Item 59 - William Whewell to Julius Charles Hare

WW now thinks of his future 'with unmingled hope and comfort, and of Cordelia [Cordelia Marshall] as my good angel'. WW has to attend 'this great ugly meeting at Plymouth' [BAAS] and then examine for the Trinity Fellowships. After this he hopes they shall 'take up our abode at a house which one of Cordelia's brothers has upon Coniston Lake. Do you think it will be desirable to found a school of Lake philosophy as well as of Lake poetry?' WW needs some advice concerning his Moral Philosophy. He thinks he may be looking at a certain problem too systematically and technically, and wants JCH to have a guess at the truth of his subject: 'when crimes are committed in consequence of habitual vices, how is the guilt to be assigned respectively to the habit and to the act? Is the habit a palliation or an aggravation of the crime? Is the condemnation of the moralist to fall, for instance, upon the vice of covetousness or upon acts of dishonesty? Is covetousness which never breaks out in dishonesty, or dishonesty which arises only from a transient covetousness, the more immoral? or, if it be not the best way to talk about 'more immoral', what is the way?'