The Several Bertrand Russells

...On arrival, he would announce that when he left my rooms he would commit suicide...

...I read enormously...

...Some of the observations in this book suggest this: "There is no longer, even among those who think themselves more or less liberal, a belief that it is a good thing to study all sides of a question...

...At the beginning of the following term, he brought me the fulfilment of this suggestion...

...This discovery has saved me an immense amount of time...

...Like Adams, too, Russell testifies to a frustrated feeling of public responsibility because of his divorce from any position of power in the world of affairs...

...Take, for example, the matter of the pains which a writer is traditionally supposed to take...

...Has Russell in late years become one of those whom Sidney Hook calls "ritualistic liberals...

...It was a mass scene of thousands of students running across the campus, and it reminded me of some of the effects of Cecil B. DeMille and Sergei Eisenstein...

...He seems to mistake such neatness for truth, as in the following passage: "But the evils, of which the extreme form is seen in Communist countries, exist in a lesser degree, and may easily increase, in many countries belonging to what is somewhat humorously called the 'Free World.' Vavilov, the most distinguished geneticist that Russia has produced in recent times, was sent to perish miserably in the Arctic because he would not subscribe to Stalin's ignorant belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics...

...There are few readers, I imagine, who will not be annoyed with him at times...

...Oppenheimer doubted not merely the practicability of the hydrogen bomb but its morality (which is hardly the same thing...

...The Index Expurgatorius has become a recognized part of the policy of those who say that they fight for freedom...

...But, putting this aside, is there anything really comparable between the fate of Vavi-lov and that of Oppenheimer...

...Why-are you asking me?' He said...

...The goddess he worships is called Sprightliness, and she can make him do and say silly things at times which to humorless people must be infuriating...

...The lecture had originally been scheduled for New Lecture Hall, a sizable auditorium, but, as it was discovered that the overflow would be very large, the site was shifted to Sanders Theater in another part of the Yard...

...I had no engagements, no difficult decisions to make, no fear of callers, no interruptions to my work...

...The purging of United States libraries in Europe, and of school libraries in America, is designed to prevent people from knowing more than one side of a question...

...Other ancestors of his have played their parts in English history as far back at least as the 17th century...

...If my memory does not fail me, Dr...

...And this comparison with Cummings reminds us that, in addition to great acuteness of intellect, Russell is a man of most delicate and sensitive esthetic perceptions...

...I have abridged the sketch somewhat for lack of space, and what I have left out is quite as vivid as what I have quoted...

...It is probably Russell's excellence as a mathematician that seduces him into the neat balances between things which are in fact not comparable at all...

...That was at a memorable series of lectures on philosophy at the Rand School...

...Was the American scientist in fact "disgraced and prevented from pursuing his work...

...When I found ray friends applauding these men as liberators and regarding the regime that they were creating as a paradise, I wondered in a bewildered manner whether it was my friends or I that were mad...

...But I have saved the illustration of his most engaging quality for the last...

...What I do not find is that I can improve a sentence when I am satisfied with what it means...

...He has a way with short, sharp, jabbing formulation which startles one awake and does not desert the mind even after the paradox in what he has said has been clearly recognized...

...He used to come to my rooms at midnight, and for hours he would walk backward and forward like a caged tiger...

...He may be likened in this respect to Henry Adams in our own country...

...I conscientiously tried this, but found that my first draft was almost always better than my second...

...I cannot believe that the author, if pressed, would care to maintain any such thing...

...These lectures were distinguished by the wit and salutary intellectual shock which are the hallmarks of all Russell's utterances, written or oral...

...I still remember how excited I was by the appointment and how chagrined I was by the intervention of politics which prevented it from taking effect...

...During the time that I was there, I felt a gradually increasing horror which became an almost intolerable oppression...

...He does, in other words, exactly what a good teacher ought to do—he goads you into thinking for yourself and makes you half suspect that your best answers might easily be overthrown by a ready wit...

...It was hard to grasp that all this eagerness was a response to a philosopher speaking in more or less technical language which few of his hearers were qualified to understand...

...I saw very little of him in his later years, but at the time when I knew him well he was immensely impressive, as he had fire and penetration and intellectual purity to a quite extraordinary degree...

...The picture here, though part of the repetitive dogma of certain circles, is so far from what I apprehend to be the truth of the matter that it is difficult to know where to begin in arguing against it...

...When I discover an error of an important kind, I rewrite the whole...

...I do not, of course, apply it to the substance, but only to the form...

...I have heard Russell under circumstances more intimate and favorable than were provided at Harvard...

...When it was demanded of him: "Who is left...

...I wrote a book, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, and began the work for Analysis of Mind...

...Among the portraits in this book is one of his grandfather Lord John Russell, who was Queen Victoria's Prime Minister from 1846 to 1852...

...He is always questioning conventional ideas, especially of those who pride themselves upon being unconventional, and often succeeds in saying new things on altogether unsuspected points...

...At the end of his first term at Cambridge, he came to me and said: 'Will you please tell me whether I am a complete idiot or not?' I replied, 'My dear fellow...

...When I finally decided to say what I thought of the Bolsheviks, my former political friends, including very many who have since come to my opinion, denounced me as a lackey of the bourgeoisie...

...Yet, this is only a passing page in an essay innocuously entitled "Some Philosophical Contacts...

...But the reactionaries did not notice what I said and continued to describe me in print as a 'lily-livered Bolshie swine.' And so I succeeded in getting the worst of both worlds...

...At his worst, he could have had himself in mind as well as George Bernard Shaw when he wrote: "Shaw, like many witty men, considered wit an adequate substitute for wisdom...

...Both inserted marks of intellectual punctuation into family annals predominantly created by men of action...

...This experience did not turn out as bad as it sounds, for he now writes: "I found prison in many ways quite agreeable...

...He shows up in the following passage: "My visit to Russia in 1920 was a turning point in my life...

...One wishes that something of the spirit of those people had been present in the New York City officials who prevented Russell from assuming the duties of professor of philosophy at my alma mater, the College of the City of New York...

...He writes, in this book, in criticism of Santayana: "I find myself, in reading him, approving each sentence in an almost somnambulistic manner, but quite unable, after a few pages, to remember what it was all about...

...On one such evening, after an hour or two of dead silence, I said to him, 'Wittgenstein, are you thinking about logic or about your sins?' 'Both,' he said, and then reverted to silence...

...I have an indelible impression of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who began as Russell's pupil and later succeeded him at both Oxford and Cambridge: "His notions seemed to me odd, so that for a whole term I could not make up my mind whether he was a man of genius or merely an eccentric...

...I don't know...

...In order to earn his living, he became a village schoolmaster at a little place called Tratten-bach, from which he wrote me unhappy letters saying, 'The men of Trattenbach are wicked.' I replied, 'All men are wicked.' He rejoined, 'True, but the men of Trattenbach are more wicked than the men of any other place.' I retorted that my logical sense rebelled against such a statement, and there the matter rested until residence elsewhere enlarged his view as to the prevalence of sin...

...He is no unworthy descendant of the great family whose name he bears, and he shows every sign of awareness of the pride in his heritage...

...The friends whom he sketches in the book have been not only philosophers like Whitehead and Santayana, and social thinkers like Shaw and the Webbs and H. G. Wells, but pure men of letters like Joseph Conrad (to whom he devotes some excellent pages) and D. H. Lawrence...

...As for his almost visceral judgment upon the Russian Revolution (or rather upon its Bolshevik permutation), it is of a piece with that described so well by the poet E. E. Cummings in Eimi, where the feeling is exfoliated over some 400 pages...

...he was ready with an answer, specious possibly but suggestive, too, of the special point of view which he was pleading at that moment: "Oh, plenty of good people—Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Spinoza...

...The same thing cannot be said of Russell himself...

...there will be even fewer obtuse or ungenerous enough not to be pleased with him much more often...

...The latter bouquet was thrown at Russell because of his pacifist opinions during World War I, opinions which he was ready to fight for to the last extreme and for which even the tolerant government of Britain imprisoned him for six months during 1918...

...After reading only one sentence, I said to him: 'No, you must not become an aeronaut.' And he didn't...

...He could defend any idea, however silly, so cleverly as to make those who did not accept it look like fools...

...But even if it appeared to be a tribute to an off-Broadway type of advertising (Russell had either just been given or was about to be given the Nobel Prize), it was a touching spectacle—as touching as that more recent report of 14,000 people from five Midwestern states assembling in a stadium at the University of Minnesota to listen to T. S. Eliot...

...There are three kinds of statements to which Russell is addicted—those which are astonishing and true, those which are astonishing and not true, and those which are simply astonishing...

...Or am I perhaps mistaken...

...The country seemed to me one vast prison in which the jailers were cruel bigots...

...He inherited a great fortune from his father, but he gave it away on the ground that money is only a nuisance to a philosopher...

...What he will never consent to forfeit is your attention...

...There followed a remarkable scene as those students who were already ensconced in New Lecture Hall set out at a gallop to get good seats in Sanders Theater...

...He was not, however, altogether easy to deal with...

...Russell's brother-in-law, Logan Pearsall Smith, was single-minded in his pursuit of style, and "his most emphatic advice was that one must always rewrite...

...Reviewed by Milton Hindus Professor of literature, Brandeis University i remember trying to hear Bertrand Russell lecture some years ago at Harvard...

...This is his ability to limn character in a few well-chosen incidents...

...Because if I am a complete idiot I shall become an aeronaut, but if not I shall become a philosopher.' "I told him to write me something during the vacation on some philosophical subject and I would then tell him whether he was a complete idiot or not...

...Of one of his earliest friends during his undergraduate days at Cambridge he writes: "My earliest memory 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, Tvger, burning bright.' I had never, till that moment, heard of Blake, and the poem affected me so much that I became dizzy and had to lean against tile wall...

...So, in spite of getting sleepy, I did not like to turn him out...

...Of Russell himself it may be said that in his mid-80s he still keeps some of the wide-eyed innocence of a very bright and graceful child...

...Oppenheimer is disgraced and prevented from pursuing his work largely because he doubted the practicability of the hydrogen bomb at a time when this doubt was entirely rational...

...And as a matter of historical dynamics it seemed obvious that revolutionary ardor must develop into imperialism as it had done in the French Revolution...

...But the habit: of following my own judgment rather than that of others had grown strong in nie during the war years...

...But there is another and far more sympathetic Russell as well...

...Strictly speaking, the occasion was perhaps less a tribute to Russell as a person than to Intellect, which he was taken to represent...

...I remember, for example, his saying in one of the conversations on Invitation to Learning: "There have been four misfortunes in the history of philosophy, and their names have been Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Hegel...