Talk:James Seth

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James Seth (1860 - 1925) was a Scottish philosopher.

He was born in Edinburgh, the son of a Scottish banker and the third of seven children, one of whom also became a professor of philosophy. He attended George Watson’s, College, one of Edinburgh’s Merchant Company schools, and from there went to Edinburgh University in the autumn of 1876. The classical education he received at Watson’s stood him in good stead, but he soon excelled at philosophy as a student of Alexander Campbell Fraser and Henry Calderwood, winning medals for moral philosophy, the study of Kant, and metaphysics, before completing his degree with First Class Honours in 1881.

James Seth won two philosophical scholarships, but like many of his contemporaries, he had studied philosophy as a preliminary to Divinity and ordination, and so proceeded to a theology degree at New College. But during this time he spent two summers on philosophical study in Germany, and then gave classes in philosophy as an assistant to Campbell Fraser. This determined that his future would be teacher of philosophy rather than minister of religion and in 1886 he went to Canada as Professor of Metaphysics at Dalhousie College in Halifax. His classes included Ethics, and in teaching this he used the textbook written by his own teacher Henry Calderwood, thereby extending and continuing the Scottish philosophical tradition abroad. Subsequently he wrote his own, highly successful text, a Study of Ethical Principles which, like Calderwood’s, was widely adopted.

In 1892 Seth moved to Brown University, one of the oldest and most distinguished American universities, located in Providence, Rhode Island, famous in the world of philosophy for the fact that Bishop George Berkeley had spent three years there. Seth was both happy and successful at Brown, but in 1896 the opportunity arose to become Sage Professor at Cornell University, and at the same time, Editor of the Philosophical Review, a prestigious academic journal. This appointment secured his position in America as a philosopher of considerable status, but he was hardly in post before his teacher Henry Calderwood died, thereby leaving vacant the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. It is an indication of the continuing prestige of the Edinburgh Chair even into the late 19th century, that Seth relinquished an established Chair in one of the largest and best equipped American universities in order to succeed Calderwood. He took up his duties there in October 1898, and marked his accession to the Chair with an inaugural lecture on ‘The Scottish Contribution to Moral Philosophy’, subsequently published by the Philosophical Review, the journal he had edited.

James Seth occupied the Edinburgh Chair of Moral Philosophy for twenty six years. During most of this time, the corresponding Chair of Logic and Metaphysics was occupied by his brother Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattisson. Like his teacher Calderwood, James Seth was active in social campaigning on behalf of both temperance and education, and on the strength of this became a notable figure in Edinburgh city life. He died quite suddenly in July 1925. A collection of essays on ethics and religion was published posthumously, together with a memoir written by his brother Andrew.

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[Educated atEdinburgh and in Germany. 1883-5, Eraser's Assistant at Edinburgh; 1886-98 Professor successively at Dalhousie, Brown, and Cornell Universities ; 1898-1924, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Edinburgh. Freedom as Ethical Postulate, 1891 ; A Study of Ethical Principles, 1894 (seventeenth edition, 1926); English Philosophers and Schools of Philosophy, 1912.

Posthumous: Essays in Ethics and Religion, with Other Papers, edited with a memoir by A. S. Pringle-Pattison, 1926. Includes complete bibliography.]

James Seth developed in the same philosophical environment as his brother Andrew. Both grew up in the Scottish capital, which in philosophical matters was dominated for several decades by Fraser and Calderwood, the occupants of the two chairs in philosophy at the University. Although these were little affected by the neo-idealistic movement, they made the ground favourable for the reception and growth of the new ideas; Fraser by his revival of Berkeley's Idealism, Calderwood by his rejection of Hamiltonianism, at that time generally accepted in Scotland. Both were theists, and so far stood near to the Hegelian idealists. The new Idealism entered the Scottish capital about the beginning of the 'eighties from Glasgow, where Edward Caird was its influential ambassador. About the same time a University Philosophical Society was founded in Edinburgh, with such gifted young men as Adamson, Sorley, Haldane, Ritchie, and the two Seths among its members ;

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and through their discussion of the new ideas the idealistic movement took root in the city, where, by the way, the original pioneer of British Hegelianism, Stirling, was then residing. By the 'nineties the two university chairs were occupied by representatives of the new tendency: Andrew Seth succeeded Eraser in 1891 and James Seth succeeded Calderwood in 1898. Both continued their teaching activity, with unusual power and fruitfulness, until after the Great War.

To a community of blood and calling the two brothers added a community of doctrine. In all essentials they were in agreement. But while Andrew's chief interest lay in meta- physics, James's lay in ethics. In this field he gave to his brother's ideas a wide application and not infrequently a more rigorous and precise formulation. In his essay, highly thought of at the time, on Freedom as Ethical Postulate, he defended the autonomy and integrity of moral personality against the destructive tendency of the Hegelians, thereby writing a sort of ethical sequel to his brother's Hegelianism and Personality. Of the two sides from which the autonomy of the person, the basis and presupposition of all moral life, was threatened namely, Naturalism, which dissolved it in Nature, and Absolu- tism, which dissolved it in God he regarded the latter as the more dangerous. But both jettisoned freedom, which is so closely bound up with the idea of personality that with it man as a distinctive being stands or falls.

The task of ethics is to define man's peculiar position in relation to natural events on the one hand and the Divine Power on the other. Ethics, therefore, cannot be a merely positive science, an empirical investigation of moral phenomena and their origins, as it remains in naturalism and evolutionism (with Leslie Stephen as its typical representative), but must press forward in one direction to the philosophy of nature, in another to metaphysics and theology. In these further fields James's system is in general the same as his brother's. Philosophy is the supreme synthesis of the three metaphysical realities nature, man, and God. But in the synthesizing it must bring out their differences as well as their positive

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relations, and in particular guard against any engulfing of one by another, by giving due weight to the proper status and worth of each. The crucial metaphysical problem is the relation of man as a free moral person to God. To solve this, however, without burking any of its difficulties, is beyond the capacity of thought: the two factors seem incompatible, and yet neither can be abandoned* in favour of the other, as is done, for example, religiously in mysticism and philosophically in idealistic absolutism. Man only reaches the idea of a supreme being through the conviction of his own superiority over nature and of his moral freedom and autonomy. A worthy conception of human nature is consequently the only proper guarantee of a worthy conception of God: to merge and lose man's personality in God's would be simply to lose God's greatness too. For these reasons man cannot be regarded as a mere passive instrument in the hands of God. The essential note o'f his life as the free shaping of his own destiny is activity, and the highest view he can take of his relation to God is that of active co-operation, in which, by identifying himself with the divine ends, he becomes himself a contributor to the advancement of the world-process. With this attractive idea is linked the view that evil is a positive and real force, which we must recognize in all its tragic gravity. In this connection, as in the matter of personality, Seth again shows his opposition to the Hegelians, whose facile optimism only shelved rather than solved the problem of evil.

These ethical views, taken with their metaphysical implica- tions, are obviously nearer to the Kantian than to the Hegelian spirit. They also have a close kinship with the ethics of Mar- tineau. But Seth's chief debt, besides that to his brother, was by his own admission to the Ethica of his fellow-countryman, Laurie, who was teaching at the same time in the University of Edinburgh and who neither then nor later received much attention in professionally philosophical circles. 1

In a later and extremely successful book, A Study of Ethical Principles, Seth elaborated his ideas into a comprehensive 1 On Laurie, see pp. 429 ff.

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ethical system. Against the naturalists he treated ethics as a normative science, having as its main end the discovery of the moral ideal, of the supreme criterion of moral value. Among the various solutions of this cardinal problem two opposed types may be distinguished, the Hedonism of the Epicureans and the Utilitarians, whose criterion is feeling, and the Rigorism of the Stoics, of Intuitionists, and of Kant, whose criterion is reason. A mediating theory is needed between these two extremes, one that shall do full justice to both feeling and reason and keep them together in the unity of man's total nature. This more comprehensive attitude Seth calls Eudae- monism, or the ethics of personality, meaning by this not the happiness theory of the British enfipirical moralists of the XVIIIth and XlXth Centuries but the idealistic attitude most purely embodied in Plato and Aristotle, in Butler and Hegel, in Goethe's Faust, and in the poetry of Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold. While the motto of Hedonism is self-satisfaction and of Rigorism self-sacrifice, that of Eudaemonism is self- realization. The moral imperative is directed to neither feeling nor reason, but to the total self, which is both, at a free per- sonality regarded in every one of its activities and relations, at a self with all its capacities harmonized and living a moral life in which the real and the ideal have been brought into organic connection. The moral self is the synthetic unity of apperception looked at from the ethical point of view. The moral law, then, is that we should develop out of natural individuality the genuine ideal self of personality. And to become a person is to be free. The law of all rational beings is accordingly autonomy.

After thus determining the moral ideal he proceeds to a detailed application of it to individual and social life. He ends with a metaphysic of ethics in which he treats of freedom, God, and immortality. Here, as we have already noted, he does not go beyond the programme laid down in his first writing, or depart in anything essential from the views of his brother.