Henry Osborn Taylor

Background

Taylor was born in New York City, in 1856, the third of four sons and fourth of five children of Henry Augustus Taylor, a New York merchant, and Catharine Augusta (Osborn) Taylor. His father was descended from William Taylor, who came to Massachusetts in 1635 and settled in Wethersfield, Connecticut Taylor grew up in New York City and at his family's summer home in rural Connecticut. He was a thoughtful child of bookish tastes, deeply attached to his parents.

Education

Privately tutored, he expected to follow a business career and at the age of fourteen worked briefly in a shipbroker's office. During part of his seventeenth year he was bookkeeper of a mining company in Austin, Nev. , of which his father was president. In this uncongenial Western environment, history and literature attracted him more than ever, and he decided to go to college. Taylor entered Harvard in 1874 and studied American history under Henry Adams, who taught him research methods. On graduating, he entered Columbia Law School (he received an LL. B. in 1881). His studies there, which he did not enjoy, were interrupted by a year at the University of Leipzig, where he studied Roman law.

Taylor received honorary doctorates from Harvard (1912), Wesleyan University (1921), and Columbia (1926).

Career

Stimulated by his German training, his interests turned toward legal theory. He was admitted to the New York bar in 1884, but his practice dwindled while he composed his Treatise on the Law of Private Corporations (1884), which became a standard law school text. Taylor had experienced considerable tension in choosing between an active life and a contemplative one, but finally an inheritance gave him a modest financial independence which enabled him to devote himself to scholarship.

The motivating force behind his early work was the desire to follow the evolution of human ideals. His first historical study, Ancient Ideals: A Study of Intellectual and Spiritual Growth from Early Times to the Establishment of Christianity (2 vols. , 1896), was a product of youthful enthusiasm and has been replaced by later research. His next book, however--The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages (1901) - became a minor classic.

Taylor's most objective work, it was a pioneering study of the transition from ancient to medieval culture; its chief shortcoming, neglect of Byzantine influences, is excusable considering the state of Byzantine studies in 1901. His masterpiece was The Mediaeval Mind (2 vols. , 1911), an impressive synthesis of intellectual development from the Latin Fathers to Dante, based on extensive reading in the original sources. Perhaps its most original feature was its recognition of emotion as an element in intellectual progress. For Taylor, the important contribution of the Middle Ages was not the rational structure of scholastic philosophy but the emotional humanizing of patristic Christianity. The book is primarily a history of medieval sensibility, particularly religious sensibility. Its critics pointed out Taylor's failure to relate the history of ideas to social, political, and economic developments, and noted that his "medieval mind" excluded the mentality of the merchant, the peasant, and the practical statesman. Taylor was a generalist in the age of the monograph, and his exaltation of emotion was out of harmony with scientific historiography. The book, however, met with a warm response from students and the general public and eventually became a standard college text.

Taylor's Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century (2 vols. , 1920), a less successful work, embodies a medievalist's revolt against the Burckhardtian concept of the "Renaissance" (a term Taylor rejected); it concludes a series which collectively forms an intellectual history of Western civilization in premodern times.

Taylor's life was in the tradition of the nineteenth-century patrician historian. He lectured for two years at Columbia in the late 1890's, but gave this up because it interfered with his research and writing and never held any other academic post. He did, however, belong to a medieval club in New York composed of distinguished scholars; and his circle of friends included the historian James Harvey Robinson, the theologian Arthur Cushman McGiffert, and the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

In his later years Taylor turned increasingly to philosophy, and in three books sought to sum up the knowledge and insight gained in a lifetime of research and reflection: Freedom of the Mind in History (1923), Human Values and Verities (1928), and Fact, the Romance of the Mind (1932).

He died of pneumonia at his New York home at the age of eighty-four.

Achievements

• By his will he left more than a quarter of a million dollars to Harvard College to maintain professors' salaries. Although the tremendous increase in historical knowledge since Taylor's death has diminished the value of his books as repositories of learning, they continue to hold an honored place in historical literature, and The Mediaeval Mind remains a classic of intellectual history.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A treatise on the law of private corporations having capital stock.

    (The Making of the Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-1926 ...)

  • Human Values and Verities

    (Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)

  • Prophets, Poets, and Philosophers, of the Ancient World (Classic Reprint)

    (In fact, their thoughts, projected along diverging lines,...)

  • The Medieval Mind

    (The Middle Ages! They seem so far away; intellectually so...)

  • The Classical Heritage, of the Middle Ages (Classic Reprint)

    (The subject of this book is the transition from the Class...)

  • Fact The Romance Of Mind

    (This book an EXACT reproduction of the original book publ...)

  • Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • Deliverance, the Freeing of the Spirit in the Ancient World (Classic Reprint)

    (Homer sword for it, that not all dreams are from Zeus. No...)

  • Ancient Ideals: A Study of Intellectual and Spiritual Growth from Early Times to the Establishment of Christianity (Classic Reprint)

    (CHAPTER XIV. THE EMPIRE: THE PUBLIC HOPE. THE last centur...)

Religion

By formal affiliation he was an Episcopalian, but his religious views gradually evolved into a kind of mystical theism.

Membership

He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1915 and in 1940 to its inner circle, the American Academy. He was president of the American Historical Association in 1927.

Connections

On October 21, 1905, Taylor married Julia Isham, daughter of William Bradley Isham, a New York banker. They had no children. The marriage was singularly happy, contributing to the serenity and productivity of Taylor's later years. The couple lived in New York City and maintained a summer home in Portland, Connecticut.

Father:

Henry Augustus Taylor

Mother:

Augusta (Osborn) Taylor

Spouse:

Julia Isham