Pflug’s PREFACE for the STACE Autobiography on British Colonial Ceylon

Bernd Pflug ** .… PREFACE

 The purpose of this book is to present a first-hand account of a British member of the Ceylon Civil Service in the first half of the twentieth century. Walter Terence Stace was a member of the Ceylon Civil Service from 1910 to 1932. In 1964, he wrote an autobiography, till date unpublished, entitled Footprints on Water, the major part of which deals with his life and work in Ceylon. These chapters on Ceylon are published here as a book.

  Pflug

Stace

First-hand accounts are primary sources and the basis of historical research. Read uncritically, they would be part of a memoir-culture which prefers nostalgia to detached insight, and telling a good story to a reflective narrative. Stace’s account weaves effortlessly and skilfully the personal with the specific, and the factual with the ideological. His account is empirical and philosophical; his judgements are cautious and reasoned without forcing the reader to follow suit at any cost. He leaves many things unsaid but comes across as a sincere writer and thinker not sparing himself some blushes when he tells us about awkward moments in his life. His account is a valuable source for the on-going explanation of the mosaic and predicament of British rule in Ceylon. Stace’s book offers not only the professional historian of ideas but everyone who is interested in the recent history of Sri Lanka a practical and intellectual view of colonial rule in Ceylon. His clear and lucid style of writing makes it easy to enjoy and understand his narration and thought.

Walter Terence Stace was born in London on 17 November 1886 and died in Laguna Beach, California, The United States, on 2 August 1967. He received his schooling in various, rather obscure and in today’s views rather eccentric, private schools in Wales and Scotland and his B.A. degree in Philosophy from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. His professional career was marked by two completely different vocations, first as a British colonial civil servant in Ceylon from 1910 to 1932, and then as a teacher of philosophy at Princeton University in the United States from 1932 to 1955, first as lecturer then as Stuart Professor of Philosophy. During his colonial service and thereafter he developed a critical view of colonialism which on a psychological level shows a deep sympathy for humankind, but is somewhat short in arguments of political and economic insight.

Stace was a prolific academic writer both during his time in Ceylon and at Princeton, but also after his retirement and until his last days. To many, his most important philosophical contributions were in the philosophy of mysticism with Mysticism and Philosophy (1960) his best-known work. In this study he tried to reconcile empiricism and mysticism claiming that the mystical experience is the same in all cultures though its interpretations vary widely from culture to culture, and that genuine empiricism could not ignore the mystical experience simply because it is logically paradoxical.

From early on, Stace’s intention was not to become a specialist philosopher but an intellectual who was able to cover the major disciplines of philosophy – ethics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and epistemology – and to make philosophy popular and comprehensible to general readers. Contrary to many philosophers of his generation, he believed in the task of philosophy to make sense of the great questions of humankind.

I heard of Stace for the first time in 2008 when I was told, in Colombo, that he had been the mayor of the city in the early 1930s. A short while later, I recognised him also as the author of A Critical History of Greek Philosophy (1920) of which I had acquired an Indian reprint. Around the same time, I found in a pile of unsorted material (part of the “Research Collection”) in the library of the University of Colombo his booklet Buddhism and Western Thought (1914) of which I failed, to my regret, to secure a photocopy. Fortunately, a copy of this booklet is accessible in the library of the University of Kelaniya, Colombo, and the British Library in London. For several years thereafter, I did not think of Stace because I was more interested in reading about Leonard Woolf’s life and work in Ceylon from 1904 to 1911, next to my research in the history of anthropology in Bombay in the 20 th century.

Years later, in 2018, I read that a typescript by Stace consisting of the Ceylon chapters of his unpublished autobiography was kept in the Special Collections of the Library of the University of London. I read its 120 odd pages with growing interest, not only because of its attempt to assess British colonialism, but also because of its simple and reader-friendly style, a rarity amongst philosophers. In these chapters Stace is open and candid about his life and work in Ceylon from 1910 to 1932 combining the reflection on personal experience with the analysis of the greater picture of service, society, and colonialism. Once the idea of a publication of these chapters had taken root, I tried to get a copy of the whole typescript of Stace’s autobiography. I was fortunate enough to do so with the help of Stace’s daughter, Jennifer Stace, who lived in the United States for most of her life and now lives in Mexico (sadly Jennifer died suddenly in December 2022, aged 88), and Michael Stace, a member of the New Zealand branch of the Stace family and a researcher in the history of the large Stace family. From the very beginning, both Jennifer and Michael have been very supportive in encouraging and aiding my efforts to put the present book together. Malcolm McKinnon, the New Zealand historian, and author of Asian Cities: globalization, urbanization and nation building (Copenhagen 2011) gave valuable suggestions for the editorial work.

Fortunately, the original typescript of the autobiography has been for the past four decades, and is still with a descendant of W.T. Stace’s first wife, Adelaide Vaughan Cooke; a photocopy of this typescript was made earlier and kept with Michael Stace; from this photocopy a new typescript was created in 2018 and deposited with the Archives and Special Collections of the University of London in 2021 (File 100/3). A special thanks to Catherine Eileen Ivie, a granddaughter of W.T. Stace from his first marriage to Adelaide, for providing me with valuable family background information, and to both Catherine and her husband, James Ivie, for helping with thoughtful comments on my Introduction.

The original typescript of Stace’s autobiography of 1964 consists of 273 pages; it is here referred to as Stace OT, 1964; the newly created typescript of 2018 runs into 148 pages and is henceforth referenced as Stace NT, 2018; page numbers quoted in the following Introduction are those of the copy deposited in the Special Collections of the Library of the University of London. The text in this book follows this new transcript in which typographical errors, some spellings, and some stylistic forms contained in the original typescript have been changed or corrected.

Stace’s autobiography consists of 20 chapters and one annex. The first four chapters deal with his childhood, school days, stays at the family estate in Ireland, and his years as a student at Trinity College. His undergraduate years were a curious mix of trying out poetry and theology, with the final decision to try his luck in philosophy, with H.E. Macran, a Hegel scholar at Trinity, to become the dominant influence on his philosophical commitment.

Chapters 5 and 6 of his autobiography are accounts of the two years (1908-1910) in which he prepared for his career in the civil service with the opportunistic decision to finally go to Ceylon. Why and how Stace chose to get married in 1910 and how this had a direct bearing on his choosing a career as a civil servant in Ceylon, is more than comic. It is breath-taking in its calculating pragmatism and in its absence of any deeper affinity with the country he chose to work in. Because these chapters are important in order to know about Stace’s motives to join the colonial service in Ceylon, I feel justified to include them here as the opening chapters of the book. These two chapters are then followed by the ten chapters of his autobiography in which he describes, and reflects on, his time in Ceylon. The present book contains these twelve chapters with the title, British Colonialism in Ceylon, given by the editor.

The final four chapters of Stace’s autobiography deal first with his time at Princeton and his meetings and relationships with Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and Albert Einstein; and second with questions and problems of ‘religion’ and ‘East-West’ philosophy’. The autobiography ends abruptly with a meditation on death and an annex which is an account from the military officer who reported on the flying accident of Stace’s son, Noel, who died in 1960 while trying to land his fighter jet on an aircraft carrier near Okinawa.

The file with the typescript of Stace’s Ceylon chapters in the University of London also contains part of a letter written by a colleague and friend of Stace in the Ceylon Civil Service, H.E. Newnham, who was asked to comment on Stace’s Ceylon account. The extract of this letter is produced in the present book as an annex.

I have read Stace’s autobiography many a time over the past years. From the beginning I liked the openness of the author, his calmness and humour, his candid comments, and his humane attitude. With quite a few of his observations I do agree, having lived in the Subcontinent for more than three decades. Yet I do not agree with Stace on some of his cliché-like assessments of ‘the Buddhists’ or ‘the Indians’, and when he shows a near total ignorance of the deep social and economic impact of colonialism and argues, instead, in favour of its ‘civilising’ role. However, for me the most attractive aspect of his life and work in Ceylon is his ‘oddly mixed-up life’ as a colonial civil servant and a philosopher, a problem which I propose to elucidate in the following introductory essay.

Bernd Pflug