ABSTRACT
Early in 1912 T. E. Hulme, sent down from Cambridge eight years earlier for a range of public and private misdemeanours, applied to his old college, St John’s, for reinstatement as an undergraduate.1 As part of this application he used a letter of recommendation from Henri Bergson, whom he had met, for the second time, at an international congress of philosophy the previous year in Bologna.2 Hulme had attended as a member of the Aristotelian Society, to which he had been elected in June 1910. The Aristotelian Society was a key institution in academic philosophy in Britain in the first part of the century. Its chairman was G. E. Moore, an influence upon the Bloomsbury group, but also a key figure in the subsequent development of British philosophy away from continental figures such as Bergson and towards logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy. Another pivotal anti-Bergsonian, Bertrand Russell, became President of the Aristotelian Society in 1911. Writing in 1956, Moore had no recollection of Hulme, and perhaps it was Hulme’s interest in Bergson that caused Moore to eradicate this member from his memory bank; in later years Russell did remember Hulme, if only to call him ‘an evil man who could have created nothing but evil’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 1).
