Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 23.djvu/298

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Grote
290
Grote


tion of Hamilton,' in an article for the 'Westminster Review,' January 1866 (reprinted as a little volume in 1868, and again in Minor Works, pp. 279-330). Here, besides delivering himself on a number of philosophical questions that had long possessed him, he took occasion to acknowledge with fine gratitude the intellectual debt of his life to Mill's father; as later, in 1868, he was ready to join in supplying the desirable annotations to a second edition of his old master's 'Analysis.' Fearing that he might not live to complete the exposition of his favourite thinker, he anticipated one part of his task in an account of the 'Psychology of Aristotle,' appended to a third edition of Professor Bain's 'Senses and Intellect' in 1868. Some months earlier in that year he had also contributed to the same friend's 'Mental and Moral Science' two careful dissertations on the 'History of Nominalism and Realism,' and on Aristotle's theory of knowledge, besides some pages on the Stoic and Epicurean doctrines. Though he laboured upon Aristotle to the last weeks of his life, he was able, in fact, only to complete his account of the 'Organon.' He had hardly begun, after laborious analysis of the 'Metaphysica' and the physical treatises, to put into shape the results of his study when illness and death stopped his hand. All of his Aristotelian writing, so far as then known, that could be printed to any purpose was (under the editorship of Professor Bain and the present writer) issued in two volumes in 1872, the year after his death; a second edition (in one volume) following in 1880, with inclusion of some matter on the 'Ethica' and 'Politica' found in the interval among his papers.

After publishing the first two volumes of his 'History,' Grote began again to take active interest in public education. In June 1846 he delivered an address (Minor Works, pp. 177- 194) on the coming of age of the City of London Literary and Scientific Institution, which he had joined in founding in 1825, for young men engaged by day in mercantile pursuits. In July he reappeared, after an interval of sixteen years, on his old familiar ground of the 'London University,' now become (since 1836) University College, speaking to the students (ib. pp. 197-204) with the authority of an original founder who had lost none of his sympathy with its aims. He was re-elected to the council in February 1849, and from 1850 began continuous attendance. The college could soon again rely upon him as one of its chief pillars. He undertook the responsible duties of treasurer in 1860. In 1868, when the headship of the college was vacated by the death of Brougham, there was a unanimous determination, initiated by the vice-president, Grote's old friend Lord Belper, that it should be assumed by the one survivor on the council from among the fathers of the old 'university.' As president he continued his active superintendence of every department of the college work, and within a few weeks of his death he was holding committee-meetings in his study. In 1864 he had presented to the college, for decoration of the south cloister, the 'Marmor Homericum,' a beautiful work of art by Triqueti, in coloured marbles, which represented (according to an idea of his own) the blind bard reciting before a group of typical listeners and Delian maidens, with a border of scenes and figures (some in marble relief) illustrative of the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey.' On his death he left the reversion of 6,000l. as an endowment to the chair of philosophy of mind and logic, the filling of which had a second time given him special anxiety and trouble. The first professor retiring in 1866, it became at once Grote's earnest desire to procure a successor who might treat the subjects of the chair with direct regard to modern requirements, as they had come through his own influence to be recognised in the examinations of the now independently constituted University of London. He held if possible more strongly than ever to his old opinion that the professor of philosophy should not be a minister of religion, committed before the world to a body of fixed doctrine on subjects coming within the scope of philosophic inquiry. The only candidate of distinction was the Rev. James Martineau, who as a Unitarian divine came not the less within Grote's proscribed circle. Others, and first the professorial body of the college, now charged with the duty of recommending for the chair, did not recognise the disability; Mr. Martineau was accordingly submitted to the council as having the strongest claim to appointment. Through Grote's influence the recommendation was not accepted; but at the same meeting of council in August he was unable to carry either a general declaration that it was 'inconsistent with the principle of complete religious neutrality proclaimed and adopted by University College to appoint to the chair of mental philosophy and logic a candidate eminent as minister and preacher of one among the various sects which divide the religious world,' or the specific proposal to appoint that lay candidate whom he himself favoured, and to whom, after Mr. Martineau, the professorial report pointed as next eligible. During the vacation, when Mr. Martineau's rejection became known, there was much angry comment in the press; the action of the council