A young man from Webster Grove

 

A young man from Webster Grove, a soldier in the Army, but interested in philosophy, met Henri Bergson.....in Paris. In the course of conversation the soldier mentioned that he came from St. Louis. “Oh,” said Bergson, “that is the city Dr. Harris made famous with his great insight into philosophy! (Lieidecker 1946).”

               William Torrey Harris was a Yale drop out and a Public school teacher, why did Bergson view him so highly? During his time Harris was one of the most well know philosophers in the world (Lieidecker 1946). Harris was one of the pioneers of the St. Louis Movement. Harris also offered insight into one of Hegel’s most difficult texts; the Larger Logic.

Harris was the secretary of  the St. Louis Hegelians and he, along with this group, started the first philosophical journal west of the Mississippi (The Speculative Journal of Philosophy).

               Harris and other members of the St. Louis Hegelians tasked themselves with Translating Hegel’s works. They read these works fluently in German and translated them into English, as a hobby[1].  Harris believed that The Science of Logic was the study of though, or the thinking activity. Being is when the will unified with the intellect come to consciousness. Being is self-activity for Harris. The Manifold is, at first, a seizing of the, Immediate, manifold in the form of the feeling and the sensuous, this is not thinking, because the relating of the same is thinking. Then the thinking activity becomes abstraction after it apprehends the representation of the world through he senses. Abstraction is when I neglect one determination of an object and select another. The Ego is an abstract determination. I know of the Ego only in so far as I exclude all determinations from myself (Hegel 1957).

Harris describes what he means by the speculative of the self-activity, Aristotle’s the 'active intellect', the highest form of knowing.” The active intellect is “that which is its own object, (subject and object,) and hence as containing its own end and aim in itself, its aim is being infinite.

According to Garmo (1898) the second part of the Psychologic Foundations of Education, titled the Psychologic System, Self-activity rises to the top of the hierarchy and looks down upon them to consult, guide, and control the other processes (Garmo 1898).

This paper is split into three parts. (1) The society is a general description of the St. Louis Hegelians with an emphasis on what they though a bout Hegel’s Larger Logic and how they used it generally. (2) I Outlines of Hegel’s Logic; I compare some general premises from the Outline to another work by Harris titled the Speculative. In this section I want to show the reader the Harris believed that Hegel’s notion of Being was self-activity. (3) In the final section I offer a summary of the second section of Psychologic Foundations of Education, titled the Psychologic System.

               William Torrey Harris (1835) was born on a farm in Massachusetts. He attended Yale for two years. While at Yale, Harris excelled in all his classes. He excelled so far to school became second nature to him and other interests, occult interests began to take shape in his mind. H became interested in Swedenborg, mesmerism, the transcendentalists and even the early psychic-phantasm movement. School was no longer a challenge to him, plus he was fed up with the Scottish Realism of Yale. Harris went to St. Louis in the summer around 1857. In St. Louis Harris became a public school teacher. After a very short time in St. Louis Harris met Henry Brokmeyer a former owner of a shoe making business, lawyer and an avid Hegelian philosopher. Harris taught himself German at Yale because he was tired of Greek and Latin. Harris and Brokmeyer would met at the Mercantile with other like minded individuals and discuss Hegel's philosophy as well as make translations.

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[1] Imagine reading, let along translating, Hegel’s Larger Logic as a hobby. These men were serious.