William Mackintire Salter

Background

He was born on January 30, 1853 in Burlington, Iowa, United States. He was the son of Rev. William and Mary Ann (Mackintire) Salter.

Education

His early religious and educational training was stimulated by his Congregational father who put the boy to the study of Latin at the age of ten and introduced him to Greek two years later. When he was fourteen, he entered Knox College, Galesburg, Ill.

He entered the theological department of Yale College in the fall of 1871, where he searched theology and sacred writings for a justification of orthodoxy. In 1873 he left Yale for the Harvard Divinity School.

He was granted the degree of bachelor of divinity in 1876. During 1881-82 he was a student at Columbia University.

Career

During the summers of 1872-73 he preached at Somesville, Me. , and from August 16, 1874, to July 4, 1875, in the Unitarian Church at Wayland, Massachussets While in the latter place he attempted to formulate his own creed in a series of sermons beginning with "Man's Need of Religion, " but found, after reentering Harvard in 1875, that solid grounds for distinctive Christian faith in any form had slipped away.

He was appointed Parker Fellow of Harvard at the University of Gottingen. His health failed, however, and he returned to the United States, where he herded sheep in Colorado from February 1878 to October 1879. While tending his flocks he prepared a pamphlet, On a Foundation for Religion (1879), based upon the "enthusiasm of humanity" which John Robert Seeley's Ecce Homo, a volume much beloved by him, described.

In 1881 he affiliated himself with Dr. Adler's ethical culture movement. His rise in the movement was rapid; from 1883 to 1892 and again from 1897 to 1907 he was lecturer for the Chicago society, and from 1892 to 1897 for the Philadelphia society. He was a special lecturer on Nietzsche at the University of Chicago from 1909 to 1913.

On July 19, 1913, he sailed for Europe and, after traveling in Italy and the Austrian Tyrol, settled down in Munich to begin work on his book, Nietzsche the Thinker (1917). Interrupted by the World War, he returned to the United States to study, lecture, and write at "Hilltop, " his home on Silver Lake, N. H. He completed his book, upon which his fame as a scholar rests, contributed articles on Nietzsche and the World War to magazines, and in the winter of 1920-21 lectured on Nietzsche at Johns Hopkins University.

Achievements

• With other Ethical Culture leaders, he signed the call for the 1909 National Negro Conference, which led to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Besides, he wrote several books on philosophy and a critical and enduring major classic on Nietzsche. In addition to about eighty printed lectures, he published the next famous works: Die Religion der Moral (Leipzig, 1885), Moralische Reden (Leipzig, 1889), Ethical Religion (1889), First Steps in Philosophy (1892), Anarchy or Government (1895), Walt Whitman (1899), and Burgess's Political Philosophy as Indicated in His Recent "The Sanctity of Law" (1929).

Works

More photos

• book

  • Ethical Religion (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Ethical Religion It is only fair to any one...)

  • Personal Morality: Two Lectures Before the Society for Ethical Culture of Chicago, February, 1886

    ( About the Book Philosophy is the study of problems conc...)

  • Nietzsche The Thinker, A Study

    (CRITICISM of Nietzsche is rife, understanding rare; this ...)

  • The conflict of the Catholic church with the French republic

    (This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)

  • First Steps in Philosophy (Physical and Ethical) 1892

    (Originally published in 1892. This volume from the Cornel...)

Religion

At college he became skeptical with respect to orthodox religion.

Politics

He pleaded for a fair trial for the bombers of the Chicago Haymarket riots when public opinion was against him, and he remained unswervingly pro-German and anti-British during the World War.

Views

While in Germany he turned his attention from the Christian fathers to the pagan philosophers, studying Plato, Aristotle, and others, not alone for themselves, but with the thought of tracing pagan influence on the development of Christian doctrine.

Quotations: He said "I might at least hold on to enough to be a Unitarian minister if I could not be an Orthodox one. "

Personality

Although gentle and lovable, Salter possessed great moral strength.

Connections

On December 2, 1885, he was married to Mary S. Gibbens, of Cambridge, Massachussets; a daughter by this marriage died and they adopted a boy.

Father:

Rev. William Salter

Mother:

Mary Ann (Mackintire) Salter

Spouse:

Mary S. Gibbens