Newman Studies Journal

Of Victorian metaphysics we might be tempted to draw the same comparison Samuel Johnson once offered in a different context: as with a dog "walking on his hind legs," we presume it "is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."¹ Indeed, metaphysics in the nineteenth-century British Isles is studied so little now that it is hard even to list the names of more than a very few practitioners. We are more likely to give what time we have to the German tradition, with its many magnificent waves of thought. Enter W. J. Mander, a contemporary philosopher and Oxford don who has dedicated his life's work (so far) to uncovering and re-engaging British metaphysics in the long nineteenth century, and particularly its idealist strain.

Mander's entire oeuvre will be of interest to students of Newman, chiefly because he unearths and makes a case for many thinkers and positions close to Newman's own, but generally beyond the purview of recent systematic theology. His most recent book, though, may be of special interest, as The Unknowable deals with both a fundamentally Newmanian question—what is our epistemic relation to that which transcends us?—and sets up its discussion in relation to a thinker Newman was very much interested in: Sir William Hamilton. Mander's thesis concerns "the idea of an ultimate but unknowable way that things really are in themselves," a fixation of Hamilton's early in the century (1). If we but see this question looming at the center of the century's philosophical culture, the three major branches of Victorian metaphysics, the epistemic "agnostics," the empiricists, and the idealists, will become more intelligible both in their similarity and their difference.

The book falls into three neat sections, corresponding to each branch or strain of the tradition, and subdivided into chapters on specific historical figures, each approached both biographically and analytically in relation to the central question. Mander has a nice way (not unlike the method of T. H. Irwin in the history of ethics) of taking each figure seriously on his own terms, privileging the author's own texts and voice, and yet also drawing his theories into dialogical relation to the others at hand. In the first part (on those who were agnostic as to [End Page 94] the way things ultimately are in themselves) gives us first Hamilton, then chapters on H. L. Mansel, Herbert Spencer, and T. H. Huxley. The latter two, more familiar in Darwinian studies, are helpfully contextualized within a tradition with which Newman (despite his diffidence about metaphysics) had at least some sympathy. The second part deals with what is perhaps the best-known school of thought from the period, the empiricists, who defined themselves against the agnostic position, confident as they were in the perceptive power of the senses, and skeptical of claims about reality that made it more than what we can take in that way. Here there are chapters on J. S. Mill, whose criticism of Hamilton so damaged the reputation of the agnostic branch. It is followed by three more chapters on lesser known figures, including Alexander Bain, W. K. Clifford, G. H. Lewes, and Karl Pearson. While Clifford and Pearson are often associated with the history and philosophy of mathematics, and Lewes with his more luminous partner, the novelist George Eliot (Marian Evans), they appear here, joining the empiricist circle around the question of the unknowable. The third part treats Mander's favorites, the idealists, who gained particular prominence later in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth centuries. "Opposed," with the empiricists, "to the notion of an unknowable reality," the idealists were nevertheless also set against the limits of empiricist sensationalism, preferring the view that reality tout court is in some sense "given" to the mind, a vision in which the mind must continue to grow and open itself over time (208). The chapters here...