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Some Reminiscences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

(The following article is the substance of a chapter of an autobiographical account by the late John Henry Muirhead, in which with characteristic modesty the author gives the “recollection of a Journeyman in Philosophy of some movements of life and thought in his time.” Professor Muirhead was closely connected with the Institute of Philosophical Studies and its Journal from its inception, and it was thought that readers of Philosophy would appreciate this account of visitors, philosophical and other, to Birmingham in the early years of the present century. The volume John Henry Muirhead will be published shortly by Messrs. George Allen and Unwin, and will include a short biographical completion and memoir together with a bibliography of Muirhead's writings.)

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1942

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References

page 336 note 1 Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, p. 15Google Scholar.

page 339 note 1 He happened to be staying with us over night, and when, returning home latish in the evening after the lecture, I found that I had forgotten my latch-key, he had an opportunity of practising what he had been preaching. He was a good shot, and taking up a handful of gravel from the path he threw it at the top room window where the maids were asleep with just sufficient force to break their slumbers without breaking the glass.

page 340 note 1 Autobiography, p. 295Google Scholar.

page 340 note 2 Pp. 218 foll. It was in the end this inertia of the Liberals in the matter of educational reform as contrasted with the deep concern for it in the Labour Party that later led him to throw in his fortunes with it.

page 340 note 3 Op. cit., p. 173.

page 340 note 4 Ibid., p. 185.

page 341 note 1 Professor Bryce once asked me this question about Balfour, and seemed somewhat surprised -when I replied that his reputation among philosophers partly rested on his great place in the House of Commons. “Odd!” he said, “we give him great credit there for his position among philosophers!”

page 341 note 2 Elizabeth Haldane in the Dictionary of National Biography.

page 344 note 1 When I happened to mention this strain in it as having much impressed me, he told me that the first course of lectures he had given was on Plotinus. It was from Plotinus,-too, that he took the motto of his first important book: “If anyone were to ask Nature for her aim in creation, and if she were willing to lend an ear and to speak, she would say: ‘Ask not but understand in silence even as I am silent and unused to speech.’ ”

page 344 note 2 A Pluralistic Universe (1909), Lecture VI.

page 347 note 1 I found this view afterwards stated more definitely in a letter of 1896. “The results that come from all this laboratory work seem to me to become more and more disappointing and trivial. What is most needed is new ideas. For every man who has one of them one may find a hundred who are willing to drudge patiently at some unimportant experiment.”

page 347 note 2 With the exception, I should add, of John MacCunn's Making of Character.

page 350 note 1 Readers interested in the early history of Psychical Research in America could not do better than refer to Chap. LXI in R. B. Perry's monumental book on the Thought and Character of William James.