Liberalism and the Metaphysical Society

The initial scholarly and, in fact, only comprehensive study of the Metaphysical Society was by Alan Willard Brown, The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis 1869–1880 in 1947. For Brown, the central unifying theme of the Society was an underlying robust sense of liberalism. This chapter examines the diverse conceptions of liberalism within the membership of the Society in the 1870s through the lens of illustrative papers by members. These diverse conceptions encompass ideas of, for example, utilitarianism, evolutionary theory, intuitionism, rationalism, Whiggism, and idealism. Contra Brown’s reading, it is argued that there is no one singular accepted narrative on liberalism in the Society debates. Further, the decade of the 1870s—the heyday of the Metaphysical Society—is seen to coincide with a moment of cultural turbulence particularly over issues such as the rise of both natural science and democracy. In consequence, the diverse liberalisms and labyrinthine metaphysical debates of the Society are seen to both embody and reflect a broader sense of crisis in conceptual and social meanings in Victorian society.