In 1933 McLuhan obtained his bachelor’s degree from the university and won a University Gold Medal in Arts and Science. (…)  McLuhan’s gold medal along with recommendations from professors such as R.C. Lodge — who called McLuhan his “most outstanding” student — ensured that he would have no problem being accepted at Cambridge. (Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, 32 and 34.)

From the very first note included in his published Letters — McLuhan to his mother, Elsie, on February 19, 1931 — it appears that McLuhan had decided as a nineteen year-old that Rupert Lodge was an exceptional talent at the University of Manitoba and that he needed to work with him:¹

Next year² I shall throw myself into Philosophy and leave the English for the summers. I shall certainly attend very few lectures in English. (Letters 9)

Then, in his job-seeking letter from December 1935 to E.K. Brown, the new head of the UM English department (appointed after McLuhan had left Winnipeg in 1934), McLuhan would write from Cambridge: 

I wish merely to introduce myself as one of the products of some of the leanest years of the Manitoba English Department. The last year was somewhat relieved by the presence of Dr. Wheeler³, but I had directed my energies to philosophy, and did my best work for Professor Lodge. (Letters 79)

The two letters were written almost five years apart and yet they show a remarkable continuity. Halfway through his third year at UM (second in English), McLuhan had identified the path that he would follow over the next three years as he completed his B.A. and M.A. degrees there — namely, he would work chiefly with a professor outside his major, Rupert Lodge in philosophy.

A close personal and intellectual relationship grew up between the two.⁴ Since both had a strong theoretical bent, their personal and intellectual relations could hardly have been strictly compartmentalized, but McLuhan (as he came to realize himself at Cambridge) had further to grow personally in order to understand (and thereby to share) Lodge’s intellectual insights.

A remarkable portrait of McLuhan is preserved in a paper which Lodge published in 1934 in the Dalhousie Review, ‘Philosophy and Education‘. In the paper Lodge characterized what he held to be the three basic forms of all human experience — realism, idealism and pragmatism⁵ — in terms of education. Some one of these basic forms must always already be in place to the exclusion of the other two, he held, whenever any sort of human experience unfolds. His idea in ‘Philosophy and Education’ was to illustrate these three forms in terms of the fundamentally different kinds of pupils, teachers and education administrators which are pro-duced from their varying assumption.

Here is Lodge describing what he termed “the idealist pupil” (as contrasted with “the realist pupil” and “the pupil with a pragmatist outlook”):

He feels drawn toward persons rather than subjects, and has a tendency toward hero-worship. Merely to associate with some of the teachers, altogether apart from taking courses with them, seems to help him.⁶ Others, he avoids.⁷ However great their objective knowledge, he feels that he has “nothing to learn” from them. When he looks back over his school life, in later years, he finds that the books which were “vital” were not the painfully accurate, up-to-the-last-minute textbooks which bristled with objective footnotes, but the books which, whatever their objective shortcomings, had about them some touch of greatness.

In this portrait of “the idealist pupil” there seems to have been a two-way influence between Lodge and McLuhan. For Lodge almost certainly formulated his description of how an ‘idealist” student thought and behaved taking McLuhan as his model. And McLuhan eventually accepted this description from Lodge as an accurate depiction of how he had experienced the world at the University of Manitoba. At the same time, Lodge’s insistence on the plurality of truth served as a way-marker to McLuhan of how he would have to grow if he were to overcome his provincial limitation to a singular “idealist” bent of mind and become e-ducated — that is, be ex-posed to multiple truths.⁸

Confirmation of these rather surprising claims may be found in letters McLuhan wrote to his mother, Elsie, and to E.K. Brown (already cited above) in the fall of 1935 when he had entered his second and last undergraduate year at Cambridge.

The great difficulty about Truth is that it is not simple [he wrote to Elsie] except to those who can attain to see it whole [that is, in its fundamental plurality]. The very definition of an enthusiast is that he has seized a truth which he cannot and would not if he could, relate to other truths of life. He is invariably unsympathetic and lacking in humanity. l have some elements of enthusiasm which have been more than occupied in hero-worship —- e.g. Macaulay and Chesterton. Them days is gone forever but I shall always think that my selection of heroes was fortunate. Both were calculated to suppress effectively any tendency I had towards harping on one truth at a time. (McLuhan letter to his mother, September 5, 1935, Letters 72)

McLuhan returned again and again in this letter to Lodge’s view that “truth (…) is not simple”, that there are always “other truths of life”, that there is something both blind and wrong about “harping on one truth”.  Further, in specifying that he had “some elements of enthusiasm which have been more than occupied in hero-worship” he was identifying the way he had been at UM  (now “gone forever”) with Lodge’s portrait of “the idealist pupil” and its “tendency toward hero-worship”.

He made a similar admission in his letter to Brown three months later:

until I came to the Cambridge English School, my principal qualification was a boundless enthusiasm for great books, great events, and great men. Dr. Richards and Dr. Leavis have proved to be a useful supplement and corrective to that attitude.  (McLuhan letter to E.K. Brown, December 12, 1935, Letters 79)

At Manitoba McLuhan had self-admittedly been Lodge’s “idealist pupil”, with “a tendency toward hero-worship“, for whom “the books which were ‘vital’ (…) had about them some touch of greatness“. Indeed, in articles he wrote in the Manitoban, only months before he would leave UM for Cambridge, he gave clear evidence of this “idealist” commitment:

Shakespeare (…) no more questioned the health and value of the great traditions that he inherited than a flower disputes the value of the ambient air or the nature of the soil beneath. Men become great only when they accept with gusto a great tradition made by millions before them. (‘George Meredith, Feminist?‘, Manitoban, Nov 21,1933)

Two years ago certain active and noble-spirited students voluntarily undertook to make a comprehensive report of the state of that vital community within the [general] community which is our university. It [“that vital community”] is to the [general] community what the head is to the body. (‘Stupid Student Apathy‘, Manitoban, February 13, 1934)

Whoever reads Newman or “Q”⁹ on education will discover the simplicity that is the effect of  profundity in the minds of a few great men.  (‘Adult Education‘, Manitoban, Feb 16, 1934)¹⁰

According to Lodge, such emphasis on the “vital” and on “greatness” and “hero-worship” was typical of “idealism” — but “idealism” was only one of multiple possible basic approaches to experience. So when McLuhan began at Cambridge to appreciate other manners of experience¹¹ as a “supplement and corrective to that attitude” he had had at Manitoba, it was actually first of all Lodge, not Richards or Leavis or anyone else there, who was his mentor and spur in this process.¹²

Whether McLuhan appreciated the fundamental role played by Lodge in his education is questionable (although correspondence in the Ottawa papers shows that the two remained in touch until at least 1945). But Lodge and McLuhan himself frequently argued that the dominants of our experience are rarely conscious.