Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/286

 admiring the solidity of the Roman administrative system, he nevertheless accorded to the wreckers of the culture and the system a more genial treatment than Gibbon would have approved. Hodgkin's imagination was fired by the epic element in his theme and in the Teutonic character. He does not altogether neglect the slow and obscure developments of legal principles and political institutions. But the story is for him the main thing. He enlivens and illuminates the story with vignettes from contemporary life, and with finely drawn sketches of men of action and men of letters. As an historian he is almost inevitably to be compared with Grote. Both were bankers by trade and scholars by inclination. Both desired to write books of scholarship for the delight and the information of the general public. Hodgkin was, however, less interested in political theories than Grote, and more interested in plain humanity and the vicissitudes of human society. A full bibliography of Hodgkin's minor writings is given in the ninth volume of the third series of Archaeologia Aeliana; but his reputation rests on his two principal works. He died at Falmouth on 2 March 1913.  HODGSON, SHADWORTH HOLLWAY (1832–1912), philosopher, was born at Boston, Lincolnshire, 25 December 1832, the eldest son of Shadworth Hodgson, of Boston, by his wife, Anne, daughter of John Palmer Hollway, also of Boston. He was educated at Rugby and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He graduated in 1854, after taking a first class in classical moderations, and a second class in literae humaniores. In 1855 he married Ann, daughter of the Rev. Edward Browne Everard, rector of Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk. The death of his wife and only child in 1858 led to his applying himself with rare devotion to philosophy. He acquired a most unusual knowledge of philosophical literature, and collected a fine library. His chief works are Time and Space: a Metaphysical Essay (1865), The Theory of Practice (1870), The Philosophy of Reflection (1878), and The Metaphysic of Experience (1898), the last of which contains a full exposition of his philosophy. He was the first president (1880–1894) and the leading spirit of the Aristotelian Society; its Proceedings contain fourteen presidential addresses and many other papers by him. He was elected an honorary fellow of his college in 1882, and fellow of the British Academy in 1901. He died in London 13 June 1912.

Hodgson thought of himself as continuing the work of Hume and also that of Kant, but as improving on both by discarding their respective assumptions. Both those thinkers start by assuming the distinction of subject and object, a distinction not immediately experienced but presupposing much naïve reflection. Empiricism assumes experience to be produced by the action of bodies; transcendentalism assumes it to be modified by a synthetic activity of the subject; but philosophy, Hodgson held, should not assume the activity either of subjects or of objects. What is found directly in experience is not the distinction of subject and object but that of consciousness and content: i.e. of ‘thatness’, the fact that consciousness occurs, and ‘whatness’, the particular nature of the consciousness. As consciousness moves towards the future, it distinguishes its past ‘whatnesses’ from its present ‘whatness’, and objectifies them. While we must not start with the distinction of mind and matter, the analysis of consciousness reveals features which show this distinction to be necessary. Hodgson's system is thus ultimately dualistic. It is a bold and able attempt to work out a complete metaphysic by a thoroughgoing analysis of experience. His precise point of view was, however, one which other philosophers found it difficult to share, and he founded no school; the main value of his work probably resides in his detailed psychological analysis.

 HOLLAND, HENRY SCOTT (1847–1918), theologian and preacher, born at Ledbury, Herefordshire, 27 January 1847, was the eldest son of George Henry Holland by his wife, the Hon. Charlotte Dorothea Gifford, eldest daughter of Robert, first Baron Gifford [q.v.], of St. Leonard, Devon. His father was the second son of Swinton Colthurst Holland, of Dumbleton, Gloucestershire. After four years at a private school at Allesley, near Coventry, he went to Eton in January 1860, where he had the good fortune to be the pupil of William Johnson (William 260