Background
Morris, George Sylvester, , Vermont 1840 1889 Male Educator Philosopher educator and philosopher, was born in Norwich, Vt. , the son of Sylvester and Susanna (Weston) Morris.
Morris, George Sylvester, , Vermont 1840 1889 Male Educator Philosopher educator and philosopher, was born in Norwich, Vt. , the son of Sylvester and Susanna (Weston) Morris.
Morris was educated first in the local district school and then in Kimball Union Academy, Meriden, N. H.
In the autumn of 1857 he entered Dartmouth College.
He had planned to enter Auburn Theological Seminary, but the loyalties invoked by the Civil War led to his enlistment in the 16th Vermont Volunteers.
While teaching, he continued his studies and secured his master's degree.
The next important step in his education was a sojourn abroad for two years, spent chiefly in study at Berlin.
While waiting for an opening in the college field, he was a tutor in the family of Jesse Seligman, a New York banker.
their original migration to America having occurred in 1636.
After graduation he taught for one year.
There is little doubt that his war experience had its broadening effect upon a boy hitherto too much of a recluse and too much dominated by a family atmosphere of a moralistic and pietistic type.
In September 1864, he entered Union Theological Seminary, New York, where he came in contact with liberal thought in the person of Prof. Henry Boynton Smith.
Here he came under the influence of F. A. Trendelenburg, a noted Aristotelian scholar.
He undertook the translation of Friedrich Ueberweg's History of Philosophy and carried it through in an extremely creditable fashion, publishing the translation in two volumes, in 1871-73.
It is worthy of note that he acted as one of the examiners of Josiah Royce, later the famous idealist philosopher of Harvard.
This arrangement at Baltimore did not develop the possibilities which had been hoped from it, but it did lead to his transfer at Michigan to the department of philosophy in 1881.
He now entered upon a period of scholarly production.
In 1885, he was made head of the department of philosophy and henceforth devoted all his energies to his work at Ann Arbor and to his writing.
He was only forty-nine years of age when he died.
Thus he can be regarded as a co-worker with W. T. Harris [q. v. ] and the St. Louis movement on this side of the Atlantic and with men like T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley in England.
These works show careful scholarship.
In appearance, Morris was of average height and rather spare of build.
His face was sensitive and somewhat ascetic.
A picture of him hangs in a room at the University called, in his honor, the Morris seminary.
(Queen's Univ. , Kingston, Ont. )
, Jan. 1918; Morris' Commonplace book, MS. , in Univ. of Mich.
His was a point of view which was destined to dominate much of English and American thought during the latter part of the nineteenth century.
This idealism was opposed to traditional empiricism and to Spencerian agnosticism.
Here he was given the detached service of mail carrier for the regiment.
In June 1876 he had married Victoria Celle, who with a son and a daughter survived him.