Item 151 - Letter from Julius Charles Hare

5 pp.

Herstmonceux - JCH has long been meaning to thank WW for his metaphysical essay. However he wanted to first look at John S. Mill's book [A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, 1843]: 'I have never yet found time to read his Logic, and do not understand how any man in these days, with a philosophical head, & a knowledge of what has been done, can maintain the objective origin of all knowledge. At all events I rejoice to find you as zealous and rigorous in maintaining the contrary truth. Metaphysics, like etymology, come to me now almost like visions of past worlds: but they are very pleasant visions; and I wish I could indulge more in the contemplation of them. Objective and subjective seem to me now fairly establisht, or rather reestablisht, in our language. For they once were a part of its philosophical vocabulary. Baxter [Andrew Baxter] frequently uses objective, & I think subjective also, in a sense nearly approaching to the Kantian, though not always with precision: and Norris of Bemerton [John Norris], into whom I was looking the other day, has a chapter in the 2d Volume of his Ideal World [Essay towards the Theory of an Ideal and Intelligible World, part 1, 1701, and part 2, 1704], "of formal & objective thought, with some reflexions on the Scholastic use of that distinction". At present I frequently meet with the words in Reviews & Magazines, & hardly know how the language can go on without them'. JCH thinks there is some truth in WW's notion of unsporadic hexameters.