Metaphysical Society

The Metaphysical Society was a British society, founded in 1869 by James Knowles. Many of its members were prominent clergymen.

The members from first to last were as follows:

• Dean Stanley
• John Robert Seeley
• Roden Noel
• James Martineau
• William Benjamin Carpenter
• James Hinton
• T H Huxley
• Charles Pritchard
• Richard Holt Hutton
• William George Ward
• Walter Bagehot
• James Anthony Froude
• Alfred Lord Tennyson
• Alfred Barry
• Lord Arthur Russell
• William Ewart Gladstone
• Henry Edward Manning
• James Knowles
• Lord Avebury
• Henry Alford
• Alexander Grant
• Connop Thirlwall
• Frederic Harrison
• Father Dalgairns
• Sir George Grove
• Shadworth Hodgson
• Henry Sidgwick
• Edmund Lushington
• Bishop Ellicott
• Mark Pattison
• the Duke of Argyll
• John Ruskin
• Robert Lowe, Viscount Sherbrooke
• Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff
• William Rathbone Greg
• Alexander Campbell Fraser
• Henry Acland
• John Frederick Denison Maurice
• Archbishop Thomson
• Thomas Mozely
• Richard William Church
• William Connor Magee
• George Croom Robertson
• James Fitzjames Stephen
• Sylvester
• John Charles Bucknill
• Andrew Clark
• William Kingdon Clifford
• St George Mivart
• Matthew Boulton
• William Waldegrave Palmer, 2nd Earl of Selborne
• John Morley
• Leslie Stephen
• Frederick Pollock
• FA Gasquet
• C Barnes Upton
• William Withey Gull
• Robert Clarke
• Arthur James Balfour
• James Sully
• Alfred Barratt

Papers were read and discussed at meetings on such subjects as the ultimate grounds of belief in the objective and moral sciences, the immortality of the soul, etc. A description of one of the meetings was given by Magee (then Bishop of Peterborough) in a letter of February 13 1873:

"Archbishop Manning in the chair was flanked by two Protestant bishops right and left; on my right was Hutton, editor of the Spectator, an Arian; then came Father Dalgairns, a very able Roman Catholic priest; opposite him Lord A. Russell, a Deist; then two Scotch metaphysical writers, Freethinkers; then Knowles, the very broad editor of the Contemporary; then, dressed as a layman and looking like a country squire, was Ward, formerly Rev. Ward, and earliest of the perverts to Rome; then Greg, author of The Creed of Christendom, a Deist; then Froude, the historian, once a deacon in our Church, now a Deist; then Roden Noel, an actual Atheist and red republican, and looking very like one! Lastly Ruskin, who read a paper on miracles, which we discussed for an hour and a half! Nothing could be calmer, fairer, or even, on the whole, more reverent then the discussion. In my opinion, we, the Christians, had much the best of it. Dalgairns, the priest, was very masterly; Manning, clever and precise and weighty; Froude, very acute, and so was Greg. We only wanted a Jew and a Mahommedan to make our Religious Museum complete" (Life, i. 284).

The last meeting of the society was held on May 16, 1880. Huxley said that it died "of too much love"; Tennyson, "because after ten years of strenuous effort no one had succeeded in even defining metaphysics." According to Dean Stanley, "We all meant the same thing if we only knew it."