Letters to His Friends

by Forbes Robinson

You are not one man, but two or three. Thank God for that. It means that you will have a hard life—an awful struggle with self or selves: but it also means more influence, more power to enter into man's life. So many of the finest men owe their attractiveness to their diverse, many-sided nature. You will be able to feel for such, and perhaps to help them. You are half a Greek with your yearning for beauty and knowledge, half a Hebrew with your loathing for sin and love of God. The Greek in you must not be annihilated, but it must be subordinated to the Hebrew. Conscience must be absolute master. You must sacrifice the 'Greek' to Christ; but He will give you back what is best in the Greek ideal, all the better for the mark of the Cross on it. He will give it you back partly in this world, partly in the next, when you have learnt to renounce it—if need were, for ever—for His sake. But you must give up all for Him without thought of reward. He can give no reward to the man who is looking for it. The thought of your life helps me. Go on, for the night cometh when no man can work. Thank God it is yet day.

To his brother Edward in South Africa.

Mühlen, Switzerland: January 11, 1903.

I found walking a pleasant change after reading philosophy, which I have been doing during my holidays. I seem to have been getting my ideas a little clearer, and am no longer as content as I was with the Kantian doctrine, that our knowledge in speculative matters never gets beyond 'appearances.' I feel that at every turn we do get to that which is—to an underlying reality. I cannot feel that Kant's hard and fast division between 'speculative' and 'moral' reason holds good. The external world, because it is intelligible, must be akin to us; there must be an intelligence in it, otherwise it would never become an object of knowledge to our intelligence. It is not only in our ethical life that we come across the absolute consciousness. I feel now more than ever how we cannot divide up ourselves into water-tight compartments, and think of reason, will, and feeling as separate things, lying side by side. They can be separated—abstracted—in thought, but in actual life you never find one without the other. We cannot think without some degree of attention, and attention involves an exercise of will, and will cannot be exercised without desire, and desire involves feeling.

I think faith also cannot be regarded as a separate faculty. Reason, will, and feeling are all involved even in the faith of a poor cottager; much more does reason enter into the faith of a thoughtful man.

I have been reading Butler, and hope when I go back to study Hume. What a wealth of light the conception of 'Development' has shed upon the problems which exercised the eighteenth century! I have read half through Leslie Stephen's 'Thought in the Eighteenth Century,' and I have been struck again and again at the new aspect that the old questions take when looked at from the standpoint of Evolution.

I feel also that we need to study more the evolution of thought—the necessary phases that reason (like man's physical life) must pass through before perfection.…

I think you are right, that education must now include instruction in imperial ideas—in our relations with that larger social life which is dawning upon us—a step towards a still larger social life to be realised in the brotherhood of nations.

To F. J. C.

Christ's College, Cambridge: February 1, 1903.