‘Of course I can do nothing in a letter but suggest lines of thought and lines of reading. After Armstrong, I should most like you to take either Green’s Prolegomena or Martineau’s Types, and read both several times. Green will help you to see the unity underlying all possibility of knowledge.
‘It is perhaps more than anything the harmony of the Threefold Unity which helps me to realise the conception of the divine which Jesus uttered most clearly.
‘One sees the absolute physical unity, each atom forming part of the complete whole, and standing in vital relation to the whole.
‘One sees all knowledge as real, only when it takes its place as in (can I say part of?) the Universal thought. One can see things only when one sees all in God. But one sees that this which we have separated off as physical nature, is yet the means and the condition of the intellectual too; for Light, which is necessary to vital processes, is the means by which the Universal thought is revealed to our intelligence, by which God touches, as it were, from without and awakens, and causes truly to live, our intellectual being.
‘Thirdly, each—the physical, the intellectual—are felt by us to be the means to the highest of all, the perfection of the moral nature. Without this, goodness, power, and intellect would be worthless or horrible; and as the material can only be translated into the conception by the intellectual, so we feel that the moral alone can interpret the intellectual.
‘That the full solution is not ours must seem natural to us, who know ourselves to be shut in by space and time. But I am sure that men will not long remain blind to other facts, as they have been to some extent in this generation, owing to the scientific sudden growth of our day.
‘The facts of conscience are to me quite inexplicable on any other hypothesis than that of One who is supremely good speaking to His children, not through “eye or ear,” but directly. There is the unity of consciousness which makes memory possible, and moral judgment possible; and yet there is a secondary consciousness, the “categorical imperative,” the ideal goodness, ever revealing to man a higher and better. What if the conscience has never—I should say Except in One—received the perfect vision of goodness? This is only to say that the receiver is limited and imperfect, not that the perfect spiritual sun is not, or rather I should say the universal light, for the sun is a localisation of that which is invisible; is saturating through infinite space. Words ever fail.
‘I know that endless questions are still unanswered, but this seems to me to be a real knowledge, which is consistent and which gives peace, that all other theories are inconsistent, and that the highest, the moral being is starved upon them.’