st twenty
years cultivated this field with an industry and ability which have
deserved larger harvests than have yet been reaped. Two remarkable
men, both devoted friends of his, worked with him, Edmund Gurney and
Frederic Myers the poet, the latter of whom survived him a few months
only. It was characteristic of Sidgwick that he never committed
himself to any of the bold and possibly over-sanguine anticipations
formed by some of the other members of the Society, while yet he never
was deterred by failure, or by the discovery of deceptions, sometimes
elaborate and long sustained, from pursuing inquiries which seemed to
him to have an ultimate promise of valuable results. The phenomena, he
would say, may be true or false; anyhow they deserve investigation.
The mere fact that so many persons believe them to be genuine is a
problem fit to be investigated. If they are false, it will be a
service to have proved them so. If they contain some truth, it is
truth of a kind so absolutely new as to be worth much effort and long
effort to reach it. In any case, science ought to take the subject out
of the hands of charlatans.

The main business of his life, however, was teaching and writing. Three
books stand out as those by which he will be best remembered--his
_Methods of Ethics_, his _Principles of Political Economy_, and his
_Elements of Politics_. All three have won the admiration of those
who are experts in the subjects to which they respectively relate, and
they continue to be widely read in universities both in Britain and in
America. All three bear alike the peculiar impress of his mind.

It was a mind of singular subtlety, fertility, and ingenuity, which
applied to every topic an extremely minute and patient analysis. Never
satisfied with the obvious view of a question, it seemed unable to
acquiesce in any broad and sweeping statement. It discovered
objections to every accepted doctrine, exceptions to every rule. It
perceived minute distinctions and qualifications which had escaped the
notice of previous writers. These qualities made Sidgwick's books
somewhat difficult reading for a beginner, who was apt to ask what,
after all, was the conclusion to which he had been led by an author
who showed him the subject in various lights, and added not a few
minor propositions to that which had seemed to be the governing one.
But the student who had already some knowledge of the topic, who,
though he apprehended its main principl