Item 3 - Letter from W. K. Clifford to Frederick Pollock

1 single sheet

(Place of writing not indicated.)—Is delighted (by the news of Pollock’s engagement). Is studying energy and reading Kant, Aristotle, and Noah Porter. Croom Robertson is going to marry Miss Crompton. Refers to the mathematical volume published in commemoration of the marriage of Camilla Brioschi.

(Undated.)

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Transcript

My dearest Fred—I am so glad, you can’t think; {1} and am biting the end of a quill pen in consequence—like Smut who is very ill from somebody trying to poison him, which he has taken Morison’s pills for it and they have done him good. I don’t mean that I am ill, but that Smut used to bite a quill pen once when he was well and happy. Of course I meant a pretty pig; that is, it is the other sort of falling in love that is akin to madness and involves a disease of your faculties. I shall tell you all about energy when you come back and I know more about it but I have now got Mahaffy’s translation of Kant and Grote’s Aristotle and a great wise lumbering silly book by Noah Porter {2} and I think some true propositions are apparently general but are really particular judgements about our apprehensive apparatus and not about things—this is an approximation to Kant although of course the judgements in question are not those which he considers a priori, but quite different ones. I have now got another pen at last, and can make stops; the former one got so full of ink that I could not empty it, merely because at first I said it would not hold much. Croom Robertson also is going to be married to Miss Crompton. {3} Henrici has received two math[ematica]l dissertations published by Casorati and Cremona per le nozze di Camilla Brioschi; which I think an ingenious epithalamium. {4} You make a fellow quite giddy with your double state; but you know I love you in all shapes and look forward to better acquaintance with the other part of you.

Willi.

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{1} Clifford was responding to the announcement of Pollock’s engagement to Georgina Deffell.

{2} The first volume of Kant’s Critical Philosophy for English Readers, by J. P. Mahaffy, Aristotle, by George Grote (2 vols.), and The Human Intellect, with an Introduction upon Psychology and the Soul, by Noah Porter, all published in 1872.

{3} Croom Robertson married Caroline Anna Crompton on 14 December 1872.

{6} F. Casorati and L. Cremona, Per le nozze di Camilla Brioschi con Costanzo Carcano (1872).