BERTRAND RUSSELL MYSTICISM AND LOGIC AND OTHER ESSAYS
LONDON
GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD RUSKIN HOUSE MUSEUM STREET
MYSTICISM AND LOGIC AND OTHER ESSAYS
BY BERTRAND RUSSELL
The ABC of Relativity
The Analysis of Matter
Human Society in Ethics and Politics The Impact of Science on Society New Hopes for a Changing World Authority and the Individual
Human Knowledge
History of Western Philosophy The Principles of Mathematics Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy The Analysis of Mind
Our Knowledge of the External World
An Outline of Philosophy
The Philosophy of Leibniz
1
An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth
Logic and Knowledge
The Problems of Philosophy
Principia Mathematica
Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare
Why I am Not a Christian
Portraits from Memory
My Philosophical Development
Unpopular Essays
Power
In Praise of Idleness
The Conquest of Happiness
Sceptical Essays
The Scientific Outlook
Marriage and Morals
Education and the Social Order
On Education
Freedom and Organization Principles of Social Reconstruction Roads to Freedom
Practice and Theory of Bolshevism
Satan in The Suburbs
Nightmares of Eminent Persons
First published as "Philosophical Essays"October 1910
Second Edition as "Mysticism and Logic" December 1917
Third Impression April 1918
Fourth Impression February 1919
Fifth Impression October 1921
Sixth Impression August 1925
Seventh Impression January 1932
Eighth Impression 1949
Ninth Impression 1950
Tenth Impression 1951
Eleventh Impression 1959
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, 1956, no portion may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiry should be made to the publisher.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN by Taylor Garnett Evans & Co. Ltd., Watford, Herts.
[v] PREFACE
The following essays have been written and published at various times, and my thanks are due to the previous publishers for the
2
permission to reprint them.
The essay on "Mysticism and Logic" appeared in the Hibbert Journal for July, 1914. "The Place of Science in a Liberal Education" appeared in two numbers of The New Statesman, May 24 and 31, 1913. "The Free Man's Worship" and "The Study of Mathematics" were included in a former collection (now out of print), Philosophical Essays, also published by Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co. Both were written in 1902; the first appeared originally in the Independent Review for 1903, the second in the New Quarterly, November, 1907. In theoretical Ethics, the position advocated in "The Free Man's Worship" is not quite identical with that which I
hold now: I feel less convinced than I did then of the objectivity of good and evil. But the general attitude towards life which is suggested in that essay still seems to me, in the main, the one which must be adopted in times of stress and difficulty by those who have no dogmatic religious beliefs, if inward defeat is to be avoided.
The essay on "Mathematics and the Metaphysicians" was written in 1901, and appeared in an American magazine, The International Monthly, under the title "Recent Work in the Philosophy of Mathematics." Some points [vi]in this essay require modification in view of later work. These are indicated in footnotes. Its tone is partly explained by the fact that the editor begged me to make the article "as romantic as possible."
All the above essays are entirely popular, but those that follow are somewhat more technical. "On Scientific Method in Philosophy" was the Herbert Spencer lecture at Oxford in 1914, and was published by the Clarendon Press, which has kindly allowed me to include it in this collection. "The Ultimate Constituents of Matter" was an address to the Manchester Philosophical Society, early
in 1915, and was published in the Monist in July of that year. The essay on "The Relation of Sense-data to Physics" was written in
January, 1914, and first appeared in No. 4 of that year's volume of Scientia, an International Review of Scientific Synthesis, edited
by M. Eugenio Rignano, published monthly by Messrs. Williams and Norgate, London, Nicola Zanichelli, Bologna, and Felix Alcan, Paris. The essay "On the Notion of Cause" was the presidential address to the Aristotelian Society in November, 1912, and was published in their Proceedings for 1912-13. "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description" was also a paper read before the Aristotelian Society, and published in their Proceedings for 1910-11.
London, September, 1917
[vii] CONTENTS
Page
I.
Mysticism and Logic
1
II. The Place of Science in a Liberal Education 33
III. A Free Man's Worship 46
IV. The Study of Mathematics 58
V. Mathematics and the Metaphysicians 74
VI. On Scientific Method in Philosophy 97
VII. The Ultimate Constituents of Matter 125
VIII. The Relation of Sense-data to Physics 145
IX. On the Notion of Cause 180
X. Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description 209
Index 233
[1]
MYSTICISM AND LOGIC
3
AND OTHER ESSAYS
IToC
MYSTICISM AND LOGIC
Metaphysics, or the attempt to conceive the world as a whole by means of thought, has been developed, from the first, by the union and conflict of two very different human impulses, the one urging men towards mysticism, the other urging them towards science. Some men have achieved greatness through one of these impulses alone, others through the other alone: in Hume, for example, the scientific impulse reigns quite unchecked, while in Blake a strong hostility to science coexists with profound mystic insight. But the greatest men who have been philosophers have felt the need both of science and of mysticism: the attempt to harmonise the two was what made their life, and what always must, for all its arduous uncertainty, make philosophy, to some minds, a greater thing than either science or religion.
Before attempting an explicit characterisation of the scientific and the mystical impulses, I will illustrate them by examples from two philosophers whose greatness lies in the very intimate blending which they achieved. The two philosophers I mean are Heraclitus and Plato.
[2]Heraclitus, as every one knows, was a believer in universal flux: time builds and destroys all things. From the few fragments that