BRIGHTMAN, EDGAR SHEFFIELD

Philosopher, leading American exponent of person alism; b. Holbrook, Mass., Sept. 20, 1884; d. Newton, Mass., Feb. 25, 1953. The son of a Methodist minister and himself an ordained Methodist minister, Brightman studied at Brown University, at Boston University, and at the Universities of Berlin and of Marburg. His life as a professor and scholar, after early teaching at Nebraska Wesleyan University (1912–15) and at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. (1915–19), was spent at Boston University (1919–53). Between 1925 and 1953 he wrote 14 books, more than 200 articles, and 300 book reviews on metaphysics, religion, ethics, and education. His scholarly and personal concern for his students was remarkable; an unusual proportion of his disciples became college presidents, deans, productive scholars, teachers, and pastors in America and elsewhere.

In B. P. Bowne's personalism Brightman found the synthesis of what had attracted his earlier loyalties to J. royce and W. james. Brightman grounded the theistic, pluralistic idealism that Bowne had developed from Berkeleyan, Lotzean, and Kantian roots in what he believed to be sounder experiential foundations. He argued that metaphysical, theological, and ethical hypotheses should be reasoned explanations of data immediately given in irreducible personal experience. The person, which he conceived as a complex unity of activities and capable of self-consciousness, moral purpose, and religious sensitivity, in his view should replace the scholastic notion of soul. The person is not a part of the personal God who created him free within limits. By contrast, physical and organic nature exist as the order of God's active Will, guided by reason and love. God Himself is omnitemporal, not eternal, and His power is limited. He is a personal Creator whose goodness and reason are the ideal guides of His will as He exerts continuous, if somewhat incomplete, control throughout cosmic evolution over the nonrational factors within His own nature.

Although Brightman's critics urged that this finitistic view of God did not meet the demands of religious experience and faith, Brightman questioned the unanimity of genuine religious experience on this point. Critics urged also that God's nature was dichotomized, but Brightman held that His metaphysical unity was not in fact jeopardized. In any case, he said, God's purpose is realized as persons actualize their individual potential in a free communitarian society that treats persons and God as ends in themselves and never as means only.

Bibliography: e. s. brightman, Introduction to Philosophy (New York 1925; 3d ed. r. n. beck, 1963); The Problem of God (New York 1930); The Finding of God (New York 1931); Moral Laws (New York 1933); A Philosophy of Religion (New York 1940; reprint Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1958); Person and Reality: An Introduction to Metaphysics, ed. p. a. bertocci et al. (New York 1958). j. j. mclarney, The Theism of Edgar Sheffield Brightman (Washington, D.C. 1936).

[p. a. bertocci]