Faraday to Christian Friedrich Schoenbein   25 July 1853

Royal Institution | 25 July 1853

My dear Schoenbein

I believe it is a good while since I had your last letter¹ i.e the one previous to that I received by the hands of Mr Drew² - but consider my age & weariness & the rapid manner in which I am becoming more & more inert - and forgive me. Even when I set about writing I am restrained by the consciousness that I have nothing worth communication. To be sure many letters are written having the same character; but then there is something in the manner which makes up the value: and which when I receive a letter from a kind friend such as you often raises it in my estimation far above what a mere reader would estimate it at. So you are going down the Danube one point on [sic] which I once saw³ and are about enjoying a holiday in the presence of pure nature. May it be a happy & a health giving one and may you return to your home loving it the better for the absence & finding there all the happiness which a man sound both in mind & body has a right to expect on this earth.

I have not been at work except in turning the tables upon table turners - nor should I have done that but that so many enquiries poured in upon me that I thought it better to stop the inpouring flood by letting all know at once what my views & thoughts were. What a weak credulous incredulous, unbelieving superstitious, bold, frightened, what a ridiculous world ours is, as far as concerns the mind of man. How full of inconsistencies contradictions & absurdities it is. I declare that taking the average of many minds that have recently come before me (and apart from that spirit which God has placed in each) and accepting for a moment that average as a standard, I should far prefer the obedience affections & instinct of a dog before it. Do not whisper this however to others. There is one above who worketh in all things and who governs even in the midst of that misrule to which the tendencies & powers of man are so easily perverted.

The Ozone question appears indeed to have been considerably illuminated by the researches in Bunsens⁴ laboratory⁵. But why do you think it wonderful that Oxygen should assume an allotropic condition? We are only beginning to enter upon the understanding of the philosophy of molecules & I think by what you say in former letters that you are feeling it to be so. Oxygen is of all bodies to me the most wonderful as it is to you. And truly the views & expectations of the philosopher in relation to it would be as wild as those of any table turner &c &c &c were it not that the philosopher has respect to the laws under which the wonderful things that he acknowledges come to pass and to the never failing recurrence of the effect when the cause of it is present. At the close of our Friday Evenings, I gave a little account to our members of Fremy⁶ & Becquerels expts.⁷ in producing Ozone by Electricity⁸ - and I confess myself glad that whilst at Heidelberg they have shewn an HO⁹ they have also proved the existence of a true <oring>O.

My dear Schoenbein, I really do not know what I have been writing above & I doubt whether I shall reread this scrawl least I should be tempted to destroy it altogether. So it shall go as a letter carrying with it our kindest remembrances to Madam Schoenbein and the sincerest Affection and Esteem of

Yours Ever Truly | M. Faraday

Address: Dr. Schoenbein | &c &c &c | University | Bale | on the Rhine