We take our Quaker hats off to our readers! No sooner do we mention in this column some missing piece of information, or gap in understanding of an issue than hey, presto! A reader - or several - rushes forward with the desired material. We are most impressed that after mentioning Professor V.H. Mottram (scientist and Quaker pacifist) and the second edition of his book The Physical Basis of Personality - which is missing from the library at FH - some of you offered your copies to Eye.
This all stems from the rumbling controversy concerning a designed or evolved universe. Martin Mottram, the professor's son, who is an occasional contributor to The Friend, reminded us of his father's contribution to the debate in the forties when it started out as a 'nature versus nurture' disagreement. The eminent professor, a physiologist, experienced a profound dilemma on this matter. After his first edition in 1944, he published a second to which he added a 'Recapitulation and Coda'. Science was his business, but he was also a Quaker. The soul could not be omitted from his deliberations.

So Eye has been struggling with the Coda, helped a little by the editor who has an old interest in how the soul behaves in the body. Together we studied this extraordinarily pertinent book, and although space is limited here we feel you would like to see this gem from an unblinkered scientific mind - The 'saints' in moments of mystical insight seem to discern beneath the personality an inner self which partakes of the nature of ultimate reality, by whatever name they may call this reality - God, Allah, Yahweh, Brahman, the Absolute, Love, or Wisdom. And this familiar thing which we call self, this assertive, greedy and sensual thing compact of egoism, selfish desires, odd moods and passions, and of outstanding characteristics which we dub personality is an imposture and delusion. So I throw out the suggestion that the real 'I', the core of our being, that thing so alien from the everyday 'I', is a spark, an atom of the fundamental Reality in the Universe, but that its activities are conditioned, moulded and determined by inheritance and nurture. A persona is thrust upon it by our genes and our upbringing.

• The book has been gifted to the FH library by Mary Friend of Bristol. She tells us: 'I bought it as a biology student in the 1950s. It is amazing how much of the seminal work of genetics arose around the war time period. His final chapter puts the Quaker point of view clearly - and very much basically as I still see it.'