Born in
Kensington,
London, on 24 June 1858, Rashdall was the son of an
Anglican priest. He was educated at
Harrow and received a scholarship for
New College, Oxford. After short tenures at
St David's University College and
University College, Durham, Rashdall was made a Fellow of first
Hertford College, Oxford, then
New College, Oxford, and dedicates his main work,
The Theory of Good and Evil (1907), to the memory of his teachers
T. H. Green and
Henry Sidgwick. The dedication is appropriate, for the particular version of utilitarianism put forward by Rashdall owes elements to both Green and Sidgwick. Whereas he holds that the concepts of good and value are logically prior to that of right, he gives right a more than instrumental significance. His idea of good owes more to Green than to the hedonistic utilitarians. "The ideal of human life is not the mere juxtaposition of distinct goods, but a whole in which each good is made different by the presence of others." Rashdall has been eclipsed as a moral philosopher by
G. E. Moore, who advocated similar views in his earlier work
Principia Ethica (1903). Rashdall was also a
Berkeleyan and advocated his own variant of
personal idealism. He rejected absolute idealism and criticised other philosophers who identified God with the absolute. He argued that there can be no matter without a perceiving mind and that God is an infinite mind, ground of all things and the supreme personality. His historical study,
The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, was described in the introduction to its recent reprinting as "one of the first comparative works on the subject" whose "scope and breadth has assured its place as a key work in intellectual history." His
The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology surveyed different approaches to the Christian doctrine of
atonement, concluding with an influential defence of the "subjective" theory of the atonement that Rashdall attributed to both
Peter Abelard and
Peter Lombard. Rashdall argued that the "objective" view of the atonement associated with
Anselm of Canterbury was inadequate, and that the most authentically Christian doctrine was that Christ's life was a demonstration of God's love so profound that Christ was willing to die rather than compromise his character. This in turn inspires believers to emulate his character and his intimacy with the Father. Rashdall may have coined the phrase "equality of opportunity". Rashdall received the degree
Doctor of Letters (DL) from New College, Oxford, in October 1901. He was president of the
Aristotelian Society from 1904 to 1907, a member of the
Christian Social Union from its inception in 1890, and was an influential
Anglican modernist theologian of the time, being appointed to a canonry in 1909. He was
Dean of Carlisle from 1917 to 1924, and died of cancer in
Worthing on 9 February 1924. He is buried in
Holywell Cemetery, Oxford. ==Selected works==