Walter Terence Stace (17 November 1886 – 2 August 1967) was a British civil servant, educator, public philosopher and epistemologist, who wrote on Hegel, mysticism, and moral relativism. He worked with the Ceylon Civil Service from 1910 to 1932, and from 1932 to 1955 he was employed by Princeton University in the Department of Philosophy. He is most renowned for his work in the philosophy of mysticism, and for books like Mysticism and Philosophy (1960) and The Teachings of the Mystics (1960). These works have been influential in the study of mysticism, but they have also been severely criticised for their lack of methodological rigor and their perennialist pre-assumptions.
Walter Terence Stace was born on 17 November 1886 in Hampstead, London into an English military family. He was a son of Major Edward Vincent Stace (3 September 1841 – 6 May 1903) (of the Royal Artillery) and Amy Mary Watson (1856 - 29 March 1934), who were married on 21 December 1872 in Poona (Pune), India. In addition to attaining high rank in the Royal Artillery, Walter's father Edward had also served as a British Political Agent (February 1889-August 1893) in British Somaliland. Walter's great-grandfather William Stace (1755 - 31 May 1839) was Chief Commissary (Commissary-General) of the Royal Artillery during the Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815). Walter's mother Amy was a daughter of Rev. George Augustus Frederick Watson (1821-1897) and Elizabeth Mary Williams, who were married on 15 June 1852 in St. James' Church, Paddington, London. Rev. G. A. F. Watson was vicar (1877-1893) of St. Margaret's Church in Abbotsley, Huntingdonshire/Cambridgeshire.
Instead of pursuing a military career, Walter decided to follow a religious and philosophical path. He was educated at Bath College (1895-1901), Fettes College (in Edinburgh, Scotland) (1902-1904), and later at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland). His original intention was to become a priest in the Anglican Church, having experienced a religious conversion in his teens. However, while at Trinity College, through the influence of Hegel scholar Henry Stewart Macran (1867-1937) (professor of moral philosophy in Trinity College) he developed a deep interest in the systematic philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), and graduated in philosophy in 1908.
Under family pressure Stace joined the British Civil Service, and between 1910 and 1932 he served in the Ceylon Civil Service (now Sri Lanka) which was then a part of the British Empire. He held several positions in the Ceylonese government, including District Judge (1919-1920) and Mayor of Colombo (1931-1932), the capital city of Ceylon. In Colombo a street named after him (Stace Road) still exists. It was during his period in Ceylon that he developed an interest in Hinduism and Buddhism, religions which were to influence his subsequent studies of mysticism. While employed by the Ceylon Civil Service, during the period 1920-1932 Stace published 4 philosophical works (see below).
Anticipating a change in the Ceylonese government and a possible termination of his employment, in 1929 Stace earned a LittD from Trinity College after he presented the college with a thesis, The Theory of Knowledge and Existence. In 1932 this thesis was published as a book by Oxford University Press. The LittD degree, and the 4 books he had published while an employee of the Ceylon Civil Service, proved to be the keys to his entry into a new career.
After being employed for 22 years (1910-1932) in the Ceylon Civil Service, in 1932 Stace was offered the option of retirement, which he took. He then moved to Princeton University (in Princeton, New Jersey, USA) where he was employed by the Department of Philosophy, first as lecturer in Philosophy (1932-1935) and then as Stuart Professor of Philosophy (1935-1955). In 1949-1950 he was president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division). Stace retired from Princeton University in 1955. From 1955 to 1967 he held the title/status of Professor Emeritus.
Stace was married twice. His first wife, Adelaide McKechnie (born 1868 in Carlow, Ireland), was 18 years older. He married Adelaide in 1910 and they were divorced in 1924. His second wife was Blanche Bianca Beven (4 August 1897 – 17 July 1986), whom he married in 1926. Blanche was born in Colombo, Ceylon and died in Los Angeles County, California.
Walter Terence Stace died on 2 August 1967, of a heart attack at his home in Laguna Beach, California.
Stace's first 4 books - A Critical History of Greek Philosophy (1920), The Philosophy of Hegel: A Systematic Exposition (1924), The Meaning of Beauty (1929), and The Theory of Knowledge and Existence (1932) - were all published while he was employed by the Ceylon Civil Service. After these early works, his philosophy followed the British empiricist tradition of David Hume, G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and H.H. Price. However, for Stace, empiricism did not need to be confined to propositions which it is possible to demonstrate. Instead, our common sense beliefs find support in two empirical facts: (1) men's minds are similar (2) men co-operate with each other, with the aim of solving their common problems.
Stace is regarded as a pioneer in the philosophical study of mysticism. Many scholars regard Mysticism and Philosophy (1960) as his major work. Stace was the dissertation advisor of John Rawls when Rawls was a graduate student at Princeton, though it is not clear that he had a strong influence on Rawls.
Richard Marius attributed his loss of faith partly to his intellectual engagement with Stace's essay Man Against Darkness.
His work in the 1930s and 40s bears a strong influence of phenomenalism, a form of radical empiricism (not to be confused with phenomenology, which examines the structure and content of consciousness). In his first book published while at Princeton, The Theory of Knowledge and Existence (1932), Stace proposes an empirical epistemology. He attempts to "trace out the logical steps by which the mind, starting with what is given, arrives at and justifies its belief in an external world". The book can be seen as a criticism of pragmatism. His paper Refutation of Realism (1934) acted as a response to G.E. Moore's famous refutation of idealism. Stace did not argue that realism is false, but that "there is absolutely no reason for asserting" it is true, so it "ought not be believed". Turning from epistemology to ethics, in 1937 he considered whether morals were relative or subject to a general law in The Concept of Morals.
In 1948, Stace wrote an influential essay, Man Against Darkness, for The Atlantic Review in which he examined religion. He concluded that the spirit of scientific enquiry (rather than scientific discoveries themselves) has furthered religious scepticism by undermining the teleological presumption of an ultimate 'final cause'. Concern with divine purpose of events had been replaced by investigation into what had caused them; the new imaginative picture of the world was dominated by the idea that life is purposeless and meaningless. The effects of this change included moral relativity, the individualisation of morality, and the loss of belief in free will. Stace wrote:
Skepticism did not have to wait for the discoveries of Darwin and the geologists in the nineteenth century. It flooded the world immediately after the age of the rise of science.
Neither the Copernican hypothesis nor any of Newton's or Galileo's particular discoveries were the real causes. Religious faith might well have accommodated itself to the new astronomy. The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when the scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called "final causes." ... If the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends, money, fame, art, science, and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center. Hence the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless, spirit of modern man.