July 20th. There are about three di?erent, though converging ways of
looking at this question of free will, ?rst, from the omnipotence of God,
second from the reign of law, and third, from the fact that all our actions, if
looked into, show themselves as caused by motives. These three ways we see
at once to be really identical, for God’s omnipotence is the same thing as the
reign of law, and the determination of actions by motives is the particular
form which the reign of law takes in man. Let us now examine closely each of
these ways.
First, from the omnipotence of God. What do we mean, in the ?rst place,
by free will? We mean that, where several courses are open to us, we can
choose any one. But according to this de?nition, we are not ruled by God,
and alone of created things, we are independent of him. That appears
unlikely, but is by no means impossible, since his omnipotence is only an
inference. Let us then pass on to the second, from the reign of law. Of all
things we know, except perhaps the higher animals, it is obvious that law is
completely the master. That man is also under its dominion appears from a
fact such as Grimm’s Law, and again from the fact that it is possible some-
times to predict human actions. If man, then, be subject to law, does not this
mean, that his actions are predetermined, just as much as the motions of a
planet or the growth of a plant? The Duke of Argyll, indeed, speaks of free-
dom within the bounds of law, but to me that’s an unmeaning phrase, for
subjection to law must mean a certain consequence always following in given
conditions. No doubt di?erent people in the same circumstances act di?er-
ently, but that is only owing to di?erence of character, just as two comets in
the autobiography of bertrand russell 44the same position move di?erently, because of di?erences in their eccentrici-
ties. The third, from the consideration of motives, is about the strongest. For
if we examine any action whatsoever, we ?nd always motives, over which we
have no more control than matter over the forces acting on it, which produce
our actions. The Duke of Argyll says we can present motives to ourselves, but
is not that an action, determined by our character, and other unavoidable
things? The argument for free will from the fact that we feel it, is worthless,
for we do not feel motives which we ?nd really exist, nor that mind depends
on brain, etc. But I am not prepared dogmatically to deny free will, for I have
often found that good arguments don’t present themselves on one side of a
question till they are told one. My nature may incline me to disbelieve free
will, and there may be very excellent arguments for free will which either I
have never thought of, or else have not had their full weight with me. . . . It is
di?cult not to become reckless and commit suicide, which I believe I should
do but for my people.
adolescence 453
CAMBRIDGE
My father had been at Cambridge, but my brother was at Oxford. I went to
Cambridge because of my interest in mathematics. My ?rst experience of the
place was in December 1889 when I was examined for entrance scholarships.
I stayed in rooms in the New Court, and I was too shy to enquire the way to
the lavatory, so that I walked every morning to the station before the examin-
ation began. I saw the Backs through the gate of the New Court, but did not
venture to go into them, feeling that they might be private. I was invited to
dine with the Master, who had been Headmaster of Harrow in my father’s
time. I there, for the ?rst time, met Charles and Bob Trevelyan. Bob character-
istically had borrowed Charles’s second best dress suit, and fainted during
dinner because somebody mentioned a surgical operation. I was alarmed
by so formidable a social occasion, but less alarmed than I had been a few
months earlier when I was left tête-à-tête with Mr Gladstone. He came to stay at
Pembroke Lodge, and nobody was asked to meet him. As I was the only male
in the household, he and I were left alone together at the dinner table after
the ladies retired. He made only one remark: ‘This is very good port they have
given me, but why have they given it me in a claret glass?’ I did not know the
answer, and wished the earth would swallow me up. Since then I have never
again felt the full agony of terror.
I was very anxious to do well in the scholarship examination, and ner-
vousness somewhat interfered with my work. Nevertheless, I got a minor
scholarship, which gave me extreme happiness, as it was the ?rst time I had
been able to compare myself with able contemporaries.
From the moment that I went up to Cambridge at the beginning of
October 1890 everything went well with me. All the people then in residence
who subsequently became my intimate friends called on me during the ?rstweek of term. At the time I did not know why they did so, but I discovered
afterwards that Whitehead, who had examined for scholarships, had told
people to look out for Sanger and me. Sanger was a freshman like myself, also
doing mathematics, and also a minor scholar. He and I both had rooms in
Whewell’s Court. Webb, our coach, had a practice of circulating ??? among
his classes, and it fell to my lot to deliver a ?? to Sanger after I had done with
it. I had not seen him before, but I was struck by the books on his shelves. I
said: ‘I see you have Draper’s Intellectual Development of Europe which I think a very
good book.’ He said: ‘You are the ?rst person I have ever met who has heard
of it!’ From this point the conversation proceeded, and at the end of half
an hour we were lifelong friends. We compared notes as to how much
mathematics we had done. We agreed upon theology and metaphysics. We
disagreed upon politics (he was at the time a Conservative, though in later life
he belonged to the Labour Party). He spoke of Shaw, whose name was until
then unknown to me. We used to work on mathematics together. He was
incredibly quick, and would be half-way through solving a problem before
I had understood the question. We both devoted our fourth year to moral
science, but he did economics, and I did philosophy. We got our Fellowships
at the same moment. He was one of the kindest men that ever lived, and in
the last years of his life my children loved him as much as I have done. I have
never known anyone else with such a perfect combination of penetrating
intellect and warm a?ection. He became a Chancery barrister, and was
known in legal circles for his highly erudite edition of Jarman On Wills. He
used to lament that Jarman’s relatives had forbidden him to mention in the
preface that Jarman died intestate. He was also a very good economist, and he
could read an incredible number of languages, including such out-of-the-
way items as Magyar and Finnish. I used to go walking tours with him in
Italy, and he always made me do all the conversation with inn-keepers, but
when I was reading Italian, I found that his knowledge of the language was
vastly greater than mine. His death in the year 1930 was a great sorrow to me.
The other friends whom I acquired during my ?rst term I owed chie?y
to Whitehead’s recommendation. I learned afterwards that in the scholarship
examination another man had obtained more marks than I had, but
Whitehead had the impression that I was the abler of the two. He therefore
burned the marks before the examiners’ meeting, and recommended me in
preference to the other man. Two of my closest friends were Crompton and
Theodore Llewelyn Davies. Their father was vicar of Kirkby Lonsdale, and
translator of Plato’s Republic in the Golden Treasury edition, a distinguished
scholar and a Broad Churchman whose views were derived from F. D. Maurice.
He had a family of six sons and one daughter. It was said, and I believe with
truth, that throughout their education the six sons, of whom Crompton and
Theodore were the youngest, managed, by means of scholarships, to go
cambridge 47through school and university without expense to their father. Most of them
were also strikingly good-looking, including Crompton, who had very ?ne
blue eyes, which sometimes sparkled with fun and at other times had a steady
gaze that was deeply serious. The ablest and one of the best loved of the
family was the youngest, Theodore, with whom, when I ?rst knew them,
Crompton shared rooms in College. They both in due course became Fellows,
but neither of them became resident. Afterwards the two lived together in a
small house near Westminster Abbey, in a quiet out-of-the-way street. Both
of them were able, high-minded and passionate, and shared, on the whole,
the same ideals and opinions. Theodore had a somewhat more practical
outlook on life than Crompton. He became Private Secretary to a series of
Conservative Chancellors of the Exchequer, each of whom in turn he con-
verted to Free Trade at a time when the rest of the Government wished them
to think otherwise. He worked incredibly hard and yet always found time to
give presents to the children of all his friends, and the presents were always
exactly appropriate. He inspired the deepest a?ection in almost everybody
who knew him. I never knew but one woman who would not have been
delighted to marry him. She, of course, was the only woman he wished to
marry. In the spring of 1905, when he was thirty-four, his dead body was
found in a pool near Kirkby Lonsdale, where he had evidently bathed on his
way to the station. It was supposed that he must have hit his head on a rock
in diving. Crompton, who loved his brother above everyone, su?ered almost
unendurably. I spent the weeks after Theodore’s death with him, but it was
di?cult to ?nd anything to say.
1
The sight of his unhappiness was agonising.
Ever since, the sound of Westminster chimes has brought back to me the
nights I lay awake in misery at this time. On the Sunday after the accident, I
was in church when his father, with determined stoicism, took the service
as usual, and just succeeded in not breaking down. Gradually Crompton
recovered, but not fully until his marriage. After that, for no reason that I
could understand, I saw nothing of him for many years, until one evening,
when I was living in Chelsea, I heard the front door bell, and found Crompton
on the doorstep. He behaved as if we had met the day before, was as charming
as ever, and insisted on seeing my children asleep. I think I had become so
much associated with his su?ering after Theodore’s death, that for a long
time he found my presence painful.
One of my earliest memories of Crompton is of meeting him in the darkest
part of a winding College staircase and his suddenly quoting, without any
previous word, the whole of ‘Tyger, Tyger, burning bright’. I had never, till
that moment, heard of Blake, and the poem a?ected me so much that I
became dizzy and had to lean against the wall. Hardly a day passed without
my remembering some incident connected with Crompton – sometimes a
joke, sometimes a grimace of disgust at meanness or hypocrisy, most often
the autobiography of bertrand russell 48his warm and generous a?ection. If I were tempted at any time to any fail-
ure of honesty, the thought of his disapproval would still restrain me. He
combined wit, passion, wisdom, scorn, gentleness, and integrity, in a degree
that I have never known equalled. In addition to all these, his intense and
unalterable a?ection gave to me and others, in later years, an anchor of
stability in a disintegrating world.
His loyalties were usually peculiar to himself. He was incapable of following
a multitude, either for good or evil. He would profess contempt and amuse-
ment for all the causes in which his friends excited themselves, laughing to
scorn ‘The Society for this’ or ‘The World League for Promoting that’, while
all the time he was a crusade in himself, for Ireland against England, for small
business against big, for the have-nots against the haves, for competition
against monopoly. His chief enthusiasm was for the taxation of land values.
Henry George is now an almost forgotten prophet, but in 1890, when I
?rst knew Crompton, his doctrine that all rent should be paid to the State
rather than to private landowners was still an active competitor with Socialism
among those who were not satis?ed with the economic status quo. Crompton,
at this time, was already a fanatical adherent of Henry George. He had, as was
to be expected, a strong dislike of Socialism, and a strong devotion to the
principle of freedom for private enterprise. He had no dislike of the capitalist
who made his money in industry, but regarded as a mere incubus the man
who is able to levy toll on the industry of others because he owns the land
that they need. I do not think he ever asked himself how the State could fail to
become immensely powerful if it enjoyed all the revenue to be derived from
landownership. In his mind, as in Henry George’s, the reform was to be the
completion of individualistic liberalism, setting free energies now throttled by
monopoly power. In 1909, he believed that Henry George’s principles were
being carried out by Lloyd George, whose famous budget he helped to perfect.
At the beginning of the 1914–18 War he was solicitor to the Post O?ce,
but his ardent agreement with the opinions of his wife, who was an Irish
Nationalist and imprisoned as a Sinn Feiner, made his position untenable. He
was dismissed at a moment’s notice. In spite of the prejudice of the time he
was almost immediately taken in as a partner by Messrs Coward, Chance &
Co, one of the leading ?rms of City solicitors. In 1921, it was he who drafted
the treaty of peace that established Irish self-government, though this was
never publicly known. His unsel?shness made any important worldly success
impossible, since he never stood in the way of others acquiring credit for
his work; and he did not care for public recognition and honours. But his
ability, though it was not this that made him unforgettable, was very great.
What made Crompton at the same time so admirable and so delightful,
was not his ability, but his strong loves and hates, his fantastic humour, and
his rock-like honesty. He was one of the wittiest men that I have ever known,
cambridge 49with a great love of mankind combined with a contemptuous hatred for most
individual men. He had by no means the ways of a saint. Once, when we were
both young, I was walking with him in the country, and we trespassed over a
corner of a farmer’s land. The farmer came running out after us, shouting and
red with fury. Crompton held his hand to his ear, and said with the utmost
mildness: ‘Would you mind speaking a little louder? I’m rather hard of hear-
ing.’ The farmer was reduced to speechlessness in the endeavour to make
more noise than he was already making. Not long before his death I heard
him tell this story, with great detail and exaggeration, attributing his part in
it to me, while I interrupted, saying, ‘Don’t believe a word of it. It wasn’t me,
it was all Crompton,’ until ?nally he dissolved in a?ectionate chuckles.
He was addicted to extreme shabbiness in his clothes, to such a degree
that some of his friends expostulated. This had an unexpected result. When
Western Australia attempted by litigation to secede from the Commonwealth
of Australia, his law ?rm was employed, and it was decided that the case
should be heard in the King’s Robing Room. Crompton was overheard ring-
ing up the King’s Chamberlain and saying: ‘The unsatisfactory state of my
trousers has lately been brought to my notice. I understand that the case is
to be heard in the King’s Robing Room. Perhaps the King has left an old pair
of trousers there that might be useful to me.’
His distastes – which were numerous and intense – were always expressed
in a manner that made one laugh. Once, when he and I were staying with his
father, a Bishop was also a guest – the mildest and most ino?ensive type of
cleric, the kind of whom it would be natural to say that he would not hurt a
?y. Unfortunately his politics were somewhat reactionary. When at last we
were alone, Crompton put on a manner that would have been appropriate to
a fellow-captive on a pirate ship, and growled out: ‘Seems a desperate character.’
When the Liberal Government came into o?ce at the end of 1905, and
Lord Haldane, fat, comfortable, and soothing, was put at the War O?ce,
Crompton, very gravely, said he had been chosen to prevent the Generals
from having apoplexy when Army reforms were suggested.
Motor tra?c annoyed him by its imperiousness. He would cross London
streets without paying attention to it, and when cars hooted indignantly he
would look round with an air of fastidious vexation, and say, ‘Don’t make
that noise!’ Although he wandered about with an air of dreamy abstraction,
wearing his hat on the back of his head, motorists became convinced that
he must be someone of enormous importance, and waited patiently while
he went his way.
He loved London as much as Lamb or Dr Johnson did. Once, when he was
inveighing against Wordsworth for writing about the lesser celandine, I said,
‘Do you like him better on Westminster Bridge?’ ‘Ah, yes,’ he answered, ‘if
only he had treated it on the same scale.’ In his last years we often walked
the autobiography of bertrand russell 50together in London after dinner, he and my wife and I. Crompton would take
our arms, if he were not holding them already, as we passed Wren’s church
of St Clement Danes, to remind us to look up at one of his favourite sights,
the spire standing out dimly against the glowing blue of the evening sky.
On these walks he would sometimes get into conversation with people that
we met. I remember him engaging a park-keeper in an earnest discussion,
perhaps of land values. The park-keeper was at ?rst determined to remember
both his class and his o?cial position, and treated Crompton with respectful
disapproval. Strangers ought not to be so ready to talk to strangers, gentlemen
should not be so easy with workingmen, and no one should talk to o?cials
on duty. But this sti?ness soon melted. Crompton was truly democratic. He
always spoke to his clerks or his servants with the same tone that he would
have used to an important person such as one of the Indian Rajahs whose
a?airs he handled, and his manner in a two-roomed Irish cabin was exactly
the same as in a party of celebrities. I remember with what grave courtesy
he rose to bow and shake hands with our parlourmaid, on hearing that she
came from the same district as his family.
By temperament he was inclined to anarchism; he hated system and organ-
isation and uniformity. Once, when I was with him on Westminister Bridge,
he pointed with delight to a tiny donkey-cart in the middle of the heavy
tra?c. ‘That’s what I like,’ he said, ‘freedom for all sorts.’
On another occasion, when I was walking with him in Ireland, we went
to a bus station, where I, without thinking, made for the largest and most
comfortable bus. His expression was quite shocked as he took me by the arm
and hurried me away to a shabby little ‘jalopie’ of a bus, explaining gravely
that it was pluckily defying the big combines.
His opinions were often somewhat wayward, and he had no objection to
giving his prejudices free rein. He admired rebels rather more, perhaps, than
was wholly rational. He had a horror of anything that seemed calculating, and
I once shocked him deeply by saying that a war could not be justi?ed unless
there was a likelihood of victory. To him, heroic and almost hopeless de?ance
appeared splendid. Many of his prejudices were so consonant to my feelings
that I never had the heart to argue with them – which in any case would
have been a hopeless task.
With his temperament and opinions, it was natural that he should hate the
Sidney Webbs. When they took up Poor Law Reform, he would say that, since
everyone else rejected their attempts at regulation, they had at last been
driven to organise the defenceless paupers. He would allege, as one of their
triumphs of organisation, that they employed a pauper with a peg leg to drill
holes for the potatoes.
He was my lawyer for many years – a somewhat thankless task which he
undertook out of friendship. Most of his practice consisted of a?airs of great
cambridge 51importance, concerning Indian Princes, Dominion Governments, or leading
Banks. He showed, in legal matters, unbending straightforwardness, com-
bined with skill and patience – this last truly astonishing, since nature had
made him one of the most impatient of men. By these methods, which
inspired con?dence even in opponents, he achieved results which ingenious
trickery could never have achieved. I remember the stony expression which
came over his face during the course of a legal consultation when someone
suggested a course that was not entirely straightforward.
With all his underlying seriousness, he was almost invariably gay. At the
end of a long day of exhausting and responsible work he would arrive at a
dinner party as jolly as if he had already enjoyed a good dose of champagne,
and would keep everybody laughing. It was in the middle of a dinner party
that he died, quite suddenly, of heart failure. Probably he had known that this
was liable to happen, but he had kept the knowledge to himself. Afterwards,
his friends remembered slight indications that he had not expected to live
long, but they had not been su?cient to cause active anxiety among those
who valued him.
In his last years he spent much of his leisure in writing a book on phil-
osophy, which he referred to disparagingly as his ‘pie-dish’ in allusion to an
old man in a play who had only one talent, the making of pie-dishes, and
only one ambition, to make a really good pie-dish before he died. After Greek
poetry, philosophy had been, when he was young, his main intellectual
preoccupation; when I ?rst knew him, we spent much time arguing about
ethics and metaphysics. A busy professional life had kept him, throughout his
middle years, engaged in practical a?airs, but at last he was able to spare some
time for purely theoretical thinking, to which he returned with wholehearted
joy. When the book was nearly ?nished he lost it, as people do sometimes
lose the things they value most. He left it in a train. It was never recovered.
Someone must have picked it up in the hope that it had ?nancial value. He
mentioned the loss, sadly but brie?y, said that there was nothing for it but to
begin all over again from the few notes he had, and then changed the subject.
We saw less of him during the few months that were left before his death,
though when we did see him he was as gay and a?ectionate as ever. He was
spending most of his spare energy on trying to make up the work that was
lost; but the pie-dish was never ?nished.
Another friend of my Cambridge years was McTaggart, the philosopher,
who was even shyer than I was. I heard a knock on my door one day – a very
gentle knock. I said: ‘Come in’, but nothing happened. I said, ‘Come in’,
louder. The door opened, and I saw McTaggart standing on the mat. He was
already President of The Union, and about to become a Fellow, and inspired
me with awe on account of his metaphysical reputation, but he was too shy to
come in, and I was too shy to ask him to come in. I cannot remember how
the autobiography of bertrand russell 52many minutes this situation lasted, but somehow or other he was at last in the
room. After that I used frequently to go to his breakfasts, which were famous
for their lack of food; in fact, anybody who had been once, brought an egg
with him on every subsequent occasion. McTaggart was a Hegelian, and at
that time still young and enthusiastic. He had a great intellectual in?uence
upon my generation, though in retrospect I do not think it was a very good
one. For two or three years, under his in?uence, I was a Hegelian. I remember
the exact moment during my fourth year when I became one. I had gone out
to buy a tin of tobacco, and was going back with it along Trinity Lane, when
suddenly I threw it up in the air and exclaimed: ‘Great God in boots! – the
ontological argument is sound!’ Although after 1898 I no longer accepted
McTaggart’s philosophy, I remained fond of him until an occasion during the
?rst war, when he asked me no longer to come and see him because he could
not bear my opinions. He followed this up by taking a leading part in having
me turned out of my lectureship.
Two other friends whom I met in my early days in Cambridge and retained
ever since, were Lowes Dickinson and Roger Fry. Dickinson was a man who
inspired a?ection by his gentleness and pathos. When he was a Fellow and I
was still an undergraduate, I became aware that I was liable to hurt him by
my somewhat brutal statement of unpleasant truths, or what I thought to be
such. States of the world which made me caustic only made him sad, and
to the end of his days whenever I met him, I was afraid of increasing his
unhappiness by too stark a realism. But perhaps realism is not quite the right
word. What I really mean is the practice of describing things which one ?nds
almost unendurable in such a repulsive manner as to cause others to share
one’s fury. He told me once that I resembled Cordelia, but it cannot be said
that he resembled King Lear.
From my ?rst moment at Cambridge, in spite of shyness, I was exceedingly
sociable, and I never found that my having been educated at home was any
impediment. Gradually, under the in?uence of congenial society, I became
less and less solemn. At ?rst the discovery that I could say things that I
thought, and be answered with neither horror nor derision but as if I had said
something quite sensible, was intoxicating. For a long time I supposed that
somewhere in the university there were really clever people whom I had not
yet met, and whom I should at once recognise as my intellectual superiors,
but during my second year, I discovered that I already knew all the cleverest
people in the university. This was a disappointment to me, but at the same
time gave me increased self-con?dence. In my third year, however, I met
G. E. Moore, who was then a freshman, and for some years he ful?lled my
ideal of genius. He was in those days beautiful and slim, with a look almost of
inspiration, and with an intellect as deeply passionate as Spinoza’s. He had a
kind of exquisite purity. I have never but once succeeded in making him tell a
cambridge 53lie, that was by a subterfuge, ‘Moore,’ I said, ‘do you always speak the truth?’
‘No’, he replied. I believe this to be the only lie he had ever told. His people
lived in Dulwich, where I once went to see them. His father was a retired
medical man, his mother wore a large china brooch with a picture of the
Colosseum on it. He had sisters and brothers in large numbers, of whom the
most interesting was the poet, Sturge Moore. In the world of intellect, he was
fearless and adventurous, but in the everyday world he was a child. During my
fourth year I spent some days walking with him on the coast of Norfolk. We
fell in by accident with a husky fellow, who began talking about Petronius with
intense relish for his indecencies. I rather encouraged the man, who amused
me as a type. Moore remained completely silent until the man was gone, and
then turned upon me, saying: ‘That man was horrible.’ I do not believe that
he has ever in all his life derived the faintest pleasure from improper stories
or conversation. Moore, like me, was in?uenced by McTaggart, and was for a
short time a Hegelian. But he emerged more quickly than I did, and it was
largely his conversation that led me to abandon both Kant and Hegel. In spite
of his being two years younger than me, he greatly in?uenced my philo-
sophical outlook. One of the pet amusements of all Moore’s friends was to
watch him trying to light a pipe. He would light a match, and then begin to
argue, and continue until the match burnt his ?ngers. Then he would light
another, and so on, until the box was ?nished. This was no doubt fortunate
for his health, as it provided moments during which he was not smoking.
Then there were the three brothers Trevelyan. Charles, the eldest, was
considered the least able of the three by all of us. Bob, the second, was my
special friend. He became a very scholarly, but not very inspired, poet, but
when he was young he had a delicious whimsical humour. Once, when we
were on a reading party in the Lakes, Eddie Marsh, having overslept himself,
came down in his night-shirt to see if breakfast was ready, looking frozen and
miserable. Bob christened him ‘cold white shape’, and this name stuck to him
for a long time. George Trevelyan was considerably younger than Bob, but I
got to know him well later on. He and Charles were terri?c walkers. Once
when I went a walking tour with George in Devonshire, I made him promise
to be content with twenty-?ve miles a day. He kept his promise until the last
day. Then he left me, saying that now he must have a little walking. On
another occasion, when I was walking alone, I arrived at the Lizard one
evening and asked if they could give me a bed. ‘Is your name Mr Trevelyan?’
they answered. ‘No,’ I said, ‘are you expecting him?’ ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘and his
wife is here already.’ This surprised me, as I knew that it was his wedding
