The Metaphysic of Experience

Shadworth Hollway Hodgson (1832-1912) was considered one of the most distinguished and original English philosophers of the Victorian era. Working outside of the universities he is perhaps today best known as co-founder and first President of the Aristotelian Society. During his 14 years as the Society's President (1880-93) he read many papers which were published in the proceedings, and it is in his role there that he exerted most influence on other philosophers. Before this mid-life period Hodgson had written three books, "Time and Space" (1865), "The Theory of Practice", 2 vols (1870) and "The Philosophy of Reflection", 2 vols (1878). Hodgson's early interest in philosophy was inspired by the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. However, it was J.F. Ferrier's work "Institutes of Metaphysic" that gave him the starting point for his own philosophical writings. With Kantian tendencies throughout his life, and philosophical methods based on Berkeley, Locke and Hume, Hodgson attacked the emptiness and the vagueness of the philosophy of the associations and the Germanizing idealists.
It was his time meeting his intellectual peers at the Aristotelian Society that made him wish to reconsider and reformulate his earlier published ideas. The outcome of this was the publication in 1898 of his major work, "The Metaphysic of Experience". This exposition of his philosophy is divided into four distinct books entitled "General Analysis of Experience", "Positive Science", "Analysis of Conscious Action" and "The Real Universe". It is an attempt to work out a complete metaphysic by a detailed analysis of experience. His psychological analysis was particularly modern, and his views on consciousness gave rise to the term epiphenomenalism with even William James acknowledging Hodgson's original ideas. With the powerful ascent of Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore and the British school of analytical philosophy, Hodgson's work was unfairly marginalized. His philosophy compares with the later phenomenological reduction of Edmund Husserl, and it is in relation to both the British Idealist school and to the Continental school of phenomenology, as well as to 19th-century psychology, that Hodgson's reputation and metaphysical ideas should now be reassessed.