Shadworth Holloway Hodgson, the English metaphysician and epistemologist, was educated at Rugby and Oxford. Although he worked outside the universities, Hodgson was widely respected among English philosophers; he was elected president of the Aristotelian Society at its founding in 1880 and was reelected for thirteen successive years. In the United States, William James recognized the similarity of many of his own doctrines to those of Hodgson, and acknowledged Hodgson's priority despite their profound differences on fundamental points of metaphysics.

Independent and workmanlike, Hodgson was remarkably free from the characteristics and fashions of late Victorian philosophy. He remained steadfast in a central position, attacking the superficial clarities of the associationists on the one side and the vague generalizations of the Germanizing idealists on the other. His primary achievement was to keep alive the firmness of intellectual analysis peculiar to the epoch of Sir William...