Frederic Harrison

English philosopher

• Born: October 18, 1831
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: January 14, 1923
• Place of death: Bath, Somerset, England

In his varied career as a professor of law, literary critic, and lecturer, Harrison was one of the staunchest advocates of the philosophy of positivism in mid-Victorian England.

Early Life

Frederic Harrison was the son of Frederick Harrison (whose first name was spelled differently), an architect turned stockbroker, and Jane (née Brice) Harrison. The couple’s firstborn had died in infancy; Frederic would become the eldest of the five sons who survived. The family, of some means, would often spend time in the English countryside. Frederic’s mother taught him to appreciate history and French and Latin, while his father imparted a passion for the fine arts. Frederic’s family life was characterized by stability and the loving concern of his parents and bordered on the aristocratic.

Before he was six, in 1837, Frederic witnessed the coronation of Queen Victoria. The family moved to Oxford Square, Hyde Park, in 1840, where Frederic attended the day school of Joseph King for two years, followed by enrollment in the sixth form (or grade) at King’s College School, where he would remain until 1849. Because of the success of his earlier schooling, Frederic found himself in classes with boys several years older; though he played most sports and excelled as a student, for a time the others treated him condescendingly and nicknamed him “Fan.”

The nickname vanished when Harrison was befriended by one of the older students, Charles Cookson, a passionate devotee of literature and the High Church movement. Associated with Edward Pusey, advocates sought to move the Anglican Church closer to the Roman Catholic tradition. Harrison had been reared in the Anglican tradition of William Paley, with its emphasis on moral utilitarianism, but he would come to reject all forms of Christianity in favor of a new “Religion of Humanity.” Harrison would teach that one’s duty to humankind was paramount, not obeisance to a metaphysical deity. As part of his future positivist belief, Harrison’s faith would rest in the essential goodness and progress of humanity. However, what of individuals themselves, Harrison would wonder: Where should one’s sympathies lie?

Revolutionary fervor was abroad on the Continent. With the publication of Karl Marx’s Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848; The Communist Manifesto, 1850), there were uprisings in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Rome; in England, bad harvests that same year brought a renewal of the working-class Chartist movement that sought parliamentary and electoral reforms. Harrison found himself sympathizing with the fall of the old regimes and with the demands of the working class; yet throughout his life he would struggle with the question of whether specific political action would ever usher in the universal positivist utopia.

Harrison was eighteen when he entered Wadham College in Oxford in 1849. He had come to detest the intense competition inherent in formal schooling in England, as well as professors who only “taught for the test.” An exception was Richard Congreve, his history professor and the founder of the British positivist movement. Though, in later years, Harrison would lament Congreve’s turn toward his own fanatical brand of positivism, Harrison applauded Congreve’s presentation of history as the surging progress of humanity and not a list of names and dates and innumerable “periods.”

Harrison was graduated from Wadham in 1853 but remained two more years as Librarian of the Union and as a tutor. Though still considering himself a Christian, Harrison was brought under the sway of the French positivist philosopher Auguste Comte, by a group of Oxford friends who called themselves “Mumbo-Jumbo” and who had already renounced the creeds of the Church. Harrison himself declined to take orders for a career in the Church and in 1855 began a study of law at Lincoln’s Inn in London. In that same year, he met in Paris with Comte.

Harrison was the portrait of the active Victorian. An ardent mountaineer most of his life, he was physically rugged, with a large head, black hair, and fierce whiskers. Incurably optimistic (at least after his student days), he was at times pompous, quick-tempered, and irascible. He dressed to befit his class; punctuality was his hallmark. As one of his sons later observed, Harrison

liked time-tables, inventories, and everything that contributed towards the regular life, and he probably was the most consistently normal man who ever wrote books.

He was a skilled debater and a personal friend of many of England’s nineteenth century luminaries, including William E. Gladstone, Thomas Carlyle, and John Stuart Mill.

Life’s Work

Harrison counted his meeting with Comte as the most significant of his life; his growing adherence to Comtian philosophy provided unity to a life full of many undertakings. Comte had rejected absolutist metaphysics as unproductive: People had argued for thousands of years about God’s existence and had come no closer to agreement. Instead, Comte proposed a philosophic system that was scientific, relative, and human-centered. As Harrison explained in two lectures given in 1920, three years before his death, the new system was scientific because it saw physical and social activity ordered by laws, but relative and human-centered because formulation of those laws depended on fallible human observation.

However, there was progress in humankind’s understanding of the world. In ancient times, the world was explained in terms of myth; that gave way to the absolute generalizations of metaphysics, which led, in turn, to the scientific and relative positive philosophy of the nineteenth century. It was “positive” in the sense that it depended on substantive observations of the world (relative to humankind) and not on the manipulation of contentless abstractions. The sciences could be ordered by their complexity relative to humans (with sociology, a term coined by Comte in 1837, the most complex), with each science having its own methodology. Thus ordered, the scientific enterprise becomes a powerful tool for progress (as heralded by the Industrial Revolution). Humankind’s faith, then, turns from the worship of ill-defined abstractions to that of humanity itself, with one’s highest goal the altruistic service to humankind.

Comte’s was a grand vision, in many ways suited to the Victorian tones of optimistic progress amid the waning belief in the old verities preached by the Church, and yet it offered a renewed sense of the centrality of the family and the importance of personal morality. Positivism’s appeal to Harrison was manifest with, as defined by Comte, its so-called Calendar of 558 names, from Homer to Moses, representing an overview of civilization, its library of 270 works divided into four categories as an organized scheme of general literature, and its emotional appeal in the worship of humanity.

Harrison did not want to promulgate merely a new sect; he was uneasy about partisan political involvement but believed that the lot of the working man had to be improved. Called to the bar in 1858, Harrison concentrated on the plight of those nations struggling for independence from imperialist regimes. He reported from Italy for the Daily News and Morning Post and believed that he won his countrymen to the Italian cause. In 1866, Harrison joined the Jamaica Committee to pressure the governor to lift the martial law imposed there, and he was on the Royal Commission on Trades Unions from 1867 to 1869. His work helped lay the foundation for future trade-union legislation.

Harrison married his cousin Ethel Harrison in 1870. Secure in his traditional marriage, he seemed never to waver from his new positive religion, to which he had converted Ethel. A decade earlier, Harrison had clarified his religious views in his reply to Essays and Reviews (1860), a series of articles, originating with the Broad Church or Liberal movement, which called for the redrawing of the boundaries of traditional Christian doctrines in the light of modern science (including Higher Criticism). Harrison, critical of the book, called the result “Neo-Christianity,” an attempt to separate all religious feelings from matters of scientific fact. What was needed, he said, was a synthesis of the religious impulse in humans with that of science, in the Religion of Humanity. (The future, for Harrison, belonged to positivism. Just as Christianity was no longer tenable, so any idea of culture transforming the world, as advanced by Matthew Arnold, was simply wind.)

In the decade of the 1870’s, Harrison saw Prussian imperialism at first hand in France as a correspondent for The Times of London. He joined the Chapel St. Group in 1870 under Congreve’s leadership and during the mid-1870’s worked for the disestablishment of the Church of England (though he did not succeed). He was appointed Professor of Jurisprudence, International and Constitutional Law by the Council of Legal Education in 1877, and lectured at Middle Temple Hall for twelve years thereafter.

Harrison reluctantly agreed to preside over a new positivist group that first met at Newton Hall in 1879. A year earlier, Congreve had broken with Comte and his successor in France, Pierre Lafitte, to develop further the ceremonial aspects of the Religion of Humanity; thus Newton Hall was founded to carry on the French tradition.

Harrison’s only attempt to enter Parliament failed in the general election of 1886, and political activism gave way to his writing. Works on positivism as well as literary studies seemed to pour from his pen. He aided in the founding of the Positivist Review in 1893 (which died with his passing), journeyed to the United States for a series of lectures in 1901 (the year of Queen Victoria’s death), and, succumbing to what he called a senile weakness, wrote a historical novel, Theophano: The Crusade of the Tenth Century, a Romantic Monograph (1904). He published two volumes of memoirs in 1911.

The Harrisons had four sons and one daughter. Harrison died of heart failure on January 14, 1923, while he was correcting proofs for a book of essays containing what was to be his last defense of positivism.

Significance

Frederic Harrison believed passionately in the family as the foundation for any scientifically ordered society of the future; education must begin in the home, and women were to find their liberation in the care of the household. In criticizing John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women (1869), Harrison affirmed that “nothing can be made right in sociology whilst society is regarded as made up of individuals instead of families.” It was not the first time that theorists have envisioned a “new order” that is little but their own lives writ large and made universal.

Before his marriage, Harrison was a seeker, an activist. In the last half of his long life, he seemed to step back from the political fray for a longer view. He would be the librarian of the new positivist society, worshiping dutifully at the shrine of Humanity with a clear conscience, anticipating the social progress that was yet to come. His would be the genteel, the aristocratic role, in this most orderly revolution in history.

However, positivism from the first was philosophically unsound. Despite his ardent defense of positivist faith, Harrison never saw that simply declaring metaphysical speculation off limits would never silence God; that Comte’s absolute principles of historical progress were themselves metaphysical; and that the basic dualism between observation and humankind’s conceptualizing of his findings made the positivist interpretation itself suspect.

Harrison’s life and pursuits were quintessentially Victorian; he was the consummate amateur, always busy. Harrison the optimist lived to see one of his sons die in World War I, and, with positivism passing from the scene, he was regaled not for his advocacy but as the man who was the friend of the great men and women of the Victorian era; he was no longer the prophet, but the storyteller.

Bibliography

Amigoni, David. Victorian Biography: Intellectuals and the Ordering of Discourse. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. An analysis of the works of nineteenth century biographers. Amigoni maintains that Harrison and other late nineteenth century writers sought to create a biography style that differed from their predecessor, Thomas Carlyle.

Harrison, Austin. Frederic Harrison: Thoughts and Memories. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927. A valuable anecdotal view of Harrison by one of his sons. An impressionistic (not chronological) overview of Harrison’s faith, character, and temperament. No substitute for a biography.

Harrison, Frederic. Autobiographic Memoirs. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1911. Good source material on Harrison’s early life, though less an autobiography (Harrison did not want to focus attention on himself) than a personal history of Victorian times. Volume 1 covers the years 1832-1870; volume 2, 1870-1910.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. De Senectute: More Last Words. London: T. F. Unwin, 1923. Published posthumously, the book contains “A Philosophic Synthesis,” two lectures given by Harrison in 1920, and his last published defense of positivism.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. George Washington and Other American Addresses. New York: Macmillan, 1901. In some of these addresses, Harrison struggled with the idea of democracy. How could the best minds surface in the United States if society treated everyone equally? Note also “Personal Reminiscences,” a lecture given to Bryn Mawr Women’s College in Pennsylvania, detailing Harrison’s friendship with Comte, Charles Darwin, the novelist George Eliot, and many others.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Meaning of History and Other Historical Pieces. New York: Macmillan, 1894. In “The Use of History,” Harrison advises his readers that knowledge of history is in large part knowledge of its great men; another chapter annotates some of the great books of history, and a third, “The Sacredness of Ancient Buildings,” focuses on Harrison’s love of architecture and expresses his view that buildings are living relics.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and Other Literary Estimates. New York: Macmillan, 1899. Includes what amounts to almost a panegyric on Matthew Arnold (though it does reprise delicately some of Harrison’s earlier criticism of Arnold’s idea of Culture). This volume also contains a useful critique of Harrison’s friend John Stuart Mill.

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. Victorian Minds. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. A good introduction to the Victorian period through studies of some of its leading personalities: John Stuart Mill, Leslie Stephen, Walter Bagehot, and others. Harrison is scarcely mentioned, though he is characterized (in a list of Victorian paradoxes) as a religious libertarian with a Puritan morality.

Kent, Christopher. Brains and Numbers: Elitism, Comtism, and Democracy in Mid-Victorian England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978. A technical study of the politics of reform, especially as it is mirrored by Harrison’s friend John Morley and by Harrison himself. Characterizes Harrison’s political problem as that of reconciling government by an elite (which seemed logical to him) with the rising tide of democratic sentiment. Sets Comte into a middle-class context and clarifies his appeal. The book includes a large bibliography and makes reference to Harrison’s personal papers.

Metraux, Guy S., and Francois Crouzet, eds. The Nineteenth-Century World. New York: Mentor Books, 1963. This work is especially interesting for Henri Gouhier’s essay on “Auguste Comte’s Philosophy of History,” an essay generally sympathetic to Comte, crediting him with shrewdly understanding the impact of the Industrial Revolution.

Sullivan, Harry R. Frederic Harrison. Boston: Twayne, 1983. A valuable survey of Harrison’s life and major concerns, with good bibliographic references. The chapters on positivism are clear enough; the two long chapters on Harrison’s literary critiques seem valuable only to the antiquarian. A generally sympathetic nontechnical study.