Item 63 - Richard Jones to William Whewell

'Let me talk about your book first ['The History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time', 3 vols, 1837] - I cannot promise allegiance to all your metaphysical views but it gave me much comfort to perceive that you do not mean to write the book in the synthetical form in which you put the substance of it in your first letter. If you analyse and unravel the different stages knowledge has gone through and the mind must go through in reaching it then up to the last points your book must be full of useful and interesting truth and those last points, the hyperphysical hooks and glue, are (forgive me) happily by no means of first rate importance and I am sure that if you attempted to synthesize and begin with them you would be thought as wild as Goethe himself when he wrote about light mind you may be perfectly right after all but there is film in my eye as yet when I get to these points a film which I seriously hope you will help to remove'. RJ has been in the valleys for three weeks and off to Ditching tomorrow. Since he did not know where to send WW this letter in Edinburgh, he has sent it to Thomas Chalmers - 'pray make my excuses to him for the liberty I have taken I hope he is well and an active statistician'.