BR TO OTTOLINE MORRELL, [6 AUG. 1911]
BRACERS 17247. ALS. Morrell papers #167, Texas
Proofread by K. Blackwell et al.

Trin. Coll.1^, 2
Sunday aftn. 6 Aug.

My Darling

I can’t tell you what a joy your letter this morning was to me — it was a most wonderful letter. Yes, I have been feeling too that now we meet easily and naturally at the highest level. We have learnt to find each other there at once. It is not only at moments, but constantly. I feel your thoughts and even your dim wants so intimately — and it is such a joy to be able to speak to each other’s deepest needs. Often I hardly know whether it is your thoughts or mine that I am expressing — they seem so much the same. But when I come away, I lose much of the strength of the vision — it won’t keep its brightness through catching trains and giving lectures. At Ipsden I lose none of it, so I want to stay on there and write all through September — it will be filled with you even after you are gone.

I am very much interested in all you say about your brother. One felt his love of humanity in him. I dare say Liberals strike him as humbugs, as they very often are. I don’t think you ought to do much in the way of active philanthropy, partly because your strength is too small, partly because your impulse is to the spiritual things, and it is no good going against one’s impulse. My feeling, too, is that the spiritual things are more important — but sometimes I feel they are not for the most unfortunate — I think tho’ that it is wrong to let sympathy for the most unfortunate prevent one from keeping the sacred fire alive — one must hand on whatever positive good the world can achieve, or else, when the great evils are removed, one has mere smugness and material comfort. Let us talk more about it. It is the force of your belief in the spiritual things that is such a strength to me — and it is by that you help every one you have to do with. Your shyness, I think, prevents your giving your best in philanthropy, doesn’t it? The philanthropy one imagines merely uses material things to bring the love of God to those who need it — but that is a rare gift.

Yesterday at tea I had a visit from Brodetsky, the East-End Russian Jew who was the penultimate Senior Wrangler. He interests and pleases me. His people fled when he was four — if the aliens Act had been in force, they and he would have been sent back to be massacred. He is uncouth, but has a great massive intellect, with massive passions behind it. He is a very loyal Jew.

The exact antithesis to him is Mrs Cornford — slight, graceful, pleasant, and without background. I am convinced she is really uninteresting. The dinner failed in the one point I care about, quantity. Besides soup and stewed fruit, there were only a few slices of cold meat on a plate. Most of the Darwins suffer from a practically insane parsimony, and I rather gathered she has inherited it. However, the talk was excellent, and I enjoyed it — seeing Jourdain was partly a pleasure, but he is distinctly worse, and his speech has grown very indistinct. He has got work on the Monist, an American philosophical journal, so his financial difficulties are more or less solved. He is coming to tea with me today — his man will carry him up my stairs.

The rest of my time has been taken up with letters and an unusually difficult batch of proofs. It is a nuisance how proofs go on after one’s mind has travelled on to other things — I feel I have done with the topics the mathematical book deals with, and I find it hard to take any interest in it.

We must read some more Spinoza. His “intellectual love of God” is so much the thing we care for. I think I won’t distinguish the animal and divine parts of Man, but the particular and universal — the part that separates a man from others, and the part that unites. One doesn’t want no separation, because union demands separateness. When the people in the Symposium say that the lover would wish to be one with his beloved, they are wrong, because he would have nothing left to love. But the separateness needs to be reduced to the bare minimum. Spinoza says self-preservation is what makes everything be what it is and preserve its identity. He means I think the sort of self-assertion that prevents it from being absorbed in God and so ceasing to exist as a separate thing. But Spinoza is too pantheistic for the truth, and allows too little substantiality to individual things; nevertheless his view about self-preservation is interesting. I can fit the “universal and particular” view very well on to my metaphysic. The result will be extraordinarily Platonic. I seem to be living into the heart of all the mysticisms of the world.

It is a strange experience. I hardly know where the journey will end. Monism in feeling, dualism in judgment, covers much reconciliation of religion and truth. That is the fundamental notion of the whole, I think. But it takes time to get order into one’s thoughts and see what is the basis of the whole. I half feel that the ideas are important enough to make it necessary to apply them to all life and the whole world, making quite a big book. But that remains to be seen.

I took the opinion of the P.O. officials yesterday, and am following their advice, but I have only a very slender hope of this letter reaching you tomorrow.

Goodbye my Dearest Dearest — I am thankful these days are passing — it is hateful being away from you — the days with you grow more and more utterly wonderful and beautiful — it is beyond all I had imagined of joy and deep happiness —

Goodbye my Beloved —

Your
B

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  [document] Document 000167. Proofread against a colour scan of the original.

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  [envelope] A circled “167”.