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By Root 193 0

Unconscious. They are, it must be said, far more wicked than they were in the diatribes of the monks; they display, in modern textbooks, an ingenuity and persistence in sinful imaginings to which in the past there was nothing comparable except St. Anthony. Is all this the objective truth at last? Or is it merely an adult imaginative compensation for being no longer allowed to wallop the little pests? Let the Freudians answer, each for the others.” One more quotation from Russell’s writings which shows how deeply this humanist thinker has experienced this joy of living. “The lover,” he wrote in The Scientific Outlook (1931), “the poet, and the mystic find a fuller satisfaction than the seeker after power can ever know, since they can retain the object of their love, whereas the seeker after power must be perpetually engaged in some fresh manipulation if he is not to suffer from a sense of emptiness. When I come to die I shall not feel I have lived in vain. I have seen the earth turn red at evening, the dew sparkling in the morning, and the snow shining under a frosty sun; I have smelt rain after drought, and have heard the stormy Atlantic beat upon the granite shores of Cornwall. Science may bestow these and other joys among more people than could otherwise enjoy them. If so, its power will be wisely used. But when it takes out of life the moments to which life owes its values, science will not deserve admiration, however cleverly and however elaborately it may lead men along the road to despair.”

Bertrand Russell is a scholar, a man who believes in reason. But how different he is from the many men whose profession is the same: scholarship. With these the thing that counts is the intellectual grasp of the world. They feel certain that their intellect exhausts reality, and that there is nothing of significance which cannot be grasped by it. They are skeptical toward everything which cannot be caught in an intellectual formula, but they are naively unskeptical toward their own scientific approach. They are more interested in the results of their thoughts than in the process of enlightenment which occurs in the inquiring person. Russell spoke of this kind of intellectual procedure when discussing pragmatism in his Philosophical Essays (1910): “Pragmatism,” he wrote, “appeals to the temper of mind which finds on the surface of this planet the whole of its imaginative material; which feels confident of progress, and unaware of nonhuman limitations to human power; which loves battle, with all the attendant risks, because it has no real doubt that it will achieve victory; which desires religion, as it desires railways and electric light, as a comfort and a help in the affairs of this world, not as providing nonhuman objects to satisfy the hunger for perfection and for something to be worshipped without reserve.”

For Russell, in contrast to the pragmatist, rational thought is not the quest for certainty, but an adventure, an act of self-liberation and of courage, which changes the thinker by making him more awake and more alive.

Bertrand Russell is a man of faith. Not of faith in the theological sense, but of faith in the power of reason, faith in man’s capacity to create his own paradise through his own efforts. “As geological time is reckoned,” so he wrote in Man’s Peril from the Hydrogen Bomb (1954), “Man has so far existed only for a very short period—1,000,000 years at the most. What he has achieved, especially during the last 6,000 years, is something utterly new in the history of the Cosmos, so far at least as we are acquainted with it. For countless ages the sun rose and set, the moon waxed and waned, the stars shone in the night, but it was only with the coming of Man that these things were understood. In the great world of astronomy and in the little world of the atom, Man has unveiled secrets which might have been thought undiscoverable. In art and literature and religion, some men have shown a sublimity of feeling which makes the species worth preserving. Is all this to end in trivial horror because so few are able