Item 126 - Letter from Julius Charles Hare

4 pp.

London - Asks William to show Hare's friend, Blackstone, around Cambridge. He almost wishes he 'could imbibe a little of Mr Lyell's spirit, who tells us in the Quarterly, that he looks back to the reading of Locke's Essay as an era in his life, that it was the creature Let there be light which dawned upon the chaos of his mind, forgetting that his mind is only one of those puzzle-maps which any poor six-years old child can put together; and then fancying himself soaring upwards by the help of this bubble which he takes from a balloon, he identifies his own mind with that of the universe and has the presumption to tell the world that the said John Locke was not the enlightening spirit only of him the said William Lyell, but also of all the rest of the world, which all the rest of the world also believe implicitly, and have no doubt that, as Mr Lyell tells them, a Junior Soph now knows much more of the nature of the human mind than Plato and Pythagoras, and Heraclitus and Aristotle and Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas and Leibnitz and Mallebranche. For my own part I am much more disposed to agree with my friend Le Maistre, who says only one thing is wanting to make the Essay on the human understanding perfect, and that is to call it an Essay on the Understanding of John Locke'. What does WW think regarding the topic which Hare has heard so much of since his return to England - 'the curse of a plenteous harvest? I am not sufficiently at home in our political economists, to determine whether the truth of this proposition that a plenteous harvest is a curse arises necessarily from the axioms of their theories. If so it only proves that their theories are worthless, and I must try to become acquainted with them to be able to lend a hand in pulling down so trumpery an edifice. There must be something essentially false that has this power of transmuting good into evil by its satanic alchemy'.