CORRESPONDENCE, 1856-66. 325 



see any occasion to feel depressed about it. The world is not 1864. 

 what it was when the Admiral and I were young. There are 

 strange break-downs of opinion and build-ups of system. I do 

 not know that it is more extraordinary than that I, of all persons, 

 should declare and publish my actual experience of phenomena 

 which so many will have to be actually the work of disembodied 

 spirits, which I can neither deny nor affirm. The Christian 

 world is actually tending towards the belief that a great many 

 mythologies and idolatries are really diseased revelations. Wait 

 a few years until it begins to be generally apprehended that 

 Juggernaut and Cham Chi Thaungee if you happen to know 

 him were originally divine, though a little altered by time and 

 priest, and it will then seem a very natural thing that the 

 measures in the Pyramid should have come from the same 

 quarter. I wish the reasoning had been a little more sound and 

 the mind less influenced by bias of system, but this is not peculiar 

 to primeval inspiration advocates. It is the beauty of these 

 extreme vagaries that they show off and illustrate the methods 

 which are most in vogue among savans who are quite in the 

 groove. But the moral courage which ventures upon a trip off 

 the line is not so common/ 



The work itself is part of an impulse which is doing strange 

 marvels, which will make Bishop Colenso die a heretic, and 

 which has made Robert Owen die a Christian; nay, which has 

 made a Christian of Dr. John Elliotson, the strongest materialist 

 almost that I ever heard of. If we go on in this way twenty 

 years longer, the name of God will be heard at a meeting of the 

 Royal Society, from which Dr. Gumming will take occasion to 

 declare that the millennium has commenced. 



There are educated persons by thousands not in the little 

 knot, who will look on Piazzi's book without much surprise as 

 to his mere conclusions. It is astonishing how little the world of 

 science knows about opinion outside. 



Kind regards to the Admiral, who, I suppose, has his work 

 well-nigh done. What a beautiful feeling the proof of the title- 

 page gives ! 



Yours very sincerely, 



A. DE MORGAN. 



