Bertrand Russell was born in 1872 in Britain. His mother’s name was Katherine Russell, Lady Amberley. She gave birth to three children between 1865 and 1872, of whom Bertrand was the last. Like her husband, she supported birth control, religious freedom and even free love. She died, when Bertrand was too young to remember her. She was vigorous, lively, witty, serious and fearless lady.
His father John Russell, Lord Amberely, was born in 1842 and died in 1876. He lived in the shadow of his father, the famous statesman Earl Russell. He was a progressive Liberal M.P. from 1865 to 1868, when support for birth control destroyed any chance of continuing in public life.
He then turned to writing. His most notable book was ‘Analysis of Religious Belief’. Due to non-resistance against bronchitis, and because of heart failure, he died.
Russell’s elder brother’s name was John Francis Stanley Russell (1865-1931) and his sister’s name was Rachel (1868-1874). In June 1874, Rachel and her mother suffered from diphtheria and within few days they died.
He was born in one of Britain’s most distinguished aristocratic Whig families. In 1876, he became orphan, before he was of four years. He was brought up by his grandmother, who tried to train him to become Prime Minister in the tradition of his grandfather.
COLLEGE
He had little idea of his abilities, until he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1890. There, his talents in philosophy and mathematics developed and until 1914, he worked for most of his time to these pursuits, to become a world authority.
FIRST AFFAIR
At the age of seventeen, he fell in love with the puritanical, high–minded Alys Pearsall Smith. On December 13, 1894, he married her, though he was once attracted to her younger sister Mary.
In 1893, he graduated in Arts with mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge.
A RESEARCHER
FIRST BOOK
In 1903, he worked on ‘Principia Mathematica’. Russell’s work on the foundations of mathematics, on logic and epistemology, put British philosophy in a new direction. He sought to bring philosophy into close alliance with science. His views were challenged by Wittgenstein, but remained critical, as the founding text of analytic philosophy.
DEVELOPING HIS ABILITIES
He engaged himself in political campaigns, notably those in favor of Free Trade during 1903–1904. He took part in another movement of women’s suffrage. He fought from 1906 to 1910 for women’s right to vote in political election.
He contested the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in the Wimbledon by-election.
During 1910 to 1913, he worked on the foundations of mathematics. And during this period, he published ‘Principia Mathematica’.
In 1911, Lady Ottoline Morrell became his mistress and remained his close friend and confidant till her death in 1938. Russell conducted many events from 1914 on, arguing for the liberation of men and women from sexual repression. This approach to human relations made him popular as early as prior to 1960.
He wrote a novel called ‘The Perplexities of John Forstice’, in 1912. In the same year, he worked on ‘Problems of Philosophy’, and argued for the position which he called Realism.
Appealed by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he devoted his abilities to agitating for a negotiated peace, with a fear that long struggle could permanently impair European civilization.
For this movement, he was dismissed from Trinity College. He was forbidden to go to America, subjected to restrictions on his freedom of movement in Britain. He was imprisoned for five months. He was shocked by the xenophobic nationalism displayed throughout the war. He wrote some of his most important books on political behaviour and philosophy.
He became a staunch advocate of Guild socialism, by which he hoped society would gain significant control over the economy. He also became an extremely effective speaker on human problems.
In 1915, he was given the ‘Butler Gold Medal’ for his contributions to philosophy.
During the summer of 1915, he wrote ‘Principles of Social Reconstruction’. In this, he suggested a philosophy of politics, based on the belief that impulse has more effect than conscious purpose in moulding men’s lives.
A POPULAR PUBLIC FIGURE
He remained a popular public figure with the coming of peace, but resumed his philosophical writing. Looking for societies that transcended the warlike flaws of the West, he visited Russia in 1920. He tried to support the Bolsheviks to come away repelled by the brutality, lack of liberty and similarities to fanatical religions that he found there.
In 1920 and much of 1921, he went to China, analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of that ancient civilization attempting to industrialize, and warned the dangers of imperial powers interfering in China’s affairs.
While he was a prisoner, he wrote the book : ‘The Analysis of Mind’, it was published in 1921. He continued to write books intended to emancipate readers from what he saw : the fetters at outmoded religious belief, restructive marriages, repressed attitude toward sexuality.
He married for the second time with Dora Black in 1921. He became the father of two children, a son and a daughter later on. His son’s name was John and daughter’s name was Katharine. He and Dora Russell started a model school at Beacon Hill in an attempt to transform education in order to eradicate possessiveness and warlike psychology.
To finance this experiment, he then often went on fund-raising tours in America, a society, as a whole respected, but also feared for its dogmatic capitalism and popular materialism.
In 1922, he published a book on China. He stood for Parliament in Chelsea, in the same year.
In the next year, his book on "The Prospects of Industrial Civilization" was published. The same year he wrote a small book titled "The A.B.C. of Atoms."
In the subsequent years, he wrote three small books titled "The Future of Science", ‘The A.B.C. of Relativity’ and ‘What I Believe’.
In 1927, he published ‘The Analysis of Matter’, which was in some sense a companion volume to ‘The Analysis of Mind’.
During 1920 to 1930, as his marriage to Dora broke down and he lost faith in Beacon Hill, he continued to write books intended to emancipate readers.
EFFORTS FOR WORLD PEACE
In a realm of politics, he persistently criticized the Bolshevik experiment in Russia, while analyzing the irrational savagery of Fascism.
When he wrote ‘Marriage and Morals’, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, withdrew permission for Russell to lecture at Columbia because of widespread condemnation of this book.
The next year, he published, ‘The Conquest of Happiness’. In this book, he advised what an individual can do to overcome temperamental causes of unhappiness. He spent his years of Second World War in America, where he wrote his popular book – "History of Western Philosophy".
He returned to Britain in 1944, becoming an eminent figure after the war. He warned about the dangers of war caused to civilization, posed by Russians developing its atomic weapons.
In 1945, Russell’s first anti- nuclear writing "The Bomb and Civilization" was edited by Kenneth Blackwell.
This fear for civilization, led him in the late 1950s and early 1960s into his last great crusade, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). He believed that Britain, by unilateral disarmament, could set an example to the world, leading Great Power Disarmament.
He was rescued from the boat crash on October 8, 1948. He was hospitalized in Trondheim, Norway.
On June 9, 1949 he was given the ‘Order of Merit’ by King George VI.
In 1949, his marriage with Patricia came to an end. She was an attractive Oxford undergraduate. She had been his children’s governess in the summer of 1930.
In March, 1939, he moved to Santa Barbara to take up a professorship at the University of California at Los Angeles. The next year, he resigned in order to teach at the city college of New York.V
He delivered a short series of Lectures at Columbia University, later on, published as ‘The Impact of Science on Society.’
IN LAST YEARS
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER
At the end of year 1950, he was given world’s most prestigious ‘Nobel Prize for Literature’. He was awarded for his book ‘Marriage and Morals’ at Stockholm.
He received ‘Kalinga Prize’ for the ‘Popularization of Science’, at UNESCO, in 1958.
During the summer of 1958 and 1959, he worked on the subject of common sense and Nuclear Warfare.
A bronze bust of Russell was made by the famous British Sculptor, Jacob Epstein, in 1960.
FOURTH MARRIAGE
Russell married for the fourth time with Edith Finch. His last marriage, provided him much happiness when he was over eighty.
DEATH
He died in Britain in 1970. At the time of his death, he was one of the world’s most influential critics of nuclear weapons and the American war in Vietnam.
Russell himself believed near the end of his life that the freedom in personal behaviour that he advocated had some pernicious and unanticipated effects.
Yet, till the end, he remained an apostle of political and personal freedom against oppression whether by the state, education or public opinion.
AN ORPHANED CHILD
1872 He was born in Britain. His mother’s name was Katharine Russell, Lady Amberley. She gave birth to three children between 1865 and 1872, of whom Bertrand was the last. His father’s name was John Russell, Lord Amberley. He lived in the shadow of his father, the famous statesman Earl Russell. Russell’s elder brother’s name was John Francis Stanley Russell.
JUNE 1874 His mother and his sister Rachel contracted diphtheria and within days, were dead.
1976 Orphaned before he was four years old. He was brought up by his grandmother. She tried to train him to become Prime Minister in the tradition of his grandfather.
FIRST LOVE
1889 He met the American Quaker, Alys Pearsall Smith. At the age of 17 years, Russell fell in love with the puritanical, high minded Alys.
1890 He went to Training College, Cambridge. There his talents in philosophy and mathematics developed.
1893 He graduated in Mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge.
1894 He married to Alys, though, he was once attracted to her younger sister Mary. Mary later married to the distinguished art historian Bernard Berenson.
POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS
1903 He worked on ‘Principia Mathematica’. Later on, it expanded in a 3–volume work written jointly with Alan Whitehead.
1903-04 He engaged himself in political campaigns, notably those in favor of Free Trade.
1906-10
He took part in another political campaign in favor of women’s suffrage. He fought for women’s right to vote in political elections.
He ran as the candidate for the national union of women’s suffrage societies in the Wimbledon by-election.
He ran as the candidate for the national union of women’s suffrage societies in the Wimbledon by-election. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society.
1910-13 He worked on the foundations of mathematics and during this period, he published ‘Principia Mathematica’.
The marriage between Russell and Alys ended by separation. Lady Ottoline Momell became his mistress and remained his close friend and confidant until her death in 1938.
He wrote a novel called ‘The Perplexities of John Forstice.’
He published ‘Problems of Philosophy’. In this, he argued for the position which he called Realism. He devoted most of his time to philosophy and mathematics.
A PEACE LOVER IMPRISONED
1914 With the outbreak of the Great World War, he devoted his energies to agitating for a negotiable peace.
For his efforts, he was dismissed from Training college, he was forbidden to go to America, and subjected to restrictions on his freedom of movement in Britain.
1915 He was given the ‘Butler Gold Medal’ for his contributions to philosophy.
During the summer, he wrote, ‘Principles of Social Reconstruction’. In this book, he suggested a philosophy of politics based upon the belief that impulse has more effect than conscious purpose in moulding men’s lives.
1918 He was imprisoned for five months, for anti-conscription campaign. He was shocked by xenophobic nationalism displayed throughout the war. He wrote some of his most important books on political behaviour and philosophy.
A TRAVELER
1920 He visited Russia. He tried to support the Bolsheviks only to come away repelled by the brutality, lack of liberty and similarities to fanatical religions that he found there.
1920-21 He visited China. He analyzed the strengths and weaknesses that ancient civilization was attempting to industrialize, and warned of the dangers of imperial powers interfering in China’s affairs.
He continued to write books intended to emancipate readers from what he saw as the fetters at outmoded religious belief, restrictive marriages, repressed attitudes towards human sexuality and authoritarian educational practices.
While he was a prisoner, he began to write on ‘The Analysis of Mind’. It was published in 1921.
He returned from China.
SECOND MARRIAGE
1921-23
He married for second time with Dora Black. He became the father of two children, a son, John and a daughter, Katharine. He and his wifestarted a model school at Beacon Hill, in an attempt to transform education so as to eradicate possessiveness and warlike psychology.
To finance this experiment, he often went on fund–raising tours to America. He published a book on China. He was a candidate for the Parliament in Chelsea.
A book on ‘The Prospects of Industrial Civilization’ was published. The same year, he wrote a small book titled ‘The A.B.C. of Atoms.’
1924 He worked on ‘The Future of Science’. His wife Dora stood for Parliament.
1925 He wrote two other small books, ‘The A.B.C. of Relativity’ and ‘What I Believe.’
1927 He published ‘The Analysis of Matter’, which was in some sense a companion volume to ‘The Analysis of Mind.’
His wife Dora and he decided to lay a foundation of a school in order that their children might be educated as they thought best.
He delivered lectures to the National Secular Society, south London Branch, at Battersea Town Hall. It was published in pamphlet form in the same year. Later on, in 1957 it was published titled "Why I am not a Christian and Other Essays…."
A PROSPEROUS PHILOSOPHER
1929 He prospered financially, after publication of ‘Marriage and Morals’ which was tremendously popular.
Dr. Nicholas Murray Bulter, the president of Columbia University, withdrew permission for Russell to lecture in Columbia, because of widespread condemnation of the book.
1930 He published ‘The Conquest of Happiness’. It consisted of commonsense advice as to what an individual can do to overcome temperamental causes of unhappiness.
Dec. 25, 1931 He returned from American lecture tour and spent the day on Atlanti.
1936 He married for the third time to an attractive Oxford undergraduate, Patricia Spence. She had been his children’s governess in the summer of 1930.
HITLER COMPELS HIM
1939 He was compelled to abandon his peace advocacy due to the aggressive autocracy of Hitler in Poland.
He spent the days of second World War in America. He was employed by the Philadelphia millionaire, Dr. Albert Barnes. There, he wrote his popular book ‘History of Western Philosophy’. During that time, he remained unhappy being away from Britain fighting for her life against Hitler.
He moved to Santa Barbara to take up a professorship at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Feb. 1940 He resigned from California University, in order to teach at the City College of New York. This appointment was withheld after a celebrated legal battle between the upholders of religious morality and academic freedom.
1944 Trinity College made amends for its expulsion of Russell in 1916 by offering him a five-year lectureship and fellowship.
He returned to Britain, as an established figure after the war; warning against the dangers to civilization posed by Russia, developing Atomic weapons.
1945 Russell’s first anti-nuclear writing "The Bomb and Civilization" was edited by Kenneth Blackwell.
THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
Theory of knowledge is a product of doubt. When we have asked ourselves seriously whether we really know anything at all, we are naturally led into an examination of knowing.
Kant, the founder of modern theory of knowledge, represented a natural reaction against Hume’s skepticism. Nowadays, few philosophers would assign to this subject quite such a fundamental importance as it had in Kant’s "Critical" system. This system remains an essential part of philosophy.
The theory of knowledge can be divided into three stages.
1 > The definition of knowledge.
2 > Data.
3 > Methods of Inference.
<1 > DEFINITION OF KNOWLEDGE
BELIEF :
Traditionally, a "belief" is a state of mind of a certain sort. Many behaviorists deny that there are states of mind, or at least that they can be known. Therefore, they avoid the word "belief".
BELIEF AND BEHAVIOUR :
Belief is to be something casually important. It must be defined as a characteristic of behaviour. Both human beings and animals act so as to achieve certain results. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail.
WORDS :
In order to bring this view into harmony with the facts of human behaviour, it is of course necessary to take account of the influence of words. According to the behaviorists, it is the use of words and their efficacy in producing conditional responses that constitutes "thinking". It is important to realize that verbal behaviour has the characteristics which lead us to regard it as pre-eminently a mark of "belief". Verbal habits are not infallible evidences of belief.
TRUTH AND LOGIC :
In logic, we take for granted that a word has a "meaning", what we signify by this can only be explained in behavioristic terms. When once we have acquired a vocabulary of words which have "meaning", we can proceed in a formal manner without needing to remember what "meaning" is.
UNCERTAINTIES AND VAGUENESS :
All knowledge is more or less uncertain and more or less vague. Vague knowledge has more likelihood of truth than precise knowledge, but is less useful.
<2 > THE DATA
Different methods and different types of skill are required for the observations, which provide the data in a quantitative science.
ANIMAL INFERENCE :
As we found it necessary to admit that knowledge may be only a characteristic of behaviour, so we shall have to say about inference. What a logical person recognizes as interference is refined operation, belonging to a high degree of intellectual development. There is another kind of inference which is practised even by animals. We must consider this primitive form of inference before we can become clear as to what we mean by "data".
MENTAL AND PHYSICAL DATA :
There are two sorts of data. One is physical which is derived from the senses. The other is mental which is derived from introspection. Data, in the sense in which we are using the word, consist of brief events, rousing in us various reactions, some of which may be called "inference".
<3 > METHODS OF INFERENCE
Inference is distinguished into Deduction and Induction.
INDUCTION :
The important forms of inference for theory of knowledge are those in which we infer the existence of something having certain characteristics from the existence of something having certain other characteristics.
PROBABILITY :
We have found a number of instances in which two characteristics are combined. The instances in which they are not combined, we find a new instance in which we know that one of the characteristics is present,
but don’t know whether the other is present or not. The degree of probability, which we infer will vary according to various circumstances
GRADES OF CERTAINTY :
Theory of knowledge is a subject which is partly logical and partly psychological. The connection between these parts is not very close. The logical part may come to be mainly an organization of what passes for knowledge according to differing grades of certainty."
THE PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY
Bertrand Russell’s book – ‘The Problems of Philosophy’ is divided into fifteen chapters. These chapters are titled as – ‘Appearance and Reality’, ‘The Existence and Matter’, ‘The Nature of Matter’, ‘Idealism’, ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description’, ‘On Induction’, ‘On our Knowledge of General Principles’, ‘How A Priori Knowledge is Possible’.
‘The World of Universals’, ‘On Intuitive Knowledge’, ‘Truth and Falsehood’, ‘Knowledge, Error, and Probable Opinion’, ‘The Limits of Philosophical Knowledge’ and ‘The Value of Philosophy.’
In this book, he has argued for a position which he called Realism, by which he meant that not only objects, but Universals, are "real", that it exists like matter independent of consciousness. This thesis was the only explanation for a priori knowledge : these universals exist, and the mind is capable of perceiving them through reason.
In his latter ‘Philosophy of Logical Atomism’, he modified his position, holding that what existed objectively were only "logical atoms" – properties, relations etc.
THE BOMB AND CIVILIZATION
Russell’s first anti–nuclear writing is called "The Bomb and Civilization". It was written in 1945. The editor of these papers was Kenneth Blackwell.
This article was Russell’s first response to the news of the devastation caused by the first atomic bomb. The article announced the urgency of the search for a structure of world peace.
It reiterated his faith in scientific progress and his hope that the United States would assume leadership in creating the global structures which were necessary for the survival of the human race.
As a man of science, he wished to reassure the public concerning the scientific achievement. He advised his readers that "The atomic bomb embodies the results of a combination of genius and patience as remarkable as any history of mankind."
Even before the war had ended, he was convinced of the outbreak of rivalry between the wartime Allies, the United States and the Soviet Union. He was convinced about another war to be inevitable.
He ended the article with the hope that after the next world war "Some Power will emerge with such preponderant strength as be able to establish a peaceful hegemony over the rest of the world."
WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN AND OTHER ESSAYS
Russell delivered this lecture on March 6, 1927 to the National Secular Society, South London Branch, at Battersea Town Hall. It was published in a pamphlet form in that same year. Later on, in 1957, it was published in a book form. In this book, he had explained his views in detail. Some thoughts are given below :
The word ‘Christian’ is used these days in a very loose sense by a great many people. Some people mean no more by it than a person who attempts to live a good life.
In that sense, I suppose there would be Christians in all sects and creeds, but I don’t think that, that is the proper sense of the word, if only because it would imply that all the people who are not Christians, all the Buddhists, Confucians, Mohammedans, and so on – are not trying to live a good life."
I don’t mean by a Christian, any person who tries to live decently according to his lights. I think that you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian.
There are two different items which are quite essential to anybody calling himself a Christian. The first is one who has a dogmatic nature – namely, that you must believe in God and immortality.
Then, further than that, as the name implies, you must have some kind of belief about Christ. Therefore I take it when I tell you why I am not a Christian, I have to tell you two different things : first, why I do not believe in God and immortality, and, secondly, why I don’t think that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant him a very high degree at moral goodness."
As read in a selection of articles from ‘The Spokesman.’" The latest phase of the undeclared war in the Middle East is based upon a profound miscalculation. The bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender, but will stiffen their resolve to resist.
This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment. The Vietnamese who have endured years of American heavy bombing have responded not by capitulation but by shooting down more enemy aircraft.
In 1940 my own fellow countrymen resisted Hitler’s bombing raids with unprecedented unity and determination. For this reason, the present Israeli attacks will fail in their essential purpose, but at the same time they must be condemned vigorously throughout the world."
The development of the crisis in the Middle East is both dangerous and instructive. For over 20 years Israel has expanded by force of arms. After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to "reason" and has suggested "negotiations".
This is the traditional role of the imperial power, because it wishes to consolidate with the least difficulty what it has already taken by violence. Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression.
The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annexe foreign territory, but because very expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world will tolerate."
The refugees who surround Palestine in their hundreds of thousands were described recently by the Washington journalist I.F. Stone as "the moral millstone around the neck of world Jewry. Many of the refugees are now well into the third decade of their precarious existence in temporary settlements. The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was "given" by a foreign Power to another people for the creation of a new State.
The result was that may hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their number have increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty ? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict.
No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate ? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East."
We are frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate any suffering. What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present if gross hypocrisy.
Not only does Israel condemn a vast number of refugees to misery; not only are many Arabs under occupation condemned to military rule; but also Israel condemns the Arab nations only recently emerging from colonial status, to continued impoverishment as military demands take precedence over national development."
All who want to see an end to bloodshed in the Middle East must ensure that any settlement does not contain the seeds of future conflict. Justice requires that the first step towards a settlement must be an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in June, 1967. A new world campaign is needed to help bring justice to the long-suffering people of the Middle East.
Russell’s last message on Israel was delivered on January 31, 1970. It was published in April, 1970.
• I am persuaded that there is absolutely no limit in the absurdities that can, by government action, come to be generally believed. Give me an adequate army, with power to provide it with more pay and better food than falls to the lot of the average man, and I will undertake, within thirty years, to make the majority of the population believe that two and two are three, that water freezes when it gets hot and boils when it gets cold, or any other nonsense that might seem to serve the interest of the State.
• There are some desires which, though very powerful, have not, as a rule, any great political importance. Most men at some period of their lives desire to marry, but as a rule they can satisfy this desire without having to take any political action.
• If politics is to become scientific, and if the event is not to be constantly surprising, it is imperative that our political thinking should penetrate more deeply into the springs of human action.
• One of the troubles about vanity is that it grows with what it feeds on. The more you are talked about, the more you will wish to be talked about.
• Most political leaders acquire their position by causing large numbers of people to believe that these leaders are actuated by altruistic desires.
• Politics is largely governed by sententions platitudes which are devoid of truth.
• The conscientious Radical is faced with great difficulties. He knows that he can increase his popularity by being false to his creed, and appealing to hatreds that have nothing to do with the reforms in which he believes.
• I cannot be content with a brief moment of riotous living followed by destitution, and however clever the scientists may be, there are some things that they cannot be expected to achieve.
• How long will it be before the accessible oil in the world is exhausted ? Will all the arable land be turned into dustbowls as it has been in large parts of the United States ? Will the population increase to the point where men again, like their remote ancestors, have no leisure to think of anything but the food supply ? Such questions are not to be decided by general philosophical reflections. Communists think that there will be plenty of oil; if there are no capitalists. Some religious people think that there will be plenty of food if we trust in Providence. Such ideas are superficial, even when they are called scientific, as they are by the Communists.
• We all know that the price of food goes up, but most of us attribute this to the wickedness of the Government. If we live under a progressive Government, it makes us reactionary; if we live under a reactions are superficial and frivolous.
• Everything done by European administrators to improve the lot of Africans is, at present, totally and utterly futile because of the growth of population. The Africans, not unnaturally, though now mistakenly, attribute their destitution to their exploitation by the white man.
• If two hitherto rival football teams, under the influence of brotherly love, decided to co-operate in placing the football first beyond one goal and then beyond the other, no one’s happiness would be increased.
• In a shipwreck the crew obey orders without the need of reasoning with themselves, because they have a common purpose which is not remote, and the means to its realization are not difficult to understand. But if the Captain were obliged, like the Government, to explain the principles of currency in order to prove his commands wise, the ship would sink before his lecture was finished.
• The savage, in spite of his membership of a small community, lived a life in which his initiative was not too much hampered by the community. The things that he wanted to do, usually hunting and war, were also the things that his neighbors wanted to do, and if he felt an inclination to become a medicine man he only had to ingratiate himself with some individual already eminent in that profession, and so, in due course, to succeed to his powers of magic. If he was a man of exceptional talent, he might invent some improvement in weapons, or a new skill in hunting. These would not put him into any opposition to the community, but, on the contrary, would be welcomed. The modern man lives a very different life. If he sings in the street he will be thought to be drunk and if he dances a policeman will reprove him for impeding the traffic.
• Two great religions- Buddhism and Christianity- have sought to extend to the whole human race the co-operative feeling that is spontaneous towards fellow tribesmen. They have preached the brotherhood of man, showing by the use of the word ‘brotherhood’ that they are attempting to extend beyond its natural bounds an emotional attitude which, in its origin, is biological. If we are all children of God, then we are all one family.
• Before the war (World War I) one of the objections commonly urged against votes for women was that women would tend to be pacifists. During the war they gave a large-scale refutation of this charge, and the vote was given to them for their share in the bloody work.
• There are many points of view from which the life of man may be considered. There are those who think of him primarily in cultural terms as being capable of lofty art and sublime speculation and discovery of the hidden secrets of nature. There are those who think of him as one of those kinds of animals that are capable of government, though in this respect he is completely outshone by ants and bees. There are those who think of him as the master of war; these include all the men in all countries who decide upon the adornment of public squares, where it is an invariable rule obeyed by all right-thinking public authorities that the most delectable object to be seen by the passers-by is a man on horseback, who is commemorated for his skill in homicide.
• Organizations are of two kinds, those which aim at getting something done, and those which aim at preventing something from being done.
• I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing. There are others, which, one must suppose, opponents of birth control would prefer. War ...has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove more effective.
• In superstitious moments I am tempted to believe in the myth of the Tower of Babel, and to suppose that in our own day a similar but greater impiety is about to be visited by a more tragic and terrible punishment. Perhaps- so I sometimes allow myself to fancy- God does not intend us to understand the mechanism by which He regulates the material universe.
• Men, quite ordinary men, will compel children to look on while their mothers are raped. In pursuit of political aims men will submit their opponents to long years of unspeakable anguish.
• I am a firm believer in democratic representative government as the best form for those who have the tolerance and self-restraint that is required to make it workable.
• The American legislators who made the immigration laws consider the Nordics superior to Slavs or Latins or any other white men. But the Nazis, under the stress of war, were led to the conclusion that there are hardly any true Nordics outside Germany; the Norwegians, except Quisling and his few followers, had been corrupted by intermixture with Finns and Lapps and such. Thus politics are a clue to descent. The biologically pure Nordics love Hitler, and if you did not love Hitler, that was proof of tainted blood.
• Very little remains of institutions and ways of life that when I was a child appeared as indestructible as granite. I grew up in an atmosphere impregnated with tradition. My parents died before I can remember, and l was brought up by my grandparents.... I was taught a kind of theoretic republicanism which was prepared to tolerate a monarch so long as he recognized that he was an employee of the people and subject to dismissal if he proved unsatisfactory.
• I am not myself in any degree ashamed of having changed my opinions.
• Owing to the identification of religion with virtue, together with the fact that the most religious men are not the most intelligent, a religious education gives courage to the stupid to resist the authority of educated men.
• If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument, rather than by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in what is called ‘education’.
• Punctuality is a quality the need of which is bound up with social co-operation. It has nothing to do with the relation of the soul to God, or with mystic insight, or with any of the matters with which the more elevated and spiritual moralists are concerned.
• To modern educated people, it seems obvious that matters of fact are to be ascertained by observation, not by consulting ancient authorities. But this is an entirely modern conception, which hardly existed before the seventeenth century.
• It is not altogether true that persuasion is one thing and force is another. Many forms of persuasion, even many of which everybody approves, are really a kind of force. Consider what we do to our children. We do not say to them: ‘Some people think the earth is round, and others think it flat; when you grow up, you can, if you like, examine the evidence and form your own conclusion.’ Instead of this we say : ‘The earth is round.’ By the time our children are old enough to examine the evidence, our propaganda has closed their minds, and the most persuasive arguments of the Flat Earth Society make no impression.
• Until the time of Galileo, astronomers, following Aristotle, believed that everything in the heavens, from the moon upwards, is unchanging and incorruptible. Since Laplace, no reputable astronomer has held this view. Nebulae, stars, and planets, we now believe, have all developed gradually. Some stars, for instance the companion of Sirius, are ‘dead’; they have at some time undergone a cataclysm which has enormously diminished the amount of light and heat radiating from them. Our own planet, in which philosophers are apt to take a parochial and excessive interest, was once too hot to support life, and will in time be too cold.
• Generalizing, we may say that Dr. Dewey, like everyone else, divides beliefs into two classes, of which one is good and the other bad. He holds, however, that a belief may be good at one time and bad at another. A belief about some event in the past is to be classified as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ not according to whether the event really took place, but according to the future effects of the belief.
• Children are made to learn bits of Shakespeare by heart, with the result that ever after they associate him with pedantic boredom. If they could meet him in the flesh, full of jollity and ale, they would be astonished, and if they had never heard of him before they might be led by his jollity to see what he had written. But if at school they had been inoculated against him, they will never be able to enjoy him.
• Boys and young men acquire readily the moral sentiments of their social milieu, whatever these sentiments may be.
• Dread of disaster makes everybody act in the very way that increases the disaster. Psychologically the situation is analogous to that of people trampled to death when there is a panic in a theatre caused by a cry of ‘Fire!’.
• Male superiority in former days was easily demonstrated, because if a woman questioned her husband’s he could beat her. From superiority in this respect others were thought to follow. Men were more reasonable than women, more inventive, less swayed by their emotions, and so on.
• Some ‘advanced thinkers’ are of the opinion that anyone who differs from the conventional opinion must be in the right. This is a delusion; if it were not, truth would be easier to come by than it is.
• The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.
• Some kind of philosophy is a necessity to all but the most thoughtless, and in the absence of knowledge it is almost sure to be a silly philosophy.
• When the journey from means to end is not too long, the means themselves are enjoyed if the end is ardently desired.
• Herd pressure is to be judged by two things : first, its intensity, and second, its direction.
• Dr. Arnold, the hero of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and the admired reformer of public schools, came across some cranks who thought it a mistake to flog boys. Anyone reading his outburst of furious indignation against this opinion will be forced to the conclusion that he enjoyed inflicting floggings, and did not wish to be deprived of this pleasure.
• Men of science are being increasingly compelled to pursue the ends of governments rather than those proper to science.... The scientist who discovers how to injure others is therefore at least as much honored as the one who shows us how to benefit ourselves.
• In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias as is possible for human beings.
• I was a solitary, shy, priggish youth. I had no experience of the social pleasures of boyhood and did not miss them. But I liked mathematics, and mathematics was suspect because it has no ethical content.
• I think the first thing that led me toward philosophy (though at that time the word ‘philosophy’ was still unknown to me) occurred at the age of eleven. My childhood was mainly solitary as my only brother was seven years older than I was. No doubt as a result of much solitude I became rather solemn, with a great deal of time for thinking but not much knowledge for my thoughtfulness to exercise itself upon. I had, though I was not yet aware of it, the pleasure in demonstrations which is typical of the mathematical mind.
• There are some simple maxims which I think might be commended to writers of expository prose. First : never use a long word if a short word will do. So, if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences. Third : do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.
• Vanity is a motive of immense potency.
• I once befriended two little girls from Estonia, who had narrowly escaped death from starvation in a famine. They lived in my family, and of course had plenty to eat. But they spent all their leisure visiting neighboring farms and staling potatoes, which they hoarded. Rockefeller, who in his infancy had experienced great poverty, spent his adult life in a similar manner.
• What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it’s easy to have glory without power.
• The desire for excitement is very deep-seated in human beings, especially in males. I suppose that in the hunting stage it was more easily gratified than it has been since. The chase was exciting, war was exciting, courtship was exciting. A savage would manage to commit adultery with a woman while her husband is asleep beside her. This situation, I imagine, is not boring. But with the coming of agriculture life began to grow dull, except, of course, for the aristocrats, who remained, and still remain, in the hunting stage.
• The completely un-traveled person will view all foreigners as the savage regards the members of another herd. But the man who has travelled, or who has studied international politics, will have discovered that, if he had to prosper, it must, to some degree, become amalgamated with other herds.
• Civilized life has altogether grown too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide a harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting.
• I think every big town should contain artificial waterfalls that people can descend in very fragile canoes, and they should contain bathing pools full of mechanical sharks. Any person found advocating a preventive war should be condemned to two hours a day with these ingenious creatures.
• Every isolated passion, is, in isolation, insane; sanity may be defined as synthesis of insanities. Every dominant passion generates a dominant fear, the fear of its non-fulfillment. Every dominant fear generates a nightmare, sometimes in form of explicit and conscious fanaticism, sometimes in paralyzing timidity, sometimes in an unconscious or subconscious terror which finds expression only in dreams. the man who wishes to preserve sanity in a dangerous world should summon in his own mind a parliament of fears, in which each in turn is voted absurd by all the others.
• The frequency with which a man experiences lust depends upon his own physical condition, whereas the occasion which rouse such feelings in him depend upon the social conventions to which he is accustomed.
• If nakedness were the fashion, it would cease to excite us, and women would be forced, as they are in certain savage tribes, to adopt clothing as means of making themselves sexually attractive. Exactly similar considerations apply to the literature and pictures: what was exciting in the Victorian Age, would leave a man of franker epoch quite unmoved. The more prudes restrict the permissible degree of sexual appeal, the less is required to make such an appeal effective.
• Men who allow their love of power to give them a distorted view of the world are to be found in every asylum: one man will think that he is the Governor of the Bank of England, another will think he is the King, and yet another will think he is God. Highly similar delusions, if expressed by educated men in obscure language, lead to professorships in philosophy; and if expressed by emotional men in eloquent language, lead to dictatorships.
• In Lisbon, where heretics were publicly burned, it sometimes happened that one of them, by particularly edifying recantation, would be granted a boon of being strangled before being put to into the flames. This would make the spectators so furious, that he authorities had a great difficulty preventing them from lynching the penitent and burning him on their own account. The spectacle of writhing torments of the victims was, in fact, one of the principal pleasures to which the populace looked forward to enliven a somewhat drab existence. I cannot doubt that pleasure greatly contributed to the general belief that burning of heretics was a righteous act. The same sort of thing applies to war. People who are vigorous and brutal often find war enjoyable, provided that it is a victorious war, and that there is not too much interference with rape and plunder. This is a great help in persuading people that wars are righteous.
• In order to be happy we require all kinds of supports to our self-esteem. We are human beings, therefore human beings are the purpose of god’s creation.
• There was, until the end of the eighteenth century, a theory that insanity is due to a possession by devils. It was inferred that any pain suffered by the patient is also suffered by the devils, so that the best cure for is to make the patient suffer so much that the devils will decide to abandon him. The insane, in accordance with this theory, were savagely beaten. This treatment was tried on king George III when he was mad, but without success. It is a curious and painful fact that almost all the completely futile treatments that have been believed in during the long history of medical folly have been such as caused acute suffering to the patient.
• ...hence the need of religion and morality to reinforce self-interest.
• If we could all live solitary and without labor, we could all enjoy this ecstasy of independence; since we cannot, its delights are only available to madmen and dictators.
• Happiness is promoted by association of persons who share similar tastes and similar opinions. Social intercourse may be expected to develop more and more along these lines, and it may be hoped that by these means the loneliness that now afflict so many unconventional people will be gradually diminished almost to vanishing point. This will undoubtedly increase their happiness, but it will of course diminish the sadistic pleasure which the conventional at present derive from having the unconventional at their mercy. I do not think, however, that this is a pleasure which we need to be greatly concerned to preserve.
• Our mental make-up is suited to a life of very severe physical labor.
• There is no greater reason for children to honor parents than for parents to honor children except, that while the children are young, the parents are stronger than children.
• The man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man; neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for a man.
• A large proportion of the human race, it is true, is obliged to work so hard in obtaining the necessaries that little energy is left over for the other purposes; but those whose livelihood is assured do not, on that account, cease to be active.
• Some astronomers try to cheer us up in the moments of depression by assuring us that one fine day the sun will explode, and in the twinkling of an eye we shall all be turned into gas. I do not know whether this is going to happen, nor when it will happen if it does happen, but I think it’s safe to say that if it does it will be a matter outside human control, and that even the best astronomers would be unable to prevent it.
• Mass hysteria is a phenomenon not confined to human beings; it may be seen in any gregarious species. I once saw a photograph of a large herd of wild elephants in Central Africa Seeing an airplane for the first time, and all in a state of wild collective terror. The elephant, at most times, is calm and sagacious beast, but this unprecedented phenomenon of a noisy, unknown animal in the sky, had thrown the whole herd completely off its balance. Each separate animal was terrifies, and its terror communicated itself to the others, creating a vast multiplication of panic. As, however, there were no journalists among them, the terror died down when the airplane was out of sight.
• You must not kill your neighbor, whom perhaps you genuinely hate, but by a little propaganda this hate can be transferred to some foreign nation, against whom all your murderous impulses become patriotic heroism.
• If you ask a modern anti-Semite why he dislikes Jews, he will tell you that they are unscrupulous and sharp in business and merciless to their debtors; he will tell you that they are always on the make, always intriguing, always supporting each other against gentile competitors. If you say you have sometimes found similar characteristics among Christians, the anti-Semite will say: "Oh, of course I don’t deny there are ruffians who are not Jews. And I have some very good friends among Jews. But I am speaking of the average." If you question him when he is off his guard, you will find that whenever a Jew engages in a bit of share practice he says, "how like a Jew," but when a Gentile does likewise he says "and, you know, the astonishing thing is that he is not a Jew." This is not a scientific method of arriving at averages.
• Young men and young women meet each other with much less difficulty than was formerly the case, and every housemaid expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a Jane Austin heroine throughout a whole novel.
• Everybody has had at some time nightmares of falling, which seem to suggest an origin in the lives of our arboreal ancestors, though this perhaps is fanciful.
• My first advice (on how not to grow old) would be to choose you ancestors carefully.
• The difference between mind and brain is not a difference of quality, but a difference of arrangement. It is like the difference between arranging people in geographical order or in alphabetical order, both of which are done in the post office directory.
• I observe that a very large portion of the human race does not believe in God and suffers no visible punishment in consequence. And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that he would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt his existence.
• Although we are taught the Copernican astronomy in our textbooks, it has not yet penetrated to our religion or our morals, and has not even succeeded in destroying belief in astrology. People still think that the Divine Plan has special reference to human beings, and that a special Providence not only looks after the good, but also punishes the wicked. I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious-for instance, the nuns who never take a bath without wearing a bathrobe all the time. When asked why, since no man can see them, they reply: ‘Oh, but you forget the good God.’ Apparently they conceive of the Deity as a Peeping Tom, whose omnipotence enables Him to see through bathroom walls, but who is foiled by bathrobes. This view strikes me as curious.
• Christians hold that their faith does good, but other faiths do harm. At any rate, they hold this about the Communist faith. What I wish to maintain is that all faiths do harm. We may define ‘faith’ as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. When there is evidence, no one speaks of ‘faith.
• The Church attacked the habit of the bath on the ground that everything which makes the body more attractive tends towards sin Dirt was praised and the odor of sanctity became more and more penetrating. ‘The purity of the body and its garments,’ said St. Paula, ‘means the impurity of the soul.’ (Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. IV, p. 31.) Lice were called the pearls of God, and to be covered with them was an indispensable mark of a holy man.
• Since evolution became fashionable, the glorification of Man has taken a new form.
• For my part, I find even eternal damnation less incredible, certainly less ridiculous, than this lame and impotent conclusion which we are asked to admire as the supreme effort of Omnipotence.
• Mankind . . . are a mistake. The universe would be sweeter and fresher without them.
• It is not by prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws.
• According to St. Thomas the soul is not transmitted with the semen, but is created afresh with each man. There is, it is true, a difficulty : when a man is born out of wedlock, this seems to make God an accomplice in adultery. This objection, however, is only specious. There is a grave objection which troubled St. Augustine, and that is as to the transmission of original sin. It is the soul that sins, and if the soul is not transmitted, but created afresh, how can it inherit the sin of Adam ? This is not discussed by St. Thomas.
• If you genuinely desire the happiness of mankind, certain forms of ignoble personal happiness are not open to you. If your child is ill, and you are a conscientious parent, you accept medical diagnosis, however doubtful and discouraging; if you accept the cheerful opinion of a quack and your child consequently dies, you are not excused by the pleasantness of belief in the quack while it lasted.
• If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.
• The agnostic is not quite so certain as some Christians are as to what is good and what is evil. He does not hold, as most Christians in the past held, that people who disagree with the Government on abstruse points of theology ought to suffer a painful death. He is against persecution, and rather chary of moral condemnation.As for ‘sin,’ he thinks it not a useful notion. He admits, of course, that some kinds of conduct are desirable and some undesirable, but he holds that the punishment of undesirable kinds is only to be commended when it is deterrent or reformatory, not when it is inflicted because it is thought a good thing on its own account that the wicked should suffer. It was this belief in vindictive punishment that made men accept hell. This is part of the harm done by the notion of ‘sin.
• It was geology, Darwin, and the doctrine of evolution, that first upset the faith of British men of science. If man was evolved by insensible gradations from lower forms of life, a number of things became very difficult to understand. At what moment in evolution did our ancestors acquire free will ? At what stage in the long journey from the ameba did they begin to have immortal souls ? When did they first become capable of the kinds of wickedness that would justify a benevolent Creator in sending them into eternal torment ? Most people felt that such punishment would be hard on monkeys, in spite of their propensity for throwing coconuts at the heads of Europeans. But how about Pithecanthropus Erectus ? Was it really he who ate the apple ? Or was it Homo Pekiniensis ?
• There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.
• There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead.
• The raw fruits of the earth were made for human sustenance. Even the white tails of rabbits, according to some theologians, have a purpose, namely to make it easier for sportsmen to shoot them. There are, it is true, some inconveniences: lions and tigers are too fierce, the summer is too hot, and the winter too cold. But these things only began after Adam ate the apple; before that, all animals were vegetarians, and the season was always spring. If only Adam had been content with peaches and nectarines, grapes and pears and pineapples, these blessings would still be ours.
• Man is a feeble creature, to whom only submission and worship are becoming. Pride is insolence, and belief in human power is impiety.
• Nature, it is true, still sees to it that we are mortal, but with the progress in medicine it will become more and more common for people to live until they have had their fill of life.
• If you question any candid person who is no longer young, he is very likely to tell you that, having tasted life in this world, he has no wish to begin again as a ‘new boy’ in another.
• Gloomy saints who abstained from all pleasures of sense, who lived in solitude in the desert, denying themselves meat and wine and the society of women, were, nevertheless, not obliged to abstain from all pleasures. The pleasures of the mind were considered to be superior to those of the body, and a high place among the pleasures of the mind was assigned to the contemplation of the eternal tortures to which the pagans and heretics would hereafter be subjected.
• The standpoint of modern liberal theologians is well set forth by Dr. Tennant in his book The Concept of Sin. To him sin consists in acts of will that are in conscious opposition to a known law, the moral law being known by Revelation as God’s will. It follows that a man destitute of religion cannot sin.
• One occasion for theological intervention to prevent the mitigation of human suffering was the discovery of anesthetics.
• The conception of purpose is a natural one to apply to a human artificer. A man who desires a house cannot, except in the Arabian Nights, have it rise before him as a result of his mere wish; time and labor must be expended before his wish can be gratified.
• The Greek Church is blamed for denying the double procession of the Holy Ghost and the supremacy of the Pope. We are warned that, although Christ was conceived of the Holy Ghost, we must not suppose that He was the son of the Holy Ghost according to the flesh.
• Belief in God and a future life makes it possible to go through life with less of stoic courage than is needed by skeptics.
• The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms.
• We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages.
• A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.
• Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. Fear is the basis of the whole thing- fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death.... Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations.
• Owing to their miraculous powers, priests (in the eleventh century) could determine whether a man should spend eternity in heaven or in hell. If he died while excommunicated, he went to hell; if he died after priests had performed all the proper ceremonies, he would ultimately go to heaven provided he had duly repented and confessed. Before going to and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind or generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.
• The Russian Government appears to think that Soviet decrees can change the laws of genetics; the Vatican apparently believes that ecclesiastical decrees could secure adequate nourishment for all even if there were only standing room on the planet. Such opinions, to my mind, represent a form of insane megalomania entirely alien to the scientific spirit.
• Christ said ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,’ and when asked ‘who is thy neighbor ?’ went on to the parable of the Good Samaritan. If you wish to understand this parable as it was understood by His hearers, you should substitute ‘German’ or ‘Japanese’ for ‘Samaritan.’ I fear many present-day Christians would resent such a substitution, because it would compel them to realize how far they have departed from the teaching of the Founder of their religion.
• Suppose atomic bombs had reduced the population of the world to one brother and sister; should they let the human race die out ? I do not know the answer, but I do not think it can be in the affirmative merely on the ground that incest is wicked.
• The whole conception of ‘sin’ is one I find very puzzling, doubtless owing to my sinful nature. If ‘sin’ consisted in causing needless suffering, I could understand, but on the contrary, sin often consists in avoiding needless suffering.
• Within the herd, we are more friendly to each other than are many species of animals, but in our attitude towards those outside the herd, in spite of all that has been done by moralists and religious teachers, our emotions are as ferocious as those of any animal, and our intelligence enables us to give them a scope which is denied to even the most savage beast.
• There is in Aristotle an almost complete absence of what may be called benevolence or philanthropy. The sufferings of mankind, in so far as he is aware of them, do not move him emotionally; he holds them intellectually to be an evil, but there is no evidence that they cause him unhappiness except when the sufferers happen to be his friends.
• Most stern moralists are in the habit of thinking of pleasure as only of the senses, and, when they eschew the pleasures of sense, they do not notice that the pleasures of power, which to men of their temperament are far more attractive, have not been brought within the ban of their ascetic self-denial.
• One of the ‘grand’ conceptions which have proved scientifically useless is the soul. I do not mean that there is positive evidence showing that men have no soul; I only mean that the soul, if it exists, plays no part in any discoverable causal law.
• Cotton goods (after the industry became scientific) could find a market in India and Africa : this was a stimulus to British Imperialism. Africans had to be taught that nudity is wicked; this was done very cheaply by missionaries. In addition to cotton goods we exported tuberculosis and syphilis, but for them there was no charge.
• At one time, the most influential text in the Bible was : ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ Nowadays, people pass over this text, in silence if possible; if not, with an apology. And so, even when we have a sacred book, we still choose as truth whatever suits our own prejudices. No Catholic, for instance, takes seriously the text which says that a Bishop should be the husband of one wife.
• Consider how much brutality has been justified by the rhyme : "A dog, a wife, and a walnut tree, The more you beat them the better they be." I have no experience of the moral effect of flagellation on walnut trees, but no civilized person would now justify the rhyme as regards wives. The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly, I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
• When we pass in review the opinions of former times which are now recognized as absurd, it will be found that nine times out of ten they were such as to justify the infliction of suffering.
• The absence of any sharp line between men and apes is very awkward for theology. When did men get souls? Was the Missing Link capable of sin and therefore worthy of hell ? Did Pithecanthropus Erectus have moral responsibility ? Was Homo Pekiniensis damned ?
• A man who uses what is called ‘bad language’ is not from a rational point of view any worse than a man who does not. Nevertheless practically everybody in trying to imagine a saint would consider abstinence from swearing as essential. Considered in the light of reason this is simply silly. The same applies to alcohol and tobacco. With regard to alcohol the feeling does not exist in southern countries, and indeed there is an element of impiety about it, since it is known that Our Lord and the Apostles drank wine. With regard to tobacco it is easier to maintain a negative position, since all the greatest saints lived before its use was known. But here also no rational argument is possible. The view that no saint would smoke is based in the last analysis upon the view that no saint would do anything solely because it gave him pleasure.
• When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning-rod, the clergy, both in England and America, with enthusiastic support of George III, condemned it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God. For, as all right-thinking people were aware, lightning is sent by God to punish impiety or some other grave sin and the virtuous are never struck by lightning. Therefore if God wants to strike anyone, Benjamin Franklin ought not to defeat His design; indeed, to do so is helping criminals to escape.
• There are logical difficulties in the notion of Sin. We are told that Sin consists in acting contrary to God’s commands, but we are also told that God is omnipotent. If He is, nothing contrary to His will can occur; therefore when the sinner disobeys His commands, He must have intended this to happen.
• According to St. Thomas, evil is unintentional, not as essence, and has an accidental cause which is good. All things tend to be like God, who is the End of all things. Human happiness does not consist in carnal pleasures, honor, glory, wealth, worldly power, or goods of the body, and is not seated in the sense. Man’s ultimate happiness does not consist in acts of moral virtue, because these are means; it consists in the contemplation of God. But the knowledge of God possessed by the majority does not suffice; nor the knowledge of Him obtained by faith. In this life, we cannot see God in His essence, or have ultimate happiness; but hereafter we shall see Him face to face. (Not literally, we are warned, because God has no face.) This will happen not by our natural power, but by the divine light; and even then, we shall not see all of Him.
• Those who first advocated religious toleration were thought wicked, and so were the early opponents of slavery.
• Protestants tell us, or used to tell us, that it is contrary to the will of God to work on Sundays. But Jews say that it is on Saturdays that God objects to work. Disagreement on this point has persisted for nineteen centuries, and I know no method of putting an end to the disagreement except Hitler’s lethal chambers, which would not generally be regarded as a legitimate method in scientific controversy.
• Jews and Mohammedans assure us that God forbids pork, but Hindus say that it is beef that he forbids. Disagreement on this point has caused hundreds of thousands to be massacred in recent years. It can hardly be said, therefore, that the Will of God gives a basis for an objective ethic.
• I know men, by no means old, who, when in infancy they were seen touching a certain portion of their body, were told with the utmost solemnity : ‘I would rather see you dead than doing that.’ I regret to say that the effect in producing virtue in later life has not always been all that conventional moralists might desire.
• The Platonic Socrates was a pattern to subsequent Philosophers for many ages. As a man, we may believe him admitted to the communion of saints; but as a philosopher he needs a long residence in a scientific purgatory.
• Since reason consists in a just adaptation of means to ends, it can only be opposed by those who think it a good thing that people should choose means which cannot realize their professed ends.
• One critic takes me to task, because I say that only evil passions prevent the realization of a better world, and goes on triumphantly to ask, ‘are all human emotions necessarily evil ?’ In the very book that leads my critic to this objection, I say that what the world needs is Christian love, or compassion. This, surely, is an emotion, and, in saying that this is what the world needs, I am not suggesting reason as a driving force. I can only suppose that this emotion, because it is neither cruel nor destructive, is not attractive to the apostles of unreason.
• Intellectually, the effect of mistaken moral considerations upon philosophy has been to impede progress to an extraordinary extent. I do not myself believe that philosophy can either prove or disprove the truth of religious dogmas, but ever since Plato, most philosophers have considered it part of their business to produce ‘proofs’ of immortality and the existence of God.
• All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things : That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave.
• If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.
• The Stoic-Christian view requires a conception of virtue very different from Aristotle’s, since it must hold that virtue is as possible for the slave as for his master. Christian ethics disapproves of pride, which Aristotle thinks a virtue, and praises humility, which he thinks a vice. The intellectual virtues, which Plato and Aristotle value above all others, have to be thrust out of the list altogether, in order that the poor and humble may be able to be as virtuous as anyone else. Pope Gregory the Great solemnly reproved a bishop for teaching grammar.
• There is no presence of justice, as we understand it, in the punishment following an act forbidden by a taboo, which is rather to be conceived as analogous to death as the result of touching a live wire.
• It must be admitted that there is a certain type of Christian ethic to which Nietzsche’s strictures can be justly applied. Pascal and Dostoevsky - his own illustrations- have both something abject in their virtue. Pascal sacrificed his magnificent mathematical intellect to his God, thereby attributing to Him a barbarity which was a cosmic enlargement of Pascal’s morbid mental tortures. Dostoevsky would have nothing to do with ‘proper pride’; he would sin in order to repent and to enjoy the luxury of confession.
• Forms of morality based on taboo linger on into civilized communities to a greater extent than some people realize.
• It is true that if we ever did stop to think about the cosmos we might find it uncomfortable. The sun may grow cold or blow up; the earth may lose its atmosphere and become uninhabitable.
• Life is a brief, small, and transitory phenomenon in an obscure corner, not at all the sort of thing that one would make a fuss about if one were not personally concerned.
• Law in origin was merely a codification of the power of dominant groups, and did not aim at anything that to a modern man would appear to be justice.
• The Christian ethics inevitably, through the emphasis laid upon sexual virtue, did a great deal to degrade the position of women. Since the moralists were men, woman appeared as the temptress; if they had been women, man would have had this role. Since woman was the temptress, it was desirable to curtail her opportunities for leading men into temptation; consequently respectable women were more and more hedged about with restrictions, while the women who were not respectable, being regarded as sinful, were treated with the utmost contumely. It is only in quite modern times that women have regained the degree of freedom which they enjoyed in the Roman Empire.
• As men begin to grow civilized, they cease to be satisfied with mere taboos, and substitute divine commands and prohibitions.
• Kant invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century.... The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in this situation: Is that difference due to God’s fiat or is it not? If it is due to God’s fiat, then for God Himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good.
• To a modern mind, it is difficult to feel enthusiastic about a virtuous life if nothing is going to be achieved by it.
• For over two thousand years it has been the custom among earnest moralists to decry happiness as something degraded and unworthy.
• Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people’s happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
• It is odd that neither the Church nor modern public opinion condemns petting, provided it stops short at a certain point. At what point sin begins is a matter as to which casuists differ. One eminently orthodox Catholic divine laid it down that a confessor may fondle a nun’s breasts, provided he does it without evil intent. But I doubt whether modern authorities would agree with him on this point.
• The phrase ‘in the sight of God’ puzzles me. One would suppose that God sees everything, but apparently this is a mistake. He does not see Reno, for you cannot be divorced in the sight of God. Register offices are a doubtful point. I notice that respectable people, who would not call on anybody who lives in open sin, are quite willing to call on people who have had only a civil marriage; so apparently God does see register offices.
• Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi, in their old age, laid it down that all sexual intercourse is wicked, even in marriage and with a view to offspring. The Manicheans thought likewise, relying upon men’s native sinfulness to supply them with a continually fresh crop of disciples. This doctrine, however, is heretical, though it is equally heretical to maintain that marriage is as praiseworthy as celibacy.
• Matrimony should be indissoluble, because the father is needed in the education of the children, both as more rational than the mother, and as having more physical strength when punishment is required.
• Incest is to be forbidden because it would complicate family life. Against brother-sister incest there is a very curious argument: that if the love of husband and wife were combined with that of brother and sister, mutual attraction would be so strong as to cause unduly frequent intercourse.
• St. Paul’s views were emphasized and exaggerated by the early Church; celibacy was considered holy and men retired into the desert to wrestle with Satan while he filled their imaginations with lustful visions.
• If the old morality is to be re-established, certain things are essential; some of them are already done, but experience shows that these alone are not effective. The first essential is that the education of girls should be such as to make them stupid and superstitious and ignorant; this requisite is already fulfilled in schools over which the churches have any control. The next requisite is a very severe censorship upon all books giving information on sex subjects. These conditions, however, since they exist already, are clearly insufficient. The only thing that will suffice is to remove from young women all opportunity of being alone with men.
• It is possible for married people to be saved, but fornication is deadly sin, and the unrepentant fornicator is sure to find himself among the goats.
• The Puritans, in their determination to avoid the pleasures of sex, became somewhat more conscious than people had been before of the pleasures of the table.
• Men have from time immemorial been allowed in practice, if not in theory, to indulge in illicit sexual relations. It has not been expected of a man that he should be a virgin on entering marriage, and even after marriage, infidelities are not viewed very gravely if they never come to the knowledge of a man’s wife and neighbors. The possibility of this system has depended upon prostitution.
• The professional moralist in our day is a man of less than average intelligence.
• The view of the orthodox moralist (this includes the police and the magistrates, but hardly any modern educators) on the question of sex knowledge may, I fancy, be fairly stated as follows : There is no doubt that sexual misconduct is promoted by sexual thoughts, and that the best road to virtue is to keep the young occupied in mind and body with matters wholly unconnected with sex. They must, therefore, be told nothing whatever about sex; they must as far as possible be prevented from talking about it with each other, and grownups must pretend that there is no such topic. It is possible by these means to keep a girl in ignorance until the night of her marriage, when it is to be expected that the facts will so shock her as to produce exactly that attitude towards sex which every sound moralist considers desirable in women.
• Catholic teaching . . . has a two-fold basis; it rests, on the one hand, upon the asceticism which we already find in St. Paul, on the other, upon the view that it is good to bring into the world as many souls as possible, since every soul is capable of salvation. For some reason which I do not understand, the fact that souls are equally capable of damnation is not taken into account, and yet it seems quite as relevant.
• Among human beings the co-operation of the father is a great biological advantage to the offspring, especially in unsettled times and among turbulent populations; but with the growth of modern civilization the role of the father is being increasingly taken over by the State, and there is reason to think that a father may cease before long to be biologically advantageous, at any rate in the wage-earning class. If this should occur, we must expect a complete breakdown of traditional morality, since there will no longer be any reason why a mother should wish the paternity of her child to be indubitable.
• Christianity is a patriarchal religion, and cannot be made emotionally or intellectually intelligible to people who do not recognize fatherhood.
• The idea that men are God’s children is one which cannot be conveyed to the Trobriand Islanders, since they do not think that anybody is the child of any male.
• Cruelty is in theory a perfectly adequate ground for divorce, but it may be interpreted so as to become absurd.
• The need for prostitution arises from the fact that many men are either unmarried or away from their wives on journeys, that such men are not content to remain continent, and that in a conventionally virtuous community they do not find respectable women available.
• Missionaries may argue that the superiority of the Christian code is known by revelation. The philosopher however, must observe that other religions make the same claim . . . the Manicheans thought it wicked to eat any animal food except fish, but many sects have considered this exception an abomination.
• The fact is that the positive purpose of marriage, namely procreation, plays a very subordinate part, and its main purpose remains, as with St. Paul, the prevention of sin. Fornication still holds the center of the stage, and marriage is still regarded essentially as a somewhat less regrettable alternative.
• It is permissible with certain precautions to speak in print of coitus, but it is not permissible to employ the monosyllabic synonym for this word.
• The commonest objection to birth control is that it is against ‘nature’.
• Very few men or women who have had a conventional upbringing have learnt to feel decently about sex and marriage. Their education has taught them that deceitfulness and lying are considered virtues by parents and teachers; that sexual relations, even within marriage, are more or less disgusting, and that in propagating the species men are yielding to their animal nature while women are submitting to a painful duty. This attitude has made marriage unsatisfying both to men and to women, and the lack of instinctive satisfaction has turned to cruelty masquerading as morality.
• A boy should be taught that in no circumstances is conversation on sexual subjects permissible, not even in marriage. This increases the likelihood that when he marries he will give his wife a disgust of sex and thus preserve her from the risk of adultery.
• Sex outside marriage is sin; sex within marriage is not sin.
• Sex relations as a dignified, rational, wholehearted activity in which the complete personality co-operates, do not often, I think, occur in America outside marriage. To this extent the moralists have been successful. They have not prevented fornication; on the contrary, if anything, their opposition, by making it spicy, has made it more common.
• Most men and women, given suitable conditions, will feel passionate love at some period of their lives. For the inexperienced, however, it is very difficult to distinguish passionate love from mere sex hunger; especially is this the case with well-brought-up girls, who have been taught that they could not possibly like to kiss a man unless they loved him.
• Peasant children early become accustomed to what are called the facts of life, which they can observe not only among human beings but among animals. They are thus saved from both ignorance and fastidiousness.
• That, of course, is especially likely in very abstract studies such as philosophical logic, because the subject-matter you are supposed to be thinking of is so exceedingly difficult and elusive that any person who has ever tried to think about it knows that you do not think about it except perhaps once in six months for half a minute. The rest of the time you think about symbols, because they are tangible, but the thing you are supposed to be thinking about is fearfully difficult and one does not often manage to think about it. The really good philosopher is the one who does once in six months think about it for a minute. Bad philosophers never do.
• By the law of the excluded middle, either ‘A is B’ or ‘A is not B’ must be true. Hence either ‘the present King of France is bald’ or ‘the present King of France is not bald’ must be true. Yet is we enumerated the things that are bald, and then the things that are not bald, we should not find the present King of France in either list. Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig.
• Before Washington’s election, a man might say ‘I hope George Washington will be the first President of the United States’, but he would not say ‘I hope the first President of the United States will be the first President of the United States’ unless he had an unusual passion for the law of identity.
• Politics is largely governed by sententious platitudes which are devoid of truth.
• Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise, and everything precise is so remote from everything we usually think, that you cannot for a moment suppose that is what we really mean when we say what we think.
• Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. People who have been puzzled by the beginnings of mathematics will, I hope, find comfort in this definition, and will probably agree that it is accurate.
• When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also add that somethings are more nearly certain than others.
• I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: ‘The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.’ In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
• We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think — in fact, they do so.
• It was Darwin, and the doctrine of evolution, that first upset the faith of British men of science. If man was evolved by insensible gradations from lower forms of life, a number of things became very difficult to understand. At what moment in evolution did our ancestors acquire free will ? At what stage in the long journey from the amoeba did they begin to have immortal souls. When did they first become capable of the kinds of wickedness that would justify a benevolent creator in sending them into eternal torment ?
• I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness in nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.
• Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
• I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness - that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.
• I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
• Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
• This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
• When the war came, I felt as if I heard the voice of God. I knew that it was my business to protest, however futile protest might be. My whole nature was involved. As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of all the belligerent nations sickened me. As a lover of civilization, the return of shown itself recalcitrant to a tidy formula embodying the hopes of some section of mankind.
• The Preacher said there is no new thing under the sun, but he would not have said so if he could have seen a large power station or a battle in the stratosphere. These things, it must be confessed, might not have prevented him from saying "all is vanity, "but that is a different question.
• Sometimes he (Herodotus) is merely repeating travelers’ tales, but very often he is confirmed by modern research.
• The theme is one that appealed to the Greek mind. A great impersonal Power, called indifferently Fate or Justice or Necessity, ruled the worked, and was superior to the gods. Whatever person or country or thing overstepped the ordained boundaries suffered the punishment of pride. This was the real religion of the Greeks, and Thucydides in his history magnificently illustrated it.
• His (Plutarch’s) heroes are not statuesque figures of perfection; they are concrete men, who could have existed even if they never in fact did.
• His wit and irony – particularly when he uses them to condemn superstition – are inimitable.
• The professors must not prevent us from realizing that history is fun, and that the most bizarre things really happen.
• Some great men become greater the more they are studied; I shoul
SPECIAL FEATURES & ACHIEVEMENT
HIS SPECIAL FEATURES:
Bertrand Russell is known as twentieth century’s most important freedom thinker. He was like a prophet of the creative and rational life.
Although born in one of the Britain’s most distinguished aristocratic Whig families, he became a persistent advocate of social democracy and other progressive causes, such as women’s rights, peace amongst nations and a scientific approach to eradicate personal and public irrationality.
Russell was a British philosopher and historian of philosophy. He was a mathematician, a pacifist and a Fabian socialist. He was jailed for 6 months in 1918 for anti-conscription campaign.
He was leader of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He was co-organizer of International War Crimes Tribunal convened in 1966 to express opposition to US war in Vietnam.
He was a staunch advocate of Guild socialism. He hoped that by this concept, society would gain significant control over economy, while at the same time, preserving the traditional value of liberty.
He was "on top of the world" in every walk of life. He was an aristocrat, a mastermind and a great personality.
He could have withdrawn from an ivory tower and have spent the rest of his life on the further pursuit of mathematics, logic and philosophy. By 1914, he became world-famous, for the work that he had done between 1900 and 1913.
His spirit was never dominated by hostility. It also never dampened by ridicule, which is harder than hostility to bear with.
His self-confidence, which was his aristocratic social heritage, led him ahead into the ring again and again, no number of hard knocks could deter him.
The motive that kept him going more than any other was, his concern for his fellow men – not just his contemporaries, but all future generations.
From 1914 to 1970, Russell did his utmost to save mankind from inhumanities, and this is why he is honored today.
Russell himself believed in his old age that the freedom in personal behaviour, that he advocated had some pernicious and unanticipated effects. Yet, till the end, he remained an apostle of political and personal freedom against oppression, whether by the state, public opinion or education.
A Popularizes and a Historian of Philosophy, a Mathematician, a Pacifist, and a Fabian Socialist. Bertrand Russell was the most famous and widely read British philosopher of this century.
His first major work was the ‘Principia Mathematica’, which later expanded in 3-volume work written jointly with Alan Whitehead.
His other contributions induces – ‘Problems of Philosophy’, ‘Principles of Social Reconstruction’, ‘The Prospects of Industrial Civilization’, ‘The A.B.C. of Atoms’, ‘The Future of Science’, ‘The A.B.C. of Relativity’, ‘What I Believe’, ‘The Analysis of Matter’, ‘The Analysis of Mind’, ‘Why I am not a Christian and other Essays…’, ‘Marriage and Morals’, ‘The Conquest of Happiness’, ‘The Bomb and Civilization’, ‘The Impact of Science on Society’ etc.
ACHIEVEMENTS:
Down to the end of his long and indefatigable career, Russell was given world’s most prestigious ‘Nobel Prize for Literature’. He was awarded for his book ‘Marriage and Morals’ at Stockholm.
He received ‘Kalinga Prize’ for the ‘Popularization and Science’, at UNESCO, in 1958.He was given the ‘Order of Merit’ by King George VI on June 9, 1949.
