he is a friend or an enemy and, if the latter, we think we are justi?ed incompelling the law to punish him.In addition to those who consider all war wrong, there are those whoobject to the particular war that they are asked to ?ght. This happened withmany people at the time of the Korean War and later in regard to the VietnamWar. Such people are punished if they refuse to ?ght. The law not onlypunishes those who condemn all war, but also those who condemn anyparticular war although it must be obvious that in any war one side, at least, isencouraging evil. Those who take this position of objecting to a certain waror a certain law or to certain actions of governments may be held justi?edbecause it is so doubtful that they are not justi?ed. Such considerations, it willbe said, since they condemn the punishment of supposed malefactors, throwthe autobiography of bertrand russell 496doubt upon the whole criminal law. I believe this is true and I hold that everycondemned criminal incurs a certain measure of doubt, sometimes great andsometimes small. This is admitted when it is an enemy who is tried, as in theNuremberg Trials. It was widely admitted that the Nuremberg prisonerswould not have been condemned if they had been tried by Germans. Theenemies of the German Government would have punished with death anysoldier among themselves who had practised the sort of civil disobediencethe lack of which among Germans they pleaded as an excuse for condemningGermans. They refused to accept the plea made by many of those whom theycondemned that they had committed criminal acts only under command ofthose in superior authority. The judges of Nuremberg believed that theGermans should have committed civil disobedience in the name of decencyand humanity. This is little likely to have been their view if they had beenjudging their own countrymen and not their enemies. But I believe it is trueof friend as well as foe. The line between proper acceptable civil disobedienceand inacceptable civil disobedience comes, I believe, with the reason for itbeing committed – the seriousness of the object for which it is committedand the profundity of the belief in its necessity.Some years before I gave the Reith Lectures, my old professor and friendand collaborator in Principia Mathematica, A. N. Whitehead, had been given the??. Now, by the early part of 1949, I had become so respectable in the eyesof the Establishment that it was felt that I, too, should be given the ??. Thismade me very happy for, though I dare say it would surprise many English-men and most of the English Establishment to hear it, I am passionatelyEnglish, and I treasure an honour bestowed on me by the Head of my coun-try. I had to go to Buckingham Palace for the o?cial bestowal of it. The Kingwas a?able, but somewhat embarrassed at having to behave graciously to soqueer a fellow, a convict to boot. He remarked, ‘You have sometimes behavedin a way which would not do if generally adopted’. I have been glad eversince that I did not make the reply that sprang to my mind: ‘Like yourbrother.’ But he was thinking of things like my having been a conscientiousobjector, and I did not feel that I could let this remark pass in silence, so I said:‘How a man should behave depends upon his profession. A postman, forinstance, should knock at all the doors in a street at which he has letters todeliver, but if anybody else knocked on all the doors, he would be considereda public nuisance.’ The King, to avoid answering, abruptly changed the sub-ject by asking me whether I knew who was the only man who had both the?? and the ??. I did not know, and he graciously informed me that it wasLord Portal. I did not mention that he was my cousin.In the February of that year I had been asked to give an address, which Icalled ‘L’Individu et l’Etat Moderne’, at the Sorbonne. In the course of itI spoke warmly and in most laudatory terms of Jean Nicod, the brilliant andreturn to england 497delightful young mathematician who died in 1924.2I was very glad after thelecture that I had done so, for I learnt that, unknown to me, his widow hadbeen in the audience.At the end of June, 1950, I went to Australia in response to an invitation bythe Australian Institute of International A?airs to give lectures at variousuniversities on subjects connected with the Cold War. I interpreted thissubject liberally and my lectures dealt with speculation about the future ofindustrialism. There was a Labour Government there and, in spite of the factthat the hatred and fear of China and, especially, Japan, was understandably?erce, things seemed better and more hopeful than they appeared to becomein the following sixteen years. I liked the people and I was greatly impressedby the size of the country and the fact that ordinary private conversations,gossips, were conducted by radio. Because of the size, too, and people’srelative isolation, the libraries and bookshops were impressively numerousand good, and people read more than elsewhere. I was taken to the capitals,and to Alice Springs which I wanted to see because it was so isolated. It wasa centre for agriculture and inhabited chie?y by sheep owners. I was showna ?ne gaol where I was assured that the cells were comfortable. In reply to myquery as to why, I was told: ‘Oh, because all the leading citizens at one timeor another are in gaol.’ I was told that, expectedly and regularly, wheneverpossible, they stole each other’s sheep.I visited all parts of Australia except Tasmania. The Korean War was in fullswing, and I learnt to my surprise that the northern parts of Queensland had,when war broke out, been evacuated, but were again inhabited when I wasthere.The Government, I found, treated the Aborigines fairly well, but the policeand the public treated them abominably. I was taken by a public o?cialwhose duty it was to look after Aborigines to see a village in which all theinhabitants were native Australians. One complained to us that he had had abicycle which had been stolen, and he displayed marked unwillingness tocomplain to the police about it. I asked my conductor why, and he explainedthat any native who appealed to the police would be grossly ill-treated bythem. I observed, myself, that white men generally spoke abusively to theAborigines.My other contact with the Government concerned irrigation. There is achain of hills called ‘Snowy Mountains’ and there was a Federal scheme toutilise these mountains for purposes of irrigation. When I was there thescheme was bogged down by the operation of States which would not bene-?t by it. A scheme was being pushed to advocate the proposed irrigation onthe grounds of defence rather than of irrigation, thus avoiding con?icts ofStates which are a standard problem in Australian politics. I spoke in favour ofthis scheme.the autobiography of bertrand russell 498I was kept very busy making speeches and being interviewed by journalistsand, at the end of my stay, I was presented with a beautifully bound book ofpress cuttings which I cherish, though I do not like much of what thejournalists report me as saying of myself. I had advocated birth control onsome occasion and naturally the Roman Catholics did not approve of me, andthe Archbishop of Melbourne said publicly that I had been at one timeexcluded from the United States by the United States Government. This wasnot true; and I spoke of suing him, but a group of journalists questioned himon the point and he admitted his error publicly, which was a disappointment,since it meant that I had to relinquish the hope of receiving damages from anArchbishop.On my way home to England my plane stopped at Singapore and Karachiand Bombay and other places. Though I was not permitted to visit any ofthese places, beyond their airports, as the plane did not stop long enough,I was called upon to make radio speeches. Later, I saw from a cutting from TheSydney Morning Herald for August 26th, an account of my speech at Singapore. Itreported my saying: ‘I think that Britain should withdraw gracefully fromAsia, as she did in India, and not wait to be driven out in the event of awar . . . In this way good-will will be won and a neutral Asian bloc could beformed under the leadership of Pandit Nehru. This is the best thing that canhappen now, and the strongest argument in its favour is that it would be astrategic move.’ This, though unheeded, seems to me to have been goodadvice.Soon after my return from Australia, I went again to the United States. I hadbeen asked to ‘give a short course’ in philosophy for a month at Mt HolyoakCollege, a well-known college for women in New England. From there I wentto Princeton where I, as usual, delivered a lecture and again met various oldfriends, among them Einstein. There I received the news that I was to begiven a Nobel Prize. But the chief memory of this visit to America is of theseries of three lectures that I gave on the Matchette Foundation at ColumbiaUniversity. I was put up in luxury at the Plaza Hotel and shepherded about byMiss Julie Medlock, who had been appointed by Columbia to bear-lead me.Her views on international a?airs were liberal and sympathetic and we havecontinued to discuss them, both by letter and when she visits us as shesometimes does.My lectures, a few months later, appeared with other lectures that I hadgiven originally at Ruskin College, Oxford, and the Lloyd Roberts Lecture thatI had given in 1949 at the Royal Society of Medicine, London, as the basis ofmy book called The Impact of Science on Society. The title is the same as that of thethree lectures that Columbia University published separately, which isunfortunate as it causes bewilderment for bibliographers and is sometimes adisappointment to those who come upon only the Columbia publication.return to england 499I was astonished that, in New York, where I had been, so short a timebefore, spoken of with vicious obloquy, my lectures seemed to be popularand to draw crowds. This was not surprising, perhaps, at the ?rst lecture,where the audience might have gathered to have a glimpse of so horrid acharacter, hoping for shocks and scandal and general rebelliousness. But whatamazed me was that the hall should have been packed with enthusiasticstudents in increasing numbers as the lectures proceeded. There were somany that crowds of those who came had to be turned away for lack of evenstanding room. I think it also surprised my hosts.The chief matter with which I was concerned was the increase of humanpower owing to scienti?c knowledge. The gist of my ?rst lecture was con-tained in the following sentence: ‘It is not by prayer and humility that youcause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of naturallaws.’ I pointed out that the power to be acquired in this way is very muchgreater than the power that men formerly sought to achieve by theologicalmeans. The second lecture was concerned with the increase of power menachieve by the application of scienti?c technique. It begins with gunpowderand the mariners’ compass. Gunpowder destroyed the power of castles andthe mariners’ compass created the power of Europe over other parts of theworld. These increases of governmental power were important, but the newpower brought by the Industrial Revolution was more so. I was largely con-cerned in this lecture with the bad e?ect of early industrial power and withthe dangers that will result if any powerful State adopts scienti?c breeding.From this I went on to the increase of the harmfulness of war when scienti?cmethods are employed. This is, at present, the most important form of theapplication of science in our day. It threatens the destruction of the humanrace and, indeed, of all living beings of larger than microscopic size. Ifmankind is to survive, the power of making scienti?c war will have to beconcentrated in a supreme State. But this is so contrary to men’s mental habitsthat, as yet, the great majority would prefer to run the risk of extermination.This is the supreme danger of our age. Whether a World Government will beestablished in time or not is the supreme question. In my third lecture I amconcerned chie?y with certain views as to good and evil from which I dissentalthough many men consider that they alone are scienti?c. The views inquestion are that the good is identical with the useful. I ended these lectureswith an investigation of the kind of temperament which must be dominant ifa happy world is to be possible. The ?rst requisite, I should say, is absence ofdogmatism, since dogmatism almost inevitably leads to war. I will quote theparagraph summing up what I thought necessary if the world is to be saved:‘There are certain things that our age needs, and certain things that it shouldavoid. It needs compassion and a wish that mankind should be happy; itneeds the desire for knowledge and the determination to eschew pleasantthe autobiography of bertrand russell 500myths; it needs, above all, courageous hope and the impulse to creativeness.The things that it must avoid and that have brought it to the brink ofcatastrophe are cruelty, envy, greed, competitiveness, search for irrationalsubjective certainty, and what Freudians call the death wish.’I think I was mistaken in being surprised that my lectures were liked bythe audience. Almost any young academic audience is liberal and likes to hearliberal and even quasi-revolutionary opinions expressed by someone inauthority. They like, also any jibe at any received opinion, whether orthodoxor not: for instance, I spent some time making fun of Aristotle for saying thatthe bite of the shrewmouse is dangerous to a horse, especially if the shrew-mouse is pregnant. My audience was irreverent and so was I. I think thiswas the main basis of their liking of my lectures. My unorthodoxy wasnot con?ned to politics. My trouble in New York in 1940 on sexualmorals had blown over but had left in any audience of mine an expectationthat they would hear something that the old and orthodox would considershocking. There were plenty of such items in my discussion of scienti?cbreeding. Generally, I had the pleasant experience of being applauded on thevery same remarks which had caused me to be ostracised on the earlieroccasion.I got into trouble with a passage at the tail end of my last Columbia lecture.In this passage, I said that what the world needs is ‘love, Christian love, orcompassion’. The result of my use of the word ‘Christian’ was a deluge ofletters from Free-thinkers deploring my adoption of orthodoxy, and fromChristians welcoming me to the fold. When, ten years later, I was welcomedby the Chaplain to Brixton Prison with the words, ‘I am glad that you haveseen the light’, I had to explain to him that this was an entire misconception,that my views were completely unchanged and that what he called seeing thelight I should call groping in darkness. I had thought it obvious that, whenI spoke of Christian love, I put in the adjective ‘Christian’ to distinguish it fromsexual love, and I should certainly have supposed that the context made thiscompletely clear. I go on to say that, ‘If you feel this you have a motive forexistence, a guide in action, a reason for courage, and an imperative necessityfor intellectual honesty. If you feel this, you have all that anybody shouldneed in the way of religion.’ It seems to me totally inexplicable that anybodyshould think the above words a description of Christianity, especially in view,as some Christians will remember, of how very rarely Christians have shownChristian love. I have done my best to console those who are not Christiansfor the pain that I unwittingly caused them by a lax use of the suspectadjective. My essays and lectures on the subject have been edited and pub-lished in 1957 by Professor Paul Edwards along with an essay by him on myNew York di?culties of 1940, under the title Why I am not a Christian.When I was called to Stockholm, at the end of 1950, to receive the Nobelreturn to england 501Prize – somewhat to my surprise, for literature, for my book Marriage andMorals – I was apprehensive, since I remembered that, exactly three hundredyears earlier, Descartes had been called to Scandinavia by Queen Christina inthe winter time and had died of the cold. However, we were kept warm andcomfortable, and instead of snow, we had rain, which was a slight disap-pointment. The occasion, though very grand, was pleasant and I enjoyed it.I was sorry for another prize winner who looked utterly miserable and was soshy that he refused to speak to anyone and could not make himself heardwhen he had to make his formal speech as we all had to do. My dinnercompanion was Madame Joliot-Curie and I found her talk interesting. At theevening party given by the King, an Aide-de-Camp came to say that theKing wished to talk with me. He wanted Sweden to join with Norway andDenmark against the Russians. I said that it was obvious, if there were a warbetween the West and the Russians, the Russians could only get to Norwegianports through and over Swedish territory. The King approved of this observa-tion. I was rather pleased, too, by my speech, especially by the mechanicalsharks, concerning whom I said: ‘I think every big town should containarti?cial waterfalls that people could descend in very fragile canoes, and theyshould contain bathing pools full of mechanical sharks. Any person foundadvocating a preventive war should be condemned to two hours a day withthese ingenious monsters.’ I found that two or three fellow Nobel prize-winners listened to what I had to say and considered it not without impor-tance. Since then I have published it in Part II of my book Human Society in Ethicsand Politics and a gramophone record has been made of it in America. I haveheard that it has a?ected many people more than I had thought which isgratifying.1950, beginning with the ?? and ending with the Nobel Prize, seems tohave marked the apogee of my respectability. It is true that I began to feelslightly uneasy, fearing that this might mean the onset of blind orthodoxy.I have always held that no one can be respectable without being wicked, butso blunted was my moral sense that I could not see in what way I had sinned.Honours and increased income which began with the sales of my History ofWestern Philosophy gave me a feeling of freedom and assurance that let meexpend all my energies upon what I wanted to do. I got through an immenseamount of work and felt, in consequence, optimistic and full of zest. I sus-pected that I had too much emphasised, hitherto, the darker possibilitiesthreatening mankind and that it was time to write a book in which thehappier issues of current disputes were brought into relief. I called thisbook New Hopes for a Changing World and deliberately, wherever there were twopossibilities, I emphasised that it might be the happier one which would berealised. I did not suggest that either the cheerful or the painful alternativewas the more probable, but merely that it is impossible to know which wouldthe autobiography of bertrand russell 502be victorious. The book ends with a picture of what the world may become ifwe so choose. I say: ‘Man, in the long ages since he descended from the trees,has passed arduously and perilously through a vast dusty desert, surroundedby the whitening bones of those who have perished by the way, maddenedby hunger and thirst, by fear of wild beasts, by dread of enemies, not onlyliving enemies, but spectres of dead rivals projected on to the dangerousworld by the intensity of his own fears. At last he has emerged from thedesert into a smiling land, but in the long night he has forgotten how tosmile. We cannot believe in the brightness of the morning. We think ittrivial and deceptive; we cling to old myths that allow us to go on livingwith fear and hate – above all, hate of ourselves, miserable sinners. This isfolly. Man now needs for his salvation only one thing: to open his heart tojoy, and leave fear to gibber through the glimmering darkness of a forgottenpast. He must lift up his eyes and say: “No, I am not a miserable sinner; I ama being who, by a long and arduous road, has discovered how to makeintelligence master natural obstacles, how to live in freedom and joy, atpeace with myself and therefore with all mankind.” This will happen ifmen choose joy rather than sorrow. If not, eternal death will bury man indeserved oblivion.’But my disquietude grew. My inability to make my fellow men see thedangers ahead for them and all mankind weighed upon me. Perhaps itheightened my pleasures as pain sometimes does, but pain was there andincreased with my increasing awareness of failure to make others share arecognition of its cause. I began to feel that New Hopes for a Changing Worldneeded fresh and deeper examination and I attempted to make this in mybook Human Society in Ethics and Politics, the end of which, for a time, satis?ed mycraving to express my fears in an e?ective form.What led me to write about ethics was the accusation frequently broughtagainst me that, while I had made a more or less sceptical inquiry into otherbranches of knowledge, I had avoided the subject of ethics except in an earlyessay expounding Moore’s Principia Ethica. My reply is that ethics is not abranch of knowledge. I now, therefore, set about the task in a di?erent way. Inthe ?rst half of the book, I dealt with the fundamental concepts of ethics; inthe second part, I dealt with the application of these concepts in practicalpolitics. The ?rst part analyses such concepts as moral codes; good and bad,sin, superstitious ethics, and ethical sanctions. In all these I seek for an ethicalelement in subjects which are traditionally labelled ethical. The conclusionthat I reach is that ethics is never an independent constituent, but is reducibleto politics in the last analysis. What are we to say, for example, about a warin which the parties are evenly matched? In such a context each sidemay claim that it is obviously in the right and that its defeat would be adisaster to mankind. There would be no way of proving this assertion exceptreturn to england 503by appealing to other ethical concepts such as hatred of cruelty or love ofknowledge or art. You may admire the Renaissance because they builtSt Peter’s, but somebody may perplex you by saying that he prefers St Paul’s.Or, again, the war may have sprung from lies told by one party which mayseem an admirable foundation to the contest until it appears that there wasequal mendacity on the other side. To arguments of this sort there is nopurely rational conclusion. If one man believes that the earth is round andanother believes that it is ?at, they can set o? on a joint voyage and decide thematter reasonably. But if one believes in Protestantism and the other inCatholicism, there is no known method of reaching a rational conclusion. Forsuch reasons, I had come to agree with Santayana that there is no such thingas ethical knowledge. Nevertheless, ethical concepts have been of enormousimportance in history, and I could not but feel that a survey of human a?airswhich omits ethics is inadequate and partial.I adopted as my guiding thought the principle that ethics is derived frompassions and that there is no valid method of travelling from passion to whatought to be done. I adopted David Hume’s maxim that ‘Reason is, and oughtonly to be, the slave of the passions’. I am not satis?ed with this, but it is thebest that I can do. Critics are fond of charging me with being wholly rationaland this, at least, proves that I am not entirely so. The practical distinctionamong passions comes as regards their success: some passions lead to successin what is desired; others, to failure. If you pursue the former, you will behappy; if the latter, unhappy. Such, at least, will be the broad general rule.This may seem a poor and tawdry result of researches into such sublimeconcepts as ‘duty’, ‘self-denial’, ‘ought’, and so forth, but I am persuaded thatit is the total of the valid outcome, except in one particular: we feel that theman who brings widespread happiness at the expense of misery to himself isa better man than the man who brings unhappiness to others and happinessto himself. I do not know any rational ground for this view, or perhaps, forthe somewhat more rational view that whatever the majority desires is pref-erable to what the minority desires. These are truly ethical problems, but I donot know of any way in which they can be solved except by politics or war.All that I can ?nd to say on this subject is that an ethical opinion can only bedefended by an ethical axiom, but, if the axiom is not accepted, there is noway of reaching a rational conclusion.There is one approximately rational approach to ethical conclusions whichhas a certain validity. It may be called the doctrine of compossibility. Thisdoctrine is as follows: among the desires that a man ?nds himself to possess,there are various groups, each consisting of desires which may be grati?edtogether and others which con?ict. You may, for example, be a passionateadherent of the Democratic Party, but it may happen that you hate the presi-dential candidate. In that case, your love of the Party and your dislike of thethe autobiography of bertrand russell 504individual are not compossible. Or you may hate a man and love his son. Inthat case, if they always travel about together, you will ?nd them, as a pair, notcompossible. The art of politics consists very largely in ?nding as numerous agroup of compossible people as you can. The man who wishes to be happywill endeavour to make as large groups as he can of compossible desires therulers of his life. Viewed theoretically, such a doctrine a?ords no ultimatesolution. It assumes that happiness is better than unhappiness. This isan ethical principle incapable of proof. For that reason, I did not considercompossibility a basis for ethics.I do not wish to be thought coldly indi?erent to ethical considerations.Man, like the lower animals, is supplied by nature with passions and has adi?culty in ?tting these passions together, especially if he lives in a close-knitcommunity. The art required for this is the art of politics. A man totallydestitute of this art would be a savage and incapable of living in civilisedsociety. That is why I have called my book Human Society in Ethics and Politics.Though the reviews of the book were all that could be hoped, nobody paidmuch attention to what I considered most important about it, the impossibil-ity of reconciling ethical feelings with ethical doctrines. In the depths of mymind this dark frustration brooded constantly. I tried to intersperse lightermatters into my thoughts, especially by writing stories which contained anelement of fantasy. Many people found these stories amusing, though somefound them too stylised for their taste. Hardly anyone seems to have foundthem prophetic.Long before this, in the beginning of the century, I had composed variousstories and, later, I made up stories for my children to while away the tediousclimb from the beach to our house in Cornwall. Some of the latter have sincebeen written down, though never published. In about 1912, I had written anovel, in the manner of Mallock’s New Republic, called The Perplexities of JohnForstice. Though the ?rst half of it I still think is not bad, the latter half seemsvery dull to me, and I have never made any attempt to publish it. I alsoinvented a story that I never published.From the time when Rutherford ?rst discovered the structure of the atom,it had been obvious that sooner or later atomic force would become availablein war. This had caused me to foresee the possibility of the complete destruc-tion of man through his own folly. In my story a pure scientist makes up alittle machine which can destroy matter throughout the universe. He hasknown hitherto only his own laboratory and so he decides that, before usinghis machine, he must ?nd out whether the world deserves to be destroyed.He keeps his little machine in his waistcoat pocket and if he presses the knobthe world will cease to exist. He goes round the world examining whateverseems to him evil, but everything leaves him in doubt until he ?nds himselfat a Lord Mayor’s Banquet and ?nds the nonsense talked by politiciansreturn to england 505unbearable. He leaps up and announces that he is about to destroy the world.The other diners rush at him to stop him. He puts his thumb in his waistcoatpocket – and ?nds that in changing for dinner he forgot to move the littlemachine.I did not publish this story at the time as it seemed too remote from reality.But, with the coming of the atom bomb, its remoteness from reality van-ished, so I wrote other stories with a similar moral, some of which ended inatomic destruction, while others, which I called ‘nightmares’, exempli?ed