The white pillars of the door,
And he forced and forced and forced
Till down the golden hinges tore:
And along the pavement sweet,
Set with pearls and rubies bright,
All his shining length he drew, –
Till upon the altar white
Vomited his poison out
On the bread and on the wine.
So I turned into a sty,
And laid me down among the swine.8
THE FIRST WAR
The period from 1910 to 1914 was a time of transition. My life before 1910
and my life after 1914 were as sharply separated as Faust’s life before and
after he met Mephistopheles. I underwent a process of rejuvenation, inaugur-
ated by Ottoline Morrell and continued by the War. It may seem curious that
the War should rejuvenate anybody, but in fact it shook me out of my preju-
dices and made me think afresh on a number of fundamental questions. It
also provided me with a new kind of activity, for which I did not feel the
staleness that beset me whenever I tried to return to mathematical logic. I
have therefore got into the habit of thinking of myself as a non-supernatural
Faust for whom Mephistopheles was represented by the Great War.
During the hot days at the end of July, I was at Cambridge, discussing the
situation with all and sundry. I found it impossible to believe that Europe
would be so mad as to plunge into war, but I was persuaded that, if there was
war, England would be involved. I felt strongly that England ought to remain
neutral, and I collected the signatures of a large number of professors and
Fellows to a statement which appeared in the Manchester Guardian to that e?ect.
The day War was declared, almost all of them changed their minds. Looking
back, it seems extraordinary that one did not realise more clearly what was
coming. On Sunday, August 2nd, as mentioned in the earlier volume of this
autobiography, I met Keynes hurrying across the Great Court of Trinity to
borrow his brother-in-law’s motor-bicycle to go up to London.
1
I presently
discovered that the Government had sent for him to give them ?nancial
advice. This made me realise the imminence of our participation in the War.
On the Monday morning I decided to go to London. I lunched with the
Morrells at Bedford Square, and found Ottoline entirely of my way of think-
ing. She agreed with Philip’s determination to make a paci?st speech in theHouse. I went down to the House in the hope of hearing Sir Edward Grey’s
famous statement, but the crowd was too great, and I failed to get in. I
learned, however, that Philip had duly made his speech. I spent the evening
walking round the streets, especially in the neighbourhood of Trafalgar
Square, noticing cheering crowds, and making myself sensitive to the emo-
tions of passers-by. 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 paci?sts contended, that wars were
forced upon a reluctant population by despotic and Machiavellian govern-
ments. I had noticed during previous years how carefully Sir Edward Grey
lied in order to prevent the public from knowing the methods by which he
was committing us to the support of France in the event of war. I na?vely
imagined that when the public discovered how he had lied to them, they
would be annoyed; instead of which, they were grateful to him for having
spared them the moral responsibility.
On the morning of August 4th, I walked with Ottoline up and down the
empty streets behind the British Museum, where now there are University
buildings. We discussed the future in gloomy terms. 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. On the evening of the 4th,
after quarrelling with George Trevelyan along the whole length of the Strand,
I attended the last meeting of a neutrality committee of which Graham Wallas
was chairman. During the meeting there was a loud clap of thunder, which
all the older members of the committee took to be a German bomb. This
dissipated their last lingering feeling in favour of neutrality. The ?rst 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 o? their feet by
Belgium. As I had long known from a military friend at the Sta? College that
Belgium would inevitably be involved, I had not supposed important publi-
cists so frivolous as to be ignorant on this vital matter. The Nation newspaper
used to have a sta? luncheon every Tuesday, and I attended the luncheon
on August 4th. I found Massingham, the editor, vehemently opposed to our
participation in the war. He welcomed enthusiastically my o?er to write for
his newspaper in that sense. Next day I got a letter from him, beginning:
‘Today is not yesterday . . .’, and stating that his opinion had completely
changed. Nevertheless, he printed a long letter from me protesting against
the War in his next issue.
2
What changed his opinion I do not know. I know
that one of Asquith’s daughters saw him descending the steps of the German
Embassy late on the afternoon of August 4th, and I have some suspicion that
he was consequently warned of the unwisdom of a lack of patriotism in such
a crisis. For the ?rst year or so of the War he remained patriotic, but as time
the autobiography of bertrand russell 226went on he began to forget that he had ever been so. A few paci?st ??s,
together with two or three sympathisers, began to have meetings at the
Morrells’ house in Bedford Square. I used to attend these meetings, which
gave rise to the Union of Democratic Control. I was interested to observe that
many of the paci?st politicians were more concerned with the question
which of them should lead the anti-war movement than with the actual work
against the War. Nevertheless, they were all there was to work with, and I did
my best to think well of them.
Meanwhile, I was living at the highest possible emotional tension.
Although I did not foresee anything like the full disaster of the War, I foresaw
a great deal more than most people did. The prospect ?lled me with horror,
but what ?lled 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. At that time I was wholly ignorant
of psycho-analysis, but I arrived for myself at a view of human passions not
unlike that of the psycho-analysts. I arrived at this view in an endeavour to
understand popular feeling about the War. I had supposed until that time that
it was quite common for parents to love their children, but the War per-
suaded me that it is a rare exception. I had supposed that most people liked
money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked
destruction even better. I had supposed that intellectuals frequently loved
truth, but I found here again that not ten per cent of them prefer truth to
popularity. Gilbert Murray, who had been a close friend of mine since 1902,
was a pro-Boer when I was not. I therefore naturally expected that he
would again be on the side of peace; yet he went out of his way to write
about the wickedness of the Germans, and the superhuman virtue of Sir
Edward Grey. I became ?lled with despairing tenderness towards the young
men who were to be slaughtered, and with rage against all the statesmen of
Europe. For several weeks I felt that if I should happen to meet Asquith or
Grey I should be unable to refrain from murder. Gradually, however, these
personal feelings disappeared. They were swallowed up by the magnitude of
the tragedy, and by the realisation of the popular forces which the statesmen
merely let loose.
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 di?cult 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 indi?erent, 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
the first war 227involved. 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 o? their feet should show that they stood ?rm. 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. Its
inhabitants began to seem like hallucinations, and I would wonder whether
the world in which I thought I had lived was a mere product of my own
febrile nightmares.
3
Such moods, however, were brief, and were put an end
to by the need of work.
Throughout the earlier phases of the War, Ottoline was a very great help
and strength to me. But for her, I should have been at ?rst completely solitary,
but she never wavered either in her hatred of war, or in her refusal to accept
the myths and falsehoods with which the world was inundated.
I found a minor degree of comfort in the conversation of Santayana, who
was at Cambridge at that time. He was a neutral, and in any case he had not
enough respect for the human race to care whether it destroyed itself or not.
His calm, philosophical detachment, though I had no wish to imitate it, was
soothing to me. Just before the Battle of the Marne, when it looked as if the
Germans must soon take Paris, he remarked in a dreamy tone of voice: ‘I
think I must go over to Paris. My winter underclothes are there, and I should
not like the Germans to get them. I have also another, though less important,
reason, which is that I have there a manuscript of a book on which I have
been working for the last ten years, but I do not care so much about that as
about the underclothes.’ He did not, however, go to Paris, because the Battle
of the Marne saved him the trouble. Instead, he remarked to me one day: ‘I
am going to Seville tomorrow because I wish to be in a place where people
do not restrain their passions.’
With the beginning of the October Term, I had to start again lecturing on
mathematical logic, but I felt it a somewhat futile occupation. So I took to
organising a branch of the Union of Democratic Control among the dons, of
whom at Trinity quite a number were at ?rst 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 ?ercer spirit began to prevail. It seemed to
be supposed that I was in some way responsible for this disaster. Of the dons
who had belonged to the Union of Democratic Control, many had by this
time got commissions. Barnes (afterwards Bishop of Birmingham) left to
the autobiography of bertrand russell 228become Master of the Temple. The older dons got more and more hysterical,
and I began to ?nd myself avoided at the high table.
Every Christmas throughout the War I had a ?t 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. At Christmas time in
1914, by Ottoline’s advice, I found a way of making despair not unendurable.
I took to visiting destitute Germans on behalf of a charitable committee to
investigate their circumstances and to relieve their distress if they deserved it.
In the course of this work, I came upon remarkable instances of kindness in
the middle of the fury of war. Not infrequently in the poor neighbourhoods
landladies, themselves poor, had allowed Germans to stay on without paying
any rent, because they knew it was impossible for Germans to ?nd work. This
problem ceased to exist soon afterwards, as the Germans were all interned,
but during the ?rst months of the War their condition was pitiable.
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 paci?st.’ That is to say, he considered any excuse
good enough for homicide. I became great friends with him, and sub-
sequently with his wife, whom he married early in 1915. As they were
desperately poor, I lent them one of the two bedrooms in my ?at, with the
result that I saw a great deal of them.
4
I was fond of them both, and
endeavoured to help them in their troubles until I discovered that their
troubles were what they enjoyed. I held some debentures nominally worth
￡3,000, in an engineering ?rm, which during the War naturally took to
making munitions. I was much puzzled in my conscience as to what to do
with these debentures, and at last I gave them to Eliot. Years afterwards, when
the War was ?nished and he was no longer poor, he gave them back to me.
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 had had no
intention of writing such a book, and it was totally unlike anything I had
previously written, but it came out in a spontaneous manner. In fact I did not
discover what it was all about until I had ?nished it. It has a framework and a
formula, but I only discovered both when I had written all except the ?rst and
last words. In it I suggested a philosophy of politics based upon the belief that
impulse has more e?ect than conscious purpose in moulding men’s lives. 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 cre-
ativeness, I was convinced, should be the principle of reform. I ?rst gave the
book as lectures, and then published it. To my surprise, it had an immediate
the first war 229success. 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. We both imagined that there was something important
to be said about the reform of human relations, and we did not at ?rst realise
that we took diametrically opposite views as to the kind of reform that
was needed. My acquaintance with Lawrence was brief and hectic, lasting
altogether about a year. We were brought together by Ottoline, who admired
us both and made us think that we ought to admire each other. Paci?sm had
produced in me a mood of bitter rebellion, and I found Lawrence equally full
of rebellion. This made us think, at ?rst, that there was a considerable meas-
ure of agreement between us, and it was only gradually that we discovered
that we di?ered from each other more than either di?ered from the Kaiser.
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. Awareness of our di?erences, however, was gradual on
both sides, and at ?rst all went merry as a marriage bell. I invited him to visit
me at Cambridge and introduced him to Keynes and a number of other
people. He hated them all with a passionate hatred and said they were ‘dead,
dead, dead’. For a time I thought he might be right. I liked Lawrence’s ?re, I
liked the energy and passion of his feelings, I liked his belief that something
very fundamental was needed to put the world right. I agreed with him in
thinking that politics could not be divorced from individual psychology. I felt
him to be a man of a certain imaginative genius, and, at ?rst, when I felt
inclined to disagree with him, I thought that perhaps his insight into human
nature was deeper than mine. 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.
I was at this time preparing the course of lectures which was afterwards
published as Principles of Social Reconstruction. He, also, wanted to lecture, and for a
time it seemed possible that there might be some sort of loose collaboration
between us. We exchanged a number of letters, of which mine are lost but his
have been published. In his letters the gradual awareness of the consciousness
of our fundamental disagreements can be traced. I was a ?rm believer in
democracy, whereas he had developed the whole philosophy of Fascism
before the politicians had thought of it. ‘I don’t believe’, he wrote, ‘in demo-
cratic control. I think the working man is ?t to elect governors or overseers
for his immediate circumstances, but for no more. You must utterly revise the
electorate. The working man shall elect superiors for the things that concern
the autobiography of bertrand russell 230him immediately, no more. From the other classes, as they rise, shall be
elected the higher governors. The thing must culminate in one real head, as
every organic thing must – no foolish republic with foolish presidents, but an
elected King, something like Julius Caesar.’ 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. He would go into long tirades about how one
must proclaim ‘the Truth’ to the multitude, and he seemed to have no doubt
that the multitude would listen. I asked him what method he was going to
adopt. 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). Well, I said,
what would you do? At this point he would change the subject.
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. If anybody
overheard the soliloquies, so much the better, but they were designed at most
to produce a little faithful band of disciples who could sit in the deserts of
New Mexico and feel holy. All this was conveyed to me in the language of a
Fascist dictator as what I must preach, the ‘must’ having thirteen underlinings.
His letters grew gradually more hostile. He wrote, ‘What’s the good of
living as you do anyway? I don’t believe your lectures are good. They are
nearly over, aren’t they? What’s the good of sticking in the damned ship and
haranguing the merchant pilgrims in their own language? Why don’t you
drop overboard? Why don’t you clear out of the whole show? One must be
an outlaw these days, not a teacher or preacher.’ This seemed to me mere
rhetoric. I was becoming more of an outlaw than he ever was and I could not
quite see his ground of complaint against me. He phrased his complaint in
di?erent ways at di?erent times. On another occasion he wrote: ‘Do stop
working and writing altogether and become a creature instead of a mechan-
ical instrument. Do clear out of the whole social ship. Do for your very
pride’s sake become a mere nothing, a mole, a creature that feels its way and
doesn’t think. Do for heavens sake be a baby, and not a savant any more. Don’t
do anything more – but for heavens sake begin to be – Start at the very
beginning and be a perfect baby: in the name of courage.
‘Oh, and I want to ask you, when you make your will, do leave me enough
to live on. I want you to live for ever. But I want you to make me in some part
your heir.’
The only di?culty with this programme was that if I adopted it I should
have nothing to leave.
He had a mystical philosophy of ‘blood’ which I disliked. ‘There is’, he
said, ‘another seat of consciousness than the brain and nerves. There is a
the first war 231blood-consciousness which exists in us independently of the ordinary mental
consciousness. One lives, knows and has one’s being in the blood, without
any reference to nerves and brain. This is one half of life belonging to the
darkness. When I take a woman, then the blood-percept is supreme. My
blood-knowing is overwhelming. We should realise that we have a blood-
being, a blood-consciousness, a blood-soul complete and apart from a mental
and nerve consciousness.’ This seemed to me frankly rubbish, and I rejected
it vehemently, though I did not then know that it led straight to Auschwitz.
He always got into a fury if one suggested that anybody could possibly
have kindly feelings towards anybody else, and when I objected to war
because of the su?ering that it causes, he accused me of hypocrisy. ‘It isn’t in
the least true that you, your basic self, want ultimate peace. You are satisfying
in an indirect, false way your lust to jab and strike. Either satisfy it in a direct
and honourable way, saying “I hate you all, liars and swine, and am out to set
upon you”, or stick to mathematics, where you can be true – But to come as
the angel of peace – no, I prefer Tirpitz a thousand times in that role.’
I ?nd it di?cult now to understand the devastating e?ect that this letter
had upon me. I was inclined to believe that he had some insight denied to
me, and when he said that my paci?sm was rooted in blood-lust I supposed
he must be right. For twenty-four hours I thought that I was not ?t to live and
contemplated suicide. But at the end of that time, a healthier reaction set in,
and I decided to have done with such morbidness. When he said that I must
preach his doctrines and not mine I rebelled, and told him to remember that
he was no longer a school-master and I was not his pupil. He had written ‘the
enemy of all mankind you are, full of the lust of enmity. It is not a hatred of
falsehood which inspires you, it is the hatred of people of ?esh and blood, it
is a perverted mental blood-lust. Why don’t you own it? Let us become
strangers again. I think it is better.’ I thought so too. But he found a pleasure
in denouncing me and continued for some months to write letters contain-
ing su?cient friendliness to keep the correspondence alive. In the end, it
faded away without any dramatic termination.
Lawrence, though most people did not realise it, was his wife’s mouth-
piece. He had the eloquence, but she had the ideas. She used to spend part of
every summer in a colony of Austrian Freudians at a time when psycho-
analysis was little known in England. Somehow, she imbibed prematurely the
ideas afterwards developed by Mussolini and Hitler, and these ideas she
transmitted to Lawrence, shall we say, by blood-consciousness. Lawrence was
an essentially timid man who tried to conceal his timidity by bluster. His wife
was not timid, and her denunciations have the character of thunder, not of
bluster. Under her wing he felt comparatively safe. Like Marx, he had a
snobbish pride in having married a German aristocrat, and in Lady Chatterley
he dressed her up marvellously. His thought was a mass of self-deception
the autobiography of bertrand russell 232masquerading as stark realism. His descriptive powers were remarkable, but
his ideas cannot be too soon forgotten.
What at ?rst attracted me to Lawrence was a certain dynamic quality and a
habit of challenging assumptions that one is apt to take for granted. I was
already accustomed to being accused of undue slavery to reason, and I
thought perhaps that he could give me a vivifying dose of unreason. I did in
fact acquire a certain stimulus from him, and I think the book that I wrote in
spite of his blasts of denunciation was better than it would have been if I had
not known him.
But this is not to say that there was anything good in his ideas. I do not
think in retrospect that they had any merit whatever. They were the ideas of a
sensitive would-be despot who got angry with the world because it would
not instantly obey. When he realised that other people existed, he hated
them. But most of the time he lived in a solitary world of his own imaginings,
peopled by phantoms as ?erce as he wished them to be. His excessive
emphasis on sex was due to the fact that in sex alone he was compelled to
admit that he was not the only human being in the universe. But it was so
painful that he conceived of sex relations as a perpetual ?ght in which each is
attempting to destroy the other.
The world between the wars was attracted to madness. Of this attraction
Nazism was the most emphatic expression. Lawrence was a suitable exponent
of this cult of insanity. I am not sure whether the cold inhuman sanity of
Stalin’s Kremlin was any improvement.
5
With the coming of 1916, the War took on a ?ercer form, and the position
of paci?sts at home became more di?cult. My relations with Asquith had
never become unfriendly. He was an admirer of Ottoline’s 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 paci?st 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 conscien-
tious objectors were condemned to death and several of us went on a deputa-
tion to Asquith to get their sentences reduced. Although he was just starting
for Dublin, he listened to us courteously, and took the necessary action. It had
been generally supposed, even by the Government, that conscientious
objectors were not legally liable to the death penalty, but this turned out to be
a mistake, and but for Asquith a number of them would have been shot.
Lloyd George, however, was a tougher proposition. I went once with
Cli?ord Allen (chairman of the No Conscription Fellowship) and Miss
Catherine Marshall, to interview him about the conscientious objectors who
were being kept in prison. The only time that he could see us was at lunch
the first war 233at Walton Heath. I disliked having to receive his hospitality, but it seemed
unavoidable. His manner to us was pleasant and easy, but he o?ered 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.
With the coming of conscription, I gave practically my whole time and
energies to the a?airs of the conscientious objectors. The No Conscription
Fellowship consisted entirely of men of military age, but it accepted women
and older men as associates. After all the original committee had gone to
prison, a substitute committee was formed, of which I became the acting
chairman. There was a great deal of work to do, partly in looking after the
interests of individuals, partly in keeping a watch upon the military authorities
to see that they did not send conscientious objectors to France, for it was only
after they had been sent to France that they became liable to the death penalty.
Then there was a great deal of speaking to be done up and down the country.
I spent three weeks in the mining areas of Wales, speaking sometimes in halls,
sometimes out-of-doors. I never had an interrupted meeting, and always
