STEPHEN, SIR LESLIE (1832-1904), English philosopher and man of letters, son of Sir James Stephen, was born in London on Nov. 28, 1832. He was educated at Eton, at King's college, London, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. In 1854 Stephen obtained a Goodbehere fellowship, and was ordained deacon on Dec. 21, 1855, becoming a priest in 1859. In 1856 he was ad mitted to a junior tutorship at Trinity Hall. He was a good athlete and a mountaineer. His first ascent was in 1857 (Col du Geant), and he made many others in the following years, until his first marriage in 1867. He was president of the Alpine club from 1865 to 1868, and editor of the Alpine Journal from 1868 to 1871. His accounts of his mountaineering feats were published in various journals, and collected in The Playground of Europe (1871). In the meantime, during his residence at Trinity Hall, his philosophical studies led him to abandon the orthodox theological position, and in 1875 he relinquished his orders. He interested himself in university politics, and advocated the need for exami nation reforms. During the American Civil War he was greatly in sympathy with the North, and in 1863 visited America to investigate the situation. On his return he published The Times and the American War by L. S. (1865), in answer to English arguments in support of the South. Stephen came to London in 1864, with useful recommendations from his brother Sir J. Fitz james Stephen. He contributed for many years to the Saturday Review, and from 1865 co-operated with George Smith in the foundation of the Pall Mall Gazette. From Oct. 1866 to Aug. 1873 he contributed political articles to the Nation. His literary criticisms for the Cornhill Magazine (from 1866) were collected from time to time in separate volumes, as Hours in a Library (1874, 1876 and 1879). In 1871 he became editor of the Corn hill, and during the II years of his editorship the magazine made a reputation by its literary excellence. R. L. Stevenson, Thomas
Hardy, Henry James and Edmund Gosse were among his con tributors. In his Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking (1873) Stephen challenged the dogmas of popular religion. His History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols., 1876), later extended into The English Utilitarians (1900), re mains a standard work on the subject. He married in 1867 the younger daughter of W. M. Thackeray, and in 1868 visited America with her, where he met Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes the younger.
In Nov. 1882 George Smith made Stephen editor of the Dic tionary of National Biography, which he conducted until April 1891, continuing to contribute until 1901. His first wife died in 1875, and in 1878 he married again. In his later years he was greatly affected by the death first of his brother James (1894), and shortly afterwards (1895) of his wife. One of his daughters, Mrs. Virginia Woolf, is separately noticed in this book. Stephen received many marks of distinction, and in 1902 was made K.C.B. He continued his literary work almost to the end of his life, and his last books were a monograph on Hobbes (1904), and his Ford lectures, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century, published on the day of his death, Feb. 22, 1904. His work, both philosophical and literary, is remarkable for the sincerity of the author's outlook, and for his unprejudiced judgments. He wrote also Social Rights and Duties (1896); Science and Ethics (1882) ; An Agnostic's Apology (1893) Studies of a Biographer (2 vols., two series, 1899 and 1902), and monographs for the "English Men of Letters" series.
See F. W. Maitland, Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906) Sir Sidney Lee, Principles of Biography (the Leslie Stephen lecture, 1911).