James Hutchison Stirling (1820—1909)

James Hutchison Stirling was a 19th century British Idealist
philosopher. In 1865 Stirling's The Secret of Hegel appeared and
marked the inauguration of a new era in the development of English
idealism. In an article in the Fortnightly Review for October 1867
(republished in the volume Jerrold, Tennyson, and Macaulay) the author
passes a ruthless condemnation upon the spurious reputation for a
knowledge of German idealism which had attached itself to the name of
Coleridge, as well as, in a minor degree, to that of De Quincey, and
fastens especially upon Coleridge's 'dreamy misapprehensions' and
'strange misrepresentations' of the Kantian philosophy. Himself
profoundly convinced of the truth of the Hegelian system, he set
himself, in the Secret, to explain and defend that system. Stirling
undoubtedly possessed 'the temperament of genius,' and was a man of
remarkable speculative insight; but his style, though often striking,
is so marked by the influence of Carlyle, and he so resolutely
declines to conform to ordinary standards of systematic exposition,
that his work is almost as difficult as the original which it is
intended to illuminate. Yet its importance, and its influence at the
time of its appearance, are not to be underestimated; it certainly
called the attention of the English-speaking world to the significance
of a system which even Ferrier had pronounced unintelligible, and
brought home to the English mind the necessity of coming to terms, not
only with Hegel, but with his predecessors, Kant, Fichte, and
Schelling.Stirling insisted upon going back to the origins of
Hegelianism in these earlier systems, and in 1881 he followed up the
Secret of Hegel with the Textbook to Kant, in which the defects of the
earlier work were less apparent and in which he supported a one-sided
interpretation of the Kantian philosophy, as represented by the first
two divisions of the Critique of Pure Reason, with great learning and
with remarkable ability. His translation of Schwegler's History of
Philosophy, published in 1867, which passed through many editions and
was used by many generations of students, contains a series of
illuminating 'annotations' which rival in interest and value the
substance of the History itself. A little volume of lectures on The
Philosophy of Law (1873) and the Gifford lectures on Philosophy and
Theology (1890) complete the list of Stirling's more important
contributions to philosophy. The standpoint is always the same — that
of the Hegelian idealism, which Stirling is inclined to interpret in a
theistic rather than in a pantheistic sense.