"Monday mg." "While I was doing this Wittgenstein came and stayed till after 12. We had a close equal passionate discussion of the most difficult point in mathematical philosophy. I think he has genius. In discussion with him I put out all my force and only just equal his. With all my other pupils I shd. squash them flat if I did so. He has suggested several new ideas wh. I think valuable. He is the ideal pupil—he gives passionate admiration with vehement and very intelligent dissent. He spoke with intense feeling about the beauty of the big book [Principia], said he found it like music. That is how I feel it, but few others seem to. Our parting was very affectionate on both sides. He said the happiest hours of his life had been passed in my room. He is not a flatterer, but a man of transparent and absolute sincerity. I have the most perfect intellectual sympathy with him—the same passion and vehemence, the same feeling that one must understand or die, the same sudden jokes breaking down the frightful tension of thought.

He is far more terrible with Xtians than I am. He had liked Farmer, the undergraduate monk, and was horrified to learn that he is a monk. Farmer came to tea with him, and W. at once attacked him—as I imagine, with absolute fury. He made of course no impression. Yesterday he returned to the charge, not arguing but only preaching honesty. I wonder what will have come of it. He abominates ethics and morals generally; he is deliberately a creature of impulse, and thinks one should be. What he disliked about my last chapter was saying philosophy has value; he says people who like philosophy will pursue it, and others won't, and there's an end of it. His strangest impulse is philosophy.