Thomas Davidson was an American philosopher and wandering scholar. He devoted all his life to searching the philosophy that justified the claims of the intellect and provided an adequate ground for a spiritual, religious interpretation of life.
Background
Thomas Davidson was born on October 25, 1840 in the parish of Old Deer in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He came of very humble antecedents, his father, Thomas Davidson, being a small farmer, and his mother, Mary Warrender, of sturdy peasant stock. She was a stern disciplinarian, and a woman of deep piety and resolute will, qualities which were but intensified in her son Thomas.
Education
Davidson was from the first avid of learning and eagerly devoured all the books he could lay hands upon. Games and sports played no part in his life, but Baxter’s Saints’ Rest was his delight. The reading of this book marked an epoch in his life. It gave him a sense of religious exaltation and illumination that transformed his world, and left an indelible impression of the sublimity of human life and its infinite possibilities for weal or woe.
At the same time his never-failing and contagious good humor made him a general favorite with his companions, old and young.
He was prepared for college by Robert Wilson, the parish schoolmaster of Old Deer, who, discovering the making of a scholar in him, took him into his home and treated him as a son, helping him in his studies every evening in return for his assistance during the day in teaching the junior classes in school.
At the age of sixteen he entered King’s College, Aberdeen, having won a four-year scholarship in the Bursary Competition.
Here he acquired, as a second nature, the habit of exact and thorough scholarship.
Career
After serving for three years as rector of the Old Aberdeen Grammar School, Davidson went to England and taught Latin and Greek, first at Tunbridge Wells and later at Wimbledon.
In 1866 he moved to Canada where he taught for a year in the Collegiate Institute of London, Ontario. He then came to the United States, and, after a short stay in Boston, where he fell among the radicals, with whom he cordially sympathized, he accepted a position in the public schools of St. Louis, where he was soon promoted to the principalship of a branch high school. Here he made the acquaintance of that famous group of enthusiastic Hegelian philosophers, whose leader, W. T. Harris, became his intimate and life-long friend.
The influence of this group was profound and lasting, although Davidson himself could never find anything in Hegel. They convinced him of the shallowness of positivism, which had all but caught him in the stormy years of doubt that had followed his college career; sent him back to the study of German thought, and through that to the deeper study of Plato and especially of Aristotle who remained for him to the end “the master of those who know”; and they gave him a better appreciation of the educational value of art and literature when interpreted philosophically. But Davidson was a radical individualist and a born dissenter, and could not and would not fit into any niche. He chafed under all restraint, and was not entirely contented until, after removing to Boston in 1875, he found his liberty in the life of a free lance and wandering scholar, gaining a modest livelihood by teaching private classes, tutoring, lecturing, writing, while holding himself responsible to himself alone.
His mode of life gave him six months of every year for leisurely study and frequent opportunities for long visits to Europe.
He took extended walking tours through Greece where he gained a vivid appreciation and a thorough and intimate knowledge of ancient Hellenic art and culture.
From 1878 to 1884 most of his time was spent in Domo d’Ossola, Italy, in close contact with the members of the Rosminian order. Here he lived the life of a hermit, devoting himself to the study of the writings of Rosmini, in which he felt that he had at last found the philosophy that all his life he had been seeking. At the same time he carried further his researches into the whole period of scholastic philosophy. His own philosophy underwent further development in later years, but never wholly lost the Rosminian stamp.
If it must be described in a word it might be said to be a form of pluralistic idealism (apeirotheism, he sometimes called it), coupled with a stern ethical rigorism, —but all labels are misleading. While studying in Italy he seriously contemplated joining the Catholic Church, but he could not bring himself to accept the dogmas. Nevertheless the practical activities of his later life were given direction by this experience. Their common purpose was the organization of the spiritual life, but on the basis of philosophical insight rather than of dogma.
During a brief sojourn in London in 1883, he founded the Fellowship of the New Life, of which the Fabian Society was an offshoot.
Later he established a branch of the Fellowship in New York, and a Summer School for the Culture Sciences, held first at St. Cloud, New Jersey, then at Farmington, Connecticut, and finally on a farm that he had bought in the Adirondacks near the village of Keene, New York. None of these undertakings proved entirely satisfactory and it was only toward the end of his life that he stumbled, almost by chance, upon the opportunity to carry out his ideal in a war that seemed to him altogether encouraging.
In association with the People’s Institute and the Educational Alliance of New York he gathered together a group of eager, earnest young men and women from the lower East Side and organized a Bread-Winners’ College inspired by the idea of helping the wage-earners to share in the best culture of the ages and to rise to a higher level of mental and spiritual power.
Personality
Davidson had a prodigious memory; he seemed never to forget anything he had ever read. He spoke nearly all the languages of Europe except Slavic with fluency, including Latin and modern Greek. The range of his learning was vast, and his scholarship accurate and thorough. Yet he carried this load lightly, and with all modesty, and prized it only for its value in pointing the way to a nobler life for himself and for others, to whom he was ever ready to give himself without stint. It is perhaps chiefly as a great personal force that his influence has been manifest. He had a vivid and exuberant personality and a genius for friendship, and he carried with him an air of elevation which came from his constant association with the saints and seers of all times.