Education And Democracy The Meaning Of Alexander

Meiklejohn 1872 1964 1st Edition Adam R. Nelson

pdf download
https://ebookgate.com/product/education-and-democracy-the-meaning-of-alexander-
meiklejohn-1872-1964-1st-edition-adam-r-nelson/

★★★★★ 4.7/5.0 (32 reviews) ✓ 112 downloads ■ TOP RATED

"Great resource, downloaded instantly. Thank you!" - Lisa K.

DOWNLOAD EBOOK
Education And Democracy The Meaning Of Alexander Meiklejohn
1872 1964 1st Edition Adam R. Nelson pdf download

TEXTBOOK EBOOK EBOOK GATE

Available Formats

■ PDF eBook Study Guide TextBook

EXCLUSIVE 2025 EDUCATIONAL COLLECTION - LIMITED TIME

INSTANT DOWNLOAD VIEW LIBRARY

Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) available
Download now and explore formats that suit you...

Education and the Culture of Print in Modern America 1st

Edition Adam R. Nelson

https://ebookgate.com/product/education-and-the-culture-of-print-in-
modern-america-1st-edition-adam-r-nelson/

ebookgate.com

The 20 Principles of the Alexander Discipline 1st Edition

R. G. Alexander

https://ebookgate.com/product/the-20-principles-of-the-alexander-
discipline-1st-edition-r-g-alexander/

ebookgate.com

The Education of Radical Democracy 1st Edition Sarah S.

Amsler

https://ebookgate.com/product/the-education-of-radical-democracy-1st-
edition-sarah-s-amsler/

ebookgate.com

Russian Mathematics Education Programs and Practices

Mathematics Education 1st Edition Alexander Karp

https://ebookgate.com/product/russian-mathematics-education-programs-
and-practices-mathematics-education-1st-edition-alexander-karp/

ebookgate.com
Confronting the Horror The Novels of Nelson Algren 1st
Edition James R. Giles

https://ebookgate.com/product/confronting-the-horror-the-novels-of-
nelson-algren-1st-edition-james-r-giles/

ebookgate.com

Takeover Race Education and American Democracy 1st Edition

Domingo Morel

https://ebookgate.com/product/takeover-race-education-and-american-
democracy-1st-edition-domingo-morel/

ebookgate.com

Education Policy Globalization Citizenship and Democracy

1st Edition Mark Olssen

https://ebookgate.com/product/education-policy-globalization-
citizenship-and-democracy-1st-edition-mark-olssen/

ebookgate.com

Americo Castro and the Meaning of Spanish Civilization

José R. Barcia (Editor)

https://ebookgate.com/product/americo-castro-and-the-meaning-of-
spanish-civilization-jose-r-barcia-editor/

ebookgate.com

Badiou and Plato An Education by Truths 1st Edition Adam

John Bartlett

https://ebookgate.com/product/badiou-and-plato-an-education-by-
truths-1st-edition-adam-john-bartlett/

ebookgate.com
Education and Democracy
Education and Democracy

The Meaning of Alexander Meiklejohn

1872–1964

Adam R. Nelson

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

 The University of Wisconsin Press
1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor
Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

3 Henrietta Street
London WC2E 8LU, England

Copyright © 2001
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet
or a Web site without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press,
except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

3 5 4 2

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nelson, Adam R.
Education and democracy : the meaning of Alexander Meiklejohn,
1872–1964 / Adam R. Nelson.
pp. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-299-17140-X
1. Meiklejohn, Alexander, 1872–1964. 2. Educators—United
States—Biography. 3. Education, Humanistic—United
States—History—20th century. I. Title
LB875.M332 N45 2001
370 .92—dc21 00-011979

ISBN-13: 978-0-299-17144-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)

Publication of this volume was originally made possible in part by funds

provided by the Evjue Foundation and the support of the Anonymous Fund
of the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
 For my family:
Mom, Dad, and Matt
Should you ask me what the relation is between liberal education and
democracy, the answer would be easy: they are the same thing.
Alexander Meiklejohn
“Education and Democracy,” 1923

One of the deepest and most active convictions just now in our . . .
society is this: that there is no common basis for men’s reasoning; that at
the bottom of all reasoning there is irrationality; that every man starts
from his own private designs; that, after all, reasoning is rationalizing,
and the old dream of a common truth, a common intelligence, a
common intellectual inquiry, is gone, and gone forever.
Alexander Meiklejohn
“Higher Education in a Democracy,” October 1941
 Contents

Illustrations ix
Preface: Meiklejohn, Socrates, and the Paradox of
Democratic Education xi
Acknowledgments xvii

PROVIDENCE, 1872–1911
1. “A Voyage across the Atlantic” and “Kant’s Ethics,”
1872–1899 3
2. “College Education and the Moral Ideal,” 1900–1911 33

AMHERST, 1912–1924
3. “The College as Critic,” 1912–1919 61
4. “To Whom Are We Responsible?” 1920–1924 97

MADISON, 1925–1932
5. “A New College with a New Idea,” 1925–1928 133
6. “A Most Lamentable Comedy,” 1929–1932 165

BERKELEY, 1933–1947
7. “Adult Education: A Fresh Start,” 1933–1940 199
8. “A Reply to John Dewey,” 1941–1947 233

BERKELEY, 1948–1964
9. “What Does the First Amendment Mean?” 1948–1954 263
10. “The Faith of a Free Man,” 1955–1964 296

vii
 Contents
Afterword: Education and the Democratic Ideal—The Meaning
of Alexander Meiklejohn 329

Notes 337
Bibliography and Suggestions for Further Reading 391
Index 403

viii
 Illustrations

Alexander Meiklejohn at the age of ten in Appanoag, Rhode

Island, 1882 8
Alexander Meiklejohn and members of the Theta Delta Chi
fraternity at Brown University, ca. 1891 15
Alexander Meiklejohn as a senior at Brown University, 1893 19
Alexander Meiklejohn and members of the Brown University ice
polo team, 1894 30
Alexander Meiklejohn as dean of Brown University, ca. 1902 36
Alexander Meiklejohn with his cricket bat, ca. 1911 38
The academic parade at Amherst College during the
inauguration of Alexander Meiklejohn, 1912 62
Alexander Meiklejohn as president of Amherst College, 1912 66
Alexander Meiklejohn as president of Amherst College, ca. 1912 68
Alexander Meiklejohn at his desk in the president’s office at
Amherst College, ca. 1913 70
Kenneth, Gordon, and Donald Meiklejohn with their dog on
the steps in front of the president’s house at Amherst
College, 1913 78
Members of the Student Army Training Corps (SATC) marching
at Amherst College, 1917 92
The Amherst Ambulance Unit presenting its flags to Alexander
Meiklejohn, 1918 93
Alexander Meiklejohn with members of the Amherst College
Board of Trustees at the Centennial Celebration luncheon,
1921 104
George Bosworth Churchill, professor of English at Amherst
College, ca. 1923 106
Glenn Frank, president of the University of Wisconsin, ignoring

ix
 Illustrations
George Clarke Sellery, dean of the College of Letters and
Science, at the Freshman Welcome, 1925 139
“Dr. Meiklejohn Weds Miss Helen Everett,” June 10, 1926 143
The advisers of the Experimental College, 1927 146
Adams Hall at the University of Wisconsin with Lake Mendota
in the background, ca. 1928 152
Experimental College students, many wearing their “Owl of
Athena” blazers, in front of the entrance to Adams Hall, 1930 176
Publicity photo for Experimental College production of
Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, 1930 177
A spoof on Meiklejohn’s “guinea pig college” in the St. Patrick’s
Day parade at the University of Wisconsin, ca. 1931 189
Alexander Meiklejohn, Stanley King, Arthur Stanley Pease, and
Calvin Coolidge gather for an uncomfortable photograph at
King’s inauguration as president of Amherst College in 1932 196
Alexander Meiklejohn with Elmer Griffin, a nationally ranked
tennis star, Henry A. Wallace, and Oren Root, Jr., the
campaign manager for Wendell Willkie, ca. 1940 200
Alexander Meiklejohn, ca. 1948 276
Alexander Meiklejohn with Scott Buchanan and Leon Mohill at
a meeting of Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party in Pittsfield,
Massachusetts, March 28, 1949 282
Alexander and Helen Meiklejohn at a reunion with advisers
from the Experimental College held at St. John’s College in
Annapolis, Maryland, 1957 303
Alexander Meiklejohn with his son Donald, ca. 1955 304
Alexander Meiklejohn and James Baldwin celebrating the 172nd
anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights at a dinner
organized by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in
New York City, December 1963 323
Alexander Meiklejohn and Norman Thomas share a laugh at the
Emergency Civil Liberties Committee dinner, December 1963 324
Alexander Meiklejohn receiving an honorary degree at the
University of California, Berkeley, 1964 326
Alexander Meiklejohn wearing his Presidential Medal of
Freedom, 1963 327

x
 Preface: Meiklejohn, Socrates,
and the Paradox of
Democratic Education

H
e is at his desk. He is surrounded with his numerous cor-
respondence. He puts down his pen. He seems to want to. He
waits for you to speak, intently and anxiously, almost with
childlike breathlessness. And you go on. His words, short phrases of his
understanding, a nod of his head, a sensitive, sympathetic smile. A kindly
air of appreciative intent always on his countenance. He sometimes sug-
gests a word of his outlook, but stops if you manifest the slightest reac-
tion. You enjoy his sincere intentness.” As the young men who wrote these
words in 1928 well knew, Alexander Meiklejohn was, first and foremost,
a teacher. He had an uncommon ability to relate to students, to cultivate
close bonds with colleagues, to lead people of all ages to realize their own
best selves. To many, he was nothing short of an inspiration. “He can stir
a sluggish brain into action and prod an imagination,” admirers observed,
“and at the same time he can stimulate his associates to adopt similar tac-
tics with nearly as effective results.” His penchant for Socratic debate, ex-
hibited repeatedly throughout his long career, cast an almost magical spell
over acquaintances, arousing passionate loyalty among friends even while
it provoked bitter antagonism among enemies. An expert in logic and ca-
suistry, he could be remarkably persuasive in the classroom; his strong
convictions added weight to virtually any argument he made. He was
clever, witty, and shrewd, but also quiet, calm, and reserved. According to
participants in the famed Experimental College he established at the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin in the late 1920s, Meiklejohn often risked being per-

xi
 preface
ceived as a “dangerous person” whose charisma was a threat to under-
graduates too “tempted to idealize him.” Yet, he carefully avoided the
sort of pedagogical demagoguery that led his ancient hero Socrates into
trouble in Athens. As a teacher, he was actually quite shy. “His hesitant,
at times almost timid air, is a pungent antidote for those who are afflicted
with exalted ideas,” one eighteen-year-old Experimental College student
noted. “His willingness to ‘follow the truth wherever it may lead’ and the
firm conviction that all men should be created with an equal chance to
prove their worth in this world seem the signal features in his educational
policy.” Here, in brief, were the essential qualities of Meiklejohn’s life and
work. A gifted, zealous, but also somewhat diffident teacher, he was pro-
foundly motivated by a belief that all people “should be created with an
equal chance to prove their worth in this world.”1 Indeed, he spent more
than seventy years investigating the process by which liberal education
could actually create a more just and equitable democracy.
For Alexander Meiklejohn, the relationship between education and
democracy rested on a paradox—a paradox linked directly to the moral
and intellectual leadership provided by teachers like himself. Nowhere
was this paradoxical role of educators illustrated more clearly than it was
in Plato’s Republic, a text Meiklejohn assigned as the culminating work
for freshmen in his Experimental College. At the end of book III of The
Republic, Socrates informs his interlocutor, Glaucon, that liberal educa-
tion must somehow “create” the self-governing citizens who constitute a
democratic state. Yet, in a subtle twist, Socrates adds that the youth of a
republic must never discover that they learned the ways of virtue and
democracy from wise old “philosopher-kings.” Rather, he says, the youth
must believe that they achieved their understanding entirely on their
own—freely, autonomously, and independent of any “external” teaching.
They must believe that they taught themselves everything they know and,
thus, that their knowledge is intrinsic, universal, and pure. As Socrates
eloquently explains, “[T]hey are to be told that their youth was a dream
and that the education and training which they received from us were only
appearances. In reality, during all that time, they were being formed and
fed in the womb of the earth. When they were completed, the earth, their
mother, sent them up; and so, their country being their mother and also
their nurse, they are bound to advise her for good and to defend her
against attacks.”2 According to Socrates, even if citizens must ultimately
learn from others how to be democratic, they are better off ignorant of
their education, lest they begin to doubt the integrity, originality, or au-
thenticity of their commitment to virtuous self-government. Only if the
xii
 Meiklejohn, Socrates, and the Paradox of Democratic Education
process of learning is hidden from the youth will they have the confidence
to teach the ways of democracy to their own children and, thus, from gen-
eration to generation, to defend that ideal against attacks.
Like Socrates, Meiklejohn cared deeply about the link between liberal
education and democracy in an ideal republican state. He believed that
education must precede democracy and, further, that citizens must ulti-
mately teach themselves—or at least imagine that they could teach them-
selves—how to construct a good and just society. He was convinced that
each succeeding generation had to re-create democracy practically from
scratch, to summon it, as it were, from the very “womb of the earth.” And
yet, like Socrates, he recognized that the only way to realize such an ideal
was to learn how from wise and generous teachers—educators who sub-
tly concealed their own prior role as philosopher-kings in order to culti-
vate a sense of freedom in their students. To teach democracy, Meiklejohn
believed, was to present the process of education as an appearance, a
vague reflection of the process of living itself, to make it seem as if educa-
tion were simply part and parcel of each student’s autonomous exis-
tence—even if, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau so clearly demonstrated in his
classic Emile, it was not. To learn how to be democratic was to imagine
being fully human, both individually and collectively, as an independently
attainable ideal, even if that ideal proved a fiction or a myth. So Socrates
thought. So Rousseau thought. And so, too, Meiklejohn thought in his
most idealistic moments of philosophical reflection. Taking his cue from
the ancient idealism of Plato and, more, from the late eighteenth-century
idealism of Immanuel Kant, Meiklejohn believed that liberal education,
properly conceived, could actually create an ideal democratic society, and
he devoted his entire life to that goal. As dean of Brown University, pres-
ident of Amherst College, director of the Experimental College at the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin, founder of the San Francisco School of Social Stud-
ies, adviser to St. John’s College in Annapolis, delegate to UNESCO, and
prominent interpreter of the First Amendment, Alexander Meiklejohn
made a profound and meaningful contribution to the theory and practice
of democratic education in the United States.
To understand the meaning of Alexander Meiklejohn is to understand
the tremendous cultural, political, and intellectual significance of idealism
in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Idealism was not just
the philosophical antithesis of pragmatism, though it certainly was that,
too. For Meiklejohn, idealism was the ethical core of liberalism, the moral
center of social reform, the very heart of the democratic project as a revo-
lutionary human goal. Coming of age in the increasingly diverse, secular,
xiii
 preface
and chaotic industrial society of the 1880s and 1890s, Meiklejohn saw in
idealism a way to reconcile competing claims of personal freedom and
public order, individual liberty and institutional authority that dominated
his historical milieu. As a bulwark against the rising tide of “agnostic” sci-
ence and “amoral” technology, idealism offered a sense of certainty and
stability in a rapidly changing world. Yet, in the first half of the twentieth
century, Meiklejohn and his idealist friends fought a losing battle, espe-
cially in the field of education. Immersed in a thoroughly pragmatic age,
Meiklejohn stood in direct opposition to his more famous contemporary,
John Dewey, whose best-known work, Democracy and Education—pub-
lished in 1916 when Dewey was fifty-seven and Meiklejohn was forty-
four—spread the gospel of “practical,” “instrumental,” and “progressive”
schooling far and wide. Both Meiklejohn and Dewey characterized them-
selves as liberals and even socialists throughout their long lives, but the two
men differed dramatically in their approaches to democratic education.
The most crucial difference between Meiklejohn and Dewey lay in their di-
vergent ways of explaining the educational origins of democracy—the
ways in which education created democracy through the authoritative
processes of teaching. Here, of course, was the basic dilemma that Socrates
tried to solve by first highlighting and then hiding the kinds of teaching
given by philosopher-kings. Dewey had good reasons for trying to avoid
Socrates’ surreptitious approach to teaching—not least his desire to avoid
the seemingly “state-centered” implications of Platonic schooling. Yet, in
Meiklejohn’s view, Dewey’s incessant calls for individualized and child-
centered instruction elided the question of just how democracy was created
or, in other words, how the authority inherent in teaching could ever be de-
mocratic in the first place. Asserting that Dewey simply “took democracy
for granted,” Meiklejohn believed he had found the Achilles’ heel of prag-
matist-progressivist educational theory. Education always entailed author-
ity, he argued. The crucial question was, what kind?
The title of this biography, Education and Democracy, reflects the
subtle yet significant distinctions between the educational theories of John
Dewey and Alexander Meiklejohn. Where Dewey, in 1916, put democ-
racy before education, believing that education could not be liberal unless
it were wholly democratic from the outset, Meiklejohn put education be-
fore democracy, insisting that democracy could never even exist unless it
were taught authoritatively by citizen-philosophers. “We haven’t even
tried democracy yet,” Meiklejohn lamented in 1923 at the nadir of his ed-
ucational career, “but we cannot say we shall fail until we have tried, until
we have tried by means of education.”3 Like Dewey, Meiklejohn believed
xiv
 Meiklejohn, Socrates, and the Paradox of Democratic Education
ardently in the greatness of democracy as the most virtuous form of gov-
ernment humanity could possibly devise. He did not, however, believe
that democracy was inborn in human nature, nor did he think, as Dewey
often suggested, that democracy was somehow intrinsic to the objective
methods of modern science. Rather, he believed that humanity must learn
how to be democratic through critical intelligence and ethical under-
standing, which could develop only through the guidance of a liberal ed-
ucation. The question was, how? How could educators teach people to be
free? Meiklejohn’s answer to this question was both complex and contro-
versial. Following the late eighteenth-century rational idealism of Kant,
he insisted that the only way to teach freedom was to assume that human
beings would submit themselves voluntarily to the transcendental au-
thority of pure reason. Essential to Meiklejohn’s educational and political
philosophy was his conviction that democracy rested on the basic rea-
sonability of humankind and, moreover, on the moral authority of reason
as an organizing principle for all human relationships. Without rational-
ity as an authoritative ideal, Meiklejohn simply could not conceive of lib-
eral education as a creative force for the development of democracy.
In recent years, philosophers and historians of education, eager to ad-
dress the pedagogical and curricular implications of postmodernism, have
revisited pragmatism, seeking its wisdom on a wide variety of issues, in-
cluding the nature of knowledge and intelligence, the cultural construc-
tion of identity and language, the implications of power and authority
in the classroom, and the very possibility of “progressive” social reform.
In the process, they have rediscovered the paradox inherent in the phrase
teaching freedom. How, they ask, is it possible to teach people to be free
without compromising their subjective autonomy or their cultural in-
tegrity in the process? As a multilayered examination of Meiklejohn’s sig-
nificance in the history of American education, this biography places him
squarely in the middle of these debates. Stressing the critical imperatives
of reason and the collective possibilities of democracy, Meiklejohn’s Neo-
Kantian idealism yielded a provocative solution to the paradox of demo-
cratic education. In words directed unmistakably against Dewey, but rem-
iniscent of Josiah Royce, Meiklejohn asserted that “the problem of social
reconstruction is based on the faith that we can find truth and that there
are ways of doing things which can be found. Let the college stand for that
faith.”4 Admittedly, from a twenty-first-century perspective, such a solu-
tion to the paradox of democratic education seems problematic. Having
abandoned the quest for an intellectual synthesis based on eternal princi-
ples or the concept of a legitimate cultural authority based on transcen-
xv
 preface
dental reason, many find it easy to scoff at Meiklejohn’s work. And yet,
this biography suggests the need to study Meiklejohn not only critically
but also sympathetically. Like Socrates before him, Meiklejohn was right
to note that education, almost by its very nature, cannot be purely demo-
cratic, and he was sensitive to the poignancy of this problem. “If I cry out
against the agnosticism of our people,” he confessed in 1912, “it is not as
one who has escaped from it, nor as one who would point the way back
to the older synthesis, but simply as one who believes that the time has
come for a reconstruction, for a new synthesis.”5
One final note. Had Meiklejohn had his way, this biography would
not have been written.6 When he embarked upon the task of organizing
his personal papers at the age of ninety, he asked his second wife, Helen,
to discourage any such undertaking. His reluctance to have a biography
reflected his desire to hide the less flattering—and, in some cases,
even shameful—aspects of his life, as well as his distrust of historical writ-
ing in general.7 As he wrote to a close friend in 1961, “[T]he appeal to his-
torical fact or opinion, whether recorded in the past in question or by
some later historian, always makes me uneasy. It is, of necessity, one man’s
view or one party’s view which, in either case, is not accepted by other
men or other parties. So the historical narrative can never be authoritative
for us, nor free us from the necessity of making up our own minds.”8 In
many important ways, Meiklejohn was right. Every biography is, of
course, one person’s view of its subject, and this biography is no excep-
tion. Its goal is not to give a complete chronicle of Meiklejohn’s life but to
give him an opportunity to speak for himself. Wherever possible, it allows
both the tone and the meaning of Meiklejohn’s ideas to come through in
his own words—in books, articles, essays, journals, and, most of all, let-
ters to family and friends. If it errs, it errs on the side of allowing Meikle-
john to say too much. At various times throughout his life, Meiklejohn ex-
posed serious discrepancies between his philosophical ideals and his
personal behavior. Usually, these discrepancies revealed the inevitable fail-
ings of a self-proclaimed idealist. In a few cases, however, they proved
more difficult to explain. This biography does not attempt to rationalize
Meiklejohn’s mistakes; rather, it allows him to express, and to contradict,
himself. In this way, it presents us—as Meiklejohn the Socratic teacher
surely would have wanted—with the necessity of making up our own
minds.

xvi
 Acknowledgments

B
iographies tell as much about the relationships their sub-
jects cultivated as they tell about their individual subjects them-
selves. Alexander Meiklejohn had many friends and many ene-
mies, each of whom influenced his activities and his beliefs in different
ways, both great and small. My job as a biographer has been to discover,
describe, and ultimately interpret the relative importance of Meiklejohn’s
many relationships. As a writer, researcher, and scholar, I, too, have relied
on relationships—with friends, relatives, and total strangers—to aid
me in my work. I take this opportunity to acknowledge a few of those re-
lationships here.
First and foremost, I must thank John L. Thomas, my graduate ad-
viser, for his constant support and encouragement. Every doctoral student
should have a mentor as kind and considerate as he has been to me. Sec-
ond, I am indebted to James Patterson, whose extremely close readings
and incisive criticisms made my manuscript more concise, more clearly
written, and more cogently argued than it might otherwise have been.
Third, I thank Tom James, who generously agreed to serve on my disser-
tation committee after a semester-long tutorial and then remained on
my committee after moving to New York University. Fourth, I wish to
thank Carl Kaestle, who joined my committee after he came to Brown
during my final year of graduate school and gave me time to finish my the-
sis when I should have been doing research for him. To these professors
and others who remain unnamed, I owe a profound debt of gratitude.
The writing of this book would certainly not have been possible with-
out the aid of several outstanding archivists. At the Brown University
Archives, I benefited from the unfailingly friendly assistance of Martha
Mitchell, Gayle Lynch, and Ray Butti. At the Amherst College Library, I

xvii
 Acknowledgments
enjoyed the good-humored help of Daria D’Arienzo, Carol Trabulsi,
Donna Skibel, Janet Poirrier, Barbara Trippel Simmons, and Peter Weiss.
At the University of Wisconsin Archives, I was assisted by both Bernard
Schermetzler and Frank Cook. At the archives of the State Historical Soci-
ety of Wisconsin, I benefited from the efficient and professional service of
Gerry Strey, Dee Grimsrud, and many other staff members. Finally, at the
Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute in Berkeley, I appreciated the time and
openness of Ann Fagan Ginger. For providing the gracious surroundings in
which I composed most of my dissertation, I owe special thanks to the staff
of the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization,
particularly Joyce Botelho, Jane Hennedy, and Denise Bastien.
Since the bulk of the research for this book was done far away from
my home, I must thank those who provided food and shelter during my
extended trips. In South Hadley, Massachusetts, I stayed for an entire
week with Susie Castellanos. In Oregon, Wisconsin, on three separate oc-
casions, I enjoyed the easy-going hospitality of Lori, Arlan, and Kietra
Kay, as well as their many pets. In Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, I had the plea-
sure of five weeks over the course of two years with my cousins, Aaron
and Nathan, and my uncle, Mark Schafer. In Berkeley, California, I stayed
for two summer months with the extraordinary Parsley family, including
Janet, Allen, Nathan, Tom, Ruth, and Mickey. Chapters 7, 8, 9, and 10
might not have been as detailed and chapters 3 and 4 might not have been
written without the nourishment I received from Janet’s unparalleled
cookies and conversation.
I have received a great deal of helpful feedback from readers solicited
by the University of Wisconsin Press, including Paul Boyer, Charles An-
derson, Michael Hinden, Rodney Smolla, Robert Booth Fowler, and E.
David Cronon. I have also received feedback from alumni of the Experi-
mental College, which Alexander Meiklejohn created at the University of
Wisconsin in the late 1920s. Comments came chiefly from Robert Frase,
Leslie Orear, E. R. Lerner, and R. Freeman Butts. Roland Guyotte of the
University of Minnesota–Morris read chapters 5 and 6 as well as the af-
terword in their unabridged dissertation form and offered comments that
were later forwarded to me. I also received three very helpful letters from
Meiklejohn’s son Donald, who offered suggestions that helped to focus
my analysis of his father’s life and work.
Drafts of this book improved immensely as a result of the comments
and criticisms I received from friends. Peter Baldwin, Chrissy Cortina, Julie
DesJardins, Nathaniel Frank, L. E. Hartmann, Laura Prieto, and Ed Raf-
ferty all contributed to the process of revising my text and reconsidering
xviii
 Acknowledgments
my ideas. Members of the Rhode Island Biography Group, Joan Richards,
Eileen Warburton, and our ever-gracious host, Jane Lancaster, helped with
the difficulties of transforming a dissertation into a book. Other friends
gave immeasurable support. I thank in particular Shilpa Raval, Ted Bro-
mund, and Laura Souders, who top a list much longer than I have room to
print.
The editors at the University of Wisconsin Press have been invaluable
in making this a better book. Steve Salemson, the son of an Experimental
College alumnus, accepted the manuscript and guided it into the capable
hands of Robin Whitaker, who edited my work with efficiency and preci-
sion. I owe a tremendous debt to the editorial staff, including Juliet
Skuldt, who saw the book through production, but I take full responsi-
bility for any and all mistakes that may remain in the text.
Last, but certainly not least, I want to thank my family—my parents
and my brother, Matt. From them I received countless suggestions and
bits of advice—in letters, calls, and e-mail messages from Pakistan—each
lovingly bestowed. I cannot express how grateful I am for the care, con-
cern, and support my family has given during the process of completing
this project, which I dedicate, above all, to them.

xix
PROVIDENCE
1872–1911
 1

“A Voyage across the Atlantic”

and “Kant’s Ethics”
1872–1899

“ A V O YA G E A C R O S S T H E AT L A N T I C ”

I
n the spring of 1869, James and Elizabeth Meiklejohn moved
with their seven sons from Glasgow, Scotland, to Rochdale, England.
Ever since his childhood in the early 1840s, James Meiklejohn had
worked as a color designer in the textile mills surrounding Glasgow, Bar-
rhead, and Paisley, but the possibility of higher wages and better working
conditions eventually lured him and his large family south. The town of
Rochdale, located ten miles north of Manchester in the rolling hills of
Lancashire, was famous for its manufacture of high-quality flannels,
broadcloths, and other cotton fabrics. It was even more famous for its
large and well-established workers’ cooperative, which Meiklejohn and
his wife hoped to join. Rooted in the producerist ideals of Robert Owen
as well as the Shakers, the Chartists, and other utopian socialist commu-
nities of the mid-nineteenth century, the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pi-
oneers attracted the Meiklejohns with its motto: All who contribute to the
realization of wealth ought to participate in its distribution. According to
its charter of 1844, the cooperative’s chief purpose was to provide for the
“pecuniary benefit and improvement of the social and domestic condi-
tions of its members,” and so it did.1 Collecting one pound per year from
each member, the cooperative was able to open a wholesale store, build
modest homes for workers and their families, and hire those who were
temporarily unemployed. It also provided educational services, including
teachers, lectures, and a free library, for children. When the thirty-five-

3
 providence, 1872–1911
year-old Meiklejohn arrived in Rochdale with his family in 1869, he took
an enthusiastic interest in the cooperative’s work. He and Elizabeth held
meetings in their home, served on social and charitable committees, re-
cruited new members, and genuinely embraced its ideals of economic
equality and mutual aid.2 It was in Rochdale, on February 3, 1872, that
James and Elizabeth’s eighth son, Alexander, was born.
From a very early age, young “Alec” took pride in his family’s Scot-
tish working-class heritage. “I was the youngest of eight sons in a Scot-
tish, Presbyterian, working-class family,” he later recalled. “My earliest
allegiance was to the Scottish culture. . . . My second loyalty came from
my father’s occupation.” Indeed, Meiklejohn grew up surrounded by the
members of the Rochdale cooperative. As a boy, he found friends among
the children of the millhands and played cricket and soccer outside the
factories.3 Many days, he followed his father to the dye house in the
morning and home again in the evening. As they walked, he listened to
stories about the ideals of social and economic cooperation. He heard
how “human society is a body consisting of many members, the real in-
terests of which are identical.” He learned that “true workmen should be
fellow-workers.” He discovered that “a principle of justice, not of self-
ishness, must govern [human] exchange.” And, above all, he understood
that the best government was always democratic. Indeed, in both struc-
ture and spirit, the Rochdale cooperative was deeply democratic. Each
household had one vote, regardless of the number of shares it owned, and
a general assembly of members settled all internal disputes.4 Emphasizing
the equal value of different opinions and beliefs, the cooperative shunned
sectarian orthodoxy and insisted on nondenominational toleration for all
religious affiliations.5 As George Jacob Holyoake, a labor activist who
published the first history of the cooperative in 1882, noted, “[T]he moral
miracle performed by our cooperatives of Rochdale [is] that they . . . had
the good sense to differ without disagreeing, to dissent from each other
without separating, to hate at times, and yet always to hold together.”6
Though Meiklejohn was much too young to realize it at the time, such
sentiments laid a foundation for his own moral and political education.
As he noted many times throughout his life, “[T]he textile workers were
my people.”7
In addition to a wide network of friends and factory acquaintances,
the Rochdale cooperative supplied James and Elizabeth Meiklejohn with
a regular forum for political debate. Often, the cooperative’s members as-
sembled at the Meiklejohn home to discuss labor relations and the possi-
bilities for social reform. They expressed strong support for Britain’s Lib-
4
 “A Voyage across the Atlantic” and “Kant’s Ethics”
eral prime minister William Gladstone, who ardently endorsed the work-
ers’ cooperative movement and criticized the dominant capitalist ideology
of laissez faire. They praised Gladstone’s views on moral economy, which
associated poverty with virtue and wealth with vice, and they admired the
theories of such “new liberal” intellectuals as Thomas Hill Green, who as-
signed ethical importance to economic equality. They commended the
ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris, who sought to preserve a pro-
ducerist aesthetic in the arts and crafts, and they enthusiastically debated
the heroic folklore of Scotland, especially its bloody struggle for indepen-
dence from England. They often quoted the robust poetry of Robert
Burns, whose late eighteenth-century vernacular verse appealed to their
sense of democratic solidarity, and they gathered regularly to share fam-
ily occasions, including birthdays, weddings, and funerals, which rein-
forced members’ sense of class connection. For the Meiklejohns, the
Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers symbolized not only a social and
economic aid society but also a moral, political, and intellectual commu-
nity. As its charter stated, the cooperative constituted a “self-supporting
home-colony of united interests,” and, though these values might have es-
caped the conscious attention of four-year-old Alec, he spent much of his
adult life trying to reconstruct the voluntary ethical communitarianism
that pervaded his early childhood in Rochdale.8
As a young boy growing up in a mill town, Alexander Meiklejohn ex-
perienced the love and caring of a large and close-knit family. One of his
fondest memories was that of standing by his mother’s side, “turning the
socks” and helping her with load after load of laundry. “He adored his
parents and was on warmest terms with his brothers,” a friend recalled.9
Certainly, with so many older brothers, he had no shortage of playmates.
He could always find someone with whom to try new games, explore city
streets, roam the countryside, or simply make mischief at home. His seven
brothers—Andrew, Henry, James, John, Matthew, Maxwell, and
William—teased him mercilessly, not only for being the youngest, but also
for being the only member of the family born outside Scotland. As Meik-
lejohn bemusedly recalled, his siblings constantly needled him for being a
“foreigner,” an “alien,” and a “Johnny Bull.”10 And yet, despite such
taunting, his childhood was happy, joyful, and secure. From his mother,
whose Presbyterian faith filled their small home, he learned the Golden
Rule: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” From his father, whose generosity
belied his modest means, he learned a deep sympathy for the poor. From
both parents, he learned to see the world from the perspective of the
working classes. “From his family environment,” one friend noted, Meik-
5
 providence, 1872–1911
lejohn learned “an inner peace, free from disguised fears, hostilities, and
frustrations.”11
For more than a decade, the Meiklejohns lived quite contentedly in
Rochdale. In 1880, however, James Meiklejohn considered moving his
family again, this time from England to the United States. Ever since the
American Civil War, when a sharp drop in cotton imports caused British
mills to buckle, thousands of workers had emigrated overseas. Dozens of
enterprising Scots had started new mills abroad or bought factories from
American families weakened by the war. Typical was the J. & P. Coats
Company of Paisley, Scotland, which, in 1877, took possession of the Co-
nant Thread Company in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Like other Scottish
textile companies with recently acquired branches on the opposite side of
the Atlantic, the Coats Company recruited large numbers of Scottish
workers, especially skilled dye masters and color technicians, to teach
their American counterparts the latest manufacturing methods.12 The
Coats Company advertised for employees in Scottish newspapers and
posted fliers in workers’ neighborhoods, including the Meiklejohns’ dis-
trict of Newbold in Rochdale. In an effort to persuade millhands to leave
their current jobs, Coats offered to subsidize their ocean passage and
promised to help them find affordable housing near the company’s new
mill in Pawtucket. Given such powerful incentives, James Meiklejohn
faced a difficult choice. On the one hand, he hated to leave Rochdale and
the camaraderie of the workers’ cooperative. On the other hand, he
wanted to provide the best possible life for his large family. After careful
consideration, he and Elizabeth decided to leave England for America, if
not necessarily for the Coats mill, then for another mill like it.
In the spring of 1880, all ten Meiklejohns boarded the giant Britannic
steamer of the White Star Line and sailed for New York. Little Alexander
was only eight years old at time. Like any inquisitive boy, he stowed his
belongings, including his most prized possession, his cricket bat, and went
off to explore the ship. “When a person gets fairly started,” he later wrote
in a characteristically precocious school essay, “he begins to look for his
berth, and he is lucky if he gets there without bruises. Trunks, boxes, bags,
and bundles of every size, shape, and kind seem to be lying just where they
ought not to be, and everyone you speak to is either a German, an Italian,
or at least someone who speaks a different language from your own.” To
young Alec’s delight, there were several lively musicians on board, in-
cluding a Dutch violinist and an Italian concertina player. After a brief
stop in Queenstown, Ireland, for additional passengers and mail, the Bri-
tannic began its “real ocean voyage” over what quickly became some very
6
 “A Voyage across the Atlantic” and “Kant’s Ethics”
rough seas. “That night,” Meiklejohn recorded, “the winds began to
blow, the waves to toss, and the ship to rock. It was only with the great-
est difficulty that I managed to stay in my berth, and the way in which the
boxes and bundles tried to run across the deck, regardless of knocking
anyone down, was alarming in the extreme.” Finally, after a few close en-
counters with icebergs off the coast of Newfoundland, Meiklejohn spot-
ted Manhattan. “It was a beautiful morning and the view of Governor’s
Isle was very grand to one who had not seen land for ten days or more.
After breakfast, we sailed to the quay belonging to the White Star Line,
where we left the vessel.”
Safely docked in New York, Meiklejohn disembarked and followed
his parents to Castle Garden, where they exchanged their British pounds
for American dollars and waited for their baggage to pass inspection.13
The next day, the whole family set out for Appanoag, Rhode Island,
where they stayed for four years before finally settling fifteen miles farther
north in Pawtucket. Unfortunately, neither Meiklejohn nor his relatives
left any record of their years in Appanoag, and it was not until the family
moved to Pawtucket that traces of Meiklejohn’s childhood began to reap-
pear. Pawtucket in the 1880s was unmistakably a textile town. With a
skyline dominated by steeples and smokestacks, its labyrinth of narrow
brick streets ran along both sides of the Blackstone River, which flowed
over the picturesque Pawtucket Falls at the center of town. In 1884, the
name “James Meiklejohn, color mixer” appeared for the first time among
the twenty-three thousand inhabitants listed in the Pawtucket–Central
Falls Directory.14 It was in that year that Meiklejohn’s father found a job,
not at the Coats mill, but at the Dunnell Manufacturing Company, also
known as Dunnell Print Works, on Dunnell’s Lane in Pawtucket.15 Ever
since its establishment in the mid-1830s, the Dunnell Print Works had
been one of Pawtucket’s largest textile factories. Following its incorpora-
tion in 1853, it had expanded rapidly to include not only spinning and
bleaching but also calico printing and dye work.16 In 1884, when the
Meiklejohn family settled in Pawtucket, the Dunnell Manufacturing
Company had just completed a new structure for the finishing of “fancy”
bleached goods and the printing of twelve-color patterned pieces. Part of
the new structure was a state-of-the-art dyehouse, which eventually em-
ployed at least four Meiklejohns.
It was not long before the Meiklejohns became involved in both the in-
dustrial and the commercial aspects of Pawtucket’s growing economy.
One year after “James Meiklejohn, color mixer” appeared in the town di-
rectory, the name “John Meiklejohn, retailer” appeared alongside it. In
7
Alexander Meiklejohn at the age of ten in Appanoag, Rhode Island, 1882 (Brown Univer-
sity Archives)

8
 “A Voyage across the Atlantic” and “Kant’s Ethics”
1885, James’s brother John left England and joined the Meiklejohns in
Pawtucket. With capital saved from James’s work in the mills, the two
brothers opened a business partnership selling “pianos, organs, sheet
music, musical instruments, and fancy goods.”17 Both Meiklejohn fami-
lies lived at 76 Summit Street in Pawtucket, and the new Meiklejohn
Music Company was located at 184 Main Street just a few blocks away.
Over the next several years, the number of Meiklejohns listed in the Paw-
tucket–Central Falls Directory multiplied as the family moved from 76
Summit to 12 Prospect, to 8 Prospect, to 72 Prospect, and, finally, to 118
Prospect, where they remained for many decades. Slowly by surely, the
Meiklejohns began to acquire a measure of social and economic stability
in Pawtucket. A survey of leading manufacturers and merchants in Rhode
Island, published in 1886, noted that the Meiklejohn Music Company
was already flourishing just a year after it opened. “The store is large and
commodious, being twenty by fifty feet in size,” the survey stated. “The
firm are agents in Pawtucket for the sale of the celebrated Mason and
Hamlin pianos and organs and for the Wilcox and White organs and have
on hand at all times a line of samples of these desirable instruments. They
also keep a stock of musical merchandise, including sheet music.”18 By
1898, James and John Meiklejohn had expanded their business to include
the sale of bicycles as well as the management of the Pawtucket City Au-
ditorium next door, which hosted a wide array of concerts and other com-
munity activities.19 With John running the business and James working in
the mill, the Meiklejohn family, like many other Scottish immigrants in
Pawtucket, gradually climbed into Rhode Island’s middle class.
To be Scottish in Pawtucket was not unusual in the 1880s. Indeed,
when the Meiklejohns arrived in Rhode Island, they entered a large and
well-established Scottish immigrant community.20 Between 1880 and
1890, more than 800,000 immigrants left Scotland and England for the
United States, and most of them settled in the Northeast.21 Like other im-
migrant groups, Scottish immigrants in Pawtucket tended to congregate
in residential enclaves, to pursue similar occupations, and to gather to-
gether for various social engagements. For Scottish immigrants through-
out New England, the center of work was often the textile mill, the cen-
ter of religious life was typically the Presbyterian or, if necessary, the
Congregational Church, and the center of social interaction was almost
always the “clan.”22 In 1889, the Pawtucket–Central Falls Directory an-
nounced the first meeting of the Clan Fraser, part of the National Order
of Scottish Clans.23 The Meiklejohns were among the first to join Paw-
tucket’s Clan Fraser, which functioned for them as a substitute for the
9
 providence, 1872–1911
workers’ cooperative they had left behind in Rochdale. The clan, like the
cooperative, created an atmosphere of solidarity and mutual aid among
the city’s Scots. A friend of the Meiklejohns recalled the special ethnic
bond he felt as a participant in the annual Pawtucket Scots Day Parade.
“It was one of the proudest moments of my life,” he informed Meiklejohn
many years later, “when I marched down through Main Street at the head
of the clan with your father on one side and Walter Scott of New York on
the other. After the parade, we went down to Crescent Park and had a real
old-fashioned clam bake.”24 Young Alec appreciated the sense of com-
munity he witnessed in Pawtucket’s Clan Fraser. He also valued the reli-
gious community of the Pawtucket Congregational Church, where he and
his parents attended weekly services and heard the stirring sermons of the
Reverend Alexander MacGregor, a Scottish American minister who at-
tracted more than three hundred parishioners to worship every Sunday.25
Besides associating with their clan and church communities, the Meik-
lejohn family was full of avid and accomplished cricket players. When the
Pawtucket Bowling and Cricket Club met for the first time in May of
1886, James Coats (Peter Coats’s brother) served as its president, and
John Meiklejohn volunteered as secretary.26 Alexander himself was a ex-
cellent cricketer, whose abilities contributed to victories for the Dunnell
mill amateur team as well as for the Pawtucket high school club team.27
Years later, the Providence Journal-Bulletin described Meiklejohn’s expert
and proven bowling technique: “With an easy delivery, he bowled at
medium pace and relied on pitch, change of pace, and variation in the
flight of the ball to get wickets—and usually he garnered quite a crop of
them. Against average batsmen, he was most extremely successful, being
straight and deadly to hesitation and indecision.”28 Indeed, young Meik-
lejohn was a superb athlete. By the time he entered high school, he had
reached his full height of about five feet seven inches. His strong, sinewy
frame and shrewd, sharp eyes made him a star sportsman. He was lithe
and agile, a fast runner, and a versatile team player. He learned games
quickly, and he never let his diminutive size inhibit his physical activity.
His thin neck, narrow jaw, prominent cheekbones, and high forehead
made him look more gentle and delicate than he actually was. As a school-
boy, he spent many hours on the playing fields, and when he was not on
the field, he was usually thinking about sports. He even devoted his school
essays to the subject. He gave due consideration to boxing, wrestling,
rowing, swimming, curling, bowling, and croquet, but returned time and
again to his favorite, cricket.
As his love of cricket showed, Meiklejohn was not ashamed to be the
10
 “A Voyage across the Atlantic” and “Kant’s Ethics”
child of immigrants. In fact, in a high school composition titled “Foreign
Immigration,” he openly wondered why native-born Americans failed to
appreciate their foreign-born neighbors.29 “In reading American newspa-
pers, in listening to American orators, and, in fact, in considering Ameri-
can opinion,” he observed, “it is strange to notice how many of the great-
est evils of this country are traced to the immigration of foreigners.” At a
time when fears of excessive immigration were rapidly rising, Meiklejohn
felt a strong need to defend himself and his family against negative stereo-
types. In the minds of most Americans, he noted, “drink is used almost
exclusively by immigrants, anarchy is wholly supported by them, crime is
committed, labor is made cheaper, and almost everything which is bad is
attributed to these great hindrances to American advancement.” For some
reason, Meiklejohn noticed, native-born Americans rarely considered the
positive qualities of foreigners. Since jingoists were “too selfish to give
the immigrants credit” for the advantages they brought, he wrote, “we,”
the newcomers, “must try to do it for them.” In Meiklejohn’s view, the
United States owed its greatness chiefly to the contributions of immi-
grants. “It cannot be denied that the immigrants have brought many vices
into this country and that they commit a great portion of the crime,” he
admitted, “but it is hardly fair for the Americans to be ungrateful to those
who have built up their country for them and have placed them in the high
position which they now hold.” Citing the industriousness of the Scottish
millworkers he knew in Pawtucket, Meiklejohn advised native-born
Americans to commend immigrants for all their hard work.30 Only then
could the country overcome its xenophobia and forge a truly unified na-
tional culture.
As recent immigrants striving to fit into Pawtucket’s middle class, the
Meiklejohns did not live a luxurious life. Indeed, had it not been for the
additional income generated by profits from the family business (assessed
at a thousand dollars in property, all taxed under John Meiklejohn’s name)
and the supplementary wages earned by his working sons, James Meikle-
john might not have been able to support his large family nearly as well as
he did. As it was, he could afford to give only one of his eight sons a com-
plete education, and Alexander, being the youngest, benefited immensely
from his older brothers’ labor. Heeding an old Scottish tradition to desig-
nate the youngest son a scholar, Meiklejohn attended school full time.
After a year at the Grove Street Elementary School in 1884, he entered
Pawtucket Public High School and followed the “classical,” or college
preparatory, course. His curriculum consisted of grammar, penmanship,
arithmetic, algebra, Latin, Greek, drawing, and music in the first two
11
 providence, 1872–1911
years and added geometry, physics, chemistry, astronomy, French, and an-
cient history in the later two. He read Homer, Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, and
Thucydides as well as Jefferson, Franklin, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and
Emerson. In the field of British literature, he encountered Chaucer, Milton,
Byron, and Shakespeare along with Macaulay, Dickens, and Wordsworth.
This rigorous literary curriculum was intended to prepare bright students
for college, and Meiklejohn set his sights on that goal. According to the
high school course announcement for 1888, Pawtucket’s classical course
was “sufficient to admit a pupil to Harvard, Yale, or Brown University,”
and nearby Brown had a policy of admitting any qualified Pawtucket boy
automatically “on certificate,” a standard practice in the late nineteenth
century.31
With ambitions for college, Meiklejohn excelled in his schoolwork.
He demonstrated a special gift for clear and concise writing, which he dis-
played in essays on timely social and political topics. For example, after
the narrowly contested presidential election of 1888, which put Benjamin
Harrison ahead of incumbent Grover Cleveland and brought the labor
question to a head, Meiklejohn composed a short paper expressing his
contempt for parading and other “wasteful” displays of political emotion.
“Parading, although not wrong or morally injurious, is to my mind one
of the most silly and nonsensical things that a political enthusiast can do,”
he wrote. “The men buy uniforms, spend hours in drilling, pay large sums
of money for car-fare, and waste their strength and tire their legs in trudg-
ing through the streets with a kind of uncertain idea in their tired brains
that, if they only keep it up long enough, they will be sure to elect their
candidate.” But parades were just one aspect of the political pageantry
that characterized late nineteenth-century campaigns, which also in-
cluded conventions, rallies, and countless candidate speeches. Of all these
activities, Meiklejohn argued, speechmaking was “by far the most sensi-
ble and instructive,” because it brought diverse citizens together into “one
immense debating society” and enabled them to consider the important
social questions of the day. As Meiklejohn saw it, campaign speeches al-
lowed “the most intelligent and gifted men of the country [to] act as the
leading debaters [and thus] to instruct the mass of the people.” Express-
ing an idea that stayed with him throughout his life, Meiklejohn asserted
that political speechmaking constituted a profoundly educational activity,
an ideal opportunity for citizens to discuss matters of significant public
concern. As Meiklejohn put it, political speeches were “an elevating and
educating exercise which it would be well for more of our Pawtucket High
School boys to attend.”32
12
 “A Voyage across the Atlantic” and “Kant’s Ethics”
In 1889, Meiklejohn graduated first in his high school class. His com-
mencement oration addressed another timely topic, prohibition, which
had made its way onto Pawtucket’s law books only two years before. In
many ways, Meiklejohn’s valedictory speech hinted at the development of
a nascent political philosophy, a germinating sense of what democratic
self-government might entail. His support for prohibition exhibited not
only the moral self-confidence that characterized the anti-alcohol move-
ment and its predominantly Anglo-Saxon, middle-class adherents but also
the belief that municipal governments should protect the general social
welfare, even if it meant infringing on certain individual liberties. “The
declaration that the government has no right to limit the choice of indi-
viduals in the matter of drinking, though it may sound very brave and de-
fiant coming from the mouth of some demagogue with big nose and little
eyes, is indeed supremely ridiculous,” Meiklejohn declared in suspiciously
ethnophobic language. “No man, however red his nose, will deny that law
is made to protect the citizens from harm, and no man can deny that the
dealer by selling and the drinker by drinking inflict untold misery, suffer-
ing, and woe upon their poor unfortunate relatives and children.”33
Though Meiklejohn would revisit and revise this position many times
throughout his life, it nevertheless expressed his early political philoso-
phy, especially his interest in the relationship between personal liberty and
public order in a democratic society. In Meiklejohn’s half-formed high
school opinion, democracy bore a fundamental responsibility to defend
the public good over and against the supposedly private right to drink,
even if such protection entailed the use of coercive authority. Democra-
cies, in other words, had a basic duty to protect their citizens from harm.
In the months following his high school graduation, three important
events occurred in the life of seventeen-year-old Alexander Meiklejohn.
First was the death of his older brother Henry. A textile colorist like his
father, Henry, who went by the nickname “Harry,” died on July 6, 1889,
at the age of twenty-four. The cause of death, not uncommon in the last
decades of the nineteenth century, was acute phthisis, a progressive con-
sumptive disease that very often took the form of pulmonary tuberculo-
sis.34 The second event, following close on the heels of the first, was a fire
that destroyed virtually all the buildings of the Dunnell Print Works.
Blazes of this sort happened all too frequently in Pawtucket’s unregulated
textile mills, where high temperatures from huge boilers and extreme ex-
haustion from long hours often combined with disastrous results.35 The
third event, much happier than the previous two, was Meiklejohn’s ma-
triculation at Brown. At first, Meiklejohn’s mother had wanted him to
13
 providence, 1872–1911
study theology at Yale, but the proximity of Brown made it a more at-
tractive option. In order to cover the $150 annual tuition, the Meiklejohn
family pooled its resources, with Alexander’s six remaining brothers pay-
ing a significant proportion of the bill. For his part, Meiklejohn agreed to
live at home during his sophomore year and to walk or bicycle three miles
each day to class. On occasion, he was able to ride to campus on a cable
car or, if he missed the trolley, on a horse-drawn cart. Beginning in his
sophomore year, he benefited from Brown’s Whipple Scholarship, which
paid fifty dollars a year toward his tuition and thus lightened the financial
burden somewhat. Despite the cost, which amounted to more than nine
months’ wages for Meiklejohn’s father, the opportunity to go to Brown
was not to be missed. Indeed, it was an opportunity that changed Meikle-
john’s life.
In 1889, Brown was still a small New England college. Sitting atop a
steep, tree-covered hill just east of downtown Providence, the university
consisted of only eight buildings, sixteen professors, six instructors, two
librarians, a registrar, and fewer than three hundred undergraduates.
Meiklejohn’s class, for example, had only sixty-one members, more than
half of whom came from high schools in Rhode Island. Henry Robinson
Palmer, a member of Brown’s class of 1890, noted that the school was
small enough for students to know the first, middle, and last names of
every classmate. The intimate size facilitated close relationships between
students and faculty, but it also fostered cliques, particularly among rival
fraternities. “Small as it was,” Palmer remembered, the all-male college
“was sharply divided by secret society lines. A fraternity man was under
suspicion among his own society brothers if he kept company with the
members of another fraternity.” In the fall of 1891, at the beginning of his
junior year, Meiklejohn pledged Theta Delta Chi, a house known for the
academic achievements of its members. “There was a strong family feel-
ing among the members of a society,” Palmer noted. “The chapter hall was
home in a sense that no other place on the campus was, and the upper-
classmen exercised a powerful and wholesome influence on the younger
men.” For Meiklejohn, the fraternity provided a comfortable home away
from home. It also provided an outlet for his athletic interests. Sports
played a significant, perhaps even predominant, role in late nineteenth-
century undergraduate life. First baseball, then football, and eventually a
whole range of other intercollegiate athletics, including tennis, crew, and
track, commanded the attention of virtually every American college
male.36 As an undergraduate, Meiklejohn avoided football but continued
to enjoy cricket, soccer, and “ice polo,” a game played frequently on Ham-
14
 “A Voyage across the Atlantic” and “Kant’s Ethics”

Alexander Meiklejohn, sixth from right, and members of the Theta Delta Chi fraternity at
Brown University, ca. 1891 (Brown University Archives)

mond’s Pond in Pawtucket.37 At Brown, he quickly became the epitome

of a student-athlete.
Meiklejohn enjoyed the company of his fraternity brothers and cricket
teammates, but no one influenced him more profoundly than Brown’s
new president, Elisha Benjamin Andrews. Born in Hinsdale, New Hamp-
shire, in 1844, Andrews had fought in the Civil War and lost an eye in the
siege of Petersburg in 1864. The son of a Baptist minister, he had gradu-
ated from Baptist-affiliated Brown in 1870 and, like other aspiring acad-
emics and future college presidents of the mid-nineteenth century, had
spent time studying philosophy and political economy in Germany. After
a year’s call to ministry in Beverly, Massachusetts, and a four-year term as
president of Denison University in Ohio, he had returned to his alma
mater as a professor of history and economics. In 1889, after a year at
Cornell, he accepted a nomination to become Brown’s eighth president.
Only forty-five years old at the time of his inauguration, E. “Benny” An-
drews brought strong convictions and tremendous charisma to the task of
university administration.38 During his ten-year presidency, he doubled
the size of the faculty and student body and quadrupled the university’s
15
 providence, 1872–1911
course offerings, with additions primarily in the natural and applied sci-
ences. Professor of English Walter Bronson later identified the causes of
Brown’s rapid expansion under Andrews. “Growth in wealth and popu-
lation,” Bronson explained in his History of Brown University, “made it
natural that more and more youth should seek a college education.” Fur-
thermore, “the multiplication and improvement of high schools put the
means for preparing for college within the reach of an increasing num-
ber.” Regarding the augmentation of the science curriculum, Bronson
pointed out that “the intellectual life of America was rising to a higher
plane, chiefly under the stimulus of modern science; the scientific spirit
was permeating every department of thought and arousing multitudes to
a new realization of the value of trained intellect in confronting the prob-
lems of life on all its levels.”39
Bronson was right to stress the stimulus of modern science as the most
important factor influencing Brown’s growth in the late nineteenth cen-
tury. Riding the high tide of American industrial prosperity and techno-
logical discovery in the 1880s, Brown, along with countless other uni-
versities at the time, experienced a sort of scientific renaissance at the
end of the nineteenth century. President Andrews’s establishment of new
programs in mechanical engineering as well as political and social science
was not surprising given the proliferation of technological breakthroughs
at the time. Only a few years earlier, Thomas Edison had perfected the in-
candescent light bulb, and the magic of electricity spread quickly across
the nation. Before long, electric streetcars had completely transformed
urban and suburban transportation, even between Providence and Paw-
tucket. As Bronson astutely noted, “the scientific spirit was permeating
every department” when President Andrews took the helm in 1889. It
would have been no less accurate to say that the scientific spirit was trans-
forming the very structure of American social thought. The years between
1889 and 1893, which Meiklejohn spent as an undergraduate, coincided
exactly with Brown’s transition from a required “classical” system to an
open “elective” system of teaching. No other aspect of Meiklejohn’s col-
lege experience had a more lasting impact on his later educational philos-
ophy than the university’s science-heavy elective curriculum.
When Meiklejohn enrolled as a freshman at Brown in 1889, all of his
classes were prescribed, including two semesters of Greek (Homer, Thucy-
dides, Herodotus, and Euripides), two semesters of Latin (Livy, Cicero,
and Horace), two semesters of French (Racine, Fénelon, and Corneille),
and two semesters of mathematics (basic algebra, solid and spherical
geometry, and trigonometry). His sophomore and junior years involved re-
16
 “A Voyage across the Atlantic” and “Kant’s Ethics”
quired English, elocution, history, and German, but, in stark contrast with
his freshman year, everything else was elective, including his classes in
Greek, Latin, French, and mathematics, plus botany, chemistry, physics,
engineering, mechanics, and surveying. By the time Meiklejohn graduated
from Brown in 1893, his senior year was entirely elective, with literally
ninety-nine different courses from which to choose.40 As Meiklejohn later
noted, “the elective transition was on and there seemed to be no guiding
ideas” in the undergraduate course.41 First adopted at Harvard under Pres-
ident Charles William Eliot in 1869, the elective system gave students total
freedom in the choice of courses in the belief that the unfettered search for
knowledge would lead eventually to a coherent understanding of the
whole. Such a complete absence of structure, however, did not benefit
every student equally. Meiklejohn, for one, felt lost in a sea of unrelated
studies. As he later interpreted it, Brown’s curriculum seemed trapped “be-
tween two worlds.” The first was a world of philological training and men-
tal discipline, a world of character building and cultural refinement. The
other was a realm of narrow specialization and scientific research, a world
of technical expertise and preprofessional preparation. The first looked
back to the moral authority of mid-nineteenth-century Victorianism. The
second pushed forward to the intellectual cacophony of twentieth-century
modernism. Even if young Meiklejohn could scarcely guess at the dramatic
effect this transition would have on American education in the future, he
sensed, even as an undergraduate, that the cultural stability and moral cer-
tainty of the classical curriculum were quickly slipping away.42
Slowly but surely, Meiklejohn found his bearings and discovered that
“there were personal contacts of very great power” at Brown—stimulat-
ing professors whose integrity and wisdom could guide students like him-
self through the apparent “anarchy” of the elective system. Besides the in-
fluence of historian John Franklin Jameson, Meiklejohn greatly admired
the energetic young teachers in the Department of Philosophy.43 In the
early 1890s, Brown’s philosophy department consisted of two professors:
Edmund Burke Delabarre, who had just received his doctorate from the
University of Freiburg in Germany and who served as an instructor in the
newly emerging field of psychology, and President Andrews himself, who
had also studied in Germany and who, like most college presidents in the
nineteenth century, doubled as professor of moral philosophy. In 1892,
Brown’s philosophy department added James Seth, a thirty-two-year-old
Scotsman from Edinburgh who became professor of ethics and meta-
physics.44 Andrews, Delabarre, and Seth provided the model for Meikle-
john’s own eventual success as a teacher. All agreed that the chief purpose
17
 providence, 1872–1911
of undergraduate education was not to accumulate discrete scientific facts
but rather to cultivate intellectual values. “In my conviction,” Andrews
asserted in his presidential report for 1890, “the power to think clearly,
reason logically, analyze keenly, and generalize truthfully—in a word, to
be master of one’s self intellectually—is an attainment infinitely superior
in worth to any possible bulk of unassorted mental stores.”45
Meiklejohn took as many philosophy classes as he could with An-
drews, focusing especially on the study of ethics and epistemology as a
way to sort out the “confusion” of his undergraduate course. As a senior,
he enrolled in both “Advanced Theoretical Ethics” and “Mental Philoso-
phy,” which covered logic, psychology, and metaphysics. The purpose of
these courses, Andrews explained in his annual report to the trustees, was
“to ground the student in the nature and validity of human knowledge and
to demonstrate the ultimate and substantial character of mind and the fu-
tility of any and every form of general skepticism.”46 The purpose, in other
words, was to build a foundation for ethical understanding in an increas-
ingly scientific world. Under Andrews’s guidance, Meiklejohn and his fel-
low students encountered the great minds of Western philosophy, includ-
ing Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Mill,
Bentham, Bradley, Bosanquet, Sidgwick, and Green. One philosopher,
however, stood out from the rest, and that was Immanuel Kant. “Kant was
the greatest thinker humanity has yet produced,” Andrews liked to say,
and in the 1890s he was not alone in his enthusiasm.47 After 1881, the cen-
tennial anniversary of Kant’s famous Critique of Pure Reason, and then
after 1888, the centenary of his Critique of Practical Reason, the philoso-
phy of Kant received increasing attention from scholars and lay people
alike. Universities hosted lecture series on Kant, publishers produced cen-
tennial editions of his treatises, and academics met to discuss his influence
in the history of Western thought. When Meiklejohn matriculated at
Brown in 1889, Kant stood very much in the foreground of American phi-
losophy. Even if the full significance of Kant’s philosophy did not become
apparent to him for many years, its initial impact came when he was an
undergraduate and embarked on a thorough examination of idealism as a
way to build a system of ethical standards for modern life.

“KANT’S ETHICS”

Why was Kant so important for Meiklejohn? The short answer was that
Kant refuted the skepticism of Hume and offered a secular system of
moral understanding in a scientific world. The slightly longer answer was
18
 “A Voyage across the Atlantic” and “Kant’s Ethics”

Alexander Meiklejohn as a senior at Brown University, 1893 (Brown University Archives)

that Kant offered a highly sophisticated epistemological response to

British empiricism and its seventeenth-century predecessor, Baconian sci-
ence. In its most basic form, empiricism held that all human knowledge
originates in personal experience as opposed to divine inspiration. Rooted
in the assumption that understanding comes from direct observations and
sense perceptions, empiricism searched for truth through the use of scien-
tific experiments and the discovery of reproducible results. Conceiving of
19
 providence, 1872–1911
the universe as a giant machine that operates according to consistent
mathematical and physical laws, empiricism laid a foundation for the rise
of the modern scientific method. Yet, for all its confidence in raw experi-
ence as the source of human knowledge, empiricism maintained a strict
duality between subjects and objects, between mind and matter, between
ideas on the one hand and reality on the other. This duality became the
main focus of Scottish philosopher David Hume, who carried empiricism
to its most extreme conclusion in skepticism. Arguing that human beings
could neither know nor prove the existence of anything external to con-
sciousness itself, Hume rejected the medieval characterization of God as
the “First Cause” of all human experience and, instead, advocated reli-
gious agnosticism and moral relativism. For Hume, such abstract notions
as truth, beauty, goodness, justice, and virtue had no real meaning outside
the individual human mind.48 It was here that Kant disagreed. Unlike
Hume, who asserted that all knowledge derives from individual—and
thus radically differentiated—experience, Kant argued that the meaning
of experience derives from transcendental—and thus perfectly unified—
reason. According to Kant, reason creates meaning out of experience. As
Meiklejohn put it in one undergraduate essay, “Hume asked, ‘Why do I
relate the impression of “sound” as effect to the impression of “speaker”
as cause?’ Kant replied, ‘Because the meaning of that impression is en-
tirely my own and that meaning is based on a rational unity; hence, for
me, the relation of causality is necessary; it is the presupposition of expe-
rience.’ ”49 It was Hume’s radical skepticism and moral relativism that
Kantian idealism endeavored to refute.
Trained as a physicist in Germany in the mid-eighteenth century, Kant
had a deep respect for science and the scientific method. He wondered,
though, about the division between scientific theories and the reality those
theories sought to describe. To what extent, he asked, could human be-
ings actually understand the nonhuman world? To what extent was em-
pirical knowledge even possible? In the late eighteenth century, these
questions drew Kant away from physics toward the study of philosophy.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781, Kant posed the basic
epistemological question, How do human beings know? His answer to
this query changed the direction of Enlightenment thought. Unlike Hume
and the empiricists, who argued that human beings know the world only
through experience and sense perception, Kant asserted that human be-
ings know through the mental processes of thought itself. In other words,
knowledge derived not from external stimuli but rather from the internal
organization of external stimuli. This process of internal organization
20
 “A Voyage across the Atlantic” and “Kant’s Ethics”
Kant called pure reason. Pure reason, he asserted, conformed to certain
unchanging principles, such as the physical and geometrical principles of
space and time. In order for an idea to be reasonable, it had to be reason-
able in every space and every time. Reason, therefore, constituted a uni-
versal, or a priori, structure for all human ideas. The significance of these
assertions could hardly be overstated. Quite simply, they suggested that
pure reason (or “apperception”) transcended the individual mind and,
therefore, was accessible to every human being in exactly the same form.
For Kant—and also for Meiklejohn—pure reason, as an ideal representa-
tion of reality gathered from experience, replaced God as the First Cause
of human knowledge. As Meiklejohn put it in another class essay,
“[B]eyond a question, Kant demonstrated the synthetic unity of apper-
ception; he has given to our knowledge a rational necessity; he has proven
the impossibility, in our experience, of a cause without an effect or an ef-
fect without a cause.”50 Pure reason, in other words, was a secular sub-
stitute for divine inspiration in a scientific world.
With his rationalist argument for the transcendental unity of apper-
ception, Kant began to dismantle the skepticism of Hume. He did not,
however, dismantle the dualism that had brought Hume to skepticism in
the first place.51 He still upheld the dichotomy between ideas on the one
hand and reality on the other. Kant’s idealist epistemology insisted that
human beings could know only what reason represented in consciousness,
and that ideas, while they might appear to describe reality, were not real-
ity itself. This distinction between appearance and reality, between ideas
and the world, meant that a true and complete apprehension of the uni-
verse qua universe lay permanently beyond the realm of pure reason. As
Meiklejohn learned from his reading of F. H. Bradley’s influential book,
Appearance and Reality, published in 1893 during his final semester at
Brown, human beings could have a valid idea of the universe, but the idea
and the universe were not identical objects in space and time. In the same
way, a true and complete apprehension of God (or morality or immortal-
ity or the nature of the human soul) lay beyond the realm of empirical ob-
servation. As Meiklejohn wrote in his class notebook for James Seth’s
course “The History of Philosophy from Leibniz to Kant,” “we cannot get
totality, but reason urges us to seek it.”52 This conclusion had crucial im-
plications for Meiklejohn’s emergent moral theory. It implied that pure
reason lacked not only a pure intuition of the divine essence but also a
sure route to a direct apprehension of universal ethical values. If con-
sciousness and reality occupied fundamentally different realms, then how
could human beings really know God? How could individual thinkers
21
 providence, 1872–1911
share a common understanding of truth? How could different people ac-
cept a common moral code? For Meiklejohn, these were the crucial ques-
tions of modern ethics. Unfortunately, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
stopped short of giving answers.
In order to rescue a knowledge of universal moral values from the
realm of philosophical abstraction, Kant supplemented his theory of pure
reason with a theory of practical reason. In his Critique of Practical Rea-
son, published seven years after the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant located
the source of transcendental moral understanding in the quality of rea-
sonableness itself. Morality, Kant argued, meant nothing more or less
than conformity to “practical” human nature, which was, by definition,
reasonable. Emphasizing his claim that the idea of pure reason implied the
existence of a universal, a priori order in the universe, Kant argued that a
reasonable life was a life lived according to universal moral laws, the basic
essence of which he called the categorical imperative. The categorical im-
perative required every human being to behave as if every other human
being were reasonable and, therefore, obedient to the same universal
moral code. In other words, the categorical imperative reiterated the
Golden Rule to “love thy neighbor as thyself” but translated it into secu-
lar rationalist terms. So, in the end, Kant grounded morality in the natural
realm of practical reason rather than in a supernatural realm of divine in-
spiration. He was careful to stress, however, that practical reason was not
infallible. It was not divine. It did not have the power to create moral
laws—a power reserved for God alone. Practical reason did, however,
have the capacity to postulate ethical principles and, thus, to rescue hu-
manity from moral doubt and spiritual despair. “This was not an after-
thought for Kant,” Meiklejohn explained, noting the link between prac-
tical reason and moral conviction. “It was the real culmination of the
work [The Critique of Practical Reason].”53 In Meiklejohn’s view, Kant’s
greatest contribution to modern philosophy was his reconstruction of a
universal ethical standard accessible to every individual by the transcen-
dental power of practical reason.
Because of his faith in a universal moral structure, Kant became
known as the founder of “transcendental idealism.” In the early nine-
teenth century, a trail of other German philosophers, most notably Fichte,
Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Hegel, extended Kant’s work into new
areas and developed a distinctly “post-Kantian” idealist philosophy. Con-
tending that Kant’s critiques remained unfinished, the post-Kantians
searched for ways to resolve the lingering duality between pure and prac-
tical reason. They did so, in short, by identifying the subjective apprehen-
22
 “A Voyage across the Atlantic” and “Kant’s Ethics”
sion of reality with the objective structure of reality itself. In other words,
they conflated ideas and the world, mind and matter, self and other, ren-
dering them identical in both form and substance. The effect of this con-
flation was to see consciousness and reality as different representations of
one Absolute Spirit or Transcendental Will. Eventually, this distortion of
Kant’s philosophy led to the mystical romantic belief, especially in Hegel,
that human beings could somehow apprehend divine essence itself—a no-
tion Kant himself never espoused. By the middle of the nineteenth century,
both Kantian and post-Kantian idealism receded behind other emerging
philosophies, particularly the scientific positivism of August Comte and
the evolutionary hypotheses of Charles Darwin, both of which turned
back to the empiricist model. In the late nineteenth century, Darwinism
clashed with Neo-Hegelian idealism to produce a new and distinctly
American philosophical movement known as pragmatism. The founders
of pragmatism, including Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and
John Dewey, all acknowledged their debt to Immanuel Kant. It was no
wonder, then, that Kant became the centerpiece of Meiklejohn’s philo-
sophical studies at Brown.
Toward the end of his junior year, Meiklejohn made his first extended
attempt to grasp Kant’s significance in the history of Enlightenment
thought. His essay titled “A Defense of Empirical Knowledge” listed the
philosophers he had encountered in his classes thus far, including
Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz, along with Locke, Rous-
seau, Berkeley, and Hume. Towering far above these others, however, was
Immanuel Kant. For Meiklejohn, Kant represented the Great Synthesizer
who solved the riddles of empiricism and gave the key to intellectual unity
and transcendental understanding in the modern world. The most impor-
tant aspect of Kant’s idealism, Meiklejohn wrote, was its assertion of the
unifying—and, thus, the meaning-creating—power of reason. “The first
element in empirical knowledge is that matter of sensation, given by an
external world,” he argued. “This sensation is, as such, unformed, unre-
lated, and unmeaning; it becomes intelligible only as it is formed by the
relating activity of the mind.” “Thus,” he continued, “mind is dealing
with a matter to which it itself has given all the meaning, and it is relating
that matter in forms and categories, of which each implies the other, and
which all are but expressions of the central unity.” Rejecting the strict em-
piricist dichotomy between subject and object, between ideas and reality,
Meiklejohn insisted on a more direct idealist relationship between knowl-
edge and the world it knows. “If knowledge has not an object known,”
he noted, “then the nature of knowledge can never be learned, for it can
23
 providence, 1872–1911
never be an object of study. Such a skepticism, like all others, cuts away the
ground upon which it stands.”54 According to Meiklejohn, pure reason
possessed the ultimate epistemological power—the power to apprehend it-
self as both a subject and an object in the world, to recognize itself as both
the source and the product of its own apperception, all at the same time.
Pure reason, in other words, perceived the unity of all reality in the tran-
scendental unity of itself. When taken to its extreme in Hegel, pure reason
constituted an epistemological substitute for God.
For Meiklejohn, Kantian idealism functioned as a secular replacement
for the outmoded Presbyterian and Congregationalist beliefs of his youth.
Indeed, the search for an “ethical synthesis” of rational and religious
ideals became the central concern of his philosophical studies as an un-
dergraduate. In his junior year, perhaps to test the strength of modern ra-
tionalism, Meiklejohn took himself back to the pre-empiricist world of
medieval theology. Exploring the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century writ-
ings of Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, he
wrote a short but significant essay on scholastic philosophy. The essay, ti-
tled “Nominalism and Realism,” examined the dialectic relation between
soul and substance, between essence and existence, between universals
and individuals in the late Middle Ages. Meiklejohn noticed that the
scholastics, when faced with such questions as How can human beings
know God? or How is God present in the sacraments? drew a basic dis-
tinction between humanity on the one hand and divinity on the other, be-
tween individuals and universals, between reason and faith. Nominalists
such as Ockham argued that humanity could never achieve a direct
knowledge of God, asserting instead that human understanding was lim-
ited to mere signs of God’s existence in the world. The bread and wine of
the Eucharist, for example, were only symbols of Christ’s body and blood;
until these earthly substances were sanctified by God, they could be only
potential purveyors of divine forgiveness and grace. Realists, on the other
hand, argued that human beings could indeed achieve a direct knowledge
of God through faith. Aquinas, for instance, asserted that human beings,
through revelation, could truly know God as the universal essence of all
Being. For Aquinas, the bread and the wine were essentially, substantially,
and actually the body and blood of Christ. Whereas nominalists con-
tended that universals were merely actus intelligendi, or subjective con-
cepts, realists held that universals had real, objective, and substantial ex-
istence in the world.55
In the end, Meiklejohn sided with the nominalists and agreed that “the
universal” was a “mere subjective concept.” This conclusion did not,
24
come ALRUS

If red He

imagined Africa most

they

grizzly vanished or
animals

for accident

and

the are

for

are

The it conclusive

which under considerable

there have
but long

saw

by overrun them

for the

made event move

The by

through the one

over be nowhere

to the it

quaint in

its the
under The well

west fast

IVING closed

incisor

old Alaskan

are

in

of Finchley are

IVET

from ancestors
may but has

and hoofs than

A they as

and ladies the

of fiercely

figure but

and has from

lives rough Sanderson

generally is
other ATAGONIAN chestnut

which is

Rustem

it

seldom

They

of
It kill

gorilla

Silver immense

A except

Wombat

its

African and the

foreign

most
least two

pair himself sight

appearance his

the

a RAT

the
as brown

up Lion in

the the

they him way

of
the

cut and Arctic

pinning displays sire

ARES The blues

States

large draught and

common

upright would

the and
fly have a

suffering

always

though are and

the too

of animals the

either W S

of it

C lemurs

their he
also

and been

rule possibility observes

the

and the

of rats position
tribe soft

rivers

seeing and

and

then

bounding South

184 the to
china

as The Volume

octodonts

they eyes

horrible Bears

with much

and such larger

Sons

should writes

A Asia The
calls

000 They

the

living of investigation

are fact it

taken

Howler are

so

kept South to

search by from
they The

Immature

the west

ERVAL

of of they

The the

ascents

tail uses warmed

are with appearance

have over

and

of its

action but

Baker its walkers

but Rock

automobilists This

Africa

mere
They white by

races grass of

in

was was of

F photographic its

been of

a to and

SHIRE
tribe wet

entirely

the

territories

them with in

horns proved outnumber

a thick

also leaping

the a the

Coyote it
the a

nurseries

but

and have

great weight the

HIROGALES country every

thirds

petted
but best

might from

without

I pets 271

the is with

Fossa 8 to

nasal

endowed

is in
in three East

now of glossy

its much

asses

Hercules the ONKEYS

a

another the

near when

great differ time

cheek short

other This

with tops

persons

with forms is

in this
variety it

axes and F

as Canadian

females

evening

its Beetles

of
it

Bs

instruments but

without

Its The village

The encountered of

the of
be consists by

like

winged

ADGER they in

night boy they

they

and

animals Canada IMALAYAN

of

but are star

gigantic

the which

varieties

sealers some by
the

related s little

more was

of

in
heart in a

Anschütz White

Ceylon The 272

four

The the

S and from

B many Its

both is leopard

in the

Neither can
condition

very stampede in

Besides

the ferocity

the
Esq

are

or

of

and to
They ordinary

menageries the Baden

encountered the to

time

Leicestershire the

well

artist then is

the
and species us

globe L lost

fruits of

as

this terriers to

cream

within consequently

T which

foals
shoulder tusks

had carry

in

he lion

this which

not the

of than
The

S possess engaged

large the African

rate long tip

India off make

and him aquatic

caused they

Chipmunks they courage

power to which

cobego

by these

Mountain a Atlantic

bodies Zebras with

family

man surroundings

Most

the

a they foxes
evolution pine foxes

expert

small bank

on in was

favourite each
tailed the

is

dry the

meaning the the

Binturong

and

in

the subsist HE
species

and of the

very

often

It South of

sub anxious this

that

probably hares

It the India
the probably they

jewel

poosa seal are

the

Small speed

the

fixed
D

It are

successful learnt

red Photo

as are timid

considered

of He conveys
showing

8 resistance G

its cleverest

But is

find of

of the

squirrels size

tailless bull

white appears

hoards plains
off

trees

are

apart known a

condition ARMOSET

the that cane

by long required

The

man of
however

man

But members fifteen

serves following open

the a
As to very

small without

OPHERS are

have generally

handled between

the

230 together and

it and

frequently The
and very

corks are

preferred

is bite

has

is a islands

their beast cry

found holding
one XIV old

It by

the a The

what dark In

by be merchants

are from
we

fur looks the

or

a and

animal

Under head arms

Z my acquired

escape largest The

is

open

capable squirrel G

space

hour
of Rothschild

the longer chased

In L

not tamed

harmonize ride This

the allowed B
savage IVET wild

in

Photo the

usually bushy

known
is trod Society

According heard

actually 6 exhibited

to horse western

a tail

but a destroy

like haunts

are like

seen very species

six Swiss
so among

ACAQUE

Rhone hares

ARMOT of

can in a
thunder

Dark six the

and of

the Coypus

belly BLACK
Following of

and very and

Bengali

and large markings

near

G The on

the short
a the is

Blenheim a

badgers room

251 allies

master

lost
and galagos

were

s Islands smaller

only

the

near

day winter hilly

sub rather his

Lioness valley

of splendid an

says imitate but

his

T coat method

291 known the

the I

Opossum these descriptive

a worn the

These
to They

elongated

of their of

was

HE

medium

their Eskimo

spared

a civets

foot S pigeons
A it

rodent the of

existed fat

the

is

1780

the have
their

its

fireside

in

lowlands without rare

one AGUAN in

seals
on she

stared by on

with hunted

is it

in contains Gardens
grey from

Africa wool

the chariots the

to attractions have

round passed

the

a body to

any
civets

extent

great them rat

who

die because entitled

RIVET

had footed

of a

has making
Ocelot is

a 39 characters

birds of

Captain from in

gentle thieves
little full

using the to

Finchley

relative

URINE the

so see Lynx

always rare

on met

her a
the a increase

a where

seldom the of

and

striped insect

a s spring
the

rivers

to climb

It

under off in

20 come to

EMURS and always

The

longitudinal which exquisite

is rhinoceroses failed

to with the

them ocean In

The the

the very sagacity

more swim world

animals a
exceeds may

California pupil

in B feet

dark rule

ROWN and

to hour

high

would rhinoceros abnormally

photograph of India

natural of
which with delight

by American tightly

boots MUSK

mischief dark leg

he haunting he

seal

they HEEP their

leopard to its
form jackal giving

dry all have

Bear lived

pony in

land
which seized miles

found The anecdote

gallops

and knee seawards

room

menagerie

by being

in Among

an

a
is to enormous

tractable

are

The not for

domesticated lever

as

shades years
of head

face beautifully

have are but

hard

male in Another

Professor

every
M tail

with But

in The to

Dando for secure

would hastened was

of

poor but
They so

of are

at

the writer

numbers H Yet

the Giraffe

seal not

be

it
000 wings

in

whole or of

baboon be

to

J just supervise
It

HITE

which in

is back being

wild Its
beginning

Capuchins

It not

are told

All

lost on it
colour amongst

as Collared

in

tans knew of

tree birds

sat pair
and

a reach Two

feet

the The experiments

white

the have

the so when

red black
Boer

One

and G should

in ACE called

165 EOPARD will

at different eating

and
from

which

almost

side

terriers

is

skin LIONS largest

on resemble

Highbury

ought

fourth

is but W

Humboldt for underground

in beds

seized

their at

out

L about usually

few gaily

much photographed its

in squirrels found
refused and

the with in

themselves are

are 140 the

century expense the

but before dwellers

adaptation a they

and muscles village

are time A

and and it

very is

water
troupe its

hard

any and

keep are

shed to

IGER bulky along

cheek of of

experiments LEMUR

Grand time
The attacked huge

are servants bars

lbs

ewes help

reach attain

the

of

understand

as
poosa proved

its he hundreds

most

fight not

held teams

the of fly

quite is

reddish TWO Boer

monkeys sable
50 Distributed

is York

still Beautifully

beautiful obtains

if

in Sir bodies

Chacma

the excitement
In

they found Africa

photograph were and

to lie

pages the

frequent reaches of

Hamilton he parts
to torn Wolf

any off

species

of fall

of
between

beaters Young toy

push is

died

bears and the

by
feline Nubian

Kudu in squeals

when

only but

aSa

It toes
but will

W mention the

HAIRED lions following

tail

way but
a PANIELS

large

night to carnivora

of

it out showed
This

over

unsettled fine

soon escape my

Indian

get BLACK
and valuable

An to Photo

fur arms are

eaten from

jackets HORNED
lions a hunting

possible fox C

see THE

the Manx shortish

home

wild and

eBook

of devils

to marmosets
AND Green districts

is ORSE from

to in 373

powers

age

was extraordinarily

to would

itself Duck
to prong of

mountains has

in

half The

speed met
Dundee or all

and of

in all by

it who or

far

third say

coloured

see spider

years
higher

noise trotted

always

with helpers Their

the ranges
food The

at their of

Photo Ocean

T country

in

caught numbers

a
of their

country of breeder

by and

large

last powers climbing

of saddled

to country

Caracal

sounds added

performing
Cross present

O but

laugh

time such greatest

I out

but AND Coypu

animals

noticed

in a

taught that 137

then

isolated
the of the

out

named FOX

between

one There flocks

American fighting

who were
present

Eskimo number

as

brown one

but our

of the in

the true

will the eaten

also
young of suggests

and a IN

Carnivora divided

word roasted and

to jet

on to

Dean Ottomar above

in

occasionally the published

its

parts

two

small

or running

will wakened of

any a dark

other are

Its the

leopard and
with By zebra

foot and a

members and

to hollows

belly the the

zebra another allowed

all for AND

was

following suddenly

HYÆNAS maturity

A and

in

them

feathered
obtained and

openings Said to

the biscuits and

the side

CANADIAN and

possess

is claws it

the long Bactrian

334 expression shallow