Bertrand Russell | Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Philosophy: Essential Selections

BERTRAND RUSSELL

From Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Philosophy: Essential Selections, by James Fieser

CONTENTS

Introduction

Facing Nature's Blind Power

Logicism: Mathematics Reducible to Formal Logic

Symbolizing Denoting Phrases

Knowledge by Acquaintance and Description

Ethical Neutrality in Philosophy

Against War

Logical Atomism

Neutral Monism

Reason the Source of Social Power

Philosophy and the Place of Humans in the Universe

Against Christianity

Study Questions

INTRODUCTION

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was born in the Welsh village of Trellech into an aristocratic family; his grandfather was John Russell, Britain's Prime Minister. By age 4 both of his parents died and he was then raised by his grandmother, where he was educated at home by tutors. He studied mathematics at the university of Cambridge, and became a lecturer at universities in England, Germany and the United States. He was politically active throughout his life, defending women's rights and opposing war and nuclear weapons, and several times unsuccessfully ran for Parliament. In 1940 he was dismissed from his teaching position at the City College of New York and, upon appeal, was judged morally unfit because of his liberal views on sex before marriage and homosexuality. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for literature in 1950 for defending freedom of thought in his various writings. He died at age 97 from influenza. Russell was a prolific author in both academic and non-academic areas, and his philosophy covers all subjects except aesthetics. He is one of the founders of the analytic school of philosophy that even now dominates the discipline in Britain and the United States.

The first selection below is from "A Free Man's Worship" (1902), which addresses the question of what life is like for us in a godless world where we are subject to nature's blind power. We question how we can retain our hopes in view of the fact that our origin is accidental and we cannot live beyond the grave. While religions worshipped this blind power, he argues, we must attempt to free ourselves from its tyranny and, in the process, unite ourselves with other people through our tie of mutual doom.

In The Principles of Mathematics (1903) he presents some of his most important contributions to the philosophy of mathematics. In the Preface he describes his overall approach, no called "logicism" which is that mathematics is reducible to formal logic. Traditional philosophical views held that mathematics is attributable to the notion of mind. However, he argues, a better explanation is that all mathematical propositions are deducible from a small number of fundamental logical principles. In this work he also presents what is now called Russell's paradox, which exposes a contradiction within traditional set theory. The problem begins with the observation that some classes of things are not members of themselves, for example, mankind is not a man. Take, now, a super-class of all the classes that are not members of themselves. Is this super-class a member of itself? If yes, then it is not a member of itself. If no, then it is a member of itself. Either way we have a contradiction. In an appendix to the work he suggests a solution which is called "type theory", where higher-tier types include only lower-tier types. Here are the three levels of types:

• Tier 1 Type: individuals, such as the objects of daily life, persons, tables, chairs, apples.

• Tier 2 Type: classes of Tier 1 objects, such as the class containing "Smith and Jones".

• Tier 3 Type: classes of classes of individuals, such as associations of clubs that contain individual people.

This solves the paradox since the super-class mentioned above would be a Tier 3 type, which by definition can only include Tier 2 types, and thus cannot include itself.

Next is his article "On Denoting" (1905), which is the grandfather of today's discipline of predicate logic and its logical approach to language. The task is to explain the underlying logical structure of denoting phrases that pick out particular things, such as "a man, some man, any man, every man, all men, the present King of England". For example, the sentence "I met a man" translates as,

" 'I met x, and x is human' is not always false" (or, in current predicate logic, "for all x, I met x and x is human")

The sentence "all men are mortal" translates as,

" 'If x is human, x is mortal' is always true" (or, in current predicate logic, "for all x, if x is human then x is mortal")

With more complex propositions, the sentence "the father of Charles II was executed" translates as,

"It is not always false of x that x begat Charles II and that x was executed and that 'if y begat Charles II, y is identical with x' is always true of y" (or, in current predicate logic, "there exists some x such that x is the father of Charles II, and, for all y, if y is the father of Charles II then y is the same person as x, and x was executed")

In Problems of Philosophy (1912) he argues that there are two different ways we know things: by acquaintance and by description. Knowledge by acquaintance consists of anything which we are directly aware of, without inference or assumptions. This is restricted to a comparatively small class of private experiences such as sense data, memory, introspection, and possibly the self. Knowledge by description is knowledge we have by reading or hearing about something, but not having direct private experience of it, such as that Lincoln was the sixteenth president. This is built upon knowledge by acquaintance that I or others have but it an assemblage of reports of them. Knowledge by description, then, is what enables us to move beyond the limits of private experience. There are different degrees or stages by which our descriptions go beyond private acquaintance. For example, the statement "Lincoln as we know him only through history" is further removed from private acquaintance than is the statement "Lincoln to those who knew him".

In "Mysticism and Logic" (1914) he maintains that scientific philosophy needs to be ethically neutral and not hold to any ethical viewpoint, such as that the world is in fact a good place. Ethics, he says, involves our subjective feelings about what is good and evil, and we call things "good" or "evil" based on those feelings. If we seek to develop philosophy as a science, rather than just a tool of our personal religion or ideology, it must be ethically neutral in the way that science sets aside personal desires. While this may seem disappointing at first to traditional philosophers, he suggests that ethical neutrality is an ethical advance since impartiality will make it more likely for philosophy to get at truth.

In "The Ethics of War" (1915) Russell argues against Britain's participation in World War I, and holds that war is an outdated method for countries to settle disputes. There are laws that prevent private individuals from violently attacking each other, and, as reasonable as it would be to extend this approach to public wars between countries, there exists no interrelation among states to do this. In all cases of potential war, one must balance the resulting good and evil, and countries poised for war typically do not take a full account of the evil results. He describes four motivations for war, and which are the most or least justifiable. The motives behind WWI, he argues, are never justified. Because of his anti-war writings like this one, in 1918 Russell was imprisoned for five months.

In "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" (1918) Russell offers a system of linguistic logic that underlies claims that we make about the world. He argues that there are atomic facts about the world, and these are the elements from which we form more complex propositions about the properties and relations of individual things. This gives us a logical language that parallels facts in the real world, and allows us to make claims about it without ambiguity and confusion. The starting point for this theory is the assumption that the world contains facts that are true or false, such as the fact that a particular snowball is white. These basic or "atomic" facts have different levels of complexity:

• Monadic: a quality of a particular thing, e.g., a snow ball being white

• Diadic: relations between two terms, e.g., a pencil sitting left to a pen

• Triadic: relations between three terms, e.g., John giving an apple to Mary

From these atomic facts we build atomic propositions, which will consist of particulars that are the subject (the word "snowball") and predicates which are the verbs (the phrase "is white"). These atomic propositions can be monadic ("the snowball is white"), diadic ("the pencil is left of the pen"), or triadic ("John gave an apple to Mary"). These are the simplest or most elemental forms of propositions, and Russell's task is to explain the underlying logic of more complex ones. The next step in complexity is that, from these atomic propositions, we can build molecular propositions using the logical connectives of "and", "or", "if-then". For example, the molecular proposition "If it rains then I will bring my umbrella" consists of two simple propositions "It is raining" and "I will bring my umbrella" connected together with if-then. Next in complexity are propositions that have two or more verbs, such as "I believe that Jones thinks he has a headache". Next are propositions that have definite descriptions, that is, propositions containing terms that pick out one unique individual, such as "the woman who won the best actress Academy Award for 1970". Next are propositions that contain "logical fictions" that do not belong to the real world but are convenient expressions. These include material objects, classes, numbers, and other human minds. He concludes this work discussing the implications of his theory of logical atomism on metaphysics. Most of the traditional problems of metaphysics, he argues, are based on mistakes in philosophical grammar, and logical atomism seeks to avoid this by basing propositions upon the smallest possible empirical system expressed through symbolic logic.

In The Analysis of Mind (1921) Russell defends a version of the metaphysical theory of neutral monism. Neutral monism is the view that seeks to narrow the gap between mind-body dualism. Dualists like Descartes held that physical bodies are completely material while human minds are completely immaterial. Neutral monism, though, takes a middle position that bodies and minds are composed of a neutral stuff that has both elements of matter and mind. Russell's specific approach is to show how "matter" is more dependent on psychology than we assume, and how our minds are more dependent upon physics more than we assume. He thus elevates matter to a more mental status while demoting mind to a more physical status, with the two meeting somewhere in between. The neutral stuff they share is sensation. Accordingly, he argues, there is no such thing as matter since it is only constituted from sensations, and there is no such thing as conscious mind, but only sensations. He has two starting points. First is behavioral psychology (particularly the views of John Watson) which makes psychology increasingly dependent upon physiology and external observation, thus making it materialist. Second is modern physics (particularly Einstein's theory of relativity), which views "matter" as increasingly less material and more of a logical construction. Psychology and physics each have different laws owing to their respective fields of study, and the two differ in that physics deals with larger systems of appearances, while psychology with particular appearances. Nevertheless, their point of commonality is sensations (not necessarily conscious ones) where matter is constituted from sensation, and introspection reveals that our mental life is constituted only of sensations.

In The Prospects of Industrial Civilization (1923), co-written with his wife Dora Russell, he argues that the chief social and political problem of his time is not the struggle between capitalism and socialism, but instead a tension between industrial civilization and humanity. As such, we need to find ways to prevent the changing industrial economic system from developing in a way that excludes human values. The answer is to use reason as a social power to preserve human values. There are three types of power: military and economic which both use force, and mental power which uses persuasion. Ultimately, he argues, mental power is the source of the other two insofar as both military and economic powers rely on it two sway popular opinion. Thus, if we hope for a better civilization, we must make use of the mental power of reason.

In An Outline of Philosophy (1927) Russell covers many of the topics that he did in The Analysis of Mind, but in the concluding section of this work he discusses philosophy's role in discovering the place of humans in the universe. He argues that philosophy's role is very limited in this respect. Questions of world's goodness and human immortality cannot be settled by philosophy, since philosophy does not have a moral purpose. Rather, philosophy's function is to describe the world as it is, and not establish that one view of it is more desirable than another. However, he says, the study of philosophy will have good moral effects by teaching us the limits of our power.

Finally, in "Why I am Not a Christian", he argues that being a Christian requires both belief in God and belief that "Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men". He denies both of these, arguing that proofs for God's existence fail, and that, while some of Christ's teachings have value, others have defects. Religion, he argues, is accepted on emotional grounds, particularly fear of the unknown.

FACING NATURE'S BLIND POWER (from "A Free Man's Worship", 1902)

Humans as a Product of Nature's Blind Power

. . . That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.

Religious Worship of Nature's Blind Power

The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of his impotence before the powers of Nature; but having in himself nothing that he respects more than Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before his gods, without inquiring whether they are worthy of his worship. Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods: surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is most precious has been freely given, their lust for blood must be appeased, and more will not be required. The religion of Moloch—as such creeds may be generically called—is in essence the cringing submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely worshiped, and receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain.

But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world begins to be felt; and worship, if it is not to cease, must be given to gods of another kind than those created by the savage. Some, though they feel the demands of the ideal, will still consciously reject them, still urging that naked Power is worthy of worship. Such is the attitude inculcated in God's answer to Job out of the whirlwind: the divine power and knowledge are paraded, but of the divine goodness there is no hint. Such also is the attitude of those who, in our own day, base their morality upon the struggle for survival, maintaining that the survivors are necessarily the fittest. But others, not content with an answer so repugnant to the moral sense, will adopt the position which we have become accustomed to regard as specially religious, maintaining that, in some hidden manner, the world of fact is really harmonious with the world of ideals. Thus Man creates God, all-powerful and all-good, the mystic unity of what is and what should be.

Freeing Oneself from the Tyranny of Nature's Power

But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our judgment to it, there is an element of slavishness from which our thoughts must be purged. For in all things it is well to exalt the dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of non-human Power. When we have realized that Power is largely bad, that man, with his knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom in a world which has no such knowledge, the choice is again presented to us: Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our God exist and be evil, or shall he be recognized as the creation of our own conscience?

The answer to this question is very momentous, and affects profoundly our whole morality. The worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us, is the result of failure to maintain our own ideals against a hostile universe: it is itself a prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice of our best to Moloch. . . .

Humans United by the Tie of Common Doom

The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison with the forces of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendor, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjection, but we absorb it, and make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things—this is emancipation, and this is the free man's worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of Time.

United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need—of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.

LOGICISM: MATHEMATICS REDUCIBLE TO FORMAL LOGIC (Principles of Mathematics, 1903)

Unsatisfactory Explanations about the Nature of Mathematics

Preface. The present work has two main objects. One of these, the proof that all pure mathematics deals exclusively with concepts definable in terms of a very small number of fundamental logical concepts, and that all its propositions are deducible from a very small number of fundamental logical principles, is undertaken in Parts 2.7 of this Volume, and will be established by strict symbolic reasoning in Volume 2. The demonstration of this thesis has, if I am not mistaken, all the certainty and precision of which mathematical demonstrations are capable. As the thesis is very recent among mathematicians, and is almost universally denied by philosophers, I have undertaken, in this volume, to defend its various parts, as occasion arose, against such adverse theories as appeared most widely held or most difficult to disprove. . . .

1.3. The Philosophy of Mathematics has been hitherto as controversial, obscure and unprogressive as the other branches of philosophy. Although it was generally agreed that mathematics is in some sense true, philosophers disputed as to what mathematical propositions really meant: although something was true, no two people were agreed as to what it was that was true, and if something was known, no one knew what it was that was known. So long, however, as this was doubtful, it could hardly be said that any certain and exact knowledge was to be obtained in mathematics. We find, accordingly, that idealists have tended more and more to regard all mathematics as dealing with mere appearance, while empiricists have held everything mathematical to be approximation to some exact truth about which they had nothing to tell us. This state of things, it must be confessed, was thoroughly unsatisfactory. Philosophy asks of Mathematics: What does it mean? Mathematics in the past was unable to answer, and Philosophy answered by introducing the totally irrelevant notion of mind. But now Mathematics is able to answer, so far at least as to reduce the whole of its propositions to certain fundamental notions of logic. At this point, the discussion must be resumed by Philosophy. I shall endeavour to indicate what are the fundamental notions involved, to prove at length that no others occur in mathematics, and to point out briefly the philosophical difficulties involved in the analysis of these notions. A complete treatment of these difficulties would involve a treatise on Logic, which will not be found in the following pages.

Logic as the Premises of Mathematics

1.10. The connection of mathematics with logic, according to the above account, is exceedingly close. The fact that all mathematical constants are logical constants, and that all the premisses of mathematics are concerned with these, gives, I believe, the precise statement of what philosophers have meant in asserting that mathematics is à priori. The fact is that, when once the apparatus of logic has been accepted, all mathematics necessarily follows. The logical constants themselves are to be defined only by enumeration, for they are so fundamental that all the properties by which the class of them might be defined presuppose some terms of the class. But practically, the method of discovering the logical constants is the analysis of symbolic logic, which will be the business of the following chapters. The distinction of mathematics from logic is very arbitrary, but if a distinction is desired, it may be made as follows. Logic consists of the premisses of mathematics, together with all other propositions which are concerned exclusively with logical constants and with variables but do not fulfil the above definition of mathematics (§1). Mathematics consists of all the consequences of the above premisses which assert formal implications containing variables, together with such of the premisses themselves as have these marks. Thus some of the premises of mathematics, e.g. the principle of the syllogism, if p implies q and q implies r, then p implies r, will belong to mathematics, while others, such as implication is a relation, will belong to logic but not to mathematics. But for the desire to adhere to usage, we might identify mathematics and logic, and define either as the class of propositions containing only variables and logical constants; but respect for tradition leads me rather to adhere to the above distinction, while recognizing that certain propositions belong to both sciences.

From what has now been said, the reader will perceive that the present work has to fulfil two objects, first, to show that all mathematics follows from symbolic logic, and secondly to discover, as far as possible, what are the principles of symbolic logic itself.

Russell's Paradox: Contradiction in Traditional Set Theory (Chapter 9)

The Paradox: An Object is Defined in terms of a Class of Objects that Contains the Object being Defined, Resulting in a Logical Contradiction

96. . . . The axiom that all referents with respect to a given relation form a class seems, however, to require some limitation, and that on account of the contradiction mentioned at the end of Chapter vi. This contradiction may be stated as follows. We saw that some predicates can be predicated of themselves. Consider now those of which this is not the case. These are the referents (and also the relata) in what seems like a complex relation, namely the combination of non-predicability with identity. But there is no predicate which attaches to all of them and to no other terms. For this predicate will either be predicable or not predicable of itself. If it is predicable of itself, it is one of those referents by relation to which it was defined, and therefore, in virtue of their definition, it is not predicable of itself. Conversely, if it is not predicable of itself, then again it is one of the said referents, of all of which (by hypothesis) it is predicable, and therefore again it is predicable of itself. This is a contradiction, which shows that all the referents considered have no exclusive common predicate, and therefore, if defining predicates are essential to classes, do not form a class.

[Clearer explanation: "The comprehensive class we are considering, which is to embrace everything, must embrace itself as one of its members. In other words, if there is such a thing as "everything," then, "everything" is something, and is a member of the class "everything." But normally a class is not a member of itself. Mankind, for example, is not a man. Form now the assemblage of all classes which are not members of themselves. This is a class: is it a member of itself or not? If it is, it is one of those classes that are not members of themselves, i.e., it is not a member of itself. If it is not, it is not one of those classes that are not members of themselves, i.e. it is a member of itself. Thus of the two hypotheses – that it is, and that it is not, a member of itself – each implies its contradictory. This is a contradiction." Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, 1919, Ch. 8]

Theory of Types Solution: Higher-Tier Types include only Lower-Tier Types (Appendix B)

The doctrine of types is here put forward tentatively, as affording a possible solution of the contradiction; but it requires, in all probability, to be transformed into some subtler shape before it can answer all difficulties. In case, however, it should be found to be a first step towards the truth, I shall endeavour in this Appendix to set forth its main outlines, as well as some problems which it fails to solve. . . .

[Tier 1 Type:] A term or individual is any object which is not a range. This is the lowest type of object. If such an object — say a certain point in space — occurs in a proposition, any other individual may always be substituted without loss of significance. What we called, in Chapter vi, the class as one, is an individual, provided its members are individuals; the objects of daily life, persons, tables, chairs, apples, etc., are classes as one. (A person is a class of psychical existents, the others are classes of material points, with perhaps some reference to secondary qualities.) These objects, therefore, are of the same type as simple individuals. It would seem that all objects designated by single words, whether things or concepts, are of this type.

[Tier 2 Type:] The next type consists of ranges or classes of individuals [i.e., sets of Tier 1 objects]. . . . Thus [the class containing] "Brown and Jones" is an object of this type. . . .

[Tier 3 Type:] The next type after classes of individuals consists of classes of classes of individuals [i.e., sets of Tier 2 objects]. Such are, for example, associations of clubs; the members of such associations, the clubs, are themselves classes of individuals. It will be convenient to speak of classes only where we have classes of individuals, of classes of classes only where we have classes of classes of individuals, and so on. . . .

To sum up: it appears that the special contradiction of Chapter X is solved by the doctrine of types [i.e., a type cannot be a member of itself], but that there is at least one closely analogous contradiction which is probably not soluble by this doctrine.

SYMBOLIZING DENOTING PHRASES ("On Denoting" 1905)

Types of Denoting Phrases

By a 'denoting phrase' I mean a phrase such as any one of the following: a man, some man, any man, every man, all men, the present King of England, the present King of France, the center of mass of the solar system at the first instant of the twentieth century, the revolution of the earth round the sun, the revolution of the sun round the earth. Thus a phrase is denoting solely in virtue of its form. We may distinguish three cases: (1) A phrase may be denoting, and yet not denote anything; e.g., 'the present King of France'. (2) A phrase may denote one definite object; e.g., 'the present King of England' denotes a certain man. (3) A phrase may denote ambiguously; e.g. 'a man' denotes not many men, but an ambiguous man. The interpretation of such phrases is a matter of considerably difficulty; indeed, it is very hard to frame any theory not susceptible of formal refutation. All the difficulties with which I am acquainted are met, so far as I can discover, by the theory which I am about to explain.

Knowledge through Direct Acquaintance and Knowledge through Denoting (i.e. description)

The subject of denoting is of very great importance, not only in logic and mathematics, but also in the theory of knowledge. For example, we know that the center of mass of the solar system at a definite instant is some definite point, and we can affirm a number of propositions about it; but we have no immediate acquaintance with this point, which is only known to us by description. The distinction between acquaintance and knowledge about is the distinction between the things we have presentations of, and the things we only reach by means of denoting phrases. It often happens that we know that a certain phrase denotes unambiguously, although we have no acquaintance with what it denotes; this occurs in the above case of the center of mass. In perception we have acquaintance with objects of perception, and in thought we have acquaintance with objects of a more abstract logical character; but we do not necessarily have acquaintance with the objects denoted by phrases composed of words with whose meanings we are acquainted. To take a very important instance: there seems no reason to believe that we are ever acquainted with other people's minds, seeing that these are not directly perceived; hence what we know about them is obtained through denoting. All thinking has to start from acquaintance; but it succeeds in thinking about many things with which we have no acquaintance.

The course of my argument will be as follows. I shall begin by stating the theory I intend to advocate; I shall then discuss the theories of Frege and Meinong, showing why neither of them satisfies me; then I shall give the grounds in favor of my theory; and finally I shall briefly indicate the philosophical consequences of my theory.

Defining Three Denoting Terms: Everything, Nothing, and Something

My theory, briefly, is as follows. I take the notion of the variable as fundamental; I use 'C(x)' to mean a proposition in which x is a constituent, where x, the variable, is essentially and wholly undetermined. [i.e., "C" is any statement about whatever is contained in parentheses.] Then we can consider the two notions 'C(x) is always true' and 'C(x) is sometimes true'. Then everything and nothing and something (which are the most primitive of denoting phrases) are to be interpreted as follows:

C(everything) means 'C(x) is always true';

[e.g., "everything is a creation", more formally, ∀x(Cx) "for all x, x is a creation"]

C(nothing) means ' "C(x) is false" is always true';

[e.g., "nothing is a centaur", more formally, ∀x(~Cx) "for all x, x is not a centaur"]

C(something) means 'It is false that "C(x) is false" is always true.'

[e.g., "something is a caterpillar", more formally, ~∀x(~Cx) "it is not the case that for all x no x is a caterpillar")]

Here the notion 'C(x) is always true' is taken as ultimate and indefinable, and the others are defined by means of it. Everything, nothing, and something are not assumed to have any meaning in isolation, but a meaning is assigned to every proposition in which they occur. This is the principle of the theory of denoting I wish to advocate: that denoting phrases never have any meaning in themselves, but that every proposition in whose verbal expression they occur has a meaning. The difficulties concerning denoting are, I believe, all the result of a wrong analysis of propositions whose verbal expressions contain denoting phrases. The proper analysis, if I am not mistaken, may be further set forth as follows.

Translating "I Met a Man"

Suppose now we wish to interpret the proposition, 'I met a man'. If this is true, I met some definite man; but that is not what I affirm. What I affirm is, according to the theory I advocate:

' "I met x, and x is human" is not always false'.

[i.e., ∀x(Mix & Hx) "for all x, I met x and x is human"]

Generally, defining the class of men as the class of objects having the predicate human, we say that:

'C(a man)' means ' "C(x) and x is human" is not always false'.

This leaves 'a man', by itself, wholly destitute of meaning, but gives a meaning to every proposition in whose verbal expression 'a man' occurs.

Translating "All Men are Mortal"

Consider next the proposition 'all men are mortal'. This proposition is really hypothetical and states that if anything is a man, it is mortal. That is, it states that if x is a man, x is mortal, whatever x may be. Hence, substituting 'x is human' for 'x is a man', we find:

'All men are mortal' means ' "If x is human, x is mortal" is always true.'

[i.e., ∀x(Hx → Mx) "for all x, if x is human then x is mortal"]

This is what is expressed in symbolic logic by saying that 'all men are mortal' means ' "x is human" implies "x is mortal" for all values of x'. More generally, we say:

'C(all men)' means ' "If x is human, then C(x) is true" is always true'.

Similarly

'C(no men)' means ' "If x is human, then C(x) is false" is always true'.

'C(some men)' will mean the same as 'C(a man)', and

'C(a man)' means 'It is false that "C(x) and x is human" is always false'.

'C(every man)' will mean the same as 'C(all men)'.

Translating Identity Statements

It remains to interpret phrases containing the. These are by far the most interesting and difficult of denoting phrases. Take as an instance 'the father of Charles II was executed'. This asserts that there was an x who was the father of Charles II and was executed. Now the, when it is strictly used, involves uniqueness; we do, it is true, speak of 'the son of So-and-so' even when So-and-so has several sons, but it would be more correct to say 'a son of So-and-so'. Thus for our purposes we take the as involving uniqueness. Thus when we say 'x was the father of Charles II' we not only assert that x had a certain relation to Charles II, but also that nothing else had this relation. The relation in question, without the assumption of uniqueness, and without any denoting phrases, is expressed by 'x begat Charles II'. To get an equivalent of 'x was the father of Charles II', we must add 'If y is other than x, y did not beget Charles II', or, what is equivalent, 'If y begat Charles II, y is identical with x'. Hence 'x is the father of Charles II' becomes: 'x begat Charles II; and "If y begat Charles II, y is identical with x" is always true of y'.

Thus 'the father of Charles II was executed' becomes: 'It is not always false of x that x begat Charles II and that x was executed and that "if y begat Charles II, y is identical with x" is always true of y'. [i.e., Ǝx{[(Fx) & ∀y(Fy → y=x)] & Ex} "there exists some x such that x is the father of Charles II, and, for all y, if y is the father of Charles II then y is the same person as x, and x was executed"]

This may seem a somewhat incredible interpretation; but I am not at present giving reasons, I am merely stating the theory.

To interpret 'C(the father of Charles II)', where C stands for any statement about him, we have only to substitute C(x) for 'x was executed' in the above. Observe that, according to the above interpretation, whatever statement C may be, 'C(the father of Charles II)' implies:

'It is not always false of x that "if y begat Charles II, y is identical with x" is always true of y',

which is what is expressed in common language by 'Charles II had one father and no more'. Consequently if this condition fails, every proposition of the form 'C(the father of Charles II)' is false. Thus e.g. every proposition of the form 'C(the present King of France)' is false. This is a great advantage to the present theory. I shall show later that it is not contrary to the law of contradiction, as might be at first supposed.

The above gives a reduction of all propositions in which denoting phrases occur to forms in which no such phrases occur. Why it is imperative to effect such a reduction, the subsequent discussion will endeavor to show.

The evidence for the above theory is derived from the difficulties which seem unavoidable if we regard denoting phrases as standing for genuine constituents of the propositions in whose verbal expressions they occur. . . .

KNOWLEDGE BY ACQUAINTANCE AND DESCRIPTION (Problems of Philosophy, 1912, 5)

Acquaintance and Description Explained

In the preceding chapter we saw that there are two sorts of knowledge: knowledge of things, and knowledge of truths. In this chapter we shall be concerned exclusively with knowledge of things, of which in turn we shall have to distinguish two kinds. Knowledge of things, when it is of the kind we call knowledge by acquaintance, is essentially simpler than any knowledge of truths, and logically independent of knowledge of truths, though it would be rash to assume that human beings ever, in fact, have acquaintance with things without at the same time knowing some truth about them. Knowledge of things by description, on the contrary, always involves, as we shall find in the course of the present chapter, some knowledge of truths as its source and ground. But first of all we must make clear what we mean by 'acquaintance' and what we mean by 'description'.

We shall say that we have acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference or any knowledge of truths. Thus in the presence of my table I am acquainted with the sense-data that make up the appearance of my table—its colour, shape, hardness, smoothness, etc.; all these are things of which I am immediately conscious when I am seeing and touching my table. The particular shade of colour that I am seeing may have many things said about it—I may say that it is brown, that it is rather dark, and so on. But such statements, though they make me know truths about the colour, do not make me know the colour itself any better than I did before so far as concerns knowledge of the colour itself, as opposed to knowledge of truths about it, I know the colour perfectly and completely when I see it, and no further knowledge of it itself is even theoretically possible. Thus the sense-data which make up the appearance of my table are things with which I have acquaintance, things immediately known to me just as they are.

My knowledge of the table as a physical object, on the contrary, is not direct knowledge. Such as it is, it is obtained through acquaintance with the sense-data that make up the appearance of the table. We have seen that it is possible, without absurdity, to doubt whether there is a table at all, whereas it is not possible to doubt the sense-data. My knowledge of the table is of the kind which we shall call 'knowledge by description'. The table is 'the physical object which causes such-and-such sense-data'. This describes the table by means of the sense-data. In order to know anything at all about the table, we must know truths connecting it with things with which we have acquaintance: we must know that 'such-and-such sense-data are caused by a physical object'. There is no state of mind in which we are directly aware of the table; all our knowledge of the table is really knowledge of truths, and the actual thing which is the table is not, strictly speaking, known to us at all. We know a description, and we know that there is just one object to which this description applies, though the object itself is not directly known to us. In such a case, we say that our knowledge of the object is knowledge by description.

Knowledge by Acquaintance: Sense Data, Memory, Introspection

All our knowledge, both knowledge of things and knowledge of truths, rests upon acquaintance as its foundation. It is therefore important to consider what kinds of things there are with which we have acquaintance.

Sense-data, as we have already seen, are among the things with which we are acquainted; in fact, they supply the most obvious and striking example of knowledge by acquaintance. But if they were the sole example, our knowledge would be very much more restricted than it is. We should only know what is now present to our senses: we could not know anything about the past—not even that there was a past—nor could we know any truths about our sense-data, for all knowledge of truths, as we shall show, demands acquaintance with things which are of an essentially different character from sense-data, the things which are sometimes called 'abstract ideas', but which we shall call 'universals'. We have therefore to consider acquaintance with other things besides sense-data if we are to obtain any tolerably adequate analysis of our knowledge.

The first extension beyond sense-data to be considered is acquaintance by memory. It is obvious that we often remember what we have seen or heard or had otherwise present to our senses, and that in such cases we are still immediately aware of what we remember, in spite of the fact that it appears as past and not as present. This immediate knowledge by memory is the source of all our knowledge concerning the past: without it, there could be no knowledge of the past by inference, since we should never know that there was anything past to be inferred.

The next extension to be considered is acquaintance by introspection. We are not only aware of things, but we are often aware of being aware of them. When I see the sun, I am often aware of my seeing the sun; thus 'my seeing the sun' is an object with which I have acquaintance. When I desire food, I may be aware of my desire for food; thus 'my desiring food' is an object with which I am acquainted. Similarly we may be aware of our feeling pleasure or pain, and generally of the events which happen in our minds. This kind of acquaintance, which may be called self-consciousness, is the source of all our knowledge of mental things. It is obvious that it is only what goes on in our own minds that can be thus known immediately. What goes on in the minds of others is known to us through our perception of their bodies, that is, through the sense-data in us which are associated with their bodies. But for our acquaintance with the contents of our own minds, we should be unable to imagine the minds of others, and therefore we could never arrive at the knowledge that they have minds. It seems natural to suppose that self-consciousness is one of the things that distinguish men from animals: animals, we may suppose, though they have acquaintance with sense-data, never become aware of this acquaintance. I do not mean that they doubt whether they exist, but that they have never become conscious of the fact that they have sensations and feelings, nor therefore of the fact that they, the subjects of their sensations and feelings, exist.

We have spoken of acquaintance with the contents of our minds as self-consciousness, but it is not, of course, consciousness of our self: it is consciousness of particular thoughts and feelings. The question whether we are also acquainted with our bare selves, as opposed to particular thoughts and feelings, is a very difficult one, upon which it would be rash to speak positively. When we try to look into ourselves we always seem to come upon some particular thought or feeling, and not upon the 'I' which has the thought or feeling. Nevertheless there are some reasons for thinking that we are acquainted with the 'I', though the acquaintance is hard to disentangle from other things. . . .

We may therefore sum up as follows what has been said concerning acquaintance with things that exist. We have acquaintance in sensation with the data of the outer senses, and in introspection with the data of what may be called the inner sense—thoughts, feelings, desires, etc.; we have acquaintance in memory with things which have been data either of the outer senses or of the inner sense. Further, it is probable, though not certain, that we have acquaintance with Self, as that which is aware of things or has desires towards things.

In addition to our acquaintance with particular existing things, we also have acquaintance with what we shall call universals, that is to say, general ideas, such as whiteness, diversity, brotherhood, and so on. Every complete sentence must contain at least one word which stands for a universal, since all verbs have a meaning which is universal. We shall return to universals later on, in Chapter IX; for the present, it is only necessary to guard against the supposition that whatever we can be acquainted with must be something particular and existent. Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

Knowledge by Description: Derived from Acquaintance

It will be seen that among the objects with which we are acquainted are not included physical objects (as opposed to sense-data), nor other people's minds. These things are known to us by what I call 'knowledge by description', which we must now consider.

By a 'description' I mean any phrase of the form 'a so-and-so' or 'the so-and-so'. A phrase of the form 'a so-and-so' I shall call an 'ambiguous' description; a phrase of the form 'the so-and-so' (in the singular) I shall call a 'definite' description. Thus 'a man' is an ambiguous description, and 'the man with the iron mask' is a definite description. . . . I shall therefore, in the sequel, speak simply of 'descriptions' when I mean 'definite descriptions'. Thus a description will mean any phrase of the form 'the so-and-so' in the singular.

All names of places—London, England, Europe, the Earth, the Solar System—similarly involve, when used, descriptions which start from some one or more particulars with which we are acquainted. I suspect that even the Universe, as considered by metaphysics, involves such a connection with particulars. In logic, on the contrary, where we are concerned not merely with what does exist, but with whatever might or could exist or be, no reference to actual particulars is involved. . . .

It will be seen that there are various stages in the removal from acquaintance with particulars: there is Bismarck to people who knew him; Bismarck to those who only know of him through history; the man with the iron mask; the longest-lived of men. These are progressively further removed from acquaintance with particulars; the first comes as near to acquaintance as is possible in regard to another person; in the second, we shall still be said to know 'who Bismarck was'; in the third, we do not know who was the man with the iron mask, though we can know many propositions about him which are not logically deducible from the fact that he wore an iron mask; in the fourth, finally, we know nothing beyond what is logically deducible from the definition of the man. There is a similar hierarchy in the region of universals. Many universals, like many particulars, are only known to us by description. But here, as in the case of particulars, knowledge concerning what is known by description is ultimately reducible to knowledge concerning what is known by acquaintance.

The fundamental principle in the analysis of propositions containing descriptions is this: Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted.

We shall not at this stage attempt to answer all the objections which may be urged against this fundamental principle. For the present, we shall merely point out that, in some way or other, it must be possible to meet these objections, for it is scarcely conceivable that we can make a judgement or entertain a supposition without knowing what it is that we are judging or supposing about. We must attach some meaning to the words we use, if we are to speak significantly and not utter mere noise; and the meaning we attach to our words must be something with which we are acquainted. Thus when, for example, we make a statement about Julius Caesar, it is plain that Julius Caesar himself is not before our minds, since we are not acquainted with him. We have in mind some description of Julius Caesar: 'the man who was assassinated on the Ides of March', 'the founder of the Roman Empire', or, perhaps, merely 'the man whose name was Julius Caesar'. (In this last description, Julius Caesar is a noise or shape with which we are acquainted.) Thus our statement does not mean quite what it seems to mean, but means something involving, instead of Julius Caesar, some description of him which is composed wholly of particulars and universals with which we are acquainted.

The chief importance of knowledge by description is that it enables us to pass beyond the limits of our private experience. In spite of the fact that we can only know truths which are wholly composed of terms which we have experienced in acquaintance, we can yet have knowledge by description of things which we have never experienced. In view of the very narrow range of our immediate experience, this result is vital, and until it is understood, much of our knowledge must remain mysterious and therefore doubtful.

ETHICAL NEUTRALITY IN SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY ("Mysticism and Logic" 1914)

Ethics involves Subjective Feelings about Actions and the Possibility of Universal Love

Mysticism maintains that all evil is illusory, and sometimes maintains the same view as regards good, but more often holds that all Reality is good. Both views are to be found in Heraclitus: "Good and ill are one," he says, but again, "To God all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right." A similar twofold position is to be found in Spinoza, but he uses the word "perfection" when he means to speak of the good that is not merely human. "By reality and perfection I mean the same thing," he says; but elsewhere we find the definition: "By good I shall mean that which we certainly know to be useful to us." Thus perfection belongs to Reality in its own nature, but goodness is relative to ourselves and our needs, and disappears in an impartial survey. Some such distinction, I think, is necessary in order to understand the ethical outlook of mysticism: there is a lower mundane kind of good and evil, which divides the world of appearance into what seem to be conflicting parts; but there is also a higher, mystical kind of good, which belongs to Reality and is not opposed by any correlative kind of evil.

It is difficult to give a logically tenable account of this position [that all reality is good] without recognising that good and evil are subjective, that what is good is merely that towards which we have one kind of feeling, and what is evil is merely that towards which we have another kind of feeling. In our active life, where we have to exercise choice, and to prefer this to that of two possible acts, it is necessary to have a distinction of good and evil, or at least of better and worse. But this distinction, like everything pertaining to action, belongs to what mysticism regards as the world of illusion, if only because it is essentially concerned with time. In our contemplative life, where action is not called for, it is possible to be impartial, and to overcome the ethical dualism which action requires. So long as we remain merely impartial, we may be content to say that both the good and the evil of action are illusions. But if, as we must do if we have the mystic vision, we find the whole world worthy of love and worship, if we see "The earth, and every common sight. . . Apparell'd in celestial light," we shall say that there is a higher good than that of action, and that this higher good belongs to the whole world as it is in reality. In this way the twofold attitude and the apparent vacillation of mysticism are explained and justified.

The possibility of this universal love and joy in all that exists is of supreme importance for the conduct and happiness of life, and gives inestimable value to the mystic emotion, apart from any creeds which may be built upon it. But if we are not to be led into false beliefs, it is necessary to realise exactly what the mystic emotion reveals. It reveals a possibility of human nature—a possibility of a nobler, happier, freer life than any that can be otherwise achieved. But it does not reveal anything about the non-human, or about the nature of the universe in general. Good and bad, and even the higher good that mysticism finds everywhere, are the reflections of our own emotions on other things, not part of the substance of things as they are in themselves. And therefore an impartial contemplation, freed from all pre-occupation with Self, will not judge things good or bad, although it is very easily combined with that feeling of universal love which leads the mystic to say that the whole world is good.

The philosophy of evolution, through the notion of progress, is bound up with the ethical dualism of the worse and the better, and is thus shut out, not only from the kind of survey which discards good and evil altogether from its view, but also from the mystical belief in the goodness of everything. In this way the distinction of good and evil, like time, becomes a tyrant in this philosophy, and introduces into thought the restless selectiveness of action. Good and evil, like time, are, it would seem, not general or fundamental in the world of thought, but late and highly specialised members of the intellectual hierarchy.

Although, as we saw, mysticism can be interpreted so as to agree with the view that good and evil are not intellectually fundamental, it must be admitted that here we are no longer in verbal agreement with most of the great philosophers and religious teachers of the past. I believe, however, that the elimination of ethical considerations from philosophy is both scientifically necessary and—though this may seem a paradox—an ethical advance. Both these contentions must be briefly defended.

An Ethically Neutral Philosophy is Scientifically Necessary since Science Sets Aside Desires

The hope of satisfaction to our more human desires—the hope of demonstrating that the world has this or that desirable ethical characteristic—is not one which, so far as I can see, a scientific philosophy can do anything whatever to satisfy. The difference between a good world and a bad one is a difference in the particular characteristics of the particular things that exist in these worlds: it is not a sufficiently abstract difference to come within the province of philosophy. Love and hate, for example, are ethical opposites, but to philosophy they are closely analogous attitudes towards objects. The general form and structure of those attitudes towards objects which constitute mental phenomena is a problem for philosophy, but the difference between love and hate is not a difference of form or structure, and therefore belongs rather to the special science of psychology than to philosophy. Thus the ethical interests which have often inspired philosophers must remain in the background: some kind of ethical interest may inspire the whole study, but none must obtrude in the detail or be expected in the special results which are sought.

If this view seems at first sight disappointing, we may remind ourselves that a similar change has been found necessary in all the other sciences. The physicist or chemist is not now required to prove the ethical importance of his ions or atoms; the biologist is not expected to prove the utility of the plants or animals which he dissects. In pre-scientific ages this was not the case. Astronomy, for example, was studied because men believed in astrology: it was thought that the movements of the planets had the most direct and important bearing upon the lives of human beings. Presumably, when this belief decayed and the disinterested study of astronomy began, many who had found astrology absorbingly interesting decided that astronomy had too little human interest to be worthy of study. Physics, as it appears in Plato's Timæus for example, is full of ethical notions: it is an essential part of its purpose to show that the earth is worthy of admiration. The modern physicist, on the contrary, though he has no wish to deny that the earth is admirable, is not concerned, as physicist, with its ethical attributes: he is merely concerned to find out facts, not to consider whether they are good or bad. In psychology, the scientific attitude is even more recent and more difficult than in the physical sciences: it is natural to consider that human nature is either good or bad, and to suppose that the difference between good and bad, so all-important in practice, must be important in theory also. It is only during the last century that an ethically neutral psychology has grown up; and here too, ethical neutrality has been essential to scientific success.

An Ethically Neutral Philosophy is an Ethical Advance since it is Impartial to Human Demands

In philosophy, hitherto, ethical neutrality has been seldom sought and hardly ever achieved. Men have remembered their wishes, and have judged philosophies in relation to their wishes. Driven from the particular sciences, the belief that the notions of good and evil must afford a key to the understanding of the world has sought a refuge in philosophy. But even from this last refuge, if philosophy is not to remain a set of pleasing dreams, this belief must be driven forth. It is a commonplace that happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly; and it would seem that the same is true of the good. In thought, at any rate, those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

We are thus brought back to our seeming paradox, that a philosophy which does not seek to impose upon the world its own conceptions of good and evil is not only more likely to achieve truth, but is also the outcome of a higher ethical standpoint than one which, like evolutionism and most traditional systems, is perpetually appraising the universe and seeking to find in it an embodiment of present ideals. In religion, and in every deeply serious view of the world and of human destiny, there is an element of submission, a realisation of the limits of human power, which is somewhat lacking in the modern world, with its quick material successes and its insolent belief in the boundless possibilities of progress. "He that loveth his life shall lose it"; and there is danger lest, through a too confident love of life, life itself should lose much of what gives it its highest worth. The submission which religion inculcates in action is essentially the same in spirit as that which science teaches in thought; and the ethical neutrality by which its victories have been achieved is the outcome of that submission.

The good which it concerns us to remember is the good which it lies in our power to create—the good in our own lives and in our attitude towards the world. Insistence on belief in an external realisation of the good is a form of self-assertion, which, while it cannot secure the external good which it desires, can seriously impair the inward good which lies within our power, and destroy that reverence towards fact which constitutes both what is valuable in humility and what is fruitful in the scientific temper.

Human beings cannot, of course, wholly transcend human nature; something subjective, if only the interest that determines the direction of our attention, must remain in all our thought. But scientific philosophy comes nearer to objectivity than any other human pursuit, and gives us, therefore, the closest constant and the most intimate relation with the outer world that it is possible to achieve. To the primitive mind, everything is either friendly or hostile; but experience has shown that friendliness and hostility are not the conceptions by which the world is to be understood. Scientific philosophy thus represents, though as yet only in a nascent condition, a higher form of thought than any pre-scientific belief or imagination, and, like every approach to self-transcendence, it brings with it a rich reward in increase of scope and breadth and comprehension. Evolutionism, in spite of its appeals to particular scientific facts, fails to be a truly scientific philosophy because of its slavery to time, its ethical preoccupations, and its predominant interest in our mundane concerns and destiny. A truly scientific philosophy will be more humble, more piecemeal, more arduous, offering less glitter of outward mirage to flatter fallacious hopes, but more indifferent to fate, and more capable of accepting the world without the tyrannous imposition of our human and temporary demands.

AGAINST WAR ("The Ethics of War", 1915)

Justifications of War based on Feelings not Arguments

The question whether war is ever justified, and if so under what circumstances, is one which has been forcing itself upon the attention of all thoughtful men. On this question I find myself in the somewhat painful position of holding that no single one of the combatants is justified in the present war, while not taking the extreme Tolstoyan view that war is under all circumstances a crime. Opinions on such a subject as war are the outcome of feeling rather than of thought: given a man's emotional temperament, his convictions, both on war in general, and on any particular war which may occur during his lifetime, can be predicted with tolerable certainty. The arguments used will be mere reinforcements to convictions otherwise reached. The fundamental facts in this as in all ethical questions are feelings; all that thought can do is to clarify and systematize the expression of those feelings, and it is such clarifying and systematizing of my own feelings that I wish to attempt in the present article.

Parallel between Private Wars and Public Wars

The question of the rights and wrongs of a particular war is generally considered from a juridical or quasi-juridical standpoint: so and so broke such and such a treaty, crossed such and such a frontier, committed such and such technically unfriendly acts, and therefore by the rules it is permissible to kill as many of his nation as modern armaments render possible. There is a certain unreality, a certain lack of imaginative grasp about this way of viewing matters. It has the advantage, always dearly prized by lazy men, of substituting a formula, at once ambiguous and easily applied, for the vital realization of the consequences of acts. The juridical point of view is in fact an illegitimate transference, to the relations of States, of principles properly applicable to the relation of individuals within a State. Within a State, private war is forbidden, and the disputes of private citizens are settled, not by their own force, but by the force of the police, which, being overwhelming, very seldom needs to be explicitly displayed. It is necessary that there should be rules according to which the police decide who is to be considered in the right in a private dispute. These rules constitute law. The chief gain derived from the law and the police is the abolition of private wars, and this gain is independent of the question whether the law as it stands is the best possible. It is therefore in the public interest that the man who goes against the law should be considered in the wrong, not because of the excellence of the law, but because of the importance of avoiding the resort to force as between individuals within the State.

In the interrelation of States nothing of the same sort exists. There is, it is true, a body of conventions called "international law," and there are innumerable treaties between High Contracting Powers. But the conventions and the treaties differ from anything that could properly be called law by the absence of sanction: there is no police force able or willing to enforce their observance. It follows from this that every nation concludes multitudes of divergent and incompatible treaties, and that, in spite of the high language one sometimes hears, the main purpose of the treaties is in actual fact to afford the sort of pretext which is considered respectable for engaging in war with another Power. . . .

Balance the Good and Evil of a War

It is necessary, in regard to any war, to consider, not its paper justification in past agreements, but its real justification in the balance of good which it is to bring to mankind. At the beginning of a war each nation, under the influence of what is called patriotism, believes that its own victory is both certain and of great importance to mankind. The praiseworthiness of this belief has become an accepted maxim of common sense: even when war is actually in progress it is held to be natural and right that a citizen of an enemy country should regard the victory of his side as assured and highly desirable. By concentrating attention upon the supposed advantages of the victory of our own side, we become more or less blind to the evils inseparable from war and equally certain whichever side may ultimately prove victorious. Yet so long as these are not fully realized, it is impossible to judge justly whether a war is or is not likely to be beneficial to the human race. Although the theme is trite, it is necessary therefore briefly to remind ourselves what the evils of war really are. . . .

Four Types of Wars

Are there any wars which achieve so much for the good of mankind as to outweigh all the evils we have been considering? I think there have been such wars in the past, but they are not wars of the sort with which our diplomatists are concerned, for which our armies and navies have been prepared, and which are exemplified by the present conflict. For purposes of classification we may roughly distinguish four kinds of wars, though of course in any given case a war is not likely to be quite clearly of any one of the four kinds. With this proviso we may distinguish: (1) Wars of Colonization; (2) Wars of Principle; (3) Wars of Self-defence; (4) Wars of Prestige. Of these four kinds I should say that the first and second are fairly often justified; the third seldom, except against an adversary of inferior civilization; and the fourth, which is the sort to which the present war belongs, never. . . .

War is an Anachronistic Method of Settling Disputes

The objects for which men have fought in the past, whether just or unjust, are no longer to be achieved by wars amongst civilized nations. A great weight of tradition, of financial interests, of political insincerity, is bound up with the anachronism of international hostility. It is, however, perhaps not chimerical to hope that the present war, which has shocked the conscience of mankind more than any war in previous history, may produce a revulsion against antiquated methods, and may lead the exhausted nations to insist upon that brotherhood and co-operation which their rulers have hitherto denied them. There is no reason whatever against the settlement of all disputes by a Council of the Powers deliberating in public. Nothing stands in its way except the pride of rulers who wish to remain uncontrolled by anything higher than their own will. When this great tragedy has worked itself out to its disastrous conclusion, when the passions of hate and self-assertion have given place to compassion with the universal misery, the nations will perhaps realize that they have fought in blindness and delusion, and that the way of mercy is the way of happiness for all.

LOGICAL ATOMISM ("The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" 1918)

Atomic Facts and Relations (Lecture 1)

Logical Atomism Explained

The reason that I call my doctrine logical atomism is because the atoms that I wish to arrive at as the sort of last residue in analysis are logical atoms and not physical atoms. Some of them will be what I call "particulars," — such things as little patches of color or sounds, momentary things — and some of them will be predicates or relations and so on. The point is that the atom I wish to arrive at is the atom of logical analysis, not the atom of physical analysis.

It is a rather curious fact in philosophy that the data which are undeniable to start with are always rather vague and ambiguous. You can, for instance, say: "There are a number of people in this room at this moment." That is obviously in some sense undeniable. But when you come to try and define what this room is, and what it is for a person to be in a room, and how you are going to distinguish one person from another, and so forth, you find that what you have said is most fearfully vague and that you really do not know what you meant. That is a rather singular fact, that everything you are really sure of, right off is something that you do not know the meaning of, and the moment you get a precise statement you will not be sure whether it is true or false, at least right off. The process of sound philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we started from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow. . . .

I propose now to consider what sort of language a logically perfect language would be. In a logically perfect language the words in a proposition would correspond one by one with the components of the corresponding fact, with the exception of such words as "or," "not," "if," "then," which have a different function. In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component. A language of that sort will be completely analytic, and will show at a glance the logical structure of the facts asserted or denied. The language which is set forth in Principia Mathematica is intended to be a language of that sort. It is a language which has only syntax and no vocabulary whatsoever. Barring the omission of a vocabulary I maintain that it is quite a nice language. It aims at being that sort of a language that, if you add a vocabulary, would be a logically perfect language. . . .

Atomic Facts

The first truism to which I wish to draw your attention — and I hope you will agree with me that these things that I call truisms are so obvious that it is almost laughable to mention them — is that the world contains facts, which are what they are whatever we may choose to think about them, and that there are also beliefs, which have reference to facts, and by reference to facts are either true or false. I will try first of all to give you a preliminary explanation of what I mean by a "fact." When I speak of a fact — I do not propose to attempt an exact definition, but an explanation, so that you will know what I am talking about — I mean the kind of thing that makes a proposition true or false. If I say "It is raining," what I say is true in a certain condition of weather and is false in other conditions of weather. The condition of weather that makes my statement true (or false as the case may be), is what I should call a "fact." If I say "Socrates is dead," my statement will be true owing to a certain physiological occurrence which happened in Athens long ago. If I say, "Gravitation varies inversely as the square of the distance," my statement is rendered true by astronomical fact. If I say, "Two and two are four," it is arithmetical fact that makes my statement true. On the other hand, if I say "Socrates is alive," or "Gravitation varies directly as the distance," or "Two and two are five," the very same facts which made my previous statements true show that these new statements are false. . . .

Monadic, Diadic and Triatic Facts/Relations

The simplest imaginable facts are those which consist in the possession of a quality by some particular thing. Such facts, say, as "This is white." They have to be taken in a very sophisticated sense. I do not want you to think about the piece of chalk I am holding, but of what you see when you look at the chalk. If one says, "This is white" it will do for about as simple a fact as you can get hold of. The next simplest would be those in which you have a relation between two facts, such as: "This is to the left of that." Next you come to those where you have a triadic relation between three particulars. (An instance which Royce gives is "A gives B to C"). So you get relations which require as their minimum three terms, those we call triadic relations; and those which require four terms, which we call tetradic, and so on. There you have a whole infinite hierarchy of facts, — facts in which you have a thing and a quality, two things and a relation, three things and a relation, four things and a relation, and so on. That whole hierarchy constitutes what I call atomic facts, and they are the simplest sort of fact. You can distinguish among them some simpler than others, because the ones containing a quality are simpler than those in which you have, say, a pentadic relation, and so on. The whole lot of them, taken together, are as facts go very simple, and are what I call atomic facts. The propositions expressing them are what I call atomic propositions [i.e., propositions that contain a single verb].

Atomic facts contain, besides the relation, the terms of the relation — one term if it is a monadic relation, two if it is dyadic, and so on. These "terms" which come into atomic facts I define as "particulars."

Particulars = terms of relations in atomic facts. Definition.

That is the definition of particulars, and I want to emphasize it because the definition of a particular is something purely logical. The question whether this or that is a particular, is a question to be decided in terms of that logical definition. In order to understand the definition it is not necessary to know beforehand "This is a particular" or "That is a particular". It remains to be investigated what particulars you can find in the world, if any. The whole question of what particulars you actually find in the real world is a purely empirical one which does not interest the logician as such. The logician as such never gives instances, because it is one of the tests of a logical proposition that you need not know anything whatsoever about the real world in order to understand it.

Atomic Propositions: Particulars and Predicates (Lecture 2)

Particulars: The Subjects of the Proposition

Passing from atomic facts to atomic propositions, the word expressing a monadic relation or quality is called a "predicate," and the word expressing a relation of any higher order would generally be a verb, sometimes a single verb, sometimes a whole phrase. At any rate the verb gives the essential nerve, as it were, of the relation. The other words that occur in the atomic propositions, the words that are not the predicate or verb, may be called the subjects of the proposition. There will be one subject in a monadic proposition, two in a dyadic one, and so on. The subjects in a proposition will be the words expressing the terms of the relation which is expressed by the proposition.

The only kind of word that is theoretically capable of standing for a particular is a proper name, and the whole matter of proper names is rather curious.

Proper Names = words for particulars. Definition.

I have put that down although, as far as common language goes, it is obviously false. It is true that if you try to think how you are to talk about particulars, you will see that you cannot ever talk about a particular particular except by means of a proper name. . . .

Predicates: Words Used to Designate a Quality of a Particular

I pass on from particulars to predicates and relations and what we mean by understanding the words that we use for predicates and relations. . . . Understanding a predicate is quite a different thing from understanding a name. By a predicate, as you know, I mean the word that is used to designate a quality such as red, white, square, round, and the understanding of a word like that involves a different kind of act of mind from that which is involved in understanding a name. To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name, and you must know that it is the name of that particular. You do not, that is to say, have any suggestion of the form of a proposition, whereas in understanding a predicate you do. To understand "red," for instance, is to understand what is meant by saying that a thing is red. You have to bring in the form of a proposition. . . .

Molecular Propositions (Lecture 3)

. . . I come on now to the proper topic of to-day's lecture, that is molecular propositions. I call them molecular propositions because they contain other propositions which you may call their atoms, and by molecular propositions I mean propositions having such words as "or," "if," "and," and so forth. If I say, "Either to-day is Tuesday, or we have all made a mistake in being here," that is the sort of proposition that I mean that is molecular. Or if I say, "If it rains, I shall bring my umbrella," that again is a molecular proposition because it contains the two parts "It rains" and "I shall bring my umbrella." If I say, "It did rain and I did bring my umbrella," that again is a molecular proposition. Or if I say, "The supposition of its raining is incompatible with the supposition of my not bringing my umbrella," that again is a molecular proposition. There are various propositions of that sort, which you can complicate ad infinitum

Propositions with Two or more Verbs: Belief (Lecture 4)

You will remember that after speaking about atomic propositions I pointed out two more complicated forms of propositions which arise immediately on proceeding further than that: the first, which I call molecular propositions, which I dealt with last time, involving such words as "or," "and," "if," and the second involving two or more verbs such as believing, wishing, willing, and so forth. In the case of molecular propositions it was not clear that we had to deal with any new form of fact, but only with a new form of proposition, i.e., if you have a disjunctive proposition such as "p or q" it does not seem very plausible to say that there is in the world a disjunctive fact corresponding to "p or q" but merely that there is a fact corresponding to p and a fact corresponding to q, and the disjunctive proposition derives its truth or falsehood from those two separate facts. Therefore in that case one was dealing only with a new form of proposition and not with a new form of fact. Today we have to deal with a new form of fact. . . .

Take any sort of proposition, say "I believe Socrates is mortal." Suppose that that belief does actually occur. The statement that it occurs is a statement of fact. You have there two verbs. You may have more than two verbs, you may have any number greater than one. I may believe that Jones is of opinion that Socrates is mortal. There you have more than two verbs. You may have any number, but you cannot have less than two. You will perceive that it is not only the proposition that has the two verbs, but also the fact, which is expressed by the proposition, has two constituents corresponding to verbs. I shall call those constituents verbs for the sake of shortness, as it is very difficult to find any word to describe all those objects which one denotes by verbs. Of course, that is strictly using the word "verb" in two different senses, but I do not think it can lead to any confusion if you understand that it is being so used. This fact (the belief) is one fact. It is not like what you had in molecular propositions where you had (say) "p or q." It is just one single fact that you have a belief. That is obvious from the fact that you can believe a falsehood. It is obvious from the fact of false belief that you cannot cut off one part: you cannot have

I believe/Socrates is mortal.

Definite Descriptions that Designate a Unique Individual (Lecture 5)

There are two sorts of descriptions, what one may call "ambiguous descriptions," when we speak of "a so-and-so," and what one may call "definite descriptions," when we speak of "the so-and-so" (in the singular). Instances are:

Ambiguous:

A man, a dog, a pig, a Cabinet Minister.

Definite:

The man with the iron mask.

The last person who came into this room.

The only Englishman who ever occupied the Papal See.

The number of the inhabitants of London.

The sum of 43 and 34.

(It is not necessary for a description that it should describe an individual: it may describe a predicate or a relation or anything else.)

It is phrases of that sort, definite descriptions, that I want to talk about today. I do not want to talk about ambiguous descriptions, as what there was to say about them was said last time.

I want you to realize that the question whether a phrase is a definite description turns only upon its form, not upon the question whether there is a definite individual so described. For instance, I should call "The inhabitant of London" a definite description, although it does not in fact describe any definite individual.

The first thing to realize about a definite description is that it is not a name. We will take "The author of Waverley." That is a definite description, and it is easy to see that it is not a name. . . . You sometimes find people speaking as if descriptive phrases were names, and you will find it suggested, e. g., that such a proposition as "Scott is the author of Waverley" really asserts that "Scott" and "the author of Waverley" are two names for the same person. That is an entire delusion; first of all, because "the author of Waverley" is not a name, and, secondly, because, as you can perfectly well see, if that were what is meant, the proposition would be one like "Scott is Sir Walter," and would not depend upon any fact except that the person in question was so called, because a name is what a man is called. . . .

There are a great many other sorts of incomplete symbols besides descriptions. These are classes, which I shall speak of next time, and relations taken in extension, and so on. Such aggregations of symbols are really the same thing as what I call "logical fictions," and they embrace practically all the familiar objects of daily life: tables, chairs, Piccadilly, Socrates, and so on. Most of them are either classes, or series, or series of classes. In any case they are all incomplete symbols, i.e., they are aggregations that only have a meaning in use and do not have any meaning in themselves.

Metaphysics (Lecture 8)

Metaphysics based on Mistakes of Philosophical Grammar

I come now to the last lecture of this course, and I propose briefly to point to a few of the morals that are to be gathered from what has gone before, in the way of suggesting the bearing of the doctrines that I have been advocating upon various problems of metaphysics. I have dwelt hitherto upon what one may call philosophical grammar, and I am afraid I have had to take you through a good many very dry and dusty regions in the course of that investigation, but I think the importance of philosophical grammar is very much greater than it is generally thought to be. I think that practically all traditional metaphysics is filled with mistakes due to bad grammar, and that almost all the traditional problems of metaphysics and traditional results — supposed results — of metaphysics are due to a failure to make the kind of distinctions in what we may call philosophical grammar with which we have been concerned in these previous lectures.

Take, as a very simple example, the philosophy of arithmetic. If you think that 1, 2, 3, and 4, and the rest of the numbers, are in any sense entities, if you think that there are objects, having those names, in the realm of being, you have at once a very considerable apparatus for your metaphysics to deal with, and you have offered to you a certain kind of analysis of arithmetical propositions. When you say, e. g., that 2 and 2 are 4, you suppose in that case that you are making a proposition of which the number 2 and the number 4 are constituents, and that has all sorts of consequences, all sorts of bearings upon your general metaphysical outlook. If there has been any truth in the doctrines that we have been considering, all numbers are what I call logical fictions. Numbers are classes of classes, and classes are logical fictions, so that numbers are, as it were, fictions at two removes, fictions of fictions. Therefore you do not have, as part of the ultimate constituents of your world, these queer entities that you are inclined to call numbers. The same applies in many other directions.

Logical Atomism involves Analyzing things into Simples

One purpose that has run through all that I have said, has been the justification of analysis, i.e., the justification of logical atomism, of the view that you can get down in theory, if not in practice, to ultimate simples, out of which the world is built, and that those simples have a kind of reality not belonging to anything else. Simples, as I tried to explain, are of an infinite number of sorts. There are particulars and qualities and relations of various orders, a whole hierarchy of different sorts of simples, but all of them, if we were right, have in their various ways some kind of reality that does not belong to anything else. The only other sort of object you come across in the world is what we call facts, and facts are the sort of things that are asserted or denied by propositions, and are not properly entities at all in the same sense in which their constituents are. That is shown in the fact that you cannot name them. You can only deny, or assert, or consider them, but you cannot name them because they are not there to be named, although in another sense it is true that you cannot know the world unless you know the facts that make up the truths of the world; but the knowing of facts is a different sort of thing from the knowing of simples.

Logical Atomism involves Ockham's Razor

Another purpose which runs through all that I have been saying is the purpose embodied in the maxim called Occam's Razor. That maxim comes in, in practice, in this way: take some science, say physics. You have there a given body of doctrine, a set of propositions expressed in symbols— I am including words among symbols — and you think that you have reason to believe that on the whole those propositions, rightly interpreted, are fairly true, but you do not know what is the actual meaning of the symbols that you are using. The meaning they have in use would have to be explained in some pragmatic way: they have a certain kind of practical or emotional significance to you which is a datum, but the logical significance is not a datum, but a thing to be sought, and you go through, if you are analyzing a science like physics, these propositions with a view to finding out what is the smallest empirical apparatus — or the smallest apparatus, not necessarily wholly empirical — out of which you can build up these propositions. What is the smallest number of simple undefined things at the start, and the smallest number of undemonstrated premises, out of which you can define the things that need to be defined and prove the things that need to be proved? That problem, in any case that you like to take, is by no means a simple one, but on the contrary an extremely difficult one. It is one which requires a very great amount of logical technique; and the sort of thing that I have been talking about in these lectures is the preliminaries and first steps in that logical technique. You cannot possibly get at the solution of such a problem as I am talking about if you go at it in a straightforward fashion with just the ordinary acumen that one accumulates in the course of reading or in the study of traditional philosophy. You do need this apparatus of symbolical logic that I have been talking about. . . .

Mathematical Logic May or May Not be Dull

It is true that the transferring of a region from philosophy into science will make it distasteful to a very important and useful type of mind. I think that is true of a good deal of the applications of mathematical logic in the directions that I have been indicating. It makes it dry, precise, methodical, and in that way robs it of a certain quality that it had when you could play with it more freely. I do not feel that it is my place to apologize for that, because if it is true, it is true. If it is not true, of course, I do owe you an apology; but if it is, it is not my fault, and therefore I do not feel I owe any apology for any sort of dryness or dulness in the world. I would say this too, that for those who have any taste for mathematics, for those who like symbolic constructions, that sort of world is a very delightful one, and if you do not find it otherwise attractive, all that is necessary to do is to acquire a taste for mathematics, and then you will have a very agreeable world, and with that conclusion I will bring this course of lectures to an end.

NEUTRAL MONISM DEFENDED (The Analysis of Mind, 1921)

Reconciling Materialist Psychology with Immaterialist Physics (Preface)

This book has grown out of an attempt to harmonize two different tendencies, one in psychology, the other in physics, with both of which I find myself in sympathy, although at first sight they might seem inconsistent. On the one hand, many psychologists, especially those of the behaviourist school, tend to adopt what is essentially a materialistic position, as a matter of method if not of metaphysics. They make psychology increasingly dependent on physiology and external observation, and tend to think of matter as something much more solid and indubitable than mind. Meanwhile the physicists, especially Einstein and other exponents of the theory of relativity, have been making "matter" less and less material. Their world consists of "events," from which "matter" is derived by a logical construction. Whoever reads, for example, Professor Eddington's "Space, Time and Gravitation" (Cambridge University Press, 1920), will see that an old-fashioned materialism can receive no support from modern physics. I think that what has permanent value in the outlook of the behaviourists is the feeling that physics is the most fundamental science at present in existence.

But this position cannot be called materialistic, if, as seems to be the case, physics does not assume the existence of matter. The view that seems to me to reconcile the materialistic tendency of psychology with the anti-materialistic tendency of physics is the view of William James and the American new realists, according to which the "stuff" of the world is neither mental nor material, but a "neutral stuff," out of which both are constructed. I have endeavoured in this work to develop this view in some detail as regards the phenomena with which psychology is concerned.

Finding the Commonality between Mind and Matter (Lecture 1)

Idealists and Materialists Opposite Extremes about Mind and Matter

Few things are more firmly established in popular philosophy than the distinction between mind and matter. Those who are not professional metaphysicians are willing to confess that they do not know what mind actually is, or how matter is constituted; but they remain convinced that there is an impassable gulf between the two, and that both belong to what actually exists in the world. Philosophers, on the other hand, have maintained often that matter is a mere fiction imagined by mind, and sometimes that mind is a mere property of a certain kind of matter. Those who maintain that mind is the reality and matter an evil dream are called "idealists"—a word which has a different meaning in philosophy from that which it bears in ordinary life. Those who argue that matter is the reality and mind a mere property of protoplasm are called "materialists." They have been rare among philosophers, but common, at certain periods, among men of science. Idealists, materialists, and ordinary mortals have been in agreement on one point: that they knew sufficiently what they meant by the words "mind" and "matter" to be able to conduct their debate intelligently. Yet it was just in this point, as to which they were at one, that they seem to me to have been all alike in error.

The stuff of which the world of our experience is composed is, in my belief, neither mind nor matter, but something more primitive than either. Both mind and matter seem to be composite, and the stuff of which they are compounded lies in a sense between the two, in a sense above them both, like a common ancestor. As regards matter, I have set forth my reasons for this view on former occasions, and I shall not now repeat them. But the question of mind is more difficult, and it is this question that I propose to discuss in these lectures. A great deal of what I shall have to say is not original; indeed, much recent work, in various fields, has tended to show the necessity of such theories as those which I shall be advocating. Accordingly in this first lecture I shall try to give a brief description of the systems of ideas within which our investigation is to be carried on.

Problems distinguishing Conscious from Unconscious

If there is one thing that may be said, in the popular estimation, to characterize mind, that one thing is "consciousness." We say that we are "conscious" of what we see and hear, of what we remember, and of our own thoughts and feelings. Most of us believe that tables and chairs are not "conscious." We think that when we sit in a chair, we are aware of sitting in it, but it is not aware of being sat in. It cannot for a moment be doubted that we are right in believing that there is some difference between us and the chair in this respect: so much may be taken as fact, and as a datum for our inquiry. But as soon as we try to say what exactly the difference is, we become involved in perplexities. Is "consciousness" ultimate and simple, something to be merely accepted and contemplated? Or is it something complex, perhaps consisting in our way of behaving in the presence of objects, or, alternatively, in the existence in us of things called "ideas," having a certain relation to objects, though different from them, and only symbolically representative of them? Such questions are not easy to answer; but until they are answered we cannot profess to know what we mean by saying that we are possessed of "consciousness." . . .

Different Causal Laws for Psychology and Physics

My own belief—for which the reasons will appear in subsequent lectures—is that [William] James is right in rejecting consciousness as an entity, and that the American realists are partly right, though not wholly, in considering that both mind and matter are composed of a neutral-stuff which, in isolation, is neither mental nor material. I should admit this view as regards sensations: what is heard or seen belongs equally to psychology and to physics. But I should say that images belong only to the mental world, while those occurrences (if any) which do not form part of any "experience" belong only to the physical world. There are, it seems to me, prima facie different kinds of causal laws, one belonging to physics and the other to psychology. The law of gravitation, for example, is a physical law, while the law of association is a psychological law. Sensations are subject to both kinds of laws, and are therefore truly "neutral" in Holt's sense. But entities subject only to physical laws, or only to psychological laws, are not neutral, and may be called respectively purely material and purely mental. Even those, however, which are purely mental will not have that intrinsic reference to objects which Brentano assigns to them and which constitutes the essence of "consciousness" as ordinarily understood. . . .

The question whether it is possible to obtain precise causal laws in which the causes are psychological, not material, is one of detailed investigation. I have done what I could to make clear the nature of the question, but I do not believe that it is possible as yet to answer it with any confidence. It seems to be by no means an insoluble question, and we may hope that science will be able to produce sufficient grounds for regarding one answer as much more probable than the other. But for the moment I do not see how we can come to a decision. . . .

Difference between Physics and Psychology (Lecture 5)

Physics Deals with Systems of Appearances, Psychology with Particular Appearances

We can now begin to understand one of the fundamental differences between physics and psychology. Physics treats as a unit the whole system of appearances of a piece of matter, whereas psychology is interested in certain of these appearances themselves. Confining ourselves for the moment to the psychology of perceptions, we observe that perceptions are certain of the appearances of physical objects. From the point of view that we have been hitherto adopting, we might define them as the appearances of objects at places from which sense-organs and the suitable parts of the nervous system form part of the intervening medium. Just as a photographic plate receives a different impression of a cluster of stars when a telescope is part of the intervening medium, so a brain receives a different impression when an eye and an optic nerve are part of the intervening medium. An impression due to this sort of intervening medium is called a perception, and is interesting to psychology on its own account, not merely as one of the set of correlated particulars which is the physical object of which (as we say) we are having a perception.

We spoke earlier of two ways of classifying particulars. One way collects together the appearances commonly regarded as a given object from different places; this is, broadly speaking, the way of physics, leading to the construction of physical objects as sets of such appearances. The other way collects together the appearances of different objects from a given place, the result being what we call a perspective. In the particular case where the place concerned is a human brain, the perspective belonging to the place consists of all the perceptions of a certain man at a given time. Thus classification by perspectives is relevant to psychology, and is essential in defining what we mean by one mind. . . .

It is clear that psychology is concerned essentially with actual particulars, not merely with systems of particulars. In this it differs from physics, which, broadly speaking, is concerned with the cases in which all the particulars which make up one physical object can be treated as a single causal unit, or rather the particulars which are sufficiently near to the object of which they are appearances can be so treated. The laws which physics seeks can, broadly speaking, be stated by treating such systems of particulars as causal units. The laws which psychology seeks cannot be so stated, since the particulars themselves are what interests the psychologist. This is one of the fundamental differences between physics and psychology; and to make it clear has been the main purpose of this lecture.

Functional Definition of Matter: A Limiting Set of Appearances

I will conclude with an attempt to give a more precise definition of a piece of matter. The appearances of a piece of matter from different places change partly according to intrinsic laws (the laws of perspective, in the case of visual shape), partly according to the nature of the intervening medium—fog, blue spectacles, telescopes, microscopes, sense-organs, etc. As we approach nearer to the object, the effect of the intervening medium grows less. In a generalized sense, all the intrinsic laws of change of appearance may be called "laws of perspective." Given any appearance of an object, we can construct hypothetically a certain system of appearances to which the appearance in question would belong if the laws of perspective alone were concerned. If we construct this hypothetical system for each appearance of the object in turn, the system corresponding to a given appearance x will be independent of any distortion due to the medium beyond x, and will only embody such distortion as is due to the medium between x and the object. Thus, as the appearance by which our hypothetical system is defined is moved nearer and nearer to the object, the hypothetical system of appearances defined by its means embodies less and less of the effect of the medium. The different sets of appearances resulting from moving x nearer and nearer to the object will approach to a limiting set, and this limiting set will be that system of appearances which the object would present if the laws of perspective alone were operative and the medium exercised no distorting effect. This limiting set of appearances may be defined, for purposes of physics, as the piece of matter concerned.

Matter and Mental Introspection are both about Sensations (Lecture 6)

Material Objects are Connected with Mental Sensation, Mental Life is connected with Matter

One of the main purposes of these lectures is to give grounds for the belief that the distinction between mind and matter is not so fundamental as is commonly supposed. In the preceding lecture I dealt in outline with the physical side of this problem. I attempted to show that what we call a material object is not itself a substance, but is a system of particulars analogous in their nature to sensations, and in fact often including actual sensations among their number. In this way the stuff of which physical objects are composed is brought into relation with the stuff of which part, at least, of our mental life is composed.

There is, however, a converse task which is equally necessary for our thesis, and that is, to show that the stuff of our mental life is devoid of many qualities which it is commonly supposed to have, and is not possessed of any attributes which make it incapable of forming part of the world of matter. In the present lecture I shall begin the arguments for this view.

Introspection Only Reveals Sensations, while Matter is Constituted from Sensations

Corresponding to the supposed duality of matter and mind, there are, in orthodox psychology, two ways of knowing what exists. One of these, the way of sensation and external perception, is supposed to furnish data for our knowledge of matter, the other, called "introspection," is supposed to furnish data for knowledge of our mental processes. To common sense, this distinction seems clear and easy. When you see a friend coming along the street, you acquire knowledge of an external, physical fact; when you realize that you are glad to meet him, you acquire knowledge of a mental fact. Your dreams and memories and thoughts, of which you are often conscious, are mental facts, and the process by which you become aware of them seems to be different from sensation. Kant calls it the "inner sense"; sometimes it is spoken of as "consciousness of self"; but its commonest name in modern English psychology is "introspection." It is this supposed method of acquiring knowledge of our mental processes that I wish to analyse and examine in this lecture. . . .

(3) Can we [introspectively] observe anything intrinsically different from sensations? We come now to our third question concerning introspection. It is commonly thought that by looking within we can observe all sorts of things that are radically different from the constituents of the physical world, e.g. thoughts, beliefs, desires, pleasures, pains and emotions. The difference between mind and matter is increased partly by emphasizing these supposed introspective data, partly by the supposition that matter is composed of atoms or electrons or whatever units physics may at the moment prefer. As against this latter supposition, I contend that the ultimate constituents of matter are not atoms or electrons, but sensations, and other things similar to sensations as regards extent and duration. As against the view that introspection reveals a mental world radically different from sensations, I propose to argue that thoughts, beliefs, desires, pleasures, pains and emotions are all built up out of sensations and images alone, and that there is reason to think that images do not differ from sensations in their intrinsic character. We thus effect a mutual rapprochement of mind and matter, and reduce the ultimate data of introspection (in our second sense) to images alone. On this third view of the meaning of introspection, therefore, our decision is wholly against it.

Causal Laws of Physics and Psychology the Same (Lecture 15)

Similarity between Physics and Psychology

If we have been right in our analysis of mind, the ultimate data of psychology are only sensations and images and their relations. Beliefs, desires, volitions, and so on, appeared to us to be complex phenomena consisting of sensations and images variously interrelated. Thus (apart from certain relations) the occurrences which seem most distinctively mental, and furthest removed from physics, are, like physical objects, constructed or inferred, not part of the original stock of data in the perfected science. From both ends, therefore, the difference between physical and psychological data is diminished. Is there ultimately no difference, or do images remain as irreducibly and exclusively psychological? In view of the causal definition of the difference between images and sensations, this brings us to a new question, namely: Are the causal laws of psychology different from those of any other science, or are they really physiological?

Certain ambiguities must be removed before this question can be adequately discussed.

First, there is the distinction between rough approximate laws and such as appear to be precise and general. I shall return to the former presently; it is the latter that I wish to discuss now.

Matter, as defined at the end of Lecture V, is a logical fiction, invented because it gives a convenient way of stating causal laws. Except in cases of perfect regularity in appearances (of which we can have no experience), the actual appearances of a piece of matter are not members of that ideal system of regular appearances which is defined as being the matter in question. But the matter is, after all, inferred from its appearances, which are used to verify physical laws. Thus, in so far as physics is an empirical and verifiable science, it must assume or prove that the inference from appearances to matter is, in general, legitimate, and it must be able to tell us, more or less, what appearances to expect. It is through this question of verifiability and empirical applicability to experience that we are led to a theory of matter such as I advocate. From the consideration of this question it results that physics, in so far as it is an empirical science, not a logical phantasy, is concerned with particulars of just the same sort as those which psychology considers under the name of sensations. The causal laws of physics, so interpreted, differ from those of psychology only by the fact that they connect a particular with other appearances in the same piece of matter, rather than with other appearances in the same perspective. That is to say, they group together particulars having the same "active" place, while psychology groups together those having the same "passive" place. Some particulars, such as images, have no "active" place, and therefore belong exclusively to psychology.

Differences between Physics and Psychology

We can now understand the distinction between physics and psychology. The nerves and brain are matter: our visual sensations when we look at them may be, and I think are, members of the system constituting irregular appearances of this matter, but are not the whole of the system. Psychology is concerned, inter alia, with our sensations when we see a piece of matter, as opposed to the matter which we see. Assuming, as we must, that our sensations have physical causes, their causal laws are nevertheless radically different from the laws of physics, since the consideration of a single sensation requires the breaking up of the group of which it is a member. When a sensation is used to verify physics, it is used merely as a sign of a certain material phenomenon, i.e. of a group of particulars of which it is a member. But when it is studied by psychology, it is taken away from that group and put into quite a different context, where it causes images or voluntary movements. It is primarily this different grouping that is characteristic of psychology as opposed to all the physical sciences, including physiology; a secondary difference is that images, which belong to psychology, are not easily to be included among the aspects which constitute a physical thing or piece of matter. . . .

Six Conclusions

The conclusions at which we have arrived may be summed up as follows:

I. Physics and psychology are not distinguished by their material. Mind and matter alike are logical constructions; the particulars out of which they are constructed, or from which they are inferred, have various relations, some of which are studied by physics, others by psychology. Broadly speaking, physics group particulars by their active places, psychology by their passive places.

II. The two most essential characteristics of the causal laws which would naturally be called psychological are subjectivity and mnemic causation [i.e., memory causation, "This characteristic is embodied in the saying 'a burnt child fears the fire"" Lecture 4]; these are not unconnected, since the causal unit in mnemic causation is the group of particulars having a given passive place at a given time, and it is by this manner of grouping that subjectivity is defined.

III. Habit, memory and thought are all developments of mnemic causation. It is probable, though not certain, that mnemic causation is derivative from ordinary physical causation in nervous (and other) tissue.

IV. Consciousness is a complex and far from universal characteristic of mental phenomena.

V. Mind is a matter of degree, chiefly exemplified in number and complexity of habits.

VI. All our data, both in physics and psychology, are subject to psychological causal laws; but physical causal laws, at least in traditional physics, can only be stated in terms of matter, which is both inferred and constructed, never a datum. In this respect psychology is nearer to what actually exists.

USING REASON AS A SOCIAL POWER TO PRESERVE HUMAN VALUES (Prospects of Industrial Civilization, 1923)

Retaining Human Values within a Mechanistic Industrial Society (Preface)

We concluded, as some writers in Germany and Czechoslovakia have also concluded, that the important fact of the present time is not the struggle between capitalism and socialism, but the struggle between industrial civilization and humanity. A new economic mode of existence brings with it new views of life which must be analysed and subdued if they are not to dominate to the exclusion of human values. Thus in the past, it has been necessary to destroy a superstitious reverence for agriculture, which dominated before it was made to serve the needs of human beings. Many prejudices still held by modern people are nothing but remnants of the agricultural, or even of the hunting, stage of man's development. We came to believe that the important differences in the modern world are those which divide nations living by industrialism from those which still live by the more primitive methods, though these are being rapidly abandoned, and industrialism is spreading all over the globe. . . . As persons of a sceptical and analytic disposition, and as heretics, not to industrialism, which we regard as practically inevitable, but to a mechanistic conception of society, we set ourselves the task, first, of analysing the various forces in modern life in relation to their historical background; and second, of trying to see what ends mechanism, unsuperstitiously used, could be made to serve.

Types of Power (Chapter 10)

Power Requires a Basis in Popular Opinion

Those who aim at any radical reform of our social system are faced by the difficulty that the existing system is advantageous to the holders of power, and is therefore difficult to change. It is not easy to see how power is to be wrested from those who now possess it, unless by a struggle so terrible as to destroy our whole civilization. The apparent hopelessness of this problem causes many to acquiesce in present evils in spite of keen consciousness of their magnitude, while it leads other to a recklessly revolutionary attitude which estranges those who have a sense of social responsibility. I believe that the problem is by no means as insoluble as it is thought to be. Power, even the most monarchical, requires a popular basis, either in the general opinion of some large group or in its traditions and habits. Tradition and habit, strong as they are, are diminishing forces in our kaleidoscopic world. Thus opinion becomes the decisive factor in determining who is to hold power in the future. This is the thesis which I wish to establish, by analysing the main sources of power in modern communities.

Definition of Power

Power may be defined as ability to cause people to act as we wish, when they would have acted otherwise but for the effects of our desires; it includes also ability to prevent people from acting against our wishes, which is sometimes the utmost that we aim at achieving — for instance, in the case of a murderer who is executed. A man possesses power in proportion to his capacity for causing people to act in accordance with his wishes, or for preventing them from acting otherwise. The power of a group is similarly defined, by reference to its collective or dominant wishes.

Acquiring Power through Force or Persuasion

One may distinguish broadly two methods of acquiring power, namely, force and persuasion. The two are not sharply separated, and merge into each other in marginal cases, but in most instances the difference is clear: the power of the executioner over his victim may be taken as the type of force, while the power of a scientific discoverer over men's thoughts may be taken as the type of persuasion. We may set up the following definitions: Force is an influence over the acts of others without altering their desires and beliefs, or at any rate not by means of such alteration; persuasion is an influence over the acts of others acquired by means of an alteration in their desires or beliefs. But these definitions are not adequate to distinguish between force and persuasion in doubtful cases. What shall we say of an influence acquired through hypnotism or by supplying morphia? If we regard hypnotism as force, we must face the fact that there is an element analogous to hypnotism in almost all persuasion, and notably in early education. We cannot therefore draw any sharp line between persuasion and force, or say precisely where one ends and the other begins. But for practical purposes the distinction is a useful one, and in most cases it is not difficult to apply.

Military and Economic Force

In politics there are two main forms of force. The first is that applied in fighting, and also in the criminal law, except in so far as its penalties consist of fines. In this form, we make it physically impossible for a man to do things which we consider undesirable, either by putting him to death, or by depriving him of physical liberty. The second form of force is that which is applied in economic relations, and consists in the power of depriving a man of his livelihood in whole or part. I shall call the first form of force military (including force exercised by the police), and the second economic. Those who can exert military or economic force if they choose are the holders of military and economic power. Here again the distinction is by no means sharp. The pressure exerted on Germany during the war by the blockade was economic, but the power that made this pressure possible was in our sense military (i.e. naval). In international affairs the two kinds of power are constantly intermingled, but in the internal affairs of a country they are somewhat more clearly separated, A man can be starved by his employer or imprisoned by the magistrate, and these are, broadly speaking, two different forms of control to which he is subject. They merge into one when the law imprisons a man for having no visible means of subsistence.

Mental Power the Source of Military and Economic Power

We may therefore distinguish, though not too sharply, three kinds of power: military, economic, and mental. The power of armies and navies is military, the power of Trust magnates is economic, and the power of the Catholic Church is mental. I propose to consider in succession the sources of these three kinds of power, and I shall try to show that mental power is the ultimate source of the other two. If this is true, both military and economic power could be indefinitely modified by the operation of mental power. . . .

Reason as a Source of Opinion (Chapter 10)

Even those who Reject Reason as a Source of Opinion Still Rely on It

I come now to the last of the sources of opinion with which I propose to deal, namely, what may be called argument or reason. In our day it has become unfashionable to regard reason as a possible cause of a man's opinions. Freudians have persuaded intellectuals that all our opinions are expressions of obscure sexual passions, and Marxians have persuaded thoughtful wage-earners that all our opinions are products of our economic status. Pragmatists preach that the truth is what pays, and a commercial age has hailed this as a great gospel foreshadowed by the insight of advertisers. All these sects decry reason; nevertheless all appeal to it. The Freudians believe that their doctrine of the importance of sex is not inspired, in themselves, by thwarted sexual impulses, but is the result of an impartial survey of the facts. Marxians consider that Marx's doctrines are true, and are not merely evidence that he was hard up and had to come to the British Museum to keep warm. Pragmatists, in some sense, believe it to be objectively true that there is no objective truth, or at lowest believe it to be an absolute fact that pragmatism pays. There is therefore something which may be called reason, or the endeavour to discover truth, which even its professed critics really believe in. I believe that it has played a quite enormous part in the genesis of opinion, and that we must look to it, almost exclusively, for improvements in industrial civilization.

In the eighteenth century, belief in the power of reason was common. Voltaire, in one of his Contes [i.e., philosophical tales] confronts his hero with a tribe of cannibals who are about to eat him. But he makes them a fine speech, beginning "Messieurs," and proves from first principles that it is a mistake to eat people. They are all converted, and acclaim him as a great man. The incident is of course intended to be comic, but nobody nowadays would imagine, even in fun, such a victory of reason. Rousseau and the Revolution put an end to this comfortable outlook, which, however, had a partial revival under the influence of nineteenth-century science. Science has since become either so technical as to be without interest for the man in the street, or so prostituted to interests and armaments as to be incapable of inspiring respect. Thus, although the results of science dominate us more and more, the scientific outlook upon the world has all but perished. This is infinitely to be regretted. But perhaps it is only a temporary eclipse.

Definition of Reason

It might be well to define "reason" before going farther. I do not mean by "reason" any faculty of determining the ends of life. The ends which a man will pursue are determined by his desires; but he may pursue them wisely or unwisely. We may assume that the Kaiser hoped to increase his power by the war, and that the Tsar hoped to avert revolution; neither of them showed wisdom in the choice of means to these ends. When I speak of "reason" I mean merely the endeavour to find out the truth about any matter with which we are concerned, as opposed to the endeavour to prove to ourselves that what we desire is true. At the beginning of the war, many men wished the war to break out, but continued, as before, to wish to grow rich. They therefore persuaded themselves that they would be enriched by the war, which only proved to be the case in a very small percentage of instances. Reason helps us to a right choice of means to our ends; it also generates an impersonal habit of mind, since the truth is impersonal. On both grounds, it serves a useful purpose.

Examples of the Force of Reason

Those who believe that reason has little influence in human affairs are blind to many patent historical facts. Galileo had nothing but reason on his side in his contest with the Inquisition, yet Galileo's doctrine won the day. Modern science, which practically begins with him, has dominated human life more and more in each successive century. The doctrines that made the French Revolution, and the doctrines that made the Russian Revolution, had originally no force on their side except that of reason. The immense growth of socialism during the last hundred years must be attributed to the force of reason; so must the extraordinary diminution in the power of the Churches, Most of the events of first-class importance in modern history, with the exception of the great war, have been contrary to the wishes of the Church, in spite of its unrivalled opportunities of propaganda and education. Men who genuinely believe in reason, and at the same time possess a vigorous intellect, have a power over opinion which is incalculable, because it is more lasting than any other power. It is to them and their influence that we must look if a better civilization is to emerge from the present chaos, not to a mixture of passion and propaganda leading to a dreary round of violence and disenchantment. To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true. It is not a hopeless task to save the world, but it will never be achieved by those who allow themselves to think it hopeless.

PHILOSOPHY AND THE PLACE OF HUMANS IN THE UNIVERSE (Outline of Philosophy, 1927, Chapter 27: Man's Place in the Universe)

The World's Goodness and Human Immortality Cannot be Settled by Philosophy

I want to end with a few words about man's place in the universe. It has been customary to demand of a philosopher that he should show that the world is good in certain respects. I cannot admit any duty of this sort. One might as well demand of an accountant that he should show a satisfactory balance-sheet. It is just as bad to be fraudulently optimistic in philosophy as in money matters. If the world is good, by all means let us know it; but if not, let us know that. In any case, the question of the goodness or badness of the world is one for science rather than for philosophy. We shall call the world good if it has certain characteristics that we desire. In the past philosophy professed to be able to prove that the world had such characteristics, but it is now fairly evident that the proofs were invalid. It does not, of course, follow that the world does not have the characteristics in question; it follows only that philosophy cannot decide the problem. Take for example the problem of personal immortality. You may believe this on the ground of revealed religion, but that is a ground which lies outside philosophy. You may believe it on the ground of the phenomena investigated by psychical research, but that is science, not philosophy. In former days, you could believe it on a philosophical ground, namely, that the soul is a substance and all substances are indestructible. You will find this argument, sometimes more or less disguised, in many philosophers. But the notion of substance, in the sense of a permanent entity with changing states, is no longer applicable to the world. It may happen, as with the electron, that a string of events are so interconnected causally that it is practically convenient to regard them as forming one entity, but where this happens it is a scientific fact, not a metaphysical necessity. The whole question of personal immortality, therefore lies outside philosophy, and is to be decided, if at all, either by science or by revealed religion.

Philosophy does Not Have a Moral Purpose

I will take up another matter in regard to which what I have said may have been disappointing to some readers. It is sometimes thought that philosophy ought to aim at encouraging a good life. Now, of course, I admit that it should have this effect, but I do not admit that it should have this as a conscious purpose. To begin with, when we embark upon the study of philosophy we ought not to assume that we already know for certain what the good life is; philosophy may conceivably modify our views as to what is good, in which case it will seem to the non-philosophical to have had a bad moral effect. That, however, is a secondary point. The essential thing is that philosophy is part of the pursuit of knowledge, and that we cannot limit this pursuit by insisting that the knowledge obtained shall be such as we should have thought edifying before we obtained it. I think it could be maintained with truth that all knowledge is edifying, provided we have a right conception of edification. When this appears to be not the case, it is because we have moral standards based upon ignorance. It may happen by good fortune that a moral standard based upon ignorance is right, but if so knowledge will not destroy it; if knowledge can destroy it, it must be wrong. The conscious purpose of philosophy, therefore, ought to be solely to understand the world as well as possible, not to establish this or that proposition which is thought morally desirable. Those who embark upon philosophy must be prepared to question all their preconceptions, ethical as well as scientific; if they have a determination never to surrender certain philosophic beliefs, they are not in the frame of mind in which philosophy can be profitably pursued.

Philosophy has Good Moral Effects

But although philosophy ought not to have a moral purpose, it ought to have certain good moral effects. Any disinterested pursuit of knowledge teaches us the limits of our power, which is salutary; at the same time, in proportion as we succeed in achieving knowledge, it teaches the limits of our impotence, which is equally desirable. And philosophical knowledge, or rather philosophical thought, has certain special merits not belonging in an equal degree to other intellectual pursuits. By its generality it enables us to see human passions in their just proportions, and to realise the absurdity of many quarrels between individuals, classes, and nations. Philosophy comes as near as possible for human beings to that large, impartial contemplation of the universe as a whole which raises us for the moment above our purely personal destiny. There is a certain asceticism of the intellect which is good as a part of life, though it cannot be the whole so long as we have to remain animals engaged in the struggle for existence. The asceticism of the intellect requires that, while we are engaged in the pursuit of knowledge, we shall repress all other desires for the sake of the desire to know. While we are philosophising, the wish to prove that the world is good, or that the dogmas of this or that sect are true, must count as weaknesses of the flesh — they are temptations to be thrust on one side. But we obtain in return something of the joy which the mystic experiences in harmony with the will of God. This joy philosophy can give, but only to those who are willing to follow it to the end, through all its arduous uncertainties.

Human Accomplishment is not Constrained by Power or Limit

The world presented for our belief by a philosophy based upon modern science is in many ways less alien to ourselves than the world of matter as conceived in former centuries. The events that happen in our minds are part of the course of nature, and we do not know that the events which happen elsewhere are of a totally different kind. The physical world, so far as science can show at present, is perhaps less rigidly determined by causal laws than it was thought to be; one might, more or less fancifully, attribute even to the atom a kind of limited free will. There is no need to think of ourselves as powerless and small in the grip of vast cosmic forces. All measurement is conventional, and it would be possible to devise a perfectly serviceable system of measurement according to which a man would be larger than the sun. No doubt there are limits to our power, and it is good that we should recognise the fact. But we cannot say what the limits are, except in a quite abstract way, such as that we cannot create energy. From the point of view of human life, it is not important to be able to create energy; what is important is to be able to direct energy into this or that channel, and this we can do more and more as our knowledge of science increases. Since men first began to think, the forces of nature have oppressed them; earthquakes, floods, pestilences, and famines have filled them with terror. Now at last, thanks to science, mankind are discovering how to avoid much of the suffering that such events have hitherto entailed. The mood in which, as it seems to me, the modern man should face the universe is one of quiet self-respect. The universe as known to science is not in itself either friendly or hostile to man, but it can be made to act as a friend if approached with patient knowledge. Where the universe is concerned, knowledge is the one thing needful. Man, alone of living things, has shown himself capable of the knowledge required to give him a certain mastery over his environment. The dangers to man in the future, or at least in any measurable future, come, not from nature, but from man himself. Will he use his power wisely? Or will he turn the energy liberated from the struggle with nature into struggles with his fellow-men? History, science, and philosophy all make us aware of the great collective achievements of mankind. It would be well if every civilised human being had a sense of these achievements and a realisation of the possibility of greater things to come, with the indifference which must result as regards the petty squabbles upon which the passions of individuals and nations are wastefully squandered.

Philosophy should make us know the ends of life, and the elements in life that have value on their own account. However our freedom may be limited in the causal sphere, we need admit no limitations to our freedom in the sphere of values: what we judge good on its own account we may continue to judge good, without regard to anything but our own feeling. Philosophy cannot itself determine the ends of life, but it can free us from the tyranny of prejudice and from distortions due to a narrow view. Love, beauty, knowledge, and joy of life: these things retain their lustre however wide our purview. And if philosophy can help us to feel the value of these things, it will have played its part in man's collective work of bringing light into a world of darkness.

AGAINST CHRISTIANITY ("Why I Am Not a Christian", 1927)

What Is a Christian?

I think. . . that there are two different items which are quite essential to anybody calling himself a Christian. The first is one of a dogmatic nature -- namely, that you must believe in God and immortality. If you do not believe in those two things, I do not think that you can properly call yourself a Christian. Then, further than that, as the name implies, you must have some kind of belief about Christ. The Mohammedans, for instance, also believe in God and in immortality, and yet they would not call themselves Christians. I think you must have at the very lowest the belief that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men. If you are not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not think you have any right to call yourself a Christian. Of course, there is another sense, which you find in Whitaker's Almanack and in geography books, where the population of the world is said to be divided into Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, fetish worshipers, and so on; and in that sense we are all Christians. The geography books count us all in, but that is a purely geographical sense, which I suppose we can ignore. Therefore I take it that when I tell you why I am not a Christian I have to tell you two different things: first, why I do not believe in God and in immortality; and, secondly, why I do not think that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant him a very high degree of moral goodness. . . .

The Existence of God

To come to this question of the existence of God: it is a large and serious question, and if I were to attempt to deal with it in any adequate manner I should have to keep you here until Kingdom Come, so that you will have to excuse me if I deal with it in a somewhat summary fashion. You know, of course, that the Catholic Church has laid it down as a dogma that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason. That is a somewhat curious dogma, but it is one of their dogmas. They had to introduce it because at one time the freethinkers adopted the habit of saying that there were such and such arguments which mere reason might urge against the existence of God, but of course they knew as a matter of faith that God did exist. The arguments and the reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic Church felt that they must stop it. Therefore they laid it down that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason and they had to set up what they considered were arguments to prove it. There are, of course, a number of them, but I shall take only a few.

The First-cause Argument

Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. (It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God.) That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?'" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.

The Argument from Design

The next step in the process brings us to the argument from design. You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application. It is an easy argument to parody. You all know Voltaire's remark, that obviously the nose was designed to be such as to fit spectacles. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have seemed in the eighteenth century, because since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it.

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.

I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that, they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries about much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation -- it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.

The Character of Christ

I now want to say a few words upon a topic which I often think is not quite sufficiently dealt with by Rationalists, and that is the question whether Christ was the best and the wisest of men. It is generally taken for granted that we should all agree that that was so. I do not myself. I think that there are a good many points upon which I agree with Christ a great deal more than the professing Christians do. I do not know that I could go with Him all the way, but I could go with Him much further than most professing Christians can. You will remember that He said, "Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." That is not a new precept or a new principle. It was used by Lao-tse and Buddha some 500 or 600 years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as a matter of fact Christians accept. I have no doubt that the present prime minister [Stanley Baldwin], for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on one cheek. I think you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense. . . .

Then there is one other maxim of Christ which I think has a great deal in it, but I do not find that it is very popular among some of our Christian friends. He says, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor." That is a very excellent maxim, but, as I say, it is not much practised. All these, I think, are good maxims, although they are a little difficult to live up to. I do not profess to live up to them myself; but then, after all, it is not quite the same thing as for a Christian.

Defects in Christ's Teaching

Having granted the excellence of these maxims, I come to certain points in which I do not believe that one can grant either the superlative wisdom or the superlative goodness of Christ as depicted in the Gospels; and here I may say that one is not concerned with the historical question. Historically it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about him, so that I am not concerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one. I am concerned with Christ as He appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, he certainly thought that His second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. . . .

The Moral Problem

Then you come to moral questions. There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching -- an attitude which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract from superlative excellence. You do not, for instance find that attitude in Socrates. You find him quite bland and urbane toward the people who would not listen to him; and it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to take that line than to take the line of indignation. You probably all remember the sorts of things that Socrates was saying when he was dying, and the sort of things that he generally did say to people who did not agree with him. . . .

The Emotional Factor

As I said before, I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it. You know, of course, the parody of that argument in Samuel Butler's book, Erewhon Revisited. You will remember that in Erewhon there is a certain Higgs who arrives in a remote country, and after spending some time there he escapes from that country in a balloon. Twenty years later he comes back to that country and finds a new religion in which he is worshiped under the name of the "Sun Child," and it is said that he ascended into heaven. He finds that the Feast of the Ascension is about to be celebrated, and he hears Professors Hanky and Panky say to each other that they never set eyes on the man Higgs, and they hope they never will; but they are the high priests of the religion of the Sun Child. He is very indignant, and he comes up to them, and he says, "I am going to expose all this humbug and tell the people of Erewhon that it was only I, the man Higgs, and I went up in a balloon." He was told, "You must not do that, because all the morals of this country are bound round this myth, and if they once know that you did not ascend into Heaven they will all become wicked"; and so he is persuaded of that and he goes quietly away.

That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. . . .

Fear, the Foundation of Religion

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing -- fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.

STUDY QUESTIONS

Please answer all of the following questions.

1. According to Russell in "A Free Man's Worship", what are the main features of nature's blind power, and how does he recommend that we respond to it?

2. According to Russell in "Principles of Mathematics", what are the unsatisfactory explanations about the nature of mathematics by empiricists and rationalists, and what explanation does Russell propose instead?

3. According to Russell in "On Denoting", what are his translations of the sentences "I Met a Man" and "All Men are Mortal"?

4. According to Russell in "Problems of Philosophy", what is his distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description?

5. According to Russell in "Problems of Philosophy", what are his examples of knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description?

6. According to Russell in "Mysticism and Logic" what are the types of desires that science sets aside?

7. According to Russell in "Mysticism and Logic" how is an ethically neutral philosophy impartial to human demands?

8. According to Russell in "The Ethics of War", where does the parallel fail between preventing private wars and public wars, and why are wars today anachronistic?

9. According to Russell in "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" Lecture 1, what are atomic facts and what are the monadic, diadic and triadic relations?

10. According to Russell in "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" Lecture 2 on atomic propositions, what are particulars and predicates?

11. According to Russell in "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" Lectures 3-5, what are molecular propositions, beliefs, and definite descriptions?

12. According to Russell in "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" Lecture 8, what is the main mistake of traditional metaphysics, and what are the justifications of logical atomism?

13. According to Russell in "The Analysis of Mind" Lecture 1, what are the idealist and materialist positions on mind and matter, and what are the different causal laws for psychology and physics?

14. According to Russell in "The Analysis of Mind" Lecture 5, what are the differences between physics and psychology, and what is his functional definition of matter?

15. According to Russell in "The Analysis of Mind" Lecture 6, how do both material objects and mental introspection involve sensation?

16. According to Russell in "The Analysis of Mind" Lecture 15, what are the similarities and differences between physics and psychology?

17. According to Russell in "Prospects of Industrial Civilization", describe the three types of power, and why he believes that the mental power of reason is the source of opinion.

18. According to Russell in "Outline of Philosophy", why does he believe that philosophy does not have a moral purpose, and what are some of the good moral effects of philosophy?

19. According to Russell in "Why I Am Not a Christian", what is wrong with the first cause and design arguments for God's existence?

20. According to Russell in "Why I Am Not a Christian", what does he agree with about Christ's teachings, and what does he disagree with?

21. Short essay: please select one of the following and answer it in a minimum of 100 words.

a. C.D. Broad lays out the following three questions about Russell's theory of knowledge by acquaintance: "Thus there arise the following questions: (A) Is there such a thing as acquaintance ? (B) If so, is acquaintance itself knowledge? (C) What is knowledge by acquaintance, and does it exist?" To the first question Broad answers "I feel no doubt of its reality; but there are two difficulties in giving satisfactory examples." To the second question he answers "This seems to me mainly a verbal question. Acquaintance, so far as I can see, differs from judgment. And the most usual and important meaning of knowledge is true judgment. If I am right, acquaintance is not knowledge in this sense. It may be called knowledge in so far as it immediately gives rise to the grounds for judgments which do constitute knowledge. But here we are speaking figuratively; this only makes acquaintance knowledge in the sense in which we can say that 'the blood is the life'" ("Symposium: Is there Knowledge by Acquaintance" 1912). Discuss Broad's point and how Russell might respond.

b. Alfred Hoernlé criticizes that Russells ethical neutrality is "a passionate 'receptivity to facts'-- not the facts of concrete life and experience which call for moral judgment, but the facts of Mr. Russell's abstract logical and mathematical speculations. It is a religion of clear thinking on problems into which no values enter. The price of the "true union" has been the impoverishment of the materials of philosophical speculation by the sacrifice of the fulness of life" ("The Religious Aspect of Bertrand Russell's Philosophy" 1916). Discuss Hoernle's point and how Russell might respond.

c. Alfred Hoernle makes the following criticism of Russell's "A Free Man's Worship": "Mr. Russell's modern soul sees values only in man, values which the world scorns, and which man can affirm only by scorning the world in his turn. Even the value of the very science which reveals to us such a world is, we must hold, only that it teaches us to know the worst. And we are most true to ourselves when we accept the worst undaunted and, even with the certain prospect of utter annihilation, still affirm that the pursuit of ideals is worth while. Such is the deep and tragic conflict in the modern mind, such the austere harmony, tinged with pain, which alone it can reach, if harmony it may be called, where anguish and despair are so strangely mingled with defiance and exaltation. Such is the outcome of the passionate quest for passionless truth, such the reward of one who, sharing the Mystic's emotional demands, refuses the Mystic's hope, the Mystic's vision" ("The Religious Aspect of Bertrand Russell's Philosophy" 1916). Discuss Hoernle's point and how Russell might respond.

d. C.D. Broad makes the following comment about Russell's view of ethical neutrality: "I agree entirely with Mr. Russell about the importance and the rareness of ethical neutrality in philosophy. Our hopes, fears, and judgments of value (even supposing the latter to deal with a characteristic of things as objective as redness or squareness) seem to me to be only relevant in philosophy in one rather roundabout way. The way is this. Among the facts that the ethically neutral philosopher has to recognise is the somewhat strange one that the process of evolution has produced people with hopes and fears, and with the power of ignoring them and acting and speculating disinterestedly" (review "Mysticism and Logic" 1918). Are Russell and Broad correct that philosophy needs to be ethically neutral, and might Broad's observation about evolution offer a path for one's ethical opinions to be legitimately discussed in philosophy?

e. In the "Philosophy of Logical Atomism" Russell defends his theory with the principle of simplicity: "every diminution in the number of entities increases the amount of work for mathematical logic to do in building up things that look like the entities you used to assume". John Laird criticizes that the principle of simplicity cannot prove Russell's theory: "I contrasted two views of the physical world. According to Mr. Russell's view this world consists (1) of my sense-data (actual and remembered), (2) of other people's sense-data (actual and remembered), and (3) of possible sense-data (i. e., of sensibilia which are not actually sensed by any one or remembered by any one). Given these entities, the laws of physics can be expressed as logical constructs from them or their constituent parts. According to the other view the world consists of unperceived physical objects which, when they stimulate another unperceived physical object (my body and brain) cause the existence of the sense-data actually perceived. My principal contention was that the Law of Parsimony cannot decide between these two theories. The second offends the demand for simplicity by assuming unverifiably that unperceived physical objects exist. On the other hand, it does not require us to suppose that there are any sensibles except those actually perceived. Mr. Russell's theory avoids the first luxury but it requires the second. And the hypothesis of the actual existence of possible sensibles is just as inimical to the principle of parsimony as the hypothesis of unperceived physical objects, besides having peculiar difficulties of its own" ("Logical Atomism and the Law of Parsimony" 1920). Discuss Laird's point and how Russell might respond.

f. Alan Dorward describes the conclusion of Russell's book "The Analysis of Mind" as follows: "the conclusion is that there is no specific character "'consciousness' which is of- the essence of mind. We say that " consciousness " exists when there occurs a certain complex of sensations and images related in a certain way; the whole phenomenon is analysable into these sensations and images, but by themselves they have nothing "conscious " about them. Thus we end by analysing the subject, and all mental states and -mental processes into sensations and images variously inter-related." Dorwward continues, though with the following criticism: "But that conclusion is in danger so long as a single type of mental state resists analysis into sensations and images, even if all the others have been successfully dealt with" (Review, The Analyisis of Mind, 1922). Discuss Dorward's point and how Russell might respond.

g. Leonard James Russell makes the following criticism of Bertrand Russell's theory of neutral monism: "I think Mr. Russell . . . is right in his criticisms of the categories of substance and causality; that he is right in denying both the materiality of matter and the immateriality of mind; that he is right in his general support of the behaviouristic approach to knowledge of man, and in his finding this method of approach inadequate at certain critical points; but I think that in his central positive thesis, regarding the kind of thing that we know with greatest certainty, he is wrong, and wrong because he over-estimates Berkeley ["that what I know with the greatest certainty is my own precepts"], and under-estimates Kant, on the question of the knowledge reached by introspection (Review, "An Outline of Philosophy", 1928). Discuss the critic's point that Russell relies to heavily on Berkeley's view of matter, and how Russell might respond.