"DEAR STIRLING,--
"You well know how reluctant I have been to interfere at all in the
election now close on us, and that in stating, as bound, what my own
clear knowledge of your qualities was, I have strictly held by that,
and abstained from more. But the news I now have from Edinburgh is of
such a complexion, so dubious, and so surprising to me; and I now find
I shall privately have so much regret in a certain event--which
seems to be reckoned possible, and to depend on one gentleman of the
seven--that, to secure my own conscience in the matter, a few plainer
words seem needful. To whatever I have said of you already, therefore,
I now volunteer to add, that I think you not only the one man in
Britain capable of bringing Metaphysical Philosophy, in the ultimate,
German or European, and highest actual form of it, distinctly home to
the understanding of British men who wish to understand it, but that
I notice in you farther, on the moral side, a sound strength of
intellectual discernment, a noble valour and reverence of mind, which
seems to me to mark you out as the man capable of doing us the highest
service in Ethical science too: that of restoring, or decisively
beginning to restore, the doctrine of morals to what I must ever
reckon its one true and everlasting basis (namely, the divine or
supra-sensual one), and thus of victoriously reconciling and rendering
identical the latest dictates of modern science with the earliest
dawnings of wisdom among the race of men.
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