Archimedes, to be killed because of absorption in eternal things. And when
once men get away from their rights, from the struggle to take up more room
in the world than is their due, there is such a capacity of greatness in them. All
the loneliness and the pain and the eternal pathetic hope – the power of love
and the appreciation of beauty – the concentration of many ages and spaces
in the mirror of a single mind – these are not things one would wish to
destroy wantonly, for any of the national ambitions that politicians praise.
There is a possibility in human minds of something mysterious as the night-
wind, deep as the sea, calm as the stars, and strong as Death, a mystic con-
templation, the ‘intellectual love of God’. Those who have known it cannot
the autobiography of bertrand russell 302believe in wars any longer, or in any kind of hot struggle. If I could give to
others what has come to me in this way, I could make them too feel the
futility of ?ghting. But I do not know how to communicate it: when I speak,
they stare, applaud, or smile, but do not understand.
To Ottoline Morrell August 8th, 1918
All you write about S.S. [Siegfried Sassoon] is interesting and poignant. I
know so well the indignation he su?ers from – I have lived in it for months,
and on the edge of it for years. I think that one way of getting over it is to
perceive that others might judge oneself in the same way, unjustly, but with
just as good grounds. Those of us who are rich are just like the young women
whose sex ?ourishes on the blood of soldiers. Every motor-tyre is made out
of the blood of negroes under the lash, yet motorists are not all heartless
villains. When we buy wax matches, we buy a painful and lingering death for
those who make them . . . War is only the ?nal ?ower of the capitalist system,
but with an unusual proletariat. S.S. sees war, not peace, from the point of
view of the proletariat. But this is only politics. The fundamental mistake lies
in wrong expectations, leading to cynicism when they are not realised. Con-
ventional morality leads us to expect unsel?shness in decent people. This is
an error. Man is an animal bent on securing food and propagating the species.
One way of succeeding in these objects is to persuade others that one is after
their welfare – but to be really after any welfare but one’s own and one’s
children’s is unnatural. It occurs like sadism and sodomy, but is equally
against nature. A good social system is not to be secured by making people
unsel?sh, but by making their own vital impulses ?t in with other people’s.
This is feasible. Our present system makes self-preservation only possible at
the expense of others. The system is at fault; but it is a weakness to be
disgusted with people because they aim at self-preservation. One’s idealism
needs to be too robust for such weaknesses. It doesn’t do to forget or deny the
animal in man. The God in man will not be visible, as a rule, while the animal
is thwarted. Those who have produced stoic philosophies have all had
enough to eat and drink. The sum total of the matter is that one’s idealism
must be robust and must ?t in with the facts of nature; and that which is
horrible in the actual world is mainly due to a bad system. Spinoza, always, is
right in all these things, to my mind.
11th August, 1918
It is quite true what you say, that you have never expressed yourself – but
who has, that has anything to express? The things one says are all unsuccess-
ful attempts to say something else – something that perhaps by its very nature
cannot be said. I know that I have struggled all my life to say something that I
never shall learn how to say. And it is the same with you. It is so with all who
the first war 303spend their lives in the quest of something elusive, and yet omnipresent, and
at once subtle and in?nite. One seeks it in music, and the sea, and sunsets; at
times I have seemed very near it in crowds when I have been feeling strongly
what they were feeling; one seeks it in love above all. But if one lets oneself
imagine one has found it, some cruel irony is sure to come and show one that
it is not really found. (I have come nearest to expressing myself in the chapter
on Education in Social Reconstruction. But it is a very long way from a really full
self-expression. You are hindered by timidity.)
The outcome is that one is a ghost, ?oating through the world without any
real contact. Even when one feels nearest to other people, something in one
seems obstinately to belong to God and to refuse to enter into any earthly
communion – at least that is how I should express it if I thought there was
a God. It is odd isn’t it? I care passionately for this world, and many things
and people in it, and yet . . . what is it all? There must be something more
important, one feels, though I don’t believe there is. I am haunted – some
ghost, from some extramundane region, seems always trying to tell me some-
thing that I am to repeat to the world, but I cannot understand the message.
But it is from listening to the ghost that one comes to feel oneself a ghost.
I feel I shall ?nd the truth on my deathbed and be surrounded by people too
stupid to understand – fussing about medicines instead of searching for
wisdom. Love and imagination mingled; that seems the main thing so far.
Your B.
27th August, 1918
I have been reading Marsh38
on Rupert [Brooke]. It makes me very sad and
very indignant. It hurts reading of all that young world now swept away –
Rupert and his brother and Keeling and lots of others – in whom one fool-
ishly thought at the time that there was hope for the world – they were full of
life and energy and truth – Rupert himself loved life and the world – his
hatreds were very concrete, resulting from some quite speci?c vanity or
jealousy, but in the main he found the world lovable and interesting. There
was nothing of humbug in him. I feel that after the war-mongers had killed
his body in the Dardanelles they have done their best to kill his spirit
by ——’s lies . . . When will people learn the robustness of truth? I do not
know who my biographer may be, but I should like him to report ‘with what
?ourish his nature will’ something like this: ‘I was not a solemn stained glass
saint, existing only for purposes of edi?cation; I existed from my own centre,
many things that I did were regrettable, I did not respect respectable people,
and when I pretended to do so it was humbug. I lied and practised hypocrisy,
because if I had not I should not have been allowed to do my work; but there
is no need to continue the hypocrisy after my death. I hated hypocrisy and
lies: I loved life and real people, and wished to get rid of the shams that
the autobiography of bertrand russell 304prevent us from loving real people as they really are. I believed in laughter
and spontaneity, and trusted to nature to bring out the genuine good in
people, if once genuineness could come to be tolerated.’ Marsh goes building
up the respectable legend, making the part of youth harder in the future, so
far as lies in his power – I try so hard not to hate, but I do hate respectable
liars and oppressors and corruptors of youth – I hate them with all my soul,
and the war has given them a new lease of power. The young were shaking
them o?, but they have secured themselves by setting the young to kill each
other. But rage is useless; what is wanted is to carry over into the new time
something of the gaiety and civilised outlook and genial expansive love that
was growing when the war came. It is useless to add one’s quota to the sum
of hate – and so I try to forget those whom I cannot but hate when I
remember them.
Friday, 30 Aug. 18
My dearest O
It was a delight seeing you – tho’ you do not seem in very good health – and
those times are di?cult for talking – letters are really more satisfactory – your
letters are the very greatest joy to me – To begin with personal things: I do trust
my friends to do everything possible – no one ever had such kind and devoted
friends – I am wonderfully touched by what all of you have done; the people
I don’t trust are the philosophers (including Whitehead). They are cautious
and constitutionally timid; nine out of ten hate me personally (not without
reason); they consider philosophical research a foolish pursuit, only excusable
when there is money in it. Before the war I fancied that quite a lot of them
thought philosophy important; now I know that most of them resemble
Professors Hanky and Panky in Erewhon Revisited.
I trust G. Murray, on the whole, over this business. If he gets me a post, I
hope it will be not very far from London – not further than Birmingham say. I
don’t the least desire a post except as a way of getting round Geddes: what
I desire is to do original work in philosophy, but apparently no one in
Government circles considers that worth doing. Of course a post will interfere
to some extent with research tho’ it need not interfere very much. I must
have some complete holiday when I ?rst come out of prison. I do not want
residence away from London: I would almost as soon face another term of
imprisonment, for reasons which can’t be explained to G. Murray. But I am
most grateful to him for all the trouble he is taking. I am not worrying in
the least.
How delightful of you to think of Lulworth too. It was the very place I had
been thinking of, because I came upon it in R. Brooke. I was only there once
for a moment on a walking-tour (1912) and have always wanted to go back.
Do stick to the plan – latish October. We can settle exactly when, later. It will
be glorious.
the first war 305I wonder whether you quite get at Brett. I am sure her deafness is the main
cause of all that you regret in her. She wrote a terrible account of what it
means to her the other day in a letter you sent me – I don’t know whether
you read it. If not I will show it you. I am very sorry about Burnley. It is a blow.
There will be no revival of paci?sm; the war will go on till the Germans admit
themselves beaten, which I put end of next year. Then we shall have the
League to Enforce Peace, which will require conscription everywhere. – Much
interested about S.S. and munition factory; all experience may be useful. It
would never occur to me to think of it as an ‘attitude’.
I was sorry to refuse so many books, and also to give you the trouble of
taking so many away. I believe in future I shall be able to send them by Carter
Paterson. My cell is small and I must keep down the number of books. Between
books and earwigs I have hardly had room to turn round.
Please thank Miss Bentinck most warmly for the lovely peaches. I think it
very kind of her to send them when she thinks me so wicked. – I don’t know
how long you are staying at Kirkby Lonsdale – All that region is so associated
in my mind with Theodore’s death.
Oh won’t it be glorious to be able to walk across ?elds and see the horizon
and talk freely and be with friends – It is near enough now to believe it will
come – I am settled into this existence, and fairly placid, but only because it
will end soon. All kinds of delights ?oat before my mind – above all talk, talk,
TALK. I never knew how one can hunger for it – The time here has done me
good, I have read a lot and thought a lot and grown collected, I am bursting
with energy – but I do long for civilisation and civilised talk – And I long for
the SEA and wildness and wind – I hate being all tidy like a book in a library
where no one reads – Prison is horribly like that – Imagine if you knew you
were a delicious book, and some Jew millionaire bought you and bound you
uniform with a lot of others and stuck you up in a shelf behind glass, where
you merely illustrated the completeness of his System – and no anarchist was
allowed to read you – That is what one feels like – but soon now one will be
able to insist on being read. – Goodbye – Much much love – and endless
thanks for your endless kindness. Do stick to Lulworth –
Your B.
P.S. Letter to Brett elsewhere. Please return commonplace books – Wednesday
will do. But I run short of them unless they are returned.
To Dorothy Brett 30.8.18
My dear Brett
Thank you for your letter. It is a kindness writing letters to me when I am
here, as they are the only unhampered contact I can have with other people. I
the autobiography of bertrand russell 306think prison, if it lasted, would be worse than your fate, but as mine is so
brief it is nothing like as bad as what you have to endure. I do realise how
terrible it is. But I believe there are things you could do that would make it
less trying, small things mostly. To begin with a big thing: practise the mental
discipline of not thinking how great a misfortune it is; when your mind
begins to run in that direction, stop it violently by reciting a poem to yourself
or thinking of the multiplication-table or some such plan. For smaller things:
try, as far as possible, not to sit about with people who are having a general
conversation; get in a corner with a tête-à-tête; make yourself interesting in
the ?rst place by being interested in whoever you are talking with, until
things become easy and natural. I suppose you have practised lip-reading?
Take care of your inner attitude to people: let it not be satirical or aloof, set
yourself to try and get inside their skins and feel the passions that move them
and the seriousness of the things that matter to them. Don’t judge people
morally: however just one’s judgment, that is a barren attitude. Most people
have a key, fairly simple; if you ?nd it, you can unlock their hearts. Your
deafness need not prevent this, if you make a point of tête-à-tête. It has always
seemed to me fearfully trying for you at Garsington to spend so much time in
the middle of talk and laughter that you cannot understand. Don’t do more of
that than you must. You can be ‘included in human life’. But it wants e?ort,
and it wants that you should give something that people will value. Though
your deafness may make that harder, it doesn’t make it impossible. Please
don’t think all this very impertinent. I have only written it because I can’t
bear to think how you su?er.
Poor Mr Green! Tell him to consult me when he wants to make a conquest;
I will give him sage advice, which he evidently needs. – Your picture of the
3 women sounds most exciting. I do hope it will be glorious. I hope I shall
see you when you return from destroying your fellow-creatures in Scotland –
I sympathise with the Chinese philosopher who ?shed without bait, because
he liked ?shing but did not like catching ?sh. When the Emperor found him
so employed, he made him Prime Minister. But I fear that won’t happen
to me.
Yrs.
B.R.
The lady to whom the above letter is addressed was a daughter of Lord Esher but was known to all
her friends by her family name of Brett. At the time when I wrote the above letter, she was
spending most of her time at Garsington with the Morrells. She went later to New Mexico in the
wake of D. H. Lawrence.
the first war 307To Ottoline Morrell 31/8/18
(For any one whom it may interest)
There never was such a place as prison for crowding images – one after
another they come upon me – early morning in the Alps, with the smell of
aromatic pines and high pastures glistening with dew – the lake of Garda as
one ?rst sees it coming down out of the mountains, just a glimpse far below,
dancing and gleaming in the sunlight like the eyes of a laughing, mad,
Spanish gypsy – thunderstorm in the Mediterranean, with a dark violet sea,
and the mountains of Corsica in sunshine far beyond – the Scilly Isles in the
setting sun, enchanted and unreal, so that you think they must have vanished
before you can reach them, looking like the Islands of the Blest, not to be
achieved during this mortal life – the smell of the bog myrtle in Skye –
memories of sunsets long ago, all the way back into childhood – I can hear
now as if it were yesterday the street-cry of a man in Paris selling ‘artichaux
verts et beaux’ 24 years ago almost to a day. Quite from childhood I remember
a certain row of larches after rain, with a raindrop at the end of every twig –
and I can hear the wind in the tree-tops in midnight woods on summer
nights – everything free or beautiful comes into my thoughts sooner or later.
What is the use of shutting up the body, seeing that the mind remains free?
And outside my own life, I have lived, while I have been here, in Brazil and
China and Tibet, in the French Revolution, in the souls of animals and even of
the lowest animals. In such adventures I have forgotten the prison in which
the world is keeping itself at the moment: I am free, and the world shall be.
September 4th, 1918
Dearest O
It is dreadful the killing of the people who might have made a better future.
As for me: I am sure it is a ‘sure ?rm growth’. It is two quite distinct things:
some quite good technical ideas, which have come simply because they were
due, like cuckoos in April; and a way of feeling towards life and the world,
which I have been groping after especially since the war started, but also
since a certain moment in a churchyard near Broughton, when you told me
to make a place for wildness in my morality, and I asked you what you
meant, and you explained. It has been very di?cult: my instinctive morality
was so much that of self-repression. I used to be afraid of myself and the
darker side of my instincts; now I am not. You began that, and the war
completed it.
the autobiography of bertrand russell 3089
RUSSIA
The ending of the war enabled me to avoid several unpleasant things which
would otherwise have happened to me. The military age was raised in 1918,
and for the ?rst time I became liable to military service, which I should of
course have had to refuse. They called me up for medical examination, but
the Government with its utmost e?orts was unable to ?nd out where I was,
having forgotten that it had put me in prison. If the War had continued I
should very soon have found myself in prison again as a conscientious
objector. From a ?nancial point of view also the ending of the War was very
advantageous to me. While I was writing Principia Mathematica I felt justi?ed in
living on inherited money, though I did not feel justi?ed in keeping an
additional sum of capital that I inherited from my grandmother. I gave away
this sum in its entirety, some to the University of Cambridge, some to
Newnham College, and the rest to various educational objects. After parting
with the debentures that I gave to Eliot, I was left with only about ￡100 a year
of unearned money, which I could not get rid of as it was in my marriage
settlement. This did not seem to matter, as I had become capable of earning
money by my books. In prison, however, while I was allowed to write about
mathematics, I was not allowed to write the sort of book by which I could
make money. I should therefore have been nearly penniless when I came out
but for the fact that Sanger and some other friends got up a philosophical
lectureship for me in London. With the end of the War I was again able to
earn money by writing, and I have never since been in serious ?nancial
di?culties except at times in America.
The ending of the War made a di?erence in my relations with Colette.
During the War we had many things to do in common, and we shared all the
very powerful emotions connected with the War. After the War thingsbecame more di?cult and more strained. From time to time we would part
for ever, but repeatedly these partings proved unexpectedly temporary.
During the three summer months of 1919, Littlewood (the mathematician)
and I rented a farmhouse on a hill about a mile outside Lulworth. There were
a good many rooms in this farmhouse, and we had a series of visitors
throughout the whole summer. The place was extraordinarily beautiful, with
wide views along the coast. The bathing was good, and there were places
where Littlewood could exhibit his prowess as a climber, an art in which he
was very expert. Meantime I had been becoming interested in my second
wife. I met her ?rst in 1916 through her friend Dorothy Wrinch. Both were
at Girton, and Dorothy Wrinch was a pupil of mine. She arranged in the
summer of 1916 a two days’ walk with herself, Dora Black, Jean Nicod, and
me. Jean Nicod was a young French philosopher, also a pupil of mine, who
had escaped the War through being consumptive. (He died of phthisis in
1924.) He was one of the most delightful people that I have ever known, at
once very gentle and immensely clever. He had a type of whimsical humour
that delighted me. Once I was saying to him that people who learned
philosophy should be trying to understand the world, and not only, as in
universities, the systems of previous philosophers. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but the
systems are so much more interesting than the world.’ Dora Black, whom I
had not seen before, interested me at once. We spent the evening at Shere,
and to beguile the time after dinner, I started by asking everybody what they
most desired in life. I cannot remember what Dorothy and Nicod said; I said
that I should like to disappear like the man in Arnold Bennett’s Buried Alive,
provided I could be sure of discovering a widow in Putney as he did. Dora,
to my surprise, said that she wanted to marry and have children. Until that
moment I had supposed that no clever young woman would confess to so
simple a desire, and I concluded that she must possess exceptional sincerity.
Unlike the rest of us she was not, at that time, a thorough-going objector
to the War.
In June 1919, at Dorothy Wrinch’s suggestion, I invited her to come to tea
with Allen and me at the ?at that I shared with him in Battersea. She came,
and we embarked on a heated argument as to the rights of fathers. She said
that, for her part, if she had children she would consider them entirely her
own, and would not be disposed to recognise the father’s rights. I replied
hotly: ‘Well, whoever I have children by, it won’t be you!’ As a result of this
argument, I dined with her next evening, and at the end of the evening we
arranged that she should come to Lulworth for a long visit. I had on that day
had a more than usually de?nitive parting from Colette, and I did not sup-
pose that I should ever see her again. However, the day after Littlewood and I
got to Lulworth I had a telegram from Colette to say that she was on her way
down in a hired car, as there was no train for several hours. Fortunately, Dora
the autobiography of bertrand russell 310was not due for some days, but throughout the summer I had di?culties and
awkwardnesses in preventing their times from overlapping.
I wrote the above passage in 1931, and in 1949 I showed it to Colette.
Colette wrote to me, enclosing two letters that I had written to her in 1919,
which showed me how much I had forgotten. After reading them I remem-
bered that throughout the time at Lulworth my feelings underwent violent
?uctuations, caused by ?uctuations in Colette’s behaviour. She had three
distinct moods: one of ardent devotion, one of resigned determination to
part for ever, and one of mild indi?erence. Each of these produced its own
echo in me, but the letters that she enclosed showed me that the echo had
been more resounding than I had remembered. Her letter and mine show the
emotional unreliability of memory. Each knew about the other, but questions
of tact arose which were by no means easy. Dora and I became lovers when
she came to Lulworth, and the parts of the summer during which she was
there were extraordinarily delightful. The chief di?culty with Colette had
been that she was unwilling to have children, and that I felt if I was ever to
have children I could not put it o? any longer. Dora was entirely willing to
have children, with or without marriage, and from the ?rst we used no
precautions. She was a little disappointed to ?nd that almost immediately our
relations took on all the character of marriage, and when I told her that I
should be glad to get a divorce and marry her, she burst into tears, feeling, I
think, that it meant the end of independence and light-heartedness. But the
feeling we had for each other seemed to have that kind of stability that made
any less serious relation impossible. Those who have known her only in her
public capacity would scarcely credit the quality of el?n charm which she
possessed whenever the sense of responsibility did not weigh her down.
Bathing by moonlight, or running with bare feet on the dewy grass, she won
my imagination as completely as on her serious side she appealed to my
desire for parenthood and my sense of social responsibility.
Our days at Lulworth were a balance of delicious outdoor activities,
especially swimming, and general conversations as good as any that I have
ever had. The general theory of relativity was in those days rather new, and
Littlewood and I used to discuss it endlessly. We used to debate whether the
distance from us to the post-o?ce was or was not the same as the distance
from the post-o?ce to us, though on this matter we never reached a conclu-
sion. The eclipse expedition which con?rmed Einstein’s prediction as to the
bending of light occurred during this time, and Littlewood got a telegram
from Eddington telling him that the result was what Einstein said it should be.
As always happens when a party of people who know each other well is
assembled in the country, we came to have collective jokes from which casual
visitors were excluded. Sometimes the claims of politeness made these jokes
quite painful. There was a lady called Mrs Fiske Warren whom I had known
russia 311when I lived at Bagley Wood, rich and beautiful and intellectual, highly
intellectual in fact. It was for her uno?cial bene?t that Modern Greats were
?rst invented. Carefully selected dons taught her Greek philosophy without
demanding a knowledge of Greek. She was a lady of deep mystical intuitions,
and an admirer of Blake. I had stayed at her country house in Massachusetts in
1914, and had done my best to live up to her somewhat rare?ed atmosphere.
Her husband, whom I had never met, was a fanatical believer in Single Tax,
and was in the habit of buying small republics, such as Andorra, with a view
to putting Henry George’s principles into practice. While we were at
Lulworth, she sent me a book of her poems and a book of her husband’s on
his hobby. At the same time a letter came from her husband, who was in
London, saying that he wished to see me. I replied that it was impossible as I
was not in London. He telegraphed back to say that he would come to lunch
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, whichever suited me,
although to do so he had to leave London at six in the morning. I chose
Friday, and began hastily cutting the pages of his wife’s poems. I found a
poem headed ‘To One who Sleeps by my Side’, in which occurred the line:
‘Thou art too full of this world’s meat and wine.’ I read the poem to the
company, and called up the housekeeper, giving orders that the meal should
be plentiful and that there should be no de?ciency of alcohol. He turned out
to be a lean, ascetic, anxious character, too earnest to waste any of the
moments of life here below in jokes or frivolities. When we were all
assembled at lunch, and I began to o?er him food and drink, he replied in a
sad voice: ‘No, thank you. I am a vegetarian and a teetotaller.’ Littlewood
hastily made a very feeble joke at which we all laughed much more than its
merits warranted.
Summer, the sea, beautiful country, and pleasant company, combined with
love and the ending of the War to produce almost ideally perfect circum-
stances. At the end of the summer I went back to Cli?ord Allen’s ?at in
Battersea, and Dora went to Paris to pursue the researches which she was
making, in her capacity of Fellow of Girton, into the beginnings of French
free-thinking philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I still
saw her occasionally, sometimes in London, sometimes in Paris. I was still
seeing Colette, and was in a mood of indecision.
At Christmas Dora and I met at the Hague, to which place I went to see
my friend Wittgenstein. I knew Wittgenstein ?rst at Cambridge before the
War. He was an Austrian, and his father was enormously rich. Wittgenstein
had intended to become an engineer, and for that purpose had gone to
Manchester. Through reading mathematics he became interested in the
principles of mathematics, and asked at Manchester who there was who
worked at this subject. Somebody mentioned my name, and he took up his
residence at Trinity. He was perhaps the most perfect example I have ever
