out letters by enclosing them in the uncut pages of books. I could not, ofcourse, explain the method in the presence of the warder, so I practised it ?rstby giving Ottoline the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, and telling herthat it was more interesting than it seemed. Before I invented this device, Ifound another by which I could incorporate love-letters to Colette into letterswhich were read by the Governor of the prison. I professed to be readingFrench Revolutionary Memoirs, and to have discovered letters from theGirondin Buzot to Madame Roland. I concocted letters in French, saying that Ihad copied them out of a book. His circumstances were su?ciently similar tomy own to make it possible to give verisimilitude to these letters. In any case,I suspect that the Governor did not know French, but would not confessignorance.the first war 243The prison was full of Germans, some of them very intelligent. When Ionce published a review of a book about Kant, several of them came up to meand argued warmly about my interpretation of that philosopher. During partof my time, Litvinov was in the same prison, but I was not allowed anyopportunity of speaking to him, though I used to see him in the distance.Some of my moods in prison are illustrated by the following extracts fromletters to my brother, all of which had to be such as to be passed by theGovernor of the prison:(May 6, 1918) . . . ‘Life here is just like life on an Ocean Liner; one is coopedup with a number of average human beings, unable to escape except into one’sown state-room. I see no sign that they are worse than the average, except thatthey probably have less will-power, if one can judge by their faces, which isall I have to go by. That applies to debtors chie?y. The only real hardship oflife here is not seeing one’s friends. It was a great delight seeing you the otherday. Next time you come, I hope you will bring two others – I think you andElizabeth both have the list. I am anxious to see as much of my friends aspossible. You seemed to think I should grow indi?erent on that point but Iam certain you were wrong. Seeing the people I am fond of is not a thingI should grow indi?erent to, though thinking of them is a great satisfaction. I?nd it comforting to go over in my mind all sorts of occasions when thingshave been to my liking.‘Impatience and lack of tobacco do not as yet trouble me as much as Iexpected, but no doubt they will later. The holiday from responsibilityis really delightful, so delightful that it almost outweighs everything else.Here I have not a care in the world: the rest to nerves and will is heavenly.One is free from the torturing question: What more might I be doing? Isthere any e?ective action that I haven’t thought of? Have I a right to let thewhole thing go and return to philosophy? Here, I have to let the whole thinggo, which is far more restful than choosing to let it go and doubting if one’schoice is justi?ed. Prison has some of the advantages of the CatholicChurch...’(May 27, 1918) . . . ‘Tell Lady Ottoline I have been reading the two books onthe Amazon: Tomlinson I loved; Bates bores me while I am reading him, butleaves pictures in my mind which I am glad of afterwards. Tomlinson owesmuch to Heart of Darkness. The contrast with Bates is remarkable: one sees howour generation, in comparison, is a little mad, because it has allowed itselfglimpses of the truth, and the truth is spectral, insane, ghastly: the more mensee of it, the less mental health they retain. The Victorians (dear souls) weresane and successful because they never came anywhere near truth. But for mypart I would rather be mad with truth than sane with lies...’the autobiography of bertrand russell 244(June 10, 1918) . . . ‘Being here in these conditions is not as disagreeable asthe time I spent as attaché at the Paris Embassy, and not in the same world ofhorror as the year and a half I spent at a crammer’s. The young men therewere almost all going into the Army or the Church, so they were at a muchlower moral level than the average...(July 8, 1918) . . . ‘I am not fretting at all, on the contrary. At ?rst I thought agood deal about my own concerns, but not (I think) more than was reason-able; now I hardly ever think about them, as I have done all I can. I read a greatdeal, and think about philosophy quite fruitfully. It is odd and irrational, butthe fact is my spirits depend on the military situation as much as anything:when the Allies do well I feel cheerful, when they do badly, I worry over allsorts of things that seem quite remote from the War...’(July 22, 1918) . . . ‘I have been reading about Mirabeau. His death is amus-ing. As he was dying he said “Ah! si j’eusse vécu, que j’eusse donné de chagrin à ce Pitt!”which I prefer to Pitt’s words (except in Dizzy’s version). They were nothowever quite the last words Mirabeau uttered. He went on: “Il ne reste plusqu’une chose à faire: c’est de se parfumer, de se couronner de ?eurs et de s’environner de musique,a?n d’entrer agréablement dans ce sommeil dont on ne se réveille plus. Legrain, qu’on se prépare àme raser, à faire ma toilette toute entière.” Then, turning to a friend who was sob-bing, “Eh bien! êtes-vous content, mon cher connaisseur en belles morts?” At last, hearingsome guns ?red, “Sont-ce déjà les funérailles d’Achille?” After that, apparently, heheld his tongue, thinking, I suppose, that any further remark would be ananticlimax. He illustrates the thesis I was maintaining to you last Wednesday,that all unusual energy is inspired by an unusual degree of vanity. There isjust one other motive: love of power. Philip II of Spain and Sidney Webb ofGrosvenor Road are not remarkable for vanity.’There was only one thing that made me mind being in prison, and that wasconnected with Colette. Exactly a year after I had fallen in love with her, shefell in love with someone else, though she did not wish it to make anydi?erence in her relations with me. I, however, was bitterly jealous.13I had theworst opinion of him, not wholly without reason. We had violent quarrels,and things were never again quite the same between us. While I was in prison,I was tormented by jealousy the whole time, and driven wild by the sense ofimpotence. I did not think myself justi?ed in feeling jealousy, which Iregarded as an abominable emotion, but none the less it consumed me. WhenI ?rst had occasion to feel it, it kept me awake almost the whole of every nightfor a fortnight, and at the end I only got sleep by getting a doctor to prescribesleeping-draughts. I recognise now that the emotion was wholly foolish, andthat Colette’s feeling for me was su?ciently serious to persist through anythe first war 245number of minor a?airs. But I suspect that the philosophical attitude which Iam now able to maintain in such matters is due less to philosophy than tophysiological decay. The fact was, of course, that she was very young, andcould not live continually in the atmosphere of high seriousness in which Ilived in those days. But although I know this now, I allowed jealousy to leadme to denounce her with great violence, with the natural result that herfeelings towards me were considerably chilled. We remained lovers until1920, but we never recaptured the perfection of the ?rst year.I came out of prison in September 1918, when it was already clear that theWar was ending. During the last weeks, in common with most other people, Ibased my hopes upon Woodrow Wilson. The end of the War was so swift anddramatic that no one had time to adjust feelings to changed circumstances. Ilearned on the morning of November 11th, a few hours in advance of thegeneral public, that the Armistice was coming. I went out into the street, andtold a Belgian soldier, who said: ‘Tiens, c’est chic!’ I went into a tobacconist’s andtold the lady who served me. ‘I am glad of that’, she said, ‘because now weshall be able to get rid of the interned Germans.’ At eleven o’clock, when theArmistice was announced, I was in Tottenham Court Road. Within two min-utes everybody in all the shops and o?ces had come into the street. Theycommandeered the buses, and made them go where they liked. I saw a manand woman, complete strangers to each other, meet in the middle of the roadand kiss as they passed.Late into the night I stayed alone in the streets, watching the temper of thecrowd, as I had done in the August days four years before. The crowd wasfrivolous still, and had learned nothing during the period of horror, except tosnatch at pleasure more recklessly than before. I felt strangely solitary amidthe rejoicings, like a ghost dropped by accident from some other planet. True,I rejoiced also, but I could ?nd nothing in common between my rejoicingand that of the crowd. Throughout my life I have longed to feel that onenesswith large bodies of human beings that is experienced by the members ofenthusiastic crowds. The longing has often been strong enough to lead meinto self-deception. I have imagined myself in turn a Liberal, a Socialist, or aPaci?st, but I have never been any of these things, in any profound sense.Always the sceptical intellect, when I have most wished it silent, has whis-pered doubts to me, has cut me o? from the facile enthusiasms of others, andhas transported me into a desolate solitude. During the War, while I workedwith Quakers, non-resisters, and socialists, while I was willing to accept theunpopularity and the inconvenience belonging to unpopular opinions, Iwould tell the Quakers that I thought many wars in history had been justi?ed,and the socialists that I dreaded the tyranny of the State. They would lookaskance at me, and while continuing to accept my help would feel that I wasnot one of them. Underlying all occupations and all pleasures I have felt sincethe autobiography of bertrand russell 246early youth the pain of solitude. I have escaped it most nearly in moments oflove, yet even there, on re?ection, I have found that the escape dependedpartly upon illusion.14I have known no woman to whom the claims ofintellect were as absolute as they are to me, and wherever intellect intervened,I have found that the sympathy I sought in love was apt to fail. What Spinozacalls ‘the intellectual love of God’ has seemed to me the best thing to live by,but I have not had even the somewhat abstract God that Spinoza allowedhimself to whom to attach my intellectual love. I have loved a ghost, and inloving a ghost my inmost self has itself become spectral. I have thereforeburied it deeper and deeper beneath layers of cheerfulness, a?ection, and joyof life. But my most profound feelings have remained always solitary and havefound in human things no companionship. The sea, the stars, the night windin waste places, mean more to me than even the human beings I love best,and I am conscious that human a?ection is to me at bottom an attempt toescape from the vain search for God.The War of 1914–18 changed everything for me. I ceased to be academicand took to writing a new kind of books. I changed my whole conception ofhuman nature. I became for the ?rst time deeply convinced that Puritanismdoes not make for human happiness. Through the spectacle of death Iacquired a new love for what is living. I became convinced that most humanbeings are possessed by a profound unhappiness venting itself in destructiverages, and that only through the di?usion of instinctive joy can a good worldbe brought into being. I saw that reformers and reactionaries alike in ourpresent world have become distorted by cruelties. I grew suspicious of allpurposes demanding stern discipline. Being in opposition to the whole pur-pose of the community, and ?nding all the everyday virtues used as meansfor the slaughter of Germans, I experienced great di?culty in not becoming acomplete Antinomian. But I was saved from this by the profound compassionwhich I felt for the sorrows of the world. I lost old friends and made newones. I came to know some few people whom I could deeply admire, ?rstamong whom I should place E. D. Morel. I got to know him in the ?rst days ofthe War, and saw him frequently until he and I were in prison. He had single-minded devotion to the truthful presentation of facts. Having begun byexposing the iniquities of the Belgians in the Congo, he had di?culty inaccepting the myth of ‘gallant little Belgium’. Having studied minutely thediplomacy of the French and Sir Edward Grey in regard to Morocco, he couldnot view the Germans as the sole sinners. With untiring energy and immenseability in the face of all the obstacles of propaganda and censorship, he didwhat he could to enlighten the British nation as to the true purposes forwhich the Government was driving the young men to the shambles. Morethan any other opponent of the War, he was attacked by politicians and thepress, and of those who had heard his name ninety-nine per cent believedthe first war 247him to be in the pay of the Kaiser. At last he was sent to prison for the purelytechnical o?ence of having employed Miss Sidgwick, instead of the post, forthe purpose of sending a letter and some documents to Romain Rolland. Hewas not, like me, in the ?rst division, and he su?ered an injury to his healthfrom which he never recovered. In spite of all this, his courage never failed. Heoften stayed up late at night to comfort Ramsay MacDonald, who frequentlygot ‘cold feet’, but when MacDonald came to form a government, he couldnot think of including anyone so tainted with pro-Germanism as Morel.Morel felt his ingratitude deeply, and shortly afterwards died of heart disease,acquired from the hardships of prison life.There were some among the Quakers whom I admired very greatly, inspite of a very di?erent outlook. I might take as typical of these the treasurerof the No Conscription Fellowship, Mr Grubb. He was, when I ?rst knewhim, a man of seventy, very quiet, very averse from publicity, and veryimmovable. He took what came without any visible sign of emotion. Heacted on behalf of the young men in prison with a complete absence ofeven the faintest trace of self-seeking. When he and a number of others werebeing prosecuted for a paci?st publication, my brother was in court listeningto his cross-examination. My brother, though not a paci?st, was impressedby the man’s character and integrity. He was sitting next to Matthews, thePublic Prosecutor, who was a friend of his. When the Public Prosecutor satdown at the end of his cross-examination of Mr Grubb, my brother whis-pered to him: ‘Really, Matthews, the role of Torquemada does not suityou!’ My brother’s remark so angered Matthews that he would never speak tohim again.One of the most curious incidents of the War, so far as I was concerned,was a summons to the War O?ce to be kindly reasoned with. Several RedTabs with the most charming manners and the most friendly attitude,besought me to acquire a sense of humour, for they held that no one with asense of humour would give utterance to unpopular opinions. They failed,however, and afterwards I regretted that I had not replied that I held my sideswith laughter every morning as I read the casualty ?gures.When the War was over, I saw that all I had done had been totally uselessexcept to myself. I had not saved a single life or shortened the War by aminute. I had not succeeded in doing anything to diminish the bitternesswhich caused the Treaty of Versailles. But at any rate I had not been anaccomplice in the crime of all the belligerent nations, and for myself I hadacquired a new philosophy and a new youth. I had got rid of the don and thePuritan. I had learned an understanding of instinctive processes which I hadnot possessed before, and I had acquired a certain poise from having stood solong alone. In the days of the Armistice men had high hopes of Wilson. Othermen found their inspiration in Bolshevik Russia. But when I found thatthe autobiography of bertrand russell 248neither of these sources of optimism was available for me, I was neverthelessable not to despair. It is my deliberate expectation that the worst is to come,15but I do not on that account cease to believe that men and women willultimately learn the simple secret of instinctive joy.LETTERSFrom Norbert WienerBühlstr. 28G?ttingenGermany[c. June or July, 1914]My dear Mr RussellAt present I am studying here in G?ttingen, following your advice. I amhearing a course on the Theory of Groups with Landau, a course on Di?eren-tial Equations with Hilbert (I know it has precious little to do with Philosophybut I wanted to hear Hilbert), and three courses with Husserl, one on Kant’sethical writings, one on the principles of Ethics, and the seminary on Phe-nomenology. I must confess that the intellectual contortions through whichone must go before one ?nds oneself in the true Phenomenological attitudeare utterly beyond me. The applications of Phenomenology to Mathematics,and the claims of Husserl that no adequate account can be given of thefoundations of Mathematics without starting out from Phenomenology seemto me absurd.Symbolic logic stands in little favour in G?ttingen. As usual, the Mathema-ticians will have nothing to do with anything so philosophical as logic, whilethe philosophers will have nothing to do with anything so mathematical assymbols. For this reason, I have not done much original work this term: it isdisheartening to try to do original work where you know that not a personwith whom you talk about it will understand a word you say.During the P?ngsten holidays, I called on Frege up at Brunnshaupten inMecklenburg, where he spends his holidays. I had several interesting talkswith him about your work.A topic which has interested me of late is the question whether one canobtain a simpler set of postulates for Geometry by taking the convex solid& relations between convex solids as inde?nable, and de?ning points asyou de?ne instants. I have obtained ?ve or six sets of de?nitions of the funda-mental Geometrical concepts in this manner, but I am utterly at a loss for amethod to simplify the postulates of Geometry in this manner: e.g. thetriangle-transversal postulate o?ers almost insuperable di?culties if oneattempts to simplify it by resolving it into a proposition about arbitraryconvex surfaces.the first war 249I thank you very much for your interest in my article & discovery. I havesome material now that might go with my work on sensation-intensities tomake a new article: I would like to ask you what I should do with it. It is anextension of my work on time to polyadic relations having some of theproperties of series: for example, to the ‘between’ relation among the pointsof a given straight line...16I herewith send you my reprints, and o?er my apologies to you for nothaving sent them sooner. The reason is this: I sent all of my articles destinedfor distribution in America to father, with directions to ‘sow them wherethey would take root’. Father probably imagined that I had sent your copies toyou direct.I am very glad to hear that you had such an enjoyable time with us,and I shall certainly spend next year studying under you in Cambridge. I amjust beginning to realise what my work under you there has ment [sic]for me.Yours very respectfullyNorbert WienerTo the London Nation for August 15, 1914SirAgainst the vast majority of my countrymen, even at this moment, inthe name of humanity and civilisation, I protest against our share in thedestruction of Germany.A month ago Europe was a peaceful comity of nations; if an Englishmankilled a German, he was hanged. Now, if an Englishman kills a German, or if aGerman kills an Englishman, he is a patriot, who has deserved well of hiscountry. We scan the newspapers with greedy eyes for news of slaughter, andrejoice when we read of innocent young men, blindly obedient to the wordof command, mown down in thousands by the machine-guns of Liège.Those who saw the London crowds, during the nights leading up to theDeclaration of War, saw a whole population, hitherto peaceable and humane,precipitated in a few days down the steep slope to primitive barbarism,letting loose, in a moment, the instincts of hatred and blood lust againstwhich the whole fabric of society has been raised. ‘Patriots’ in all countriesacclaim this brutal orgy as a noble determination to vindicate the right;reason and mercy are swept away in one great ?ood of hatred; dim abstrac-tions of unimaginable wickedness – Germany to us and the French, Russia tothe Germans – conceal the simple fact that the enemy are men, like ourselves,neither better nor worse – men who love their homes and the sunshine, andall the simple pleasures of common lives; men now mad with terror in thethought of their wives, their sisters, their children, exposed, with our help, tothe tender mercies of the conquering Cossack.the autobiography of bertrand russell 250And all this madness, all this rage, all this ?aming death of our civilisationand our hopes, has been brought about because a set of o?cial gentlemen,living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart,have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them shouldsu?er some in?nitesimal rebu? to his country’s pride. No literary tragedy canapproach the futile horror of the White Paper. The diplomatists, seeing fromthe ?rst the inevitable end, mostly wishing to avoid it, yet drifted from hourto hour of the swift crisis, restrained by punctilio from making or acceptingthe small concessions that might have saved the world, hurried on at last byblind fear to loose the armies for the work of mutual butchery.And behind the diplomatists, dimly heard in the o?cial documents, standvast forces of national greed and national hatred – atavistic instincts, harmfulto mankind at its present level, but transmitted from savage and half-animalancestors, concentrated and directed by Governments and the Press, fosteredby the upper class as a distraction from social discontent, arti?cially nour-ished by the sinister in?uence of the makers of armaments, encouraged by awhole foul literature of ‘glory’, and by every text-book of history with whichthe minds of children are polluted.England, no more than other nations which participate in this war,can be absolved either as regards its national passions or as regards itsdiplomacy.For the past ten years, under the fostering care of the Government anda portion of the Press, a hatred of Germany has been cultivated and a fear ofthe German Navy. I do not suggest that Germany has been guiltless; I do notdeny that the crimes of Germany have been greater than our own. But I do saythat whatever defensive measures were necessary should have been taken in aspirit of calm foresight, not in a wholly needless turmoil of panic and sus-picion. It is this deliberately created panic and suspicion that produced thepublic opinion by which our participation in the war has been renderedpossible.Our diplomacy, also, has not been guiltless. Secret arrangements, con-cealed from Parliament and even (at ?rst) from almost all the Cabinet, created,in spite of reiterated denials, an obligation suddenly revealed when the warfever had reached the point which rendered public opinion tolerant of thediscovery that the lives of many, and the livelihood of all, had been pledgedby one man’s irresponsible decisions. Yet, though France knew our obliga-tions, Sir E. Grey refused, down to the last moment, to inform Germany of theconditions of our neutrality or of our intervention. On August 1st he reportsas follows a conversation with the German Ambassador (No. 123):‘He asked me whether, if Germany gave a promise not to violate Belgianneutrality, we would engage to remain neutral. I replied that I could not saythat; our hands were still free, and we were considering what our attitudethe first war 251should be. All I could say was that our attitude would be determined largelyby public opinion here, and that the neutrality of Belgium would appeal verystrongly to public opinion here. I did not think that we could give a promise ofneutrality on that condition alone. The Ambassador pressed me as to whetherI could not formulate conditions on which we would remain neutral. Heeven suggested that the integrity of France and her colonies might be guaran-teed. I said I felt obliged to refuse de?nitely any promise to remain neutral onsimilar terms, and I could only say that we must keep our hands free.’It thus appears that the neutrality of Belgium, the integrity of France andher colonies, and the naval defence of the northern and western coasts ofFrance, were all mere pretexts. If Germany had agreed to our demands in allthese respects, we should still not have promised neutrality.I cannot resist the conclusion that the Government has failed in its duty tothe nation by not revealing long-standing arrangements with the French,until, at the last moment, it made them the basis of an appeal to honour; thatit has failed in its duty to Europe by not declaring its attitude at the beginningof the crisis; and that it has failed in its duty to humanity by not informingGermany of conditions which would insure its non-participation in a warwhich, whatever its outcome, must cause untold hardship and the loss ofmany thousands of our bravest and noblest citizens.Yours, etc.August 12, 1914 Bertrand RussellFrom Lord Morley17FlowermeadPrinces RoadWimbledon Park, S.W.Aug. 7. 16 [’14]Dear Mr RussellThank you for telling me that you and I are in accord on this breakdown ofright and political wisdom. The approval of a man like you is of real value,and I value it sincerely.YoursM[Morley]From C. P. Sanger Cote BankWestbury-on-TrymBristolFriday 7th Aug. 1914Dear BertieIt was very kind of you to write. I feel overwhelmed by the horror of thewhole thing. As you know I have always regarded Grey as one of the mostthe autobiography of bertrand russell 252wicked and dangerous criminals that has ever disgraced civilisation, but it isawful that a liberal Cabinet should have been parties to engineering a war todestroy Teutonic civilisation in favour of Servians and the Russian autocracy. Ipray that the economic disturbance may be so great as to compel peace fairlysoon, but it looks as bad as can be.Your fraternallyC. P. SangerFrom F. C. S. Schiller Esher HouseEsher, Surrey19/8/14Dear RussellI have just read ?rst your admirable letter in the Nation and then theWhite Book, with special attention to the sequence of events which culmin-