I found walking a pleasant change after reading philosophy, which I have been doing during my holidays. I seem to have been getting my ideas a little clearer, and am no longer as content as I was with the Kantian doctrine, that our knowledge in speculative matters never gets beyond 'appearances.' I feel that at every turn we do get to that which _is_--to an underlying reality. I cannot feel that Kant's hard and fast division between 'speculative' and 'moral' reason holds good. The external world, because it is intelligible, must be akin to us; there must be an intelligence in it, otherwise it would never become an object of knowledge to our intelligence. It is not only in our ethical life that we come across the absolute consciousness. I feel now more than ever how we cannot divide up ourselves into water-tight compartments, and think of reason, will, and feeling as separate things, lying side by side. They can be separated--abstracted--in thought, but in actual life you never find one without the other. We cannot think without some degree of attention, and attention involves an exercise of will, and will cannot {179} be exercised without desire, and desire involves feeling. I think faith also cannot be regarded as a separate faculty. Reason, will, and feeling are all involved even in the faith of a poor cottager; much more does reason enter into the faith of a thoughtful man. I have been reading Butler, and hope when I go back to study Hume. What a wealth of light the conception of 'Development' has shed upon the problems which exercised the eighteenth century! I have read half through Leslie Stephen's 'Thought in the Eighteenth Century,' and I have been struck again and again at the new aspect that the old questions take when looked at from the standpoint of Evolution. I feel also that we need to study more the evolution of _thought_--the necessary phases that reason (like man's physical life) must pass through before perfection. . . . I think you are right, that education must now include instruction in imperial ideas--in our relations with that larger social life which is dawning upon us--a step towards a still larger social life to be realised in the brotherhood of nations. _To F. J. C._ Christ's College, Cambridge: February 1, 1903. I am slow to suggest to another man that what seems bad luck is in reality the voice of God making itself felt in his busy life, calling him to fuller sacrifice. But I am sure that we are right when we interpret it {180} thus for ourselves. I share your wish for 'some really strong man' to come as a prophet and read the writing on the wall, and tell us 'what it all means.' Yet the absence of human help is not accidental. It must be designed, in order that we may learn to fall back on the everlasting arms--to find by experience that the unseen is more real than the seen. There is an arm that never tires When human strength gives way.