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Samuel Alexander (1859–1938)

Alexander built a metaphysics of emergence on an evolutionary scale. In Space, Time and Deity (1920) the basic stuff of the world is space-time itself, and everything else arises from it in a sequence of levels: matter, then life, then mind, each a new quality that appears when the level below reaches a certain complexity, and none of them explicable from what came before. The qualities are to be accepted, in the phrase he took from Wordsworth, with “natural piety”. The sequence does not stop at mind: the universe strives, in his word, toward a further quality not yet realised, which he called deity. With Conwy Lloyd Morgan he was one of the two principals of emergent evolution, the reading of evolution as the successive appearance of genuinely new qualities.

Samuel Alexander was born in Sydney on 6 January 1859 and grew up in Melbourne, where he studied at Wesley College and the University of Melbourne. He went to Balliol College, Oxford, took a first in 1881, and in 1882 became a fellow of Lincoln College, the first Jew to hold a fellowship at Oxford or Cambridge. His early book Moral Order and Progress (1889) treated ethics in evolutionary terms. From 1893 he was professor of philosophy at the University of Manchester, where he taught for three decades. He gave the Gifford Lectures at Glasgow in 1916–18, published as Space, Time and Deity in two volumes in 1920. He was twice president of the Aristotelian Society, a fellow of the British Academy from 1913, and in 1930 became the first Jew to receive the Order of Merit. He died in Manchester on 13 September 1938.

Key concepts

Space-time. Alexander held that space and time are not two things but one, and that space-time is the stuff of which everything else is made, before matter; things are complexes of point-instants. Time is what makes space-time active: “Time is the mind of Space”, he wrote, meaning that time stands to space as mind stands to body, the principle of motion and change in a manifold that would otherwise be inert. Space-time also carries the categories, such as substance, causality and number, that belong to everything that exists.

Emergent qualities. From configurations of space-time arise the qualities of matter; from certain configurations of matter, life; from certain configurations of living things, mind. Each is a new quality, carried by the level below but not reducible to it: mind, he wrote, “though descended on its physical side from lower forms of existence, is, when it comes, a new quality in the world”. The emergence of a new quality cannot be predicted or explained from the lower level; it is a brute fact of the world’s history, to be accepted with natural piety.

Deity. The series has a direction, a nisus in the world toward higher qualities, and the next quality beyond mind is deity. Deity is not yet actual: God, for Alexander, is the whole world as tending toward deity, a being in time, not outside it. The view made deity the future of an evolving universe rather than its creator.

Enjoyment and contemplation. A mind experiences its own acts, which Alexander called enjoying them, and experiences its objects, which he called contemplating them. The distinction let him hold that the mind is known to itself in a different way from how it knows anything else, without making mind a separate substance.

Where Alexander stops

Brian McLaughlin’s “The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism” (1992) argued that British emergentism, the tradition Alexander shared with Lloyd Morgan and C. D. Broad, lost its empirical footing when quantum mechanics explained chemical bonding: its central case, chemical and biological properties that could not in principle be derived from physics, was undercut. The debate over emergence that followed is set out under Emergence.

Broad reviewed Space, Time and Deity at length and critically in Mind (1921), and, as Emily Thomas has shown, took from it the conviction that time has a direction, which became his theory of a growing block universe.

Key works

Moral Order and Progress: An Analysis of Ethical Conceptions (1889)
Locke (1908)
Space, Time and Deity (Gifford Lectures 1916–18; 2 vols, 1920)
Beauty and Other Forms of Value (1933)