Origins
The Bloomsbury Group came from mostly upper middle-class professional families; formed part of "an intellectual aristocracy which could trace itself back to the Clapham Sect". E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell had independent incomes. Others such as Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, the MacCarthys, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry needed to work for their living. Of the "set", perhaps only Clive Bell could be called wealthy. Of the male members of the early Bloomsbury Group, all but Duncan Grant were educated at Trinity or King’s. At Trinity in 1899 Strachey, Woolf, Sydney-Turner and Bell became good friends with Thoby Stephen, who introduced them to his sisters Vanessa and Virginia in London, and in this way the Bloomsbury Group came into being. All the Cambridge men except Clive Bell and the Stephen brothers were also members of "the exclusive Cambridge society, the 'Apostles'"; there they met older members such as Desmond MacCarthy and Roger Fry as well as E. M. Forster and J. M. Keynes, who were all from King’s College.
Through the Apostles they also encountered the analytic philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell who were revolutionizing British philosophy at the start of the 20th century. Distinguishing between ends and means was a commonplace of ethics, but what made Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903) so important for the philosophical basis of Bloomsbury thought was Moore's conception of intrinsic worth as distinct from instrumental value. As with the distinction between love (an intrinsic state) and monogamy (a behavior), Moore's differentiation between intrinsic and instrumental value allowed the Bloomsburies to maintain an ethical high-ground based on intrinsic merit, independent of, and without reference to, the consequences of their actions. For Moore, intrinsic value depended on an indeterminable intuition of good and a concept of complex states of mind whose worth as a whole was not proportionate to the sum of its parts. For both Moore and Bloomsbury, the greatest ethic goods were "the importance of personal relationships and the private life", as well as aesthetic appreciation: "art for art's sake". But more important than these for the group’s values was the recurrent questioning of human behaviour in terms of instrumental means and intrinsic ends.
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