THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHERS 357
beautiful." But the same mellow wisdom offers us a lesson which we
learn, usually, too late. "No one has ever been able to show me precisely
the right way. ... As for me, I follow my feeling for the beautiful.
What man is certain of having found a better guide? ... If I had to
choose between beauty and truth, I should not hesitate; it is beauty I
should . . . keep. There is nothing true in the world 35
except beauty."
Let us hope that we need not choose. Perhaps we shall some day be
strong enough and clear enough in soul to see the shining beauty of even
the darkest truth.
III. BERTRAND RUSSELL
i. THE LOGICIAN
We have kept for the last the youngest and the most virile of thr?
European thinkers of our generation.
When Bertrand Russell spoke at Columbia University in 1914, he
looked like his subject, which was epistemology thin, pale, and moribund;
one expected to see him die at every period. The Great War had
just broken out, and this tender-minded, peace-loving philosopher had
suffered from the shock of seeing the most civilized of continents disinte-
grate into barbarism. One imagined that he spoke of so remote a subject
as "Our Knowledge of the External World" because he knew it was
remote, and wished to be as far as possible from actualities that had become
so grim. And then, seeing him again, ten years later, one was happy
to find him, though fifty-two, hale and jolly, and buoyant with a still re-
bellious energy. This despite an intervening decade that had destroyed
almost all his hopes, loosened all his friendships, and broken almost all
the threads of his once sheltered and aristocratic life.
For he belongs to the Russells, one of the oldest and most famous
families in England or the world, a family that has given statesmen to
Britain for many generations. His grandfather, Lord John Russell, was a
great Liberal Prime Minister who fought an unyielding battle for freetrade,
for universal free education, for the emancipation of the Jews, for
liberty in every field. His father, Viscount Amberley, was a free-thinker,
who did not over-burden his son with the hereditary theology of the West*
He is now heir presumptive to the second Earl Russell but he rejects the
institution of inheritance, and proudly earns his own living. When
Cambridge dismissed him for his pacifism he made the world his university,
and became a traveling Sophist (in the original sense of that once
noble word) , whom the world supported gladly.
There have been two Bertrand Russells: one who died during the war;
and another who rose out of that one's shroud, an almost mystic com-
"Anatole France, On Life and Letters, EngL tr., vol. ii, pp. 113 and 176.