Item 5 - Letter from W. K. Clifford to Frederick Pollock

1 folded sheet, 1 single sheet

Exeter.—Asks about his legs, and responds to his remarks on the new edition of Hume’s Treatise. Lucy has been trying to save her sister from going into an Anglican convent.

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Transcript

Exeter Sp. 11/74

My dear old Cripple

You don’t say how far you have got in the mending of your legs—which, although a mere finite empirical relation, finds its meaning in a Welt-sehnsucht {1} or eternal dissatisfaction:—“neither delighteth He in any man’s legs.” {2} What you say about the Green Grosery {3} is quite true as far as I can make out; but there are also according to Appleton (“Strauss as a Theologian,” last Contemp. but one) {4} certain delicate nuances in the Hegelian thought-and-speech-habit, which we with our utter want of tact and the finer sensibilities do not appreciate. They seem to me to consist in saying one thing when you deliberately mean another; but this is doubtless only my gross empirical way of putting it, and an example of the utter want κ.τ.λ. I hope you have seen Sidgwick’s remarks on them (I think in the Academy); he points out that to prove Hume insufficient is not to do much in the present day. It should I think be brought out clearly that if we pay attention only to the scientific or empirical school, the theory of consciousness and its relation to the nervous system has progressed in exactly the same way as any other scientific theory; that no position once gained has ever been lost, and that each investigator has been able to say “I don’t know” of the questions which lay beyond him without at all imperilling his own conclusions. Green for instance points out that Hume has no complete theory of the object, which is of course a very complex thing from the subjective point of view, because of the mixture of association and symbolic substitution in it; and in fact I suppose this piece of work has not yet been satisfactorily done. But it seems merely perverse to say that the scientific method is a wrong one because there is yet something for it to do; and to find fault with Hume for the omission is like blaming Newton for not including Maxwell’s Electricity in the Principia.

Lucy has been to Aberdeen to try to save her sister {5} from going into an anglican convent {6}. It was no use for they would not let her see the poor child till the ceremony of admission was over. Can’t you make the act of persuading any woman under 30 to enter a conventual institution punishable in the same way as the other mode of seducing a child? The higher limit of age is required by the nature of the offence and the far greater demoralization produced. This poor girl is just 21; even supposing that in four or five years her conscience comes to maturity and brings her out of the place, she will have spent the most impressionable part of her life with thoroughly shallow people having only one idea, reading nothing but books of devotion, and living in an atmosphere of falsehood and treachery. The superior deliberately tried to make the other sister deceive her father and sleep in the convent against his orders. Unfortunately these scotch episcopalians are at present beyond the reach of the law, and this might be made a good argument against disestablishment.

Tell Sir Frederic he shall have back your charming bit of Rabelais on Monday.

Thy
Willi.

My best love to Georgie & Mrs Deffell.

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Letter-head of the Devon and Exeter Institution.

{1} Lit. ‘world-longing’ (German).

{2} Psalm cxlvii. 10 (Prayer Book version).

{2} i.e. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose’s edition of Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1874).

{4} See C. E. Appleton, ‘Strauss as a Theologian’, Contemporary Review, vol. xxiv, pp. 234-53 (July 1874), particularly the following passage (p. 239):

'“Common Sense,” the intellectual phase of the eighteenth century, could not accept a miraculous history as miraculous. Missing with characteristic coarseness and absence of tact, all the finer points, all the sentiment, not to speak of the speculative ideas involved in primitive Christianity, it invented the hypothesis of imposture to account for the miracles.'

(In the collected edition of Appleton’s works ‘coarseness and absence of tact’ was replaced by ‘want of tact’. See Dr Appleton, his Life and Literary Relics, ed. J. H. Appleton and A. H. Sayce (1881), p. 139.)

{5} Isabel. Cf. CLIF A4/9a.

{6} St Margaret's.

Partly printed in Lectures and Essays, i. 45-6.