[5] _Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography_, "The Clapham Sect," pp. 543-544 (ed. 1860). Miss Nightingale referred to this association of her grandfather with Wilberforce and Clarkson in one of her _Addresses to Probationers_ (1875). Something else Florence Nightingale owed to, or shared with, her father. He, like some other members of his family, was of a reflective temperament, interested in speculative problems. There is a letter written by him to his wife from his father's sick-room (Sept. 1822) which shows the bent of his thoughts:-- I sit by his bedside and look at him as one would at a sleeping man, the idea of death only now and then flashing across my mind. I have been _studying_ Mad. de Staël on the feeling of conviction, which exists more or less in different people and different nations, on the subject of soul as independent of external ideas. My imagination is a dull one, for it certainly required _study_ with me to feel the full force of conviction that soul does and must exist quite separately from, though influenced by, external circumstances. _You_ will say, I know, with a firm belief in Scripture and religion, Leave all philosophical speculation to the wild imaginations of the Germans. Nothing can change _your_ reliance on religion. The perversity of _my_ nature refers me to experience and analogies, though I begin to think that the study of the creation displayed before our faculties will exalt me into a conception of Divinity completely pervading the whole, but particularly that part of man which enables him to feel the difference between right and wrong independently of the ideas which he derives from external circumstances. Florence Nightingale's mother accepted the religious standpoint of the day without question. Unitarianism was dropped by her and by her elder daughter; by Florence it was, as we shall hear, transcended. The mother's essential bent was practical, though the scope of it was somewhat limited. The mind of her daughter Florence found room in equal measure for practice and for contemplation. She inherited her mother's organising capacity, though she turned it to directions of her own. It was from her father that she inherited the taste for speculative inquiry which absorbed a large part of her life. II