pered by finding sources of internal disputes for generating new variants,
together with fresh amalgams of ingredients from other positions.
New trends in scholarship were pressed into support of religion; on the one
hand, the techniques of the new experimental psychology; on the other hand,
the opening to Asian philology and history, such as the translation of Hindu
texts (beginning in 1875) by the Oxford professor Max Müller, an import from
German philology seminars. This was the heyday of seances and spirit-callings,
of Madame Blavatsky (who founded the Theosophical Society in 1875) and
Annie Besant (the Theosophical leader in the 1890s). In 1882 Sidgwick and
F. W. H. Meyers, a psychologist and fellow Trinity man, founded the Society
for Psychical Research, seeking scientific evidence of the survival of bodily
death.^45 Laboratory psychologists also promulgated Idealist metaphysics, in-
cluding Stout’s Mind and Matter as late as 1931 and his posthumous God and
Nature (1952).
Sub-disputes proliferated as Idealists divided to fill their now-reigning at-
tention space. The prominence of Bradley’s impersonal Absolute left a space
for the defense of theistic or personal Idealism, by James Ward among others.
Against the personalists Bradley’s follower Bosanquet defended Absolute Ide-
alism by blending it with the aesthetics and the moralistic do-gooding of the
liberal intellectuals; art, science, and religion, he held, are the higher aspects
of Reality which we may touch through our own activities. On the other side,
Ward’s Trinity pupil McTaggart reconstructed a Christianity without Christ or
redemption, and without a creative or controlling God; the world consists in
a community of personal souls, connected by feelings of love. All this takes
place on the level of Absolute Reality, which is beyond time. One consequence
is that souls exist eternally, reappearing through successive births and deaths.
McTaggart nevertheless derived his system in a highly technical way, con-
necting it to the investigations of his colleague Bertrand Russell into the logical
foundations of mathematics and physics. The key to McTaggart’s system was
formulated in a 1908 paper on the unreality of time. Time consists in two
series: past-present-future and earlier-later. Only the former involves change
and hence must be the essence of time. But past, present, and future are
relational properties which change and hence must be related to something
outside the time series. Equally fatally, the three temporal characteristics of
events are incompatible, and cannot be made compatible via a concept of
successiveness without begging the question. Time-bound events are appear-
ances only, perhaps reflections of a non-temporal ordering.^46 Everything cul-
minates, Bradley-like, in a “final” stage which is not temporal, but which
absorbs all pleasure and pain and gives infinite value to the universe.
McTaggart speculates as to the relative maxima, limits, and bounds of
various kinds of goods and evils in the series beyond time, in a fashion that
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^669