I t was in the officer’s mess of the 4th Hussars that Churchill was first exposed to sustained speculation on religious belief and moral action: On Religion…īut Bangalore a lso offered much time for talk, not all of it of a military nature. Nor, obviously, had his previous education offered much instruction concerning the relationship between religious doctrine and correct action.
#Winston churchhill professional
Yet, as with the other subjects, there was no professional tutoring or concise outline of the topic to be obtained within his vicinity. Then someone told me that Ethics were concerned not merely with the things you ought to do, but with why you ought to do them, and that there were whole books written on the subject. Judging from the context I thought they must mean “ the public school spirit, ” “ playing the game, ” “ esprit de corps, ” “ honourable behavior, ” “ patriotism, ” and the like. This sounded good, but what were Ethics? They had never been mentioned to me at Harrow or Sandhurst. Before he left England, a friend had told him Christ’s gospel was the last word in Ethics. 1 One of these perceived gaps in his education was in moral and ethical instruction. He puzzled about Socrates and read Gibbon, Macaulay, Schopenhauer, Malthus, Darwin, Plato, and Aristotle, among others, for hours every day. “What were Ethics?”Į agerly the young officer consumed classic works of history, philosophy, and politics. Recognizing that he had many gaps in his education, he sent home for books. As he recounts in My Early Life, Churchill made good use of this time. The garrison was there to maintain order, and the soldiers mostly slept or relaxed through the very hot days, turning out in the evenings for the polo matches. Churchill’s first army posting was in Bangalore, India in 1896. In terms of the higher realms of thought, we must regard him as largely self-educated-and his greatest early strides toward a moral philosophy took place in an unusual location.
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