Item 134 - Letter from Hugh James Rose

Horsham - Instructions to WW to take to the printers. HJR has written to James H. Monk - a member of the Cambridge Press Syndics - to see if he can have access to the press at or after Christmas. However Monk is too busy on his honeymoon to answer, so can WW find out. WW is 'a lost heretic in Metaphysics. However you are not it seems a regular follower of that Scotch school which has been forming away for the last twenty years and after doing nothing but proposing new divisions of the faculties and cheating itself with words is ending at last in smoke. What most provokes me is to hear the prate of its defenders and its opposers when they come to the connexion of it with Religious matters as if both it and the Locke system did not alike lead to the most hopeless scepticism as to the existence of a first cause and I hate both alike as leading to the cultivation of the sensible part of man instead of his spiritual and teaching people to occupy themselves with the theory of differences and the knowledge of formulae, which if a man knew all about them that was or can be known about him just where he was, not wiser but fuller, not with a more enlarged but with a more occupied understanding, very much instead the same sort of thing as Babbage's calculating machine. Indeed I believe that the approximation of the operations of the mind and of machinery is a very fit occupation for the Mechanics School'.