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both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy." But he knows also that
these are "almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds."
That they
are,
and that they are worth being curious and ultimately
concerned about, is a primary axiom of his moral being. With his life–
long insistence on the non-human, indeed superhuman, objectivity of
truth, Russell has been the most pious of atheists: "In all this [the
instrumentalist and similar theories of truth] I feel a grave danger, the
danger of what might be called cosmic impiety. The concept of 'truth'
as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has
been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the
necessary elemen t of humility. When this check upon pride is removed,
a further step is taken on the road towards a kind of madness."
But admission to this senior common room is not as carefully checked
as at a Cambridge college. Strangers are there; they have refused to wear
their gowns; they have spilled the port, and turned to more fiery flasks;
they have no manners, and they shout out
their
truths without benefit of
ordered premises. It is to exorcise them, to persuade himself they do not
even exist, that Russell draws on his full armory- his logical subtlety,
the appeal to impersonal evidence, his wit, disgust, contempt, and fear.
The gentleman, who accepts the rules, is in a room with the declassed;
the brigadier confronts the Indonesian natives. Rousseau, Augustine,
Bergson, Nietzsche, the renegade Byron ("It is on the Continent that
Byron was influential, and it is not in England that his spiritual progeny
is to be sought" ), the myth-making Plato.
"If
I had to choose between
Thomas Aquinas and Rousseau, I should unhesitatingly choose the Saint."
Of course. How could that bright rationalism look with anything other
than horror at Plato's dark myths, Augustine's passion, Bergson's scorn
of reason, at the shameless secrets of the heart which Rousseau so shame–
lessly exposes? Pascal, in Russell's
History,
becomes just a contemptuous
footnote-dismissing as "quite in Rousseau's style" that phrase (given in
a bad translation) which tells more than half a dozen academic philoso–
phies:
L e coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connait pas.
For what comes out in the end wonderfully clear from this book
is that Russell is English, an English gentleman, legitimate heir of Eng–
lish thought and English life.
Finis enim totius motus est principium sui–
as Eliot adapts it, "In my end is my beginning." Russell rejoins his roots.
The days of the sowing of paradoxes are over; no more of the iconoclasm
that leads to ousting from the University, and jail for opposition to a
war. In the new war, Russell upholds his country, its values and his; he
accepts the title; Cambridge receives back its son who was dead, and is
alive again; and in the month of this book's publication, he rises in the
House of Lords to defend his historical, as in this book he defends his
intellectual, heritage.
For an Englishman, a philosophy cannot be "an imaginative and
