Imaginism

I was born at Hove, Brighton, April 11, 1866. My parents were E. B. Fawcett, a " Fawcett of Scaleby," the Cambridge and All-England cricketer, and Myra, daughter of Colonel Macdougall, of the Indian Army. I was educated at Newton College, Devon, and Westminster School (Queen's Scholar), In 1896 I married my cousin, M. B. V. Jackson, and have lived since mostly in Switzerland. My philosophical career dates, I suppose, from talks about Berkeley with two Westminster boys—the eldest fourteen or fifteen years old—one of whom is now a distinguished Oxford professor. But I was not stirred seriously till the age of seventeen when, on my father's decease, I happened on Louis Figuier's well-known Day After Death. This book defends belief in the plurality of lives: the attractive, but so far unverified, hypothesis shared by Orphism, Plato, Plotinus, Drossbach, Schopenhauer, Pezzani, Professsor McTaggart, Dr. Schiller, and many others, and upheld so stoutly by French " re-incarnationists," and the theosophists and kindred mystics whose doctrines derive from the East. The problem of life became interesting, and I began a long course of self-education in science and philosophy. In philosophy Plotinus, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Herbart, Lotze, Mill, Bain, Martineau, James, Bradley, Schiller, and Western and Eastern mysticism all made effective appeal. Coming as a young man into touch with the theosophists and their " Indian wisdom," I was asked to revise the philosophy and science of Madame Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine, a syncretistic and fanciful work, but full of suggestion; a popular version or advance-guard, as it seemed, of an Eastern cult whose intellectuals were yet unborn. But there dwelt here merely a "réligion manquée." Leaving the theosophists disillusioned, I wrote a monadology, Riddle of the Universe (Arnold, 1893), resembling what is now called " spiritual pluralism," on independent lines. The experiment, while educative, was unsatisfactory. There followed in 1909 Individual and Reality (Longmans), but time once more brought dissatisfaction. However, with World as Imagination (Macmillan, 1916) the beginnings of a satisfying world-hypothesis rose into view, and the long and tedious process of trial and error was to bear fruit. So radical was the change of standpoint that all preceding works and essays, etc., had to be withdrawn. In 1921 appeared Divine Imagining, and the series thus initiated is being continued to-day. The standpoint is now generally known under the name of " Imaginism."