The Unknowable: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Metaphysics by W. J. Mander (review)

Abstract

Of Victorian metaphysics we might be tempted to draw the same comparison Samuel Johnson once offered in a different context: as with a dog “walking on his hind legs,” we presume it “is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”1 Indeed, metaphysics in the nineteenth-century British Isles is studied so little now that it is hard even to list the names of more than a very few practitioners. We are more likely to give what time we have to the German tradition, with its many magnificent waves of thought. Enter W. J. Mander, a contemporary philosopher and Oxford don who has dedicated his life’s work (so far) to uncovering and re-engaging British metaphysics in the long nineteenth century, and particularly its idealist strain. Mander’s entire oeuvre will be of interest to students of Newman, chiefly because he unearths and makes a case for many thinkers and positions close to Newman’s own, but generally beyond the purview of recent systematic theology. His most recent book, though, may be of special interest, as The Unknowable deals with both a fundamentally Newmanian question—what is our epistemic relation to that which transcends us?—and sets up its discussion in relation to a thinker Newman was very much interested in: Sir William Hamilton. Mander’s thesis concerns “the idea of an ultimate but unknowable way that things really are in themselves,” a fixation of Hamilton’s early in the century (1). If we but see this question looming at the center of the century’s philosophical culture, the three major branches of Victorian metaphysics, the epistemic “agnostics,” the empiricists, and the idealists, will become more intelligible both in their similarity and their difference. The book falls into three neat sections, corresponding to each branch or strain of the tradition, and subdivided into chapters on specific historical figures, each approached both biographically and analytically in relation to the central question. Mander has a nice way (not unlike the method of T. H. Irwin in the history of ethics) of taking each figure seriously on his own terms, privileging the author’s own texts and voice, and yet also drawing his theories into dialogical relation to the others at hand. In the first part (on those who were agnostic as to