Article by John R. Shook in Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Philosophers (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002), vol. 2, pp. 979-983.

SCHILLER, Ferdinand Canning Scott (1864–1937)

Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller was born on 16 August 1864 in Schleswig-Holstein on the Danish side of the border, and died in Los Angeles on 9 August 1937. His father, of German origin, was a Calcutta merchant who gave his three sons British educations. After Rugby School, Schiller entered Oxford and Balliol, where Master Benjamin Jowett, T.H. Green, Edward Caird, William Wallace and Richard Nettleship were founding British neo-idealism in the 1880s. Schiller was awarded firsts in classical moderations and in Greats, the Taylorian Scholarship for German in 1887 and the MA degree. He was an instructor in logic and metaphysics at Cornell University from 1893 until 1897, when Oxford’s Corpus Christi College called him back home, to be assistant tutor, then tutor, senior tutor and Fellow. From 1900 to 1926 Schiller served as Treasurer of the Mind Association. He was President of the Aristotelian Society, President of the British Society for Psychical Research and a Fellow of the British Academy. He retired from Corpus Christi in 1926, and became a professor at the University of Southern California, teaching there until 1935.

                F.C.S. Schiller was the primary English representative of pragmatism, defending its principles and elaborating its theories for a mostly European audience. From his post at Oxford Schiller conducted incisive and polemical debates with absolute idealists, particularly F.H. Bradley, and also realists, especially Bertrand Russell, concerning the proper role of reason in ascertaining the nature of reality, personhood and value. Schiller championed the nascent evolutionism, voluntarism and personal idealism which was emerging in the United States, Great Britain, France and Italy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His self-titled ‘humanism’ offered a philosophy that gave special priority to the individual consciousness and free will for theorizing on the true, the good and the right. ‘Man is the measure of all things’ was Schiller’s humanistic doctrine, of which pragmatism was a particular application. His enormous productivity was distributed across religion, psychology, education, history and nearly every area of philosophy, including epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and ethics. Of central importance for Schiller was the nature of meaning in relation to thought, language, logical inference, knowledge and truth.

Schiller’s closest allies were William James, Henry Sturt, Alfred Sidgwick, and Giovanni Papini. Their common tie was a belief in the reality of human power and growth in an accommodating universe. Schiller made an early commitment to exploring evolution’s impact on philosophy, anonymously publishing Riddles of the Sphinx: A Study in the Philosophy of Evolution (1891) at the age of twenty-seven. This popular book, running through three editions, displays his lifelong quest to establish a kind of anti-materialistic and non-sceptical relativism in which revisable knowledge grounded on human interests is attainable. There are also strong signs of Nietzschean influences in this work; Schiller went the farthest in that direction of all the major pragmatists. In James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) he then discovered a biological theory of consciousness as an interactive process of growth within a selectively perceived environment. Both James and Schiller followed the primary philosophical implication: all thought must service the organism’s survival efforts in a plastic and malleable world. Schiller promptly expanded upon James’s will-to-believe doctrine, declaring truth to be what proves to be valuable, and formulated a subjectivist version of James’s stream of consciousness theory, declaring that reality must only be as it is knowable by an individual mind. Schiller asserted the ontological ultimacy of the creative personal mind because it is the most real thing knowable, and held that personal values must always be the final judge of all knowledge.

It must not be forgotten that the strong tide of absolute idealism in turn-of-the-century British thought was stoutly resisted by a group of self-titled ‘personal’ idealists. Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, Hastings Rashdall and Schiller were the most prominent dissenters. Rashdall and Schiller, together with six more Oxford personalists, contributed essays to Personal Idealism (1902), edited by Henry Sturt. Sturt was notorious for his public contempt for the rationalism inherent in British absolute idealism and embodied in Oxford’s mode of education. Schiller supported this attack, arguing in his contribution ‘Axioms as Postulates’ that scientific and logical principles are human constructions imposed on reality for practical ends. Schiller later devoted a book, Formal Logic (1912), to deploring the deleterious effects, both personal and social, of promulgating deductive logic as the only mode of thought. Besides promoting social authoritarianism, deductive rationalism in philosophy encourages the mistaken view that logical principles are transhuman entities standing in judgement upon actual psychological processes. Schiller’s stance on the psychological nature of logic brought him into agreement with Alfred Sidgwick, an early pioneer of informal logic and argumentation.

            Freed from the tight strictures of a universe conceived through any rationalistic methodology, underlying both materialistic determinism and absolutist teleology, Schiller (like James) exulted in the “open universe” of genuine possibilities for personal evolution towards greater harmony within both the social world and the natural world. For European intellectuals in the first decade of the twentieth century, “pragmatism” meant James and Schiller (Charles Peirce and John Dewey were largely unknown), and it was precisely their shared vision of freedom for the growth of human power which repulsed many but inspired a few, including Giovanni Papini. Papini, together with Giuseppe Prezzolini, led a humanist movement in Rome largely inspired by an unstable mixture of James, Schiller, Bergson, and Nietzsche. Prezzolini’s radical voluntarism led to his philosophy of the “Man-god”: the novel pragmatic Superman whose will asserts itself as the omnipotent transformer of his world. Neither Papini nor Schiller went that far; reality remained a cooperative yet quasi-independent partner to human efforts. While natural processes cannot be identified apart from the results of human transformations of the world (how can nature be known at all before such transformations?), reality surely imposes many constraints on our partially free enterprises.

Reality should be pragmatically conceived as not yet complete, still in the process of growth, stimulated towards definite forms by human activity. Human creations are not merely rearrangements of pre-existing raw materials. All our creations, including knowledge, transform reality into genuinely novel things, thereby creating truly new realities and adding to the amount of being. The dictum that matter (or energy, etc.) can neither be created nor destroyed is but a convenient fiction successfully imposed on the world for a circumscribed kind of scientific investigation, and cannot, like any such principle, be taken as reigning absolutely over all dealings with the universe. The best term for reality is the Aristotelian notion of hulé, signifying the indeterminate potentiality of objective nature which can be known only insofar as human interaction creatively establishes actuality. The subjective nature of knowledge’s origins cannot plunge personal idealism into either solipsism or panpsychism, since knowledge is created in this wider human–environment matrix.

At the heart of this metaphysical vision is a post-Kantian empiricist epistemology, placing Schiller in the company of positivists such as Ernst Mach, Henri Poincaré and Rudolf Carnap, and pragmatic empiricists, especially John Dewey and C.I. Lewis. Schiller’s version of pragmatism was announced in “Axioms as Postulates” and elaborated by several essays in Humanism (1903) and Studies in Humanism (1907). Pragmatic empiricism cannot endorse the psychological passivity of positive experience, denying that inductive generalizations from atomic facts in turn structure further experience. The mind must impose its own principled ordering on experience in order for there to be any meaningful facts, leaving to induction only a limited efficacy for suggesting higher-order principles. Kantianism, while rescuing the normative character of principles from positivism’s clutches, mistakenly elevates their necessary role to an a priori and universal status. If the mind is instead an actively biological process, its own habits control our behavioural habits, which in turn may track cooperating natural processes. To the degree that successful cooperation can be reliably established, our mental habits are “verified” as (fallibly) true. Both the correspondence theory of truth upheld by realists and the coherence theory of truth upheld by absolutists vainly try to legislate a priori the nature of truth, and both reap the inevitable sceptical consequences.

Psychological habits are both “axioms” and “postulates”: they are regular, normative, social and transformable. Regularity implies stability without rigid fixity or universal dominion; as Schiller observes, laws of thought are not natural laws without exception since even a philosopher may contradict himself or herself. That he or she can recognize his or her error is made possible by the normative nature of mental laws. Most mental laws are socially normative in a double sense: the most general (e.g. that there is an external world, that this world displays uniformities) have their evolutionary roots in our common humanity, and many more have historical roots in the evolution of one’s culture. To the extent that mental laws come under reflective scrutiny (in situations where their operations produce more failure than success) there arises an opportunity deliberatively to transform them. This opportunity grounds their status as “postulates” in the sense that we grasp their contingent status as dependent on continued human allegiance. In the first chapter of Studies in Humanism Schiller asserts that the meaning of a rule lies in its application; long before Wittgenstein’s endorsement, many of the wider implications of this pragmatic approach to rules were explored in Schiller’s writings.

The higher-order axioms of logical and mathematical science remain epistemologically necessary as structuring experience even while they are contingently sustained by the scientific community. Schiller argued that logical necessity is only psychological certainty produced by our conviction in the meaning of terms, and that valid syllogisms are just exercises in begging the question. Genuine learning requires altering the meanings of terms in response to novel experiences, as all scientific progress shows. Meaning cannot be either an inherent property of objects or a static relation between objects, but an activity or attitude taken up towards objects by a subject. To attribute meaning and to attribute value are practically the same thing. Understanding the contextual value, the situational practical relevance, of a statement is needed for grasping and applying its meaning. The theory of propositions, the life-blood of modern rationalisms, abstracts all psychological value from statements to create an illusion of transhuman truth.

In “Scientific Discovery and Logical Proof” (1917), “Hypothesis” (1921), and Logic for Use (1929) Schiller constructed a sophisticated philosophy of science grounded in a distinction between the logic of discovery and logic of verification, and a denial of the notion that facts can be ascertained independently of a guiding hypothesis. Schiller develops a theory of the theory–observation relation, his own version of abductive logic, and an explanation of how causal analysis is dependent on the inquirer’s selection of relevant factors. Also of note is Schiller’s agreement with Peirce and Dewey on the side of realism against nominalism, demonstrating why pragmatism cannot be categorized with positivistic empiricism or instrumentalism.

            No metaphysical truth can be attributed to any laws; whether reality is such that we should conceive it according to one or another mental law depends on the results of a posteriori experimental science. Science should embrace theoretical relativism, since there can be no reasonable expectation that the science’s separate bodies of postulates could ever be reduced to the principles of any one of them. Metaphysics at best may suggest novel postulates attempting to harmonize scientific principles, but these too are subject to experimental confirmation. No absolute harmonization could be possible, and thus metaphysical pluralism is recommended, because complete agreement on metaphysics is obstructed by temperamental and valuational disparities across humanity. Science and metaphysics thus rest on ethics.

                Pluralism also characterizes Schiller’s moral theory and axiology, further developed in his last books. His definition of value as an unconstrained personal attitude towards an object of interest forbids reducing of value to anything else. Moral laws and religious doctrines represent long-tested useful beliefs, revisable in the face of new demands and problems. With James, Schiller found a finite evolving personal God congenial to moral progress towards cosmic harmony. With Bergson, Schiller conceived nature as the source of evil insofar as its processes resist God and evolution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

[A Troglodyte] Riddles of the Sphinx: A Study in the Philosophy of Evolution (1891; 2nd edn, 1894; 3rd rev. edn, Riddles of the Sphinx: A Study in the Philosophy of Humanism, 1910).

“Axioms as Postulates,” Personal Idealism, ed. Henry Sturt (London and New York, 1902), pp. 47–133.

Humanism: Philosophical Essays (London and New York, 1903; 2nd rev. edn, 1912). Four essays, with nine from Studies in Humanism, in Humanismus: Beifräge zu einer pragmatischen Philosophie, trans. R. Eisler (Leipzig, 1911).

Studies in Humanism (London and New York, 1907; 2nd edn, 1912; trans. by S. Jankélévitch, Étude sur l’humanisme, Paris, 1909).

“Is Mr. Bradley Becoming a Pragmatist?”, Mind, vol. 17 (1908), pp. 370–83.

“The Present Phase of ‘Idealist’ Philosophy,” Mind, vol. 19 (1910), pp. 30–45.

Formal Logic: A Scientific and Social Problem (1912; 2nd edn, 1931).

“Realism, Pragmatism, and William James,” Mind, vol. 25 (1915), pp. 516–24.

“Scientific Discovery and Logical Proof,” in C.J. Singer (ed.), Studies in the History and Method of Science, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1917), pp. 235–89.

“The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” Mind, vol. 29 (1920), pp. 385–414.

“Hypothesis,” in C.J. Singer (ed.), Studies in the History and Method of Science, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1921), pp. 414–46.

“Mr. Russell’s Psychology,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 19 (1922), pp. 281–92.

Problems of Belief (1924).

“Psychology and Logic,” in W. Brown (ed.), Psychology and the Sciences (1924), pp. 53–70.

Logic for Use: An Introduction to the Voluntarist Theory of Knowledge (1929).

Must Philosophers Disagree? And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (London and New York, 1934).

Our Human Truths (New York, 1939).

Other Relevant Works

“Why Humanism?,” Contemporary British Philosophy: Personal Statements, 1st ser., ed. J.H. Muirhead (1924), pp. 385–410.

Humanistic Pragmatism: The Philosophy of F.C.S. Schiller, ed. Rueben Abel (New York, 1966).

Further Reading

Abel, Reuben, The Pragmatic Humanism of F.C. S. Schiller (New York, 1955).

Winetrout, Kenneth, F.C.S. Schiller and the Dimensions of Pragmatism (Columbus, Ohio, 1967).

Marrett, R.R. “Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller,” Proceedings of the British Academy vol. 23 (1937), pp. 538–50.

Searles, Harvey, and Allan Shields, A Bibliography of the Works of F.C.S. Schiller (San Diego, 1969).

Slosson, Edwin, “F.C.S. Schiller,” in Six Major Prophets (Boston, 1917), pp. 190–233.

White, Stephen, A Comparison of the Philosophies of F.C.S. Schiller and John Dewey (Chicago, 1940).

John R. Shook
Oklahoma State University