Item 4 - Letter from W. K. Clifford to Frederick Pollock

1 folded sheet, 1 single sheet

Trinity College, Cambridge.—Discusses various mathematical and philosophical topics. He and Crotch went see Body speak, and were impressed by his ‘mystic earnestness and apostleship’.

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Transcript

Trin. Coll. Camb.
April 2/70

Dear Fred—I forgot altogether to write any word of comfort about your class: and now hear that the wicked have ceased from troubling you for a season. Several new ideas have come to me lately: first, I have procured Lobatschewsky, Études Géométriques sur la Théorie des Parallèles, trans. by Houel, Gauthier-Villars, 1866 {1}—a small tract, of which Gauss, therein quoted, says “l’auteur a traité la matière en main de maître et avec le veritable esprit géométrique. Je crois devoir appeler votre attention sur ce livre, dont la lecture ne peut manquer de vous causer le plus vif plaisir”. It is quite simple, merely Euclid without the vicious assumption, but the way the things come out of one another is quite lovely.

2. The science of continuous quantity is founded on the fact that you may add together a finite number of quantities in any order and they will always come to the same sum. Lejeune Dirichlet made the exceedingly important remark that this is not true of an infinite number of quantities; e.g. 1/2 – 1/3 + 1/4 – 1/5 + &c is not the same as 1/2 + 1/4 – 1/3 + 1/6 + 1/8 – 1/5 + &c, though both are perfectly determinate numbers. Generally the laws of thought (syllogism, induction κτλ) are very approximately true for all ideas in the immediate neighbourhood of our present set, but more than this may not be affirmed. E.g. a train of syllogisms is not necessarily valid when the number of steps is infinite.

3. Every thing is an average, and the entire universe depends on the chance-function e^–x^2/c^2.

4. Our prospective ideas (morality of the future, etc.) are valuable not quâ accomplished facts of the future, but quâ aspirations of the present. As possibly established they should inspire the same onward shrinking as things actually established. I seem to recollect this: whence?

5. I am a dogmatic nihilist, and shall say the brain is conscious if I like. {2} Only I do not say it in the same sense as that in wh. I say that I am conscious. It seems to me that not even Vogt, however you fix it, can talk about matter for scientific purposes except as a phenomenon; that in saying the brain is conscious—or, better, that you are conscious, I only affirm a correlation of two phenomena, and am as ideal as I can be; that, consequently, a true idealism does not want to be stated, and conversely, an idealism that requires to be stated must have something wrong about it. In the same way to say that there is god apart from the universe is to say that the universe is not god, or that there is no real god at all; it may be all right, but it is atheism. And an idealism which can be denied by any significant aggregation of words is no true idealism. As I write this, it appears to me to be rot, and you will probably mash it up at once.

Body has been here—the same that 12-day-missed, {3} you know. Crotch & I went together—he knew him in viâ, but we were both altogether converted and impressed; and have been seriously considering whether some such mystic earnestness and apostleship is altogether inconsistent with and unworthy of the aims of secularism. One has hitherto been inclined to condemn it off-hand as brotherkeeping; but this man certainly seemed not so much to notice ("yearn after") us as to have something in him which must needs come out. And he showed his own spots, like the sun; wherever he was immoral and distinctly Xtian, you perceived it instantly, in virtue of the general exaltation which he inspired. The general conclusion is Sunday evening lectures on texts out of the Ethica and social subjects.

Thine
W.K.C.

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Written in purple ink.

{1} Etudes géométriques sur la théorie des parallèles par N. I. Lobatschewsky, suivi d’un extrait de la correspondance de Gauss et de Schumacher, translated by Jules Hoüel (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1866).

{2} In Lectures and Essays Pollock inserts here: ‘(This in reply to some verbal criticism of mine.)’

{3} i.e. came on a twelve-day mission. Cf. CLIF A3/7.

{4} ‘“yearn after”’ interlined above ‘notice’; brackets supplied.

Partly printed in Lectures and Essays, i. 44-5.