THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHERS 359
He was rejoiced to hear that parallel lines may somewhere meet, and that
the whole may be no greater than one of its parts. He likes to startle the
innocent reader with such puzzles as this : the even numbers are but half
of all numbers, and yet there are just as many of them as there are num-
bers altogether, since for every number there is its even double. Indeed,
this is the whole point about that hitherto indefinable thing, the mathe-
matical infinite: it is a whole containing parts that have as many terms
or items as the whole. The reader may follow this tangent if the moves him.
spirit
40
What draws Russell to mathematics is, again, its rigid impersonality and
objectivity; here, and here alone, is eternal truth, and absolute knowledge;
these d priori theorems are title "Ideas" of Plato, the "eternal order"
of Spinoza, the substance of the world. The aim of philosophy should be
to equal the perfection of mathematics by confining itself to statements
similarly exact, and similarly true before all experience. "Philosophical
propositions . . . must be h priori" says this strange positivist. Such
propositions will refer not to things but to relations, and to universal
relations. They will be independent of specific "facts" and events; if every
particular in the world were changed, these proportions would still be
true. E. g., "if all A's are B's, and X is A, then X is a B" : this is true
whatever A may be; it reduces to a universal and priori form the old
syllogism about the mortality of Socrates; and it would be true if no
Socrates, even if nobody at all, had ever existed. Plato and Spinoza were
right: "the world of universals may also be described as the world of
being. The world of is being unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the
mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all
who love perfection more than life." 41 To reduce all philosophy to such
mathematical form, to take all specific content out of it, to compress it
(voluminously)
Pythagoras.
into mathematics this was the ambition of this ne\v
"People have discovered how to make reasoning symbolic,
algebra, so that deductions can be effected by
as it is in
mathematical rules. . . .
that one -would recommend Russell's mathematical volumes to the lay
reader. The Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy sets out with a specious
intelligibility, but soon makes demands which only a specialist in mathematics can
meet. Even the little book on The Problems of Philosophy, though intended to be
popular, is difficult, and unnecessarily epistemological; the larger volume, Mysticism
and Logi^ is much clearer and closer to the earth. The Philosophy of
Leibnitz is a fine exposition of a great thinker, ignored in these limited pages. The
twin volumes on The Analysis of Mind and The Analysis of Matter will serve to
bring the reader up to date with certain aspects of psychology and physics. The
post-war books are easy reading; and though they suffer from the confusion natural
to a man whose idealism is slipping into disillusionment, they are interesting and
worth while. Why Men Fight is still the best of these tracts for the times. Roads to
Freedom is a genial survey of social philosophies as old as Diogenes, which Russell
^discovers with all the enthusiasm of a Columbus.
^Mysticism and Logic* p. in; The Problems of Philosophy, p. 156-