William Douw Lighthall (1857-1954)
William Douw Lighthall (December 27, 1857 - August 3, 1954) was a Canadian lawyer, politician, and poet. Born in Hamilton, Canada West, the son William Francis Schuyler Lighthall and Margaret Wright, Lighthall attended McGill University where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1879, a Bachelor of Civil Law degree in 1881, and a Master of Arts degree in 1885. He practiced law with the firm of Cahan, Lighthall, Lighthall and Henry and his own firm of Lighthall & Harwood. A member of the city council of Westmount, Quebec, he was mayor from 1900 to 1903. He helped found the Union of Canadian Municipalities in 1901. A poet, his works, Old Measures: Collected Verse, were published in 1922. He also wrote novels, The Young Seigneur; or Nation-Making. A Romance in 1888 (written as Wilfrid Chteauclair), The False Chevalier or The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette in 1898, Hiawatha the Hochelagan in 1906 and The Master of Life. A Romance of the Five Nations and of Prehistoric Montreal in 1908. In 1905, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and was its president from 1917 to 1918. Lighthall was among a number of the post-Darwinian thinkers of the nineteenth century who struggled with the concept of a Supreme Cause. Some of them not only struggled to redefine God; they also struggled to rename this entity. For his part Lighthall defined the cause as a force of will and called that force The Outer Consciousness, The Outer Knowledge, The Directive Power, and The Person of Evolution. However unlike the philosopher Schopenhauer or the novelist Hardy, Lighthall, who considered himself to be both a philosopher and a novelist was optimistic in his view of the nature of the will. That optimism was based on Lighthall's unbending faith in the positive nature of evolutionary progress. His views are present in his Novels particularly in The Master of Life as well as in his hope for Canada as a nation. A reader of Lighthall's philosophical works may encounter some difficulty with the style. The main problem lies in the fact that Lighthall seldom completely reworked the lecture notes, pamphlets, and texts that he used to create the works as he published them. Furthermore, he preferred to number his paragraphs, as he considered these paragraphs to be capsular ideas. Perhaps due to his training in law he preferred to protect the integrity of these modules rather than sacrifice any of their meaning for the integrated flow of ideas in a particular chapter as a whole. Because of this practice the authors style appears jarringly disjointed at times. Ironically, the logical progression of deductive reasoning, so important to Lighthall's system, is often under stress because of this style. The Lighthall system, was an attempt to remarry science and religion in a single philosophical understanding of reality. Within the structure of that system Lighthall claimed to have avoided what he called the metaphysical problem. He insisted that all that was proposed in the hypothesis was derived from his observation of scientific fact. To be precise Lighthall considered the principles of his theory to be proven scientific facts and the proof to be founded upon deductive reasoning. The system equated Instinct with Will. Further it viewed Will as the manifest cause of both the conscious and unconscious act. Lighthall stated: 'All living action is willing, and all is by nature purposive. Lighthall informed his readers that it was the phenomenon of the altruistic act that had been the initial middle ground that had led him to the formulation of the theory: The utilitarian school, with its intellectual solutions on the basis of joy and pains, reflected by sympathy, appeared to me to give a reasonable account of most other moral acts,-but that an individual could deliberately annihilate himself for another evidently imported some element extraneous to the individual's own ordinary machinery of willing. Determined to accept no superficial 'explanation' of the problem such as glib use of words like 'volition' and 'conation,' I reduced acts of will to their simplest forms, noting their gradual shadings into, and intimate connections with habits, instincts, functions, reflexes, etc., and observing that these led to a world outside the consciousness of the individual. Thence I was brought to conclude, like Schopenhauer, that there is a unitary directive cause behind all these processes, and I included Evolution itself, regarded as one long act of willing. The characteristics that struck me most forcibly were the independence of this outer will, and its apparently highly conscious nature.'
William Douw Lighthall's Books:
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