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ABSTRACT
In this paper, I reconstruct the views on historical progress of two nineteenth-century English-speaking philosophical women, Harriet Martineau (1802–76) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904). Martineau and Cobbe put forward theories of progress which I classify as versions of teleological progressivism. Their theories are bound up with their accounts of different world civilizations and religions, and their advancement towards either Christianity, for Cobbe, or through and beyond Christianity towards secularization, for Martineau. After explaining the overall nature of teleological progressivism in the Victorian era and locating Cobbe and Martineau within this intellectual context (Section 1), I turn to the details of Martineau’s version of teleological progressivism (Section 2), then Cobbe’s initial version (Section 3) followed by her second, revised version (Section 4). I then draw out some conclusions about the shared structure of Martineau’s and Cobbe’s forms of teleological progressivism and its complicated connections with Eurocentrism and colonialism (Section 5).
Acknowledgements
My thanks to the referees for their extremely helpful, careful, and constructive comments on earlier versions.
Notes
1 See Meyers, “Martineau’s Autobiography”. Pace Odile Boucher-Rivalain, who denies that Martineau ever identified as a philosopher (“Harriet Martineau”, 25), Martineau’s Autobiography abounds with references to her philosophy and self-descriptions as a philosopher (e.g. Autobiography, 1: 103–111, 158, 426).
2 On the autobiography’s positivist structure, see Petersen, Autobiography, Chapter 5.
3 Martineau, letter to Monckton Milnes, 22 February 1845, quoted in Roberts, Woman and the Hour, 149.
4 See Gange, Dialogues with the Dead, 110; Roberts, Woman and the Hour, Chapter 6.
5 Pace John Barrell, “Death on the Nile”, who claims (1) that Martineau regarded the Nubians as black and (2) that she was consequently troubled about black people having originated Western culture. Even if (1) is true, which I doubt, (2) Martineau was happy to recognize black people as having culture-originating genius; she wrote a fictionalized biography of the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint L’Ouverture to bring “into full notice the intellectual and moral genius of as black a negro as was ever seen” (Autobiography 2: 160).
6 Indeed, Eastern Life became the best-known Higher-Critical work in English up to that point. See Roberts, Woman and the Hour, 155–156.
7 A significant qualification concerns Islam, the subject of Part 4 of Eastern Life. Like other European progressivists, Martineau wants to avoid what would seem the natural conclusion that Islam makes yet another purifying effort and is the most advanced religion yet. Her solution is to say that Islam reduced the moral law to empirical precepts, in order to adapt it to the passionate ‘Oriental’ character. Hence Islam is supposedly a step backwards compared with Christianity’s orientation towards rational principles.
8 Newspaper clipping about Cobbe, c. 1870, from the Welsh Portrait Collection at the National Library of Wales.
9 Her other relevant essays are “Sacred Books of the Zoroastrians” (1865), “The Brahmo Samaj” (1866), “Max Müller’s Chips” (1868), and “Ancient and Medieval India” (1870). Over these essays Cobbe worked out the picture of religious progression summed up in “Evolution of Morals and Religion”, subsequently modified to yield her position in “Evolution of the Social Sentiment” of 1874.
10 Cobbe’s concept of animism was informed by Tylor’s Citation1871 work Primitive Culture.
11 Cobbe’s view of sympathy was not directly influenced by Eliot’s; rather, both were operating in an intellectual field where the notion of sympathy figured prominently (see Lanzoni, “Sympathy in ‘Mind’”).
12 One might wonder whether this was because the word empathy was not yet available. But others such as Eliot had the concept of empathy if not the word; in “Natural History of German Life” Eliot stresses that great literature can bring us to apprehend imaginatively how others feel.
13 See, on Martineau and empire: Dzelzainis and Caplan, Harriet Martineau, Logan, Harriet Martineau, Victorian Imperialism, especially 9, 12, and Logan, Harriet Martineau’s Writings; on Cobbe and empire: Hamilton, “Making History”, Peacock, Theological and Ethical Writings, Chapter 3, and Suess, “Colonial Bodies”.