"Despite his inability to build a system, Sidgwick had made Cambridge Benthamite in its social reasoning. Perhaps this development was always inevitable in a university which had aimed to turn out mathematical rather than classical curates. But it had important consequences. Only a philosophy based on a hedonistic calculus could provided exact reasoning about social policy. Alfred Marshall was a product of Sidgwick's Cambridge. On the other hand, Sidgwick left moral philosophy in a mess. Intuitionist ideas revived, with an admixture of Hegelianism, in the more dynamic form of Idealism. But its headquarters were at Oxford rather than Cambridge; its high priests the Oxford philosophers Bradley and T. H. Green. Cambridge had become too critical, too empirical, to accept its ethics in metaphysical form. The way was open for G. E. Moore to construct a Cambridge system detached from both Benthamism and metaphysics. Moore was as much a product of Sidgwick's failure as was Marshall."
Henry Sidgwick

January 1, 1970