(_Miss Nightingale to Benjamin Jowett._)[138] LEA HURST, _Oct._ 3 [1871]. I am quite scandalized at your materialism. (I shall shut up you and Plato for a hundred years in punishment in another world till you have both obtained clearer views.) Is it for an old maid like me to be preaching to you a Master in Israel that even "on physical principles" there are essential points in marriage (to turn out the best order of children), which, being absent, the perfection of "health and strength" in both parents is of no avail even for the physical part of the children? And might I just ask one small question: whether you consider man has a little soul? If he has ever such a little one, you can scarcely consider him as a simple body, an animal, or even as a twin, the soul being one twin and the body the other, but as all one, the soul and the body making one being (altho' only in this sense). If you _do_, at all events _God_ does not. And consequently He makes a great many more things enter into the "physical" constitution even of the children than the mere "health and strength" of the parents. (My son, really Plato talked nonsense about this.) Take a much more material thing than the producing of a bad or degenerate family or race. Take a railway accident. What are the laws therein concerned? You have by no means only to consider the "physical" laws--the strength of iron, the speed of steam, the smoothness of rails, the friction &c., &c.--but you have to consider the state of mind of Directors, whether they care only for their dividends, so that the railway-servants are underpaid or overworked &c., &c. You quote Huxley. He is undoubtedly one of the prime educators of the age, but he makes a profound mistake when he says to Mankind: objects of sense are more worthy of your attention than your inferences and imaginations. On the contrary, the finest powers man is gifted with are those which enable him to infer from what he sees what he _can't_ see. They lift him into truth of far higher import than that which he learns from the senses alone. I believe that the laws of nature all tend to improve the _whole_ man, moral and physical, that it is absurd to consider man either as a body to be "improved," or as a soul to be "improved," separately.