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Trinity College, Cambridge.—Discusses various mathematical and philosophical topics. He and Crotch went see Body speak, and were impressed by his ‘mystic earnestness and apostleship’.

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Transcript

Trin. Coll. Camb.
April 2/70

Dear Fred—I forgot altogether to write any word of comfort about your class: and now hear that the wicked have ceased from troubling you for a season. Several new ideas have come to me lately: first, I have procured Lobatschewsky, Études Géométriques sur la Théorie des Parallèles, trans. by Houel, Gauthier-Villars, 1866 {1}—a small tract, of which Gauss, therein quoted, says “l’auteur a traité la matière en main de maître et avec le veritable esprit géométrique. Je crois devoir appeler votre attention sur ce livre, dont la lecture ne peut manquer de vous causer le plus vif plaisir”. It is quite simple, merely Euclid without the vicious assumption, but the way the things come out of one another is quite lovely.

2. The science of continuous quantity is founded on the fact that you may add together a finite number of quantities in any order and they will always come to the same sum. Lejeune Dirichlet made the exceedingly important remark that this is not true of an infinite number of quantities; e.g. 1/2 – 1/3 + 1/4 – 1/5 + &c is not the same as 1/2 + 1/4 – 1/3 + 1/6 + 1/8 – 1/5 + &c, though both are perfectly determinate numbers. Generally the laws of thought (syllogism, induction κτλ) are very approximately true for all ideas in the immediate neighbourhood of our present set, but more than this may not be affirmed. E.g. a train of syllogisms is not necessarily valid when the number of steps is infinite.

3. Every thing is an average, and the entire universe depends on the chance-function e^–x^2/c^2.

4. Our prospective ideas (morality of the future, etc.) are valuable not quâ accomplished facts of the future, but quâ aspirations of the present. As possibly established they should inspire the same onward shrinking as things actually established. I seem to recollect this: whence?

5. I am a dogmatic nihilist, and shall say the brain is conscious if I like. {2} Only I do not say it in the same sense as that in wh. I say that I am conscious. It seems to me that not even Vogt, however you fix it, can talk about matter for scientific purposes except as a phenomenon; that in saying the brain is conscious—or, better, that you are conscious, I only affirm a correlation of two phenomena, and am as ideal as I can be; that, consequently, a true idealism does not want to be stated, and conversely, an idealism that requires to be stated must have something wrong about it. In the same way to say that there is god apart from the universe is to say that the universe is not god, or that there is no real god at all; it may be all right, but it is atheism. And an idealism which can be denied by any significant aggregation of words is no true idealism. As I write this, it appears to me to be rot, and you will probably mash it up at once.

Body has been here—the same that 12-day-missed, {3} you know. Crotch & I went together—he knew him in viâ, but we were both altogether converted and impressed; and have been seriously considering whether some such mystic earnestness and apostleship is altogether inconsistent with and unworthy of the aims of secularism. One has hitherto been inclined to condemn it off-hand as brotherkeeping; but this man certainly seemed not so much to notice ("yearn after") us as to have something in him which must needs come out. And he showed his own spots, like the sun; wherever he was immoral and distinctly Xtian, you perceived it instantly, in virtue of the general exaltation which he inspired. The general conclusion is Sunday evening lectures on texts out of the Ethica and social subjects.

Thine
W.K.C.

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Written in purple ink.

{1} Etudes géométriques sur la théorie des parallèles par N. I. Lobatschewsky, suivi d’un extrait de la correspondance de Gauss et de Schumacher, translated by Jules Hoüel (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1866).

{2} In Lectures and Essays Pollock inserts here: ‘(This in reply to some verbal criticism of mine.)’

{3} i.e. came on a twelve-day mission. Cf. CLIF A3/7.

{4} ‘“yearn after”’ interlined above ‘notice’; brackets supplied.

Trinity College, Cambridge.—Prefixes a poem about the grief of a mother for her dead son (apparently a response to an actual event). Has not yet sent in his Royal Institution abstract. Is going to London for the funeral today. Responds to Pollock’s comments on the ideas discussed in A3/4.

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Transcript

Trinity College, Cambridge
2.30 a.m.
Saturday 9/4/70

A certain one passed into subjective existence.

O shaken through with the choking sobs,
Mother, in mourning woe;
He is gone for ever, and gone this day;
He is gone for ever, and no man robs
The hard fast grave of its awful prey,
Of a soul that is once laid low.

There shall never a son be alive for thee
As the years sink slowly on;
There shall never a son’s face smile on the face
That once stood firm and refused to flee
The swift sharp pain that was filled with grace,
With a grace that has grown and gone!

O mother, where are the infant ways,
The child’s laugh mighty and sweet,
The leaning hand and the trustful eyes
And the solemn mirth of the early days,
To take root happy and grow up wise,
And the guiding of little feet?

They are further off than the great good son
That gave thee a helpful arm;
That stood forth firm in the storm of life,
That never ran where the cowards run,
But met full face with death in the strife
And died of a deadly harm.
When the child passed slowly, thy heart was sore;
—O mother, abate thy moan—
For the hero came in his place and stood,
And none can alter his likeness more.
For the hero’s heart, that is great and good,
Shall die in thy grave alone!

What folly this is—I ought to be finishing R.I. abstract, which is not yet sent in. Tomorrow (Saturday—really today) I shall be in London to the funeral, but must come back the same night and shall probably not be able to see you. My only hope is that I shall be able to make up my mind to go down before the Math. meeting next Thursday—for the more time I give myself, the more I have to do before going down.

2. Undoubtedly; the marking off of a conception which enables a statement to be made, being only a rough average like the boundary of a solid body.

3. The frequency of an error of magnitude x is Ce^–x^2/c^2. Error means chance-deviation from an average.

4. The eternal and divine Desire of progress manifests itself either in a stretching forward to the immediate future, which is therefore regarded as good, or as a recoil and shrinking from the immediate past, which is so regarded as evil: ‘ο νυν αι’ων κακος ’εστι, κζ παραγεται. I can’t put in the accents.

5. Because I regard existence as a complex idea, expressible in terms of relations; and admit therefore no substratum, neither of mind, nor of matter, nor of both.

6. The 2 phenomena are such as

(unconscious cerebration)
{ my ideas get cleared up while I am asleep or know nothing about it
{ blush and modification of grey matter in hemispheres

or (conscious d[itt]o.)
{ string of pictures comes into my mind
{ blush & modification + nerve-message to sensory ganglia

The Revd G. Body. 12-day Mission. Awful swell. Thought you would get Willis before long. He is rather an idiot. Useful to have in one’s rooms, though, by way of forcing visitors to read the Ethics. I make every body sit down at once who calls on me—they all look so beautifully foolish.

Your answer about Time was splendid. I do not however “want” 4 dimensions of space, but only that certain arbitrary assumptions about 3 dim. should be recognised as such.

The Conservation of Energy is an equation connecting squared velocity with position; the word position including physical state in respect of heat, electricity, chemical aggregation, etc. Thus in the simplest case—a falling body—the equation of energy is ½v^2 = fs; where f is the constant acceleration, s the space fallen through, and v the velocity—½v^2 is the kinetic energy; potential energy is a convenient but meaningless name for f(h – s) where h is an arbitrary constant height. I do not see how the Conservation of Energy could suggest Force; it certainly suggests energy, which is quite a different thing; but this is either kinetic, that is to say, motion, or else it is potential, which is a mere mathematical expression except upon the theory that it also is ultimately kinetic—e.g. that in a strained spring the particles are actually oscillating faster than when it was in its natural state. Goodnight. I must sleep a little—early train—damn—Thine. W.K.C.

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Two sheets—one letter-head, black-edged, and a section torn from a sheet. Written in purple ink. The spelling and accentuation of the Greek quotation are uncertain.