Arts and Letters

To some philosophy means a long discipline in abstract speculation; to the man in the street it means little more than resignation; to Professor Woodbridge it was neither abstruse nor passive. As writer, teacher, editor, and administrator he felt philosophy to be in constant relation to every man's daily life. Professor Woodbridge was not only a lover of wisdom himself, but he called forth the operation of the philosophic faculty in all who came in contact with him. He lived through the years when the United States was producing a school of philosophy which arrested the attention of the whole thinking world and he played a vital part in that movement, but he freely acknowledged that he was more occupied with its extension than with the formulation of its doctrines. He said of himself: "The principle of realism seems so important to me for metaphysics and philosophy that I have been more busy with championing it than with developing it." This championship was as remarkable for its diversity as for its vigor.

Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1867. His father was actively engaged at the time in certain movements of political reform in the community, but impatient with the conservatism of his fellow-citizens he presently crossed the border into this country and became the head of an institution of public health in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Frederick Woodbridge went from the schools of Kalamazoo to Amherst College where he graduated in 1889, returning for the degree of Master of Arts in 1898. The thirty-four years of distinguished scholastic and administrative service which he gave to Columbia University did not prevent his serving his own alma mater with signal devotion: he was trustee of Amherst College for nineteen years; and twice he refused the presidency believing, as he said, that "the final executive decision was not his forte" and that he could be more useful to both institutions as teacher and adviser.

For a time Frederick Woodbridge felt himself to be destined for the ministry and he accepted a scholarship at the Union Theological Seminary in this city, then a Presbyterian institution. Though philosophy was to regain its place as his primary interest, a religious emphasis reappears at intervals in his work and in the last book, An Essay on Nature, his discussion of the teleological direction in nature derives from a religious viewpoint. In 1898 he made the first of many trips to Europe. He studied at the University of Berlin where he was to return later as the Theodore Roosevelt Professor of Philosophy. After teaching two years at the University of Minnesota he was called in 1902 to be Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. In 1895 he had married Miss Helena Belle Adams of Chicago, whose wide interests and sympathies found expression in an influential participation in various movements of social and civic betterment until her death in 1935. Professor and Mrs. Woodbridge are survived by four children.

When Professor Woodbridge first entered teaching the temper of philosophical studies in this country may be described as reflecting a liberal idealism. What Santayana calls "the trade-winds of doctrine" were blowing from Kant, Hegel, and the English rationalists. But the tide was gathering for the movement which, stemming from Charles Pierce's influence on William James and reinforced by a world-wide activity in experimental psychology, was to assume and outgrow the name of Pragmatism. William James published his Principles of Psychology in 1880, his Will to Believe in 1897; and in 1898 he delivered in Berkeley, California, his epoch-making lecture on "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results." Josiah Royce followed with his Religious Aspects of Philosophy and John Dewey with his Studies in Logical Theory in 1903. This tide was to make the tour of the world and to return to us from the University of Vienna as the logical positivism which is the prevailing "trade-wind of doctrine" that young philosophers are facing today.

It was this movement—“the shifting of emphasis in philosophy from pure intellect to perception," as it has been called—which Professor Woodbridge championed, and his gifts and energy opened up ever wider fields of activity. As an author he is best represented by his volumes The Purpose of History, The Realm of the Mind, and An Essay on Nature, the proofs of which he read during his last illness. On his seventieth birthday, in 1937, the philosophical faculties of Columbia, Minnesota, and Amherst combined in publishing and presenting to him a volume of his essays collected from periodicals and from his books. Professor Woodbridge's contribution to the movement as an editor was no less influential: in 1904 he founded The Journal of Philosophy and soon after The Archives of Philosophy. These journals served as vehicles for the increasingly adventurous declarations of the movement, and rereading them today one can recapture something of what Professor Woodbridge remembered as the "excitement" that surrounded their publication. A still more practical outlet was found, however, for his ideas; in 1912 he was appointed Dean of the Faculties of Political Science, Philosophy, Pure Science, and Fine Arts at Columbia University, an office he held until 1929. His annual reports to the President were widely read throughout the country; year after year they aroused fruitful controversy and have taken their place among the classical documents in the theory of higher education.

Professor Woodbridge felt, however, that the formation of those students who are now teaching philosophy in all parts of the world was his principal work, and neither editorial nor administrative duties caused any intermission in this task nor diminished the generous vitality he expended on it. His clarity and force as a writer were equally present in his conversation; he possessed to an unusual degree that art of discussion that is called the Socratic method, whereby ideas seem rather to be elicited than imposed and which combines informality with precision.

Professor Woodbridge became a member of the Academy in 1935. In his death we have lost not only the admired thinker and writer, but a wise associate and a valued friend.