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JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
ness."
"If
only one lived in the days of Spinoza, when systems were still
possible ..." (Letter to Gilbert Murray, 1902). To Lowes Dickinson,
who was visiting the Orient, he wrote in 1913: "But intellect, except at
white heat, is very apt to be trivial." Still through it all, and to this
day, there persists the great faith in reason and its powers, and
in
that
same letter to Dickinson he said:
Are you finding the Great Secret in the East? I doubt it. There is
none - there is not even an enigma. There is science and sober
daylight and the business of the day - the rest is mere phantoms
of the mind.
And when Russell had his shortlived and tumultuous encounter with
D. H. Lawrence during the war (which should appear in the next
volume), John Stuart Mill would have seen that the seminal antithesis
between Bentham and Coleridge which he pointed out in two celebrated
essays was being enacted all over again, in an exaggerated, not to say
outrageous, fashion in the twentieth century by Lawrence and Russell.
For example, in the next to last paragraph in the last letter to Russell
in
D. H. Lawrence's Letters to Bertrand Russell
occurs the sentence,
"Nothing is born by taking thought."
It
is hard to name a crucial social cause in modern times that has
not had Russell's name associated with it. He began by helping to bring
to final fruition - we hope - the kinds of things that Mill, most
potently, had fought for: legalized birth control, women's rights, women's
suffrage, freedom of speech, freedom of conduct, educational reform
and so on. And he is ending with the problems of the cold war, the H–
bomb and, presently, Vietnam. And in that "world conscience" that
condemns the American intervention in Vietnam and what is probably
the most unsavory war that America has ever engaged in Russell's voice
is undoubtedly one of the most important. This is not always a matter
of what he explicitly says, for along with his great wit and aptness he
has always had a real gift for saying preposterous things. As a prophet
he is no better than the rest of us, and he can be on occasion as silly
as most men. What is important is what he has stood for and done and
suffered in his ninety-odd years. But the suffering in this volume is mostly
emotional and intellectual. The pains undergone in opposing society are
yet to come. There are not many things these days to look forward to: one
of the few is the appearance of the next volume of this autobiography.
John Henry Raleigh
