Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1862 – 1932)

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (6 August 1862 – 3 August 1932), was a British political scientist and philosopher. He led most of his life at Cambridge, where he wrote a dissertation on Neoplatonism before becoming a fellow. He was closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group.

Dickinson was deeply distressed by Britain's involvement in World War I. He drew up the idea of the League of Nations within a fortnight of the war's outbreak, and his subsequent writings helped to shape public opinion towards the League.



Early years

Dickinson was born in London to Margaret Ellen Williams Dickinson, daughter of William Smith Williams who was literary advisor to Smith, Elder & Company and had discovered Charlotte Brontë. His father was Lowes Cato Dickinson (1819–1908), a portrait painter. When the boy was about one year old his family moved to The Spring Cottage in Hanwell, then a country village. The family also included his brother, Arthur, three years older, an older sister, May, and two younger sisters, Hester and Janet.

His schooling included attendance at a day school in Somerset Street, Portman Square, when he was 10 or 11. At about age 12 he was sent to Beomonds boarding school in Chertsey. His teenage years from 14 to 19 were spent at Charterhouse School in Godalming, where his brother, Arthur, preceded him. He was unhappy at the school, although he enjoyed seeing plays put on by visiting actors, and he played violin in the school orchestra. While he was at Charterhouse, his family moved from Hanwell to a house behind All Souls Church in Langham Place.

In 1881 he went to King's College, Cambridge as an exhibitioner, where his brother, Arthur, had again preceded him. Near the end of his first year he received a telegram informing him that his mother had died from asthma. During his college years, his tutor, Oscar Browning, was a strong influence, and Dickinson became a close friend of fellow King's College student C.R. Ashbee. Dickinson won the chancellor's English medal in 1884 for a poem on Savonarola, and in graduating that summer he was awarded a first-class Classical Tripos.

After travelling in the Netherlands and Germany, he returned to Cambridge late that year and was elected to the Cambridge Conversazione Society, better known as the Cambridge Apostles. In a year or two he was part of the circle that included Roger Fry, J. M. E. McTaggart, and Nathaniel Wedd.

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1862-1932), the son of portrait painter Cato Lowes Dickinson. He was brought up in a Christian Socialist environment and though he later rejected Christianity he saw his work in the context of its social utility. He was a pacifist during World War I, and he was later instrumental in the conception of the League of Nations.

He is the author of An Essay on the Civilizations of India, China & Japan, in an essay which seeks with justice to define the character of Indian civilization, profoundly remarks, that it is so unique that the contrast is not so much between East and West as between India and the rest of the world. Thus India stands for something which distinguishes it from all other peoples, and so she calls Herself a Karma-bhumi as opposed to the Bhoga-bhumi of all other peoples. For this She has been wonderfully preserved until today. Even now we can see the life of thousands of years ago. Standing on the Ghats at Benares or by any village well we are transported into the beautiful antique world.

(source: Is India Civilized - Essays on Indian Culture - By Sir John Woodroffe p.136 -137).

Dickinson, who was a friend of E. M. Forster, wrote in his "Essay on the Civilizations" thesis, wrote:

"The real antithesis is not between East and West, but between India and the rest of the world." Only India is different; only India un spools some other possibility fantastically. India is the odd man out of the global citizenry." Dickinson held, because religion, religion, religion everywhere had transported the land to somewhere nearly extraterrestrial. All other countries were located on planet Earth, in present time, in specific material conditions- which were so much "maya" or secondary reality in India, where what was important had migrated over the mountaintops into the clouds.

"Indian religion has never been a system of dogma, and is not entangled in questionable history. Indian philosophy and religion have always affirmed that there is; that by meditation and discipline an internal perception is opened which is perception of truth."

"In the first place, India has never put Man in the center of the universe. In India, and wherever Indian influence has penetrated, it is, on the one hand, the tremendous forces of nature, and what lies behind them that is the object of worship and of speculation; and, on the other hand, Mind and Spirit; not the mind or spirit of the individual person, but the universal Mind or Spirit, which is in him, but which he can only have access by philosophic mediation and discipline....It is very much in harmony with the spirit of western science than with that of western religion. And this fact is exemplified not only by the religious and philosophic literature of India, but by its art."

(source: An Essay on the Civilizations of India, China and Japan - By G. Lowes Dickinson p.11-31).

iv never heard of half these peeps