A MODERN PHILOSOPHE
639
The explanation seems to be that Russell (like most of the philo–
sophes) is a man of sentiment rather than a man of passion. He lacks
that capacity for strong emotionalism which
in
the eighteenth century
was reprobated under the name of "enthusiasm"-a word that did not
acquire a good connotation until the Romantic Movement. Only a man
whose own emotions were very firmly under control could have argued
(as Russell did in earlier stages of his career) that war could be abolished
if
everybody learned to practise non-resistance, or that marriage would
be improved
if
men and women got rid of their possessive impulses and
ceased to ask each other for sexual fidelity. (Russell remarks
in
this book
that his own aggressiveness
is
sufficiently sublimated
in
the reading of
detective stories.) Unfortunately, as was discovered by those philosophes
who were still alive at the time of the French Revolution, "enthusiasm"
is the principal source of dynamism in human affairs, and without it
very little can be accomplished. For this reason the thinkers who actually
influence the course of events are those (like Rousseau or Nietzsche)
whose ideas are derived from an emotional bias rather than from ratio–
cination, and who introduce not so much a new mode of thinking as
a new kind of sensibility. This is as true of the philosopher and the
political theorist as of the litterateur. The great system-builders who have
had an enduring effect-Plato and Augustine, Calvin and Hegel and
Marx-have owed their potency to the element of irrational passion at
the core of their vision of the universe. Even as a philosopher Russell
has been too cerebral to exert this kind of influence, and his work lacks
the organic unity that is derived only from a deeply-felt emotional drive.
These observations should perhaps be regarded as a criticism of
the human race rather than of Bertrand Russell.
It
is probable that
human beings would have been considerably better off if none of the
great system-builders had ever lived, or at least if their works had been
recognized for what they really were-a series of imaginative creations
tending to organize and channel human emotions in new forms, and
not statements of objective reality. Civilization depends upon the con–
trol of "enthusiasm," and has in the twentieth century almost been
destroyed by an excess of it. Disinterested intelligence is always the
rarest and most necessary of human qualities; and in an age that has
been characterized chiefly by the profusion of political fanaticism, it
is particularly necessary to defend the values which Russell represents.
But for effective action it is also desirable to remember that the thinker
influences other people only insofar as he works with emotion and
imagination rather than with pure reason, in other words by being
primarily a creative artist.
Henry Bamford Parkes
