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MR. THOMAS CASE

PHILOSOPHER AND POLITICIAN

FROM The Times, NOVEMBER 2, 1925

MR. THOMAS CASE

PHILOSOPHER AND POLITICIAN

FROM The Times, NOVEMBER 2, 1925.

WE announce with much regret that Mr. Thomas Case, formerly President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, died at Falmouth from heart failure on Saturday at the age of 81. Philosopher and politician, Aristotelian and architect, cricketer and musician, professor and president, Mr. Case was a man of extraordinary intellectual gifts and strong and attractive personality, who left his mark not only on Oxford, but also on the world outside.

Thomas Case was born on July 14, 1844, the son of Mr. Robert Case, of Liverpool. It gave him great satisfaction when in 1914 he completed his 70th year, for he said he could meet Aristotle in the next world with a clearer conscience having completed the Blos Téλelos. He was sent to Rugby School, then under Dr. Temple, and made a name there for intellectual ability, original character, and high excellence in both cricket and football. He came up to Balliol in 1863 as a commoner, and was the pupil of the Rev. Edward Woollcombe, of whom he had more than one good story to tell. He took firsts in Moderations in 1865, and in Lit. Hum. in 1867.

In 1869 he was elected a Fellow of Brasenose. For a very short time he went on the Stock Exchange. But he used to say that Aristotle had spoiled his nerve for money-making. Be that as it may, he certainly deliberately chose the theoretic' rather than thechrematistic' life, for he returned to Oxford and became lecturer and tutor of Balliol from 1870 to 1876. He had already proved an excellent

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private coach, and he now showed himself a singularly successful lecturer and tutor, being exact, methodical, lucid, and logical, in a very unusual degree, and at the same time winning the interest of his pupils by his geniality, his lively sallies, and even rollicking humour, his strong common sense, and his devotion to their interest in the schools and in after-life. Case was equally strong in Greek history, in logic, whether for Mods' or 'Greats', and in moral and metaphysical philosophy, being, before all, a thorough and all-round Aristotelian. His first published work was Materials for the History of Athenian Democracy from Solon to Pericles, published in 1874, and his second, Realism in Morals (1877).

From 1883 to 1889 he was lecturer in Greek history at Christ Church, and in 1889, on the death of that eminent Aristotelian of the previous generation, Professor Chandler, he was elected, against a very strong field, to the Waynflete Chair of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, and became a Fellow of Magdalen College, of which society a former pupil had been elected President four years earlier. He held this post for 21 years, until 1910. For the last six of these he was also President of Corpus, and the Visitor, Bishop Ryle, having ruled, much to his surprise, that this was legal, he remained a Fellow of Magdalen, just as his pupil, Henry Pelham, combined the Headship of Trinity with a Professorship and Fellowship at Brasenose.

Case's success as a professor was not quite in proportion to what he had achieved as a college tutor. This was partly because, as has been indicated, his kind of philosophy, inclining rather to the older English 'Natural Philosophy' of the eighteenth century and the early portion of the nineteenth, had become less fashionable at Oxford after the effort of T. H. Green and other Transcendentalists in the 'seventies and 'eighties. For Case was, as J. A.

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