my morning tea’.
Both brother and sister refused to continue to know me when I ceased to be respectable, but
the brother relented in the end. The sister remained adamant.
c/o Miss Frigell
Cairo
November 6th, 1898
My dear Bertie
It is a great pleasure to hear from you and to be reminded that the right
sort of people exist. Do you know that Brunyate has come out here to a law
berth of ￡1200 a year? He is amiable, but a savage. He thinks apparently that
no subject but mathematics can be of any di?culty to a really great mind. He
sneered at Political Economy, in the person of Sanger, at Metaphysics in the
person of McT. – and I fear did not spare yourself, telling me that Forsythe did
not believe in your theories. I questioned Forsythe’s competence; he said that
F. was capable of judging any logical proposition. So I could only say that it
took six months or a year to state any metaphysical proposition to a person
the autobiography of bertrand russell 132who knew nothing about it. The beast seems to think that Trinity has fallen
into the hands of mugs who give fellowships to political economists and
metaphysicians for corrupt motives. However one ought to remember
that some are predestined to damnation, and that instead of worrying
oneself to set them right, one had better spend one’s time lauding the G.A.
for his inscrutable decrees, especially in the matter of one’s own election.
Sometimes I confess I have qualms that I also am a reprobate. What for
instance Moore means by saying that the world consists of concepts alone,
I do not know.
I should much like to discuss my own and your a?airs with you. It seems
to me that I at any rate fall further away as time goes on from the state of
having de?nite and respectable ambitions. The worst of all is to feel ?amboy-
ant – as one does occasionally – and to see no opening for drilling – or even
for being tried on.
I shall not really know what to think of this place till you and Alys and
Bonté come and report on it to me from a dispassionate point of view.
Meanwhile I think I am learning various useful things. I am only occupied
at the Ministry in the mornings; and I have just arranged to spend my
afternoons in the o?ce of the leading lawyer here, a Belgian, where I think
I shall pick up a lot. Meanwhile it is night, getting fairly cool, cheerful, and
I have about enough to live on and come home in the summer. I also have
plenty to do.
The plan of your book sounds splendid. Perhaps I shall be able to under-
stand it when it comes out, but probably not. I think it possible that I may
take up my mathematics again out here because – I wish I had said this to that
b.f. Brunyate, there is no doubt that Mathematics is less a strain on the
attention than any other branch of knowledge: you are borne up and carried
along by the notation as by the Gulf Stream. On the other hand it is shiftless
work, getting up a subject without any de?nite aim.
I am glad to hear that you are Jingo. But I think it is a good thing that
we should win diplomatically, if possible, without a war – although the old
Adam wants the latter.
This we now seem to have done, in the most triumphant manner. The
Fashoda incident gives us a new position in Egypt; we now have it by right
of Conquest, having o?ered ?ght to the French, which they have refused.
I very much wish I was doing anything of the same kind of work as you,
so as to be able to write to you about it. I wonder if there is such a thing
as mental paralysis, or if one is bound to emerge after all.
Your a?ectionate friend
M. S. Amos
first marriage 133Cairo
May 5, 1899
Dear Bertie
I have just got leave for three months and a half from the 9th of June. I shall
be home about the 10th, and I am looking forward very much to seeing
you and Alys. I shall unfortunately have to go to Paris during July for an
examination, but I think I shall have long enough in England altogether to
bore my friends. I hope you will give me a fair chance of doing so to you.
I was much struck by your lyrical letter about Moore. I have made it the
text of more than one disquisition for the bene?t of Frenchmen and other
Barbarians, on the real state of spirits in England. I explain that our colonial
and commercial activity is a mere pale re?ection of the intense blaze of
quintessential ?ame that consumes literary and philosophical circles. In fact
that the true character of the present time in England is that of a Great Age, in
which, under a perfect political system, administered by a liberal, respected
and unenvied aristocracy teeming millions of a prosperous working class
vie with the cultured and a?uent orders of the middle rank in Imperial
enthusiasm, loyalty to the Throne, and respect for learning – the same gener-
ous and stimulating atmosphere which has lent new life to trade, has had
an even more stupendous and unprecedented e?ect on the intellectual life of
the nation: this is especially seen in the Great Universities, which are not
only, as heretofore, the nurseries of proconsuls or statesmen and of a terri-
torial gentry of unrivalled liberality and elegance, but have within the last
generation equalled and far surpassed all other seats of learning in Europe
and America as centres of pure and abstract scienti?c inquiry. You should see
the Frenchmen squirm. They can stand Spithead Reviews: they can just bear
Fashoda, because they doubt where it is. But when it comes to new systems
of Platonic philosophy, they tear their hair.
This is inexcusable frivolity. But it will be very nice to see you and Alys
again and talk about all sorts of matters in all sorts of moods. Have you read
Les Déracinés of Barrés?
Yours a?ectionately
M. Sheldon Amos
the autobiography of bertrand russell 1346
‘PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA’
In July 1900, there was an International Congress of Philosophy in Paris in
connection with the Exhibition of that year. Whitehead and I decided to go to
this Congress, and I accepted an invitation to read a paper at it. Our arrival in
Paris was signalised by a somewhat ferocious encounter with the eminent
mathematician Borel. Carey Thomas had asked Alys to bring from England
twelve empty trunks which she had left behind. Borel had asked the White-
heads to bring his niece, who had a teaching post in England. There was a
great crowd at the Gare du Nord, and we had only one luggage ticket for the
whole party. Borel’s niece’s luggage turned up at once, our luggage turned
up fairly soon, but of Carey’s empty trunks only eleven appeared. While we
were waiting for the twelfth, Borel lost patience, snatched the luggage ticket
out of my hands, and went o? with his niece and her one valise, leaving us
unable to claim either Carey’s trunks or our personal baggage. Whitehead and
I seized the pieces one at a time, and used them as battering-rams to penetrate
through the ring of o?cials. So surprised were they that the manoeuvre was
successful.
The Congress was a turning point in my intellectual life, because I there
met Peano. I already knew him by name and had seen some of his work,
but had not taken the trouble to master his notation. In discussions at the
Congress I observed that he was always more precise than anyone else, and
that he invariably got the better of any argument upon which he embarked.
As the days went by, I decided that this must be owing to his mathematical
logic. I therefore got him to give me all his works, and as soon as the
Congress was over I retired to Fernhurst to study quietly every word written
by him and his disciples. It became clear to me that his notation a?orded an
instrument of logical analysis such as I had been seeking for years, and thatby studying him I was acquiring a new and powerful technique for the work
that I had long wanted to do. By the end of August I had become completely
familiar with all the work of his school. I spent September in extending his
methods to the logic of relations. It seems to me in retrospect that, through
that month, every day was warm and sunny. The Whiteheads stayed with us
at Fernhurst, and I explained my new ideas to him. Every evening the discus-
sion ended with some di?culty, and every morning I found that the dif-
?culty of the previous evening had solved itself while I slept. The time was
one of intellectual intoxication. My sensations resembled those one has after
climbing a mountain in a mist, when, on reaching the summit, the mist
suddenly clears, and the country becomes visible for forty miles in every
direction. For years I had been endeavouring to analyse the fundamental
notions of mathematics, such as order and cardinal numbers. Suddenly, in the
space of a few weeks, I discovered what appeared to be de?nitive answers to
the problems which had ba?ed me for years. And in the course of discover-
ing these answers, I was introducing a new mathematical technique, by
which regions formerly abandoned to the vaguenesses of philosophers were
conquered for the precision of exact formulae. Intellectually, the month of
September 1900 was the highest point of my life. I went about saying to
myself that now at last I had done something worth doing, and I had the
feeling that I must be careful not to be run over in the street before I had
written it down. I sent a paper to Peano for his journal, embodying my new
ideas. With the beginning of October I sat down to write The Principles of
Mathematics, at which I had already made a number of unsuccessful attempts.
Parts III, IV, V, and VI of the book as published were written that autumn.
I wrote also Parts I, II, and VII at that time, but had to rewrite them later, so
that the book was not ?nished in its ?nal form until May 1902. Every day
throughout October, November and December, I wrote my ten pages, and
?nished the ?? on the last day of the century, in time to write a boastful letter
to Helen Thomas about the 200,000 words that I had just completed.
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 simul-
taneously by intellectual and emotional problems which plunged me into the
darkest despair that I have ever known.
During the Lent Term of 1901, we joined with the Whiteheads in taking
Professor Maitland’s house in Downing College. Professor Maitland had had
to go to Madeira for his health. His housekeeper informed us that he had
‘dried hisself up eating dry toast’, but I imagine this was not the medical
diagnosis. Mrs Whitehead was at this time becoming more and more of an
invalid, and used to have intense pain owing to heart trouble. Whitehead and
Alys and I were all ?lled with anxiety about her. He was not only deeply
devoted to her but also very dependent upon her, and it seemed doubtful
the autobiography of bertrand russell 136whether he would ever achieve any more good work if she were to die. One
day, Gilbert Murray came to Newnham to read part of his translation of
The Hippolytus, then unpublished. Alys and I went to hear him, and I was
profoundly stirred by the beauty of the poetry.
1
When we came home, we
found Mrs Whitehead undergoing an unusually severe bout of pain. She
seemed cut o? 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 super?cial. I had
forgotten all the deeper issues, and had been content with ?ippant cleverness.
Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in
quite another region. Within ?ve minutes I went through some such re?ec-
tions 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 ?ve minutes, I had become a completely di?erent
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 ?nd myself in far closer
touch than previously with all my friends, and many of my acquaintances.
Having been an Imperialist, I became during those ?ve minutes a pro-Boer
and a Paci?st. Having for years cared only for exactness and analysis, I found
myself ?lled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty, with an intense inter-
est in children, and with a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to
?nd 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 ?rst war, my interest in
children, my indi?erence to minor misfortunes, and a certain emotional tone
in all my human relations.
At the end of the Lent Term, Alys and I went back to Fernhurst, where I set
to work to write out the logical deduction of mathematics which afterwards
‘principia mathematica’ 137became Principia Mathematica. I thought the work was nearly ?nished, but in the
month of May I had an intellectual set-back almost as severe as the emotional
set-back which I had had in February. Cantor had a proof that there is no
greatest number, and it seemed to me that the number of all the things in the
world ought to be the greatest possible. Accordingly, I examined his proof
with some minuteness, and endeavoured to apply it to the class of all the
things there are. 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. At ?rst
I supposed that I should be able to overcome the contradiction quite easily,
and that probably there was some trivial error in the reasoning. Gradually,
however, it became clear that this was not the case. Burali-Forti had already
discovered a similar contradiction, and it turned out on logical analysis that
there was an a?nity with the ancient Greek contradiction about Epimenides
the Cretan, who said that all Cretans are liars. A contradiction essentially
similar to that of Epimenides can be created by giving a person a piece of
paper on which is written: ‘The statement on the other side of this paper is
false.’ The person turns the paper over, and ?nds on the other side: ‘The
statement on the other side of this paper is true.’ It seemed unworthy of a
grown man to spend his time on such trivialities, but what was I to do? There
was something wrong, since such contradictions were unavoidable on ordin-
ary premisses. Trivial or not, the matter was a challenge. Throughout the
latter half of 1901 I supposed the solution would be easy, but by the end of
that time I had concluded that it was a big job. I therefore decided to ?nish
The Principles of Mathematics, leaving the solution in abeyance. In the autumn Alys
and I went back to Cambridge, as I had been invited to give two terms’ lectures
on mathematical logic. These lectures contained the outline of Principia
Mathematica, but without any method of dealing with the contradictions.
About the time that these lectures ?nished, when we were living with the
Whiteheads at the Mill House in Grantchester, a more serious blow fell than
those that had preceded it. I went out bicycling one afternoon, and suddenly,
as I was riding along a country road, I realised that I no longer loved Alys.
I had had no idea until this moment that my love for her was even lessening.
The problem presented by this discovery was very grave. We had lived ever
since our marriage in the closest possible intimacy. We always shared a bed,
and neither of us ever had a separate dressing-room. We talked over together
everything that ever happened to either of us. She was ?ve years older than
I was, and I had been accustomed to regarding her as far more practical and
far more full of worldly wisdom than myself, so that in many matters of daily
life I left the initiative to her. I knew that she was still devoted to me. I had no
wish to be unkind, but I believed in those days (what experience has taught
me to think possibly open to doubt) that in intimate relations one should
the autobiography of bertrand russell 138speak the truth. I did not see in any case how I could for any length of time
successfully pretend to love her when I did not. I had no longer any instinc-
tive impulse towards sex relations with her, and this alone would have been an
insuperable barrier to concealment of my feelings. At this crisis my father’s
priggery came out in me, and I began to justify myself with moral criticisms
of Alys. I did not at once tell her that I no longer loved her, but of course she
perceived that something was amiss. She retired to a rest-cure for some
months, and when she emerged from it I told her that I no longer wished to
share a room, and in the end I confessed that my love was dead. I justi?ed this
attitude to her, as well as to myself, by criticisms of her character.
Although my self-righteousness at that time seems to me in retrospect
repulsive, there were substantial grounds for my criticisms. She tried to be
more impeccably virtuous than is possible to human beings, and was thus led
into insincerity. Like her brother Logan, she was malicious, and liked to make
people think ill of each other, but she was not aware of this, and was instinc-
tively subtle in her methods. She would praise people in such a way as to
cause others to admire her generosity, and think worse of the people praised
than if she had criticised them. Often malice made her untruthful. She told
Mrs Whitehead that I couldn’t bear children, and that the Whitehead chil-
dren must be kept out of my way as much as possible. At the same time she
told me that Mrs Whitehead was a bad mother because she saw so little of her
children. During my bicycle ride a host of such things occurred to me, and
I became aware that she was not the saint I had always supposed her to be. But
in the revulsion I went too far, and forgot the great virtues that she did in fact
possess.
My change of feeling towards Alys was partly the result of perceiving,
though in a milder form, traits in her which I disliked in her mother and
brother. Alys had an unbounded admiration of her mother, whom she
regarded as both a saint and a sage. This was a fairly common view; it was
held, for example, by William James. I, on the contrary, came gradually to
think her one of the wickedest people I had ever known. Her treatment of her
husband, whom she despised, was humiliating in the highest degree. She
never spoke to him or of him except in a tone that made her contempt
obvious. It cannot be denied that he was a silly old man, but he did not
deserve what she gave him, and no one capable of mercy could have given it.
He had a mistress, and fondly supposed that his wife did not know of her. He
used to tear up this woman’s letters and throw the pieces into the waste-
paper basket. His wife would ?t the bits together, and read out the letters to
Alys and Logan amid ?ts of laughter. When the old man died, she sold
his false teeth and refused to carry out his death-bed request to give a present
of ￡5 to the gardener. (The rest of us made up the sum without any contribu-
tion from her.) This was the only time that Logan felt critical of her: he was in
‘principia mathematica’ 139tears because of her hardheartedness. But he soon reverted to his usual rever-
ential attitude. In a letter written when he was 3? months old, she writes:
Logan and I had our ?rst regular battle today, and he came off conqueror,
though I don’t think he knew it. I whipped him until he was actually black and
blue, and until I really could not whip him any more, and he never gave up one
single inch. However, I hope it was a lesson to him.
2
It was. She never had to whip him black and blue again. She taught her
family that men are brutes and fools, but women are saints and hate sex.
So Logan, as might have been expected, became homosexual. She carried
feminism to such lengths that she found it hard to keep her respect for the
Deity, since He was male. In passing a public house she would remark: ‘Thy
housekeeping, O Lord.’ If the Creator had been female, there would have
been no such thing as alcohol.
I found Alys’s support of her mother di?cult to bear. Once, when Friday’s
Hill was to be let, the prospective tenants wrote to inquire whether the drains
had been passed by a sanitary inspector. She explained to us all at the tea-table
that they had not, but she was going to say that they had. I protested, but both
Logan and Alys said ‘hush’ as if I had been a naughty child who had inter-
rupted Teacher. Sometimes I tried to discuss her mother with Alys, but this
proved impossible. In the end, some of my horror of the old lady spread to all
who admired her, not excluding Alys.
The most unhappy moments of my life were spent at Grantchester. My
bedroom looked out upon the mill, and the noise of the millstream mingled
inextricably with my despair. I lay awake through long nights, hearing ?rst
the nightingale, and then the chorus of birds at dawn, looking out upon
sunrise and trying to ?nd consolation in external beauty. I su?ered in a very
intense form the loneliness which I had perceived a year before to be the
essential lot of man. I walked alone in the ?elds about Grantchester, feeling
dimly that the whitening willows in the wind had some message from a land
of peace. I read religious books, such as Taylor’s Holy Dying, in the hope that
there might be something independent of dogma in the comfort which their
authors derived from their beliefs. I tried to take refuge in pure contempla-
tion; 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.
Throughout the whole time of the writing of Principia Mathematica my
relations with the Whiteheads were di?cult and complex. Whitehead
appeared to the world calm, reasonable, and judicious, but when one came to
know him well one discovered that this was only a fa?ade. Like many people
possessed of great self-control, he su?ered from impulses which were
scarcely sane. Before he met Mrs Whitehead he had made up his mind to join
the autobiography of bertrand russell 140the Catholic Church, and was only turned aside at the last minute by falling in
love with her. He was obsessed by fear of lack of money, and he did not meet
this fear in a reasonable way, but by spending recklessly in the hope of
persuading himself that he could a?ord to do so. He used to frighten Mrs
Whitehead and her servants by mutterings in which he addressed injurious
objurgations to himself. At times he would be completely silent for some
days, saying nothing whatever to anybody in the house. Mrs Whitehead was
in perpetual fear that he would go mad. I think, in retrospect, that she
exaggerated the danger, for she tended to be melodramatic in her outlook.
But the danger was certainly real, even if not as great as she believed. She
spoke of him to me with the utmost frankness, and I found myself in an
alliance with her to keep him sane. Whatever happened his work never
?agged, but one felt that he was exerting more self-control than a human
being could be expected to stand and that at any moment a break-down was
possible. Mrs Whitehead was always discovering that he had run up large bills
with Cambridge tradesmen, and she did not dare to tell him that there was no
money to pay them for fear of driving him over the edge. I used to supply the
wherewithal surreptitiously. It was hateful to deceive Whitehead, who would
have found the humiliation unbearable if he had known of it. But there was
his family to be supported and Principia Mathematica to be written, and there
seemed no other way by which these objects could be achieved. I contributed
all that I could realise in the way of capital, and even that partly by borrowing.
I hope the end justi?ed the means. Until 1952 I never mentioned this to
anyone.
Meanwhile Alys was more unhappy than I was, and her unhappiness was
a great part of the cause of my own. We had in the past spent a great deal of
time with her family, but I told her I could no longer endure her mother, and
that we must therefore leave Fernhurst. We spent the summer near Broadway
in Worcestershire. Pain made me sentimental, and I used to construct phrases
such as ‘Our hearts build precious shrines for the ashes of dead hopes’. I even
descended to reading Maeterlinck. Before this time, at Grantchester, at the
very height and crisis of misery, I ?nished The Principles of Mathematics. The day
on which I ?nished the manuscript was May 23rd. At Broadway I devoted
myself to the mathematical elaboration which was to become Principia
Mathematica. By this time I had secured Whitehead’s co-operation in this task,
but the unreal, insincere, and sentimental frame of mind into which I had
allowed myself to fall a?ected even my mathematical work. I remember
sending Whitehead a draft of the beginning, and his reply: ‘Everything, even
the object of the book, has been sacri?ced to making proofs look short and
neat.’ This defect in my work was due to a moral defect in my state of mind.
When the autumn came we took a house for six months in Cheyne Walk,
and life began to become more bearable. We saw a great many people, many
‘principia mathematica’ 141of them amusing or agreeable, and we both gradually began to live a more
external life, but this was always breaking down. So long as I lived in the same
house with Alys she would every now and then come down to me in her
dressing-gown after she had gone to bed, and beseech me to spend the night
with her. Sometimes I did so, but the result was utterly unsatisfactory. For
nine years this state of a?airs continued. During all this time she hoped to
win me back, and never became interested in any other man. During all this
time I had no other sex relations. About twice a year I would attempt sex
relations with her, in the hope of alleviating her misery, but she no longer
attracted me, and the attempt was futile. Looking back over this stretch of
years, I feel that I ought to have ceased much sooner to live in the same house
with her, but she wished me to stay, and even threatened suicide if I left her.
There was no other woman to whom I wished to go, and there seemed
therefore no good reason for not doing as she wished.
The summers of 1903 and 1904 we spent at Churt and Tilford. I made a
practice of wandering about the common every night from eleven till one, by
which means I came to know the three di?erent noises made by night-jars.
(Most people only know one.) I was trying hard to solve the contradictions
mentioned above. Every morning I would sit down before a blank sheet of
paper. Throughout the day, with a brief interval for lunch, I would stare at the
blank sheet. Often when evening came it was still empty. We spent our
winters in London, and during the winters I did not attempt to work, but the
two summers of 1903 and 1904 remain in my mind as a period of complete
intellectual deadlock. It was clear to me that I could not get on without
solving the contradictions, and I was determined that no di?culty should
turn me aside from the completion of Principia Mathematica, but it seemed quite
likely that the whole of the rest of my life might be consumed in looking
at that blank sheet of paper. What made it the more annoying was that the
contradictions were trivial, and that my time was spent in considering
matters that seemed unworthy of serious attention.
It must not be supposed that all my time was consumed in despair and
