# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Wilson, John Cook

​WILSON, JOHN COOK (1849–1915), philosopher, the only son of the Rev. James Wilson, a Methodist minister, by his wife, Hannah, daughter of John Cook, of Newcastle-under-Lyme, was born at Nottingham 6 June 1849. Educated at Derby grammar school and Balliol College, Oxford, where he obtained first classes in classics and mathematics, both in moderations and the final examinations, he was elected to a fellowship at Oriel College in 1874; he also won the Chancellor's Latin essay prize in 1873, and the Conington prize in 1882. After holding a tutorship at Oriel he was elected Wykeham professor of logic in 1889, and retained the chair until his death. He resided continuously in Oxford, except for a brief period of study in Germany, where he came strongly under the influence of Hermann Lotze, and met his future wife, Charlotte, daughter of A. D. Schneider, of Gifhorn, Hanover, whom he married in 1876. There was one son of the marriage. Mrs. Wilson's health failed for many years, and the burden thus thrown upon him materially hampered his academic activities and in the end wore him out. He died at Oxford 11 August 1915.
He was singularly human—appreciative of the simpler pleasures, generous, warm-tempered but easily appeased, and resentful of anything which he thought unjust. Unselfish, affectionate, and loyal almost to a fault, he had a great capacity for friendship with people of all ages and many different kinds.
Cook Wilson's equipment as a philosopher was such as only one or two in a generation can attain. He was at once a good mathematician and a good scholar. An intensive study in his earlier years of the great philosophers, and especially of Plato and Aristotle, gave him an unrivalled background for his own inquiries. He had a great feeling for facts. His mind was independent, cautious, and intensely critical. Thus equipped, he seemed one of the few capable of doing philosophical work of that rare kind ​which does not need to be done over again. Yet he published little beyond a number of papers on the text, interpretation, and doctrine of Plato and Aristotle. This failure, which to his friends seemed tragic, was due largely to his wife's ill-health. But there were other causes. The multiplicity of his interests was a continual source of distraction. A chance statement to which he objected would set him researching, and once this process had begun, no one could say when it would stop, for, to him, all critical problems were equally fascinating. He had a passion for detail, and his hatred of error in any form constrained him to deal faithfully with any statement which he considered erroneous. Again, a sense of the pitfalls to which philosophers are exposed steadily grew on him. He considered writing on philosophy, when young, mere presumption, and cleverness a snare. He dreaded, too, the petrifying effect of publication. Moreover when, as he said, he began to think things out again from the beginning, he found himself led in a direction very different from the idealist views of those whom he regarded as his main teachers, Thomas Hill Green [q.v.] and Lotze, and this made him increasingly anxious to avoid committing himself, until he felt sure not only of the truth, but of his ability to state it in a form which would compel conviction. It was not surprising, therefore, that he threw his energies mainly into teaching, as the best means of developing his own thought. He was not, indeed, a prophet with a gospel—unless the conviction that above all things a man must not let himself be put off with shams gives a right to the title. His lectures, too, though not unrelieved by humour, were apt to seem abstract and rather dry. But his real powers stood out in informal discussions. There he cast aside reserve, and his audience could watch his mind at work. His acuteness seemed a revelation, and there was infection in his conviction that the truth was a matter of high importance.
He was certainly the strongest philosophical influence in Oxford of his generation. He influenced his fellow-teachers, to whom he was an unfailing source of help and inspiration, quite as much as his pupils; and in his later years most of his colleagues had been his pupils and looked up to him as a kind of master.
The starting-point of Cook Wilson's views lay in his unwavering conviction of the truth of mathematics. In mathematics we know. Hence the scepticism inherent in the philosophy of those who follow the metageometricians was wholly alien to him. So also was the position represented in F. H. Bradley's Appearance and Reality (1893). Reflection on our experience, he held, doubtless gives rise to puzzles in plenty, but where contradictions are alleged to be involved in our fundamental notions of the world, the cause lies in some fallacy, usually simple and often merely verbal, in which we have been involved. Not unfairly the first principle of his philosophy may be described as the principle that there is no first principle—that, in Aristotle's words, there are ἴδιαι ἁρχαί. He never tired of insisting on the impossibility of general criteria, whether of knowledge, of beauty, or of morality. The key to particular problems lay in consideration of their particular subject-matter. Yet the knowability of single facts by themselves, and the existence of irresolvable differences, were compatible with the unity of reality; they only showed that reality had not that unity which some philosophers expected it to have. Further, as he came more and more to maintain, much that is ultimate in our experience is in itself intelligible to us, and our difficulties about such realities only arise because we treat them as if they were, or try to express them in terms of, or to explain them by, something else. In particular he became convinced that this was true of knowledge itself, and that for that reason the teaching of the idealists, which for long he had accepted, was based on a fallacy.
In giving his lectures on logic—which formed the nearest approach to a systematic expression of his philosophy—Cook Wilson found himself driven from time to time to subject portions of them to drastic modification. Gradually a general doctrine seemed to be emerging which involved a greater break with tradition than was consistent with his lectures, even in their latest form; and for his friends the dominant feeling awakened by the posthumous publication of these lectures must be regret that he was not given ten more years of health and strength in which to work out his thought to the full. Unfortunately it was only towards the close of his life that he really seemed to find himself, and then it was too late.
[Notice in Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. vii, 1916; personal knowledge. See also Statement and Inference. With other Philosophical Papers by John Cook Wilson, edited by A. S. L. Farquharson, 2 vols., 1926.]
H. A. P.