the opposite fringe from Newman and the Oxford High Church movement;
together their mobilization had broken up Anglican domination and led to the
secularization of church-controlled education. These second-generation Evan-
gelicals inherited leadership as the reform wing within the establishment;
taking advantage of the new intellectual situation after the university reforms,
they produced not an anti-religion in the manner of the Utilitarians, but a
quasi-secularized version of religion.
The intellectual opening for the Idealists was initially in disputing the
Utilitarian principles brought to the center of attention in the agitation over
liberal reform. Green attacked the materialist doctrine of sense data on the
grounds that impressions are never isolated; relations among them can appear
only for a conscious mind. The world must be made by mind, and the apparent
externality of sensory material reality rests on God. Redefining the ideological
impetus, Green grounded the ethics of social reform in participation in “higher
purposes,” and argued that the spiritual self-realization of human beings must
be made in cooperative, altruistic action.
Green’s central argument made use of Hume’s critique of causal order in
the associations of sense impressions. Green’s first major scholarly work (1874)
was an edition of Hume; the result was to make Hume a canonical figure in
modern academic British philosophy. Once again we see that the most valuable
possessions for creative intellectuals are puzzles which can be used to bring
out oppositions to currently dominant positions. Green parallels Kant in the
use that both make of Hume, and Hume’s reputation as a philosopher is largely
owed to these later developments. It is not simply that philosophers’ positions
in intellectual history depend on the accidents of whether they are studied later.
The significance of any individual thinker is not created by that person alone.
The emergence of certain ideas in the mind and from the pen of an individual,
as we have repeatedly seen, is the precipitate of prior and contemporary
networks and conflicts in the intellectual community. Nor does the social
causality stop there, for the processes that make a particular individual’s
statements of major or minor significance are above all the roles that these
ideas play in future generations of intellectual alliance and opposition. Since
Idealist movements in Germany, England, and elsewhere represent the academi-
zation of philosophy, it is not surprising they should be central in formulating
the canonical sequences of philosophical history. And of course Idealism is the
philosophy which above all others recognizes the embedding of the individual
in larger contexts, and in the historical movement of ideas.
Bradley too began by taking Utilitarianism as his foil. His Ethical Studies
(1876) held that good cannot be a calculus of pleasures and pains, but involves
duties and ideals; these are social in character, historically changing, and in-
terpretable only in concrete circumstances rather than in the abstract. Bradley’s
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^667