Bertrand Russell

[The Ineffable]

Bertrand Russell: IEE

I'm not disputing that, but could you post the source?

[Crispy]

Feast your eyes on the most splendiferous of socionics databasii:
http://translate.googleusercontent.c...J3HgymCtJJVJHA

[CloudCuckooLander]

I agree with ILE - his body of work smacks of in general. I could see where one would get based on his humanitarian concerns, but that seems to be ignoring the immensely -driven nature of his philosophical works and interpreting in entirely too cartoonish a manner. It isn't as if ILEs can't care about other people - there is no "sociopath type."

[pianosinger]

My first thought was LSI; he reminds me of my brother.

This is with VI only, though. I don't really know anything about him otherwise.

[The Ineffable]

Feast your eyes on the most splendiferous of socionics databasii:
http://translate.googleusercontent.c...J3HgymCtJJVJHA

Thank you!

[Chae]

I'm so into what he writes. He did that in 1929! "Marriage and morals" is his most famous book. The scandal was huge, I still think it's an explosive text more relevant than ever. ESI SX 1w2?

Gluttony is regarded by the Catholic Church as one of the seven deadly sins, and those who practise it are placed by Dante in one of the deeper circles of hell; but it is a somewhat vague sin, since it is hard to say where a legitimate interest in food ceases and guilt begins to be incurred. Is it wicked to eat anything that is not nourishing? If so, with every salted almond we risk damnation.

There are also many important grounds of health in favour of nudity in suitable circumstances, such as out-of-doors in sunny weather. Sunshine on the bare skin has an exceedingly health-giving effect. Moreover anyone who has watched children running about in the open-air without their clothes must have been struck by the fact that they hold themselves much better and move more freely and more gracefully than when they are dressed. The same thing is true of grown-up people. The proper place for nudity is out-of-doors in the sunshine and in the water. If our conventions allowed of this, it would soon cease to make any sexual appeal; we should all hold ourselves better, we should be healthier from the contact of air and sun with the skin, and our standards of beauty would more nearly coincide with standards of health, since they would concern themselves with the body and its carriage, not only with the face. In this respect the practice of the Greeks was to be commended.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

The traditional course with children was to keep them in as great a degree of ignorance as parents and teachers could achieve....They were told never to touch their sexual organs or speak about them...all questions concerning sex were met by the words "Hush, hush" in a shocked tone. They were informed that children were brought by the stork or dug up under a gooseberry bush. Sooner or later they learnt the facts, usually in a more or less garbled form, from other children, who related them secretly, and, as a result of parental teaching, regarded them as "dirty." The children inferred that their father and mother behaved to each other in a way which was nasty and of which they themselves were ashamed, since they took so much trouble to conceal it. They learnt also that they had been systematically deceived by those to whom they had looked for guidance and instruction. Their attitude towards their parents, toward marriage and towards the opposite sex was thus irrevocably poisoned. Very few men or women who have had a conventional upbringing have learnt to feel decently about sex and marriage. Their education has taught them that deceitfulness and lying are considered virtues by parents and teachers; that sexual relations, even within marriage, are more or less disgusting, and that in propagating the species men are yielding to their animal nature while women are submitting to a painful duty. This attitude has made marriage unsatisfying both to men and to women, and the lack of intuitive satisfaction has turned to cruelly masquerading as morality.

The taboo against nakedness is an obstacle to a decent attitude on the subject of sex... It is good for children to see each other and their parents naked whenever it so happens naturally. There will be a short period, probably at about three years old, when the child is interested in the differences between his father and his mother, and compares them with the differences between himself and his sister, but this period is soon over, and after this he takes no more interest in nudity than in clothes. So long as parents are unwilling to be seen naked by their children, the children will necessarily have a sense that there is a mystery, and having that sense they will become prurient and indecent. There is only one way to avoid indecency, and that is to avoid mystery.

The psychology of adultery has been falsified by conventional morals, which assume, in monogamous countries, that attraction to one person cannot coexist with a serious affection for another. Everybody knows that this is untrue.

The frequency with which a man experiences lust depends upon his own physical condition, whereas the occasions which rouse such feelings in him depend upon the social conventions to which he is accustomed. To an early Victorian man a woman's ankles were sufficient stimulus, whereas a modern man remains unmoved by anything up to the thigh. This is merely a question of fashion in clothing. If nakedness were the fashion, it would cease to excite us, and women would be forced, as they are in certain savage tribes, to adopt clothing as a means of making themselves sexually attractive. Exactly similar considerations apply to literature and pictures; what was exciting in the Victorian age would leave the men of a franker epoch quite unmoved. The more prudes restrict the permissible degree of sexual appeal, the less is required to make such an appeal effective. Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be. On these grounds, although I fear that few will agree with me, I am firmly persuaded that there ought to be no law whatsoever on the subject of obscene publications.

I am not suggesting that there should be no morality and no self-restraint in regard to sex, any more than in regard to food. In regard to food we have restraints of three kinds, those of law, those of manners, and those of health. We regard it as wrong to steal food, to take more than our share at a common meal, and to eat in ways that are likely to make us ill. Restraints of a similar kind are essential where sex is concerned, but in this case they are much more complex and involve much more self-control. Moreover, since one human being ought not to have property in another, the analogue of stealing is not adultery, but rape, which obviously must be forbidden by law. The questions that arise in regard to health are concerned almost entirely with venereal disease.

Science enables us to realise our purposes, and if our purposes are evil, the result is disaster.

The fact that a mystery is made about sex enormously increases the natural curiosity of the young on the subject. If adults treat sex exactly as they treat any other topic, giving the child answers to all his questions and just as much information as he desires or can understand, the child never arrives at the notion of obscenity, for this notion depends upon the belief that certain topics should not be mentioned. Sexual curiosity, like every other kind, dies down when it is satisfied. Therefore far the best way to prevent young people from being obsessed with sex is to tell them just as much about it as they care to know.

Passionate mutual love while it lasts... breaks down the hard walls of the ego, producing a new being composed of two in one. Nature did not construct human beings to stand alone, since they cannot fulfil her biological purpose except with the help of another; and civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love ... Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give; unconsciously, if not consciously, they feel this, and the resulting disappointment inclines them towards envy, oppression and cruelty. To give due place to passionate love should be therefore a matter which concerns the sociologist, since, if they miss this experience, men and women cannot attain their full stature, and cannot feel towards the rest of the world that kind of generous warmth without which their social activities are pretty sure to be harmful.

I thought SEI was possible but this sounds like -

I should like to say two things. One intellectual and one moral. The intellectual thing I should want to say to them is this: "When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only: What are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed; but look only and solely at what are the facts." That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say. The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple; I should say: "Love is wise – Hatred is foolish." In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact, that some people say things we don't like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital, to the continuation of human life on this planet.

[ashlesha]

when I see the name I think of Russell brand :/
anyway here's an old thread which provides no answers, except I guess aushra typed him IEE. http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin...rtrand-Russell

[The Reality Denialist]

Probs LII.

Slightly deviated C.G. Jung copy.

[Chae]

when I see the name I think of Russell brand :/
anyway here's an old thread which provides no answers, except I guess aushra typed him IEE. http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin...rtrand-Russell

So did I Oh thanks but hey okay IEE by Aushra herself!

[The Reality Denialist]

He sounds very PoLR. Critique towards exercising power in it's different manifestations.

He is heavily

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Prin...of_Mathematics

Contents

The Principles of Mathematics consists of 59 chapters divided into seven parts: indefinables in mathematics, number, quantity, order, infinity and continuity, space, matter and motion.
In chapter one, "Definition of Pure Mathematics", Russell asserts that :

The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists in the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself.^[3]

There is an anticipation of relativity physics in the final part as the last three chapters consider Newton's laws of motion, absolute and relative motion, and Hertz's dynamics. However, Russell rejects what he calls "the relational theory", and says on page 489 :
For us, since absolute space and time have been admitted, there is no need to avoid absolute motion, and indeed no possibility of doing so.In his review, G. H. Hardy says "Mr. Russell is a firm believer in absolute position in space and time, a view as much out of fashion nowadays that Chapter [58: Absolute and Relative Motion] will be read with peculiar interest."^[4]

[powerrainbowcrystal]

Yea my first thought was LII.

[Tallmo]

I remember reading him in philosophy. Obvious NT type

Yeah, probably LII. I agree, reminds me of Jung too. Although in videos Jung seems to have more vitality despite of old age.

Both Jung and Russell are probably C-LII, and maybe the enneagram is also the same? I don't know.

[khcs]

Bertrand Russel - ENTJ - Jack London

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

Bertrand_Russell_in_1938.jpg

[Exodus]

Yeah...pretty sure he was more well-known for math/logic and analytic philosophy than that book. I haven't researched him thoroughly though.

[nokomis]

Those excerpts scream LII. About as obvious example of a type as you can get

[Kill4Me]

Added: https://www.pinterest.com/socionics/ili-te/



by incorporation, my post on aushra:

Aushra's eyes sharply observe the surroundings. Simultaneously the eyes don't seem to have any immediate need for contact but are content to keep distant, to wait the environment out. There's a toughness (a type of tough-mindedness consistent with cold, unrelenting observation).

http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin...iūtė

ILI-Te would also be the light subtype for ILI. SEE-Se is the dark subtype for SEE. So in terms of Advanced Duality those two make for better duals in the long-term than ILI-Te and SEE-Fi do.

[Aramas]

An interesting quote by Bertrand Russell:

“Education should aim at destroying free will so that pupils thus schooled, will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished. . . . Influences of the home are obstructive; and in order to condition students, verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. . . . It is for a future scientist to make these maxims precise and to discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”

In other words, he was a total scumbag.

[Not A Communist Shill]

I think I've always seen as -leading, certainly -Ego. Apparently Augusta thought he was IEE, although I don't recall the source of that typing.

[Chae]

Yeah...pretty sure he was more well-known for math/logic and analytic philosophy than that book. I haven't researched him thoroughly though.

Never heard of his other books

[Aramas]

I think I've always seen as -leading, certainly -Ego. Apparently Augusta thought he was IEE, although I don't recall the source of that typing.

It wouldn't surprise me. Based on the quote I supplied, he seems like a behaviorist. IEEs are the ultimate behaviorists. Of course, during his era, behaviorism was a dominant interpretation of psychology.

[Exodus]

An interesting quote by Bertrand Russell:



In other words, he was a total scumbag.

He was quoting someone there but he was indeed a scumbag:

EDUCATION has two purposes: on the one hand to
form the mind, on the other hand to train the
citizen. The Athenians concentrated on the former,
the Spartans on the latter. The Spartans won, but
the Athenians were remembered.

Education in a scientific society may, I think, be
best conceived after the analogy of the education
provided by the Jesuits. The Jesuits provided one
sort of education for the boys who were to become
ordinary men of the world, and another for those
who were to become members of the Society of
Jesus. In like manner, the scientific rulers will
provide one kind of education for ordinary men and
women, and another for those who are to become
holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and
women will be expected to be docile, industrious,
punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of ihese
qualities probably contentment will be considered
the most important. In order to produce it, all the
researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and
biochemistry will be brought into play. Children will
be educated from their earliest years in the manner
which is found least likely to produce complexes.
Almost all will be normal, happy, healthy boys or
girls. Their diet will not be left to the caprices of
parents, but will be such as the best biochemists
recommend. They will spend much time in the
open air, and will be given no more book-learning
than is absolutely necessary. Upon the temperament
so formed, docility will be imposed by the methods
of the drill-sergeant, or perhaps by the softer methods
employed upon Boy Scouts. All the boys and girls
will learn from an early age to be what is called
"co-operative," i.e. to do exactly what everybody
is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these
children, and insubordination, without being pun-
ished, will be scientifically trained out of them.
Their education throughout will be in great part
manual, and when their school years come to an
end they will be taught a trade. In deciding what
trade they are to adopt, experts will appraise their
aptitudes. Formal lessons, in so far as they exist,
will be conducted by means of the cinema or the
radio, so that one teacher can give simultaneous
lessons in all the classes throughout a whole country.
The giving of these lessons will, of course, be recog-
nized as a highly skilled undertaking, reserved for
the members of the governing class. All that will be
required locally to replace the present-day school
teacher will be a lady to keep order, though it is
hoped that the children will be so well-behaved that
they will seldom require this estimable person's
services.

Those children, on the other hand, who are
destined to become members of the governing class
will have a very different education. They will be
selected, some before birth, some during the first
three years of life, and a few between the ages of
three and six. All the best-known science will be
applied to the simultaneous development of intelli-
gence and will-power.

Eugenics, chemical and thermal treatment of the
embryo, and diet in early years will be used with a
view to the production of the highest possible
ultimate ability. The scientific outlook will be
instilled from the moment that a child can talk, and
throughout the early impressionable years the child
will be carefully guarded from contact with the
ignorant and unscientific. From infancy up to
twenty-one, scientific knowledge will be poured into
him, and at any rate from the age of twelve upwards
he will specialize on those sciences for which he
shows the most aptitude. At the same time he will
be taught physical toughness ; he will be encouraged
to roll naked in the snow, to fast occasionally for
twenty-four hours, to run many miles on hot days,
to be bold in all physical adventures and uncom-
plaining when he suffers physical pain. From the
age of twelve upwards he will be taught to organize
children slightly younger than himself, and will
suffer severe censure if groups of such children fail
to follow his lead. A sense of his high destiny will be
constantly set before him, and loyalty towards his
order will be so axiomatic that it will never occur
to him to question it. Every youth will thus be
subjected to a threefold training: in intelligence,
in self-command, and in command over others.
If he should fail in any one of these three, he will
suffer the terrible penalty of degradation to the ranks
of common workers, and will be condemned for the
rest of his life to associate with men and women
vastly inferior to himself in education and probably
in intelligence. The spur of this fear will suffice to
produce industry in all but a very small minority of
boys and girls of the governing class.

and this one:

It is probable
that there will be certain kinds of labour mainly
performed by negroes, and that manual workers in
general will be bred for patience and muscle rather
than for brains. The governors and experts, on the
contrary, will be bred chiefly for their intellectual
powers and their strength of character. Assuming
that both kinds of breeding are scientifically carried
out, there will come to be an increasing divergence
between the two types, making them in the end
almost different species.

https://archive.org/stream/scientifi...17mbp_djvu.txt

[Aramas]

He was quoting someone there but he was indeed a scumbag:



and this one:



https://archive.org/stream/scientifi...17mbp_djvu.txt

Quoting someone else, or taking inspiration from?

[silke]

I saw him typed as Ti-ILE. Causal-Determinist cog style is peeking out of some of his quotes, and visually he reminds me of Nikola Tesla, another Ti-ILE.

updated: enneagam so/sx the 'darksider' sx subtype, 9w1?

[The Reality Denialist]

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/...m#link2HCH0003

CHAPTER III. THE NATURE OF MATTER

[...] Now our sense-data are situated in our private spaces, either the space of sight or the space of touch or such vaguer spaces as other senses may give us. If, as science and common sense assume, there is one public all-embracing physical space in which physical objects are, the relative positions of physical objects in physical space must more or less correspond to the relative positions of sense-data in our private spaces. There is no difficulty in supposing this to be the case. If we see on a road one house nearer to us than another, our other senses will bear out the view that it is nearer; for example, it will be reached sooner if we walk along the road. Other people will agree that the house which looks nearer to us is nearer; the ordnance map will take the same view; and thus everything points to a spatial relation between the houses corresponding to the relation between the sense-data which we see when we look at the houses. Thus we may assume that there is a physical space in which physical objects have spatial relations corresponding to those which the corresponding sense-data have in our private spaces. It is this physical space which is dealt with in geometry and assumed in physics and astronomy.
Assuming that there is physical space, and that it does thus correspond to private spaces, what can we know about it? We can know only what is required in order to secure the correspondence. That is to say, we can know nothing of what it is like in itself, but we can know the sort of arrangement of physical objects which results from their spatial relations. We can know, for example, that the earth and moon and sun are in one straight line during an eclipse, though we cannot know what a physical straight line is in itself, as we know the look of a straight line in our visual space. Thus we come to know much more about the relations of distances in physical space than about the distances themselves; we may know that one distance is greater than another, or that it is along the same straight line as the other, but we cannot have that immediate acquaintance with physical distances that we have with distances in our private spaces, or with colours or sounds or other sense-data. We can know all those things about physical space which a man born blind might know through other people about the space of sight; but the kind of things which a man born blind could never know about the space of sight we also cannot know about physical space. We can know the properties of the relations required to preserve the correspondence with sense-data, but we cannot know the nature of the terms between which the relations hold. [...]

Bit anecdotal but that itself is very removed from . Something rings a bell.

[Chae]

He was quoting someone there but he was indeed a scumbag:



and this one:



https://archive.org/stream/scientifi...17mbp_djvu.txt

I think what he's doing there is rather meta-analysis? It doesn't fit into what he usually tries to convey. Though what's more of interest: what elements?

[Not A Communist Shill]

An interesting quote by Bertrand Russell:



In other words, he was a total scumbag.

He was opposed to war, torture, hell, colonialism, totalitarianism etc....he is about the last person I would call a "total scumbag". Some may say he had some significant failings in his personal life that might warrant such a label, but I don't consider him to have been especially hypocritical.

[Aramas]

He was opposed to war, torture, hell, colonialism, totalitarianism etc....he is about the last person I would call a "total scumbag". Some may say he had some significant failings in his personal life that might warrant such a label, but I don't consider him to have been especially hypocritical.

What's your definition of totalitarianism? Lol. If people are not allowed to think independently, they live in a totalitarian society. There's absolutely no way you can agree that Russell said what I quoted and then say he was not totalitarian.

[Not A Communist Shill]

What's your definition of totalitarianism? Lol. If people are not allowed to think independently, they live in a totalitarian society. There's absolutely no way you can agree that Russell said what I quoted and then say he was not totalitarian.

He was in favour of universal suffrage, and opposed to authoritarianism. He was in favour of doing the least amount of harm, and parents be able to raise their children in line with that principle. You may not agree with his views, but to say he was opposed to others having contrary opinions is absurd.

There must be in the world many parents who, like the present author, have young children whom they are anxious to educate as well as possible, but reluctant to expose to the evils of most existing educational institutions. The difficulties of such parents are not soluble by any effort on the part of isolated individuals. It is, of course, possible to bring up children at home by means of governesses and tutors, but this plan deprives them of the companionship which their nature craves, and without which some essential elements of education must be lacking. Moreover, it is extremely bad for a boy or girl to be made to feel 'odd' and different from other boys and girls; this feeling, when traced to parents as its cause, is almost certain to rouse resentment against them, leading to a love of all that they most dislike. The conscientious parent may be driven by these considerations to send his boys and girls to schools in which he sees grave defects, merely because no existing schools seem to him satisfactory - or, if any are satisfactory, they are not in his neighbourhood. Thus the cause of educational reform is forced upon conscientious parents, not only for the good of the community, but also for the good of their own children. If the parents are well-to-do, it is not necessary to the solution of their private problem that all schools should be good, but only that there should be some good school geographically available. But for wage-earning parents nothing suffices except reform in the elementary schools. As one parent will object to the reforms which another parent desires, nothing will serve except an energetic educational propaganda, which is not likely to prove effective until long after the reformer's children are grown up. Thus from love for our own children we are driven, step by step, into the wider sphere of politics and philosophy.

From this wider sphere I desire, in the following pages, to remain aloof as far as possible. The greater part of what I have to say will not be dependent upon the views that I may happen to hold as regards the major controversies of our age. But complete independence in this regard is impossible. The education we desire for our children must depend upon our ideals of human character, and our hopes as to the part they are to play in the community. A pacifist will not desire for his children the education which seems good to a militarist; the educational outlook of a communist will not be the same as that of an individualist. To come to a more fundamental cleavage; there can be no agreement between those who regard education as a means of instilling certain definite beliefs, and those who think that it should produce the power of independent judgement. Where such issues are relevant, it would be idle to shirk them. At the same time, there is a considerable body of new knowledge in psychology and pedagogy which is independent of these ultimate questions, and has an intimate bearing on education. Already it has produced very important results, but a great deal remains to be done before its teachings have been fully assimilated. This is especially true of the first five years of life; these have been found to have an importance far greater than that formerly attributed to them, which involves a corresponding increase in the educational importance of parents. My aim and purpose, wherever possible, will be to avoid controversial issues. Polemical writing is necessary in some spheres, but in addressing parents one may assume a sincere desire for the welfare of their off-spring, and this alone, in conjunction with modern knowledge, suffices to decide a very large number of educational problems. What I have to say is the outcome of perplexities in regard to my own children; it is therefore not remote or theoretical, and may, I hope, help to clarify the thoughts of other parents faced with a like perplexity, whether in the way of agreement with my conclusions or the opposite. The opinions of parents are immensely important, because, for lack of expert knowledge, parents are too often a drag upon the best educationists. If parents desire a good education for their children, there will, I am convinced, be no lack of teachers willing and able to give it.

Rigid truthfulness in adults towards children is, of course, absolutely indispensable if children are not to learn lying. Parents who teach that lying is a sin, and who nevertheless are known to lie by their children, naturally lose all moral authority. The idea of speaking the truth to children is entirely novel ; hardly anybody did it before the present generation. I greatly doubt whether Eve told Cain and Abel the truth about apples ; I am convinced that she told them she had never eaten anything that wasn't good for her. It used to be the thing for parents to represent themselves as Olympians, immune from human passions, and always actuated by pure reason. When they reproached the children they did it more in sorrow than in anger ; however they might scold, they were not "cross", but talking to the children for their good. Parents did not realize that children are astonishingly clear-sighted : they do not understand all the solemn political reasons for humbug, but despise it straightforwardly and simply. Jealousies and envies, of which you are unconscious, will be evident to your child, who will discount all your fine moral talk about the wickedness of the objects of these passions. Never pretend to be faultless and inhuman ; the child will not believe you, and would not like you any the better if he did. I remember vividly how, at a very early age, I saw through the Victorian humbug and hypocrisy with which I was surrounded, and vowed that, if I ever had children, I would not repeat the mistakes that were being made with me. To the best of my ability I am keeping this vow.

Another form of lying, which is extremely bad for the young, is to threaten punishments you do not mean to indict. Dr. Ballard, in his most interesting book on The Changing School(note: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925), has stated this principle rather emphatically : "Don't threaten. If you do, let nothing stop you from carrying out your threat. If you say to a boy, 'Do that again and I'll murder you,' and he does it again, then you must murder him. If you don't, he will lose all respect for you" (p. II2). The punishments threatened by nurses and ignorant parents in dealing with infants are somewhat less extreme, but the same rule applies. Do not insist, except for good reason ; but when you have once begun insisting, continue, however you may regret having embarked upon the battle. If you threaten a punishment, let it be one that you are prepared to inflict ; never trust to luck that your bluff will not be called. It is odd how difficult it is to get this principle understood by uneducated people. It is particularly objectionable when they threaten something terrifying, such as being locked up by the policeman, or carried off by the bogey-man. This produces first a state of dangerous nervous terror and then a complete scepticism as to all statements and threats by grown-up people. If you never insist without carrying the matter through, the child soon learns that on such occasions resistance is useless, and he obeys a mere word without giving further trouble. But it is essential to the success of this method that you should not insist unless there is some really strong reason for doing so.

http://russell-j.com/beginner/ON_EDU-TEXT.HTM

[Aramas]

He was in favour of universal suffrage, and opposed to authoritarianism. He was in favour of doing the least amount of harm, and parents be able to raise their children in line with that principle. You may not agree with his views, but to say he was opposed to others having contrary opinions is absurd.





http://russell-j.com/beginner/ON_EDU-TEXT.HTM

You're only looking at the most superficial aspects of totalitarianism. You say that he wanted universal suffrage, but if you indoctrinate people to think what you want and then give them freedom of choice, of course they choose what you want, because they were brainwashed into doing so. You think of totalitarianism as only involving the direct use of force, but it's also important to note that Bertrand Russell wanted to destroy free will. He said so himself explicitly. The ability to vote by itself isn't important if people can't actually have independent opinions that disagree.

How on Earth can you say that he was opposed to others having different opinions, and that thinking such is absurd? He literally said that education SHOULD aim at destroying free will. How much more obvious can you get? You literally can't get any more straightforward than that.

[Not A Communist Shill]

You're only looking at the most superficial aspects of totalitarianism. You say that he wanted universal suffrage, but if you indoctrinate people to think what you want and then give them freedom of choice, of course they choose what you want, because they were brainwashed into doing so. You think of totalitarianism as only involving the direct use of force, but it's also important to note that Bertrand Russell wanted to destroy free will. He said so himself explicitly. The ability to vote by itself isn't important if people can't actually have independent opinions that disagree.

How on Earth can you say that he was opposed to others having different opinions, and that thinking such is absurd? He literally said that education SHOULD aim at destroying free will. How much more obvious can you get? You literally can't get any more straightforward than that.

He was in favour of minimizing harm. I did not say that his views at the time of those comments are correct.

I really do not think he wanted to destroy free will. Rather, he wanted there to be the maximum amount of free will possible. Certainly, many including myself would disagree in whole or in part with his set of priorities and his method.

[Aramas]

So you're saying that he changed his mind later on, @Subteigh, and that his later views disagree with the quote I posted? If so, I'd be happy to change my mind if you can provide some kind of evidence that directly contradicts the quote I posted. The quote that you responded with didn't do that.

[Not A Communist Shill]

So you're saying that he changed his mind later on, @Subteigh, and that his later views disagree with the quote I posted? If so, I'd be happy to change my mind if you can provide some kind of evidence that directly contradicts the quote I posted. The quote that you responded with didn't do that.

The passages you quoted were a sample of his vision of a scientific society, perhaps largely reflective of his views. His philosophy was broadly utilitarian and concerned primarily with truth and maximizing happiness in a society. Naturally, people disagree with the exact importance of values such as truth, democracy, self-determination, and happiness, and disagree on how they should be defined.

It seems his earlier views were clouded by the view that individuals had limited or no free will.

IV. Determinism and Morals, from The Elements of Ethics (1910)

§24.
The importance to ethics of the free-will question is a subject upon which there has existed almost as much diversity of opinion as on the free-will question itself. It has been urged by advocates of free-will that its denial involves the denial of merit and demerit, and that, with the denial of these, ethics collapses. It has been urged on the other side that, unless we can forsee, at least partially, the consequences of our actions, it is impossible to know what course we ought to take under any given circumstances; and that if other people's actions cannot be in any degree predicted, the foresight required for rational action becomes impossible. I do not propose, in the following discussion, to go into the free-will controversy itself. The grounds in favour of determinism appear to me overwhelming, and I shall content myself with a brief indication of these grounds. The question I am concerned with is not the freewill question itself, but the question how, if at all, morals are affected by assuming determinism.

In considering this question, as in most of the other problems of ethics, the moralist who has not had a philosophical training appears to me to go astray, and become involved in needless complications, through supposing that right and wrong in conduct are the ultimate conceptions of ethics, rather than good and bad, in the effects of conduct and in other things. The words good and bad are used both for the sort of conduct which is right or wrong, and for the sort of effects to be expected from right and wrong conduct, respectively. We speak of a good picture, a good dinner, and so on, as well as of a good action. But there is a great difference between these two meanings of good. Roughly speaking, a good action is one of which the probable effects are good in the other sense. It is confusing to have two meanings for one word, and we therefore agreed in the previous section to speak of a right action rather than a good action. In order to decide whether an action is right, it is necessary, as we have seen, to consider its probable effects. If the probable effects are, on the whole, better than those of any other action which is possible under the circumstances, then the action is right. The things that are good are things which, on their own account, and apart from any consideration of their effects, we ought to wish to see in existence: they are such things as, we may suppose, might make the world appear to the Creator worth creating. I do not wish to deny that right conduct is among the things that are good on their own account; but if it is so, it depends for its intrinsic goodness upon the goodness of those other things which it aims at producing, such as love or happiness. Thus the rightness of conduct is not the fundamental conception upon which ethics is built up. This fundamental conception is intrinsic goodness or badness.

As the outcome of our discussions in the previous section, I shall assume the following definitions. The objectively right action, in any circumstances, is that action which, of all that are possible, gives us, when account is taken of all available data, the greatest expectation of probable good effects, or the least expectation of probable bad effects. The subjectively right or moral action is that one which will be judged by the agent to be objectively right if he devotes to the question an appropriate amount of candid thought, or, in the case of actions that ought to be impulsive, a small amount. The appropriate amount of thought depends on the importance ofthe action and the difficulty of the decision. An act is neither moral nor immoral when it is unimportant, and a small amount of reflection would not suffice to show whether it was right or wrong. After these preliminaries, we can pass to the consideration of our main topic.

§25.
The principle of causality—that every event is determined by previous events, and can (theoretically) be predicted when enough previous events are known—appears to apply just as much to human actions as to other events. It cannot be said that its application to human actions, or to any other phenomena, is wholly beyond doubt; but a doubt extending to the principle of causality must be so fundamental as to involve all science, all everyday knowledge, and everything, or almost everything, that we believe about the actual world. If causality is doubted, morals collapse, since a right action, as we have seen, is one of which the probable effects are the best possible, so that estimates of right and wrong necessarily presuppose that our actions can have effects, and therefore that the law of causality holds. In favour of the view that human actions alone are not the effects of causes, there appears to be no ground whatever except the sense of spontaneity. But the sense of spontaneity only affirms that we can do as we choose, and choose as we please, which no determinist denies; it cannot affirm that our choice is independent of all motives, and indeed introspection tends rather to show the opposite. It is said by the advocates of free-will that determinism destroys morals, since it shows that all our actions are inevitable, and that therefore they deserve neither praise nor blame. Let us consider how far, if at all, this is the case.[...]

[Not A Communist Shill]

The Problems of Philosophy: Chapter XV. The Value of Philosophy (1912)

Having now come to the end of our brief and very incomplete review of the problems of philosophy, it will be well to consider, in conclusion, what is the value of philosophy and why it ought to be studied. It is the more necessary to consider this question, in view of the fact that many men, under the influence of science or of practical affairs, are inclined to doubt whether philosophy is anything better than innocent but useless trifling, hair-splitting distinctions, and controversies on matters concerning which knowledge is impossible.

This view of philosophy appears to result, partly from a wrong conception of the ends of life, partly from a wrong conception of the kind of goods which philosophy strives to achieve. Physical science, through the medium of inventions, is useful to innumerable people who are wholly ignorant of it; thus the study of physical science is to be recommended, not only, or primarily, because of the effect on the student, but rather because of the effect on mankind in general. Thus utility does not belong to philosophy. If the study of philosophy has any value at all for others than students of philosophy, it must be only indirectly, through its effects upon the lives of those who study it. It is in these effects, therefore, if anywhere, that the value of philosophy must be primarily sought.

But further, if we are not to fail in our endeavour to determine the value of philosophy, we must first free our minds from the prejudices of what are wrongly called ‘practical’ men. The ‘practical’ man, as this word is often used, is one who recognizes only material needs, who realizes that men must have food for the body, but is oblivious of the necessity of providing food for the mind. If all men were well off, if poverty and disease had been reduced to their lowest possible point, there would still remain much to be done to produce a valuable society; and even in the existing world the goods of the mind are at least as important as the goods of the body. It is exclusively among the goods of the mind that the value of philosophy is to be found; and only those who are not indifferent to these goods can be persuaded that the study of philosophy is not a waste of time.

Philosophy, like all other studies, aims primarily at knowledge. The knowledge it aims at is the kind of knowledge which gives unity and system to the body of the sciences, and the kind which results from a critical examination of the grounds of our convictions, prejudices, and beliefs. But it cannot be maintained that philosophy has had any very great measure of success in its attempts to provide definite answers to its questions. If you ask a mathematician, a mineralogist, a historian, or any other man of learning, what definite body of truths has been ascertained by his science, his answer will last as long as you are willing to listen. But if you put the same question to a philosopher, he will, if he is candid, have to confess that his study has not achieved positive results such as have been achieved by other sciences. It is true that this is partly accounted for by the fact that, as soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science. The whole study of the heavens, which now belongs to astronomy, was once included in philosophy; Newton’s great work was called ‘the mathematical principles of natural philosophy’. Similarly, the study of the human mind, which was a part of philosophy, has now been separated from philosophy and has become the science of psychology. Thus, to a great extent, the uncertainty of philosophy is more apparent than real: those questions which are already capable of definite answers are placed in the sciences, while those only to which, at present, no definite answer can be given, remain to form the residue which is called philosophy.

This is, however, only a part of the truth concerning the uncertainty of philosophy. There are many questions—and among them those that are of the profoundest interest to our spiritual life—which, so far as we can see, must remain insoluble to the human intellect unless its powers become of quite a different order from what they are now. Has the universe any unity of plan or purpose, or is it a fortuitous concourse of atoms? Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible? Are good and evil of importance to the universe or only to man? Such questions are asked by philosophy, and variously answered by various philosophers. But it would seem that, whether answers be otherwise discoverable or not, the answers suggested by philosophy are none of them demonstrably true. Yet, however slight may be the hope of discovering an answer, it is part of the business of philosophy to continue the consideration of such questions, to make us aware of their importance, to examine all the approaches to them, and to keep alive that speculative interest in the universe which is apt to be killed by confining ourselves to definitely ascertainable knowledge.

Many philosophers, it is true, have held that philosophy could establish the truth of certain answers to such fundamental questions. They have supposed that what is of most importance in religious beliefs could be proved by strict demonstration to be true. In order to judge of such attempts, it is necessary to take a survey of human knowledge, and to form an opinion as to its methods and its limitations. On such a subject it would be unwise to pronounce dogmatically; but if the investigations of our previous chapters have not led us astray, we shall be compelled to renounce the hope of finding philosophical proofs of religious beliefs. We cannot, therefore, include as part of the value of philosophy any definite set of answers to such questions. Hence, once more, the value of philosophy must not depend upon any supposed body of definitely ascertainable knowledge to be acquired by those who study it.

The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find, as we saw in our opening chapters, that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.

Apart from its utility in showing unsuspected possibilities, philosophy has a value—perhaps its chief value—through the greatness of the objects which it contemplates, and the freedom from narrow and personal aims resulting from this contemplation. The life of the instinctive man is shut up within the circle of his private interests: family and friends may be included, but the outer world is not regarded except as it may help or hinder what comes within the circle of instinctive wishes. In such a life there is something feverish and confined, in comparison with which the philosophic life is calm and free. The private world of instinctive interests is a small one, set in the midst of a great and powerful world which must, sooner or later, lay our private world in ruins. Unless we can so enlarge our interests as to include the whole outer world, we remain like a garrison in a beleagured fortress, knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that ultimate surrender is inevitable. In such a life there is no peace, but a constant strife between the insistence of desire and the powerlessness of will. In one way or another, if our life is to be great and free, we must escape this prison and this strife.

One way of escape is by philosophic contemplation. Philosophic contemplation does not, in its widest survey, divide the universe into two hostile camps—friends and foes, helpful and hostile, good and bad—it views the whole impartially. Philosophic contemplation, when it is unalloyed, does not aim at proving that the rest of the universe is akin to man. All acquisition of knowledge is an enlargement of the Self, but this enlargement is best attained when it is not directly sought. It is obtained when the desire for knowledge is alone operative, by a study which does not wish in advance that its objects should have this or that character, but adapts the Self to the characters which it finds in its objects. This enlargement of Self is not obtained when, taking the Self as it is, we try to show that the world is so similar to this Self that knowledge of it is possible without any admission of what seems alien. The desire to prove this is a form of self-assertion and, like all self-assertion, it is an obstacle to the growth of Self which it desires, and of which the Self knows that it is capable. Self-assertion, in philosophic speculation as elsewhere, views the world as a means to its own ends; thus it makes the world of less account than Self, and the Self sets bounds to the greatness of its goods. In contemplation, on the contrary, we start from the not-Self, and through its greatness the boundaries of Self are enlarged; through the infinity of the universe the mind which contemplates it achieves some share in infinity.

For this reason greatness of soul is not fostered by those philosophies which assimilate the universe to Man. Knowledge is a form of union of Self and not-Self; like all union, it is impaired by dominion, and therefore by any attempt to force the universe into conformity with what we find in ourselves. There is a widespread philosophical tendency towards the view which tells us that Man is the measure of all things, that truth is man-made, that space and time and the world of universals are properties of the mind, and that, if there be anything not created by the mind, it is unknowable and of no account for us. This view, if our previous discussions were correct, is untrue; but in addition to being untrue, it has the effect of robbing philosophic contemplation of all that gives it value, since it fetters contemplation to Self. What it calls knowledge is not a union with the not-Self, but a set of prejudices, habits, and desires, making an impenetrable veil between us and the world beyond. The man who finds pleasure in such a theory of knowledge is like the man who never leaves the domestic circle for fear his word might not be law.

The true philosophic contemplation, on the contrary, finds its satisfaction in every enlargement of the not-Self, in everything that magnifies the objects contemplated, and thereby the subject contemplating. Everything, in contemplation, that is personal or private, everything that depends upon habit, self-interest, or desire, distorts the object, and hence impairs the union which the intellect seeks. By thus making a barrier between subject and object, such personal and private things become a prison to the intellect. The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire of knowledge—knowledge as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is possible for man to attain. Hence also the free intellect will value more the abstract and universal knowledge into which the accidents of private history do not enter, than the knowledge brought by the senses, and dependent, as such knowledge must be, upon an exclusive and personal point of view and a body whose sense-organs distort as much as they reveal.

The mind which has become accustomed to the freedom and impartiality of philosophic contemplation will preserve something of the same freedom and impartiality in the world of action and emotion. It will view its purposes and desires as parts of the whole, with the absence of insistence that results from seeing them as infinitesimal fragments in a world of which all the rest is unaffected by any one man’s deeds. The impartiality which, in contemplation, is the unalloyed desire for truth, is the very same quality of mind which, in action, is justice, and in emotion is that universal love which can be given to all, and not only to those who are judged useful or admirable. Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections: it makes us citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with all the rest. In this citizenship of the universe consists man’s true freedom, and his liberation from the thraldom of narrow hopes and fears.

Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

Materialism, Past and Present (Introduction) (1925)

Materialism as a theory of the nature of the world has had a curious history. Arising almost at the beginning of Greek philosophy, it has persisted down to our own time, in spite of the fact that very few eminent philosophers have advocated it. It has been associated with many scientific advances, and has seemed, in certain epochs, almost synonymous with a scientific outlook. Accusations of materialism have always been brought by the orthodox against their opponents, with the result that the less discriminating opponents have adopted materialism because they believed it to be an essential part of their opposition. At the present moment, the official creed of one of the largest States in the world is materialism, although hardly any one in the learned world explicitly adheres to this theory. A system of thought which has such persistent vitality must be worth studying, in spite of the professional contempt which is poured on it by most professors of metaphysics.
Lange's History of Materialism, here re-issued in "The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method," is a monumental work, of the highest value to all who wish to know what has been said by advocates of materialism, and why philosophers have in the main remained unconvinced. The first edition appeared in 1865, at the height of the period often described as "The materialistic '60's." The preface to the second edition is dated June, 1873. The author died in 1875, before the reaction against materialism had made itself felt. Lange, while very sympathetic to materialism in its struggles with older dogmatic systems, was himself by no means a materialist. He is described by Professor Cohen, in the Preface to the Ninth Edition (1921), as an "apostle of the Kantian view of the world," to which Professor Cohen himself adheres. The description is quite correct. Lange considers that materialism is unable to explain consciousness, and is refuted, on scientific grounds, by the psychology and physiology of sensation, which shows that the world studied by physics is a world dependent on our modes of perception, not a world existing independently on its own account.

It is a commonplace to object to materialism on ethical grounds, since it is supposed to have a deleterious effect on conduct. While energetically repelling many forms of this criticism, Lange nevertheless upholds it in the end, since he regards the economics of the Manchester school and the ruthlessness of modern competition as attributable to a materialistic outlook. This is perhaps the weakest part of his book, in spite of the fact that, unlike most German learned men, he had considerable experience of practical life. In 1861, at the age of 33, he resigned his position as a teacher, and became secretary of the Duisburg Chamber of Commerce. But his position became difficult owing to his radical opinions, which found vent in various directions. He edited a newspaper called The Rhine and Ruhr Gazette, and he wrote a book called Die Arbeiterfrage in ihrer Bedeutung fur Gegenwart und Zukunft, which appeared in the same year as his History of Materialism. His industry was little short of miraculous, for in this same year he published yet another book, Die Grundlegung der mathematischen Psychologie — and all this without neglecting the newspaper or the Chamber of Commerce.

In the following year (1866) he went to Switzerland, where he again took up academic work, becoming Professor at Zurich in 1870, and returning to Germany in 1872 aB Professor at Marburg. But his experiences in the world of industry and commerce undoubtedly helped to widen his outlook, and to give him an understanding, not always possessed by the learned, of the operation of theories when they pass out into the market-place. He remarks that, in England, philosophers are often statesmen, and, what is still more extraordinary, statesmen are sometimes philosophers. He does not point out how often the mixture is damaging to both, making the statesman too theoretical and the philosopher too practical.

Lange's book is divided into two parts, one dealing with the times before Kant, the other with Kant and his successors. This division shows the very great importance which he attaches to the philosopher of Konigsberg — an importance which, perhaps, may seem less as time goes on. Kant's system is intimately bound up with the state of the exact sciences in his day: Euclidean geometry gives the foundation of the transcendental aesthetic, and the Aristotelian syllogism gives the ground for the deduction of the categories. Now that geometry has become non-Euclidean and logic non-Aristotelian, Kant's arguments require restatement; to what extent this is possible, is still a moot question. To the present writer, the first half of Lange's book appears considerably better than the second, because it is less affected by the author's views on matters which are still undecided. In the periods before Kant, his critical judgment is extraordinarily sound. The account of Greek atomism, the analysis of Plato's influence for good and evil, are admirable. The combination of scientific materialism with theological orthodoxy in seventeenth-century England, and its contrast with the revolutionary materialism of eighteenth-century France, are set forth with a nice historical sense. But it is always a very difficult task to see one's own time in historical perspective. Apart from philosophical predilections, there is difficulty in disentangling what is important and permanent in the purely scientific work of one's own generation. The problems which occupied the men of science sixty years ago were very different from those of the present day, and it was impossible to know which of them would prove to be historically important.

On the question: what is true and what false in materialism? it is possible to speak with more learning and more complication than in former days, but it may be doubted whether any substantially new arguments have been invented since Greek times. Nevertheless, it may be profitable to attempt a survey of the position as it appears in the light of modern science.

The theory of Democritus was intelligible and simple. The world consisted of hard round atoms of various sizes, all falling, but the heavier atoms falling faster, so that they would occasionally impinge upon the fighter atoms. If the impact was not exactly in the line of centres, there would be a resultant sideways motion, which accounts for the fact that bodies do not move only in one direction. This view, of course, had to be modified for purely physical reasons, but the modifications were not important until we come to Descartes with his plenum and his doctrine of vortices. This showed that atomism is not an essential part of materialistic physics. Newton's followers introduced another modification; namely, action at a distance (which Newton himself still regarded as impossible). To this day the oscillation continues between atoms with action at a distance and a continuous medium (the aether) with continuous transmission of effects. Few physicists nowadays cling to either as a matter of principle; the only question is: which best explains observed phenomena? Both views have in common a belief in physical determinism, i.e. a belief that what happens in the world dealt with by physics happens according to laws such that, if we knew the whole state of the physical world during a finite time, however short, we could theoretically infer its state at any earlier or later time. This is the kernel of materialism from the standpoint of ethics, religion, sociology, etc., though not from the standpoint of metaphysics. If physical determinism is true — if, that is to say, everything that we commonly regard as the motion of matter is subject to laws of the above kind — then, although there may be a concurrent world of mind, all its manifestations in human and animal behaviour will be such as an ideally skilful physicist could calculate from purely physical data. Physics may still be unable to tell us anything about a man's thoughts, but it will be able to predict all that he will say and do. Under these circumstances, a man will be, for all practical purposes, an automaton, since his mental life can only be communicated to others or displayed in action by physical means. Even his thoughts can be inferred from physics, unless he is content never to give utterance to them.

This point of view resulted from Cartesianism, though most Cartesians attempted to escape from its consequences. Lamettrie, author of L'homme machine, justly claimed that he had derived his philosophy from Descartes. Descartes, who knew about the conservation of vis viva, but not about the conservation of momentum, endeavoured to safeguard human freedom by maintaining that the will could alter the direction of motion of the animal spirits, though not the amount of their motion. He did not, however, extend this freedom to animals, which he regarded as automata. Nowadays no one would dream of drawing such a distinction between men and animals. And even his immediate followers had to abandon his position on this point, owing to the discovery of the conservation of momentum, which showed that the quantity of motion in each direction must be constant. From that day to our own, many philosophers have advocated the theory of two parallel series, one mental and one physical, each subject to its own laws, and neither influencing the other. This theory has less plausibility in our time than it had formerly; but apart from the question of its truth, it is worth while to realise that it does not afford an escape from the more disagreeable consequences of materialism.

If there is parallelism between the physical and mental series, as this theory supposes, every physical law must have its psychological counterpart, and therefore psychology must be as rigidly deterministic as physics. There will be, so to speak, a dictionary, by which physical events can be translated into the concurrent mental events. Given this dictionary, the Laplacean calculator can, by physics alone, deduce the state of the material world at any given time, and discover from the dictionary what must be the corresponding state of the mental world. Clearly, the emancipation from physics which anti-materialists desire, is not to be achieved along these lines.

There is, however, no good reason to accept the theory of psycho-physical parallelism. The dualism of mind and matter is probably not ultimate, and the supposed impossibility of interaction rests upon nothing better than scholastic dogmas. To common-sense it appears that our minds are affected by what we see and hear, and that, conversely, our bodies are affected by our volitions whenever we will to make any movement. There is no reason whatever to suppose that common-sense is mistaken in this view, although, of course, there is great need of analysis as to what really takes place when we perceive or will.

Lange advances, quite justly, as an argument against materialism, the fact that we only know about matter through its appearances to us, which, according to materialism itself, are profoundly affected by our own physical organisation. What we see depends not only upon what is there to be seen, but also upon the eye, the optic nerve, and the brain. But the eye, the optic nerve, and the brain are only known through being seen by the physiologist. In this way materialism is driven back to sensationalism. If it is to escape sensationalism, it must abandon the empirical scientific method, substituting for it the dogmatism of an a priori metaphysic, which professes to know what is behind appearances. Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma. As a rule, the materialistic dogma has not been set up by men who loved dogma, but by men who felt that nothing less definite would enable them to fight the dogmas they disliked. They were in the position of men who raise armies to enforce peace. Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism. At the present day, the chief protagonists of materialism are certain men of science in America and certain politicians in Russia, because it is in those two countries that traditional theology is still powerful.

The two dogmas that constitute the essence of materialism are: First, the sole reality of matter; secondly, the "reign of law." The belief that matter alone is real will not survive the sceptical arguments derived from the physiological mechanism of sensation. But it has received recently another blow, from the quarter whence it was least to be expected, namely, from physics. The theory of relativity, by merging time into space-time, has damaged the traditional notion of substance more than all the arguments of philosophers. Matter, for common-sense, is something which persists in time and moves in space. But for modern relativity-physics this view is no longer tenable. A piece of matter has become, not a persistent thing with varying states, but a system of inter-related events. The old solidity is gone, and with it the characteristics that, to the materialist, made matter seem more real than fleeting thoughts. Nothing is permanent, nothing endures; the prejudice that the real is the persistent must be abandoned.

The notion of substance has not been regarded by philosophers as metaphysically valid since the time of Hume and Kant, but it persisted in the practice of physics. Its defeat, within physics, by the abandonment of a single cosmic time affords a purely scientific argument against the older type of materialism, which utilised the belief that substance is what persists through time.

The reign of law raises more difficult and also more important questions. The outlook with which the phrase "reign of law" seems to belong most naturally is that of Newton, especially as developed by his disciples. Belief in the reign of law is often combined with strict theological orthodoxy, but in that case human volitions are excepted, at any rate in certain cases. The reign of law only becomes part of the materialistic outlook when it is believed to have no exceptions, not even human volitions. It is in this form that we have to consider it. It will he necessary first to define the phrase, and then to inquire what ground there is for believing it applicable to the world.

The definition of the reign of law is by no means so easy as seems often to be supposed. The idea is derived from such instances as the law of gravitation in the solar system, where a simple formula enables us to predict the motions of the planets and their satellites. But this instance is deceptive in several respects. In the first place, there is no reason to suppose that the laws in other cases are equally simple. In the second place, it turns out that the Newtonian form of the law of gravitation is only approximate, and that the exact law is enormously more complicated. In the third place, the geography (if one may use such a term) of the solar system is amazingly schematic. To a first approximation, it may be regarded as consisting of a small number of mass-points, whose individual motions are easily observable. This point of view is not adequate for dealing with such matters as tides, but it suffices for the deduction of Kepler's laws from the law of gravitation, which was Newton's most spectacular achievement. It is obviously a very different matter to obtain laws applicable to individual electrons and protons, because of the greater geographical complexity involved. For these reasons, among others, it is rash to regard the Newtonian astronomy as typical of what is to be expected in physics.

The least that can be meant by the reign of law is this: given any phenomenon, there exists some formula of finite complexity such that, from a sufficient (finite) number of data at other times the phenomenon in question can be calculated. In practice, the "other times" will usually be earlier times, but this is not always the case — for example, in speculations as to the geological history of the earth or the origin of the solar system. Theoretically, it should be irrelevant whether the "other times" are earlier or later than that of the phenomenon concerned.

In elucidation of the above definition, there are one or two observations to be made. The reason for saying that the formula must be of finite complexity is that otherwise nothing is asserted beyond a logical truism. By admitting formulae of infinite complexity, any series of events whatever could be brought within the compass of a single law, and therefore we should assert nothing in asserting the reign of law. The reason for insisting that the number of data required must be finite is similar, but is reinforced by another, namely, that we cannot manipulate an indefinite number of data, and could therefore never discover evidence either for or against a law which required them.

There is a further point which should be borne in mind. None of our observations are completely accurate; there is always a margin of error. Consequently we can never prove that events obey exactly any law which is found to work within the margin of error, nor, conversely, need we trouble ourselves about inaccuracies which must remain below this margin. For example: it is always assumed in physics that continuous functions can be differentiated, although, as a matter of pure mathematics, this is known to be only sometimes the case. There is no harm in this from the physicist's standpoint, because, given any continuous function which cannot be differentiated, there will always be another which can be differentiated, and which differs from the first by less than the probable error in our observations. Approximations are all that we can achieve, and therefore all that we need attempt.

The question now arises: Is there any reason to believe in the reign of law in the above sense? In the world of pure physics there are a number of fundamental occurrences which cannot at present be reduced to law. No one knows why some atoms of a radio-active element disintegrate while others do not; we know statistical averages, but what goes on in the individual atom is completely obscure. Again, the spectrum of an element is caused by electrons jumping from one possible orbit to another. We know a great deal about the possible orbits, and about what happens when a jump takes place, and about the proportion that choose one possible jump as compared to those that choose another. But we do not know what (if anything) decides the particular moment at which an electron jumps, or the particular jump that it sees fit to make when several are possible. Here, again, it is statistical averages that we know. It is therefore open to anybody to say that, while averages are subject to law, the actions of individual electrons have a certain range of caprice, within which there is no evidence for the reign of law. A man who maintained such a view dogmatically would be very rash, since to-morrow he might be refuted by some new discovery. But a man who merely maintains that, in the present state of physics, it is a possibility to be borne in mind, is displaying a proper scientific caution. Thus even within the pure physics of inorganic matter the reign of law cannot he asserted to be indubitably universal.

This doubt cannot but be increased when we pass on to biology and psychology. I do not mean that there is any positive evidence against the reign of law in this region; I mean only that the evidence in its favour is less strong, because fewer laws are known, and prediction is as yet only possible within very narrow limits. The discovery of quanta in physics shows how rash it is to dogmatise as to the further surprises which even an advanced science may have in store for us; and psychology is by no means an advanced science.

In the present condition of human knowledge, therefore, either to assert or to deny the universal reign of law is a mark of prejudice; the rational man will regard the question as open. All perennial controversies, such as that between determinists and believers in free will, spring from a conflict between opposing passions, both widespread, but one stronger in one man and the other in another. In this case, the conflict is between the passion for power and the passion for safety, because if the external world behaves according to law we can adapt ourselves to it. We desire the reign of law for the sake of safety, and freedom for the sake of power. Common-sense assumes that law governs inanimate nature and one's neighbours, while freedom is reserved for oneself. In this way both passions are gratified to the full. But philosophy demands some more subtle reconciliation, and is therefore never weary of inventing new ways of combining freedom with determination. The sceptic can merely observe this struggle with detachment, and he is fortunate if his detachment does not degenerate into cynicism.

It has always been customary, and since the time of Kant it has been thought even respectable, to invoke moral considerations in support of freedom. While, however, the sceptic has a good case as against the dogmatic believer in the universal reign of law, he is not likely to admit the opposite claim that a dogmatic disbelief in this principle is helpful to morals. If he is a sceptic worthy of the name, he will begin by saying that no one knows what beliefs are helpful to morals, or even whether beliefs have any noticeable influence on conduct. But if he is a student of history, he will observe that, as a practical postulate, belief in natural law has borne good fruit by producing such knowledge as we possess, whereas its rejection has been associated with intolerance and obscurantism. He will say that, though possibly there may be phenomena not reducible to law, this is a mere speculative possibility, of which it is unnecessary to take account in the actual practice of science, since science can only advance by the discovery of laws, and where (if anywhere) there are no laws, there is also no possible science.

In our own time, the old battle of materialism persists chiefly in biology and physiology. Some men of science maintain that the phenomena of living organisms cannot be explained solely in terms of chemistry and physics; others maintain that such explanation is always theoretically possible. Professor J. S. Haldane may be regarded, in this country, as the leading exponent of the former view; in Germany it is associated with Driesch. One of the most effective champions of the mechanistic view was Jacques Loeb, who showed (inter alia) that a sea-urchin could have a pin for its father, and afterwards extended this result to animals much higher in the scale. The controversy may be expected to last for a long time, since, even if the mechanists are in the right, they are not likely soon to find explanations of all vital phenomena of the sort that their theory postulates. It will be a severe blow to the vitalists when protoplasm is manufactured in the laboratory, but they will probably take refuge in saying that their theories only apply to multi-cellular organisms. Later, they will confine vitalism to vertebrates, then to mammals, then to men, and last of all to white men—or perhaps it will be i yellow men by that time. Ordinary scientific probability suggests, however, that the sphere of mechanistic explanation in regard to vital phenomena is likely to be indefinitely extended by the progress of biological knowledge.

Psychology, which might have been expected to be more opposed to materialism than any other science, has, on the contrary, shown decided leanings in that direction. The behaviourist school maintains that psychology should only concern itself with what can be seen by external observation, and denies totally that introspection is an independent source of scientific knowledge. This view would make all the phenomena with which psychology is concerned physical phenomena, thereby conceding to materialism the utmost of its claims. Apart, however, from other difficulties, there is the difficulty already noted, that the data of physics are sensations, which are infected with the subjectivity of the observer. Physics seeks to discover material occurrences not dependent upon the physiological and psychical peculiarities of the observer. But its facts are only discovered by means of observers, and therefore only afford data for physics in so far as means exist of eliminating the observer's contribution to the phenomenon. This elimination is not an easy matter. It might be argued, on philosophical grounds, that it is impossible, and this is no doubt true if complete elimination is meant. But to a certain extent the problem can be treated scientifically, without raising metaphysical issues. It is then found that subjectivity is of three kinds, physical, physiological, and psychical. The first of these is satisfactorily dealt with by the theory of relativity: the method of tensors is its complete theoretical solution. The second and third are perhaps not really distinct; they can be dealt with in so far as one man's perceptions differ from another's, but it is difficult to see any method of eliminating subjective elements in which all men are alike.

There is one other respect in which psychology has been tending towards the point of view advocated by materialists. We used to hear much of such supposed faculties as "consciousness," "thought," and "reason." Many modern psychologists, following William James, are inclined to dismiss "consciousness" as a term destitute of any clear meaning. "Thought" and "reason," meanwhile, are found to be analogous to processes of learning among animals, which are ultimately reducible to the law of habit. All this, of course, is still controversial; but if it should prove correct, the psychological difficulties of materialism will be greatly diminished.

The conclusion of the above discussion would seem to be that, as a practical maxim of scientific method, materialism may be accepted if it means that the goal of every science is to be merged in physics. But it must be added that physics itself is not materialistic in the old sense, since it no longer assumes matter as permanent substance. And it must also be remembered that there is no good reason to suppose materialism metaphysically true: it is a point of view which has hitherto proved useful in research, and is likely to continue useful wherever new scientific laws are being discovered, but which may well not cover the whole field, and cannot, be regarded as definitely true without a wholly unwarranted dogmatism.

Why I am not a Christian (1957)

The attitude of the Christians on the subject of natural law has been curiously vacillating and uncertain. There was, on the one hand, the doctrine of free will, in which the great majority of Christians believed; and this doctrine required that the acts of human beings at least should not be subject to natural law. There was, on the other hand, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a belief in God as the Lawgiver and in natural law as one of the main evidences of the existence of a Creator. In recent times the objection to the reign of law in the interests of free will has begun to be felt more strongly than the belief in natural law as affording evidence for a Lawgiver. Materialists used the laws of physics to show, or attempt to show, that the movements of human bodies are mechanically determined, and that consequently everything that we say and every change of position that we effect fall outside the sphere of any possible free will. If this be so, whatever may be left for our unfettered volitions is of little value. If, when a man writes a poem or commits a murder, the bodily movements involved in his act result solely from physical causes, it would seem absurd to put up a statue to him in the one case and to hang him in the other. There might in certain metaphysical systems remain a region of pure thought in which the will would be free; but, since that can be communicated to others only by means of bodily movement, the realm of freedom would be one that could never be the subject of communication and could never have any social importance.

Then, again, evolution has had a considerable influence upon those Christians who have accepted it. They have seen that it will not do to make claims on behalf of man which are totally different from those which are made on behalf of other forms of life. Therefore, in order to safeguard free will in man, they have objected to every attempt at explaining the behaviour of living matter in terms of physical and chemical laws. The position of Descartes, to the effect that all lower animals are automata, no longer finds favor with liberal theologians. The doctrine of continuity makes them inclined to go a step further still and maintain that even what is called dead matter is not rigidly governed in its behaviour by unalterable laws. They seem to have overlooked the fact that, if you abolish the reign of law, you also abolish the possibility of miracles, since miracles are acts of God which contravene the laws governing ordinary phenomena. I can, however, imagine the modern liberal theologian maintaining with an air of profundity that all creation is miraculous, so that he no longer needs to fasten upon certain occurrences as special evidence of Divine intervention.

Under the influence of this reaction against natural law, some Christian apologists have seized upon the latest doctrines of the atom, which tend to show that the physical laws in which we have hitherto believed have only an approximate and average truth as applied to large numbers of atoms, while the individual electron behaves pretty much as it likes. My own belief is that this is a temporary phase, and that the physicists will in time discover laws governing minute phenomena, although these laws may differ considerably from those of traditional physics. However that may be, it is worth while to observe that the modern doctrines as to minute phenomena have no bearing upon anything that is of practical importance. Visible motions, and indeed all motions that make any difference to anybody, involve such large numbers of atoms that they come well within the scope of the old laws. To write a poem or commit a murder (reverting to our previous illustration), it is necessary to move an appreciable mass of ink or lead. The electrons composing the ink may be dancing freely around their little ballroom, but the ballroom as a whole is moving according to the old laws of physics, and this alone is what concerns the poet and his publisher. The modern doctrines, therefore, have no appreciable bearing upon any of those problems of human interest with which the theologian is concerned.

The free-will question consequently remains just where it was. Whatever may be thought about it as a matter of ultimate metaphysics, it is quite clear that nobody believes it in practice. Everyone has always believed that it is possible to train character; everyone has always known that alcohol or opium will have a certain effect on behaviour. The apostle of free will maintains that a man can by will power avoid getting drunk, but he does not maintain that when drunk a man can say "British Constitution" as clearly as if he were sober. And everybody who has ever had to do with children knows that a suitable diet does more to make them virtuous than the most eloquent preaching in the world. The one effect that the free- will doctrine has in practice is to prevent people from following out such common-sense knowledge to its rational conclusion. When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his annoying behaviour is a result of antecedent causes which, if you follow them long enough, will take you beyond the moment of his birth and therefore to events for which he cannot be held responsible by any stretch of imagination.

No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behaviour to sin; he does not say, "You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go." He attempts to find out what is wrong and to set it right. An analogous way of treating human beings is, however, considered to be contrary to the truths of our holy religion. And this applies even in the treatment of little children. Many children have bad habits which are perpetuated by punishment but will probably pass away of themselves if left unnoticed. Nevertheless, nurses, with very few exceptions, consider it right to inflict punishment, although by so doing they run the risk of causing insanity. When insanity has been caused it is cited in courts of law as a proof of the harmfulness of the habit, not of the punishment. (I am alluding to a recent prosecution for obscenity in the State of New York.)

Reforms in education have come very largely through the study of the insane and feeble-minded, because they have not been held morally responsible for their failures and have therefore been treated more scientifically than normal children. Until very recently it was held that, if a boy could not learn his lesson, the proper cure was caning or flogging. This view is nearly extinct in the treatment of children, but it survives in the criminal law. It is evident that a man with a propensity to crime must be stopped, but so must a man who has hydrophobia and wants to bite people, although nobody considers him morally responsible. A man who is suffering from plague has to be imprisoned until he is cured, although nobody thinks him wicked. The same thing should be done with a man who suffers from a propensity to commit forgery; but there should be no more idea of guilt in the one case than in the other. And this is only common sense, though it is a form of common sense to which Christian ethics and metaphysics are opposed.

To judge of the moral influence of any institution upon a community, we have to consider the kind of impulse which is embodied in the institution and the degree to which the institution increases the efficacy of the impulse in that community. Sometimes the impulse concerned is quite obvious, sometimes it is more hidden. An Alpine club, for example, obviously embodies the impulse to adventure, and a learned society embodies the impulse toward knowledge. The family as an institution embodies jealousy and parental feeling; a football club or a political party embodies the impulse toward competitive play; but the two greatest social institutions - namely, the church and the state - are more complex in their psychological motivation. The primary purpose of the state is clearly security against both internal criminals and external enemies. It is rooted in the tendency of children to huddle together when they are frightened and to look for a grown-up person who will give them a sense of security. The church has more complex origins. Undoubtedly the most important source of religion is fear; this can be seen in the present day, since anything that causes alarm is apt to turn people's thoughts to God. Battle, pestilence, and shipwreck all tend to make people religious. Religion has, however, other appeals besides that of terror; it appeals specifically to our human self-esteem. If Christianity is true, mankind are not such pitiful worms as they seem to be; they are of interest to the Creator of the universe, who takes the trouble to be pleased with them when they behave well and displeased when they behave badly. This is a great compliment. We should not think of studying an ants' nest to find out which of the ants performed their formicular duty, and we should certainly not think of picking out those individual ants who were remiss and putting them into a bonfire. If God does this for us, it is a compliment to our importance; and it is even a pleasanter compliment if he awards to the good among us everlasting happiness in heaven. Then there is the comparitively modern idea that cosmic evolution is all designed to bring about the sort of results which we call good - that is to say, the sort of results that give us pleasure. Here again it is flattering to suppose that the universe is controlled by a Being who shares our tastes and prejudices.

[Aramas]

The passages you quoted were a sample of his vision of a scientific society, perhaps largely reflective of his views. His philosophy was broadly utilitarian and concerned primarily with truth and maximizing happiness in a society. Naturally, people disagree with the exact importance of values such as truth, democracy, self-determination, and happiness, and disagree on how they should be defined.

It seems his earlier views were clouded by the view that individuals had limited or no free will.

IV. Determinism and Morals, from The Elements of Ethics (1910)

How is it possible that Russell believed that education should be aimed at destroying free will if he believed that it didn't exist? None of what you said really answers the objection I raised about Russell being totalitarian or authoritarian. Posting a wall of text isn't going to get you anywhere or prove a point, especially when you fail to explain how your quotes even relate to what I tried to point out and what you tried to contradict. In this post of yours, it seems like you're just trying to change the subject entirely and sidestep the issue.

[Not A Communist Shill]

How is it possible that Russell believed that education should be aimed at destroying free will if he believed that it didn't exist? None of what you said really answers the objection I raised about Russell being totalitarian or authoritarian. Posting a wall of text isn't going to get you anywhere or prove a point, especially when you fail to explain how your quotes even relate to what I tried to point out and what you tried to contradict. In this post of yours, it seems like you're just trying to change the subject entirely and sidestep the issue.

If you believe something should be an universal law, whether or not you have free will has no bearing on your belief.

The passage from The Problems of Philosophy show that he believed that "utility does not belong to philosophy." His own view of a scientific utopia at one point is not how he lived practically as a member of society. He desired for utility to be measured in scientific terms. Believing that something would be of benefit for the whole of society is not the same thing as imposing that thing on society. Of course, when individuals live in a society, they have a compromise.

[Aramas]

If you believe something should be an universal law, whether or not you have free will has no bearing on your belief.

The passage from The Problems of Philosophy show that he believed that "utility does not belong to philosophy." His own view of a scientific utopia at one point is not how he lived practically as a member of society. He desired for utility to be measured in scientific terms. Believing that something would be of benefit for the whole of society is not the same thing as imposing that thing on society. Of course, when individuals live in a society, they have a compromise.

You have derailed the conversation into oblivion rather than speaking directly and succinctly to the original point I made about Russell being an advocate for brainwashing children. The fact that he might not have lived or worked as a scientist attempting to find ways of brainwashing kids into being little automatons incapable of independent thinking does not mean that he did not hold that view that it was a good thing, and that view's presence in Bertrand Russell was what I was pointing out. For me, this makes Russell a bad person, because I am someone who values human freedom and independence. In my mind, someone who supports removing the individual's ability to make choices for himself is inherently a bad human being. The fact that you support someone like Russell, or so it seems to me, also says something about your own character.

The fact that, instead of trying to disprove my point by saying that Russell changed his views at a later date, or trying to say that the quote I mentioned was taken out of context, or trying to say that I misattributed the quote to Russell when it was not actually his, you simply talked about general viewpoints of utilitarianism, his ideas on education possible with his contemporary technology and science, etc., leads me to believe that you are trying to lead people here astray and deceive them. This is an interesting tactic I've seen a lot with people from the Delta quadra. Instead of answering a claim directly with a counterclaim or by disagreeing with that claim, they simply bring up other topics and act as if the argument that was originally posed has been refuted. They hope that, because they sound intelligent by talking about other topics, other people will think that they are right about the original claim and believe their opinion about it in spite of the fact that they never really said anything relevant.

[Not A Communist Shill]

You have derailed the conversation into oblivion rather than speaking directly and succinctly to the original point I made about Russell being an advocate for brainwashing children. The fact that he might not have lived or worked as a scientist attempting to find ways of brainwashing kids into being little automatons incapable of independent thinking does not mean that he did not hold that view that it was a good thing, and that view's presence in Bertrand Russell was what I was pointing out. For me, this makes Russell a bad person, because I am someone who values human freedom and independence. In my mind, someone who supports removing the individual's ability to make choices for himself is inherently a bad human being. The fact that you support someone like Russell, or so it seems to me, also says something about your own character.

The fact that, instead of trying to disprove my point by saying that Russell changed his views at a later date, or trying to say that the quote I mentioned was taken out of context, or trying to say that I misattributed the quote to Russell when it was not actually his, you simply talked about general viewpoints of utilitarianism, his ideas on education possible with his contemporary technology and science, etc., leads me to believe that you are trying to lead people here astray and deceive them. This is an interesting tactic I've seen a lot with people from the Delta quadra. Instead of answering a claim directly with a counterclaim or by disagreeing with that claim, they simply bring up other topics and act as if the argument that was originally posed has been refuted. They hope that, because they sound intelligent by talking about other topics, other people will think that they are right about the original claim and believe their opinion about it in spite of the fact that they never really said anything relevant.

Even at the time he made those comment on education, he was only interested in teaching children truth. As I said, those comments were from a time when he believed in predeterminism and utilitarianism, giving a particular harsh slant to his utopian idealism. His views in the age of Einstein were rather different. I do not know why you think it is of benefit to ignore the fact that Russell said that matters of ethics should not be a topic of philosophy. If you wish to accuse others of being off-topic, I suggest you refrain from being off-topic in the first place.

[Not A Communist Shill]

It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries. Fichte laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished. But in his day this was an unattainable ideal: what he regarded as the best system in existence produced Karl Marx. In future such failures are not likely to occur where there is dictatorship. Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.

A totalitarian government with a scientific bent might do things that to us would seem horrifying. The Nazis were more scientific than the present rulers of Russia, and were more inclined towards the sort of atrocities that I have in mind. They were said-I do not know with what truth-to use prisoners in concentration camps as material for all kinds of experiments, some involving death after much pain. If they had survived, they would probably have soon taken to scientific breeding. Any nation which adopts this practice will, within a generation, secure great military advantages. The system, one may surmise, will be something like this: except possibly in the governing aristocracy, all but 5 per cent of males and 30 per cent of females will be sterilized. The 30 per cent of females will be expected to spend the years from eighteen to forty in reproduction, in order to secure adequate cannon fodder. As a rule, artificial insemination will be preferred to the natural method. The unsterilized, if they desire the pleasures of love, will usually have to seek them with sterilized partners.

Sires will be chosen for various qualities, some for muscle, others for brains. All will have to be healthy, and unless they are to be the fathers of oligarchs they will have to be of a submissive and docile disposition. Children will, as in Plato's The Republic, be taken from their mothers and reared by pro- fessional nurses. Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrec- tion of sheep against the practice of eating mutton. (The Aztecs kept a domesticated alien tribe for purposes of cannibalism. Their regime was totalitarian.)

To those accustomed to this system, the family as we know it would seem as queer as the tribal and totem organization of Australian aborigines seems to us. Freud would have to be rewritten, and I incline to think that Adler would be found more relevant. The laboring class would have such long hours of work and so little to eat that their desires would hardly extend beyond sleep and food. The upper class, being deprived of the softer pleasures both by the abolition of the family and by the supreme duty of devotion to the State, would acquire the mentality of ascetics: they would care only for power, and in pursuit of it would not shrink from cruelty. By the practice of cruelty men would become hardened, so that worse and worse tortures would be required to give the spectators a thrill.

Such possibilities, on any large scale, may seem a fantastic nightmare. But I firmly believe that, if the Nazis had won the last war, and if in the end they had acquired world supremacy they would, before long, have established just such a system as I have been suggesting. They would have used Russians and Poles as robots, and when their empire was secure they would have used also Negroes and Chinese. Western nations would have been converted into becoming collaborationists, by the methods practiced in France from 1940 to 1944. Thirty years of these methods would have left the West with little inclination to rebel.

To prevent these scientific horrors, democracy is necessary but not sufficient. There must be also that kind of respect for the individual that inspired the doctrine of the Rights of Man. As an absolute theory the doctrine cannot be accepted.

– The Impact of Science on Society (1952)

[Sol]

mb IEI

[falsehope]

ILE, he talks like logical person and mentions basic principles of logic as it was his area of confidence. Definetly nothing one could expect from IEI or IEE.