MONTGOMERY, EDMUND DUNCAN
(1835–1911)

Edmund Duncan Montgomery, a Scottish-American philosopher, anticipated in his "philosophy of vital organization" ideas of emergent evolution, the energetic nature of matter, and the pragmatic functioning of knowledge. Born in Edinburgh, he studied medicine in Germany in the 1850s, did research on cell pathology in London in the 1860s, and emigrated to America in 1870 with his sculptor wife, Elisabet Ney.

After a short-lived communitarian experiment at Thomasville, Georgia, the Montgomerys settled on Liendo Plantation, near Hempstead, Texas. There Montgomery wrote most of his philosophical articles and, in his later years, took an active role in community affairs. As chairman of the Waller County Democratic Party in the 1896 Bryan-McKinley campaign, he argued the dependence of political liberty upon economic reforms.

By 1867 Montgomery saw life as a power of certain compounds to reintegrate their chemical unity after damage, a power evolved by the inherent creativity of matter interacting in new combinations. He tested views of matter, mentality, selfhood, knowledge, and morality by this touchstone in over sixty articles in such journals as Mind, Monist, Index, Open Court, and the International Journal of Ethics and in five books. His major book was Philosophical Problems in the Light of Vital Organization.

Even inorganic compounds, Montgomery said, are inherently reactive, evolving in unpredictable ways by virtue of their peculiar composition and organization. Conservation of energy is thus wrongly viewed as requiring inertness of matter. Mentality is not dependent on a separate substance but is a capacity of certain complex organisms (chemical unities of a high order), heirs of evolution through foregone ages. Human knowledge and action are products of man's interplay with environment; they are instruments in preserving and enhancing well-being.

Some data of consciousness, such as kinesthetic and emotive states, seem to derive in each of us only from his own body, even though the body's activity thus perceived is in turn activated by outside stimuli. Others of our conscious states (such as visual data) are occasioned by features of either our own bodies or of external objects. Montgomery denied that this difference warrants the inference that there are two distinct kinds of substance, mental and material. All inferences from sensory data are conjectural. Data do not copy things but give "hieroglyphic signs" that permit discovery, prediction, and testing of natural relations among things.

Montgomery argued for a "naturalistic humanitarianism," a "religion of life," stressing ethical self-determination in a struggle against indifferent and hostile forces, to convey to the next generation a heritage nobler than the one received. Making common cause with those who wanted a religion and an ethic consistent with scientifically established knowledge, he added to classic criticisms of prevailing theologies and moral systems his own emphasis upon their failure to heed the full potentialities of men, the preeminent heirs of an evolution far from completed.

See also Consciousness.

Bibliography

works by montgomery

On the Formation of So-Called Cells in Animal Bodies. London, 1867.

Die Kant'sche Erkenntnislehre widerlegt vom Standpunkt der Empirie. Munich, 1871.

The Vitality and Organization of Protoplasm. Austin, TX: Gammel-Statesman, 1904.

Philosophical Problems in the Light of Vital Organization. New York and London: Putnam, 1907.

The Revelation of Present Experience. Boston: Sherman, French, 1910.

works on montgomery

A complete bibliography of writings by and about Montgomery before 1950 and an index of writings by and about him appear in Morris Keeton, The Philosophy of Edmund Montgomery (Dallas, TX: University Press in Dallas, 1950). The definitive biography is I. K. Stephens, The Hermit Philosopher of Liendo (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1951).

Morris Keeton (1967)