My dear Harrot

I hope you will not get quite sick of the sight of my handwriting, but I want you to act as a funnel to your father for so much of my remarks as you may deem suitable. I never like to say all I have to say to him, for fear of tiring him. I feel I have a number of heterogeneous remarks to make some of them probably not worth making, but I sh^d like to tumble them all out of my mind. I gave him a little Abstract I had made of what I took for his views on Ethics, & I understood him to say he accepted them entirely so far as all except the self-regarding virtues went.² Now I so want him to abolish that distinction between self-regarding & others-regarding virtues. (This is not a criticism of anything in his book only of this remark to me.)³ It is like the governess’s division of plants into shrubs, bulbous plants & weeds. (the division is much better but I cant get hold of it exactly.) Of course in the police regulations of a nation we have to recognise some sort of distinction of that kind just as a gardener has to recognize the distinction between flowers & weeds, but there is surely no more science in one classification than in the other. I suppose temperance is a typical example of a self-regarding virtue, & yet if drunkenness did not put one out of the way of doing any good to one’s fellow creatures & into the way of doing them a great deal of harm (I suppose no single fact is a larger source of crime) I cannot see what harm there w^d be in it.⁴ I do so thoroughly feel nothing is self-regarding in that sense. We radiate whatever we are.

I wanted to say something about Mr Morley’s letter, which interested me very much⁵—& yet I dont think there was much in it for Uncle Ch. The drift of it seemed to me, as far as I cd take it in without remembering the criticism from which the correspondence took its rise, a vindication of the intellectual character of what we mean by the sense of beauty, as an essential part of what he calls the Association philosophy.⁶ It was much as if in some chemical work you shd find some compound spoken of by the name which you wished to keep for one of it’s constituent elements. I shd hardly think it was worth Uncle Ch’s while to attend to a matter of nomenclature like that [1 page or more missing]

have them here but how silly to take it amiss that a tea-cup wont hold a gallon!

Adieu dear Harrot I am so glad you had that charming evening with the delightful Jane.⁷ I think Euph quite agrees with you about her.⁸ Yrs FJW