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Thomas Cogswell Upham
portrait by W. Haskell Coffin, 1915
Born	January 20, 1799  Rochester
Died	April 2, 1872  (aged 73) New York City
Occupation	Philosopher, writer
Spouse(s)	Phebe Lord Upham
Parent(s)	Nathaniel Upham

Thomas Cogswell Upham (January 30, 1799 – April 2, 1872) was an American philosopher, psychologist, educator, poet, pacifist, and religious writer. He served for more than four decades as professor of mental and moral philosophy at Bowdoin College and became known for widely used textbooks in mental philosophy. In religious literature, he was an important figure in the nineteenth-century holiness movement, especially through writings that interpreted Christian perfection, the interior life, and the works of Madame Guyon, François Fénelon, Catherine of Genoa, and other mystical authors for American Protestant readers.

Life and academic career

Upham was born in Deerfield, New Hampshire, the son of Nathaniel Upham and Judith Cogswell Upham. His father later served in the United States House of Representatives. Upham graduated from Dartmouth College in 1818 and from Andover Theological Seminary in 1821. He taught Hebrew at Andover from 1821 to 1823, served briefly as a Congregational minister in Rochester, New Hampshire, and then joined the faculty of Bowdoin College, where he became professor of mental and moral philosophy in 1824 or 1825 and remained until his retirement in 1867 or 1868.

His Elements of Mental Philosophy, first published in the 1820s and later revised and expanded, became a standard American textbook. Patricia A. Ward describes Upham's work as a synthesis of epistemology and psychology drawing on John Locke, French sensationalism, Scottish empiricism, Jonathan Edwards, and Immanuel Kant. David Bundy states that Mental Philosophy appeared in fifty-seven editions over a seventy-three-year period. His textbooks helped define the teaching of "mental philosophy" in American colleges before psychology emerged as an experimental discipline.

Psychology and moral philosophy

Upham's psychology belonged to the period before psychology emerged as a separate experimental discipline. His work combined Scottish common sense realism, moral philosophy, and religious anthropology. Todd L. Adams identifies him as one of several prominent early nineteenth-century American philosophers who followed the common-sense realism of Thomas Reid, and as one of the first Americans in that tradition to publish widely on a range of philosophical topics.

Upham divided mental phenomena into the understanding or intellect, the sensibilities, and the will, while maintaining that the mind itself was indivisible. In this scheme, the intellect included such functions as perception, attention, memory, association, and reasoning; the sensibilities included appetites, desires, affections, and moral emotions; and the will was the faculty by which volitions were put forth.

His account of volition was developed in A Philosophical and Practical Treatise on the Will (1834). Adams argues that Upham used the distinction between desires and volitions to criticize determinist readings of the will, especially those indebted to Jonathan Edwards. For Upham, natural desires and feelings of moral obligation could stand before the will in conflict, and moral agency required that the will be able to choose between them.

At the same time, Upham rejected Reid's doctrine of agent causality because he feared that it made acts of will contingent and therefore irrational or capricious. He instead argued that motives were causes, while distinguishing between "preparative" and "effective" causes in order to preserve both causality and freedom. Adams concludes that this position left Upham in a dilemma: he wished to affirm free agency against determinism while also insisting that volitions were governed by law rather than chance.

Upham also contributed to early American writing on abnormal psychology. Adams notes that Outlines of Imperfect and Disordered Mental Actions (1840) treated abnormal operations of the mind, distinguished partial from total alienation, and regarded mental alienation as admitting degrees and requiring individual treatment. Darius L. Salter likewise presents Upham as an important nineteenth-century figure in the relation between mental philosophy, religious experience, and holiness theology.

Religious thought and holiness teaching

Upham became associated with the nineteenth-century holiness movement after an experience of sanctification in 1839–1840. His wife, Phebe Lord Upham, had first come into contact with holiness teaching, and Ward notes that she brought him to one of Phoebe Palmer's Tuesday meetings in New York. These meetings had originally been for women, but Phebe Upham asked permission to bring her husband; Upham later became an influential interpreter of Madame Guyon and Fénelon for the holiness movement. Salter similarly emphasizes the importance of Palmer's circle for Upham's entrance into the holiness movement and for the widening of the Tuesday Meeting beyond its original female constituency.

Upham's holiness writings joined Wesleyan and Methodist accounts of entire sanctification to the older literature of the interior life. In Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life and The Life of Faith, he presents holiness as a state of inward conformity to the divine will, marked by faith, self-renunciation, pure love, and rest in God. Ward describes his works as primers that translated the tradition of interior holiness for an American readership shaped by mid-nineteenth-century perfectionist aspirations.

Ward argues that Upham united Wesleyan holiness with the Edwardsian tradition of disinterested benevolence and, like Palmer, made the experience of holiness more acceptable to middle-class Protestant readers. Salter presents this synthesis as a characteristic union of spirit and intellect: Upham interpreted sanctification through categories drawn from mental philosophy, moral agency, habit, inward harmony, and religious experience. His writings therefore helped carry holiness teaching beyond Methodism into other Protestant settings, including New England Congregationalism.

Mysticism and divine union

Upham's later religious writings developed a Protestant mystical theology centred on divine union, pure love, inward rest, and the surrender of the will. A Treatise on Divine Union (1851) describes its subject as the relation between God and humanity in the higher forms of religious experience. In its preface, Upham places his teaching in relation to Augustine of Hippo, Johannes Tauler, Johann Arndt, Henry Scougal, Jonathan Edwards, and writers on sanctification in the present life.

The treatise presents divine union as the restoration of the divine image in the soul rather than as forgiveness alone. Upham argues that the soul must be restored through a renewed participation in divine life, so that the person is brought into union with God in faith, knowledge, love, will, providence, redemption, and rest. The book's structure reflects Upham's attempt to bring the whole person—intellect, affections, will, conduct, and social life—into relation with God.

The sections on the will are especially important for Upham's theology. He treats the union of the human and divine will, degrees of union with God's will, the training of the will to habits of subjection, and the relation of suffering to union. The final part of the book describes the peace or rest of the soul in a state of union, including rest from anxious reasoning, restless desires, fears, conflicts with providence, and anxieties of labour.

Although the language of rest, quietude, and surrender connects Upham with Catholic and Quaker mystical traditions, his presentation is framed within Protestant holiness theology. Ward writes that the American reception of Guyon and Fénelon centred on themes such as the interior way, pure or disinterested love, submission to the will of God, Christian perfection, union with God, quietude, rest, and stillness. Salter argues that Upham maintained a critical distance from mystical sources when interpreting language about annihilation, loss of will, indifference, and union with God, understanding divine union chiefly as moral, spiritual, and religious conformity rather than as a fusion of substance or the erasure of personality.

Guyon, Fénelon, and Catholic mystical writers

Upham was among the most important nineteenth-century American Protestant interpreters of Madame Guyon and François Fénelon. His two-volume Life and Religious Opinions and Experience of Madame de La Mothe Guyon appeared in 1846 and was reprinted in several editions.

Ward argues that Upham placed Guyon and Fénelon within a lineage of interior piety and Christian perfection that could be read by American holiness Protestants as a tradition of "living examples". For Upham, Guyon exemplified pure love and the sanctifying power of religion. Ward notes that he concluded his account of Guyon with the expectation that sanctification would receive philosophical, practical, and exegetical exposition, tested by living examples.

Upham also wrote a biography of Catherine of Genoa, published as Life of Madame Catharine Adorna, presenting her religious experience as an illustration of holiness. Ward notes that the Guide to Christian Perfection and later Guide to Holiness published extracts from Guyon, Fénelon, Miguel de Molinos, Catherine of Genoa, Francis de Sales, Gregory Lopez, and Francis of Assisi during the 1840s and 1850s, and that Upham's writings helped American holiness readers claim kinship with Catholic mystical experience.

Ethics, pacifism, and reform

Upham was associated with Christian pacifism and published The Manual of Peace in 1836. The work discussed the evils of war, possible remedies for war, the law of nations, and the idea of a congress of nations. A 1915 newspaper profile later called him Bowdoin College's "gentle apostle of peace".

Salter treats Upham's pacifism, opposition to capital punishment, views on slavery, and concern for social redemption as expressions of his holiness ethic rather than as isolated reform opinions. Upham's moral thought emphasized the inviolability of life, the discipline of the will, disinterested love, and the reform of social relations through sanctified character.

Although sympathetic to antislavery sentiment, Upham was not a radical abolitionist. He was associated with the American Colonization Society and placed strong emphasis on peace, law, and social order.

Relationship with Harriet Beecher Stowe

Upham and his family were close to Harriet Beecher Stowe during her residence in Brunswick, Maine. Stowe described the Upham household as "delightful... such a perfect sweetness and quietude in all its movements... It is a beautiful pattern of a Christian family." Stowe and Upham differed sharply, however, over abolitionism and obedience to law. In a letter to her sister, Stowe recalled arguing with him about whether he would obey the law if a fugitive slave came to him.

Reception and criticism

Later Reformed critics treated Upham as a major representative of mystical perfectionism. Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield devoted a long study to "The Mystical Perfectionism of Thomas Cogswell Upham", first published in The Union Seminary Review in 1920–1922 and later included in Studies in Perfectionism.

Writing from a strongly anti-perfectionist Calvinist standpoint, Warfield argued that Upham attempted to revive elements of seventeenth-century Quietist perfectionism and adapt them to nineteenth-century American Protestant life. He claimed that Upham drew on a series of Quietist and mystical writers, from Molinos to Antoinette Bourignon, and reshaped their teachings into what Warfield regarded as a form of evangelical Protestantism. Warfield criticized Upham's doctrine as tending to identify inward religious states with perfection and warned that perfectionist systems could encourage believers to mistake imperfection for perfection.

Warfield nevertheless recognized the wide circulation of Upham's writings. He noted that Upham's books went through many editions, were republished in England, and continued to be read among adherents of the Keswick movement. His polemic is therefore significant not only as criticism but also as evidence that Upham's writings were understood by later Reformed theologians as an important form of Protestant mystical perfectionism. Salter devotes sustained attention to Warfield's critique, treating it as a major twentieth-century Reformed assessment of Upham's theology but not as the final word on his significance.

Later scholarship has treated Upham in a less polemical manner. Salter's Spirit and Intellect: Thomas Upham's Holiness Theology examines him as a theologian of holiness who interpreted sanctification through mental philosophy, religious experience, and spiritual psychology. Ward places him within the broader American reception of Guyon and Fénelon and argues that his appropriation of Catholic mystical writers allowed American Protestants to interpret their own holiness experience as continuous with a wider tradition of experimental theology. Adams, writing in the history of American philosophy, treats Upham's theory of the will as an important but unstable attempt to reconcile freedom, moral responsibility, common-sense realism, and causality.

Selected works

• Upham, Thomas C. (1822). American Sketches: Farmer's Fireside, a Poem. Concord, N.H.: Hill and Moore.
• Upham, Thomas C. (1827). Elements of Intellectual Philosophy. Portland, Maine: Shirley and Hyde.
• Upham, Thomas C. (1831). Elements of Mental Philosophy. Boston and Portland.
• Upham, Thomas C. (1834). A Philosophical and Practical Treatise on the Will. Portland, Maine: William Hyde.
• Upham, Thomas C. (1835). The Religious Offering. New York: Leavitt, Lord & Co.
• Upham, Thomas C. (1836). The Manual of Peace, Embracing I. Evils and Remedies of War; II. Suggestions on the Law of Nations; III. Considerations of a Congress of Nations. New York: Leavitt, Lord and Co.
• Upham, Thomas C. (1840). Outlines of Imperfect and Disordered Mental Action. New York: Harper & Brothers.
• Upham, Thomas C. (1843). Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life: Designed Particularly for the Consideration of Those Who Are Seeking Assurance of Faith and Perfect Love. Boston: Waite, Pierce.
• Upham, Thomas C. (1846). Life and Religious Opinions and Experience of Madame de La Mothe Guyon: Together with Some Account of the Personal History and Religious Opinions of Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambray. New York: Harper & Brothers.
• Upham, Thomas C. (1850). American Cottage Life, A Book of Poems. Boston: American Tract Society.
• Upham, Thomas C. (1851). A Treatise on Divine Union, Designed to Point Out Some of the Intimate Relations Between God and Man in the Higher Forms of Religious Experience. Boston: C. H. Peirce and Company.
• Upham, Thomas C. (1852). The Life of Faith. New York: Harper & Brothers.
• Upham, Thomas C. (1858). Life of Madame Catharine Adorna, Including Some Leading Facts and Traits in Her Religious Experience. New York: Harper & Brothers.
• Upham, Thomas C. (1858). Principles of Interior or Hidden Life (8th ed.). New York: Harper & Brothers.
• Upham, Thomas C. (1869). Mental Philosophy. Vol. 1. The Intellect. New York: Harper & Brothers.
• Upham, Thomas C. (1869). Mental Philosophy. Vol. 2. The Sensibilities and Will. New York: Harper & Brothers.
• Upham, Thomas C. (1877). Life and Religious Opinions and Experience of Madame Guyon. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Further reading

• Adams, Todd L. (Summer 1992). "Agency Theory: The Dilemma of Thomas C. Upham". Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. 28 (3): 547–568. JSTOR 40320375.
• Bundy, David (1998). "Thomas Cogswell Upham and the Establishment of a Tradition of Ethical Reflection". Encounter. 59 (1–2).
• Salter, Darius L. (1986). Spirit and Intellect: Thomas Upham's Holiness Theology. Studies in Evangelicalism. Vol. 7. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-1899-6.
• Ward, Patricia A. (2009). Experimental Theology in America: Madame Guyon, Fénelon, and Their Readers. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press. ISBN 978-1-60258-197-5.
• Warfield, Benjamin Breckinridge (1932). Studies in Perfectionism. Vol. 2. New York: Oxford University Press.

External links

• "The Legacy of Thomas Cogswell Upham: An American Psychology of Holiness and Peace". John Uebersax. August 5, 2010.
• "Thomas C. Upham". The Online Books Page. University of Pennsylvania.