The Magdalen Metaphysicals. Idealism and Orthodoxy at Oxford, 1901-1945 (review)

502 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~6:3JULY 1988 else" (~93). James would have approved this conclusion, as he wouM have been relieved to have his work treated as a triumph of his devotion to philosophy rather than as yet another futile grab at the last word. JONATHAN D. MORENO GeorgeWashington University James Patrick. The Magdalen Metaphysicals.Idealismand Orthodoxyat Oxford, x9o~-i 945. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985. P. xliii + 19o. $18.95. In two essays of July 1862 the French critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve first called attention to the importance of intellectual ~lites, those groups of friends and contemporaries united in time and place which form a community of genius. Being a literary critic, he instanced the little company of Boileau, Racine, La Fontaine, and Moli~re about 1664 in Paris and Goethe's Weimar Circle. And we are all aware of the significance of such terms as "Port Royal" and "Bloomsbury." The concept of the special intellectual community also has relevance for philosophy in the modern world, although here the characteristic situation is within the university. One thinks of the great Harvard department circa 19oo which contained James, Royce, Palmer, Santayana and MOnsterberg, or about the same time, of Merton College, Oxford, with F. H. Bradley, John Burnet, A. E. Taylor and Harold Joachim. Or New College, the fountainhead of Greek studies, with Gilbert Murray, Frederic Kenyon, Edwyn Bevan, A. E. Zimmern and Richard Livingstone. And also at the same time, but at "the other place," the Trinity of M'Taggart, Whitehead, Russell, and G. E. Moore. The book under review, The Magdalen Metaphysicals:Idealismand Orthodoxyat Oxford, x9oI-x945, carves out another significant philosophical community at Magdalen a generation later, composed primarily ofJohn Alexander Smith, Clement C.J. Webb, R. G. Collingwood and C. S. Lewis, and holding fast to traditional metaphysics and orthodox Christian theology at a time when both were becoming increasingly unpopular. The community of the "Magdalen Metaphysicals" is certainly not as illustrious as any of the others mentioned above. J. A. Smith, while surely the foremost Aristotelian scholar at Oxford and extremely influential as teacher and mentor, wrote very little and is probably known in America only as the senior editor (with W. D. Ross) of The Oxford Aristotle. Clement C. J. Webb was perhaps more theologian and historian of mediaeval thought than philosopher proper. His Studies in the Historyof Natural Theology and his Gifford Lectures of 1918-1919, God and Personality,are known to theologians and his Aristotelian Society papers on Anselm and John of Salisbury to mediaevalists , but only his History of Philosophy, published in 1913 in The Home University Library (that wonderful little series which contains also Whitehead's An Introduction to Mathematics, G. E. Moore's Ethics, and Russell's The Problemsof Philosophy) is probably known to American philosophers of the last generation. C. S. Lewis, an early idealist adherent of Bradley and Bosanquet, finally entered the English School at Oxford in 1922 and became more a literary than a philosophical figure, but he remained close BOOK REVIEWS 503 both to Smith and to Webb. Of the four "Magdalen Metaphysicals" it is only R. G. Collingwood who is a philosopher of the first rank and as famous in America as in England. The "Magdalen Metaphysicals" as a group were less progressive than reactionary. At a time when the influential Oxford realists--Cook Wilson, Prichard, and H. W. B. Joseph were celebrating their victories over the ghosts of Thomas Hill Green and Richard Nettleship, these four embraced an outmoded idealism, buttressed by a devotion to the tenets of Christian theology. They were all engaged in a careful reconsideration of the essential relation between philosophy and religion. Their philosophy was based on four basic presuppositions: (1) an interest in classical Greek sources, particularly Plato and Aristotle, (2) a belief in the importance of historical studies and the revival of history as a discipline, (3) a conviction that philosophical writing was essentially literary, and finally (4) that religion could yield truth since it seemed that philosophical questions required theological answers. The philosophy shared by Smith, Webb, Collingwood, and Lewis was clearly idealism , although it owed more to Croce than to...