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

1 folded sheet, 1 single sheet

Trinity College, Cambridge.—Prefixes a poem about the grief of a mother for her dead son (apparently a response to an actual event). Has not yet sent in his Royal Institution abstract. Is going to London for the funeral today. Responds to Pollock’s comments on the ideas discussed in A3/4.

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Transcript

Trinity College, Cambridge
2.30 a.m.
Saturday 9/4/70

A certain one passed into subjective existence.

O shaken through with the choking sobs,
Mother, in mourning woe;
He is gone for ever, and gone this day;
He is gone for ever, and no man robs
The hard fast grave of its awful prey,
Of a soul that is once laid low.

There shall never a son be alive for thee
As the years sink slowly on;
There shall never a son’s face smile on the face
That once stood firm and refused to flee
The swift sharp pain that was filled with grace,
With a grace that has grown and gone!

O mother, where are the infant ways,
The child’s laugh mighty and sweet,
The leaning hand and the trustful eyes
And the solemn mirth of the early days,
To take root happy and grow up wise,
And the guiding of little feet?

They are further off than the great good son
That gave thee a helpful arm;
That stood forth firm in the storm of life,
That never ran where the cowards run,
But met full face with death in the strife
And died of a deadly harm.
When the child passed slowly, thy heart was sore;
—O mother, abate thy moan—
For the hero came in his place and stood,
And none can alter his likeness more.
For the hero’s heart, that is great and good,
Shall die in thy grave alone!

What folly this is—I ought to be finishing R.I. abstract, which is not yet sent in. Tomorrow (Saturday—really today) I shall be in London to the funeral, but must come back the same night and shall probably not be able to see you. My only hope is that I shall be able to make up my mind to go down before the Math. meeting next Thursday—for the more time I give myself, the more I have to do before going down.

2. Undoubtedly; the marking off of a conception which enables a statement to be made, being only a rough average like the boundary of a solid body.

3. The frequency of an error of magnitude x is Ce^–x^2/c^2. Error means chance-deviation from an average.

4. The eternal and divine Desire of progress manifests itself either in a stretching forward to the immediate future, which is therefore regarded as good, or as a recoil and shrinking from the immediate past, which is so regarded as evil: ‘ο νυν αι’ων κακος ’εστι, κζ παραγεται. I can’t put in the accents.

5. Because I regard existence as a complex idea, expressible in terms of relations; and admit therefore no substratum, neither of mind, nor of matter, nor of both.

6. The 2 phenomena are such as

(unconscious cerebration)
{ my ideas get cleared up while I am asleep or know nothing about it
{ blush and modification of grey matter in hemispheres

or (conscious d[itt]o.)
{ string of pictures comes into my mind
{ blush & modification + nerve-message to sensory ganglia

The Revd G. Body. 12-day Mission. Awful swell. Thought you would get Willis before long. He is rather an idiot. Useful to have in one’s rooms, though, by way of forcing visitors to read the Ethics. I make every body sit down at once who calls on me—they all look so beautifully foolish.

Your answer about Time was splendid. I do not however “want” 4 dimensions of space, but only that certain arbitrary assumptions about 3 dim. should be recognised as such.

The Conservation of Energy is an equation connecting squared velocity with position; the word position including physical state in respect of heat, electricity, chemical aggregation, etc. Thus in the simplest case—a falling body—the equation of energy is ½v^2 = fs; where f is the constant acceleration, s the space fallen through, and v the velocity—½v^2 is the kinetic energy; potential energy is a convenient but meaningless name for f(h – s) where h is an arbitrary constant height. I do not see how the Conservation of Energy could suggest Force; it certainly suggests energy, which is quite a different thing; but this is either kinetic, that is to say, motion, or else it is potential, which is a mere mathematical expression except upon the theory that it also is ultimately kinetic—e.g. that in a strained spring the particles are actually oscillating faster than when it was in its natural state. Goodnight. I must sleep a little—early train—damn—Thine. W.K.C.

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Two sheets—one letter-head, black-edged, and a section torn from a sheet. Written in purple ink. The spelling and accentuation of the Greek quotation are uncertain.