SAMUEL ALEXANDER, O.M.

A GREAT SON OF AUSTRALIA.

By Proff. J. Alexander Gunn.

The greatest living British philosopher, Samuel Alexander, who received the Order of Merit on the Kings Birthday is an Australian by birth. He is an "old boy" of Wesley College where his name may be seen inscribed on the honour board. From Wesley he passed to the University of Melbourne, and thence by scholarship to Oxford where he had the distinction of gaining not merely a double first but a triple first. He graduated with first class honours in the three honours schools of classics, Mathematics and "greats "(philosophy and its cognate subjects). He obtained the Greer prize in moral philosophy and later he was elected a fellow of two Oxford colleges Balliol and Lincoln.
Like Bergson, Alexander was born in the year in which Darwin's "Origin of Species" was published and he grew up in the wake of the controversy which was to present such a problem to the thinkers of the nineteenth century the problem enunciated so clearly by Huxley, of the apparent contradiction between Nature and ethical ideas. This problem Alexander tackled in his first book "Moral Order and Progress" written in 1891 and dedicated to his Oxford teacher T. H. Green the great English Hegelian and idealist. No one reading that book could have suspected that the writer would give to the world nearly 30 years later such a remarkable, independent, and realist book as "Space, Time and Deity " Two years after the publication of "Moral Order and Progress," however, the death of Robert Adamson was announced at Manchester. This brilliant young Scot had gone to the University of Manchester as professor of philosophy, and his early death was a tragedy. Samuel Alexander was elected to succeed him. He held that chair until his retirement after the war.

The Problem of Knowledge

Away from the idealism of Oxford he worked out his own theories, taking a line entirely at variance with his Oxford teachings. The Oxford of that day, like Scotland, was largely under the domination of the German idealism of Hegel and his successors. This "mentalism," as it might be called, coloured the attitude adopted to all problems, logic, ethics, politics, and theology. It specially coloured the problem of knowledge itself. Knowing was a purely mental act. Some of the more unguarded teachers spoke as if the conscious mind of man actually created the world outside in comprehending it. Berkeley was invoked to support the general trend of Hegel, nothing could exist unless it were perceived by mind. If it was suggested that things might exist in their own right when human beings were not observing, appeal was made to the Deity. He at least would always be on watch. It was this argument which was so amusingly put by a puzzled undergraduate in lines which he wrote in some anxiety after a philosophy lecture: —

There once was a man who said "God

 Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree

 Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."

Alexander, rebelling against idealistic arguments of this type, saw no reason why the tree or any other thing might not exist in its own right, whether observed or not.

This is the philosophy of realism. For Alexander mind is only one in a democracy of things. Other things than mind, from trees to time, can exist, whether they are perceived or not, for perceiving does not create them. They exist independently, and this is so, however much it be affirmed that mind by selective interest "creates its world." Alexander, in a series of papers from 1893 to 1914, did much to renew the interest in this question. In a little book on the English philosopher John Locke he claimed that the views of idealism were imported from Germany and planted in foreign soil. English philosophy in Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Mill had always been in tone realist, empirical, closely allied to science in its love of fact. Contemporary developments which come from Cambridge rather than " the home of lost causes" support Alexander's contentions. Moore, Russell, and Whitehead, together with most of the younger teachers of philosophy in Britain, no longer belong to the idealistic school, but are in large degree realists. This means a different attitude, not merely to the act of knowing itself, but also to other things, notably to the synthetic efforts of the Hegelians. Analysis and the tackling of separate problems replaces the Germanic attempt to erect great systems of the whole. Idealism always thought in terms of the whole or the absolute but realists are not convinced that there is a whole. Some of them like that radical empiricist and pluralist William James, are inclined to view the universe as "a multiverse."

The Gifford Lectures

During the last years of the war Alexander received the greatest honour which can come to any British philosopher. He was elected to deliver the Gifford lectures. These were published in 1920 under the title "Space, Time and Deity. " This book raised him at once to international fame. It is undoubtedly the most important book on philosophy published in England since Bradleys "Appearance and Reality " was issued in 1893. As Bradley relied for inspiration upon Hegel, Alexander seems to find his, to some extent, in Spinoza although his book is far less allied to Spinoza than Bradley's was to Hegel. Alexander however is not a pantheist. Whereas for Spinoza the basis of all things was God or Nature for Hegel the absolute idea, for Bergson the elan vital or life force for Alexander it is space—time.

It is difficult to convey briefly the wealth of argument and the grandeur of the conceptions of the universe which are set out in Space, Time, and Deity " Alexander like Kant in his "Critique of Pure Reason " begins with space and time as fundamental but he considers that one cannot exist apart from the other, and that in what he calls "space-time" lies the secret of the universe. This space time is the matrix from which spring all movements and these movements in the course of development give use to all the "things" found in the world. Undismayed by the saying, that "the world is so full of a number of things" he boldly claims that they somehow come from space time, the creator and sustainer of all that is. Like Kant again, and Renouvier, Alexander has much to say of categories. Space time itself, however, is not a category, nor is it substantial. " It is the fundamental creative matrix, the elan of which gives us the emergence of matter, life, mind and Deity (not God) Alexander distinguishes sharply between God and Deity. For him as for Spinoza, God is a fact. He is positively all there, is in space-time. Deity is the quality of striving or aspiring to a higher level.
The book contains many fine sayings about freedom, about morality, truth, and art.

The Argus  14 June 1930,