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New College, Oxford - Welcomes him as a new Fellow of New College following his election to the Savilian Chair of Geometry.

(Place of writing not indicated.)—Has been working with Lockyer on molecules and talking metaphysics with Huxley. Refers to his (own) talk on ‘the right and wrong of admitting the results of the scientific method in certain ground which it has already occupied’.

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Transcript

Dear Fred—Very sorry I can’t come to be wound up on Wednesday but we are going to the play. I am so tired, having spent the day at work with Lockyer at a paper on molecules, and the evening in talking metaphysics with Huxley. I think we have got out satisfactorily that the force between 2 molecules cannot be entirely in the line joining their centres as everybody has hitherto supposed, and this suits admirably my guess that they are small magnets.

As to my sermon, {1} I suppose it may be called so because the tag {2} dealt with the right and wrong of admitting the results of the scientific method in certain ground which it has already occupied. Now this point, that it is right to use the scientific method even on this ground, and that it is wrong to resist the evidence because the results are unpleasing, is to me a point of infinitely more importance to get people to feel, than without that to make them gently believe any amount of unorthodox doctrine. A question of right and wrong knows neither time, place, nor expediency. I think we have made a mistake in our laissez faire. It is not an intellectual revolution that has to be accomplished. The opinion of cultivated people goes of itself at an enormous rate; but the control of the feelings of the masses is falling more and more into the hands of the medicine-man, and he is awake to his true vocation and preaches social sedition. I am afraid for my civilization if we do not make an effort to discredit him, and to get people to recognize what they have hitherto acted on, that the right is an affair of plain open dealing and not of ghosts and conjuring tricks. They can be talked out of that here and now as they have been before in other places; and the clergy of all denominations are doing their worst with no small success.

Thine ever
Willi.

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{1} Possibly 'Right and Wrong’ or ‘The Ethics of Belief’.

By Lyon Barnes & Ellis. Endorsement notes that the document was copied on 2 Feb. 1860.

(Typed, except the date, the signature, and a few corrections, etc.)

a) Activities 10 April 1940 (first meeting) to 29 September 1941.
b) 18 September 1941-8 June 1942 (also mentions purchase of uranium, 9 December [1939?]).

40 Mecklenburgh Sqr. W.C. Thanks him for his kind words about his edition of Sophocles for the Loeb Classical Library, find his hendecametric experiment a tour de force.

Edinburgh - Thanks WW for his last letter. He is sorry that there is a view in the south prevailing, which suggests both he and David Brewster have been at 'dagger's drawing' over their late contest [for Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University, see JDF to WW, 31 Mar. 1833 ] - the opposite was the case. JDF still thinks that an abridgement to WW's book on mechanics [The First Principles of Mechanics: With Historical and Practical Illustrations, 1832] 'with some leading propositions for the 3 first sections of Newton (taken from your 'Introduction') and concluded with a comprehensive mathematical theory of Hydrostatics' would be really useful [see JDF to WW, 31 Mar. 1833].

Paris (4bis, rue des Ecoles) - Would like to have the second volume of 'The Idea of Immortality', which he has seen announced, and 'The Scapegoat' as well.