Haldane, Richard Burdon

(b. Edinburgh, Scotland, 30 July 1856 ; d. Cloan, Perthshire, Scotland, 19 August 1928)

Philosophy.

Haldane was the son of Robert Haldane, landowner and lawyer; his mother was Mary Elizabeth Burdon-Sanderson, a collateral descendant of Lord Eldon, a famous lawyer and member of Lord Liverpool’s government. He studied philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and for some months at Göttingen under R. H. Lotze. Having commenced a legal career in London in 1877, Haldane became Liberal member of Parliament for East Lothian in 1885, supporting W. E. Gladstone and associating with Lord Rosebery as a “liberal imperialist.”

Haldane’s very successful career as a barrister led to his being given important administrative tasks, and he became secretary of state for war in the reforming Liberal government of 1905. Between 1905 and 1911 he transformed the organization of the British army, setting up the Expeditionary Force for service overseas, the locally recruited Territorial Army for home defense, the Officers’ Training Corps (functioning in schools and universities), and the Imperial General Staff, to coordinate the policies of the Empire countries. He also reformed the army transport and medical services.

In 1912 Haldane became lord chancellor and went on a mission to Germany, seeking to persuade the German government to agree with Great Britain on common limitations on naval expansion. The mission failed; and when war broke out with Germany in 1914, a remark of Haldane’s that Germany was his “spiritual home” was used by his political opponents to impugn his patriotism and force his resignation from the government in 1915. At the end of the war Earl Haig, the victorious British commander, wrote that Haldane was “the greatest Secretary of State for War that England has ever had.” When the Labour party for the first time formed a government in 1924, Haldane, who had long been friendly with Sidney Webb and other Labour party leaders, became lord chancellor for the nine months of its existence.

Another major concern of Haldane’s life was the advancement of higher education. He helped to found the Imperial College of Science and Technology of the University of London and was active in the movement for enabling workingmen to obtain university-level education in evening classes. His chief work in the educational sphere was concerned with the formation of what he called civic universities in England and Wales so that university education could be available to more students than could be accommodated in the existing universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London, and Durham. He helped to obtain charters for universities at Liverpool, Manchester, and Leeds and advised the establishment of the University Grants Committee to allocate government funds to the universities without governmental control of their use.

Haldane’s chief and abiding interest was in philosophy. In 1883 he joined with J. Kemp in a translation of Arthur Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea and in the same year was joint editor with Andrew Seth of Essays in Philosophical Criticism, a collection of essays in memory of the idealist philosopher T. H. Green. This book was a sort of manifesto supporting the Hegelian movement in philosophy which was dominant in British philosophy for the next thirty years. Haldane contributed an article entitled “The Relation of Philosophy to Science” to this volume jointly with his younger brother, John Scott Haldane, who later became known for his work on the physiology of respiration and for his defense of vitalism in biology. In the article the Haldanes argued that for the immediate future “a new class of men” was required; they should be trained both in a scientific specialism and in “the critical investigations of Kant and Hegel.” In 1903 Haldane published The Pathway to Reality, his Gifford lectures at the University of St. Andrews. In it he developed a Hegelian view of philosophy, arguing that philosophical criticism shows the inadequacies of the categories of common sense and the abstractness of the categories of the particular sciences.

Haldane’s best-known philosophical book is The Reign of Relativity (1921), in which he sketches the mathematical context of the theories of general and special relativity in the work of C. F. Gauss, G. F. Riemann, and Hermann Minkowski, and maintains that Einstein’s theory is only an illustration of “the principle of the relativity of knowledge” to a special subject. The exposition is general but lucid and critical. In the course of it Haldane discusses Moritz Schlick’s view, expressed in Raum und Zeit in der gegenwärtigen Physik (1917), that physical space is “essentially dissimilar” from perceptual space although correlated with it and argues that such a view introduces “a splitting up of experience into sensations and conceptions which seems to have little warrant in the actual character of that experience” (p. 59). Nothing, by reference to Arthur Eddington, that Einstein’s equation for gravitation is “not so much a law as a definition,” Haldane discusses the more metaphysical approach to relativity that A. N. Whitehead had taken in The Concept of Nature (1920), supporting Whitehead’s rejection of “the bifurcation of nature.”

Haldane believed that Einstein’s theory supported the idealist thesis that the distinction between knowledge and what is known is a distinction within knowledge itself. He therefore mistakenly treated Einstein’s “observer” as if it were akin to Kant’s “transcendental unity of apperception.” The Reign of Relativity, in consequence, became a compendium of idealist metaphysics, with discussions of the work of F. H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet, a defense of vitalism in biology continued in The Philosophy of Humanism and Other Subjects (1922), and even a vindication of the general will. When Einstein came to lecture at Kings’ College, London, in 1921, he told Haldane he did not believe that his theory had metaphysical implications, and the archbishop of Canterbury that it had no religious implications. Haldane had wrongly supposed that “relative to an observer” entails “dependent on mind.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Haldane’s writings include Essays in Philosophical Criticism (London, 1883), edited with Andrew Seth; Life of Adam Smith (London, 1887); The Pathway to Reality. 2 vols. (London, 1903); Universities and National Life (London, 1912); Before the War (London, 1920); The Region of Relativity 1921); The Philosophy of Humanism and Other Subjects (London, 1922), which contains discussions of vitalism; Human Experience (London 1926); and Richard Burdon Haldane. An Autobiography (London, 1929).

II. Secondary Literature. See Stephen E. Koss, Lord Haldane: Scapegoat for Liberalism (New York-London, 1969); Sir Frederick Maurice, Life of Lord Haldane of Cloan, 2 vols. (London, 1937); and Dudley Sommer, Haldane of Cloan. His Life and Times (London, 1960).

H. B. Acton