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my morning tea’.Both brother and sister refused to continue to know me when I ceased to be respectable, butthe brother relented in the end. The sister remained adamant.c/o Miss FrigellCairoNovember 6th, 1898My dear BertieIt is a great pleasure to hear from you and to be reminded that the rightsort of people exist. Do you know that Brunyate has come out here to a lawberth of ￡1200 a year? He is amiable, but a savage. He thinks apparently thatno subject but mathematics can be of any di?culty to a really great mind. Hesneered at Political Economy, in the person of Sanger, at Metaphysics in theperson of McT. – and I fear did not spare yourself, telling me that Forsythe didnot believe in your theories. I questioned Forsythe’s competence; he said thatF. was capable of judging any logical proposition. So I could only say that ittook six months or a year to state any metaphysical proposition to a personthe autobiography of bertrand russell 132who knew nothing about it. The beast seems to think that Trinity has falleninto the hands of mugs who give fellowships to political economists andmetaphysicians for corrupt motives. However one ought to rememberthat some are predestined to damnation, and that instead of worryingoneself to set them right, one had better spend one’s time lauding the G.A.for his inscrutable decrees, especially in the matter of one’s own election.Sometimes I confess I have qualms that I also am a reprobate. What forinstance Moore means by saying that the world consists of concepts alone,I do not know.I should much like to discuss my own and your a?airs with you. It seemsto me that I at any rate fall further away as time goes on from the state ofhaving de?nite and respectable ambitions. The worst of all is to feel ?amboy-ant – as one does occasionally – and to see no opening for drilling – or evenfor being tried on.I shall not really know what to think of this place till you and Alys andBonté come and report on it to me from a dispassionate point of view.Meanwhile I think I am learning various useful things. I am only occupiedat the Ministry in the mornings; and I have just arranged to spend myafternoons in the o?ce of the leading lawyer here, a Belgian, where I thinkI shall pick up a lot. Meanwhile it is night, getting fairly cool, cheerful, andI have about enough to live on and come home in the summer. I also haveplenty to do.The plan of your book sounds splendid. Perhaps I shall be able to under-stand it when it comes out, but probably not. I think it possible that I maytake up my mathematics again out here because – I wish I had said this to thatb.f. Brunyate, there is no doubt that Mathematics is less a strain on theattention than any other branch of knowledge: you are borne up and carriedalong by the notation as by the Gulf Stream. On the other hand it is shiftlesswork, getting up a subject without any de?nite aim.I am glad to hear that you are Jingo. But I think it is a good thing thatwe should win diplomatically, if possible, without a war – although the oldAdam wants the latter.This we now seem to have done, in the most triumphant manner. TheFashoda incident gives us a new position in Egypt; we now have it by rightof Conquest, having o?ered ?ght to the French, which they have refused.I very much wish I was doing anything of the same kind of work as you,so as to be able to write to you about it. I wonder if there is such a thingas mental paralysis, or if one is bound to emerge after all.Your a?ectionate friendM. S. Amosfirst marriage 133CairoMay 5, 1899Dear BertieI have just got leave for three months and a half from the 9th of June. I shallbe home about the 10th, and I am looking forward very much to seeingyou and Alys. I shall unfortunately have to go to Paris during July for anexamination, but I think I shall have long enough in England altogether tobore my friends. I hope you will give me a fair chance of doing so to you.I was much struck by your lyrical letter about Moore. I have made it thetext of more than one disquisition for the bene?t of Frenchmen and otherBarbarians, on the real state of spirits in England. I explain that our colonialand commercial activity is a mere pale re?ection of the intense blaze ofquintessential ?ame that consumes literary and philosophical circles. In factthat the true character of the present time in England is that of a Great Age, inwhich, under a perfect political system, administered by a liberal, respectedand unenvied aristocracy teeming millions of a prosperous working classvie with the cultured and a?uent orders of the middle rank in Imperialenthusiasm, loyalty to the Throne, and respect for learning – the same gener-ous and stimulating atmosphere which has lent new life to trade, has hadan even more stupendous and unprecedented e?ect on the intellectual life ofthe nation: this is especially seen in the Great Universities, which are notonly, as heretofore, the nurseries of proconsuls or statesmen and of a terri-torial gentry of unrivalled liberality and elegance, but have within the lastgeneration equalled and far surpassed all other seats of learning in Europeand America as centres of pure and abstract scienti?c inquiry. You should seethe Frenchmen squirm. They can stand Spithead Reviews: they can just bearFashoda, because they doubt where it is. But when it comes to new systemsof Platonic philosophy, they tear their hair.This is inexcusable frivolity. But it will be very nice to see you and Alysagain and talk about all sorts of matters in all sorts of moods. Have you readLes Déracinés of Barrés?Yours a?ectionatelyM. Sheldon Amosthe autobiography of bertrand russell 1346‘PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA’In July 1900, there was an International Congress of Philosophy in Paris inconnection with the Exhibition of that year. Whitehead and I decided to go tothis Congress, and I accepted an invitation to read a paper at it. Our arrival inParis was signalised by a somewhat ferocious encounter with the eminentmathematician Borel. Carey Thomas had asked Alys to bring from Englandtwelve empty trunks which she had left behind. Borel had asked the White-heads to bring his niece, who had a teaching post in England. There was agreat crowd at the Gare du Nord, and we had only one luggage ticket for thewhole party. Borel’s niece’s luggage turned up at once, our luggage turnedup fairly soon, but of Carey’s empty trunks only eleven appeared. While wewere waiting for the twelfth, Borel lost patience, snatched the luggage ticketout of my hands, and went o? with his niece and her one valise, leaving usunable to claim either Carey’s trunks or our personal baggage. Whitehead andI seized the pieces one at a time, and used them as battering-rams to penetratethrough the ring of o?cials. So surprised were they that the manoeuvre wassuccessful.The Congress was a turning point in my intellectual life, because I theremet Peano. I already knew him by name and had seen some of his work,but had not taken the trouble to master his notation. In discussions at theCongress I observed that he was always more precise than anyone else, andthat he invariably got the better of any argument upon which he embarked.As the days went by, I decided that this must be owing to his mathematicallogic. I therefore got him to give me all his works, and as soon as theCongress was over I retired to Fernhurst to study quietly every word writtenby him and his disciples. It became clear to me that his notation a?orded aninstrument of logical analysis such as I had been seeking for years, and thatby studying him I was acquiring a new and powerful technique for the workthat I had long wanted to do. By the end of August I had become completelyfamiliar with all the work of his school. I spent September in extending hismethods to the logic of relations. It seems to me in retrospect that, throughthat month, every day was warm and sunny. The Whiteheads stayed with usat Fernhurst, and I explained my new ideas to him. Every evening the discus-sion ended with some di?culty, and every morning I found that the dif-?culty of the previous evening had solved itself while I slept. The time wasone of intellectual intoxication. My sensations resembled those one has afterclimbing a mountain in a mist, when, on reaching the summit, the mistsuddenly clears, and the country becomes visible for forty miles in everydirection. For years I had been endeavouring to analyse the fundamentalnotions of mathematics, such as order and cardinal numbers. Suddenly, in thespace of a few weeks, I discovered what appeared to be de?nitive answers tothe problems which had ba?ed me for years. And in the course of discover-ing these answers, I was introducing a new mathematical technique, bywhich regions formerly abandoned to the vaguenesses of philosophers wereconquered for the precision of exact formulae. Intellectually, the month ofSeptember 1900 was the highest point of my life. I went about saying tomyself that now at last I had done something worth doing, and I had thefeeling that I must be careful not to be run over in the street before I hadwritten it down. I sent a paper to Peano for his journal, embodying my newideas. With the beginning of October I sat down to write The Principles ofMathematics, at which I had already made a number of unsuccessful attempts.Parts III, IV, V, and VI of the book as published were written that autumn.I wrote also Parts I, II, and VII at that time, but had to rewrite them later, sothat the book was not ?nished in its ?nal form until May 1902. Every daythroughout October, November and December, I wrote my ten pages, and?nished the ?? on the last day of the century, in time to write a boastful letterto Helen Thomas about the 200,000 words that I had just completed.Oddly enough, the end of the century marked the end of this sense oftriumph, and from that moment onwards I began to be assailed simul-taneously by intellectual and emotional problems which plunged me into thedarkest despair that I have ever known.During the Lent Term of 1901, we joined with the Whiteheads in takingProfessor Maitland’s house in Downing College. Professor Maitland had hadto go to Madeira for his health. His housekeeper informed us that he had‘dried hisself up eating dry toast’, but I imagine this was not the medicaldiagnosis. Mrs Whitehead was at this time becoming more and more of aninvalid, and used to have intense pain owing to heart trouble. Whitehead andAlys and I were all ?lled with anxiety about her. He was not only deeplydevoted to her but also very dependent upon her, and it seemed doubtfulthe autobiography of bertrand russell 136whether he would ever achieve any more good work if she were to die. Oneday, Gilbert Murray came to Newnham to read part of his translation ofThe Hippolytus, then unpublished. Alys and I went to hear him, and I wasprofoundly stirred by the beauty of the poetry.1When we came home, wefound Mrs Whitehead undergoing an unusually severe bout of pain. Sheseemed cut o? from everyone and everything by walls of agony, and thesense of the solitude of each human soul suddenly overwhelmed me. Eversince my marriage, my emotional life had been calm and super?cial. I hadforgotten all the deeper issues, and had been content with ?ippant cleverness.Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself inquite another region. Within ?ve minutes I went through some such re?ec-tions as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable;nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love thatreligious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motiveis harmful, or at best useless; it follows that war is wrong, that a public schooleducation is abominable, that the use of force is to be deprecated, and that inhuman relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each personand speak to that. The Whitehead’s youngest boy, aged three, was in theroom. I had previously taken no notice of him, nor he of me. He had to beprevented from troubling his mother in the middle of her paroxysms of pain.I took his hand and led him away. He came willingly, and felt at home withme. From that day to his death in the War in 1918, we were close friends.At the end of those ?ve minutes, I had become a completely di?erentperson. For a time, a sort of mystic illumination possessed me. I felt thatI knew the inmost thoughts of everybody that I met in the street, and thoughthis was, no doubt, a delusion, I did in actual fact ?nd myself in far closertouch than previously with all my friends, and many of my acquaintances.Having been an Imperialist, I became during those ?ve minutes a pro-Boerand a Paci?st. Having for years cared only for exactness and analysis, I foundmyself ?lled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty, with an intense inter-est in children, and with a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to?nd some philosophy which should make human life endurable. A strangeexcitement possessed me, containing intense pain but also some element oftriumph through the fact that I could dominate pain, and make it, asI thought, a gateway to wisdom. The mystic insight which I then imaginedmyself to possess has largely faded, and the habit of analysis has reasserteditself. But something of what I thought I saw in that moment has remainedalways with me, causing my attitude during the ?rst war, my interest inchildren, my indi?erence to minor misfortunes, and a certain emotional tonein all my human relations.At the end of the Lent Term, Alys and I went back to Fernhurst, where I setto work to write out the logical deduction of mathematics which afterwards‘principia mathematica’ 137became Principia Mathematica. I thought the work was nearly ?nished, but in themonth of May I had an intellectual set-back almost as severe as the emotionalset-back which I had had in February. Cantor had a proof that there is nogreatest number, and it seemed to me that the number of all the things in theworld ought to be the greatest possible. Accordingly, I examined his proofwith some minuteness, and endeavoured to apply it to the class of all thethings there are. This led me to consider those classes which are not membersof themselves, and to ask whether the class of such classes is or is not amember of itself. I found that either answer implies its contradictory. At ?rstI supposed that I should be able to overcome the contradiction quite easily,and that probably there was some trivial error in the reasoning. Gradually,however, it became clear that this was not the case. Burali-Forti had alreadydiscovered a similar contradiction, and it turned out on logical analysis thatthere was an a?nity with the ancient Greek contradiction about Epimenidesthe Cretan, who said that all Cretans are liars. A contradiction essentiallysimilar to that of Epimenides can be created by giving a person a piece ofpaper on which is written: ‘The statement on the other side of this paper isfalse.’ The person turns the paper over, and ?nds on the other side: ‘Thestatement on the other side of this paper is true.’ It seemed unworthy of agrown man to spend his time on such trivialities, but what was I to do? Therewas something wrong, since such contradictions were unavoidable on ordin-ary premisses. Trivial or not, the matter was a challenge. Throughout thelatter half of 1901 I supposed the solution would be easy, but by the end ofthat time I had concluded that it was a big job. I therefore decided to ?nishThe Principles of Mathematics, leaving the solution in abeyance. In the autumn Alysand I went back to Cambridge, as I had been invited to give two terms’ lectureson mathematical logic. These lectures contained the outline of PrincipiaMathematica, but without any method of dealing with the contradictions.About the time that these lectures ?nished, when we were living with theWhiteheads at the Mill House in Grantchester, a more serious blow fell thanthose that had preceded it. I went out bicycling one afternoon, and suddenly,as I was riding along a country road, I realised that I no longer loved Alys.I had had no idea until this moment that my love for her was even lessening.The problem presented by this discovery was very grave. We had lived eversince our marriage in the closest possible intimacy. We always shared a bed,and neither of us ever had a separate dressing-room. We talked over togethereverything that ever happened to either of us. She was ?ve years older thanI was, and I had been accustomed to regarding her as far more practical andfar more full of worldly wisdom than myself, so that in many matters of dailylife I left the initiative to her. I knew that she was still devoted to me. I had nowish to be unkind, but I believed in those days (what experience has taughtme to think possibly open to doubt) that in intimate relations one shouldthe autobiography of bertrand russell 138speak the truth. I did not see in any case how I could for any length of timesuccessfully pretend to love her when I did not. I had no longer any instinc-tive impulse towards sex relations with her, and this alone would have been aninsuperable barrier to concealment of my feelings. At this crisis my father’spriggery came out in me, and I began to justify myself with moral criticismsof Alys. I did not at once tell her that I no longer loved her, but of course sheperceived that something was amiss. She retired to a rest-cure for somemonths, and when she emerged from it I told her that I no longer wished toshare a room, and in the end I confessed that my love was dead. I justi?ed thisattitude to her, as well as to myself, by criticisms of her character.Although my self-righteousness at that time seems to me in retrospectrepulsive, there were substantial grounds for my criticisms. She tried to bemore impeccably virtuous than is possible to human beings, and was thus ledinto insincerity. Like her brother Logan, she was malicious, and liked to makepeople think ill of each other, but she was not aware of this, and was instinc-tively subtle in her methods. She would praise people in such a way as tocause others to admire her generosity, and think worse of the people praisedthan if she had criticised them. Often malice made her untruthful. She toldMrs Whitehead that I couldn’t bear children, and that the Whitehead chil-dren must be kept out of my way as much as possible. At the same time shetold me that Mrs Whitehead was a bad mother because she saw so little of herchildren. During my bicycle ride a host of such things occurred to me, andI became aware that she was not the saint I had always supposed her to be. Butin the revulsion I went too far, and forgot the great virtues that she did in factpossess.My change of feeling towards Alys was partly the result of perceiving,though in a milder form, traits in her which I disliked in her mother andbrother. Alys had an unbounded admiration of her mother, whom sheregarded as both a saint and a sage. This was a fairly common view; it washeld, for example, by William James. I, on the contrary, came gradually tothink her one of the wickedest people I had ever known. Her treatment of herhusband, whom she despised, was humiliating in the highest degree. Shenever spoke to him or of him except in a tone that made her contemptobvious. It cannot be denied that he was a silly old man, but he did notdeserve what she gave him, and no one capable of mercy could have given it.He had a mistress, and fondly supposed that his wife did not know of her. Heused to tear up this woman’s letters and throw the pieces into the waste-paper basket. His wife would ?t the bits together, and read out the letters toAlys and Logan amid ?ts of laughter. When the old man died, she soldhis false teeth and refused to carry out his death-bed request to give a presentof ￡5 to the gardener. (The rest of us made up the sum without any contribu-tion from her.) This was the only time that Logan felt critical of her: he was in‘principia mathematica’ 139tears because of her hardheartedness. But he soon reverted to his usual rever-ential attitude. In a letter written when he was 3? months old, she writes:Logan and I had our ?rst regular battle today, and he came off conqueror,though I don’t think he knew it. I whipped him until he was actually black andblue, and until I really could not whip him any more, and he never gave up onesingle inch. However, I hope it was a lesson to him.2It was. She never had to whip him black and blue again. She taught herfamily that men are brutes and fools, but women are saints and hate sex.So Logan, as might have been expected, became homosexual. She carriedfeminism to such lengths that she found it hard to keep her respect for theDeity, since He was male. In passing a public house she would remark: ‘Thyhousekeeping, O Lord.’ If the Creator had been female, there would havebeen no such thing as alcohol.I found Alys’s support of her mother di?cult to bear. Once, when Friday’sHill was to be let, the prospective tenants wrote to inquire whether the drainshad been passed by a sanitary inspector. She explained to us all at the tea-tablethat they had not, but she was going to say that they had. I protested, but bothLogan and Alys said ‘hush’ as if I had been a naughty child who had inter-rupted Teacher. Sometimes I tried to discuss her mother with Alys, but thisproved impossible. In the end, some of my horror of the old lady spread to allwho admired her, not excluding Alys.The most unhappy moments of my life were spent at Grantchester. Mybedroom looked out upon the mill, and the noise of the millstream mingledinextricably with my despair. I lay awake through long nights, hearing ?rstthe nightingale, and then the chorus of birds at dawn, looking out uponsunrise and trying to ?nd consolation in external beauty. I su?ered in a veryintense form the loneliness which I had perceived a year before to be theessential lot of man. I walked alone in the ?elds about Grantchester, feelingdimly that the whitening willows in the wind had some message from a landof peace. I read religious books, such as Taylor’s Holy Dying, in the hope thatthere might be something independent of dogma in the comfort which theirauthors derived from their beliefs. I tried to take refuge in pure contempla-tion; I began to write The Free Man’s Worship. The construction of prose rhythmswas the only thing in which I found any real consolation.Throughout the whole time of the writing of Principia Mathematica myrelations with the Whiteheads were di?cult and complex. Whiteheadappeared to the world calm, reasonable, and judicious, but when one came toknow him well one discovered that this was only a fa?ade. Like many peoplepossessed of great self-control, he su?ered from impulses which werescarcely sane. Before he met Mrs Whitehead he had made up his mind to jointhe autobiography of bertrand russell 140the Catholic Church, and was only turned aside at the last minute by falling inlove with her. He was obsessed by fear of lack of money, and he did not meetthis fear in a reasonable way, but by spending recklessly in the hope ofpersuading himself that he could a?ord to do so. He used to frighten MrsWhitehead and her servants by mutterings in which he addressed injuriousobjurgations to himself. At times he would be completely silent for somedays, saying nothing whatever to anybody in the house. Mrs Whitehead wasin perpetual fear that he would go mad. I think, in retrospect, that sheexaggerated the danger, for she tended to be melodramatic in her outlook.But the danger was certainly real, even if not as great as she believed. Shespoke of him to me with the utmost frankness, and I found myself in analliance with her to keep him sane. Whatever happened his work never?agged, but one felt that he was exerting more self-control than a humanbeing could be expected to stand and that at any moment a break-down waspossible. Mrs Whitehead was always discovering that he had run up large billswith Cambridge tradesmen, and she did not dare to tell him that there was nomoney to pay them for fear of driving him over the edge. I used to supply thewherewithal surreptitiously. It was hateful to deceive Whitehead, who wouldhave found the humiliation unbearable if he had known of it. But there washis family to be supported and Principia Mathematica to be written, and thereseemed no other way by which these objects could be achieved. I contributedall that I could realise in the way of capital, and even that partly by borrowing.I hope the end justi?ed the means. Until 1952 I never mentioned this toanyone.Meanwhile Alys was more unhappy than I was, and her unhappiness wasa great part of the cause of my own. We had in the past spent a great deal oftime with her family, but I told her I could no longer endure her mother, andthat we must therefore leave Fernhurst. We spent the summer near Broadwayin Worcestershire. Pain made me sentimental, and I used to construct phrasessuch as ‘Our hearts build precious shrines for the ashes of dead hopes’. I evendescended to reading Maeterlinck. Before this time, at Grantchester, at thevery height and crisis of misery, I ?nished The Principles of Mathematics. The dayon which I ?nished the manuscript was May 23rd. At Broadway I devotedmyself to the mathematical elaboration which was to become PrincipiaMathematica. By this time I had secured Whitehead’s co-operation in this task,but the unreal, insincere, and sentimental frame of mind into which I hadallowed myself to fall a?ected even my mathematical work. I remembersending Whitehead a draft of the beginning, and his reply: ‘Everything, eventhe object of the book, has been sacri?ced to making proofs look short andneat.’ This defect in my work was due to a moral defect in my state of mind.When the autumn came we took a house for six months in Cheyne Walk,and life began to become more bearable. We saw a great many people, many‘principia mathematica’ 141of them amusing or agreeable, and we both gradually began to live a moreexternal life, but this was always breaking down. So long as I lived in the samehouse with Alys she would every now and then come down to me in herdressing-gown after she had gone to bed, and beseech me to spend the nightwith her. Sometimes I did so, but the result was utterly unsatisfactory. Fornine years this state of a?airs continued. During all this time she hoped towin me back, and never became interested in any other man. During all thistime I had no other sex relations. About twice a year I would attempt sexrelations with her, in the hope of alleviating her misery, but she no longerattracted me, and the attempt was futile. Looking back over this stretch ofyears, I feel that I ought to have ceased much sooner to live in the same housewith her, but she wished me to stay, and even threatened suicide if I left her.There was no other woman to whom I wished to go, and there seemedtherefore no good reason for not doing as she wished.The summers of 1903 and 1904 we spent at Churt and Tilford. I made apractice of wandering about the common every night from eleven till one, bywhich means I came to know the three di?erent noises made by night-jars.(Most people only know one.) I was trying hard to solve the contradictionsmentioned above. Every morning I would sit down before a blank sheet ofpaper. Throughout the day, with a brief interval for lunch, I would stare at theblank sheet. Often when evening came it was still empty. We spent ourwinters in London, and during the winters I did not attempt to work, but thetwo summers of 1903 and 1904 remain in my mind as a period of completeintellectual deadlock. It was clear to me that I could not get on withoutsolving the contradictions, and I was determined that no di?culty shouldturn me aside from the completion of Principia Mathematica, but it seemed quitelikely that the whole of the rest of my life might be consumed in lookingat that blank sheet of paper. What made it the more annoying was that thecontradictions were trivial, and that my time was spent in consideringmatters that seemed unworthy of serious attention.It must not be supposed that all my time was consumed in despair and