Bertrand Russell.  Autobiography (1969)

Book Review

Bertrand Russell’s life was fascinating and inspiring, but what makes the autobiography great is the quality of the writing.  Russell’s writing voice is exceptional: clear, easy, rhythmic and engaging, with a distinctive gentle humour.  The autobiography shows Russell’s writing at its delightful best.  

Bertrand Russell, born in 1872, was the grandson of Liberal Prime Minister Lord John Russell.  As his parents died young, he was bought up by his grandmother.  He studied mathematics and philosophy at Cambridge and then, as an academic, he did his great work in analytic philosophy, logic and the foundations of mathematics.  But he became equally famous as a writer, social critic, political activist, and public intellectual.   He authored over seventy books and thousands of essays and lectures.  He was imprisoned for opposing the First World War and for his anti-nuclear campaigns.  He became a member of the House of Lords and was awarded the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was married four times and died in 1970 at the age of 97. 

The autobiography is not about Russell’s philosophical work but tells the story of his life, ideas, passions, campaigns and acquaintances.  It is a personal human story, but is also fascinating for its historical context, its cast of characters and its stream of ideas.    

I first read the autobiography as a teenager, and it was an inspiration for me.  Like Russell, my politics are progressive, I am an atheist, I fear war and my ambition is to try to use reason and philosophy to understand and improve the world.  I admire him for his outlook on the world, for being a proto effective altruist and for continuing to campaign into his old age.  I envy his writing – his style, his fluency, the quantity he produced.

I also recognise weaknesses.  In love, as the autobiography evidences, he was repeatedly stupid and selfish.  He was an elitist and to an extent his thought was restricted to his class and time. He was excessively pessimistic that the world was getting worse.  He suffered from philosophy’s temporary descent into logical positivism.

Russell published his autobiography in three volumes in the last years of his life, drawing on material he had dictated earlier.  The standard work is now a combined single volume which collects lengthy correspondence after each chapter, but, for most readers, this extra material can be ignored.  Some character sketches and some descriptions of the anti-nuclear campaigns could also be skipped.  But most of Russell’s text is delightful and much is quite brilliant.  My highlight is the chapter on the First World War which is wonderfully vivid and passionate.  This chapter is the best of the best and everyone should try to read it.

Further Resources

Bertrand Russell Society.  Website with useful links.

BOOK EXTRACTS AND NOTES

Introduction by Michael Foot

The tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.

Here is an epic, written with all the combined passion and clarity of which he was the master.

1872-1914

Prologue: What I have Lived for

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. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what – at last – I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. 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.

1. Childhood

He was a Darwinian, and was engaged in studying the instincts of chickens, which, to facilitate his studies, were allowed to work havoc in every room in the house.

My grandfather as I remember him was a man well past eighty, being wheeled round the garden in a bath chair, or sitting in his room reading Hansard. I was just six years old when he died. I remember that when on the day of his death I saw my brother (who was at school) drive up in a cab although it was in the middle of term, I shouted ‘Hurrah!’, and my nurse said: ‘Hush! You must not say “Hurrah” today!’ It may be inferred from this incident that my grandfather had no great importance to me.

My grandmother, on the contrary, who was twenty-three years younger than he was, was the most important person to me throughout my childhood. She was a Scotch Presbyterian, Liberal in politics and religion (she became a Unitarian at the age of seventy), but extremely strict in all matters of morality. When she married my grandfather she was young and very shy. My grandfather was a widower with two children and four step-children, and a few years after their marriage he became Prime Minister. For her this must have been a severe ordeal. She related how she went once as a girl to one of the famous breakfasts given by the poet Rogers, and how, after observing her shyness, he said: ‘Have a little tongue. You need it, my dear!’ It was obvious from her conversation that she never came anywhere near to knowing what it feels like to be in love. She told me once how relieved she was on her honeymoon when her mother joined her. On another occasion she lamented that so much poetry should be concerned with so trivial a subject as love. But she made my grandfather a devoted wife, and never, so far as I have been able to discover, failed to perform what her very exacting standards represented as her duty.

Uncle Rollo: He suffered all his life from a morbid shyness so intense as to prevent him from achieving anything that involved contact with other human beings.

My mother’s father was dead, but my mother’s mother, Lady Stanley of Alderley, lived in a large house, No 40, Dover Street.  I never knew my maternal grandfather, but I heard it said that he used to brow-beat my grandmother, and felt that, if so, he must have been a very remarkable man.

My brother, who had the Stanley temperament, loved the Stanleys and hated the Russells. I loved the Russells and feared the Stanleys. As I have grown older, however, my feelings have changed. I owe to the Russells shyness, sensitiveness, and metaphysics; to the Stanleys vigour, good health, and good spirits. On the whole, the latter seems a better inheritance than the former.

I had been told that Euclid proved things, and was much disappointed that he started with axioms. At first I refused to accept them unless my brother could offer me some reason for doing so, but he said: ‘If you don’t accept them we cannot go on’, and as I wished to go on, I reluctantly admitted them pro tem. The doubt as to the premisses of mathematics which I felt at that moment remained with me, and determined the course of my subsequent work.

2. Adolescence

I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics. 

It appeared to me obvious that the happiness of mankind should be the aim of all action, and I discovered to my surprise that there were those who thought otherwise. 

After the age of fourteen I found living at home only endurable at the cost of complete silence about everything that interested me. 

I was very much concerned with politics and economics. I read Mill’s Political Economy, which I was inclined to accept completely.

3. Cambridge

I was too shy to enquire the way to the lavatory, so that I walked every morning to the station before the examination began. 

I was left tête-à-tête with Mr Gladstone. He came to stay at Pembroke Lodge, and nobody was asked to meet him. As I was the only male in the household, he and I were left alone together at the dinner table after the ladies retired. He made only one remark: ‘ This is very good port they have given me, but why have they given it me in a claret glass?’ I did not know the answer, and wished the earth would swallow me up. Since then I have never again felt the fall agony of terror.

 Compton Davies.  I never knew but one woman who would not have been delighted to marry him. She, of course, was the only woman he wished to marry. A great love of mankind combined with a contemptuous hatred for most individual men. A busy professional life had kept him, throughout his middle years, engaged in practical affairs, but at last he was able to spare some time for purely theoretical thinking, to which he returned with wholehearted joy.

I met G. E. Moore, who was then a freshman, and for some years he fulfilled my ideal of genius. 

Bob Trevelyan. What is in books appeared to him interesting, whereas what is only real life was negligible. 

Keynes. The profound conviction that the Treaty of Versailles spelt disaster so roused the earnest moralist in him that he forgot to be clever – without, however, ceasing to be so.  Keynes Lords speech:  when he had finished there remained hardly any doubters except Lord Beaverbrook and two cousins of mine with a passion for being in the minority. Keynes’s intellect was the sharpest and clearest that I have ever known.

4. Engagement

Sydney and Beatrice Webb.  They decided to devote their lives to research and to the higher branches of propaganda.

Alys. I considered that she resembled Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett.

5. First Marriage

I resolved not to adopt a profession but to devote myself to writing. 

I thought that I would write one series of books on the philosophy of the sciences from pure mathematics to physiology, and another series of books on social questions. 

At the beginning of 1896 I gave a course of lectures on [German Socialism] at the London School of Economics, which was at that time in John Adam Street, Adelphi. I was, I believe, their first lecturer. 

Whitehead. He justified himself by saying that if he answered letters, he would have no time for original work. I think the justification was complete and unanswerable.  

My lectures on German Socialism were published in 1896. This was my first book, but I took no great interest in it, as I had determined to devote myself to mathematical philosophy. 

An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry.

Since that time, academic reviewers have generally said of each successive book of mine that it showed a falling-off.

6. ‘Principia Mathematica’

Peano.

The time was one of intellectual intoxication.

Oddly enough, the end of the century marked the end of this sense of triumph, and from that moment onwards I began to be assailed simultaneously by intellectual and emotional problems which plunged me into the darkest despair that I have ever known. 

When we came home, we found Mrs Whitehead undergoing an unusually severe bout of pain. She seemed cut off from everyone and everything by walls of agony, and the sense of the solitude of each human soul suddenly overwhelmed me. Ever since my marriage, my emotional life had been calm and superficial. I had forgotten all the deeper issues, and had been content with flippant cleverness. Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless; it follows that war is wrong, that a public school education is abominable, that the use of force is to be deprecated, and that in human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that. The Whitehead’s youngest boy, aged three, was in the room. I had previously taken no notice of him, nor he of me. He had to be prevented from troubling his mother in the middle of her paroxysms of pain. I took his hand and led him away. He came willingly, and felt at home with me. From that day to his death in the War in 1918, we were close friends. 

At the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely different person. For a time, a sort of mystic illumination possessed me. I felt that I knew the inmost thoughts of everybody that I met in the street, and though this was, no doubt, a delusion, I did in actual fact find myself in far closer touch than previously with all my friends, and many of my acquaintances. Having been an Imperialist, I became during those five minutes a pro-Boer and a Pacifist. Having for years cared only for exactness and analysis, I found myself filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty, with an intense interest in children, and with a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some philosophy which should make human life endurable. A strange excitement possessed me, containing intense pain but also some element of triumph through the fact that I could dominate pain, and make it, as I thought, a gateway to wisdom. The mystic insight which I then imagined myself to possess has largely faded, and the habit of analysis has reasserted itself. But something of what I thought I saw in that moment has remained always with me, causing my attitude during the first war, my interest in children, my indifference to minor misfortunes, and a certain emotional tone in all my human relations.

This led me to consider those classes which are not members of themselves, and to ask whether the class of such classes is or is not a member of itself. I found that either answer implies its contradictory. 

When we were living with the Whiteheads at the Mill House in Grantchester . . . . I went out bicycling one afternoon, and suddenly, as I was riding along a country road, I realised that I no longer loved Alys. 

Alys’ mother. She carried feminism to such lengths that she found it hard to keep her respect for the Deity, since He was male.

I began to write The Free Man’s Worship. The construction of prose rhythms was the only thing in which I found any real consolation. 

The strain of unhappiness combined with very severe intellectual work, in the years from 1902 till 1910, was very great. 

In 1907 I even stood for Parliament at a by-election, on behalf of votes for women. The Wimbledon Campaign was short and arduous.

7. Cambridge Again

Bedford. I went down and gave an address to the Liberal Association, which was received with enthusiasm. . . In consequence of these answers, they selected as their candidate Mr Kellaway, who became Postmaster General, and held correct opinions during the War. They must have felt that they had had a lucky escape. 

Lady Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck

I then rode away on my bicycle, and with that my first marriage came to an end. I did not see Alys again till 1950.

I became aware of the solidity of Ottoline’s life, of the fact that her husband and her child and her possessions were important to her.

I was suffering from pyorrhoea although I did not know it

Young woman at Lake Garda. 

Joseph Conrad. He despised indiscipline and hated discipline that was merely external.

At our very first meeting, we talked with continually increasing intimacy. We seemed to sink through layer after layer of what was superficial, till gradually both reached the central fire. 

I arranged for a shorthand typist to come next day, though I had not the vaguest idea what I should say to her when she came. As she entered the room, my ideas fell into place, and I dictated in a completely orderly sequence from that moment until the work was finished. What I dictated to her was subsequently published as a book with the title Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy. 

T. S. Eliot as a pupil.

 Chicago woman. I spent two nights under her parents’ roof, and the second I spent with her.  She stayed in England and I had relations with her from time to time, but the shock of the war killed my passion for her, and I broke her heart. Ultimately she fell a victim to a rare disease, which first paralysed her, and then made her insane.

1914-1944

8. The First War

It may seem curious that the War should rejuvenate anybody, but in fact it shook me out of my prejudices and made me think afresh on a number of fundamental questions. 

During this and the following days I discovered to my amazement that average men and women were delighted at the prospect of war. I had fondly imagined, what most pacifists contended, that wars were forced upon a reluctant population by despotic and Machiavellian governments. 

When we spoke to others of the evils we foresaw, they thought us mad; yet it turned out that we were twittering optimists compared to the truth. 

The first days of the War were to me utterly amazing. My best friends, such as the Whiteheads, were savagely warlike. Men like J. L. Hammond, who had been writing for years against participation in a European War, were swept off their feet by Belgium. 

What filled me with even more horror was the fact that the anticipation of carnage was delightful to something like ninety per cent of the population. I had to revise my views on human nature. 

I became filled with despairing tenderness towards the young men who were to be slaughtered, and with rage against all the statesmen of Europe. 

In the midst of this, I was myself tortured by patriotism. The successes of the Germans before the Battle of the Marne were horrible to me. I desired the defeat of Germany as ardently as any retired colonel. Love of England is very nearly the strongest emotion I possess, and in appearing to set it aside at such a moment, I was making a very difficult renunciation. Nevertheless, I never had a moment’s doubt as to what I must do. I have at times been paralysed by scepticism, at times I have been cynical, at other times indifferent, but 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 civilisation, the return to barbarism appalled me. As a man of thwarted parental feeling, the massacre of the young wrung my heart. I hardly supposed that much good would come of opposing the War, but I felt that for the honour of human nature those who were not swept off their feet should show that they stood firm. After seeing troop trains departing from Waterloo, I used to have strange visions of London as a place of unreality. I used in imagination to see the bridges collapse and sink, and the whole great city vanish like a morning mist. I spoke of this to T. S. Eliot, who put it into The Waste Land.

I took to organising a branch of the Union of Democratic Control among the dons, of whom at Trinity quite a number were at first sympathetic. I also addressed meetings of undergraduates who were quite willing to listen to me. I remember in the course of a speech, saying: ‘ It is all nonsense to pretend the Germans are wicked’, and to my surprise the whole room applauded. But with the sinking of the Lusitania, a fiercer spirit began to prevail.

Every Christmas throughout the War I had a fit of black despair, such complete despair that I could do nothing except sit idle in my chair and wonder whether the human race served any purpose. 

Visited destitute Germans on behalf of a charitable committee. This problem ceased to exist soon afterwards, as the Germans were all interned. 

One day in October 1914 I met T. S. Eliot in New Oxford Street. I did not know he was in Europe, but I found he had come to England from Berlin. I naturally asked him what he thought of the War. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, ‘I only know that I am not a pacifist.’ That is to say, he considered any excuse good enough for homicide. I became great friends with him, and subsequently with his wife, whom he married early in 1915. As they were desperately poor, I lent them one of the two bedrooms in my flat, with the result that I saw a great deal of them.  I was fond of them both, and endeavoured to help them in their troubles until I discovered that their troubles were what they enjoyed. 

During the summer of 1915 I wrote Principles of Social Reconstruction, or Why Men Fight as it was called in America without my consent.

I divided impulses into two groups, the possessive and the creative, considering the best life that which is most built on creative impulses. I took, as examples of embodiments of the possessive impulses, the State, war and poverty; and of the creative impulses, education, marriage and religion. Liberation of creativeness, I was convinced, should be the principle of reform. I first gave the book as lectures, and then published it. To my surprise, it had an immediate success. I had written it with no expectation of its being read, merely as a profession of faith, but it brought me in a great deal of money, and laid the foundation for all my future earnings.

These lectures were in certain ways connected with my short friendship with D. H. Lawrence.  There were in Lawrence at that time two attitudes to the war: on the one hand, he could not be whole-heartedly patriotic, because his wife was German; but on the other hand, he had such a hatred of mankind that he tended to think both sides must be right in so far as they hated each other. As I came to know these attitudes, I realised that neither was one with which I could sympathise. It was only gradually that I came to feel him a positive force for evil and that he came to have the same feeling about me. 

He, of course, in his imagination, supposed that when a dictatorship was established he would be the Julius Caesar. This was part of the dream-like quality of all his thinking. He never let himself bump into reality.

Would he put his political philosophy into a book? No: in our corrupt society the written word is always a lie. Would he go into Hyde Park and proclaim ‘the Truth’ from a soap box? No: that would be far too dangerous (odd streaks of prudence emerged in him from time to time).  Gradually I discovered that he had no real wish to make the world better, but only to indulge in eloquent soliloquy about how bad it was. Blood-consciousness

With the coining of 1916, the War took on a fiercer form, and the position of pacifists at home became more difficult. My relations with Asquith had never become unfriendly. He was an admirer of Ottoline’e before she married, and I used to meet him every now and then at Garsington, where she lived. Once when I had been bathing stark naked in a pond, I found him on the bank as I came out. The quality of dignity which should have characterised a meeting between the Prime Minister and a pacifist was somewhat lacking on this occasion.  But at any rate, I had the feeling that he was not likely to lock me up. At the time of the Easter Rebellion in Dublin, thirty-seven conscientious objectors were condemned to death and several of us went on a deputation to Asquith to get their sentences reduced.

Lloyd George, however, was a tougher proposition. His manner to us was pleasant and easy, but he offered no satisfaction of any kind. At the end, as we were leaving, I made him a speech of denunciation in an almost Biblical style, telling him his name would go down to history with infamy. I had not the pleasure of meeting him thereafter.

No Conscription Fellowship. Acting chairman.

Lady Constance Malleson, generally known by her stage name of Colette O’Niel.  That she was young and very beautiful, I had seen for myself. She was on the stage, and had had a rapid success with two leading parts in succession, but when the War came she spent the whole of the daytime in addressing envelopes in the office of the No Conscription Fellowship. On these data, I naturally took steps to get to know her better.

The War was bound into the texture of this love from first to last.

We heard suddenly a shout of bestial triumph in the street. I leapt out of bed and saw a Zeppelin falling in flames. The thought of brave men dying in agony was what caused the triumph in the street. Colette’s love was in that moment a refuge to me, not from cruelty itself, which was un-escapable, but from the agonising pain of realising that that is what men are.

The station was crowded with soldiers, most of them going back to the Front, almost all of them drunk, half of them accompanied by drunken prostitutes, the other half by wives or sweethearts, all despairing, all reckless, all mad. The harshness and horror of the war world overcame me, but I clung to Colette. In a world of hate, she preserved love.

The words, ‘Sweet lovely roses’, were ever since a sort of refrain to all my thoughts of Colette.

We went for a three days’ honeymoon (I could not spare more from work) to the ‘Cat and Fiddle’ on the moors above Buxton. It was bitterly cold and the water in my jug was frozen in the morning. But the bleak moors suited our mood. They were stark, but gave a sense of vast freedom. We spent our days in long walks and our nights in an emotion that held all the pain of the world in solution, but distilled from it an ecstasy that seemed almost more than human. 

I wrote an open letter to President Wilson, appealing to him to save the world. It was published in almost every newspaper in America. 

We travelled up in the train with Ramsay MacDonald, who spent the time telling long stories of pawky Scotch humour so dull that it was almost impossible to be aware when the point had been reached. 

Saying that we were in communication with the Germans.  This made us somewhat unpopular in the neighbourhood, and a mob presently besieged the church.  ‘But he is the brother of an earl’, she finally cried. At this, the police rushed to my assistance.

At Trinity, meanwhile, all the younger Fellows had obtained commissions, and the older men naturally wished to do their bit. They therefore deprived me of my lectureship.

But for these various compliments on the part of the Government, I should have thrown up pacifist work, as I had become persuaded that it was entirely futile. Perceiving, however, that the Government thought otherwise, I supposed I might be mistaken, and continued.

I found prison in many ways quite agreeable. I had no engagements, no difficult decisions to make, no fear of callers, no interruptions to my work. I read enormously; I wrote a book, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, a semi-popular version of The Principles of Mathematics, and began the work for Analysis of Mind. I was rather interested in my fellow-prisoners, who seemed to me in no way morally inferior to the rest of the population, though they were on the whole slightly below the usual level of intelligence, as was shown by their having been caught.

He asked my religion and I replied ‘agnostic’. He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: ‘Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God.’ This remark kept me cheerful for about a week. One time, when I was reading Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, I laughed so loud that the warder came round to stop me, saying I must remember that prison was a place of punishment.

The holiday from responsibility is really delightful.  I read a great deal, and think about philosophy quite fruitfully.

Late into the night I stayed alone in the street, watching the temper of the crowd, as I had done in the August days four years before. The crowd was frivolous still, and had learned nothing during the period of horror, except to snatch at pleasure more recklessly than before. I felt strangely solitary amid the rejoicings, like a ghost dropped by accident from some other planet.

The War of 1914-18 changed everything for me. I ceased to be academic and took to writing a new kind of books. I changed my whole conception of human nature. I became for the first time deeply convinced that Puritanism does not make for human happiness. Through the spectacle of death I acquired a new love for what is living. I became convinced that most human beings are possessed by a profound unhappiness venting itself in destructive rages, and that only through the diffusion of instinctive joy can a good world be brought into being. I saw that reformers and reactionaries alike in our present world have become distorted by cruelties. I grew suspicious of all purposes demanding stern discipline. Being in opposition to the whole purpose of the community, and finding all the everyday virtues used as means for the slaughter of Germans, I experienced great difficulty in not becoming a complete Antinomian. But I was saved from this by the profound compassion which I felt for the sorrows of the world. I lost old friends and made new ones. 

A summons to the War Office to be kindly reasoned with. They besought me to acquire a sense of humour, for they held that no one with a sense of humour would give utterance to unpopular opinions. They failed, however, and afterwards I regretted that I had not replied that I held my sides with laughter every morning as I read the casualty figures.

When the War was over, I saw that all I had done had been totally useless except to myself. I had not saved a single life or shortened the War by a minute. I had not succeeded in doing anything to diminish the bitterness which caused the Treaty of Versailles. But at any rate I had not been an accomplice in the crime of all the belligerent nations, and for myself I had acquired a new philosophy and a new youth. I had got rid of the don and the Puritan. I had learned an understanding of instinctive processes which I had not possessed before, and I had acquired a certain poise from having stood so long alone.

 It is my deliberate expectation that the worst is to come, but I do nor on that account cease to believe that men and women will ultimately learn the simple secret of instinctive joy.

9. Russia

They called me up for medical examination, but the Government with its utmost efforts was unable to find out where I was, having forgotten that it had put me in prison. 

Dora Black, whom I had not seen before, interested me at once.

She was a little disappointed to find that almost immediately our relations took on all the character of marriage. 

Our days at Lulworth were a balance of delicious outdoor activities, especially swimming, and general conversations as good as any that I have ever had. The general theory of relativity was in those days rather new, and Littlewood and I used to discuss it endlessly. We used to debate whether the distance from us to the post-office was or was not the same as the distance from the post-office to us, though on this matter we never reached a conclusion. The eclipse expedition which confirmed Einstein’s prediction as to the bending of light occurred during this time, and Littlewood got a telegram from Eddington telling him that the result was what Einstein said it should be. 

There was a lady called Mrs Fiske Warren whom I had known when I lived at Bagley Wood, rich and beautiful and intellectual, highly intellectual in fact. It was for her unofficial benefit that Modern Greats were first invented. Carefully selected dons taught her Greek philosophy without demanding a knowledge of Greek.

Her husband , whom I had never met , was a fanatical believer in Single Tax, and was in the habit of buying small republics, such as Andorra, with a view to putting Henry George’s principles into practice.

I knew Wittgenstein first at Cambridge before the War. He was perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating. He had a kind of purity which I have never known equalled except by G. E. Moore. He lived on milk and vegetables, and I used to feel as Mrs Patrick Campbell did about Shaw: ‘God help us if he should ever eat a beef-steak.’

He used to come to see me every evening at midnight, and pace up and down my room like a wild beast for three hours in agitated silence. Once I said to him: ‘Are you thinking about logic or about your sins?’ ‘Both’, he replied, and continued his pacing.

At the end of his first term at Trinity, he came to me and said: ‘Do you think I am an absolute idiot?’ I said: ‘Why do you want to know?’ He replied: ‘ Because if I am I shall become an aeronaut, but if I am not I shall become a philosopher. ‘ I said to him: ‘My dear fellow, I don’t know whether you are an absolute idiot or not, but if you will write me an essay during the vacation upon any philosophical topic that interests you, I will read It and tell you.’ He did so, and brought it to me at the beginning of the next term. As soon as I read the first sentence, I became persuaded that he was a man of genius, and assured him that he should on no account become an aeronaut.

It appeared that he had written a book in the trenches, and wished me to read it. He was the kind of man who would never have noticed such small matters as bursting shells when he was thinking about logic. It was the book which was subsequently published under the title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 

He came to the conclusion, however, that money is a nuisance to a philosopher, so he gave every penny of it to his brother and sisters. Consequently he was unable to pay the fare from Vienna to the Hague. 

This transaction [R bought W’s furniture] made it possible for Wittgenstein to come to the Hague, where we spent a week arguing his book line by line.

He became for a time very religious, so much so that he began to consider me too wicked to associate with.

At last his sister decided to build a house, and employed him as architect. This gave him enough to eat for several years, at the end of which time he returned to Cambridge as a don.

A Labour deputation was going to Russia.

I felt that everything that I valued in human life was being destroyed in the interests of a glib and narrow philosophy, and that in the process untold misery was being inflicted upon many millions of people.

I have a thousand things to do, yet I sit here idle, thinking useless thoughts, the irrelevant, rebellious thoughts that well-regulated people never think, the thoughts that one hopes to banish by work, but that themselves banish work instead. How I envy those who always believe what they believe, who are not troubled by deadness and indifference to all that makes the framework of their lives. I have had the ambition to be of some use in the world, to achieve something notable, to give mankind new hopes. And now that the opportunity is near, it all seems dust and ashes. As I look into the future, my disillusioned gaze sees only strife and still more strife, rasping cruelty, tyranny, terror and slavish submission. The men of my dreams, erect, fearless and generous, will they ever exist on earth? Or will men go on fighting, killing and torturing to the end of time, till the earth grows cold and the dying sun can no longer quicken their futile frenzy? I cannot tell. But I do know the despair in my soul. I know the great loneliness, as I wander through the world like a ghost, speaking in tones that are not heard, lost as if I had fallen from some other planet.

The old struggle goes on, the struggle between little pleasures and the great pain. I know that the little pleasures are death and yet – I am so tired, so very tired. Reason and emotion fight a deadly war within me, and leave me no energy for outward action. I know that no good thing is achieved without fighting, without ruthlessness and organisation and discipline. I know that for collective action the individual must be turned into a machine. But in these things, though my reason may force me to believe them, I can find no inspiration. It is the individual human soul that I love – in its loneliness, its hopes and fears, its quick impulses and sudden devotions. It is such a long journey from this to armies and States and officials; and yet it is only by making this long journey that one can avoid a useless sentimentalism. 

I began to feel that all politics are inspired by a grinning devil, teaching the energetic and quick-witted to torture submissive populations for the profit of pocket or power or theory. 

Lenin, with whom I had an hour’s conversation, rather disappointed me. I do not think that I should have guessed him to be a great man, but in the course of our conversation I was chiefly conscious of his intellectual limitations, and his rather narrow Marxian orthodoxy, as well as a distinct vein of impish cruelty. I have told of this interview, as well as of my adventures in Russia, in my book Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. 

She [Dora] liked Russia just as much as I had hated it.

10. China

A civilised Chinese is the most civilised person in the world. 

Once a week the mail would arrive from England, and the letters and newspapers that came from there seemed to breathe upon us a hot blast of insanity. 

She was a deeply religious woman, and told me when I began to get better that she had seriously considered whether it was not her duty to let me die. Fortunately, professional training was too strong for her moral sense. 

Lying in my bed feeling that I was not going to die was surprisingly delightful. 

I was told that the Chinese said that they would bury me by the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret that this did not happen, as I might have become a god, which would have been very chic for an atheist. 

One missionary paper, I remember, had an obituary notice of one sentence: ‘Missionaries may be pardoned for heaving a sigh of relief at the news of Mr Bertrand Russell’s death.’ I fear they must have heaved a sigh of a different sort when they found that I was not dead after all.

Unlike the Chinese, the Japanese proved to be destitute of good manners. 

Robert Young was a delightful man, who, having left England in the eighties, had not shared in the subsequent deterioration of ideas. 

We arrived in Liverpool at the end of August. It was raining hard, and everybody complained of the drought, so we felt we had reached home.

11. Second Marriage

I did not change my views as to how men should live, but I held them with less of prophetic ardour and with less expectation of success in my campaigns. 

I tried to rent a flat, but I was both politically and morally undesirable, and landlords refused to have me as a tenant. 

Telegraph House School.  A school is like the world: only government can prevent brutal violence. 

The Conquest of Happiness. 

The faltering Idealism of middle age. 

There is no splendour, no vastness, anywhere; only triviality for a moment, and then nothing. 

In May and June, 1931, I dictated to my then secretary, Peg Adams . . .  a short autobiography, which has formed the basis of the present book down to 1921. I ended it with an epilogue, in which, as will be seen, I did not admit private unhappiness, but only political and metaphysical disillusionment.

My personal life since I returned from China has been happy and peaceful. I have derived from my children at least as much instinctive satisfaction as I anticipated, and have in the main regulated my life with reference to them. But while my personal life has been satisfying, my impersonal outlook has become increasingly sombre, and I have found it more and more difficult to believe that the hopes which I formerly cherished will be realised in any measurable future. I have endeavoured, by concerning myself with the education of my children and with making money for their benefit, to shut out from my thoughts the impersonal despairs which tend to settle upon me.

Ever since puberty I have believed in the value of two things: kindness and clear thinking. At first these two remained more or less distinct; when I felt triumphant I believed most in clear thinking, and in the opposite mood I believed most in kindness. Gradually, the two have come more and more together in my feelings. I find that much unclear thought exists as an excuse for cruelty, and that much cruelty is prompted by superstitious beliefs. The War made me vividly aware of the cruelty in human nature, but I hoped for a reaction when the War was over.

As a patriot I am depressed by the downfall of England, as yet only partial, but likely to be far more complete before long. The history of England for the last four hundred years is in my blood, and I should have wished to hand on to my son the tradition of public spirit which has in the past been valuable. In the world that I foresee there will be no place for this tradition, and he will be lucky if he escapes with his life. The feeling of impending doom gives a kind of futility to all activities whose field is in England. In the world at large, if civilisation survives, I foresee the domination of either America or Russia, and in either case of a system where a tight organisation subjects the individual to the State so completely that splendid individuals will be no longer possible.

And what of philosophy? The best years of my life were given to the Principles of Mathematics, in the hope of finding somewhere some certain knowledge. The whole of this effort, in spite of three big volumes, ended inwardly in doubt and bewilderment. As regards metaphysics, when, under the influence of Moore, I first threw off the belief in German idealism, I experienced the delight of believing that the sensible world is real. Bit by bit, chiefly under the influence of physics, this delight has faded.

When I survey my life, it seems to me to be a useless one, devoted to impossible ideals. I have not found in the post-war world any attainable ideals to replace those which I have come to think unattainable. So far as the things I have cared for are concerned, the world seems to me to be entering upon a period of darkness.

I find in the most modern thought a corrosive solvent of the great systems of even the recent past, and I do not believe that the constructive efforts of present-day philosophers and men of science have anything approaching the validity that attaches to their destructive criticism.

My activities continue from force of habit, and in the company of others I forget the despair which underlies my daily pursuits and pleasure. But when I am alone and idle, I cannot conceal for myself that my life had no purpose, and that I know of no new purpose to which to devote my remaining years. I find myself involved in a vast mist of solitude both emotional and metaphysical, from which I can find no issue.

12. Later Years of Telegraph House

When I left Dora, she continued the school until after the beginning of the Second War, though after 1934 it was no longer at Telegraph House. John and Kate were made wards in Chancery and were sent to Dartington School where they were very happy. 

Freedom and Organization. I worked at this book in collaboration with Patricia Spence, commonly known as Peter Spence.

My having refused to stay with Hearst in 1931 at his castle in California. My weekly articles in the Hearst newspapers had brought me £1,000 a year, but after my refusal the pay was halved. 

This was the last stage in the slow abandonment of many of the beliefs that had come to me in the moment of ‘conversion’ in 1901. 

In 1936, I married Peter Spence and my youngest child, Conrad, was born in 1937.

An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth.

13. America

He liked to patronise coloured people and treated them as equals, because he was quite sure that they were not.

When my case came into court, Dr Barnes complained that I had done insufficient work for my lectures, and that they were superficial and perfunctory. So far as they had gone, they consisted of the first two-thirds of my History of Western Philosophy, of which I submitted the manuscript to the judge. 

The History of Western Philosophy began by accident and proved the main source of my income for many years. 

While in Princeton, I came to know Einstein fairly well. I used to go to his house once a week to discuss with him and Gödel and Pauli. These discussions were in some ways disappointing, for, although all three of them were Jews and exiles and, in intention, cosmopolitans, I found that they all had a German bias towards metaphysics, and in spite of our utmost endeavours we never arrived at common premises from which to argue. 

My wife and I got A priority, but our son Conrad only got a B, as he had as yet no legislative function.

1944-1967

Preface

I have done what I could to add my small weight in an attempt to tip the balance on the side of hope, but it has been a puny effort against vast forces.

14. Return to England

I was taking with me the manuscript of my History of Western Philosophy, and the unfortunate censors had to read every word of it lest it should contain information useful to the enemy. They were, however, at last satisfied that a knowledge of philosophy could be of no use to the Germans, and very politely assured me that they had enjoyed reading my book, which I confess I found hard to believe.

There was one officer who whole-heartedly approved of me. He was the Chief Engineer, and he had read The ABC of Relativity without knowing anything about its author. One day, as I was walking the deck with him, he began on the merits of this little book and, when I said that I was the author, his joy knew no limits. 

I discovered that they were staying with her mother at Sidmouth, and that Conrad had pneumonia. I went there at once, and found to my relief, that he was rapidly recovering. We sat on the beach, listening to the sound of naval guns off Cherbourg. 

Trinity College had invited me to a five-year lectureship and I had accepted the invitation. It carried with it a fellowship and a right to rooms in College. 

I did no work of importance during these years. When, in 1949, my wife decided that she wanted no more of me, our marriage came to an end. 

A few months after the bombing of the two Japanese cities, I made a speech In the House of Lords pointing out the likelihood of a general nuclear war and the certainty of its causing universal disaster if it occurred. 

The arms race became inevitable unless drastic measures were taken to avoid it. That is why, in late 1948, I suggested that the remedy might be the threat of immediate war by the United States on Russia for the purpose of forcing nuclear disarmament upon her. I have given my reasons for doing this in an Appendix to my Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare. My chief defence of the view I held in 1948 was that I thought Russia very likely to yield to the demands of the West. This advice of mine is still brought up against me. At the time I gave this advice, I gave it so casually without any real hope that it would be followed, that I soon forgot I had given it . I had hotly denied that I had ever made such a suggestion.

Trondheim air-crash when all the nineteen passengers in the non-smoking compartment were killed and Russell, a smoker, swam to safety.

 I enjoyed once more the freedom of discussion that prevailed in England, but not in America.  The less fanatical attitude of English people diminished my own fanaticism, and I rejoiced in the feeling of home. 

Reith lectures. ‘Authority and the Individual.’ 1949 

By the early part of 1949, I had become so respectable in the eyes of the Establishment that it was felt that I, too , should be given the om.

Australia

From there I went to Princeton where I, as usual, delivered a lecture and again met various old friends, among them Einstein. There I received the news that I was to be given a Nobel Prize.

‘It is not by prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws.’  Why I am not a Christian. 

To receive the Nobel Prize – somewhat to my surprise, for literature, for my book Marriage and Morals. 

New Hopes for a Changing World

“No, I am not a miserable sinner; I am a being who, by a long and arduous road, have discovered how to make intelligence master natural obstacles, how to live in freedom and joy, at peace with myself and therefore with all mankind.” This will happen if men choose joy rather than sorrow. If not, eternal death will bury man in deserved oblivion.’ 

Human Society in Ethics and Politics.  Ethics is not a branch of knowledge. Ethics is derived from passions and that there is no valid method of travelling from passion to what ought to be done. [I disagree]

Writing stories. Satan in the Suburbs. Everybody wanted me to continue as a writer of doom

 Everybody in the philosophical world was babbling about ‘common usage’. I did not like this philosophy. Every section of learning has its own vocabulary and I did not see why philosophy should be deprived of this pleasure.

 Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.

15. At Home and Abroad

Edith Finch 

Everything at that time was bathed in the radiant light of mutual discovery and of joy in each other. 

Edith had no knowledge of philosophy or mathematics; there were things that she knew of which I was ignorant. But our attitude towards people and the world is similar. The satisfaction that we felt then in our companionship has grown. 

Pembroke Lodge, which used to be a nice house, was being ruined by order of the Civil Service.

The broadcast , now called ‘Man’s Peril’, ended with the following words: ‘There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal, as a human being to human beings: remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, nothing lies before you but universal death.’ 

I found a letter from him [Einstein] agreeing to sign. This was one of the last acts of his public life.

Portraits from Memory

Professor Josef Rotblat

The Einstein-Russell (or vice versa) manifesto.

Nehru himself had seemed most sympathetic. I lunched with him and talked with him at various meetings and receptions. 

We decided to sell our Richmond house and move permanently to North Wales. We kept, however, as a pied à terre in London, our flat in Millbank, with its wonderful view of the river. 

The Pugwash Conference of Scientists

Vienna Declaration

The most obvious achievement of the Pugwash movement has been the conclusion, for which it was largely responsible, of the partial Test-ban Treaty which forbade nuclear tests above ground in peace time.

16. Trafalgar Square

During the first five months of 1957 I made a great many broadcasts for the BBC. Almost the last of these was an Interview between Alan Wood and myself and a representative of the BBC in connection with Alan’s publication of his biography of me.

This was almost the last time that I saw Alan. He fell very ill shortly after this and died in October. A little over two months later, his wife, Mary, died. 

Almost at once a reply came from Premier Khrushchev. No answer came from President Eisenhower. Two months later John Foster Dulles replied for him. 

The CND was publicly launched at a large meeting at the Central Hall, Westminster, on February 17, 1958. 

Direct Action Committee. 

I did a series of TV interviews with Woodrow Wyatt as interlocutor that came out in book form as Bertrand Russell Speaks his Mind. 

I was horrified to hear Mrs Roosevelt enunciate the belief that it would be better, and that she would prefer, to have the human race destroyed than to have it succumb to Communism. 

My son-in-law had become a full fledged Minister in the Episcopal Church – and he was taking his whole family to Uganda where he had been called as a missionary. My daughter had also become very religious and was whole-heartedly in sympathy with his aspirations. I myself, naturally had little sympathy with either of them on this score. 

The Committee of 100.

When the sentence of two months was pronounced upon me cries of ‘ Shame , shame , an old man of eighty-eight!’ arose from the onlookers. The magistrate seemed to me nearer the mark in observing that, from his point of view, I was old enough to know better. 

Ayer and Julian Huxley spoke most kindly of me, and E. M. Forster recalled the early Cambridge days. 

I met for the first time the Head of my family, the Duke of Bedford and his wife. I admired his determination to keep Woburn a private estate at however great cost to himself and against great odds. Later, I paid my first visit to Woburn Abbey. I also visited Kingston Russell House. 

‘I have a very simple creed: that life and joy and beauty are better than dusty death, and I think when we listen to such music as we heard today we must all of us feel that the capacity to produce such music, and the capacity to hear such music, is a thing worth preserving and should not be thrown away in foolish squabbles. 

Fenner Brockway most kindly invited me to a luncheon in my honour at the House of Commons.

When all this pleasant fuss to do with my becoming a nonagenarian had passed, we retired to Wales, returning to London only for a few days in July for the purpose of talking with U Thant about international nuclear and disarmament policies. 

There are both advantages and disadvantages in being very old. The disadvantages are obvious and uninteresting, and I shall say little about them.

17. The Foundation

The Foundation’s debt to Ralph Schoolman.  The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and the Atlantic Peace Foundation, for the second of which we obtained charitable status. 

I met Mark Lane, the New York lawyer who, originally, had been looking into the affair on behalf of Oswald’s mother.  [Conspiracy Theory?]. The British ‘Who Killed Kennedy?’ Committee. 

And once in a blue moon I have a chance to give my mind to the sort of thing I used to be interested in, philosophical or, especially, logical problems. But I am rusty in such work and rather shy of it. 

War Crimes in Vietnam

Jean-Paul Sartre

Postscript

The serious part of my life ever since boyhood has been devoted to two different objects which for a long time remained separate and have only in recent years united into a single whole. I wanted, on the one hand, to find out whether anything could be known; and, on the other hand, to do whatever might be possible toward creating a happier world.  Up to the age of thirty-eight I gave most of my energies to the first of these tasks. I was troubled by scepticism and unwillingly forced to the conclusion that most of what passes for knowledge is open to reasonable doubt. I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith. 

To preserve hope in our world makes calls upon our intelligence and our energy. In those who despair it is frequently the energy that is lacking. 

The last half of my life has been lived in one of those painful epochs of human history during which the world is getting worse.  [Pinker would disagree.]

When I was young, Victorian optimism was taken for granted. 

I may have thought the road to a world of free and happy human-beings shorter than it is proving to be, but I was not wrong in thinking that such a world is possible, and that it is worthwhile to live with a view to bringing it nearer.

I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle, to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times.  Social: to see in Imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.