reminds us of the tools which G. E. Moore had used in his anti-Utilitarian
Principia Ethica (1903), and of Russell’s innovations in mathematical logic
(notably in Principles of Mathematics, 1903). And indeed McTaggart, Moore,
and Russell were all intimates, members of the elite discussion society, the
Apostles, at Trinity, Cambridge. Although Moore and Russell set off a move-
ment of revolt against Idealism, their techniques did not in themselves destroy
Idealism, but provided new means by which determined Idealists could open
up still further reaches of their own terrain. We see once again that creativity
proceeds via simultaneous oppositions, and that the institutional conditions
which sustain an intellectual attention space are impervious to argument. Not
until the fading of the generation brought up in the aftermath of the clerical
stronghold in the universities was a religious halfway house no longer a major
focus of attention.
Creativity comes from the energy and focus of the networks irrespective of
their contents. Moore, Russell, and their followers were offshoots of Idealist
connections, in this case of Ward, Stout, and McTaggart; they made their
reputations by repudiating their own youthful Idealism. This anti-Idealist
rebellion did not automatically displace the older lineage of cultural capital.
Others in these networks continued down through the 1920s to construct
systems which owe much to Idealism. Samuel Alexander, whose ties derived
from Green and Bradley and from the experimental psychologists Munsterberg
and Stout, repudiated Idealism in the sense of mind as the central constituent
of reality. Nevertheless, his system has a quasi-religious quality.^47 Alexander
developed a Spinoza-like two-aspect monism; in place of matter and mind, he
substituted Space (extension) and Time. Drawing on his research in physiologi-
cal psychology, Alexander (1927: 2:38) argues that mind is an emergent aspect
of the spatial ordering of matter: “Time is the mind of Space” (i.e., time is the
emergent aspect of extension, the generator of qualities). Such “emergence” of
course is on a conceptual level, not itself in time. Further emergents are mind,
in the more limited human sense, and at a conceptually “higher” level, Deity.
Alexander preserves a place for God, but as derivative of more fundamental
aspects of the universe; philosophy and science are the primary disciplines, but
in their dominance they reserve a place for theology.
Whitehead’s system, like Alexander’s, resembles Bradley’s religion of the
Absolute, transposed into the terms of naturalism. What for Bradley are
paradoxes, marks of the realm of Appearance and goads to move onward to
the Absolute, Whitehead takes as evidence that the underlying concepts are
defective. The result is not to transcend appearance but to derive it from a new
conceptual scheme, in which the misleading traditions of language are replaced
by conceptions inspired by relativity physics, and by the logical reformulations
designed since Dedekind and Cantor to overcome paradoxes in the infinitesimal
670 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths