DEAR CHARLES,--I have just read the July "Atlantic," and am so moved by your Ruskin letters that I can't refrain from overflowing. They seem to me immortal documents--as the clouds clear away he will surely take his stable place as one of the noblest of the sons of men. Mere sanity is the most philistine and (at bottom) unimportant of a man's attributes. The chief "cloud" is the bulk of "Modern Painters" and the other artistic writings, which have made us take him primarily as an art-connoisseur and critic. Regard all that as inessential, and his inconsistencies and extravagances fall out of sight and leave the Great Heart alone visible. Do you suppose that there are many other correspondents of R. who will yield up their treasures in our time to the light? I wish that your modesty had not suppressed certain passages which evidently expressed too much regard for yourself. The point should have been _his_ expression of that sort of thing--no matter to whom addressed! I understand and sympathize fully with his attitude about our war. Granted him and his date, that is the way he ought to have felt, and I revere him perhaps the more for it.... S. W.'s sudden defection is a pathetic thing! It makes one feel like closing the ranks. Affectionately--to all of you--including Theodora, W. J. _To L. T. Hobhouse._ CHOCORUA, _Aug. 12, 1904_. DEAR BROTHER HOBHOUSE,--Don't you think it a _tant soit peu_ scurvy trick to play on me ('tis true that you don't name me, but to the informed reader the reference is transparent--I say nothing of poor Schiller's case) to print in the "Aristotelian Proceedings" (pages 104 _ff_.)[54] a beautiful duplicate of my own theses in the "Will to Believe" essay (which should have been called by the less unlucky title the _Right_ to Believe) in the guise of an _alternative and substitute_ for my doctrine, for which latter you, in the earlier pages of your charmingly written essay, _substitute a travesty_ for which I defy any candid reader to find a single justification in my text? My essay hedged the license to indulge in private over-beliefs with so many restrictions and signboards of danger that the outlet was narrow enough. It made of tolerance the essence of the situation; it defined the permissible cases; it treated the faith-attitude as a necessity for individuals, because the total "evidence," which only the race can draw, has to include their experiments among its data. It tended to show only that faith could not be absolutely _vetoed_, as certain champions of "science" (Clifford, Huxley, etc.) had claimed it ought to be. It was a function that might lead, and probably does lead, into a wider world. You say identically the same things; only, from your special polemic point of view, you emphasize more the dangers; while I, from _my_ polemic point of view, emphasized more the right to run their risk.