Henry Longueville Mansel, an English philosopher and divine, was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, London, and St. John's College, Oxford. He became tutor in his college, the first Wayneflete professor of moral and metaphysical philosophy at Oxford University in 1859, Regius professor of ecclesiastical history there in 1866, and dean of St. Paul's in 1868.

Mansel was at Oxford during the period when, after more than a century of slumbers, it was again beginning to take philosophy seriously. But whereas his Oxford contemporaries, such as Benjamin Jowett and T. H. Green, looked to Germany for their philosophy, Mansel looked to France and Scotland.

Indebted to various thinkers, especially to William Hamilton and Victor Cousin, Mansel was remarkably successful in assimilating their influences. When—as on the question of the perception of an external world—he occupied common ground with Hamilton, Mansel's version was marked by...