244 PETER GUTHRIE TAIT 



In a later letter Maxwell wrote : 

 " Last three lines of Ode to Stoffkraft should be as follows : 



While Residents in the Unseen 

 Aeons or Emanations intervene, 

 And from my shrinking soul the Unconditioned screen." 



On Aug. 28, 1879, ten weeks before his death, Maxwell sent Tait 

 a curious composition purporting to be a soliloquy or self-communion by 

 Tait himself. In spite of the rapid advance of the fatal illness to which he 

 succumbed Maxwell's quaint humour still found expression to his life-long 

 friend. In this last of many letters, the speculations in The Unseen Universe 

 and the quaternion operator Nabla which Tait used with so great effect are 

 mingled together in a fashion most strange and fanciful. The jest lurks in 

 the closing sentence, pathetic though this is in its confession of physical 

 weakness. 



"HEADSTONE IN SEARCH OF A NEW SENSATION." 



" While meditating, as is my wont on a Saturday afternoon, on the enjoyments 

 and employments which might serve to occupy one or two of the aeonian aetherial 

 phases of existence to which I am looking forward, I began to be painfully conscious 

 of the essentially finite variety of the sensations which can be elicited by the combined 

 action of a finite number of nerves, whether these nerves are of protoplasmic or 

 eschatoplasmic structure. When all the changes have been rung in the triple bob 

 major of experience, must the same chime be repeated with intolerable iteration 

 through the dreary eternities of paradoxical existence ? The horror of a somewhat 

 similar consideration had as I well knew driven the late J. S. Mill to the very verge 

 of despair till he discovered a remedy for his woes in the perusal of Wordsworth's 

 Poems. 



" But it was not to Wordsworth that my mind now turned, but to the noble 

 Viscount the founder of the inductive philosophy and to the Roman city whence he 

 was proud to draw his title, consecrated as it is to the memory of the Protomartyr 

 of Britain. 



"Might not I, too, under the invocation of the holy ALBAN become inspired 

 with some germinating idea, some age-making notion by which I might burst the 

 shell of circumstance and hatch myself something for which we have not even a 

 name, freed for ever from the sickening round of possible activities and exulting in 

 a life every action of which would be a practical refutation of the arithmetic of the 

 present world. 



" Hastily turning the page on which I had inscribed these meditations, I noticed 



