November 10, 1905
My dear Lucy
It was a great pleasure to hear from you again. I think letters are more
important than one is apt to realise. If one doesn’t write, one’s doings and
one’s general state of mind cease to be known, and when a time comes for
explaining, there are so many preliminaries that the task seems impossible in
‘principia mathematica’ 171writing. So I do hope you will not be deterred by the fear of many words – it
really doesn’t do to wait till you are in extremis. What you say about Alys and ‘my
right living’ rather makes me feel that there is something wrong – too much
profession and talk about virtue; for I certainly know many people who live
better lives than I do, and are more able to accomplish long and di?cult duties
without any moments of weakness. Only they make less fuss about it, and
people do not know how di?cult the duties are that they perform in silence.
I am grateful to you for writing about Helen. I understand very well the
renewal of pain that comes when you see her, and the dread of entering the
real life, with its tortures, after the numbness of routine. I am very sorry that
it is still so bad. I wonder, though, whether any but trivial people could really
?nd it otherwise. Life is a burden if those one loves best have others who
come ?rst, if there is no corner in the world where one’s loneliness is at an
end. I hardly know how it can be otherwise. Your problem is to face this with
courage, and yet retain as much as possible of what is important to you. It
would be easier to renounce everything once for all, and kill one’s chief
a?ection. But that leads to hardness, and in the long run to cruelty, the
cruelty of the ascetic. The other course has its disadvantages too: it is physi-
cally and mentally exhausting, it destroys peace of mind, it keeps one’s
thoughts absorbed with the question of how much that one values one can
hope to rescue without undue encroachment on the territory of others. It is
horribly di?cult. There is a temptation to let one’s real life become wholly
one of memory and imagination, where duty and facts do not fetter one, and
to let one’s present intercourse be a mere shadow and unreality; this has the
advantage that it keeps the past unsmirched.
But to come to more practical things. I believe when one is not ?rst in a
person’s life, it is necessary, however di?cult, to make one’s feelings towards
that person purely receptive and passive. I mean, that one should not have an
opinion about what such a person should do, unless one is asked; that one
should watch their moods, and make oneself an echo, responding with a?ec-
tion in the measure in which it is given, repressing whatever goes further,
ready to feel that one has no rights, and that whatever one gets is so much to
the good. This must be, for example, the attitude of a good mother to a
married son. Di?cult as it is, it is a situation which is normal in the life of
the a?ections, and a duty which one has to learn to perform without spiritual
death....
I have been seeing a good deal of Crompton Davies. . . . He is and will
remain very profoundly unhappy, and I do not think that marriage or any-
thing will heal the wound. But he is brave, and to the world he makes a good
show. To his friends he is lovable in a very rare degree.
The Japanese alliance seems to me excellent – I am glad England should be
ready to recognise the yellow man as a civilised being, and not wholly sorry
the autobiography of bertrand russell 172at the quarrel with Australia which this recognition entails. Balfour’s gov-
ernment has ceased to do any harm, having grown impotent. The general
opinion is that Balfour will resign in February, trying to force the Liberals
to take o?ce before dissolving. Whatever happens, the Liberals are almost
certain of an overwhelming majority in the next Parliament.
I am interested to hear that I have a disciple at Bryn Mawr. Two young men,
Huntingdon at Harvard and Veblen at Princeton, have written works in which
they make pleasing references to me. The latter, at least, is brilliantly able....
Alys told me to say she had not time to write by this Saturday’s mail – she
is occupied with alternations of visitors and meetings, and rather tired. On
the whole, however, she has been very well lately. She asked me also to tell
you about Forster’s ‘Where angels fear to tread’ – it seems to me a clever story,
with a good deal of real merit, but too farcical in parts, and too sentimental at
the end. He is one of our Cambridge set; his age, I suppose, about 26. He
seems certainly to have talent.
Dickinson’s new book is out, A Modern Symposium. It is quite excellent. He
does the Tories with more sympathy than the Liberals, but all except Glad-
stone and the biologist are done with much sympathy. Besides Gladstone,
there are Disraeli, Henry Sidgwick, and various private friends – Bob Trev-
elyan, Ferdinand Schiller (Audubon), a compound of Berenson and Santayana,
Sidney Webb, and some characters who are nobody in particular. You must
certainly read it.
My work has gone very well this summer, in spite of a long interruption
caused by Theodore’s death. I have made more solid and permanent progress
than I usually do. But the end of Volume II is as far o? as ever – the task grows
and grows. For the rest, I have been much occupied with other people’s
tragedies – some unusually painful ones have come in my way lately. What
rather adds to the oppression is the impossibility of speaking of them – Still,
I could hardly endure life if I were not on those terms with people that make
me necessarily share their sorrows; and if the sorrows exist, I would always
rather know them than not. Only I feel increasingly helpless before mis-
fortune; I used to be able to speak encouraging words, but now I feel too
weary, and have too little faith in any remedy except endurance.
Yours a?ectionately
Bertrand Russell
Lower Copse
Bagley Wood, Oxford
January 1, 1906
My dear Lucy
I am very glad your sense of values prevailed over your Puritan instinct,
and I am sure your sense of values was right. Letters are important; I care
‘principia mathematica’ 173about getting letters from you, and it is the only way not to meet as strangers
when people only meet at intervals of some years. And generally, I am sure
you are right not to give all your best hours to routine; people who do that
infallibly become engrossed in routine, by which they both lose personally
and do the routine less well. In this, at least, I practise what I preach: I spent
the ?rst hour and a half of the new year in an argument about ethics, with
young Arthur Dakyns, who is supposed to be my only disciple up here, but
is a very restive disciple, always going after the false gods of the Hegelians.
(We were staying with his people at Haslemere.) His father is a delightful
man, with a gift of friendliness and of generous admirations that I have
seldom seen equalled; and Arthur has inherited a great deal of his father’s
charm. He is the only person up here (except the Murrays) that I feel as a real
friend – the rest are rather alien, so far as I know them....
I am looking forward very much indeed to your visit, and I do hope
nothing will happen to prevent it. I shall not be very busy at that time, as I
shall have been working continuously all the spring. I am afraid you will ?nd
me grown more middle-aged, and with less power of throwing o? the point
of view of the daily round. The e?orts of life and of work are great, and in the
long run they tend to subdue one’s spirit through sheer weariness. I get more
and more into the way of ?lling my mind with the thoughts of what I have to
do day by day, to the exclusion of things that have more real importance. It is
perhaps inevitable, but it is a pity, and I feel it makes one a duller person.
However, it suits work amazingly well. My work during 1905 was certainly
better in quality and quantity than any I have done in a year before, unless
perhaps in 1900. The di?culty which I came upon in 1901, and was worry-
ing over all the time you were in Europe, has come out at last, completely and
?nally, so far as I can judge. It all came from considering whether the King
of France is bald – a question which I decided in the same article in which
I proved that George IV was interested in the Law of Identity. The result of
this is that Whitehead and I expect to have a comparatively easy time from
now to the publication of our book, which we may hope will happen within
four or ?ve years. Lately I have been working 10 hours a day, living in a
dream, realising the actual world only dimly through a mist. Having to go
?rst to my Aunt Agatha on Hindhead, then to the Dakyns’s, I woke up
suddenly from the dream; but now I must go back into it, until we go abroad
with old Mr Ll. Davies and his daughter (on the 25th January)....
I found your kind present to Alys on my return today, but she has not had
it yet, as she has gone to West Ham to canvass for Masterman. He is not the
man I should have chosen, but she promised long ago, that she would help
him when the election came on. The political outlook is good on the whole.
The Liberals have done wisely, as well as rightly, in stopping the S. African
Slave Trade in Chinamen. Campbell-Bannerman caused a ?utter by declaring
the autobiography of bertrand russell 174more or less for Home Rule; but today Redmond and the Duke of Devonshire
both advise electors to vote Liberal, so Campbell-Bannerman has caught
the Home Rule vote without losing the Free Trade Unionist vote. Exactly the
opposite might just as well have happened, so it is a stroke of luck. But by the
time you get this letter, the results will be coming in. The Cabinet is excellent.
I am very glad John Burns is in it. But it may go to pieces later on the Irish
question. However, I hope not. I breathe more freely every moment owing to
those soundrels being no longer in o?ce; but I wish I knew what majority
we shall get. The question is: Will the Liberals be independent of the Irish?
It is bound to be a near thing one way or other.
I hope you will enjoy Dickinson’s Modern Symposium. You will recognise Bob
Trevylan and Sidney Webb. I like the book immensely.
Do write again soon. Your letters are a great pleasure to me.
Yours a?ectionately
Bertrand Russell
14 Barton Street
Westminster
February 18, 1906
My dear Lucy
...I have myself been horribly depressed lately. Margaret Davies is still in
the depths of unhappiness, and needs a great deal of silent sympathy, which
is much more tiring than the sort one can express. And I am as usual
oppressed by a good many anxieties that I cannot speak about. I am looking
forward to work, which is a refuge. But I tired myself out before starting
for abroad, and I feel still rather slack, so I may ?nd I need more holiday.
Sometimes I think I should like never to stop work, if only I had the strength
of body. Mathematics is a haven of peace without which I don’t know how
I should get on. So I am hardly the person to tell you how to avoid depres-
sion; because I can only give advice which I do not myself ?nd e?ective.
I have, however, two things which really make me happier – one is the result
of the general election, which does mean that for the next few years at least
public a?airs in England will be more or less what one could wish; the other,
more personal, is that my work has prospered amazingly, and that I have
solved the most di?cult problems I had to deal with, so that I have a prospect
of some years of easy and rapid progress. I stayed a few days in Paris, and they
got up a dinner of philosophers and mathematicians for me, which I found
most agreeable – it was interesting to meet the people, and was sweet incense
to my self-esteem. I was interested to observe, on a review of noses, that they
were mostly Jews. They seemed most civilised people, with great public spirit
and intense devotion to learning. One of them said he had read an English
poem called ‘le vieux matelot’; I couldn’t think who had written anything
‘principia mathematica’ 175called ‘the old sailor’ and began to think there might be something by Hood
of that name, when the truth ?ashed upon me. I also saw Miss Minturn and
Santayana in Paris, which I enjoyed. – I go back to Oxford the end of this
week. Alys has been very well, not at all exhausted by her labours in West
Ham. I shall hope for another letter from you soon.
Yours a?ectionately
Bertrand Russell
Providence House
Clovelly, near Bideford
April 22, 1906
My dear Lucy
...I am down here in absolute solitude for the best part of 2 months, and
?nd it so far a very great success. The country is beautiful, beyond belief –
tangled sleeping-beauty sort of woods, sloping steep down to the sea, and
little valleys full of ferns and mosses and wild ?owers of innumerable kinds.
I take a long walk every afternoon, and all the rest of the day and evening
I work, except at meals, when I re-read War and Peace, which I expect will last
me most of my time. On my walks I stop and read little bits of Walton’s Lives,
or something else that is exquisite. My work goes ahead at a tremendous
pace, and I get intense delight from it.
7
Being alone, I escape oppression of
more things to think out, and more complicated decisions to make, than
I have energy to accomplish; and so I am contented, and ?nd enough to
occupy me in work, and enough vigour to make work a pleasure instead of
a torment.
As for fame, which you speak of, I have no consciousness of possessing it –
certainly at Oxford they regard me as a conceited and soulless formalist. But I
do not now care greatly what other people think of my work. I did care, until
I had enough con?dence that it was worth doing to be independent of praise.
Now it gives me rather less pleasure than a ?ne day. I feel better able than
anyone else to judge what my work is worth; besides, praise from the learned
public is necessarily for things written some time ago, which probably now
seem to me so full of imperfections that I hardly like to remember them.
Work, when it goes well, is in itself a great delight; and after any considerable
achievement I look back at it with the sort of placid satisfaction one has after
climbing a mountain. What is absolutely vital to me is the self-respect I get
from work – when (as often) I have done something for which I feel
remorse, work restores me to a belief that it is better I should exist than not
exist. And another thing I greatly value is the kind of communion with past
and future discoverers. I often have imaginary conversations with Leibniz,
in which I tell him how fruitful his ideas have proved, and how much
more beautiful the result is than he could have foreseen; and in moments of
the autobiography of bertrand russell 176self-con?dence, I imagine students hereafter having similar thoughts about
me. There is a ‘communion of philosophers’ as well as a ‘communion of
saints’, and it is largely that that keeps me from feeling lonely.
Well, this disquisition shows how self-absorbed one grows when one is
alone!...
I am glad your country girl has married the painter. All’s well that ends
well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last
man left alive.
I am on the whole satis?ed with Birrell. The Government have made some
bad mistakes, but seem satisfactory in the main.
Write again when you can, and address here.
Yours a?ectionately
Bertrand Russell
To Lowes Dickinson:
Little Buckland
Nr. Broadway, Wors.
Aug. 2, ’02
Dear Goldie
. . . This neighbourhood, which I didn’t know before, is very charming;
all the villages are built of a very good stone, and most of the houses are
Jacobean or older. There is a great plain full of willows, into which the sun
sets, and on the other side high hills. Our lodgings are in an old and very
picturesque farm house. The place is bracing, and I have been getting through
eight or nine hours of work a day, which has left me stupid at the end of it.
My book, and Moore’s too probably, will be out some time in the winter. The
proofs come occasionally, and seem to me very worthless; I have a poor
opinion of the stu? when I think of what it ought to be. Whitehead turned
up in College, but I got little of his society, as he was terribly busy with
exam-papers. It is a funny arrangement, by which the remuneration of dons
is inversely proportional to the value of their work. I wish something better
could be devised. – It would be most agreeable to live in Cambridge, and
I daresay I shall do so some day; but at present it is out of the question.
However, we shall be in town after September 15 for six months; I hope you
will visit us during your weekly excursions to that haunt of purposeless
activity and foolish locomotion. When I see people who desire money
or fame or power, I ?nd it hard to imagine what must be the emotional
emptiness of their lives, that can leave room for such trivial things.
Yours ever
Bertrand Russell
‘principia mathematica’ 177Address: Friday’s Hill Little Buckland
Haslemere Nr. Broadway, Wors.
26 August, 1902
Dear Goldie
I was very glad of your letter, and I agree with all you said about the Paradiso,
though it is many years since I read it. I feel also very strongly what you say
about Italy and the North, though at bottom I disagree with you. I do not
think, to begin with, that Dante can count as an Italian; Italy begins with the
Renaissance, and the mediaeval mind is international. But there is to me
about Italy a quality which the rest of Europe had in the 18th century, a
complete lack of mystery. Sunshine is very agreeable, but fogs and mists have
e?ects which sunshine can never attain to. Seriously, the unmystical, rational-
istic view of life seems to me to omit all that is most important and most
beautiful. It is true that among unmystical people there is no truth
unperceived, which the mystic might reveal; but mysticism creates the truth
it believes in, by the way in which it feels the fundamental facts – the help-
lessness of man before Time and Death, and the strange depths of feeling
which lie dormant until some one of the Gods of life calls for our worship.
Religion and art both, it seems to me, are attempts to humanise the uni-
verse – beginning, no doubt, with the humanising of man. If some of the
stubborn facts refuse to leave one’s consciousness, a religion or an art cannot
appeal to one fully unless it takes account of those facts. And so all religion
becomes an achievement, a victory, an assurance that although man may be
powerless, his ideals are not so. The more facts a religion takes account of, the
greater is its victory, and that is why thin religions appeal to Puritan tem-
peraments. I should myself value a religion in proportion to its austerity – if it
is not austere, it seems a mere childish toy, which the ?rst touch of the real
Gods would dispel. But I fear that, however austere, any religion must be less
austere than the truth. And yet I could not bear to lose from the world a
certain awed solemnity, a certain stern seriousness – for the mere fact of life
and death, of desire and hope and aspiration and love in a world of matter
which knows nothing of good and bad, which destroys carelessly the things
it has produced by accident, in spite of all the passionate devotion that we
may give – all this is not sunshine, or any peaceful landscapes seen through
limpid air; yet life has the power to brand these things into one’s soul so that
all else seems triviality and vain babble. To have endowed only one minute
portion of the universe with the knowledge and love of good, and to have
made that portion the plaything of vast irresistible irrational forces, is a cruel
jest on the part of God or Fate. The best Gospel, I suppose, is the Stoic one; yet
even that is too optimistic, for matter can at any moment destroy our love of
virtue.
After all this moping, you will be con?rmed in your love of the South; and
the autobiography of bertrand russell 178indeed I feel it too, but as a longing to have done with the burden of a serious
life. ‘Ye know, my friends, with what a gay carouse’ – and no doubt there is
much to be said for the Daughter of the Vine, as for any other of Satan’s many
forms. To Hell with unity, and artistic serenity, and the insight that perceives
the good in other people’s Pain – it sickens me. (And yet I know there is truth
in it.)
Yes, one must learn to live in the Past, and so to dominate it that it is not a
disquieting ghost or a horrible gibbering spectre stalking through the vast
bare halls that once were full of life, but a gentle soothing companion,
reminding one of the possibility of good things, and rebuking cynicism and
cruelty – but those are temptations which I imagine you do not su?er from.
For my part, I do not even wish to live rather with eternal things, though
I often give them lip-service; but in my heart I believe that the best things are
those that are fragile and temporary, and I ?nd a magic in the Past which
eternity cannot possess. Besides, nothing is more eternal than the Past – the
present and future are still subject to Time, but the Past has escaped into
immortality – Time has done his worst, and it yet lives.
I don’t wonder you hate taking up your routine again. After one has had
liberty of mind, and allowed one’s thoughts and emotions to grow and
expand, it is horrible to go back to prison, and enclose all feelings within the
miserable compass of the prudent and desirable and practically useful – Pah! –
But all good things must be left to the wicked – even virtue, which only
remains spotless if it is kept under a glass case, for ornament and not for use.
I have been working nine hours a day until yesterday, living in a dream,
thinking only of space; today I begin to realise the things that are in it, and
on the whole they do not seem to me an improvement. But I hope we shall
see you in town.
Yours ever
Bertrand Russell
Churt, Farnham
July 16, 1903
Dear Goldie
I enclose the translation, but I rather wish you would get someone with a
better knowledge of French to look it over, as my French is not at all correct.
And by the way, I expect mémoire would be better than article, but I am not sure.
I am glad you are writing on Religion. It is quite time to have things said
that all of us know, but that are not generally known. It seems to me that our
attitude on religious subjects is one which we ought as far as possible to
preach, and which is not the same as that of any of the well-known
opponents of Christianity. There is the Voltaire tradition, which makes fun of
the whole thing from a common-sense, semi-historical, semi-literary point
‘principia mathematica’ 179of view; this of course, is hopelessly inadequate, because it only gets hold of
the accidents and excrescences of historical systems. Then there is the scien-
ti?c, Darwin–Huxley attitude, which seems to me perfectly true, and quite
fatal, if rightly carried out, to all the usual arguments for religion. But it is too
external, too coldly critical, too remote from the emotions; moreover, it
cannot get to the root of the matter without the help of philosophy. Then
there are the philosophers, like Bradley, who keep a shadow of religion, too
little for comfort, but quite enough to ruin their systems intellectually. But
what we have to do, and what privately we do do, is to treat the religious
instinct with profound respect, but to insist that there is no shred or particle
of truth in any of the metaphysics it has suggested: to palliate this by trying to
bring out the beauty of the world and of life, so far as it exists, and above all
to insist upon preserving the seriousness of the religious attitude and its habit
of asking ultimate questions. And if good lives are the best thing we know,
the loss of religion gives new scope for courage and fortitude, and so may
make good lives better than any that there was room for while religion
a?orded a drug in misfortune.
And often I feel that religion, like the sun, has extinguished the stars of less
brilliancy but not less beauty, which shine upon us out of the darkness of
a godless universe. The splendour of human life, I feel sure, is greater to those
who are not dazzled by the divine radiance; and human comradeship seems
to grow more intimate and more tender from the sense that we are all exiles
on an inhospitable shore.
Yours ever
B. Russell
Churt, Farnham
July 19, 1903
Dear Goldie
Many thanks for sending me the three articles on Religion: they strike me
as exceedingly good, and as saying things that much need saying. All your
eloquent passages seem to me very successful; and the parable at the end I like
quite immensely. I enclose a few remarks on some quite tiny points that
struck me in reading – mostly verbal points.
The attack on Ecclesiasticism is, I think, much needed; you if anything
underestimate, I should say, the danger of Ecclesiasticism in this country.
Whenever I happen to meet Beatrice Creighton I feel the danger profoundly;
and she illustrates one of the worst points from a practical point of view,
that even when a man belonging to an ecclesiastical system happens to be
broad-minded and liberal himself, he takes care to avoid such a state of mind
in others whom he can in?uence.
Why should you suppose I think it foolish to wish to see the people one is
the autobiography of bertrand russell 180fond of? What else is there to make life tolerable? We stand on the shore of an
ocean, crying to the night and the emptiness; sometimes a voice answers out
of the darkness. But it is a voice of one drowning; and in a moment the
silence returns. The world seems to me quite dreadful; the unhappiness of
most people is very great, and I often wonder how they all endure it. To know
people well is to know their tragedy: it is usually the central thing about
which their lives are built. And I suppose if they did not live most of the time
in the things of the moment, they would not be able to go on.
Yours ever
B. Russell
Ivy Lodge
Tilford, Farnham
July 20, 1904
Dear Goldie
Yes, I think you would do well to republish your articles on Religion in a
book. It is hard to say what one gathers from them in a constructive way, yet
there certainly is something. I think it is chie?y, in the end, that one becomes
persuaded of the truth of the passage you quote from Maeterlinck, i.e. that
the emotion with which we contemplate the world may be religious, even if
we have no de?nite theological beliefs. (Note that if Maeterlinck were not in
French, he would be saying the same as In Memoriam, ‘there lives more faith,
etc.’ This remark is linguistic.) You are likely to convince a certain number
