November 10, 1905My dear LucyIt was a great pleasure to hear from you again. I think letters are moreimportant than one is apt to realise. If one doesn’t write, one’s doings andone’s general state of mind cease to be known, and when a time comes forexplaining, there are so many preliminaries that the task seems impossible in‘principia mathematica’ 171writing. So I do hope you will not be deterred by the fear of many words – itreally doesn’t do to wait till you are in extremis. What you say about Alys and ‘myright living’ rather makes me feel that there is something wrong – too muchprofession and talk about virtue; for I certainly know many people who livebetter lives than I do, and are more able to accomplish long and di?cult dutieswithout any moments of weakness. Only they make less fuss about it, andpeople do not know how di?cult the duties are that they perform in silence.I am grateful to you for writing about Helen. I understand very well therenewal of pain that comes when you see her, and the dread of entering thereal life, with its tortures, after the numbness of routine. I am very sorry thatit is still so bad. I wonder, though, whether any but trivial people could really?nd it otherwise. Life is a burden if those one loves best have others whocome ?rst, if there is no corner in the world where one’s loneliness is at anend. I hardly know how it can be otherwise. Your problem is to face this withcourage, and yet retain as much as possible of what is important to you. Itwould be easier to renounce everything once for all, and kill one’s chiefa?ection. But that leads to hardness, and in the long run to cruelty, thecruelty of the ascetic. The other course has its disadvantages too: it is physi-cally and mentally exhausting, it destroys peace of mind, it keeps one’sthoughts absorbed with the question of how much that one values one canhope to rescue without undue encroachment on the territory of others. It ishorribly di?cult. There is a temptation to let one’s real life become whollyone of memory and imagination, where duty and facts do not fetter one, andto let one’s present intercourse be a mere shadow and unreality; this has theadvantage that it keeps the past unsmirched.But to come to more practical things. I believe when one is not ?rst in aperson’s life, it is necessary, however di?cult, to make one’s feelings towardsthat person purely receptive and passive. I mean, that one should not have anopinion about what such a person should do, unless one is asked; that oneshould watch their moods, and make oneself an echo, responding with a?ec-tion in the measure in which it is given, repressing whatever goes further,ready to feel that one has no rights, and that whatever one gets is so much tothe good. This must be, for example, the attitude of a good mother to amarried son. Di?cult as it is, it is a situation which is normal in the life ofthe a?ections, and a duty which one has to learn to perform without spiritualdeath....I have been seeing a good deal of Crompton Davies. . . . He is and willremain very profoundly unhappy, and I do not think that marriage or any-thing will heal the wound. But he is brave, and to the world he makes a goodshow. To his friends he is lovable in a very rare degree.The Japanese alliance seems to me excellent – I am glad England should beready to recognise the yellow man as a civilised being, and not wholly sorrythe autobiography of bertrand russell 172at the quarrel with Australia which this recognition entails. Balfour’s gov-ernment has ceased to do any harm, having grown impotent. The generalopinion is that Balfour will resign in February, trying to force the Liberalsto take o?ce before dissolving. Whatever happens, the Liberals are almostcertain of an overwhelming majority in the next Parliament.I am interested to hear that I have a disciple at Bryn Mawr. Two young men,Huntingdon at Harvard and Veblen at Princeton, have written works in whichthey make pleasing references to me. The latter, at least, is brilliantly able....Alys told me to say she had not time to write by this Saturday’s mail – sheis occupied with alternations of visitors and meetings, and rather tired. Onthe whole, however, she has been very well lately. She asked me also to tellyou about Forster’s ‘Where angels fear to tread’ – it seems to me a clever story,with a good deal of real merit, but too farcical in parts, and too sentimental atthe end. He is one of our Cambridge set; his age, I suppose, about 26. Heseems certainly to have talent.Dickinson’s new book is out, A Modern Symposium. It is quite excellent. Hedoes the Tories with more sympathy than the Liberals, but all except Glad-stone and the biologist are done with much sympathy. Besides Gladstone,there are Disraeli, Henry Sidgwick, and various private friends – Bob Trev-elyan, Ferdinand Schiller (Audubon), a compound of Berenson and Santayana,Sidney Webb, and some characters who are nobody in particular. You mustcertainly read it.My work has gone very well this summer, in spite of a long interruptioncaused by Theodore’s death. I have made more solid and permanent progressthan I usually do. But the end of Volume II is as far o? as ever – the task growsand grows. For the rest, I have been much occupied with other people’stragedies – some unusually painful ones have come in my way lately. Whatrather adds to the oppression is the impossibility of speaking of them – Still,I could hardly endure life if I were not on those terms with people that makeme necessarily share their sorrows; and if the sorrows exist, I would alwaysrather know them than not. Only I feel increasingly helpless before mis-fortune; I used to be able to speak encouraging words, but now I feel tooweary, and have too little faith in any remedy except endurance.Yours a?ectionatelyBertrand RussellLower CopseBagley Wood, OxfordJanuary 1, 1906My dear LucyI am very glad your sense of values prevailed over your Puritan instinct,and I am sure your sense of values was right. Letters are important; I care‘principia mathematica’ 173about getting letters from you, and it is the only way not to meet as strangerswhen people only meet at intervals of some years. And generally, I am sureyou are right not to give all your best hours to routine; people who do thatinfallibly become engrossed in routine, by which they both lose personallyand do the routine less well. In this, at least, I practise what I preach: I spentthe ?rst hour and a half of the new year in an argument about ethics, withyoung Arthur Dakyns, who is supposed to be my only disciple up here, butis a very restive disciple, always going after the false gods of the Hegelians.(We were staying with his people at Haslemere.) His father is a delightfulman, with a gift of friendliness and of generous admirations that I haveseldom seen equalled; and Arthur has inherited a great deal of his father’scharm. He is the only person up here (except the Murrays) that I feel as a realfriend – the rest are rather alien, so far as I know them....I am looking forward very much indeed to your visit, and I do hopenothing will happen to prevent it. I shall not be very busy at that time, as Ishall have been working continuously all the spring. I am afraid you will ?ndme grown more middle-aged, and with less power of throwing o? the pointof view of the daily round. The e?orts of life and of work are great, and in thelong run they tend to subdue one’s spirit through sheer weariness. I get moreand more into the way of ?lling my mind with the thoughts of what I have todo day by day, to the exclusion of things that have more real importance. It isperhaps inevitable, but it is a pity, and I feel it makes one a duller person.However, it suits work amazingly well. My work during 1905 was certainlybetter in quality and quantity than any I have done in a year before, unlessperhaps in 1900. The di?culty which I came upon in 1901, and was worry-ing over all the time you were in Europe, has come out at last, completely and?nally, so far as I can judge. It all came from considering whether the Kingof France is bald – a question which I decided in the same article in whichI proved that George IV was interested in the Law of Identity. The result ofthis is that Whitehead and I expect to have a comparatively easy time fromnow to the publication of our book, which we may hope will happen withinfour or ?ve years. Lately I have been working 10 hours a day, living in adream, realising the actual world only dimly through a mist. Having to go?rst to my Aunt Agatha on Hindhead, then to the Dakyns’s, I woke upsuddenly from the dream; but now I must go back into it, until we go abroadwith old Mr Ll. Davies and his daughter (on the 25th January)....I found your kind present to Alys on my return today, but she has not hadit yet, as she has gone to West Ham to canvass for Masterman. He is not theman I should have chosen, but she promised long ago, that she would helphim when the election came on. The political outlook is good on the whole.The Liberals have done wisely, as well as rightly, in stopping the S. AfricanSlave Trade in Chinamen. Campbell-Bannerman caused a ?utter by declaringthe autobiography of bertrand russell 174more or less for Home Rule; but today Redmond and the Duke of Devonshireboth advise electors to vote Liberal, so Campbell-Bannerman has caughtthe Home Rule vote without losing the Free Trade Unionist vote. Exactly theopposite might just as well have happened, so it is a stroke of luck. But by thetime you get this letter, the results will be coming in. The Cabinet is excellent.I am very glad John Burns is in it. But it may go to pieces later on the Irishquestion. However, I hope not. I breathe more freely every moment owing tothose soundrels being no longer in o?ce; but I wish I knew what majoritywe shall get. The question is: Will the Liberals be independent of the Irish?It is bound to be a near thing one way or other.I hope you will enjoy Dickinson’s Modern Symposium. You will recognise BobTrevylan and Sidney Webb. I like the book immensely.Do write again soon. Your letters are a great pleasure to me.Yours a?ectionatelyBertrand Russell14 Barton StreetWestminsterFebruary 18, 1906My dear Lucy...I have myself been horribly depressed lately. Margaret Davies is still inthe depths of unhappiness, and needs a great deal of silent sympathy, whichis much more tiring than the sort one can express. And I am as usualoppressed by a good many anxieties that I cannot speak about. I am lookingforward to work, which is a refuge. But I tired myself out before startingfor abroad, and I feel still rather slack, so I may ?nd I need more holiday.Sometimes I think I should like never to stop work, if only I had the strengthof body. Mathematics is a haven of peace without which I don’t know howI should get on. So I am hardly the person to tell you how to avoid depres-sion; because I can only give advice which I do not myself ?nd e?ective.I have, however, two things which really make me happier – one is the resultof the general election, which does mean that for the next few years at leastpublic a?airs in England will be more or less what one could wish; the other,more personal, is that my work has prospered amazingly, and that I havesolved the most di?cult problems I had to deal with, so that I have a prospectof some years of easy and rapid progress. I stayed a few days in Paris, and theygot up a dinner of philosophers and mathematicians for me, which I foundmost agreeable – it was interesting to meet the people, and was sweet incenseto my self-esteem. I was interested to observe, on a review of noses, that theywere mostly Jews. They seemed most civilised people, with great public spiritand intense devotion to learning. One of them said he had read an Englishpoem called ‘le vieux matelot’; I couldn’t think who had written anything‘principia mathematica’ 175called ‘the old sailor’ and began to think there might be something by Hoodof that name, when the truth ?ashed upon me. I also saw Miss Minturn andSantayana in Paris, which I enjoyed. – I go back to Oxford the end of thisweek. Alys has been very well, not at all exhausted by her labours in WestHam. I shall hope for another letter from you soon.Yours a?ectionatelyBertrand RussellProvidence HouseClovelly, near BidefordApril 22, 1906My dear Lucy...I am down here in absolute solitude for the best part of 2 months, and?nd it so far a very great success. The country is beautiful, beyond belief –tangled sleeping-beauty sort of woods, sloping steep down to the sea, andlittle valleys full of ferns and mosses and wild ?owers of innumerable kinds.I take a long walk every afternoon, and all the rest of the day and eveningI work, except at meals, when I re-read War and Peace, which I expect will lastme most of my time. On my walks I stop and read little bits of Walton’s Lives,or something else that is exquisite. My work goes ahead at a tremendouspace, and I get intense delight from it.7Being alone, I escape oppression ofmore things to think out, and more complicated decisions to make, thanI have energy to accomplish; and so I am contented, and ?nd enough tooccupy me in work, and enough vigour to make work a pleasure instead ofa torment.As for fame, which you speak of, I have no consciousness of possessing it –certainly at Oxford they regard me as a conceited and soulless formalist. But Ido not now care greatly what other people think of my work. I did care, untilI had enough con?dence that it was worth doing to be independent of praise.Now it gives me rather less pleasure than a ?ne day. I feel better able thananyone else to judge what my work is worth; besides, praise from the learnedpublic is necessarily for things written some time ago, which probably nowseem to me so full of imperfections that I hardly like to remember them.Work, when it goes well, is in itself a great delight; and after any considerableachievement I look back at it with the sort of placid satisfaction one has afterclimbing a mountain. What is absolutely vital to me is the self-respect I getfrom work – when (as often) I have done something for which I feelremorse, work restores me to a belief that it is better I should exist than notexist. And another thing I greatly value is the kind of communion with pastand future discoverers. I often have imaginary conversations with Leibniz,in which I tell him how fruitful his ideas have proved, and how muchmore beautiful the result is than he could have foreseen; and in moments ofthe autobiography of bertrand russell 176self-con?dence, I imagine students hereafter having similar thoughts aboutme. There is a ‘communion of philosophers’ as well as a ‘communion ofsaints’, and it is largely that that keeps me from feeling lonely.Well, this disquisition shows how self-absorbed one grows when one isalone!...I am glad your country girl has married the painter. All’s well that endswell; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the lastman left alive.I am on the whole satis?ed with Birrell. The Government have made somebad mistakes, but seem satisfactory in the main.Write again when you can, and address here.Yours a?ectionatelyBertrand RussellTo Lowes Dickinson:Little BucklandNr. Broadway, Wors.Aug. 2, ’02Dear Goldie. . . This neighbourhood, which I didn’t know before, is very charming;all the villages are built of a very good stone, and most of the houses areJacobean or older. There is a great plain full of willows, into which the sunsets, and on the other side high hills. Our lodgings are in an old and verypicturesque farm house. The place is bracing, and I have been getting througheight or nine hours of work a day, which has left me stupid at the end of it.My book, and Moore’s too probably, will be out some time in the winter. Theproofs come occasionally, and seem to me very worthless; I have a pooropinion of the stu? when I think of what it ought to be. Whitehead turnedup in College, but I got little of his society, as he was terribly busy withexam-papers. It is a funny arrangement, by which the remuneration of donsis inversely proportional to the value of their work. I wish something bettercould be devised. – It would be most agreeable to live in Cambridge, andI daresay I shall do so some day; but at present it is out of the question.However, we shall be in town after September 15 for six months; I hope youwill visit us during your weekly excursions to that haunt of purposelessactivity and foolish locomotion. When I see people who desire moneyor fame or power, I ?nd it hard to imagine what must be the emotionalemptiness of their lives, that can leave room for such trivial things.Yours everBertrand Russell‘principia mathematica’ 177Address: Friday’s Hill Little BucklandHaslemere Nr. Broadway, Wors.26 August, 1902Dear GoldieI was very glad of your letter, and I agree with all you said about the Paradiso,though it is many years since I read it. I feel also very strongly what you sayabout Italy and the North, though at bottom I disagree with you. I do notthink, to begin with, that Dante can count as an Italian; Italy begins with theRenaissance, and the mediaeval mind is international. But there is to meabout Italy a quality which the rest of Europe had in the 18th century, acomplete lack of mystery. Sunshine is very agreeable, but fogs and mists havee?ects which sunshine can never attain to. Seriously, the unmystical, rational-istic view of life seems to me to omit all that is most important and mostbeautiful. It is true that among unmystical people there is no truthunperceived, which the mystic might reveal; but mysticism creates the truthit believes in, by the way in which it feels the fundamental facts – the help-lessness of man before Time and Death, and the strange depths of feelingwhich lie dormant until some one of the Gods of life calls for our worship.Religion and art both, it seems to me, are attempts to humanise the uni-verse – beginning, no doubt, with the humanising of man. If some of thestubborn facts refuse to leave one’s consciousness, a religion or an art cannotappeal to one fully unless it takes account of those facts. And so all religionbecomes an achievement, a victory, an assurance that although man may bepowerless, his ideals are not so. The more facts a religion takes account of, thegreater is its victory, and that is why thin religions appeal to Puritan tem-peraments. I should myself value a religion in proportion to its austerity – if itis not austere, it seems a mere childish toy, which the ?rst touch of the realGods would dispel. But I fear that, however austere, any religion must be lessaustere than the truth. And yet I could not bear to lose from the world acertain awed solemnity, a certain stern seriousness – for the mere fact of lifeand death, of desire and hope and aspiration and love in a world of matterwhich knows nothing of good and bad, which destroys carelessly the thingsit has produced by accident, in spite of all the passionate devotion that wemay give – all this is not sunshine, or any peaceful landscapes seen throughlimpid air; yet life has the power to brand these things into one’s soul so thatall else seems triviality and vain babble. To have endowed only one minuteportion of the universe with the knowledge and love of good, and to havemade that portion the plaything of vast irresistible irrational forces, is a crueljest on the part of God or Fate. The best Gospel, I suppose, is the Stoic one; yeteven that is too optimistic, for matter can at any moment destroy our love ofvirtue.After all this moping, you will be con?rmed in your love of the South; andthe autobiography of bertrand russell 178indeed I feel it too, but as a longing to have done with the burden of a seriouslife. ‘Ye know, my friends, with what a gay carouse’ – and no doubt there ismuch to be said for the Daughter of the Vine, as for any other of Satan’s manyforms. To Hell with unity, and artistic serenity, and the insight that perceivesthe good in other people’s Pain – it sickens me. (And yet I know there is truthin it.)Yes, one must learn to live in the Past, and so to dominate it that it is not adisquieting ghost or a horrible gibbering spectre stalking through the vastbare halls that once were full of life, but a gentle soothing companion,reminding one of the possibility of good things, and rebuking cynicism andcruelty – but those are temptations which I imagine you do not su?er from.For my part, I do not even wish to live rather with eternal things, thoughI often give them lip-service; but in my heart I believe that the best things arethose that are fragile and temporary, and I ?nd a magic in the Past whicheternity cannot possess. Besides, nothing is more eternal than the Past – thepresent and future are still subject to Time, but the Past has escaped intoimmortality – Time has done his worst, and it yet lives.I don’t wonder you hate taking up your routine again. After one has hadliberty of mind, and allowed one’s thoughts and emotions to grow andexpand, it is horrible to go back to prison, and enclose all feelings within themiserable compass of the prudent and desirable and practically useful – Pah! –But all good things must be left to the wicked – even virtue, which onlyremains spotless if it is kept under a glass case, for ornament and not for use.I have been working nine hours a day until yesterday, living in a dream,thinking only of space; today I begin to realise the things that are in it, andon the whole they do not seem to me an improvement. But I hope we shallsee you in town.Yours everBertrand RussellChurt, FarnhamJuly 16, 1903Dear GoldieI enclose the translation, but I rather wish you would get someone with abetter knowledge of French to look it over, as my French is not at all correct.And by the way, I expect mémoire would be better than article, but I am not sure.I am glad you are writing on Religion. It is quite time to have things saidthat all of us know, but that are not generally known. It seems to me that ourattitude on religious subjects is one which we ought as far as possible topreach, and which is not the same as that of any of the well-knownopponents of Christianity. There is the Voltaire tradition, which makes fun ofthe whole thing from a common-sense, semi-historical, semi-literary point‘principia mathematica’ 179of view; this of course, is hopelessly inadequate, because it only gets hold ofthe accidents and excrescences of historical systems. Then there is the scien-ti?c, Darwin–Huxley attitude, which seems to me perfectly true, and quitefatal, if rightly carried out, to all the usual arguments for religion. But it is tooexternal, too coldly critical, too remote from the emotions; moreover, itcannot get to the root of the matter without the help of philosophy. Thenthere are the philosophers, like Bradley, who keep a shadow of religion, toolittle for comfort, but quite enough to ruin their systems intellectually. Butwhat we have to do, and what privately we do do, is to treat the religiousinstinct with profound respect, but to insist that there is no shred or particleof truth in any of the metaphysics it has suggested: to palliate this by trying tobring out the beauty of the world and of life, so far as it exists, and above allto insist upon preserving the seriousness of the religious attitude and its habitof asking ultimate questions. And if good lives are the best thing we know,the loss of religion gives new scope for courage and fortitude, and so maymake good lives better than any that there was room for while religiona?orded a drug in misfortune.And often I feel that religion, like the sun, has extinguished the stars of lessbrilliancy but not less beauty, which shine upon us out of the darkness ofa godless universe. The splendour of human life, I feel sure, is greater to thosewho are not dazzled by the divine radiance; and human comradeship seemsto grow more intimate and more tender from the sense that we are all exileson an inhospitable shore.Yours everB. RussellChurt, FarnhamJuly 19, 1903Dear GoldieMany thanks for sending me the three articles on Religion: they strike meas exceedingly good, and as saying things that much need saying. All youreloquent passages seem to me very successful; and the parable at the end I likequite immensely. I enclose a few remarks on some quite tiny points thatstruck me in reading – mostly verbal points.The attack on Ecclesiasticism is, I think, much needed; you if anythingunderestimate, I should say, the danger of Ecclesiasticism in this country.Whenever I happen to meet Beatrice Creighton I feel the danger profoundly;and she illustrates one of the worst points from a practical point of view,that even when a man belonging to an ecclesiastical system happens to bebroad-minded and liberal himself, he takes care to avoid such a state of mindin others whom he can in?uence.Why should you suppose I think it foolish to wish to see the people one isthe autobiography of bertrand russell 180fond of? What else is there to make life tolerable? We stand on the shore of anocean, crying to the night and the emptiness; sometimes a voice answers outof the darkness. But it is a voice of one drowning; and in a moment thesilence returns. The world seems to me quite dreadful; the unhappiness ofmost people is very great, and I often wonder how they all endure it. To knowpeople well is to know their tragedy: it is usually the central thing aboutwhich their lives are built. And I suppose if they did not live most of the timein the things of the moment, they would not be able to go on.Yours everB. RussellIvy LodgeTilford, FarnhamJuly 20, 1904Dear GoldieYes, I think you would do well to republish your articles on Religion in abook. It is hard to say what one gathers from them in a constructive way, yetthere certainly is something. I think it is chie?y, in the end, that one becomespersuaded of the truth of the passage you quote from Maeterlinck, i.e. thatthe emotion with which we contemplate the world may be religious, even ifwe have no de?nite theological beliefs. (Note that if Maeterlinck were not inFrench, he would be saying the same as In Memoriam, ‘there lives more faith,etc.’ This remark is linguistic.) You are likely to convince a certain number