of people that the absence of a creed is no reason for not thinking in a
religious way; and this is useful both to the person who insists on a creed in
order to save his religious life, and to the person who ceases to think seriously
because he has lost his creed.
Schiller, in his article, struck me as a pathetic fool, who had seized on
Pragmatism as the drowning man’s straw. I agree with you wholly that
Philosophy cannot give religion, or indeed anything of more than intellectual
interest. It seems to me increasingly that what gives one the beliefs by which
one lives is of the nature of experience: it is a sudden realisation, or perhaps a
gradual one, of ethical values which one had formerly doubted or taken on
trust; and this realisation seems to be caused, as a rule, by a situation contain-
ing the things one realises to be good or bad. But although I do not think
philosophy itself will give anything of human interest, I think a philosophical
training enables one to get richer experiences, and to make more use of those
that one does get. And I do not altogether wish mankind to become too
?rmly persuaded that there is no road from philosophy to religion, because
I think the endeavour to ?nd one is very useful, if only it does not destroy
candour.
What is valuable in Tolstoi, to my mind, is his power of right ethical
‘principia mathematica’ 181judgments, and his perception of concrete facts; his theorisings are of course
worthless. It is the greatest misfortune to the human race that he has so little
power of reasoning.
I have never read Lady Welby’s writings, but she sent me some remarks
on my book, from which I judged that she is interested in a good many
questions that interest me. I doubt very much, all the same, how much she
understood my book. I know too little of her to know whether I should
understand her or not.
I think Shaw, on the whole, is more bounder than genius; and though of
course I admit him to be ‘forcible’, I don’t admit him to be ‘moral’. I think
envy plays a part in his philosophy in this sense, that if he allowed himself to
admit the goodness of things which he lacks and others possess, he would
feel such intolerable envy that he would ?nd life unendurable. Also he hates
self-control, and makes up theories with a view to proving that self-control
is pernicious. I couldn’t get on with Man and Superman: it disgusted me.
I don’t think he is a soul in Hell dancing on red-hot iron. I think his Hell is
merely diseased vanity and a morbid fear of being laughed at.
Berenson is here. I shall be very curious to see what you say on Music. I
have never made up my mind whether, if I were founding the Republic, I
should admit Wagner or even Beethoven; but not because I do not like them.
I am working hard at Vol. II.
8
When it goes well, it is an intense delight,
when I get stuck, it is equally intense torture.
Yours always
Bertrand Russell
Ivy Lodge
Tilford, Farnham
Sep. 22, 1904
Dear Goldie
Thanks for sending me the enclosed, which I have read with interest.
I think you state your position clearly and very well. It is not a position that
I can myself agree with. I agree that ‘faith in some form or other seems to be
an almost necessary condition, if not of life, yet of the most fruitful and noble
life’. But I do not agree that faith ‘can be legitimate so long as it occupies a
region not yet conquered by knowledge’. You admit that it is wrong to say:
‘I believe, though truth testify against me.’ I should go further, and hold it is
wrong to say: ‘I believe, though truth do not testify in my favour.’ To my
mind, truthfulness demands as imperatively that we should doubt what is
doubtful as that we should disbelieve what is false. But here and in all argu-
ments about beliefs for which there is no evidence, it is necessary to dis-
tinguish propositions which may be fairly allowed to be self-evident, and
which therefore a?ord the basis of indirect evidence, from such as ought to
the autobiography of bertrand russell 182have proofs if they are to be accepted. This is a di?cult business, and prob-
ably can’t be done exactly. As for faith, I hold (a) that there are certain
propositions, an honest belief in which, apart from the badness of believing
what is false, greatly improves the believer, (b) that many of these very
propositions are false. But I think that faith has a legitimate sphere in the
realm of ethical judgments, since these are of the sort that ought to be self-
evident, and ought not to require proof. For practice, it seems to me that a
very high degree of the utility of faith can be got by believing passionately in
the goodness of certain things which are good, and which, in a greater or less
degree, our actions are capable of creating. I admit that the love of God, if
there were a God, would make it possible for human beings to be better than
is possible in a Godless world. But I think the ethical faith which is warranted
yields most of what is necessary to the highest life conceivable, and all that is
necessary to the highest life that is possible. Like every religion, it contains
ethical judgments and judgments of fact, the latter asserting that our actions
make a di?erence, though perhaps a small one, to the ethical value of the
universe. I ?nd this enough faith to live by, and I consider it warranted by
knowledge; but anything more seems to me more or less untruthful, though
not demonstrably untrue.
Let me know what you would reply. Address here, though I shall be away.
I am going tomorrow to Brittany with Theodore for a fortnight. I hope your
sciatica is better.
Yours ever
B. Russell
I Tatti,
Settignano, Florence
March 22, 1903
Dear Bertie
I have read your essay three times, and liked it better and better. Perhaps the
most ?attering appreciation to be given of it is that the whole is neither out of
tune with nor unworthy of the two splendid passages you wrote here – I see
no objection to this essay form. I have no wish of my own with regard to the
shape your writing is to take. I am eager that you shall express yourself
sooner or later, and meanwhile you must write and write until you begin to
feel that you are saying what you want to say, in the way that you wish others
to understand it.
The really great event of the last few weeks has been Gilbert Murray. I fear
I should fall into school-girlishness if I ventured to tell you how much I liked
him. You will judge when I say that no woman in my earlier years made me
talk more about myself than he has now. Conversation spread before us like
an in?nite thing, or rather like something opening out higher and greater
‘principia mathematica’ 183with every talk. I found him so gentle, so sweetly reasonable – almost the
ideal companion. Even I could forgive his liking Dickens, and Tennyson. – He
has been responsible for the delay of this scrawl, for he absorbed my energies.
What little was left went to my proofs. Happily they are nearly done.
I am so glad that Alys is coming out. It is very good of her. I shall enjoy her
visit, and be much the better for it. Dickinson will I fear su?er from the
contrast with Murray.
I am in the middle of the Gespr?che mit Goethe all interesting. – What have you
done with your paper on mathematics?
Yours ever
B. B. (Berenson)
Grayshott
Haslemere, Surrey
Ja. 10, 1904
My dearest Bertie
I was so very, very sorry to hear that you were not at Dora’s
9
funeral. I felt
quite sure you would be present and can only think that something very
de?nite must have prevented you. – I know you may feel that this last token of
respect means little and is of no avail – but I am quite sure after all she did for
you in old days and all the love she gave you that her sister and friends will
have felt pained at your absence – if you could have gone. – Many thanks to
Alys for her letter and the little Memorial Book she forwarded – I conclude
you have one. – Perhaps you have never heard it at the grave of one you loved –
but the Burial Service is about the most impressive and solemn – and
especially with music is sometimes a real help in hours of awful sorrow in
lifting one up above and beyond it. – I have had a kind letter from Dora’s
sister to whom I wrote as I feel most deeply for her – it is a terrible loss – she
is alone and had hoped some day Dora would live with her. – I hope you
wrote to her.
Miss Sedg?eld10
is probably going on Tuesday to Highgate for a week and
very much hopes to be at your lecture next Friday. – Perhaps you will see her
but anyhow please ask Alys if she will look out for her. She has written for
tickets. She asks me to tell you that she particularly hopes you are going to
make it comprehensible to the feeblest intelligence – no angles and squares
and triangles no metaphysics or mathematics to be admitted!
Thank Alys very much for the enclosures which I was delighted to see they
are very interesting and I should like some to send to a few who might be
interested. But I don’t like the sentence about Retaliation. The word alone is
distasteful and I have just looked it out in Johnson – To ‘retaliate’ (even when
successful so-called) is not a Tolstoyan or better a Christian maxim. – I hope
your lectures will contain some sentiment and some ideals! – even from the
the autobiography of bertrand russell 184low point of view of success they will be more e?ective if they do! – How
I wish I could come and hear you – I will read you in the Edinburgh but it
would be more interesting to hear and I never have heard you or Alys once!
With much love to you both and best wishes for your work in the good
cause,
11
Your loving
Auntie
Ivy Lodge
Tilford, Farnham
May 17, 1904
My dearest Bertie
I hope thee will not mind my writing thee a real letter on thy birthday. I try
very hard always to keep on the surface, as thee wishes, but I am sure thee
will remember how some feelings long for expression.
I only want to tell thee again how very much I love thee, and how glad I am
of thy existence. When I could share thy life and think myself of use to thee, it
was the greatest happiness anyone has ever known. I am thankful for the
memory of it, and thankful that I can still be near thee and watch thy devel-
opment. When thee is well and happy and doing good work, I feel quite
contented, and only wish that I were a better person and able to do more
work and be more worthy of thee. I never wake in the night or think of thee
in the daytime without wishing for blessings on my darling, and I shall
always love thee, and I hope it will grow more and more unsel?sh.
Thine ever devotedly
Alys
Cambo
Northumberland
(July, 1904)
Dear Bertie
I want to tell you how very ?ne the last part of your article is. If I could
now and then write like that I should feel more certainly justi?ed than I do in
adopting writing as a business.
When I get south again at the beginning of August I should much like to
talk to you. I have much to ask you now. Tolstoi’s letter in Times has set me
thinking very uncomfortably – or feeling rather. It ?lls me with (i) a new sense
of doubt and responsibility as to my own manner of life (ii) as to this of war.
I feel as if we were all living in the City of Destruction but I am not certain as
to whether I ought to ?ee – or whither.
It may all come to nothing de?nite, but it ought at least to leave a di?erent
spirit.
‘principia mathematica’ 185I have for long been too happy and contented with everything including
my work. Then the intense moral superiority of Tolstoi’s recusant conscripts
knocks all the breath out of one’s fatuous Whig bladder of self contentment.
1. In ? a sheet do you agree with Tolstoi about war?
2. Where will you be in August?
Yours
George Trevelyan
Cambo
Northumberland
July 17, 1904
Dear Bertie
I am deeply grateful to you for having written me so long and carefully
considered a letter. But it was not a waste of time. I am deeply interested in it
and I think I agree with it altogether.
On the other hand I hold that though you are right in supposing the
preparation of war to be a necessary function of modern states, in the spirit
and under the restrictions you name, – still one of the principal means by
which war will eventually be abolished is the passive resistance of conscripts
in the conscription nations (to whose number we may be joined if things go
badly). It will take hundreds of years to abolish war, and there will be a ‘?ery
roll of martyrdom’, opening with these recusant convicts of Tolstoi’s. It is
these people, who will become an ever increasing number all over Europe,
who will ?nally shame the peoples of Europe into viewing war and inter-
national hatred as you do, instead of viewing it as they do now. Great changes
are generally e?ected in this way, but by a double process – gradual change in
the general sentiment and practice, led and really inspired by the extreme
opinion and action of people condemned by the mass of mankind, whom
nevertheless they a?ect.
Three cheers for Tolstoi’s letter all the same. Also I think that any proposal
to introduce conscription into England must be resisted on this ground
(among others) that govt. has not the right to coerce a person’s conscience
into ?ghting or training for war if he thinks it wrong.
I think I also agree with you as to the duty of living and working in the
City of Destruction, rather than ?eeing from it. But a duty that is also a
pleasure, though it is none the less still a duty, brings dangers in the course of
its performance. It is very di?cult, in retaining the bulk of one’s property and
leisure at the disposal of one’s own will, to live in the spirit of this maxim:
‘One has only a right to that amount of property which will conduce most to
the welfare of others in the long run.’
I enclose a letter and circular. Will you join? I have done so, and I think
we are probably going to elect Goldie Dickinson who expressed a willingness
the autobiography of bertrand russell 186to join. There will certainly be perfectly free discussion and the people
will be worth getting to know. There is no obligation, as of reading
papers, incumbent on any member. I think the various points of view of the
really religious who are also really free seekers after truth (a meagre band) is
worth while our getting to know. They have expressed great hopes that you
will join.
Yours ever
George Trevelyan
8 Cheyne Gardens
Tuesday
Oct. 11, ’04
My dear Russell
It did me much good to see you again. I had a tale of woe and desperation
to pour out – vague enough and yet not enough so it seemed while I was
revolving it this morning; but when I had been with you a little while I did
not feel – well, magni?cently wretched enough to use desperate language. I
was reminded of so many things I had well worth having. And my trouble
seemed nothing that rational fortitude and very ordinary precepts properly
obeyed could not surmount.
I look to you to help me more than anybody else just now. I feel that all
those re?nements which you suspect often are half weaknesses and I too,
help me. It is everything to me to feel that you have no cut and dried rules of
what one man ought and ought not to say to another, yet I know how you
hate a spiritual indelicacy.
Do not answer this letter unless you want to or unless you have anything
you want to say. We can talk of so many things right to the bottom which is
the blessing of blessings.
I want to stop in London for a fortnight or so and get some work done.
Then I shall be better able to tell you how it is with [sic]. I must begin to hope
a little before I can talk about my despair.
Your a?ectionate
Desmond MacCarthy
41 Grosvenor Road
Westminster Embankment
Oct. 16, 1904
My dear Bertie
It was kind of you to write to me your opinion of L. H. [Leonard
Hobhouse] pamphlet and I am glad that it coincides so exactly with my
own. I quite agree with you in thinking that the fact that a ‘mood’ (such,
for instance, as the instinctive faith in a ‘Law of Righteousness’, and my
‘principia mathematica’ 187instinctive faith in prayer) is felt to be ‘compelling and recurrent’ has no
relevance, as Proof of its correspondence ‘with our order of things’.
I make an absolute distinction between the realm of proof (Knowledge of
Processes) and the realm of aspiration or Faith – (the choice of Purposes.) All
I ask for this latter World, is tolerance – a ‘Let live’ policy. In my interpret-
ation of this ‘Let live’ policy, I should probably di?er with you and L. H. –
since I would permit each local community to teach its particular form of
‘aspiration’ or ‘Faith’ out of common funds. I should even myself desire this
for my own children – since I have found that my own existence would have
been more degraded without it – and as I ‘desire’ what we call nobility of
Purpose, I wish for the means to bring it about. I know no other way of
discovering these means but actual experience or experiment, and so far my
own experience and experiment leads me to the working Hypothesis of
persistent Prayer. I do not in the least wish to force this practice on other
people and should be equally glad to pay for a school in which the experiment
of complete secularisation (viz. nothing but the knowledge of Processes) was
tried or for an Anglican or Catholic or Christian Science Establishment. All I
desire is that each section or locality should, as far as possible, be free to teach
its own kind of aspirations or absence of Aspirations.
Can you and Alys come to lunch on Thursday 10th and meet Mr Balfour?
I am taking him to Bernard Shaw’s play. Could you not take tickets for that
afternoon? It will be well for you to know Mr Balfour – in case of Regius
Professorships and the like!
Ever
B. Webb
Private Rozeldene, Grayshott
Haslemere, Surrey
March 20, 1905
My dearest Bertie
I am only writing today on one subject which I wish now to tell you
about. – I have had and kept carefully ever since his death, your Grandfather’s
gold watch and chain – I need not tell you how very very precious it is to me as
of course I so well remember his always wearing it.
But I should like very much now to give it to you – only with one condi-
tion that you will leave it to Arthur, – or failing Arthur to Johnny – as I am
anxious it should remain a Russell possession. I do not remember whether
you have and wear now any watch which has any past association – if so of
course do not hesitate to tell me and I will keep this, for Arthur later on. But if
not you could of course give (or keep if you prefer) your present watch
the autobiography of bertrand russell 188away – as I should like to feel you will wear and use this one – not put it
away. – However this you will tell me about.
Dear dear Bertie I should like to feel that you will always try to be worthy –
you will try I know – of being his grandson for he was indeed one of the
very best men the world has known – courageous – gentle – true – and with
a most beautiful childlike simplicity and straightforwardness of nature
which is most rare – I like to think that you remember him – and that his last
words to you ‘Good little boy’, spoken from his deathbed with loving gentle-
ness, – can remain with you as an inspiration to goodness through life; –
but of course you cannot remember and cannot know all that he was. – But if
you will have it I should like you to wear and treasure this watch in memory
of him – and of the long ago days in the dear home of our childhood.
12
God bless you.
Your loving
Auntie
I have just had the watch seen to in London – it is in perfect condition. I
could give it you on the 28th. – Thanks for your welcome letter last week.
Vicarage
Kirkby Lonsdale
27 July, 1905
Bertie
Theodore is dead, drowned while bathing alone on Tuesday in a pool in
the Fells, stunned as I have no doubt by striking his head in taking a header
and then drowned.
I shall be back in London on Monday. Let me see you some time soon.
Crompton
(Oct. 31?, ’05)
Dear Bertie
I enclose photo which I trust will do.
I have some more of Theo which I want to shew you. When will you come
for a night?
I have failed with—.
13
She says she thought she could have done anything
for me but resolutely declines to marry me so the matter is at an end.
Harry and I are going to Grantchester next Saturday. I haven’t managed a
visit to Bedales yet.
I have prepared your will but think I will keep it till I see you and can go
thro’ it with you.
The loss of Theodore seems still a mere phantasy and the strange mixture
of dream and waking thoughts and recollection and fact leave me in
‘principia mathematica’ 189bewilderment but slowly the consciousness of a maimed existence remaining
for me makes itself felt, as of a body that has lost its limbs and strength and
has to go on with made-up supports and medical regimen and resignation to
the loss of possibilities of achievement and hopes of sunny days.
I cling to you with all my heart and bless you for loving and helping me.
Crompton
Stocks Cottage
Tring
23rd May, 1907
Dear Bertie
So now you have ‘fought a contested election’, which Teufelsdr?ck puts
with the state of being in love, as being the second great experience of human
life. I am the greater coward that I have never done the same, and probably
never shall. I don’t suppose a pair of more oddly contrasted candidates will be
in the ?eld again for another 100 years, as you and Chaplin.
What a sporting cove you are! Next time the Austrians conquer Italy you
and I will go in a couple of red shirts, together, and get comfortably killed
in an Alpine pass. I hardly thought you were such an adventurer, and had
so much of the ?ne old Adam in you, till I came home (like old mother
Hubbard) and found you conducting an election!!
I am very grateful to you for the article in the Edinburgh.
14
It did the book a
lot of good, and helped to pull up the sale, which began badly and is now
doing well. It was, I gather from Elliot, a disappointment to you not to be able
to do it at more leisure, and I want to tell you that I appreciate this sacri?ce to
friendship, and that it was a real service to me to have the review out in April.
I was very much interested in several things you said, especially the sen-
tence at the top of p. 507 about the special function of the Revolutionaries.
I did not guess who had written it till Alys told us, tho’ I might have guessed
it from your favourite story of Jowett’s remark on Mazzini.
I hope you are both back in the academic pheasant preserve and that the
quiet of Oxford is pleasant after such turmoil.
Yours fraternally
George Trevy
67 Belsize Park Gardens
Hampstead, N.W.
23 October, 1907
Dear Russell
I have just read your article on Mathematics (in proof) and can’t resist
writing to say how much I was carried away by it. Really it’s magni?cent –
one’s carried upwards into sublime heights – perhaps the sublimest of all!
the autobiography of bertrand russell 190Your statement of the great thing about it seems to me absolutely clear and
absolutely convincing; it gives one a new conception of the glories of the
human mind. The simile of the Italian Castle struck me as particularly ?ne,
and the simplicity of the expression added tremendously to the e?ect. What
scoundrels the Independent editors were!
15
And what fools!
I could go on writing for pages – such is my excitement and enthusiasm.
