Vernon Lushington and the Ethics of Positivism

David Taylor is the inaugural recipient of the Blackham Fellowship Award, and will be speaking on the subject of his thesis, the lawyer, aesthete and Positivist, Vernon Lushington (1832-1912).

Lushington was, in the words of his friend Matthew Arnold, a traveller “between two worlds, one dead and the other powerless to be born”. No longer able to accept traditional Christian belief but concerned that “man without religion is a nutshell in the wind”, Lushington and others feared that unbelief would lead to moral degeneration and a collapse of the established system of values which underpinned nineteenth century society. Lushington sought to develop a moral and ethical framework to work through the issues of the day and, in his search to replace traditional Christianity with a new spirituality, he became a Positivist, undoubtedly influenced by Auguste Comte and his works on Positivism and the ‘Religion of Humanity’.

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