Leslie Stephen

From Philosopedia

Stephen, Leslie [Sir] (28 November 1832 - 22 February 1904)

The first serious critic of the novel, Sir Leslie was editor of the monumental Dictionary of National Biography. Although ordained a minister in 1859, he took up a study of philosophy which led him to relinquish his holy orders. In an 1865 journal entry he wrote,

• I now believe in nothing, to put it shortly; but I do not the less believe in morality.

Defending his agnosticism, he wrote Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking (1873), in which he details how he reached a point when the Christian viewpoint of life, which he had accepted on faith, simply collapsed and fell away into unreality. Stephen was an expert on English thought in the 18th century and was a well-known, fearless mountaineer. [Virginia Woolf] was his youngest daughter by his second wife.

In his house, wrote Miranda Seymour in Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale (1993), the subject of God was not to be discussed. Ever.

His History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) dealt with the deistic movement. His final work was An Agnostic’s Apology (1904).

Stephen, a member of the Metaphysical Society, was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA), and his signature appeared on the RPA’s initial financial appeals for £1,000.

Sir Leslie died of a painless cancer and retained to the last his complete disbelief in all forms of religion.

{BDF; CE; FFRF; FUK; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}