John Grote, Cambridge University and the Development of Victorian Thought

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John Grote, Cambridge University and the Development of Victorian Thought

John Richard Gibbins

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Frontispiece

John Grote (1864)

Acknowledgements

There are many individuals and institutions to whom acknowledgement and thanks must be given and these are presented in historical order of procedure. Thanks must be given to the British Academy for the Thank-Offering to Britain Fellowship in 1989-1990 which allowed me to study as Fellow of the British Academy in Cambridge. Also gratitude is due to Professor Sir David Williams, the President, and the Fellows of Wolfson College Cambridge for the generosity, friendship and company they showed to a Visiting Scholar in their college. Another intellectual debt is to a series of scholars under whose guidance I have been fortunate to come over the last twenty-two years, including Professor Tim Gray, Professor Noel O’Sullivan, Professor Michael Oakeshott, Professor Raymond Plant, Professor William Lubenow, Mark Garnett, Professor Bernard Crick and Peter Nicholson who have given advice and encouragement.

Special thanks are due to Trinity College Cambridge, to Jon Smith the Senior Archivist, the Librarian David McKitterick and the late Dr. Robert Robson for access to the Wren Library, and for permission to publish manuscripts and a fund of scholarly advice. The Master and Fellows of Trinity College were generous in the provision of dining rights and in granting the title of Visiting Archivist. Thanks are also due for permission to publish manuscripts held by St John’s College; Gonville and Caius College; King’s College and the University Library of Cambridge; Balliol and Bodleian libraries at Oxford; the Senate House library of the University of London and the British Library; Nottingham University for the Marley Papers; the Cambridge Records Office; the Cambridge Collection; and the Mayor and Rothschild families.

Above all others I must thank the late Teresa, Lady Rothschild (née Mayor) and her family and staff, especially Anne Thompson, for providing access to the Grote/Mayor Papers, and for accommodation, encouragement and friendship. Also the Jeans family who provided me with accommodation in Adams Road, Cambridge and whose garden abutted conveniently that of the Rothschilds in Herschel Road.

A few words of thanks must go to my family and friends who have tolerated, supported and encouraged me through the thirty-nine years it has taken to research and write this book, especially my wife Sheila and children Kate and Ben and my parents Ray and Jean. My wife has provided unswerving support and shown selfless tolerance as well as invaluable help with proof corrections. I wish to apologize to her for my selfishness. I wished that I had followed both her and John Grote’s advice more closely.

To all these people I would like to apologize for the decades it has taken to complete this work. I must excuse them from any responsibility for its defects and express my hope that its contents and reception will express my thanks to them. What follows only is an incomplete account of both the context of and contents of Grote’s philosophy. I will be content if a new generation of scholars uses this book as an embarkation point for, rather than a definitive account of, John Grote’s thoughts and writings. Grote’s corpus is a treasure house awaiting exploration.

Dr. John R. Gibbins

University of Newcastle upon Tyne

April 2007

Preface

The original idea for research into the writings of John Grote arose while I was studying for a Master of Arts degree in the Politics Department at Durham University between 1968 and 1969. I was then already acquainted with and interested in the Oxford Idealist movement and the work of those associated more recently with Michael Oakeshott. While browsing in the basement collection of books rarely read in the University Library, I lighted upon John Grote’s Exploratio Philosophica, Part One. A passage in a page opened at random provoked a major puzzle. How could a Cambridge scholar in 1865 have produced what read to be a clear statement of epistemological idealism when such arguments were conventionally held to have been produced in Britain only after 1870, and then in Oxford University? Further reading of Grote’s Exploratio, The Examination, and the Treatise on the Moral Ideals confirmed my conviction that Grote was an idealist and a critic of positivism, empiricism and utilitarianism, and this deepened my sense of puzzlement.

Original relief came with the writing of a short M.A. dissertation under the guidance of Dr. David Manning with Michael Oakeshott as the external examiner. Under their guidance I gained confidence in my original hypothesis and began both a historical and a philosophical rebuilding exercise (Gibbins 1969). In addition I came to the conclusion that Grote was an early example of that tradition of philosophy and political theory made popular later by Michael Oakeshott, a philosophy of anti-rationalism, anti-positivism, of respect for tradition, for practices and their intimations. I concluded that ‘Grote’s work bears testimony to an original and penetrating mind, the study of which has been too long neglected’, but then worried about the apparent lack of accredited admissions of influence and debt.

Under the influence of both Skinnerian and Oakeshottian approaches to research I examined both earlier accounts of Grote’s work and the study of philosophy in Victorian Cambridge with the intention of giving prominence to the context within which the author wrote and the evidence of his work’s reception. But if the conventional received accounts of Cambridge philosophy were trusted then there was no place for either idealism or a leading idealist philosopher in the university.

Hence this book gives prominence to reconstructing the intellectual context needed to correctly interpret and understand Grote’s philosophical enterprise, to revising the history of Cambridge philosophy in the period, and then to reconstructing and interpreting Grote’s writings. While some effort is made to critically appraise Grote’s philosophy and to map out his influence, these two matters are of secondary concern. Publication of this book - planned for 1990 - was delayed due to the re-discovery in 1989 of the surviving manuscripts of John Grote in the possession of Teresa, Lady Rothschild (née Mayor). This text reflects the first contemporary reading of this valuable new manuscript source, which I helped archive, and which is now deposited as the Mayor Papers in the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge.

In what follows I have tried to resist the dual temptations of retrospective reading and of analytic assessment against the central problems of philosophy. What I intend is a reconstruction of Grote’s philosophical work via his milieu and historical context, followed by the exploration of some interesting lines of tradition he effected; focusing especially on idealism and later Cambridge philosophy. Despite all my efforts and discoveries, the manuscript base does not allow me to provide full biographical insight into the man and his mind, nor does it allow me to trace the evolution of his thought, nor to grasp the fabric of his personal and existential life. Nor can I provide a full analysis of the significance of his work for contemporary philosophy. What I hope above all is that this book is more limited: that it will open up a new chapter in, and period of, Grotian scholarship, and so will unpack and elaborate the discoveries and clues provided below.

Introduction

If we were to judge from the rarity with which the name of John Grote (1813-1866) is mentioned in historical and philosophical writings, and the scantiness of such references as do occur, it would seem reasonable to conclude that his ideas were uninteresting and unimportant. It is the main aim of this book to controvert such a conclusion and to establish by an exercise in historical and philosophical analysis the significance of John Grote - and of Cambridge University itself - to the development of Victorian thought in the mid-nineteenth century.

The interest of John Grote to modern readers can be indicated under two headings. First, he was an original thinker who tackled and suggested solutions to the major philosophical problems of his day. Second, he filled a historical position which, when understood, makes more coherent the picture we have of Victorian intellectual development. The significance of his ideas lies in his contributions to three traditions: British idealism, Cambridge philosophy and the philosophy of language.

In the chapters on the Exploratio Philosophica, I argue that John Grote provided the most perceptive and thorough critiques of positivism and empiricism written in the nineteenth century, and that in a similar vein, An Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy provides the most carefully argued and effective critiques of that equally dominant school of thought. The chapters on the epistemological and metaphysical prolegomena to ethics will show that John Grote carefully edges towards the creation of one of the earliest examples of idealist philosophy seen in Britain, conceived with knowledge of German philosophy but apparently independently of any serious Hegelian influence. Grote’s indigenous British idealism emerges from his efforts to adjudicate between and synthesize largely indigenous philosophies of the day, most especially those of intuitionism, empiricism and materialism in England and the common-sense theory of the Scottish philosophers. While extremely well versed in German literature and philosophy, like many of his Cambridge contemporaries, Grote felt uncompelled to advocate, promote or apply them directly. German thought to Grote was a resource to be read, received and rethought within the primary context of modern British philosophy, the canon, and the long history of Western thought.

In later chapters I argue that Grote achieves a similar feat in the fields of moral and social philosophy by criticizing and synthesizing the indigenous schools of utilitarianism, intuitionism, romanticism and Scottish philosophy. With regard to political and social theory, Grote will be shown to have maintained the ‘liberal outlook’ associated at the time with Trinity College, Cambridge, on three novel grounds. First, by supporting the Vichian ‘Liberal Anglican Idea of History’ that had origins in the work of the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (Forbes, 1952; Schneewind, 1977, 96-97), which stressed the unfolding of social ideas and purpose through historical stages. Second, by supporting this by reference to a ‘relational social theory’, most usually associated with his colleague Henry Maine, which stresses the factual anthropological basis for historical and social development. The final supports for the liberal outlook come from reason and religion. Grote, I show, maintained - in Anglican broad church fashion - that neither religion nor reason need fear the other, but that both if pursued freely and rigorously would reveal the same rationally ordered and benevolent world which the study of history and anthropology already indicated was coming into existence.

According to Boyd Hilton both evangelicalism and laissez-faire ideology were used to justify a liberal free-market society in the Victorian period, with evangelicalism having the greater purchase upon both elites and the masses (Hilton, 1988, v11, 69, 245, 261-2). Grote, I argue, pioneered a third account of a liberal tolerant society, justified upon assumptions of perfectible men and an improvable society made possible by the clarification of truth and the active pursuit of the right. Creative freedom in the self and society, in a society tolerant because confident of the virtue of its laws and customs, was the key to the ultimate ideal of social self-improvement (Grote, 1870, 351; 1876, 351, 356-357; 1900, 293). While lacking appeal before 1870, this view gained ground and by 1890 was the conventional wisdom of both ruling-class intellectuals and the professional middle classes. But in the 1850s and 1860s its character was based on ‘the prevalence of kindly feelings, the spread of a spirit of peace - of a disinclination, that is, for brute violence’; on broad church religious tolerance and eclectic and idealistic philosophical development (Hilton, 1988, 268-269, 288-297, 337-339).

Finally, though I do not aim to examine in depth the later influence of Grote upon philosophy, I shall support the claim by John Passmore that his was

perhaps the first example of the Cambridge spirit - he was Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Cambridge - which was to reach its culmination in the work of G.E. Moore (Passmore, 1968, 54).

I will argue, however, that similarities are also evident with the work of Russell, Wittgenstein and Oakeshott.

When we turn to the historical and contextual story of Grote and his university in mid-century the story is even more interesting and surprising. Biographically we shall find that John’s life as a Cambridge don, a cleric, and a metaphysician struggling towards idealism, makes his friendly and respectful relationship with his brother George - the Whig historian of Greece, the atheist and philosophical radical - unique in Victorian intellectual history. Nowhere else can I discover two contemporaries from the same family so strategically ensconced in the camps of their greatest rivals. In addition his friendship network with Robert Leslie Ellis, William Whewell, Edward Harold Browne, Joseph B. Mayor, John Venn, Henry Sidgwick, Alfred Marshall and other members of the Grote Society was one of the ‘brilliant, classical and literary coteries that did actually exist in the Cambridge of that day’ (quoted in Winstanley, 1933, 259; Gibbins, 1998).

Second, the recognition of Grote’s idealism must force us to re-appraise the conventional accounts of the emergence of that philosophy in Britain and of the fate of the crucial battle between the intuitional (a priori) and empirical (a posteriori) schools of thought evidenced at the time, as well as the reasons for his mistaken identification by some as an ‘intuitionist’, a ‘realist’, a ‘rationalist’ and a ‘personalist’. Further historical interest arises from the location of John Grote’s social theory within the new story of the development of the social sciences, particularly anthropology, history, comparative linguistics, sociology and politics, recently explored by John Burrow, Stefan Collini and Donald Winch (Burrow, 1966; Collini, Winch and Burrow, 1983). John Grote turns out to be a significant figure in curriculum reform and the processes of professionalizing and specializing academic disciplines, but especially philosophy, in the nineteenth century (Gibbins, 2001; 2005).

Third, there is the significance of Grote’s work as a fulfilment of earlier and current Cambridge thought. My study will show that Cambridge thought in the period was not backward and uninteresting, nor merely a case of ‘arid rationalism’ (Annan, 1951, 130-131, 151-152), but contained a romantic idealist current associated notably with the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frederick Denison Maurice and Julius Hare. This ‘Germano Coleridgeian’ current - as the contemporary J.D. Morell called it - (Morell, 1846) was part of the wider ‘Cambridge Intellectual Network’ (Cannon, 1964) which set out to challenge the other major philosophies and intellectual elites of the day. While known and widely written about by historians of science for two decades - such as Susan Cannon, S.S. Schweber, Robert Preyer, P.M. Harman and S. Marcucci - the significance of the time when ‘The Romantic Tide Reaches Trinity’ has not until recently impacted upon historians of philosophy, ethics and political theory (Cannon, 1964, 1978; Robson, 1967; Distad, 1979; Schweber, 1981; Preyer, 1981; Harman 1985; Marcucci, 1963).

Finally, and in a unique category, John Grote’s works recommend themselves to us as a resource for both sharpening and intensifying our own philosophical gaze and the public conversation that is philosophy. Originality and uniqueness of view were the characteristic features of Grote’s mind to his friends and to many who have read him since. Reading Grote is never a completed experience; he prompts new reflections but his style and mind do not allow definitive interpretation. He is also a resource for answering not only the problems of his contemporaries but of audiences today. As we shall see in chapters two and four, Grote’s greatest fear was that the minds and courage of scholars may be blighted by the onrush of positivism, materialism, relativism and scepticism in mid-century and that a collapse in confidence in the objectivity and knowability of the true and right may result. Faced with a similar intellectual climate in the early twenty-first century, dominated by anti-foundationalism, deconstruction, relativism and the thesis of postmodernity, we may find John Grote to be a model of how to respond and proceed. Unbowed by demands for submission from opponents he was open minded and not reactionary to new and challenging ideas; patient and careful in his commitment to remove confusion; brave in his willingness to confront and penetrate the citadels of his opponents; and above all confident in his arguments and actions. Through these personal examples and his re-establishment of philosophical discourse upon the new grounds of language and being, not just thought and experience, he provided us with resources of great utility.

II

When this project was conceived it seemed possible that the significance of John Grote’s work could be elaborated through the straightforward provision of a biographical and philosophical reconstruction. The problems that appeared to be primary were, therefore, twofold: 1) Who was John Grote? How did he come to have the ideas he had? What was his relationship to his brother? Why was he so slow to publish? Why did so few contemporaries give a public reception to his work? 2) Such biographical questions were to run alongside research into other philosophical questions such as, What did Grote have to say? Was he right? Did he belong to a school of philosophy?

However, subsequent research revealed that this approach would not be effective and that an alternative strategy was needed. One reason for this was simple: the vein of biographical and primary source manuscript material listed by Joseph Bickersteth Mayor (Grote’s editor) soon ran out, only to be rediscovered in part in 1989 (Grote, 1900, x-xi). Hence a more creative approach using circumstantial evidence, unwitting testimony and extensive historical contextual support was needed to supplement the analysis of primary source material. The second reason was more significant and reflected my worries as to why John Grote’s work had been ignored for so long and whether my efforts at a reappraisal would be any more successful than those of my predecessors (Whitmore, 1927; Gelber, 1954; Macdonald, 1966). My considered view was that the reader of this book would be unlikely to gauge the significance of Grote’s work if my project remained biographical and analytic, and failed to identify the traditions, canons and contexts - intellectual, institutional and social - necessary to position Grote’s writing in the history of thought. In particular, there was a lack of understanding of the problems considered central by Victorian philosophers, the range of traditions, canons and conventions of discourse available to them and the paradigm conflicts they experienced (Quinton, 1958). As important was the failure to understand the social, cultural and institutional settings and networks within which Grote, his adversaries, and readers worked.

My predicament was mirrored somewhat in the experience of George Elder Davie recorded in the Foreword to his classic work, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and Her Universities in the Nineteenth Century.

This book originated almost accidentally, and, as it were, in the margin of regular academic ‘researches’. I was preparing for the press a doctoral book on ‘the Scottish school of common sense philosophy’, and had been asked by interested publishers to add a chapter on the intellectual and social background of the Scottish philosophers. Suddenly, in gathering this introductory and general material, the whole topic deepened; unsuspecting dramas were revealed; and finally I became absorbed in ‘the story behind the story’ that, putting aside my book manuscript on the rise and fall of the Scottish philosophy, I launched out into a quite different book, of less specialised scope, but of not less serious temper, on the rise and fall of the Scottish Universities, or, to be precise, of that central sector of them, know as the Arts Faculty (Davie, 1961, Foreword).

Davie did not, however, have the benefit of later debates, which were to reveal that the change in his plans was not merely ‘accidental’ but the result of a ‘logical’ imperative, the nature of which was revealed during the methodological debates of the 1970s on the history of thought inspired by Quentin Skinner of the University of Cambridge (Skinner, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1974).

This book has been written during a lull in the recent period of methodological debate, which has involved the history of ideas and political thought though not sociology and literary theory. Five methodological sources have been threaded together in this work to create a methodological synthesis around the re-estimation of author, text and audience, namely, the hermeneutic tradition evidenced in Oakeshott and Skinner; the work on paradigms and canons stimulated by Kuhn and Rorty; local elite and institutional history that reveals the impact of local settings on authors; Michel Foucault’s work on archaeology, the knowledge/power complex and professionalization, and finally, the Annales historians, whose approach to event and structure, micro and macro, short and long duration, has taught how we might go about recovering and recharting the ‘territory’ of history (LeRoy Ladurie, 1979).

The first source is the ‘historical’ and ‘hermeneutic’ approach of R.G. Collingwood, Michael Oakeshott and Quentin Skinner, which in turn goes back to Max Weber, Dilthey, Croce and the European neo-idealist historians of earlier decades (Collingwood, 1946; Oakeshott, 1933, 1962, 1983; Skinner, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1974; Weber, 1922, 1949; Dilthey, 1976; Croce, 1960; Outwaite, 1975; Antioni, 1959; Hughes, 1979; Rickman, 1967). From this tradition I have applied what I learnt to be their key message, that the understanding of a text requires an examination of the mind of its author; its meaning lies, if anywhere, in the author’s purposes, aims and intentions. Secondly, I gathered from them that, as authors are members of social groups who share a common language and perhaps a common culture, an author’s intention needs to be placed within the shared understandings of a group or tradition, in the social and cultural context of his time, and in a tradition of thought through time. Thirdly, from his work of building on Collingwood and Oakeshott and applying later Wittgensteinian understanding, I learnt with Skinner that the linguistic context and conventions of groups, including audiences, were a key to reconstructing individual meaning, cultural and intellectual ideas and traditions of thought (Parekh and Berki, 1973; Schochet, 1974).

Hence while chapters six to nine in this book have involved a great deal of traditional philosophical textual analysis, this has been made possible by a contextual reconstruction of the aims and intentions of John Grote in chapter five, of his contemporaries in chapter three and four and of the cultural and linguistic traditions they inherited in chapter two. My early conclusions were that a historical reconstruction was a precondition of a meaningful philosophical or rational reconstruction, and that the two exercises, though different, were compatible. In this I have found support readily from Richard Rorty and John Yolton (Rorty, 1984, 49-75; Yolton, 1985, 571-578). Chapter ten then involved the reconstruction of the mid-Victorian intellectual and cultural world; its identification of problems and issues; its sources of conflict; and its structures and institutions which give sense and meaning to John Grote’s philosophical engagement.

Recent commentators on Skinner have confirmed my belief that his ideas are part of a longer continuity in modern European thought, not a break or revolution (Boucher, 1981, 1983). Despite tensions, I consider his views on linguistic conventions to be coherent and generally compatible with Oakeshott’s idea of the tracing of traditions (Lockyer, 1979; Parekh and Berki, 1973; Greenleaf, 1964; Gunnell, 1979). My approach has been: to locate Grote’s texts in the correct cultural and intellectual contexts, to treat Cambridge and several other traditions of thought (and their institutional organization) as the correct context for understanding Grote, to locate and trace Grote’s aims and intentions, and to recover his picture and others’ pictures of Victorian intellectual history.

With this last point we encounter my second source, the results of the debate with T.S. Kuhn over ‘paradigms’ within intellectual history (Kuhn, 1970, 1974; Lakatos and Musgrave, 1970). As the debate has now subsided to the point where Kuhn can write without reference to a paradigm we can benefit from the results. One aim of this book is to draw out several paradigms or intellectual pictures of the world of Victorian philosophy shared at the time, especially those of Mill, Stephen and Sidgwick and, later, of historians such as Mehta, Roach and Robbins. After recovering lost paradigms, and critically assessing others, and attacking in particular the traditional picture of a reactionary University of Cambridge in the mid-nineteenth century, I have endeavoured to sketch the outlines of a new revisionist picture or paradigm, that makes good some of the revealed errors or omissions in the old. Such a procedure has revealed the wisdom of hermeneutic scholars such as Gadamer, Ricour and Bleicher who stress the impossibility of an objective reading of a text. Readers of texts are embroiled in a circle of understanding that relates author, text and society, in a permanent conversation. We read texts and the past through lenses provided by others or, as Rorty puts it, through mirrors (Rorty, 1980, 357-394). But the conclusion of this discovery is not a descent into relativism but, as Rorty and Oakeshott argue, a redoubling of will to enter into the conversation that is philosophy, to seek to understand each voice and each conversationalist as best one can, and to converse with them. To add one’s voice is the purpose of philosophy.

Thirdly, we come to the structural and institutional setting of authors and ideas. In this area I have been impressed by the work of Sheldon Rothblatt, Susan Cannon, Martha Garland, Jonathan Smith with Chris Stray, and William Lubenow, in recovering the institutional structure and reform of Victorian Cambridge, of Christopher Harvie in his work on the links between local elites, and by Cannon and Annan on intellectual networks. I have tied this research in with the idea of professionalization as a modern process. That knowledge was increasingly being seen as a source of power, and that the organization of knowledge and, above all, its definition and control led to conflict in mid-Victorian Britain, has been a theme that has surfaced in my writings on several occasions (Gibbins, 2001, 2005; Gibbins and Reimer, 1999, 176-178). Mill and the philosophical radicals in London; Hamilton and, later, the evangelicals at Edinburgh; Whewell and, later, Sidgwick at Cambridge; Pattison and, later, Green at Oxford, were all vying to characterize, label, centralize, institutionalize and control knowledge in mid-Victorian Britain (Collins, 1998).

In understanding the fourth source I have kept in mind Foucault’s notions of the archaeology and geology of ideas, the process of first ‘defamiliarizing’ and then ‘refamiliarizing’ history, through critique and then recovery (Foucault, 1970, 1972, 1980; Smart, 1985; Poetzl, 1983; Cousins and Hussain, 1984). In many ways the typifications of Grote as ‘original’, ‘interesting’ and yet ‘uninfluential’ were a necessary part of the maintenance of the picture and interests of Mill, Hamilton and, even, Sidgwick and Stephen. Construction of another picture of Grote was difficult and full of anomalies within the context of the received story. Hence, a precondition for understanding Grote was a ‘defamiliarization’ of the old view and the creation of an alternative view. However, despite the Foucaultian expectation that this exercise would reveal discontinuity in history or a rupture, the opposite has happened. The new picture actually fits better with what we know already than the old picture; the new one is more coherent and seems less odd. A final, and more general, methodological debt can be paid to Le Roy Ladurie and to the French Annales historians (Hughes, 1966; Burke, 1973, 1978; Iggers, 1975; Stoianovich, 1976; Stone, 1979; Clark, 1985). From Ladurie I received the example of how a lost world of ideas could be reconstructed from apparently dead and dusty tomes (Ladurie, 1978, 1979, 1980a, 1980b, 1981). In restoring the Grote family, the Grote Club and Society, the Moral Science Tripos, the French eclectics and Cambridge idealists to vision I hope to have breathed life back into people, texts and movements long ago consigned to the rubbish heap of history. From Ladurie I also discovered how to learn from apparently worthless sources, and even from those apparently antithetical to one’s taste, by using them as unwitting testimony. Hence, just as medieval papal records of inquisitions give unwitting testimony to the existence of local heretical movements and suggest an alternative to a picture of a contemporary dominant ideology, so the very fact of Mill being so ruthless and preoccupied in his attacks on Cambridge and Edinburgh becomes unwitting testimony to their intellectual and cultural significance in the middle of the nineteenth century. Location of dusty manuscripts from the Wren archives - such as the ledgers of summer book lendings, internal College examination papers for undergraduates and fellows, and ledgers of books bequeathed in wills - have made evidencing otherwise radical claims possible.

These debates revealed the logical difficulties involved in trying to analyse, criticize or converse with past writers and supported the prescription that a precondition for a competent philosophical analysis was the provision of a contextual understanding of the writer or writers concerned. So I have concluded that for an adequate understanding and appraisal of the work of John Grote to be possible, we must have an appreciation of the intellectual, institutional and social context of the mid-Victorian Britain he inhabited and of the world of Victorian Cambridge. We must in particular ask questions about the intentions shared by Grote and his colleagues, the conventions of discourse, the philosophical canon and traditions, and the institutional and social network they enjoyed. This exercise of providing the context does, however, mean that throughout this book historical issues will predominate and that intellectual ideas generally, rather than philosophy as narrowly conceived, will take precedence. Even with the discussion of biographical details, I shall utilize the recently-emerged literature on ‘local intellectual elites’ exemplified in the work of Christopher Harvie and Susan Faye (formerly Walter) Cannon (Harvie, 1976; Cannon, 1964; Collini, 1979; Collini, Winch and Burrows, 1983; Clarke, 1978).

As the argument is central to my book I must defend my claims that the inadequate state of the history of Victorian philosophy and thought - and of the social, cultural and institutional structures of the Victorian intelligentsia - in the 1960s were hurdles to the understanding and location of Grote’s work. In the preface to one of the best treatments of modern philosophy from a British perspective, John Passmore writes:

I have tried to write a history of philosophical controversy rather than to compile an annotated catalogue. I do not profess to be speaking for eternity; it is a salutary reflection that, had I written the book in 1800, I should probably have dismissed Berkeley and Hume in a few lines, in order to concentrate my attention on Dugald Stewart - and that in 1850 the centre of my interest would have shifted to Sir William Hamilton (Passmore, 1968, 8).

It is a mark of the author’s perceptiveness not only that he recognizes that intellectual history is a moving feast, but that he has also recognized the greater significance mid-Victorian philosophers gave two Scotsmen - Dugald Stewart and Sir William Hamilton - when compared to David Hume and Bishop Berkeley. One crucial task, undertaken in chapter three, will be the reconstruction of the canonical picture of the history of philosophy as understood between 1830 and 1860, but here we must look briefly at the slightly different picture of our near contemporaries in the 1960s.

In philosophy, as with the related disciplines of political and social theory, when tastes change and new schools or styles emerge to prominence, there tends to be a re-writing of the history of the discipline. Past masters are re-graded in the hierarchy of excellence, new figures join in the ranks and others are relegated to obscurity. As Alasdair MacIntyre writes:

Each age, sometimes each generation has its own canon of the great philosophical writers and indeed of the great philosophical books (MacIntyre, 1984, 33).

‘Canon-formation’, as Rorty calls it, is vital in philosophy because philosophers are regularly called upon to adjudicate on what is a central ‘philosophical question’, who are ‘the great dead philosophers’ (Rorty, 1984, 58-61). With the reincarnation of phenomenalism, positivism and analytic philosophy in the first four decades of the twentieth century, exemplified in the writings of Bertrand Russell, Alfred Ayer and George Moore, there was a rapid re-assessment of the history of philosophy. Hume, who had been thought sunk by broadsides from Thomas Hill Green (Green and Grose, 1874-5), was rapidly re-floated and in fact established as perhaps the greatest of all British philosophers. The work of other empiricists, especially Locke, Berkeley and John Stuart Mill, was also re-assessed. In return, the supposed originators of British idealism, especially Coleridge, Maurice, Green, Bosanquet and Bradley, were despatched to the breaker’s yard (Russell, 1961; Ayer, 1936, 1956; Moore, 1922, 1953). Opponents of the new currents - such as the realists and ordinary language philosophers like Strawson - have sought to retrieve and refurbish Kant for the task of destroying Humean psychology, but they had no need for the history of philosophy anyway (Strawson, 1966; Rorty, 1984). History of ideas books usually ape contemporary taste, as do publishers in their lists and choice of writers or of editors for past works. A shift against metaphysics and idealism and a particular shift against normative philosophy took place, which led to the famous quip that political philosophy was now ‘dead’, first made in 1956 (Laslett, 1967, xiv). When the anti-foundational and anti-analytic reaction followed, only history and sociology survived, supposedly ‘after philosophy’ (Baynes, Bohman and McCarthy, 1987; Gibbins, 2004a).

It would not be hard to show that the rewriting of intellectual history from the standpoint of science and analytic philosophy, which was growing in ascendancy between 1920 and 1950, had a deleterious effect on our understanding of intuitionism, idealism and other movements that stood in opposition. However, another major change in philosophical style and practice took place which not only revamped the history of philosophy in an anti-metaphysical direction but which temporarily relegated the subject of the history of philosophy to a separate and lower sphere of analysis. This was the emergence of Ludwig Wittgenstein and linguistic philosophy. The effect of Wittgenstein’s contributions was to produce a swift ‘revolution’ or ‘paradigm shift’ in British philosophy (Kuhn, 1962). Philosophy and political theory now moved their concerns away from the traditional quarries of epistemology, ontology, metaphysics and political and moral theory towards linguistics and subsequently to semantics, semiotics and ethnomethodology. The major contributions to the former discipline areas became treated with suspicion or were ignored.

In addition philosophers began to shift their concerns towards the everyday language of contemporary users and away from the rarefied language of academic (scholastic) philosophers, past or present. Implicit here was another preference, that philosophy is an ‘activity’, a ‘living activity’, and more importantly a ‘living present activity’, as opposed to the idea that philosophy is a doctrine, wisdom that is universal or ineffable, or an inheritance from the past (Gellner 1968, 63-65). The consequences were disastrous for intellectual history in the short term while this anti-historical spirit set in. For now the study of past thinkers or schools of thought became irrelevant, as well as being a likely source of confusion and error. As Professor Urmson states:

It is notorious that many philosophers claim that they are adherents of no philosophical doctrines whatsoever, and even regard adherence to a philosophical doctrine as a sign of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of philosophy… there seems nobody left under the age of eighty who is prepared to confess himself a rationalist, or empiricist, a neutral monist, a materialist, a logical atomist, a pragmatist, a realist, an idealist… (Urmson, 1957, 267).

This view, as Wolf Lepenies states, is profoundly mistaken (Lepenies, 1984, 141-157). For one reason any present activity is premised upon rules, techniques, skills and language inherited from the past. In addition philosophy lives by dialogue, discourse and conversation between members of a public who have learnt to share the same meanings, which have been inculcated from the past. Finally, meaning is related to context, and hence philosophy and history are not logically distant activities. There were some massive exceptions to these trends, but they can be explained by three considerations. First, such texts tend to be written by philosophers from outside the dominant linguistic and analytic schools of the recent past. Second, they tend to be non-British or British nationals resident overseas who have a wider philosophical perspective. Finally, the best accounts of Victorian thought came from outside the discipline of philosophy, being written by and for political theorists, sociological theorists, theologians and historians of science and education. This group includes the works of Mandelbaum, Barker, Laski, Plamenatz, Wolin, Sabine, Carre, Robson, Letwin, Giddens, Gooch, Young, Chadwick, Gillespie, Rothblatt, Garland and many others. In recent decades, before the work of Lubenow, Stray, McKitterick, Schultz, Collini, Cook, Palfrey and Groenwewegen, the best work on Cambridge and Trinity movements has come from historians of science and especially Brecher, Cannon, Herman, Preyer, Schweber, Schaffer, P. Williams and D.B. Wilson.

The picture of mid-Victorian British philosophy that dominated the period from 1920 to 1960, with the notable exclusion of Passmore and Copleston, was so narrow as to exclude serious consideration of three major movements: intuitionism, the Scottish common-sense philosophy and the early romantic and idealist reaction to positivism. It presented a triumph of empiricism, positivism, and utilitarianism over a rump of rationalists, intuitionists and religiously-minded metaphysicians. This triumph of the ‘British Philosophy of Mind’ is presented as marred only by the arrival in Britain of the alien continental philosophies of Hegelian idealism, existentialism and phenomenology. Socially, and institutionally, the universities were portrayed in a very poor light, reactionary in terms of reform (both structural and academic), religiously intolerant, upper-class in social profile and generally unprofessional and uninspired in regard to philosophical teaching and research. Ironically this modern picture was not far removed from that dominant in the minds of empiricists and positivists between 1830 and 1860 as we shall see in chapter three, but the level of attachment to the view and what it now entailed is very significant.

If the received view was correct there was even less significance in understanding the non-empiricist philosophers of the age. The revival of interest in the history of thought can be timed to the founding of the journal Victorian Studies in 1957 and in particular to the insightful article in the first volume entitled ‘The Neglect of Victorian Philosophy’ by Anthony Quinton (Quinton, 1958, 1982, 178-185). Its momentum was maintained primarily in university departments of history and politics but eventually had an impact in philosophical circles. The debates of the 1970s over Quentin Skinner’s articles on method were crucial catalysts for what was to follow. Skinner’s prescription that the historical exercise tries to recover intentions, reconstruct conventions and restore contexts has borne fruit in many directions, and the industry in Victorian scholarship has become self-generating, even amongst those not directly influenced by him. For my purposes the products of this revival have come a great way, though not far enough, to remove the obstacles to the recovery of John Grote’s philosophy. Four aspects of this revival and revision have helped this book to be written.

First, there has been a revived interest in intuitionist philosophy during the period, both by historians and those inspired by renewed interest in actively reviving intuitionist ethics. The key figure here has been Jerome B. Schneewind in his scholarly work on the Cambridge moralists and his reconstruction of the ethics of Henry Sidgwick. With more modern concerns in mind there has been the recovery of the whole ‘confrontation’ to the present in the work of W.D. Hudson (Schneewind, 1968b, 1974, 1977; Donagan, 1992; Hudson, 1980). However, as I shall show later, Schneewind has managed to recover only the rationalist and intuitionist side of Cambridge philosophy, and has wrongly fitted the idealist or Germano-Coleridgeian kind of Cambridge philosophy evidenced by Coleridge, the Hares, Maurice and Grote inside this intuitional framework (Schneewind, 1974, 371-404; 1992).

Second, we now have available a whole series of intellectual biographies of early-Victorian Cambridge scholars. With each subject in the biographies treated as a unique and distinct figure and with each text appearing in individual isolation from its wider network and group context, the collective value of these works has not been recognised. We now have Robson, Schaffer and Fisch on Whewell; Merrill Distad and McFarland on Hare; Girouard on Kenelm Digby; Walker on the Lushingtons; Schneewind and Schultz on Sidgwick; Groenewegen and Cook on Marshall; Harman on Clerk Maxwell; Annan on Leslie Stephen; Colaiqco on James Fitzjames Stephen; and Goldmann on Henry Fawcett. It is now possible to bring these figures together, and to place them in the very close proximity and interdependence that they enjoyed during their lifetimes, with surprising results. New works are now needed on Adam Sedgwick, Hugh Rose, Robert Leslie Ellis, Joseph Mayor, John Seeley, John Venn and many others to help complete the picture.

Third, there has been some excellent revisionist writing on the social, cultural and institutional character of the mid-Victorian intelligentsia, some of the best being by John Gross on literary circles, Robert Robson, Sheldon Rothblatt, Mary Garland and Susan Cannon on Cambridge University, Christopher Harvie and Ronald Brent on liberal political elites, Stefan Collini and Peter Clarke on the new liberalism of the late nineteenth century, and numerous works on the Cambridge Apostles, the Oxford Movement and other similar groups (Gross, 1973; Rothblatt, 1968; Garland, 1980; Cannon, 1964; Harvie, 1976; Collini, 1979; Clarke, 1978; Lubenow, 1998). Some of this has been outstanding, though the work done on Cambridge University (apart from that of Robson and Cannon) is remarkable for its concentration on the revolution of the 1870s and its attendant underestimation of university reform, social networks and intellectual development before this period. I shall tackle these points in chapters one and ten.

The fourth major revision concerns the historical development and the philosophical re-assessment of idealist philosophy in Britain. While being kept alive through this period by idealists, such as G.R.G. Mure, J.N. Findlay, A.V. Miller, T.M. Knox, and in particular those around the figure of Michael Oakeshott at the London School of Economics, the period since 1960 has seen the publication of some major research efforts on the subject (Collini, 1975; Plant and Vincent, 1984; Vincent, 1986; Milne, 1962; Richter, 1964; Acton, 1969; Gordon and White, 1979; Bradley, 1979a, 1979b, 1984; Boucher, 1981, 1983, 1985, 2001, 2005; Boucher and Vincent, 2000, Thomas, 1988; Nicholson, 1990, 1997; Sell, 1995; Den Otter 1996; Mander, 1999; Boucher and Vincent, 2000; Wempe, 2004, Sweet, 2006). While coming a good way to re-establishing the structure and effectiveness of Oxford idealism, and now reconstructing the Scottish idealists such as Caird and Ferrier, and the Welsh idealist Henry Jones, little has been written on idealism in Dublin and Cambridge (Clarke, 1978; Collini, 1979; Freeden, 1978; Morrow, 1984; Boucher, 2000, 2001, 2005; Boucher and Vincent, 1993; Tyler, 1999; Johnson, 2001; 2000; Graham, 2005).

My major objections to the current position cover three points. First, the British origins of idealism have deep roots outside Oxford, which were known in the nineteenth century, but which have been ignored till recently. The areas for exploration include the Scottish philosophers at Edinburgh, especially Stirling, Hamilton and Ferrier, the itinerant Kantian John Daniel Morell and, at Glasgow, the brothers John and Edward Caird and Wallace. Second, there is the early-romantic reaction to the mechanical philosophy of James Mill and Bentham, pioneered by Coleridge and Carlyle, which led to the creation of what John Morell called the ‘Germano-Coleridgeian’ movement and involving in Cambridge Maurice, Sterling, Whewell, Hare, Thirlwall, Kenelm Digby and a whole clutch of Apostles. Finally, there is the issue of ‘Cambridge Idealism’ made popular recently by Stefan Collini and C.T. Dewey and by V.R. Mehta (Collini, 1975; Dewey, 1974; Mehta, 1975). Mehta’s article reaffirms the traditional story of idealism’s Oxford origins, explaining its failure to take root in Cambridge in terms of the latter’s continuous adherence to scientific rationalism and paradoxically empiricism and positivism (Mehta, 1975, 180).

One of my aims is to rebut this traditional view and to assert the case for the emergence of idealism in Cambridge prior to 1870, under the influence of Grote and Maurice, but out of an already existing culture and network conducive to romanticism and Germano-Coleridgeian philosophy and history. C.J. Dewey for his part makes the claim for an affinity between Oxford and Cambridge Universities from 1870. He makes a case for ‘Cambridge Idealism’ out of the writings of Henry Sidgwick and Alfred Marshall (C. Dewey, 1972). Stefan Collini has rejected this claim in a patient and well argued reply. However, it seems to me that both groups miss the central point, that if there is a case for a Victorian version of Cambridge idealism it is to be found in the period before 1870, and that the key figures are John Grote, Frederick Denison Maurice, Julius Hare, James Ward, J.R. Mozely, William Sorley, William Cunningham, G. F. Stout, J.S. Mackenzie, J.M. Ellis McTaggart, possibly Alfred Marshall and not Henry Sidgwick, whose limited intention was to unite intuitionism, utilitarianism and common-sense philosophy and to attack the neo-idealist outputs of Green and his Oxford colleagues.

Finally, on idealism there remains to be reconsidered the traditional assumption that idealism is merely a continental or rather German import, or to put it in the terms of a thesis and a book on the subject, a product of ‘The Reception of Idealism in England’ (Robbins, 1967, 1982). I will argue here that a case can be made for the production of a largely indigenous philosophy of idealism during the first seven decades of the nineteenth century, which in fact set the scene and provided a context for the later triumphs of a more pronounced Hegelian idealism in Oxford in the 1870s. For nineteenth-century origins I shall look more closely to both intuitional and empirical arguments and the debate between them, the romantic movement, the Germano-Coleridgeians and the Scottish philosophers - especially James Frederick Ferrier. German idealism I take to be a resource, accessible to a few who read German, such as Grote, or who read in translation up to 1860. It became known to most through reputation, popularizing, and a few serious and readable secondary texts. However, as a resource it was always utilized within the structures and history of British thought, and not imported wholesale. My account is parallel to that given by Davie of the emergence of Ferrier’s idealism out of the debates about and within Scottish philosophy, and James Bradley’s superb account of the absorption of German idealism in Britain. Bradley judges this to be in process by 1862, and the absorption is seen as ‘the product of their own [British idealists’] native concerns and circumstances’ (Bradley, 1979, 1-10, 17). I shall argue that John Grote developed an essentially idealist epistemology, ethics, political and social theory from debates within British philosophy and between British philosophers, relying upon German resources as secondary.

This book will go further and suggest ways to modify further the already revised picture of Cambridge and Victorian idealism by, firstly, reconstructing the history of philosophy and its present conflicts and concerns as seen by John Grote’s contemporaries. We stress here the perceived preoccupation with epistemology as the foundation of all other intellectual activity; the conflict between supposedly scientific and anti-scientific schools of mental philosophy; the conflict between the three major schools of empiricism, common sense and intuitionism; and the institutionalization of these three conflicting schools in the London quarters of the philosophical radicals, Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities. We will then concentrate on mid-Victorian Cambridge and develop the insight of Susan Faye Cannon on the Cambridge network as a supplement to the insights of Rothblatt, Garland and Schneewind. By further focusing on John Grote we shall find support for a modification of the history of idealism as contained in ‘reception theory’. Finally, by comparing John with his brother George and putting them alongside the insights of Davie on Victorian Scotland, Milne, Mehta and others on Oxford, and Bradley on Britain as a whole, we can hint at the complex nature of nineteenth-century intellectual movements and elites. We can then develop the existing picture to give a more significant place to John Grote, idealism and Cambridge University in Victorian intellectual life (Gibbins, 1998).

Structure

The structure used below has been adopted for two reasons. First, it fulfils the methodological prerequisite of providing a historical reconstruction before providing an analytic or rational reconstruction. Second, because it works at another level, it allows for a gradual elucidation and elaboration of key themes and ideas, which can be drawn together in chapter ten and the conclusions.

Chapter one provides a biographical account of Grote’s life and introduces us to his thought through his minor essays, reviews and administrative papers covering religion, education, history and philology, literary criticism, reform and philosophy.

Chapter two develops the context for understanding Grote by outlining in detail the complex and pluralistic nature and typologies of early-nineteenth-century intellectual life. We cover two groups briefly, a) the empiricists and utilitarians, b) the positivists and materialists, and then focus in depth on five movements that shaped Grote’s mind: c) German philosophy in Britain, d) romanticism, e) rationalism and intuitionism, f) Scottish common-sense philosophy and g) French eclecticism.

Chapter three performs the final enclosing act by locating John Grote within the Cambridge of his day and especially what Susan Fay Cannon calls the ‘Cambridge network’, and secondly by looking at the institutional structure of the mid-Victorian intellectual elite, in particular comparing John Grote’s Cambridge with the world that his brother George inhabited in London.

Chapter four begins the effort to reconstruct and analyse the philosophy of John Grote by studying his ideas on the role and purpose of philosophy, his specific intentions and the methods he uses in his various works.

Chapter five deals exclusively with the metaphysical and epistemological arguments that John Grote produced, late in his life, to underpin and act as a prolegomenon to his ethical writings. In so doing I argue that Grote’s philosophy is essentially idealist in character and, within that category, that it is to be seen as a case of objective idealism with tendencies towards absolutism.

Chapter six provides an analysis of Grote’s theory of human nature, a theory which along with his epistemology underpins his account of action, practice, morality and politics.

Chapter seven is fundamental for the book as it gets to the heart of John Grote’s enterprise - the ambition to prove that moral rules, principles and ideals can be known, that they can be known in the same way as we know the external world, and that though moral ideals are different in character from empirical statements of fact, they are analogous. In the idea of a scale of knowledge, intellectual and moral, ascending from immediate feelings (lower facts) through reflection and judgement, to complete knowledge (of the higher facts) we have the key to Grote’s whole enterprise in moral philosophy, and in the analogy of the true and the right, the ideals of intellectual and moral knowledge respectively, we have the achievement indicated.

Chapter eight surveys the argument to date and provides one further element of importance, an outline of Grote’s careful and effective critique of utilitarian philosophy. Like the next chapter this is long and detailed, justified because of the seriousness of the issues Grote raises and the complexity of his arguments.

Chapter nine deals with the social and political aspects of Grote’s moral philosophy, which are typified by his occasional reference to his own work as being an example of ‘Jural Ethics’. This chapter explains how philosophy and politics were taught at the university in the 1860s, and then rebuilds Grote’s social and political ideas, through his theory of man, society and practice. We discover that moral life is organized as if there were a moral law analogous to the positive law of a state, and not to understand the operation of the former we need to understand the operation of the latter. Politics is understood as primarily the creation, enforcement and adjudication of the law, for and by free persons with conflicting interests and opinions, in a sovereign community called the State. Finally, the chapter deals with John Grote’s diagnostic and prescriptive social and political theory, his diagnosis of his age and society and his remedies for its ills.

Chapter ten draws together the historical and philosophical reconstructions of the past chapters into a synthesis of the three elements indicated in the title of this book, a) the philosophy of John Grote, b) John Grote and Cambridge University and c) John Grote and his place in the development of Victorian ideas.

To assist later scholars one section of the bibliography lists the entire secondary source references to John Grote known to the author at the time of publication plus details of known manuscript sources. Some of the images used are published for the first time and can be located, as with most of the John Grote manuscripts, within the Mayor Papers at the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge.

Part I: Contexts and Conventions

1: Making the Man - The Life and Early Writings of John Grote

John Grote was born at the family estate of ‘Shortlands’ at Clay Hill, Beckenham in Kent in 1813, the ninth of eleven children, all but one being sons. John Grote’s father, George Grote senior (1762-1830), was an archetypal country gentleman, being the owner of a large estate, a Justice of the Peace, the local High Sheriff and the sitting patron of a London Merchant House, Kruger and Grote, and later the Banks of Prescott, Grote & Co. and Prescott, Grote, Cave & Co.[1] The Grote family fortune, which survived from the beginning of the seventeenth and evaporated at the end of the nineteenth century, was founded upon banking, and was European in scale and reliant only to a small degree upon the British branch of the business. These European ties, nurtured throughout the period and particularly strong in regard to Holland and Germany, provided the Grotes with wealth, connections, languages and literature that set them apart from most wealthy families in that period and which bear comparison with the Rothschild family into which Teresa Mayor, a descendant of the Grotes, eventually married.

The family descended from Andreas Grote (1710-1788), who moved from Amsterdam to England in 1730 and became naturalized in 1738. The family thereafter claimed (essentially Alice Mayor in her family chronicles) that their Dutch origins related them to the famous philosopher Hugo Grotius (de Groot), though the connection has not been authenticated (Clarke, 1962, 1; Mayor, A., B24/44-54). The Dutch roots were nurtured by membership of the Calvinist-inspired Dutch Reform Church (Hessels, 1892), the reaction to which is evident in the later life of John Grote. Andreas Grote was married twice, once in St Paul’s Cathedral to Ann Adams, the daughter of a large landowner from whom he inherited a large mansion, Badgemore near Henley and, secondly, to Mary Ann Culverdon, a minor poet, by whom he had nine children (Clarke, 1962, 1-2). All the sons of this second marriage, except John’s father, died young and the daughters, Francis (born in 1760), Charlotte (1763), Letitia (1765), Mary Ann (1768), and Sarah (1770), have disappeared, like so many women in this period, from record. Most of the early generation of English Grotes are buried at Grey’s Rectory. The family lived variously at Henley and at Greenwich Hill; the father’s business interests prospered and that social barometer Sir Joshua Reynolds measured the new wealth and prestige of the family in several paintings, now hanging in the Westminister Bank Headquarters in London, painted between 1760 and 1787 (Clarke, 1962, 2). Andreas Grote’s eldest son by the earlier marriage, Joseph (1748-1814), became head of the family after his father’s death in 1788 and ran the business in Leadenhall Street in the City until he was succeeded by his half brother George.

Little more was known of the early social and economic origins of the Grote family until 1989 when a massive collection of primary source manuscript material dated between the late-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries was recovered in the possession of Teresa, Lady Rothschild (née Mayor).[2] While much further work on the Mayor Papers, now mostly catalogued in the Wren Library, is required, a new insight into Dutch and German influence on British merchant banking, family networks and intellectual developments is now possible (Mayor, C1; C2; C3). We first hear of Grotes in Britain in 1512, when royal ‘Protection for one year for Ambrose and Peter de Grote, merchants of Antwerp in Brabant’ was granted.[3] But John Grote’s grandfather Andreas was one of the fifteen children of Otto Grote (born 1673) and his wife, who was formerly a Miss Gersche of Mullerhausen in Germany. Otto Grote was Dutch but, because of the religious and business turmoil in Holland at that time, had set up a grocery and trading business in Bremen in Germany (Mayor, C2/17-28). The Grotes were Protestants who fled the various wars and religious rivalries in Holland and Flanders during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Only one other son survived into adulthood, Wilhelm Grote (1707-1772), who married Anna Fehneman in 1740 and who maintained the German branch of the family and business, handing it on to his own sons Otto and Herman Grote later (Mayor, C2/31). Andreas and his brother Wilhelm Grote moved from the mercantile into the merchant banking system and re-opened a branch of the Grote Bank in Amsterdam, run by Wilhelm’s son Otto in the 1770s (Mayor, C2/1-8; 17-28; B24/49-50). There was much foreign travel migrating between the banks, countries and families and numerous letters, bank ledgers, wills, travel diaries and other legal documents survive to indicate the early origins of international banking.

Several letters from Amsterdam in the 1770s written by C. Munch of Munch & Weslering, who co-operated in the Amsterdam venture, all in Dutch, reveal the interdependence of the three banks and incidentally the Grote preoccupation with books and philosophy which complemented their love of travel and commerce (Mayor, C2/35-49). Munch’s letter of January 1773 opens with the phrase ‘For people as we who are at once philosophers and merchants this is a laughable and sad time’ (Mayor, C2/43). Joseph, when in Bremen in 1765, received stricter and characteristic Grote family comment from his father on care about money, ‘I hope you do not go in drinking clubs, or the company with idle worthless people, which you should shun like the plague, but always associate with men of reputation by whom you can improve’ (Mayor, C2/17; B24/52). Andreas Grote was, however, prudent and opportunistic, cementing social as well as political and financial deals with a loan of £50,000 to the Treasury in 1763 (Bute Papers, British Library, 5726 D, 260, 263).

Yet for philosophy the great benefits that this family experience bestowed were twofold: first the exposure to the tolerance, individualism and liberty fostered by the Northern Dutch republic and secondly, the early and easy acquaintance with foreign languages, and particularly German, Dutch and French. German was spoken by Otto Grote, by his sons Andreas and Wilhelm, by Wilhelm’s sons Otto and Herman, by Andreas’ sons Joseph and George, by George’s wife and brother-in-law Henry Blosset, by George’s sons George junior, William Henry (1795-1844), Joseph junior (1801-1876) and John Grote, and was passed on to Alexandria Jessie (’Ally’) Grote (1831-1927), Grote’s adopted