Ethical Addresses - Eighth Series

Thomas and Julian Huxley, 1892

Series Eight of Ethical Addresses has now been added to the Bibliography for Ethical Culture.  Up to now, this blog has been playing "catch up" with the bibliographic entries made more than a year ago.  Now we are making progress again.  

Issued in 1901 (the same year as Series Seven), this issue includes fewer addresses than seems usual and more new platform speakers than usual.  While the implied message is that there was change or turmoil or other issues happening in the background around that time, what is before us in this issue is an intense focus on concepts related to Religion in general (albeit with a comparative perspective) along with some acknowledgement (pro-forma?) of the turn of the century but not-so-much about Ethical Culture per se.

New authors in this issue include:

• Edwin D. Mead - Mead was co-founder and editor of New England Magazine, a literary magazine published from 1884 to 1917.  He served as president of the Free Religion Association, which would have given him a connection to Felix Adler, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others who appear in these volumes.  Mead, along with his wife, Lucia Ames Mead, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913.
• Wu Ting-Fang - Wu was the Chinese Minister to the US, Spain, and Peru (1896 - 1902).  He lectured widely about Chinese culture and history in an effort to counter discrimination against Chinese immigrants.
• Frederic Harrison - Harrison helped found the London Positivist Committee, which was an atheistic philosophical society following the ideas of Auguste Comte.  A lawyer, Harrison was politically active and wrote extensively about positivism and Comte.
• Langdon C. Stewardson - Stewardson was a challenge to track down.  Indeed, his politically and socially active wife was more immediately searchable via Google.  However, Stewardson did eventually emerge in the more obscure sites of academic journals and web archives.  He served (1898) as Chaplain of Lehigh University.  In 1901, he was President of Hobart College (then an institution reserved for young men only) and a contributor to the International Journal of Ethics.  (Adler served on the editorial board of the IJE for many years.)

One lecture in this volume that I found to be of particular interest is Adler's "Huxley's Attitude Toward Religion" (pp. 99-122).  I have to confess that I have read from the works of the brothers, Aldous Huxley and Julian Huxley.  I had not, until reading Adler's platform, known of their grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley (also known as "Darwin's Bulldog").  While Adler strains at (this) Huxley's newly coined term--agnosticism--I found Huxley's reasoning more congenial to my own thinking, being less encumbered by the idealism that was still the center of Adler's conceptualization of the world.  Having been alerted to (this) Huxley, I have found his style of writing, as did Adler, very much to my taste, and his thinking even more so--since Huxley wrote to be accessible to the lay reader.  

Adler refers specifically to Huxley's letters to Kingsley and his Romanes lecture, both available for download from the Internet Archive.