BRACERS Record Detail for 17280
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"Thursday mg." "My Darling—No letter from you came by first post, perhaps you sent your letter to Reading."
BR TO OTTOLINE MORRELL, 28 SEPT. 1911
BRACERS 17280. Morrell papers #198, Texas
Proofread by K. Blackwell et al.
Ipsden.1, 2
Thursday mg. Sp. 28. 1911.
My Darling
No letter from you came by 1st post — perhaps you sent your letter to Reading. If none comes by 2nd post I shall go to Reading to inquire. — Yesterday I was in a beech wood when I wrote to you. I like it better than writing indoors, but it is often not warm enough now. I always feel more alive out-of-doors, and all the beech woods on the hills remind me of our times together. I wish I could visualize better. It is only once in a way that I can get a clear image of you before my mind’s eye, though I can always hear your voice.a Quite half my emotions live in my fingers — in some odd way even my sense of style in writing and my love of clearness and sharp distinctions seems to belong with the sense of touch. I don’t know if that sounds like nonsense, but it is true. Most of my instinctive knowledge of you comes through the sense of touch — there is ab decided inflexible gentleness which gives a great deal of you in your touch, and your whole power of giving immeasurably and yet preserving your inmost self is in it.
I like to think of your ambition going into my work, tho’ I know it is not chiefly that that makes you want to me to do things. You really do help my technical work, partly by your immense faith in its being worth doing, partly because happiness renews my energy and my youth. I was too weary before to undertake a really big job. But now I shall enjoy doing it — of course things will be easier when this interminable absence is over. (A fortnight yesterday — how vivid that last moment at the station is in my memory.) It is odd how being with you increases my energy. But I think any strong emotion does that; I have found remorse very stimulating. But other strong emotions are gradually dissipated in fatigue, which makes them not a permanent stimulus.
A scheme which I have for philosophical work is this: There have always been rival theories in philosophy on numbers of questions, and it has been thought necessary for a philosopher to choose a side, as if it were politics, and swear that his side can be proved right and the other wrong. In many of these perennial controversies, I believe there is not and never can be a jot of evidence for either side, but that by a further effort of abstraction one can arrive at something which both sides have in common, and which can be accepted as fairly certain. What is wanted for this is the particular kind of logical instrument which Whitehead and I have perfected. It will take a hundred years to make philosophers understand, because they are trained in Greek instead of science and mathematics. One of my purposes at Cambridge is to promote the union of philosophy and mathematics which produced Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant. Since philosophers ceased to know mathematics they have been an inferior lot — which is natural, as mathematics is the great example of what can be known by reason independently of experience.
I am sorry to say your friend Aristotle pleases me no better. I have read a great deal of the Ethics by now. The high-minded or magnanimous man, he says, will seem to look down upon everything; he will confer benefits, but be ashamed to receive them; when he has received a benefit he will confer a greater, in order to turn his creditor into a debtor, he will remember benefits he has conferred better than those he has received; he will be lofty with those of high station, but affable with middle-class people; he is not easily moved to admiration, for nothing is great to him. This Aristotle’s conception of the best man he can imagine. One more point about the magnanimous man: “he is truthful except in so far as he adopts an ironical tone in his intercourse with the masses.” Intellectually, also, Aristotle is not very profound. For instance, in an immense long chapter on justice, he states that justice consists in giving every man his due, without making the slightest attempt to determine what is a man’s due.
the peace of it. I wonder if you know how much it means to me to feel peace — all my life I have been driven by blind longings for infinite things — I couldn’t put them away, they were my life and I should have been worthless without them. There is a kind of inward restlessness which is not altogether bad, because it drives one to seek the best, and not pretend anything less is the best. But it produces a longing for rest such as I suppose other people don’t feel so strongly. And with you I get rest, because of the infinity in you. I feel this is what I have always sought for. O my heart, you are most unspeakably precious to me.
Your
B.
