Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Hodgson, Shadworth Hollway
HODGSON, SHADWORTH HOLLWAY (1832–1912), philosopher, was born at Boston, Lincolnshire, 25 December 1832, the eldest son of Shadworth Hodgson, of Boston, by his wife, Anne, daughter of John Palmer Hollway, also of Boston. He was educated at Rugby and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He graduated in 1854, after taking a first class in classical moderations, and a second class in literae humaniores. In 1855 he married Ann, daughter of the Rev. Edward Browne Everard, rector of Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk. The death of his wife and only child in 1858 led to his applying himself with rare devotion to philosophy. He acquired a most unusual knowledge of philosophical literature, and collected a fine library. His chief works are Time and Space: a Metaphysical Essay (1865), The Theory of Practice (1870), The Philosophy of Reflection (1878), and The Metaphysic of Experience (1898), the last of which contains a full exposition of his philosophy. He was the first president (1880–1894) and the leading spirit of the Aristotelian Society; its Proceedings contain fourteen presidential addresses and many other papers by him. He was elected an honorary fellow of his college in 1882, and fellow of the British Academy in 1901. He died in London 13 June 1912.
Hodgson thought of himself as continuing the work of Hume and also that of Kant, but as improving on both by discarding their respective assumptions. Both those thinkers start by assuming the distinction of subject and object, a distinction not immediately experienced but presupposing much naïve reflection. Empiricism assumes experience to be produced by the action of bodies; transcendentalism assumes it to be modified by a synthetic activity of the subject; but philosophy, Hodgson held, should not assume the activity either of subjects or of objects. What is found directly in experience is not the distinction of subject and object but that of consciousness and content: i.e. of ‘thatness’, the fact that consciousness occurs, and ‘whatness’, the particular nature of the consciousness. As consciousness moves towards the future, it distinguishes its past ‘whatnesses’ from its present ‘whatness’, and objectifies them. While we must not start with the distinction of mind and matter, the analysis of consciousness reveals features which show this distinction to be necessary. Hodgson's system is thus ultimately dualistic. It is a bold and able attempt to work out a complete metaphysic by a thoroughgoing analysis of experience. His precise point of view was, however, one which other philosophers found it difficult to share, and he founded no school; the main value of his work probably resides in his detailed psychological analysis.
[The Times, 18 June 1912; memoirs by H. Wildon Carr in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, new series, vol. xii, and in Mind, new series, vol. xxi; memoir by G. Dawes Hicks in Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. vi.]