Henry Longueville Mansel

Henry Longueville Mansel

Henry Longueville Mansel(6 October 1820 – 30 July 1871)was anEnglishphilosopherand ecclesiastic.

Life

He was born atCosgrove,Northamptonshire(where his father, also Henry Longueville Mansel, fourth son of GeneralJohn Mansel,was rector). He was educated atMerchant Taylors' School, LondonandSt John's College, Oxford.He took a double first in 1843, and became tutor of his college. He was appointed reader in moral and metaphysical philosophy atMagdalen Collegein 1855, andWaynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophyin 1859. He was a great opponent of university reform and of theHegelianismwhich was then beginning to take root in Oxford. In 1867 he succeededArthur Penrhyn Stanleyasregius professor of ecclesiastical history,and in 1868 he was appointeddean of St Paul's.He died inCosgroveon the first of July 1871.

The philosophy of Mansel, like that of SirWilliam Hamilton,was mainly due toAristotle,Immanuel KantandThomas Reid.Like Hamilton, Mansel maintained the purely formal character of logic, the duality of consciousness as testifying to both self and the external world, and the limitation of knowledge to the finite and "conditioned." His doctrines were developed in his edition of Aldrich'sArtis logicae rudimenta(1849) – his chief contribution to the reviving study ofAristotle– and in hisProlegomena logica: an Inquiry into the Psychological Character of Logical Processes(1851, 2nd ed. enlarged 1860), in which the limits of logic as the "science of formal thinking" are rigorously determined.

In hisBampton lecturesonThe Limits of Religious Thought(1858, 5th ed. 1867; Danish trans. 1888) he applied toChristiantheologythe metaphysical agnosticism which seemed to result from Kant's criticism, and which had been developed in Hamilton'sPhilosophy of the Unconditioned.While denying all knowledge of the supersensuous, Mansel deviated from Kant in contending that cognition of the ego as it really belongs among the facts of experience. Consciousness, he held – agreeing thus with the doctrine of "natural realism" which Hamilton developed from Reid – implies knowledge both of self and of the external world. The latter Mansel's psychology reduces to consciousness of our organism as extended; with the former is given consciousness of free will and moral obligation.

Caricature of Mansel

These lectures led Mansel to a bitter controversy with the Christian socialist theologianFrederick Maurice.

A summary of Mansel's philosophy is contained in his article "Metaphysics" in the 5th edition of theEncyclopædia Britannica(1860). He also wrote

• "Metaphysics or the Philosophy of Consciousness Phenomenal and Real" (4th ed., 1883), 408pps, Edinburgh, Adam and Charles Black
• The Philosophy of the Conditioned(1866) in reply toJohn Stuart Mill's criticism of Hamilton;
• Letters, Lectures, and Reviews(ed. Chandler, 1873),
• The Gnostic Heresies of the First and Second Centuries(ed.Joseph Barber Lightfoot,1875, with a biographical sketch byLord Carnarvon).

He contributed a commentary on the first two gospels to theSpeaker's Commentary(1881).

Mansel's mother, Maria, was the daughter of Admiral SirRobert Moorsom.

References

• Cited in Chisholm (1911):
  • John William Burgon,Lives of Twelve Good Men(1888–1889)
  • James Martineau,Essays, Reviews and Addresses(London, 1891), iii. 117 seq.
  • A. W. Benn,The History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century(1906), ii. 100–112
  • David Masson,Recent British Philosophy(3rd ed., London, 1877), pp. 252 seq.
  • Leslie Stephen(1893)."Mansel, Henry Longueville".InLee, Sidney(ed.).Dictionary of National Biography.Vol. 36. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
• Kenneth D. Freeman, "The Role of Reason in Religion: A Study of Henry Mansel" (The Hague, 1969)

External links

• Media related toHenry Longueville Manselat Wikimedia Commons
• Works by Henry Longueville ManselatProject Gutenberg
• Works by or about Henry Longueville ManselatInternet Archive
• Internet Archive book by Henry Longueville Mansel