369 



SECTION XI. 



CORRESPONDENCE, 1867-70. 



To Sir John Herschel. 



91 Adelaide Road, March 25, 1867. 



MY DEAR SIR JOHN, ' How do you bear this trying weather ? ' 1 867. 

 asked a friend during the late froid d'enfer, as a Frenchman might 

 say. ' Trying weather ! ' said I ; ' convicting weather ! sen- 

 tencing weather ! penal servitude weather ! ' 



The question between me and the College is simple. I 

 entered that College on what all the world knows was its loudly 

 vaunted principle, that the creed of neither teacher nor student 

 was to be an element of his competence to teach or to learn. 

 After forty years of existence the College, for worldly reasons, 

 has decided that a teacher must not be too well known to be 

 heterodox : he must not be conspicuous as a Unitarian. Breach 

 of faith, surrender of principle, and D. I. O. 



But this is not all. Between ourselves, the candidate who has 

 been refused the chair of Mental Philosophy because he is so very 

 wicked a Christian in religion, is also excluded because he is too 

 much of a theist in philosophy. He cannot help founding his 

 psychology on a moral Governor of the universe. 



Now, I would not have objected to leaving the existence of 

 God and His action on the minds of men an open question for 

 the best qualified candidate to treat in his own way ; but the 

 interference of the College as a college, and a settlement of 

 that question officially, is a step in which it concerns me, with 

 my way of thinking, to take a part. The public knows nothing 

 about this view of the question, but the Council have been 

 roundly charged with it by one of themselves in debate, and by 

 me in my D. I. 0. I have told them totidem verlis that they had 

 acted from fear of God in philosophy and fear of man in religion. 

 I am only here till the end of the current session. . . . 



Yours sincerely, 



A. DE MORGAN. 

 B B 



