"Sunday" "... I am rather oppressed by the feeling of work to do—it will be very difficult and I dread it, yet I am not content to be neglecting it. It makes it hard to get any real holiday, because the impulse to be attacking it is always with me. I will make a beginning in the mornings at Moulsford—that will give me quite as much time, with week-ends, as I need give to it. If I could, I would take a real holiday, but I can't.—I have just read an American first book of metaphysics, by one of the Six Realists—a sort of expansion of my Shilling Shocker—references to me on almost every other page—but it is a despairingly feeble book. Philosophical capacity is astonishingly rare—people are content with soft ideas, and don't exact sharp ideas that cut like diamonds. Soft ideas are disgusting to one's taste. It is a quite recent experience to me to see the same feebleness associated with my own views that I am accustomed to see associated with other people's—it is far from agreeable. But I don't wonder—it requires a great tension of mind and a constant stringing up of one's faculties to keep one's ideas sharpened. And in philosophy vague ideas are outwardly much more potent and fruitful than exact ones. I believe a certain sort of mathematicians have far more philosophical capacity than most of the people who take up philosophy. Hitherto the people attracted by philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which are all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject. It has long been one of my dreams to found a great school of mathematically-trained philosophers, but I don't know whether I shall ever get it accomplished. I had hopes of Norton, but he has not the physique. Broad is all right, but has no fundamental originality. Wittgenstein of course is exactly my dream. But I should like to make mathematics the ordinary training for a philosopher—I am sure it ought to be. That would require a tremendous propaganda of the sort that moves educational bodies; and I am afraid vested interests would always be too strong. However, when I am too old for original work I dare say I shall take it up.—The impulse to this work on Matter is extraordinarily strong, it quite possesses me, and drives me on like the lash of a slave-driver. The problem is one which nobody has considered or is aware of—I can't make people even see what I want to work at, except Whitehead and Wittgenstein, who feel its importance as much as I do. In fact Whitehead's partly the cause of my interest in it. I think it will be a long time before I get to the stage of writing anything...."