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day. I found her languishing alone, as he had left her at Truro, saying that hecould not face the whole day without a little walk. He arrived about teno’clock at night, completely exhausted, having accomplished the forty milesin record time, but it seemed to me a somewhat curious beginning for athe autobiography of bertrand russell 54honeymoon. On August 4, 1914, he and I walked together down the Strandquarrelling. Since then I saw him only once, until I returned to Trinity in1944, after he had become Master. When he was still an undergraduate heexplained to me once that the Trevelyans never make matrimonial mistakes.‘They wait’, he said, ‘until they are thirty, and then marry a girl who has bothsense and money.’ In spite of occasional bad times, I have never wished thatI had followed this prescription.Bob Trevelyan was, I think, the most bookish person that I have everknown. What is in books appeared to him interesting, whereas what is onlyreal life was negligible. Like all the family, he had a minute knowledge of thestrategy and tactics concerned in all the great battles of the world, so far asthese appear in reputable books of history. But I was staying with him duringthe crisis of the battle of the Marne, and as it was Sunday we could only get anewspaper by walking two miles. He did not think the battle su?cientlyinteresting to be worth it, because battles in mere newspapers are vulgar. Ionce devised a test question which I put to many people to discover whetherthey were pessimists. The question was: ‘If you had the power to destroy theworld, would you do so?’ I put the question to him in the presence of hiswife and child, and he replied: ‘What? Destroy my library? – Never!’ He wasalways discovering new poets and reading their poems out aloud, but healways began deprecatingly: ‘This is not one of his best poems.’ Once whenhe mentioned a new poet to me, and said he would like to read me some ofhis things, I said: ‘Yes, but don’t read me a poem which is not one of hisbest.’ This stumped him completely, and he put the volume away.The dons contributed little to my enjoyment of Cambridge. The Mastercame straight out of Thackeray’s Book of Snobs. He generally began his remarkswith ‘Just thirty years ago today . . .’ or with, ‘Do you by any chance remem-ber what Mr Pitt was doing one hundred years ago today?’, and he wouldthen proceed to relate some very tedious historical anecdote to show howgreat and good were all the statesmen mentioned in history. His epistolarystyle is illustrated by the letter that he wrote me after the mathematicaltripos in which I was bracketed seventh wrangler:Trinity Lodge,Cambridge,June 13th 1893My dear B. RussellI cannot tell you how happy this grand victory has made us. Just 33 yearshave passed since I placed the Fifth Form Prize for Latin Prose in the handsof your dear Father at Harrow, and now I am permitted to congratulate hisson and his own Mother on a remarkable Mathematical success which willbe much appreciated in the College.cambridge 55We knew your Mathematical ability but we knew also that you had notgiven your whole mind to Mathematics but had bestowed large parts of iton other, possibly even greater, subjects. If this had seriously spoiled yourMathematical position I should of course have regretted it, but I should haveunderstood that there were solid compensations.Now there is happily nothing but congratulation, and you will look forwardquietly to the Moral Science Tripos and the Fellowship without any misgivingthat you have left behind you a Mathematical waste.I must give myself the pleasure of writing just a few lines to Lady Russelland Lady Stanley. This will be a happy day for both of them.Believe me to be,Most truly yours,H. Montagu Butler(Master of Trinity)I remember once going to breakfast at the Lodge, and it happened that theday was his sister-in-law’s birthday. After wishing her many happy returns,he continued: ‘Now, my dear, you have lasted just as long as the PeloponnesianWar.’ She did not know how long this might be, but feared it was longer thanshe could wish. His wife took to Christian Science, which had the e?ect ofprolonging his life for some twenty years beyond what might otherwise havebeen expected. This happened through her lack of sympathy with his ail-ments. When he was ill, she would send word to the Council Meeting that theMaster was in bed and refused to get up. It must be said, however, that theVice-Master, Aldous Wright, and the Senior Fellow, Joey Prior, lasted almostequally long without the help of Christian Science. I remember when I wasan undergraduate watching the three of them standing bare-headed at theGreat Gate to receive the Empress Frederick. They were already very old men,but ?fteen years later they seemed no older. Aldous Wright was a very digni-?ed ?gure, standing always as straight as a ramrod, and never appearing out-of-doors without a top hat. Even once when he was roused from sleep atthree in the morning by a ?re the top hat was duly on his head. He stuck tothe English pronunciation of Latin, while the Master adopted the Continentalpronunciation. When they read grace in alternate verses, the e?ect was curi-ous, especially as the Vice-Master gabbled it while the Master mouthed itwith unction. While I was an undergraduate, I had regarded all these menmerely as ?gures of fun, but when I became a Fellow and attended Collegemeetings, I began to ?nd that they were serious forces of evil. When theJunior Dean, a clergyman who raped his little daughter and became paralysedwith syphilis, had to be got rid of in consequence, the Master went out of hisway to state at College Meeting that those of us who did not attend chapelregularly had no idea how excellent this worthy’s sermons had been. Next tothe autobiography of bertrand russell 56these three the most important person in the College was the Senior Porter, amagni?cent ?gure of a man, with such royal dignity that he was supposed byundergraduates to be a natural son of the future Edward the Seventh. After Iwas a Fellow I found that on one occasion the Council met on ?ve successivedays with the utmost secrecy. With great di?culty I discovered what theirbusiness had been. They had been engaged in establishing the painful factthat the Senior Porter had had improper relations with ?ve bedmakers, inspite of the fact that all of them, by Statute, were ‘nec juvenis, nec pulchra’.As an undergraduate I was persuaded that the Dons were a whollyunnecessary part of the university. I derived no bene?ts from lectures, and Imade a vow to myself that when in due course I became a lecturer I wouldnot suppose that lecturing did any good. I have kept this vow.I had already been interested in philosophy before I went to Cambridge,but I had not read much except Mill. What I most desired was to ?nd somereason for supposing mathematics true. The arguments in Mill’s Logic on thissubject already struck me as very inadequate. I read them at the age of eight-een. My mathematical tutors had never shown me any reason to suppose theCalculus anything but a tissue of fallacies. I had therefore two questions totrouble me, one philosophical, and one mathematical. The mathematicalquestion had already in the main been solved on the Continent, thoughin England the Continental work was little known. It was only after I leftCambridge and began to live abroad that I discovered what I ought to havebeen taught during my three years as an undegraduate. Philosophy, however,was another matter. I knew in the country Harold Joachim, who taughtphilosophy at Merton, and was a friend of F. H. Bradley. Joachim’s sister hadmarried my Uncle Rollo, and I used to meet him occasionally at tennis-parties and such occasions. I got him to give me a long list of philosophicalbooks that I ought to read, and while I was still working at mathematics Iembarked upon them. As soon as I was free to do so, I devoted myself tophilosophy with great ardour. During my fourth year I read most of the greatphilosophers as well as masses of books on the philosophy of mathematics.James Ward was always giving me fresh books on this subject, and each timeI returned them, saying that they were very bad books. I remember hisdisappointment, and his painstaking endeavours to ?nd some book thatwould satisfy me. In the end, but after I had become a Fellow, I got from himtwo small books, neither of which he had read or supposed of any value.They were George Cantor’s Mannichfaltigkeitslehre, and Frege’s Begri?sschrift.These two books at last gave me the gist of what I wanted, but in the case ofFrege I possessed the book for years before I could make out what it meant.Indeed, I did not understand it until I had myself independently discoveredmost of what it contained.By this time, I had quite ceased to be the shy prig that I was when I ?rstcambridge 57went to Cambridge. I remember a few months before I came into residence,going to see my tutor about rooms, and while I waited in the ante-room Iturned over the pages of the Granta (the undergraduate newspaper). It wasMay Week, and I was shocked to read in the paper that during this weekpeople’s thoughts were not devoted to work. But by my fourth year I hadbecome gay and ?ippant. Having been reading pantheism, I announced to myfriends that I was God. They placed candles on each side of me and proceededto acts of mock worship. Philosophy altogether seemed to me great fun, and Ienjoyed the curious ways of conceiving the world that the great philosopherso?er to the imagination.The greatest happiness of my time at Cambridge was connected with abody whom its members knew as ‘The Society’, but which outsiders, if theyknew of it, called ‘The Apostles’. This was a small discussion society, contain-ing one or two people from each year on the average, which met everySaturday night. It has existed since 1820, and has had as members most of thepeople of any intellectual eminence who have been at Cambridge since then.It is by way of being secret, in order that those who are being considered forelection may be unaware of the fact. It was owing to the existence of TheSociety that I so soon got to know the people best worth knowing, forWhitehead was a member, and told the younger members to investigateSanger and me on account of our scholarship papers. With rare exceptions, allthe members at any one time were close personal friends. It was a principle indiscussion that there were to be no taboos, no limitations, nothing consideredshocking, no barriers to absolute freedom of speculation. We discussed allmanner of things, no doubt with a certain immaturity, but with a detach-ment and interest scarcely possible in later life. The meetings would generallyend about one o’clock at night, and after that I would pace up and down thecloisters of Nevile’s Court for hours with one or two other members. We tookourselves perhaps rather seriously, for we considered that the virtue of intel-lectual honesty was in our keeping. Undoubtedly, we achieved more of thisthan is common in the world, and I am inclined to think that the bestintelligence of Cambridge has been notable in this respect. I was elected in themiddle of my second year, not having previously known that such a societyexisted, though the members were all intimately known to me already.I was elected to The Society early in 1892. The following letters of con-gratulation require an explanation of some phrases which were adopted inThe Society by way of making fun of German metaphysics. The Society wassupposed to be The World of Reality; everything else was Appearance. Peoplewho were not members of The Society were called ‘phenomena’. Sincethe metaphysicians maintained that Space and Time are unreal, it wasassumed that those who were in The Society were exempted from bondageto Space and Time.the autobiography of bertrand russell 58c/ Hon. Sir Charles Elliott, ????,Lieut. Gov. of Bengal, India Weds. March 9, 1892Dear RussellI have just heard by this morning’s mail that you have joined us – Hurrah.It is good news indeed. I mustn’t let the mail go o? this afternoon withouta few words to say how glad I am, and how sorry not to be at Cambridgenow to give you a fraternal handshake. You will of course get your ownimpressions, but it was certainly a true new life to me, and a revelation ofwhat Cambridge really was.It is just time for letters to go, so I’m afraid I can’t write just now to tellyou of my experiences. Theodore will tell you how I am getting on. I wasvery sorry to hear that you had not been well. Get all right quick. Don’t letWebb2kill you.Excuse these hurried lines. Confound those absurd humbugs, space andtime, which have the impudence to pretend that they are now separating us.Whereas we know that they have nothing to do with that true existence inthe bonds of which I was in the beginning am now and ever shall befraternally and a?ectionatelyyoursCrompton Ll. D.I haven’t time to write to Sanger a proper letter, so would you mind handinghim the enclosed scrawl?Do write to me if you have time.Devon St., New Plymouth,Taranaki, New Zealand. 17th May, 1892Dear RussellMany congratulations on the delightful news of last February, which – witha bondage to space and time perfectly inexplicable in apostolic matters – hasonly just reached me via India.I am most awfully glad. I hope you have been told of our brotherWhitehead’s penetration, who detected the apostolic nature of yourself andSanger by your entrance scholarship essays, and put us on the watch for you.I wish I could get back for a Saturday night or so, and have it out withTheodore about Xtianity being the religion of love – just the one thing whichit isn’t I should say. I don’t see how the ideas of a personal God and real lovecan coexist with any vigour.cambridge 59How about the Embryos?3I hear that the younger Trevelyan (Bob) is verypromising, and Green of Kings.I have innumerable more letters for the mail. I hope to see you in themiddle of next January.Yours fraternally,(Sgd.) Ellis McTaggartSome things became considerably di?erent in The Society shortly aftermy time.The tone of the generation some ten years junior to my own was setmainly by Lytton Strachey and Keynes. It is surprising how great a change inmental climate those ten years had brought. We were still Victorian; theywere Edwardian. We believed in ordered progress by means of politics andfree discussion. The more self-con?dent among us may have hoped to beleaders of the multitude, but none of us wished to be divorced from it. Thegeneration of Keynes and Lytton did not seek to preserve any kinship withthe Philistine. They aimed rather at a life of retirement among ?ne shadesand nice feelings, and conceived of the good as consisting in the passion-ate mutual admirations of a clique of the élite. This doctrine, quite unfairly,they fathered upon G. E. Moore, whose disciples they professed to be.Keynes, in his memoir ‘Early Beliefs’ has told of their admiration for Moore,and, also, of their practice of ignoring large parts of Moore’s doctrine. Mooregave due weight to morals and by his doctrine of organic unities avoidedthe view that the good consists of a series of isolated passionate moments,but those who considered themselves his disciples ignored this aspect ofhis teaching and degraded his ethics into advocacy of a stu?y girls-schoolsentimentalising.From this atmosphere Keynes escaped into the great world, but Stracheynever escaped. Keynes’s escape, however, was not complete. He went aboutthe world carrying with him everywhere a feeling of the bishop in partibus.True salvation was elsewhere, among the faithful at Cambridge. When heconcerned himself with politics and economics he left his soul at home. Thisis the reason for a certain hard, glittering, inhuman quality in most of hiswriting. There was one great exception, The Economic Consequences of the Peace,of which I shall have more to say in a moment.I ?rst knew Keynes through his father, and Lytton Strachey through hismother. When I was young, Keynes’s father taught old-fashioned formallogic in Cambridge. I do not know how far the new developments in thatsubject altered his teaching. He was an earnest Nonconformist who put mor-ality ?rst and logic second. Something of the Nonconformist spirit remainedin his son, but it was overlaid by the realisation that facts and argumentsmay lead to conclusions somewhat shocking to many people, and a strain ofthe autobiography of bertrand russell 60intellectual arrogance in his character made him ?nd it not unpleasant toépater les bourgeois. In his The Economic Consequences of the Peace this strain was inabeyance. The profound conviction that the Treaty of Versailles spelt disasterso roused the earnest moralist in him that he forgot to be clever – without,however, ceasing to be so.I had no contact with him in his economic and political work, but I wasconsiderably concerned in his Treatise on Probability, many parts of which Idiscussed with him in detail. It was nearly ?nished in 1914, but had to be putaside for the duration.He was always inclined to overwork, in fact it was overwork that causedhis death. Once in the year 1904, when I was living in an isolated cottagein a vast moor without roads, he wrote and asked if I could promise hima restful week-end. I replied con?dently in the a?rmative, and he came.Within ?ve minutes of his arrival the Vice Chancellor turned up full ofUniversity business. Other people came unexpectedly to every meal, includ-ing six to Sunday breakfast. By Monday morning we had had twenty-sixunexpected guests, and Keynes, I fear, went away more tired than he came.On Sunday, August 2, 1914, I met him hurrying across the Great Courtof Trinity. I asked him what the hurry was and he said he wanted to borrowhis brother-in-law’s motorcycle to go to London. ‘Why don’t you goby train?’, I said. ‘Because there isn’t time’, he replied. I did not know whathis business might be, but within a few days the bank rate, whichpanic-mongers had put up to ten per cent, was reduced to ?ve per cent. Thiswas his doing.I do not know enough economics to have an expert opinion on Keynes’stheories, but so far as I am able to judge it seems to me to be owing to himthat Britain has not su?ered from large-scale unemployment in recent years.I would go further and say that if his theories had been adopted by ?nancialauthorities throughout the world the great depression would not haveoccurred. There are still many people in America who regard depressions asacts of God. I think Keynes proved that the responsibility for these occur-rences does not rest with Providence.The last time that I saw him was in the House of Lords when he returnedfrom negotiating a loan in America and made a masterly speech recommend-ing it to their Lordships. Many of them had been doubtful beforehand, butwhen he had ?nished there remained hardly any doubters except LordBeaverbrook and two cousins of mine with a passion for being in the minor-ity. Having only just landed from the Atlantic, the e?ort he made must havebeen terri?c, and it proved too much for him.Keynes’s intellect was the sharpest and clearest that I have ever known.When I argued with him, I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldomemerged without feeling something of a fool. I was sometimes inclined tocambridge 61feel that so much cleverness must be incompatible with depth, but I do notthink this feeling was justi?ed.Lytton Strachey, as mentioned before, I ?rst got to know through hismother. She and I were fellow members of a committee designed to securevotes for women. After some months she invited me to dinner. Her husband,Sir Richard Strachey, was a retired Indian o?cial, and the British Raj wasvery much in the air. My ?rst dinner with the family was a rather upset-ting experience. The number of sons and daughters was almost beyondcomputation, and all the children were to my unpractised eyes exactly alikeexcept in the somewhat super?cial point that some were male and some werefemale. The family were not all assembled when I arrived, but dropped inone by one at intervals of twenty minutes. (One of them, I afterwards dis-covered, was Lytton.) I had to look round the room carefully to make surethat it was a new one that had appeared and not merely one of the previousones that had changed his or her place. Towards the end of the evening Ibegan to doubt my sanity, but kind friends afterwards assured me that thingshad really been as they seemed.Lady Strachey was a woman of immense vigour, with a great desire thatsome at least of her children should distinguish themselves. She had anadmirable sense of prose and used to read South’s sermons aloud to herchildren, not for the matter (she was a free-thinker), but to give them a senseof rhythm in the writing of English. Lytton, who was too delicate to be sentto a conventional school, was seen by his mother to be brilliant, and wasbrought up to the career of a writer in an atmosphere of dedication. Hiswriting appeared to me in those days hilariously amusing. I heard him readEminent Victorians before it was published, and I read it again to myself inprison. It caused me to laugh so loud that the o?cer came round to my cell,saying I must remember that prison is a place of punishment.Lytton was always eccentric and became gradually more so. When hewas growing a beard he gave out that he had measles so as not to be seenby his friends until the hairs had reached a respectable length. He dressedvery oddly. I knew a farmer’s wife who let lodgings and she told methat Lytton had come to ask her if she could take him in. ‘At ?rst, Sir,’ shesaid, ‘I thought he was a tramp, and then I looked again and saw he wasa gentleman, but a very queer one.’ He talked always in a squeaky voicewhich sometimes contrasted ludicrously with the matter of what he wassaying. One time when I was talking with him he objected ?rst to one thingand then to another as not being what literature should aim at. At last I said,‘Well, Lytton, what should it aim at?’ And he replied in one word – ‘Passion’.Nevertheless, he liked to appear lordly in his attitude towards humana?airs. I heard someone maintain in his presence that young people areapt to think about Life. He objected, ‘I can’t believe people think about Life.the autobiography of bertrand russell 62There’s nothing in it.’ Perhaps it was this attitude which made him not agreat man.His style is unduly rhetorical, and sometimes, in malicious moments, Ihave thought it not unlike Macaulay’s. He is indi?erent to historical truth andwill always touch up the picture to make the lights and shades more glaringand the folly or wickedness of famous people more obvious. These are gravecharges, but I make them in all seriousness.It was in The Society that I ?rst became aware of Moore’s excellence. Iremember his reading a paper which began: ‘In the beginning was matter,and matter begat the devil, and the devil begat God.’ The paper ended withthe death ?rst of God and then of the devil, leaving matter alone as in thebeginning. At the time when he read this paper, he was still a freshman, andan ardent disciple of Lucretius.On Sunday it was our custom to breakfast late, and then spend the wholeday till dinner-time walking. I got to know every road and footpath withinten miles of Cambridge, and many at much greater distances, in this way. Ingeneral I felt happy and comparatively calm while at Cambridge, but onmoonlight nights I used to career round the country in a state of temporarylunacy. The reason, of course, was sexual desire, though at that time I didnot know this.After my time The Society changed in one respect. There was a long drawnout battle between George Trevelyan and Lytton Strachey, both members,in which Lytton Strachey was on the whole victorious. Since his time, homo-sexual relations among the members were for a time common, but in myday they were unknown.Cambridge was important in my life through the fact that it gave mefriends, and experience of intellectual discussion, but it was not importantthrough the actual academic instruction. Of the mathematical teaching I havealready spoken. Most of what I learned in philosophy has come to seem tome erroneous, and I spent many subsequent years in gradually unlearningthe habits of thought which I had there acquired. The one habit of thoughtof real value that I acquired there was intellectual honesty. This virtue cer-tainly existed not only among my friends, but among my teachers. I cannotremember any instance of a teacher resenting it when one of his pupilsshowed him to be in error, though I can remember quite a number ofoccasions on which pupils succeeded in performing this feat. Once during alecture on hydrostatics, one of the young men interrupted to say: ‘Have younot forgotten the centrifugal forces on the lid?’ The lecturer gasped, and thensaid: ‘I have been doing this example that way for twenty years, but you areright.’ It was a blow to me during the War to ?nd that, even at Cambridge,intellectual honesty had its limitations. Until then, wherever I lived, I felt thatCambridge was the only place on earth that I could regard as home.cambridge 634ENGAGEMENTIn the summer of 1889, when I was living with my Uncle Rollo at his houseon the slopes of Hindhead, he took me one Sunday for a long walk. Aswe were going down Friday’s Hill, near Fernhurst, he said: ‘Some new peoplehave come to live at this house, and I think we will call upon them.’ Shynessmade me dislike the idea, and I implored him, whatever might happen, notto stay to supper. He said he would not, but he did, and I was glad he did.We found that the family were Americans, named Pearsall Smith, consistingof an elderly mother and father, a married daughter and her husband, namedCostelloe, a younger daughter at Bryn Mawr home for the holidays, and a sonat Balliol. The father and mother had been in their day famous evangelisticpreachers, but the father had lost his faith as the result of a scandal whicharose from his having been seen to kiss a young woman, and the mother hadgrown rather too old for such a wearing life. Costelloe, the son-in-law, wasa clever man, a Radical, a member of the London County Council. He arrivedfresh from London while we were at dinner, bringing the latest newsof a great dock strike which was then in progress. This dock strike was ofconsiderable interest and importance because it marked the penetration ofTrade Unionism to a lower level than that previously reached. I listenedopen-mouthed while he related what was being done, and I felt that I was intouch with reality. The son from Balliol conversed in brilliant epigrams,and appeared to know everything with contemptuous ease. But it was thedaughter from Bryn Mawr who especially interested me. She was very beauti-