student numbers fell, and professors’ pay plummeted (Green, 1969: 108–109).
Even in the 1860s, the main base of the secular thinkers, Utilitarians and
scientific materialists, remained the journalistic marketplace. After the Ox-
bridge reforms, the attraction of the rival civic universities fell even lower for
a time; later they became branches of the career networks of Oxbridge scholars.
Although reform was enunciated largely in the name of Utilitarian and
scientific ideas, the triumph of university secularization was followed by an
outburst of Idealism (Richter, 1969; Nicholson, 1990). At the network center
was Balliol College, where Jowett as Greek tutor had been outspoken for
university as well as civil service reform and simultaneously for the liberaliza-
tion of theology. A turning point was Jowett’s trial and acquittal on heresy
charges at Oxford in 1855. Jowett was a Plato scholar, more concerned with
upgrading teaching standards in the classics than with encouraging German-
style philosophy; nevertheless, his pupil T. H. Green (who arrived the year of
the heresy trial) became chief tutor at Balliol when Jowett became master in
1870, and Idealism was promoted by a series of Green’s students and associ-
ates: Bosanquet, Caird, Wallace (translator of Hegel), Bradley (a longtime
fellow at Merton College), and many minor followers.
The Idealists were strongly attached to educational reform and anti-cleri-
calism, at the same time treating philosophy as a reasoned substitute for
religion. Their attitude resembles that of Hegel, who declared in the 1820s that
religion henceforward could survive between the extremes of secularism and
dogmatism only by taking refuge in philosophy (Dickey, 1993). Green was the
first Balliol tutor not in religious orders; his friend Sidgwick had resigned his
Cambridge fellowship during the height of the controversy on grounds of
conscience as a nonbeliever, and resumed it only under the reformed regula-
tions.^43 Idealism as a halfway house to secularization had connections both
ways; Green and his compatriots upheld the independence of philosophical
judgments from all other considerations (political as well as religious), at the
same time claiming for philosophy the prestige of the highest moral activity.
Green, Bosanquet, Toynbee, and others of the group were crusaders for social
work, temperance, and popular education, carrying over the moral impulse of
the Evangelicals (whose agitation had been principally for strict Sabbath ob-
servance) into liberal causes. But the Idealists were not intrinsically a political
movement; they included political conservatives such as Bradley (who played
something like the part of Schopenhauer or the older Schelling to Green’s
Fichte).
The leading Idealists were all sons of Evangelical clergymen (Richter, 1969);
but we cannot explain their positions simply as a psychological reaction,
insofar as it is quite as common for sons to follow their fathers’ doctrines as
to reject them. The determining situation was structural. Evangelicals were on
666 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths