No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Victorian Morality: Ethics Not Mysterious
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Extract
ThePast fifty years have shown a marked tendency toward the suppression of any consideration of the mysterious as a part of history. R. G. Collingwood's categorical remark that “the blind forces and activities in us” are not parts of the historical process merely reflected, in a particularly distinguished quarter, an assumption that has since gained widespread support. In social studies this trend has favored the accumulation of extensive data of the kind, for example, that lies behind the growth-of-learning S-curve postulated by industrial psychologists who have made detailed studies of “cycles” in a wide variety of industries. Such accumulations of solid quantities of data that lend themselves to statistical interpretation are reassuring, and it would be foolish to disparage either the method or its results. But it is important, and especially appropriate in studying a complex topic like the morality of a culture, to recognize that if one examines closely even those more limited social patterns that lend themselves to statistical analysis, there often seems to be, as Walter Bagehot argued a hundred years ago, a point somewhere along the line of development where the individual, or a creative minority, emerges as the real source of the breakthrough which establishes the pattern.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1961
References
* This paper was delivered at the Midwest Conference of British Studies, Indiana University, November, 1960.
1 Cited by Dodds, E. R., The Greeks and the Irrational (Boston, 1957), p. 269Google Scholar.
2 For the terminology here and in other portions of this paper I am indebted to Fogarty's, Michael P. “The Rhythm of Change,” Review of Politics, XXII (1960), 457–465Google Scholar.
3 “The Victorian Attitude to Civil and Personal Responsibility,” Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians (London, 1949), p. 140Google Scholar.
4 Leisure the Basis of Culture, trans, by Dru, A. (London, 1952), p. 135Google Scholar.
5 Ibid., p. 133.
6 Science, of course, played an important role. F. Sherwood Taylor has described the impact of geological discoveries: “Now not only did there appear this terrifying desert of time, but also a most strange world peopled by fierce, hideous and brainless beings. And these man had to acknowledge as blood-relations” (“Geology Changes the Outlook,” Ideas and Beliefs, p. 195).
7 Weber, Otto, “Christian Freedom and Autonomous Man,” Cross Currents, V (1955), 137Google Scholar.
8 Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, with introd. by Leavis, F. R. (New York, 1950), p. 40Google Scholar.
9 Kenneth Allott has found in Victorian prose generally “the aesthetic equivalent of self-assertion and an urgent ‘will to survive,’” especially before the 1870's, by which time the prose begins to pause, reflect, and analyse (Victorian Prose 1830–1880, ed. Kenneth, and Allott, Miriam [London, 1956], p. xviii)Google Scholar.
10 Arnold, Thomas, Passages in A Wandering Life (London, 1900), p. viGoogle Scholar.
11 Letters of Matthew Arnold 1848–1888, ed. Russell, G. W. E. (London, 1895), I, 249Google Scholar.