Henry Cecil Sturt (1863 - 1946)

Henry Sturt  was Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford and, later, a philosophy lecturer in Wales (in 1922).

He was a Fabian and a vigorous state socialist. He was also the "personalist" who annoyed GEORGE HOLMES  Howison (1834 1917) by 'stealing' the name "personalism", etc. (Howison thought he was a crass empiricist pragmatist.)

Sturt was author of:

• Idola Theatri,  London: Macmillan, 1906
• Human value, an ethical essay  Cambridge [Eng.] The University press, 1923.
• Socialism & Character, London: George Allen &Unwin, 1922
• The idea of a free church  London ; New York : W. Scott, 1909.
• Moral experience; an outline of ethics for class-teaching, London, Watts & Co. [1928]
• The principles of understanding; an introduction to logic from the standpoint of personal idealism, Cambridge, University Press, 1915.

• Personal idealism : philosophical essays by eight members of the  Oxford University. London, New York, Macmillan & Co. ltd., 1902.

CONTENTS: Error, by G. F. Stout.--Axioms as postulates, by F. C. S. Schiller.--The problem of freedom in its relation to psychology, by W. R. Boyce.--The limits of evolution, by G. E. Underhill.--Origin and validity in ethics, by R. R. Marett.--Art and personality, by H. Sturt.--The future of ethics: effort or abstention? by F. W. Bussell.--Personality, human and divine, by H. Rashdall.

he also helped to translate Metz's "Hundred Years of British Philosophy

According to Leslie Armour "He advocated the kind of s o c i a l i s t  position that Bosanquet opposed to. Sturt allowed a place for co-operative societies, but he was critical of the conservatism  as he saw in some of their members and he thought some private enterprise would always survive. "There will always be little shops where clever workmen make boots to suit  oddly shaped feet", and he thought ornaments and literature would fall outside the socialist state as would, oddly, "dentists and to some extent physicians."* But he took a very strong view of the optimal powers of the state. The state would license marriages, "inspect families" and regulate births.**  ** pp. 92-94. (He does not say how births would be regulated but that it should be done by women: "If a wife is so weak, so incontinent, or so overpowered by material instinct that she cannot be content with five children, the women who form part of the governing class will find some means of dealing with her." Though he insisted on the rights of women and on their political empowerment he was evidently not in contemporary terms a feminist. His book was subsidised through the Tulloch and Barr publishing fund of the Fabian Society. )"

Curiously, given his socialism, in Idola Theatri (p. 67) Sturt attacked Bosanquet for not paying enough attention to "self-reliance" and "personal initiative"

A.N. McBriar (in _An Edwardian Mixed Doubles_) mentions Sturt as one of the eminent philosophers the Fabians attracted in the 1890s. But McBriar adds that the Fabians attracted philosophers as _disparate_ as Ritchie, Sturt and Russell, and so they had so little _theoretical influence_ (see p. 155).