Bloomsbury's Prophet. G. E. Moore and the Development of His Moral Philosophy (review)

504 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:3JULY 1988 with the main tradition of Anglo-American philosophy from the fifties onward. Yet their influence was diffuse and deep. J. A. Smith exercised great influence over H. H. Joachim, the formidable Aristotle and Spinoza scholar, as he did over H.J. Paton, the Croce-influenced philosopher later to become a foremost authority on Kant. Collingwood's influence was even greater, if more diffuse. Both Sir Malcolm Knox and G. R. G. Mure have noted his effect upon them, to say nothing of Collingwood's great reputation in America. James Patrick deserves our thanks for this interesting, well-researched, welldocumented addition to our history of philosophy at Oxford in the first four decades of the present century. It casts considerable light on some little known (in America), but significant philosophic figures. And it demonstrates once again the sociological consequences of philosophical fellowship. If Sainte-Beuve were alive today, he would welcome it as a significant contribution to his theory of intellectual ~lites. ALBERT WILLIAM LEVI Washington University Tom Regan. Bloomsbury'sProphet. G. E. Moore and theDevelopmentofHis Moral Philosophy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. Pp. xix + 3o7. $~9.95. Tom Regan's book is mainly, though not entirely, devoted to exploring the development of G. E. Moore's early moral philosophy and its influence upon the famous Bloomsbury group. That Moore was at one time an Idealist, that he went through personal travails, something like the crises experienced by Carlyle and Mill (though less severe), and that he was admired by the Bloomsberries, as Regan calls them, all of this is well known. But Regan, working with unpublished correspondence and other materials , fills in the outlines in vivid detail. The prospective reader might thus have expected the work to transport us on a dull voyage over familiar terrain. Instead, it turns out to be an entertaining, informative and provocative essay full of interesting theses, not all of them convincing. Regan suggests, for instance, on highly circumstantial grounds that Moore may have had a homosexual relationship with A. R. Ainsworth and then presupposes the truth of this conjecture to explain why Moore never criticized the homosexual activities of some of the Bloomsberries. That the Bloomsberries were not only "liberated" by the standards of their time but even by ours is well documented in the spate of recent books about them (by Edel, Levy and Skidelsky, for instance). Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant were lovers. Grant abandoned Strachey forJ. M. Keynes, and then rejected him for Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf's sister), who had broken off an extra marital affair with Roger Fry to join Grant. Some of Regan's most provocative theses are connected with these sorts of activities by the Bloomsberries. He holds that they found in Principia Ethica thejustification for their unconventional way of life. In particular, they read Chapter 5 as proving that the conditions for the application of moral rules are vague, and accordingly that it should be left to reflective, individual human judgment to decide on the proper course of action in a given moral situation. And this line of argumentation, Regan states, was the basis for their rejection of conventional morality. BOOK REVIEWS 505 The evidence Regan introduces on behalf of these assertions is exiguous. In the welter of words the Bloomsberries wrote about themselves and their philosophies of life, Regan cannot seem to find a direct quote demonstrating that it was this argument that they found in Moore. Indeed, much of the evidence he cites has a contrary import: Virginia Woolf has read Principia ten times and complains she cannot understand it. Another of Regan's theses is that the Bloomsbury construal of Moore is the correct one. But a careful reading of Chapter 5 shows that Moore argues that the answer to the question, "What kinds of actions ought we to perform?" is that we ought always to follow the dictates of common morality. "In short," he writes on page 162 of P.E., "though we may be sure that there are cases where the rule should be broken, we can never know which those cases are, and ought, therefore, never to break it." There...