Collingwood - JH does not think his views differ very much from [Robert L.] Ellis: 'I readily accept his 'hierarchy of causes' and I am quite willing to receive mechanical force as the cause ultimately set in action'. Bodies affect our senses by 'impressing mechanical movements in the nerves'. By 'qualitative action' JH meant 'changes induced on the exercise of forces among the molecules of bodies - alterations of their dynamical energies which alterations I conceive cannot be the result of mere mechanical force which can but push and pull a particle but cannot alter its power to push and pull another, either temporarily or permanently'. JH thinks it likely that when a copper wire acts on a magnetic needle, a power of attraction and repulsion may be transcently communicated to its molecules. Ellis's views 'that one molecule of matter may communicate to another properties itself possesses falls in very well with this and thus power may be propagated along a chain of molecules', but he does not see what the relevance of A's motion to B 'has to do with A's power to impart to B a power to exert force'. Faraday's 'inductive action of magnetic currents effectually destroys the usual dynamical relation between force time and velocity for it makes the force by which a particle A of one wire acts on a particle B of another dependent on the relative velocity and direction of A's motion with respect to B'.
48 letters to W. H. Thompson dated 1831-1866, and 1 letter addressed to [John] Allen dated 24 Aug. 1840. Names mentioned in the accompanying calendar of the letters include Henry Alford; John Allen; Robert Leslie Ellis; Edward FitzGerald; Arthur Hallam; Walter Savage Landor; Samuel Laurence; Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton; Stephen Spring Rice; Sir Henry Taylor; Robert John Tennant; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Charles Tennyson [later Turner]; and William Wordsworth. Spedding also refers to his work on Francis Bacon.
With a further 35 letters to William Aldis Wright and William George Clark, dated 1862-1881. Letters to William George Clark date from 1862 to 1864 and relate to collations of Shakespeare's plays. Letters from 1881 to William Aldis Wright relate to Frederick James Furnivall, with copies of Spedding's letters to Furnivall, and one letter from Furnivall to Spedding dated 26 Feb. 1881. Accompanied by a mechanical copy of the Northumberland Manuscript.
Includes notes on the preface to Sir J. Mackintosh's Dissertation on the progress of ethical philosophy, and Kant's Kritik der praktischen Vernunft.
Diaries dated 1 Jan. - 27 May 1836.
Concerning the binding and delivery of the books given to Smith's prize men, Waring's Meditationes Analytica and Meditationes Algebraica.
Extracts transcribed by his mother, Mrs M. Gooden, for R. L. Ellis