Cath: Hall Cambridge - Thanks WW for delivering the course of lectures on Moral Philosophy at Cambridge: RB admires those 'who are able and willing to rescue it from the degradation into which it has fallen'. Moral philosophy and religion cannot be separated. Paley's views 'have done more, than any other man dead or alive, to bring the semi-divine science of morals into disrepute with the religious world and into abuse with the learned'. The holy alliance between the church and state is at stake: 'To displace Paley then, from the place he now so fatally for this country, occupies, I conceive to be the first step towards recovering'. WW should 'publish the lecture which you this morning delivered' - RB believes they would calm the 'troubled waters which are now washing away the foundations of all order, science and virtue; except the order of anarchy, the science of practical atheism and the virtue of selfishness'.
Three separate groups of material:
- An unbound notebook of miscellaneous items, which includes a dialogue between Plato and Paley, with various drawings, parts of poems and complete poems by William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a hand-drawn calendar listing plays printed in England in the 16th and 17th centuries.
- 5 copies of a pamphlet headed “Euripides (A lecture delivered in 1857)” signed W. H. T. at the end in wrappers, including one inscribed to H. Jackson and another to Professor Badham, with Thompson's corrections, and another with a note on the front indicating that it was to be revised and submitted to the Journal of Philology, with 13 copies of the offprints from that journal, vol. XI
- Catalogue of the valuable library of the Rev. W. H. Thompson, D.D., deceased…which will be sold by auction, by Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge…on the 23rd of May, 1887 & the three days following. London, [1887]. With annotations throughout by an unidentified person.
WW sends HJR a document of some customary payments owed to him from Trinity College - 'its being the last of such literary essays which you will receive from me'. All WW's duties keeping accounts have been passed on to somebody else. WW is pleased 'to hear a good account of your university [HJR was Professor of Divinity at Durham University]... I wish most heartily among other novelties you would some of you discover or write a system of morals which might take the place of Paley & Locke. Sedgwick [Adam Sedgwick] tells me he has sent you his sermon; when you read it you will see that he has declared war against both Paley & Locke. This puts them in a different footing in Cambridge from that on which they have hitherto been; for though opinions to the same effect were in very general circulation in the place, they were never I think clothed with anything like an authoritative expression before. The task of writing a system of ethics is certainly not easy, for it must not only be erected on sound principles, but so framed as to bear an advantageous comparison in its logic and execution with the best of other systems, for instance, with Paley's book - which is no easy condition. I am afraid, from what your Brit. Mag. says of Wardlaw's Christian Ethics, he has not solved this problem'.
The draft concerning Paley's Moral Philosophy carries revisions in Whewell's hand. This is accompanied by a broadsheet advertising a course of astronomical lectures by the Plumian Professor [James Challis] dated 20 Mar. 1846; a satirical election broadsheet; a leaflet about the Masons signed in print by Granville Penn at Stoke Park, Bucks. Jan. 1 1840; a facsimile of a printed copy of Friedrich Schiller's letter dated 6 Nov. 1782; a leaflet from the Académie Royale regarding a commemorative medal in honour of M. Quetelet; Dawson Turner's booklet Emblems of Saints (Jan. 1844); three printed Moral Philosophy examination questions; printed material relating to meetings of various learned societies, and other material.