Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Caird, Edward
CAIRD, EDWARD (1835–1908), Master of Balliol College, Oxford, and philosopher, born in Greenock on 22 March 1835, was fifth of the seven sons, one of whom died in infancy, of John Caird, partner and manager of a firm of engineers (Caird & Co.) in Greenock. John Caird [q. v. Suppl. I], principal of Glasgow University, by whom Edward was greatly influenced, was the eldest son. Four sons went into business and prospered there. Their mother, Janet, daughter of Roderick Young of Paisley, was left a widow in September 1838, when the eldest son was not eighteen years old and the youngest hardly more than an infant. With limited though not straitened means, she faced her maternal responsibilities with placid optimism.
Edward lived in early childhood with his aunt, Miss Jane Caird, 'a woman of strong mind, and most deeply religious,' whose devotion to the boy did not spare him attendance at frequent and long religious services 'four hours at a yoking.' Passing to Greenock Academy in boyhood, he was repelled by the rough methods of Dr. Brown, his first headmaster; but a new rector, David Duff, only twenty-three years old, a fellow-student of Caird's eldest brother John, and afterwards professor of church history in Edinburgh, awoke his intellectual zeal and proved the kindest friend and counsellor. Caird left Greenock Academy to enter the University of Glasgow in the winter session of 1850-1. He attended the classes first in the faculty of arts and afterwards in the faculty of divinity till the end of session 1855-6. He won many distinctions, mainly in the classical department. His intimate circle of classmates included John Nichol [q. v. Suppl. I], two years his senior, and George Rankine Luke. Caird ranked among them as their ' philosopher in chief.'
Owing to weak health he left Glasgow after the session of 1856 for the sea-air of St. Andrews, under the care of his aunt. He was a student in St. Andrews University in 1856-7. Thence he removed in the spring of 1857 to the house of his brother John, who was then minister of the parish of Errol in Perthshire. At Errol Edward's health was re-established. At the same time an intention of entering the ministry of the Church of Scotland was reconsidered and abandoned. His brother's gifts as a preacher, acting on his modest estimate of himself, may have helped to alter his purpose. His reading exerted a more potent influence. Through Carlyle, whose work was eagerly studied by Scottish undergraduates, Caird was led to Goethe and to German literature, whose poetic and philosophical idealism encouraged dissatisfaction with current theology. On his return, however, to Glasgow in 1857 he resumed attendance at classes in divinity in the winter session.
Caird's mind had already turned towards Oxford and the life of a scholar and teacher. On 28 April 1860 he was elected Snell exhibitioner, and in October he matriculated at Balliol College. There he soon made for himself a high reputation. He gained the Pusey and Ellerton scholarship in Hebrew in the university in 1861, and the Jenkyns exhibition in the college next year, being placed in the same year in the first class in classical moderations. In 1863 he obtained a first class in the final classical school. Considerably older than his fellow-undergraduates and with a 'maturity of mind' beyond their reach, Caird found his intimate associates at Oxford amongst graduates of his own age, who welcomed him as one of themselves ; such were John Nichol and Luke, his Glasgow friends, and David Binning Monro, Mr. James Bryce, Mr. A. V. Dicey, and, above all, Thomas Hill Green. With Green, Caird was from the first in closest sympathy, alike in thought and practical aim. Jowett was Caird's tutor, 'watchful and exigent,' but at that time 'eager to direct students to the new sources of thought opened by the German philosophy and theology.' The most powerful of all the educative forces that played upon Caird in Oxford was, however, the 'Old Mortality Club,' formed of young graduates by John Nichol in 1857, and called by that name because 'every member was, or lately had been, in a weak or precarious state of bodily health.' Amongst its original members were Prof. A. V. Dicey, Luke, T. H. Green, Swinburne, and Mr. James Bryce. Caird had the unique honour of being elected when he was still an under-graduate. Many years afterwards Caird spoke of the meetings of the club as 'the very salt of their university life for some of its members,' with its ' free discussion of everything in heaven or earth, the fresh enjoyment of intellectual sympathy, the fearless intercommunion of spirits.' Caird, Green, and Luke were, according to Prof. Dicey, regarded by the club as 'the most remarkable [of its members] both morally and intellectually.'
Friends noted how little in later life Caird's outward aspect changed after his early Oxford days. His mental and spiritual convictions and his attitude to life's problems took at the same period, largely under the club's stimulus, a form which, while it ripened, remained essentially what it had been. He was a 'radical,' like his friend Green, not only in politics, but in religion and philosophy. In his youth he tried to persuade his brother Stuart to join the 'red-shirts' of Garibaldi. Abraham Lincoln was the political hero of his youth, and in his later years he wrote of him as the 'greatest statesman of the English-speaking race since the elder Pitt.' He did not take up many social causes, or excite himself over ^the daily barometrical changes in politics ; but there were principles, fundamental in their character and vital alike to his political, religious, and philosophical convictions, by which he stood all his life with firmness and steadiness, and with a complete absence of concern as to ridicule or obloquy. Having graduated B.A. in 1863, Caird remained at Oxford, teaching philosophy privately. In 1864 he was elected to an open fellowship at Merton and was appointed tutor. After lecturing and teaching there for two years, he was elected professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow on 28 May 1866. With characteristic magnanimity he had declined to stand when he heard that his friend Nichol was candidate, but Nichol with no smaller loyalty retired in his favour, and supported his candidature. There was an unexampled field of candidates, amongst them Henry Calderwood, John Cunningham, Robert Flint, Simon S. Laurie, John Campbell Shairp, and James Hutchison Stirling, of all of whom memoirs appear in this Dictionary. Caird's election was unanimous. He held the post for twenty-seven years. At the close of his introductory lecture in Nov. 1866 he said that his highest ambition had been 'to teach philosophy in a Scottish university, and above all,' he added, 'in this university to which I owe so much ; and now there is almost nothing I would not give for the assurance that I should be able to teach it well.' Twenty years afterwards, on the presentation of his portrait to the university, he struck the same note : 'If fortune had given me the power of choosing my place and work in life, I do not think I should have chosen any other than that which has fallen to me.'
Caird put all his energies into his work as professor. His classes were large, and he read with conscientious thoroughness, night by night, during the winter session, the weekly and fortnightly essays of his many pupils. The main endeavour, he said of his teaching, was to plant a few 'germinative ideas' in his pupils' minds. But at the same time he connected his ideas into a system of thought with characteristic passion for synthesis and construction. He excited the interest of his hearers by insisting 'that what was true could be reasoned,' and 'that what was reasoned must be true.' Some critics urged that he was prone to repetition in both lectures and books. But 'having laboriously worked his way to central coherent convictions he could not avoid repeating them in all their manifold applications' (Prof. McCunn). A buoyant optimism, too, which was yet allied with an active sympathy with suffering (cf. ' Optimism and Pessimism ' in Evolution of Religion), and a resolute adherence to what he called ' the speculative attitude,' enabled him thoroughly to impress and stimulate youthful thought of the best kind.
At the same time Caird interested himself in many matters outside his classroom. In the earliest years of his Glasgow professorship he advocated the higher education of women, when there was no member of the senate to support him save his brother ; but he persisted till he persuaded. Meanwhile Caird, in the phrase of Prof. Bosanquet, was 'punctuating his laborious life at almost regular intervals with philosophical treatises, any one of which by itself would have sufficed to found a philosopher's reputation.' 'A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant, with an historical introduction,' appeared at Glasgow in 1877, and a further volume on the same theme in 1889 (2nd edit. 1909, 2 vols.) ; in 1883 he published a monograph on Hegel (in 'Philosophical Classics for English Readers,' Edinburgh); and in 1885 'The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte' (Glasgow). In these works Caird critically interpreted other thinkers on lines of his own. In his great volumes on Kant he sought 'to display in the very argument of the great metaphysician, who was supposed to have cut the world in two with a hatchet, an almost involuntary but continuous and inevitable regression towards objective organic unity.' Notably in his treatment of Kant as of Comte his purpose was to show that there is a centre of unity to which the mind must come back out of all differences, however varied and alien in appearance. The analysis was preliminary to reconstruction. Caird's way of criticism differed indeed from that of other- philosophical writers. It was consistently and even obtrusively constructive. He seized upon the truths contained in the authors with whom he dealt, and was only incidentally concerned with their errors, if he were concerned at all. He constrained the truths to expose their one-sidedness and abstractness, and to exhibit their need of their opposites. The like originality and continuity of thought is visible in Caird's two treatises on the philosophy of religion, 'The Evolution of Religion' (1893) and 'The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophy' (1904, 2 vols.). The books were based on two courses of Gifford lectures, the first delivered before the University of St. Andrews in 1891-2 and the second before the University of Glasgow in 1900. In the first work he exhibits the spiritual sense of mankind as at first dominated by the object, but constrained by its own abstractions to swing round so as to fall under the sway of the subject. In the second work there is the same exhibition of spiritual continuity and evolution. The story of Greek philosophy, which Caird considered mainly in its relation to theology, was carried from Plato to Plotinus and St. Augustine; and was told 'with a thoroughness and mastery of detail, a soundness of judgment, and a lucidity of expression, which makes it the best complete text-book on the subject.' Two volumes of 'Essays on Literature and Philosophy' (1892) bore further witness to the breadth and depth of his interests. In literature Goethe and Carlyle divided his allegiance with Dante and Wordsworth.
On the death of Jowett, Master of Balliol, on 1 Oct. 1893, Caird was elected to the mastership by the fellows. He returned to Oxford after much grave reflection and only because he felt that to follow Green and Jowett was to continue his Glasgow work in a situation in which, as he said to a friend, 'he could have his hand on the heart of England.' He found himself face to face with a new kind of task in conditions that were very different from those of the Oxford of his Merton days, but he adapted himself to the situation. 'Where it was necessary,' wrote one of his Balliol colleagues, 'Caird acquainted himself with the often trivial details of college business ; took his full share, both by lecturing and personal tuition, in its teaching work ; showed the liveliest interest in all sides of the college life ; made himself readily accessible to all members of the college, and always found time to listen to those who wished to consult him ; was lavishly generous in his estimate of the knowledge and work of others and loyally trustful of his colleagues.' In general university affairs 'he was deeply interested in the movement for the extension of university education to women and was chosen to propose to the university the motion for granting degrees to them. When that motion was defeated he continued to help the movement in other ways.' He supported the university settlement at Toynbee Hall, London, and the Ruskin College for the education of working-men at Oxford. In politics, as in all else, he remained steadfast to his early beliefs and stoutly opposed the Boer war. He therefore resisted the bestowal of the honorary degree by the university on Cecil Rhodes [q. v. Suppl. II] in 1899. But his devotion to philosophic speculation was his main interest. He was a candidate in 1897 for the Whyte professorship of moral philosophy on the vacancy caused by the death of his friend William Wallace [q. v.], and the failure of his candidature was an unwelcome rebuff, but his activity as a college lecturer on philosophy was unc&minished. Throughout his career as Master, too, he delivered impressive lay-sermons on social problems in the College Hall, and occasionally at Toynbee Hall, and he wrote many articles on literature and philosophy in the reviews. He collected into a volume 'Lay Sermons and Addresses delivered in the Hall of Balliol College, Oxford' (1907). In 1907 serious illness compelled him to resign the mastership of Balliol, and he removed from the college to a residence in Oxford, where he died on 1 Nov. 1908. He was buried in St. Sepulchre's cemetery beside Green and Jowett.
Caird married on 8 May 1867 Caroline Frances, eldest daughter of John Wylie, minister of the parish of Carluke in Lanarkshire. She survived him without issue. Caird was made hon. LL.D. of St. Andrews in 1883, of Glasgow in 1894 ; hon. D.C.L. of Oxford in 1891, and D.Lit. of Cambridge in 1898 and of the University of Wales on 9 May 1902. He became in 1902 one of the original fellows of the British Academy, before which he read on 24 May 1903 a paper on ' Idealism and the Theory of Knowledge.' He was also elected a corresponding member to the French Academic des Sciences morales et politiques. Besides the works cited, Caird wrote the article 'Cartesianism' in the 'Encyclopædia Britannica' (llth edit.) and on Anselm's argument for the being of God in 'Journal of Theological Studies ' (Oct. 1899).
Of singularly tranquil and passive temperament and of simple, frank nature, Caird must be credited with genuinely great intellectual and moral stature. His life was devoted to what was for him the only 'one reasonable controversy' the controversy not as to the existence but as 'to the Nature of the all-embracing unity on which every intelligible experience must rest, and on the other hand, as to the nature of the differences which it equally involves.' He would probably have admitted that the total effect of his labour, sustained through so many years of heroic speculative industry, was to state the problem anew; and that his whole exposition of the movement of thought in the great philosophers, and of the movement of the world as caught up in their thought, was only the illustration and exemplification of an hypothesis rather than philosophic proof. If there is one sense in which he could not admit that the rationality of the Universe, or what to him was the same thing, the omnipresence and utter sovereignty of the Divine, was not a debatable question, there was another sense in which it was a 'Grand Perhaps.' 'It is involved in the very idea of a developing consciousness such as ours,' he wrote late in life, 'that while, as an intelligence, it presupposes the idea of the whole, and, both in thought and action, must continually strive to realise that idea, yet what it deals with is necessarily a partial and limited experience, and its actual attainments can never, either in theory or practice, be more than provisional. ... If in one sense we must call this idea a faith, we must remember that it is in no sense an arbitrary assumption; rather it is the essential faith of reason, the presupposition and bases of all that reason has achieved or can achieve.' A portrait painted by the Hon. John Collier hangs in the hall of Balliol College, and a tablet is designed for the College chapel. In 1886, after Caird had been twenty years professor at Glasgow, his pupils presented to the university his portrait by Sir George Reid; a bronze medallion by David MacGill was placed in the moral philosophy class room there in 1910. There is a caricature portrait by Spy' in 'Vanity Fair' (1895).
[Personal knowledge; Mr. Bernard Bosanquet's memoir in Proc. Brit. Acad. 1907-8, pp. 379 sq.; The Times, 3 Nov. 1908; James Addison's Snell Exhibitions, 1911; Prof. Knight's Life of Nichol; memorial address by J. L. Strachan- Davidson, Master of Balliol College, 1908; speeches by Prof. MacCunn and others at unveiling of memorial tablet at Glasgow Univ. 1910; reminiscences of Prof. A. V. Dicey, Prof. Saintsbury and Prof. Wenley; for an examination of Caird's theology see A. W. Benn's English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century, 1906.]