James Martineau - Life and Thought

Life and Thought

The life of Martineau was essentially that of a thinker, and was typical of the century in which he lived and the society within which he moved. He was good-tempered and unembittered by persecution; he rarely used his splendid rhetoric for the purposes of invective against these things, though he could be very outspoken. He was fundamentally a man of strong convictions; the root of his whole intellectual life, which was too deep to be disturbed by any superficial change in his philosophy, was the feeling for God. He described in graphic terms the greatest of the more superficial changes he underwent; how he had "carried into logical and ethical problems the maxims and postulates of physical knowledge," and had moved within the narrow lines drawn by the philosophical instructions of the class-room "interpreting human phenomena by the analogy of external nature"; how he served in willing captivity "the 'empirical' and 'necessarian' mode of thought," even though "shocked" by the dogmatism and acrid humours "of certain distinguished representatives" and how in a period of "second education" at Humboldt University in Berlin, "mainly under the admirable guidance of Professor Trendelenburg," he experienced" a new intellectual birth" which " was essentially the gift of fresh conceptions, the unsealing of hidden openings of self-consciousness, with unmeasured corridors and sacred halls behind; and, once gained, was more or less available throughout the history of philosophy, and lifted the darkness from the pages of Kant and even Hegel." Although this momentous change of view illuminated his old beliefs and helped him to re-interpret and re-articulate them, it made him no more of a theist than he had been before. And as his theism was, so was his religion and his philosophy. He developed Transcendentalist views, which became a significant current within Unitarianism.