished Letters
from John Stuart Mill to Professor Nichol.” Fortnightly Review (May,
1898, 660-678). By 1848, the discussion
had turned from Whig-radical alliances to “the great socialist questions”,
particularly property (Letter 531, 739).
[24] Joseph Willm: The Education of the People (1847; 2nd
edition Edinburgh: Nichol, 1850). The
book on education discusses the education of different age groups in great
detail.
[25] Cousin was French minister of education at this time and deeply
involved in the publishing and oversight of French philosophy and its
teaching. Willm was a correspondant
of the French Academy of moral and political sciences from 1847 to his death in
1853.
[26] Cyclopaedia of Biography, London: Griffin, 1854.
[27] Willm first wrote on Hegel in the Revue Germanique in 1835. His role is acknowledged in Koyré’s “Rapport sur l’état des études hégéliennes en France”, 226n. He is barely mentioned in the collection Philosophie, France XIXe Siècle (ed. Douailler. Livre de Poche, 1994), 1012. However, Andrea Bellantone does more justice to Willm in Hegel en France, 144-150.
[28] F W J Schelling (1775-1854): Jugement
de M. de Schelling sur la Philosophie de M. Cousin, traduit de l’allemand et
précédé d’un Essai sur la Nationalité des Philosophies (Paris, 1835). There is a copy in
Glasgow University Library, but it is from the collection of William Hamilton
and so postdates JP Nichol’s era.
Edinburgh University Library has a copy of the Histoire de la Philosophie
Allemande.
[29] Willm, Histoire, Paris: Ladrange, 1847-48.
[30] Letter to Tissot of 13 December 1839 on “Hegel’s logic, such as I
understand it to be”, cited in Henri de Lubac The Unmarxian Socialist
(London: Sheed, 1848), 135.
[31] Lubac, op cit 137, citing
Correspondence, vol 1, xxii.
[32] Lubac, 136, citing for Hegel passages in De la Création de l’Ordre dans
l’Humanité (1843) paras 210-11 and for Willm De la Justice dans la
Révolution et dans l’Eglise (1858) vol iii, 499-503.
[33] Willm’s essay on Hegel is cited (in French) in the Preface to the
Calvinist Karl Rosenkranz (1805-79)’s Hegels Leben (Berlin: Duncker,
1844), a copy of which is in Glasgow University Library. Nichol may have been alerted to Willm or
Hegel by this, Nichol’s French being apparently better than his German. There is manuscript material relating to
Willm in the Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg, but
I am told there is no correspondence with Nichol.
[34] His early political writings have yet to be recovered from the
pages of the Fife Herald. J P Nichol, Introduction to Willm’s The
Education of the People (2nd edition), xv; see also
xvii-xviii.
[35] Ibid, xiv Objections to
this, Nichol says, are of “no
perceptible consequence” (xv).
[37] JP Nichol, Introduction to Willm (op cit), xix.
[38] JP Nichol, Introduction to Willm (op cit), xviii-xix.
[39] JP Nichol, Introduction to Willm (op cit), xix.
[40] Professors’ Receipt Book 100, GUL.
Nichol borrowed William Magee’s On
the Atonement, which addressed the Unitarian position, Luther’s Sermons, Baker’s German Pulpit (London, 1829) and many similar works.
[41] Ibid, xxx.
[42] Dating from J Hutchison Stirling’s The Secret of Hegel
(1865). See for example: J Passmore 100
Years of Philosophy, 51.
[43] Geoffrey Warnock English Philosophy since 1900, who
considers that previous Idealist works “make strange reading today” and that
their views were by 1924 “doomed to almost immediate extinction”, 1. Ruggiero’s Modern Philosophy (1912)
refers to Stirling as a key text (see G Warnock, 6). See also Pucelle, L’Idéalisme en
Angleterre; Mary Warnock Ethics since 1900 (chapter 1).
[44] See Matthew Carter: T H Green and the Development of Ethical
Socialism (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003).
Carter was formerly General Secretary of the British Labour Party.
[45] Macmurray recommended T H Green to his students, according to Errol
Bedford. (See my MSc thesis “John Macmurray and the Glasgow idealists”.)
[46] The rationalism contrasts with the early thought of Thomas Chalmers
and Ralph Wardlaw, both of whom Mylne knew personally. Chalmers move from a pure evangelism to one
combined with natural theology occurred during his time in Glasgow between 1810
and 1820 (See Tulloch: Movements of Religious Thought). Wardlaw, who attacked Mylne in his Christian
Ethics (1833), was persuaded to find a place for reason in the book’s later
editions (see W Alexander’s, biography of Wardlaw).
[47] St Peter’s advice: “Be always ready to give a reason for the faith
that is in you.” (1 Pet) sums up the spirit of this tradition of Christian
rationalism.
[48] Review of Campbell Fraser, Mind,
1905, 87.
[49] Stirling, The Secret of Hegel, lxxiii. (Note: there are two editions
of this work with different pagination)
[50] Stirling, Darwinianism, 13,
[52] Lectures and Addresses
(1890) 28-9.
[53] JP Nichol borrowed Carlyle’s French
Revolution from the College library in 1839. John Nichol wrote a book on Carlyle (London,
1892) for whom the Glasgow idealists shared an early enthusiasm dating back to
the 1850s.
[54] Nichol, Byron, 202-03.
[55] His colleague John Veitch owned the Mackenzie notes.
[56] GUL:MS Gen 104/1, Lecture 1, 1870/71. 1.
[57] GUL:MS Gen 104/1, 16.
[58] See Buchanan, Notes on Psychology 1859/60, held at GUL,
MS661-2. This covers in succession
sensation, memory and judgement, as with Mylne.
[59] By George Davie, see my MSc thesis ‘John Macmurray and the Glasgow
idealists’ for references.
[60] The Hegel scholar Dudley Knowles wrote recently of Caird: “It is
one of the curiosities of intellectual history that we find so many otherwise
sober Victorians embracing the fabulous metaphysical speculations of the
post-Kantian German philosophers.” JSP, Vol 1.2 Autumn 2003, 187.
[61] Charles Stewart-Robertson sees Mylne only as a follower of Reid,
stating that he and Archibald Arthur: “continued to dabble in the arts of improvement after Reid’s
retirement”, with Mylne “leaning perhaps [...] to the sensory and affective
foundations of “moral science”.” (“Pneumatics
and Georgics of the Human Mind” in Eighteenth Century Studies Vol
20, Spring 1987, 302.)
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