Constance Naden (1858-1889)

Naden was born in Birmingham in January 1858 and was brought up by her Baptist grandparents, who sent her to a Unitarian school. Upon leaving school in 1875, she travelled around Europe, met her life-long friend and fellow philosopher Robert Lewins, began learning German, Latin, and Greek, and started taking an interest in science and freethinking philosophies. She returned to studying in 1879, first taking classes in botany, French and German at the Birmingham and Midland Institute and then enrolling at the Mason College of Science (which later became the University of Birmingham), where she studied geology, chemistry, physics, zoology, and physiology between 1881 and 1887. In 1887 Naden was made the first female Associate of the college in recognition of her achievements. Her studies were bookended by the publication of her two volumes of poetry – Songs and Sonnets of Springtime (1881) and A Modern Apostle; The Elixir of Life; The Story of Clarice, and other poems (1887) – in which she expressed her lyric engagement with the natural world, her comic observations about modern society, and the development of her philosophical ideas.

Naden’s scientific education was crucial to her philosophical thinking. As William Tilden (Professor of Chemistry) declared: ‘No inducements seemed sufficient to prevail upon her to become a mere scientific specialist’ – she studied to acquire knowledge of each discipline as a foundation for her synthetic philosophy (Memoir 68). In the first half of the 1880s she worked with Lewins to propose an atheist philosophy called Hylo-Idealism, which focused on finding ‘unity in diversity’. In an essay published in the Journal of Science in 1883, she explained the central tenet of this ‘Brain Theory of Mind and Matter’:

William R. Hughes, a friend and fellow thinker, wrote that Naden’s death in December 1889 ‘deprived the world of a fine and original thinker, Birmingham of its most gifted daughter, [and] progressive Science of a most distinguished worker’ (Memoir, 3). Obituaries in the local and national press were followed by a memoir written by four of her friends, and Lewins rapidly commissioned a marble memorial bust by William Henry Tyler, which originally sat in the Mason College library and is now displayed in the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham.

Her writings faded from view before the end of the nineteenth century, however, and it is only in the past three decades that her poetry and philosophy have come to be remembered. Nonetheless, Naden’s dedication to the ideal of a secular society with its foundations in rational thought rather than dogmatic faith (whether religious or secular) remains relevant. Her endeavours were rooted in ‘the reconciliation of poetry, philosophy, and science’ (Further Reliques, 126) – in Naden’s life and writings we find a model for working towards this goal.