Bertrand Russell:

A Passionate Rationalist
by Jim Herrick
from the book Against the Faith
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was, literally, heir to the nineteenth-century liberal tradition: his
grandfather, Lord John Russell, had been Prime Minister and his godfather was John Stuart Mill. He
was sufficiently of the Establishment to have once referred, in his early life, to the government as
'We', but the long standing tradition of dissent in his family stretched back to William Russell, who,
when sentenced to execution for alleged complicity in the Rye House Plot (1683), ordered his
chaplain to write a life of Julian the Apostate to argue that resistance against authority may be
justified. His grandmother's grandfather had been 'cut by the County for saying that the world must
have been created before 4004 B C. because there is so much lava on the slopes of Etna'
(Autobiography). Bertrand Russell's dissent and doubt were to extend much further. He inherited a
fearless individualism, and the texts which his grandmother inscribed in the fly-leaf of his Bible
affected him profoundly: 'Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil' was precisely observed and
'Be strong, and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed, for the Lord Thy God is
with Thee wheresoever thou goest' was followed in what Russell saw as the cause of humanity
rather than the Lord.
In his long life spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries he became a renowned and
controversial philosopher, atheist, publicist and political reformer. He is, perhaps, the most famous
and most passionate rationalist of the century, like Voltaire a polymath whose gifts lay in lucid and
witty exposition and dramatic publicity for diverse causes -- conscientious objection, education,
rational morality, world peace -- as much as any single piece of original work. He wrote at the
opening of his Autobiography:
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life the longing for
love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These
passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a
deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
Russell's parents, Lord Amberley and Kate Stanley, were acquainted with Mill and his circle and
involved in radical politics. Lord Amberley's brief foray into Parliament was discontinued because of
his controversial support for birth control. He embarked on a laborious study of world religions, from
which he extracted a universal religion published as An Analysis of Religious Belief (1877). His
detailed examination of scriptures from all over the world led him to conclusions which echo the
views of eighteenth-century deists such as Shaftesbury:
No man can truly oppose their religion [the adherents of universal religion] for he who seems
hostile to it is himself but one of the notes struck by the Unknowable Cause, which so plays
upon the vast instrument of humanity as to bang harmony out of jangling sounds, and to
bring the universal chords of truth from the individual discords of error. Scientific discoveries
and philosophic inquiries, so fatal to other creeds, touch not the universal religion.
Lady Amberley also held radical views, especially on the position of women. Her mother, Lady
Stanley, was 'an eighteenth-century type, rationalistic and unimaginative, and contemptuous of
Victorian goody-goody priggery' (Autobiography). She was one of the founders of Girton College and
declared that 'so long as I live there shall be no chapel at Girton'. Russell recalls noisy arguments in
her house at Sunday luncheon between her sons who variously espoused Catholicism, Unitarianism,
freethought, positivism and Mohammedanism: 'A favourite trick of my Uncle Lyulph at Sunday
luncheon was to ask: "Who is there here who believes in the literal story of Adam and Eve?" His
object in asking the question was to compel the Mohammedan and the priest to agree with each
other, which they hated doing.'
Russell's mother died from diphtheria when he was only two and two years later his heartbroken
father died from bronchitis and lack of will to live. Russell moved to Pembroke Lodge in Richmond
Park, where the former Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, lived in retirement. He died soon after
Bertrand's arrival and Lady Russell was the dominant influence on his upbringing. He was not sent to
school since his elder brother Frank had in Lady Russell's view fallen under bad influence at public

school. A sombre puritanical regime and a succession of tutors provided a lonely and gloomy
childhood. His self-education was assisted by the range of his grandfather's library. He learnt much
of Shelley's poetry by heart.
In his teens he kept a diary written in Greek characters for secrecy. At the time of his sixteenth
birthday it recorded his sorrow that he did not share the religious belief of others:
I should like to believe my people's religion, which was just what I could wish, but alas, it is
impossible. I have really no religion, for my God, being a spirit shown merely by reason to
exist, his properties utterly unknown, is no help to my life. I have nor the parson's
comfortable doctrine that every good action has its reward, and every sin is forgiven. My
whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.
Soon even the First Cause was to vanish when he was convinced by a sentence in J. S.
Mill's Autobiography '"Who made me?" cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the
further question "Who made God?".' He read Gibbon, and Milman's History of Christianity,
and Gulliver's Travels unexpurgated. 'The account of the Yahoos had a profound effect upon me, and
I began to see human beings in that light.'
Two consolations for the loss of faith and the yahoodom of humanity were his realization that he was
very clever and his passion for pure mathematics. He overheard an uncle referring to his progress
and 'realizing that I was intelligent, I determined to achieve something of intellectual importance if it
should be at all possible'. The appeal of mathematics lay partly in his 'delight in the power of
deductive reasoning' and partly in the appeal of a universe which 'operates according to
mathematical laws' and a hope 'that human actions, like planetary motions, could be calculated if we
had sufficient skill.' (He could not calculate the stormy emotions of his own life.) An impersonal
universe attracted him: 'I like mathematics because it is not human & has nothing in particular to do
with this planet or with the whole accidental universe -- because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us
in return.'
The horizons of Pembroke Lodge were enlarged for him at seventeen with his study at a crammer's
in Southgate for a Cambridge scholarship and with his visits to his uncle in Hindhead, Surrey, and
friendship with the neighbouring Pearsall Smith family. The crammer brought him merciless teasing
from English 'gentlemen' and a scholarship at Trinity College. The Pearsall Smith acquaintanceship
introduced him to progressives such as Shaw, Frederic Harrison and the Webbs, and to Alys Pearsall
Smith with whom he fell deeply in love.
At Cambridge Russell's life was lit with the friendship and intellectual stimulus which had been
absent from Pembroke Lodge. Alfred North Whitehead, who had recommended his scholarship, was
his teacher, colleague and in due course collaborator. His many friends included the Trevelyan
brothers and G. E. Moore, whose philosophy was eventually to influence him profoundly. The elite
debating club, the Apostles, elected him into their company. Here it was that he heard Moore read a
paper which began, 'In the beginning was matter, and matter begat the devil, and the devil begat
God'. 'The paper ended with the death first of God and then of the devil, leaving matter alone as in
the beginning' (Autobiography).
Russell's interest in the logical basis of mathematics led him to a fascination with philosophy. After
gaining his mathematics degree, he decided to study Moral Sciences for a year. After completing the
Moral Sciences Tripos, he fumed to the foundation of geometry for a fellowship thesis and the basis
of ethics for a paper to be read to the Apostles. Meanwhile, at the age of twenty-one he had
inherited sufficient means to ensure financial independence and persuaded Alys Pearsall Smith,
whom he had courted for three years, to marry him. Alys came from a rich American Quaker family
of temperance campaigners. Lady Russell vehemently opposed the marriage, but Russell, after
agreeing to spend three months in Paris in the diplomatic service, proved that no opposition could
cool his ardour. They were married in 1894 at a Quaker Meeting House in London. 'Don't imagine
that I really mind a religious ceremony,' he wrote in a letter to his fiancee 'any ceremony is
disgusting & the mere fact of having to advertise the most intimate thing a little more or less doesn't
make much odds'.

Russell's marriages, extra-marital affairs and his book Marriage and Morals became notorious and
were attacked by those who wished to couple atheism and immorality. His marriage with Alys which
lasted nearly thirty years, although with complete separation for nearly half of it, was deeply
unhappy and sexually unsatisfactory; both parties were by turn patient, bitter and despairing. In
middle age Russell found years of repressed sexuality and loneliness were unleashed, and his quest
for fulfilment and companionship might be seen as a response to the loneliness and puritanism of his
childhood. His affairs with Ottoline Morrell and with the actress Constance Malleson each resulted in
a life-long correspondence and friendship. His marriage to Dora Black brought intellectual and
idealistic partnership and longed-for children; his marriage to Patricia Spence brought assistance
with his work and faithful support at a difficult time; his final marriage to Edith Finch brought
profound contentment, though the cynic might wonder whether its stability was due to the waning
energy of old age.
In their early years of marriage Russell and Alys much enjoyed travel, for pleasure and study. They
visited Berlin in 1895 and Russell set about a study of the German Social Democratic Party. He
recalled a moment one spring morning in the Tiergarten when he planned to 'write a series of books
in the philosophy of sciences, growing gradually more concrete as I passed from mathematics to
biology; I thought I would also write a series of books on social and political questions, growing
gradually more abstract'. His plan to write the most technical (and abstruse) books and the most
popular journalism was fully achieved. His first published work. German Social Democracy (1896),
arose from a series of lectures he gave at the London School of Economics and placed German
socialism in the tradition of Saint-Simon and Robert Owen, while also suggesting a debt to Kant and
Hegel which turned it from a political party into a 'self-contained philosophy of the world and of
human development', making it 'a religion and an ethic'. Russell was later to characterize forms of
socialism and Marxism as religious and strongly to oppose their doctrinaire nature and tendency to
produce fanaticism.
Having been awarded a six-year fellowship at Trinity College for his work on the foundation of
geometry, Russell pondered his first major original work The Principles of Mathematics (1903). A
preliminary in the seven years' work was his liberation from Hegelian idealism which felt, he wrote,
'as if I had escaped from a hot-house onto a wind-swept headland'. The work was given further
stimulus when he attended the International Congress of Philosophy, Logic and the History of
Science in Paris in 1900.
Russell related changes in his philosophical outlook to moments of personal insight about his feelings
for others. He recalled that a consciousness of his love for Mrs Whitehead made him consider
'loneliness in general, & how only love bridges the chasm -- how force is the evil thing, & strife is the
root of all evil & gentleness the only balm'. He became 'infinitely gentle' for a time and 'turned
against the S. African war & imperialism'. He pinpointed a similar moment of crisis when smitten
with despair and anguish at his realization that he did not love Alys. In the initial stage of emotional
turmoil he completed The Principles of Mathematics 'because the oppression of it grew unendurable'.
After nearly a year of depression, they travelled to Italy to stay with Aly's sister, who was married to
the art critic Bernard Berenson. Now, in Fiesole on the hills surrounding Florence, he tried to come to
terms with his unhappiness by writing out his philosophy of life in the essay A Free Man's Worship. It
is written in passionate, lyrical prose untypical of Russell's usual lucidity. He finds humanity placed in
a purposeless, impersonal universe -- a position which much twentieth-century thought has been
forced to accept, relish or deny. He writes of a world 'purposeless' and 'void of meaning', 'which
Science presents for our belief' and proposes:
That Man is the product of causes which had not prevision of the end they were achieving;
are but the outcome of accidental collocation of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity
of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours
of the age, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius,
are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of
Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins -- all
these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which
rejects them can hope to stand.
Russell describes how Man, feeling 'the oppression of his impotence before the powers of Nature',
has created gods to worship which were at first savage forces and then a God 'all-powerful and all-

good'. The world is not good, yet we wish to worship either force or goodness: 'Shall we worship
Force or Goodness? Shall our God exist and be evil, or shall he be recognized as the creation of our
own consciences?' Russell rejects the worship of force 'to which Carlyle and Nietzsche and the creed
of Militarism have accustomed us' and proclaims that 'man's true freedom' lies in his 'determination
to worship only the God created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which
inspires the insight of our best moments'.
Russell argues that happiness and wisdom, given our unachievable desires, are only reached by
renunciation and resignation -- values which he recognizes have been found in religions. He
concludes with an affirmative picture of Man 'proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate,
for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas,
the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power'.
The essay is not entirely typical of Russell -- indeed, he came to be cynical of this approach 'because
no gospel will stand the test of life'. But it expresses a powerful strand of thought of man not so
much 'Against the Faith' as 'without a faith'.
Writing A Free Man's Worship did not purge Russell of his unhappiness, and intermittent despair was
countered by walking tours and work. His magnum opus, written in collaboration with A.N.
Whitehead, was Principia Mathematica, which contained an attempt to find a logical foundation for
mathematics and was published in 1910-1913. The authors were only able to resist the publisher's
attempt to shorten it by subsidizing the publication themselves, thus earning, as Russell put it,
'minus 50 each by ten years' work'.
It was not until the 1920s that he expressed most strongly his feeling that religious belief was
pernicious. For some years he attempted to understand the religious feelings of his lover Ottoline
Morrell. He defined, in a more generous way than in his later essays, the difference between himself
and the religious believer in a letter to her:
What you call God is very much what I call infinity. I do feel something in common in all the
great things -- something which I should not think of quite as you do, tho' it is very
mysterious & I really don't know what to think of it -- but I feel it is the most important thing
in the world & really the one thing that matters profoundly. It is to me as yet a mystery -- I
don't understand it. I think it has many manifestations -- love is the one that seems to me
the deepest & that I feel most when I am very deeply moved. But truth is the one I have
mainly served, & truth is the only one I always feel the divinity of ...
He continued:
I think Christ was right to put love of God before love of my neighbour. Only I don't think God
exists ready-made. I think he is an idea we can conceive & can do something to create. tho'
he will never exist fully. That is why human actions are important -- because God does not
exist already. There is of course one great difference between your beliefs and mine. I do not
think any spiritual force outside human beings actually helps us -- there may be such a force,
but if so it is only as incarnated in human beings that it helps us. Therefore I cannot pray or
lean on God. What strength I need I must get from myself or those whom I advise. And this
view does seem to me nobler, sterner, braver than the view which looks for help from
without, besides seeming to me truer.
His ideas on religion were further expounded in the paper 'Mysticism and Logic' which became one of
his best-known essays and in which he dealt more harshly with religious belief.
Another influence of Ottoline upon his writings was the stimulus to explain philosophical problems to
the non-specialist reader. When he was first asked to write a shilling volume for the Home University
Library to present The Problems of Philosophy to the masses, he rejected the idea, but he in fact
produced a small masterpiece, refined by his constant clarification of the text in conversation with
Ottoline. He came to feel the value of philosophy to the 'man in the street': it keeps alive 'that
speculative interest in the universe which is apt to be killed by confining ourselves to definitely
ascertainable knowledge', but above all it enlarges man's interests beyond 'the circle of his private
interests' and 'in such a life there is something feverish and confined, in comparison with which the
philosophical life is calm and free'.

Russell, to whom philosophy never seemed to bring great serenity, entered a period of hectic public
activity on the outbreak of the First World War. His opposition to the war and defence of the rights of
conscientious objectors transformed him from a well-known academic into a figure of national
renown. His initiation into politics had taken place in 1907 when he stood as a candidate for
Parliament for the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies in the Wimbledon constituency in
South London. He was never at ease in the political world of compromise and deals, but was grateful
that 'ten days of standing for Parliament brought me more relations with concrete realities than a
life-time of thought'. The concrete realities included a rat released to disturb a public meeting and an
egg which gave Alys a black eye as she accompanied him on the hustings. Henceforth, his political
activities were limited. He stood as a parliamentary candidate for Chelsea in the 1920s and became
entitled to a seat in the House of Lords on the death of his elder brother in 1931, but his activities
were essentially extra-parliamentary and single issue campaigns.
From his opposition to the First World War in his forties to the campaign against the use of nuclear
weapons in his eighties and nineties, he was powered by the emotion expressed in his despondent
observation of the enthusiastic jingoism in the months following August 1914: 'Hardly anyone seems
to remember common humanity -- that war is mad horror & that deliberately to cause the deaths of
thousands of men like ourselves is so ghastly that hardly anything can justify it.' His quarrel was
with particular wars (at the outset of the First World War he thought at first that a neutral Britain
and America could impose peace on a warring Europe) and particular forms of warfare (he saw no
justification for the genocide that atomic warfare would create) rather than a consistent, logical
pacifist crusade. Although he was deeply attached to the landscape of England, he disliked
nationalism which he saw as a kind of religion from which humanity must progress:
Men have learned gradually to free their God from the savagery with which the primitive
Israelites endowed him; few now believe that it is his pleasure to torture most of the human
race in an eternity of hell-fire. But they have not learned to free their national ideals from the
ancient taint. Devotion to the nation is perhaps the deepest and most widespread religion of
the present age. Like the ancient religions, it demands its persecutions, its holocausts, its
lurid, heroic cruelties; like them, it is noble, primitive, brutal and mad.
As a pacifist he lost his lectureship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and achieved the half-sought
martyrdom of six months' imprisonment. He discovered his ability to influence large audiences and
found that exhaustive campaigning brought a sense of fulfillment: 'Quite lately I have somehow
found myself -- I have poise and sanity. I no longer have the feeling of powers unrealized within me,
which used to be perpetual torture.'
His encounter with war and pacific resisters made him conscious of 'the volcanic side of human
nature', of the violence of feelings amongst patriots and pacifists. An anti-war meeting in the
Brotherhood Church, Southgate, was broken up by violence. He had earlier written to Ottoline:
'What is wrong with men's opposition to war is that it is negative. One must find other outlets for
people's wildness, and not try to produce people who have no wildness.' Nor did Russell
underestimate the passionate aspect of human nature, writing from prison to Constance Malleson:
I must, I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I
have never said vet, a thing that is not love or hare or pity or scorn, but the very breath of
life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the fearful passionless force of
nonhuman things ... I want to stand for life and thought -- thought as adventure, clear
thought because of the intrinsic delight of it, along with the other delights of life. Against
worldliness, which consists in doing everything for the sake of something else, like marrying
for money instead of love. The essence of life is doing things for their own sakes ... I want to
stand at the rim of the world, and peer into the darkness beyond, and see a little more than
others have seen of the strange shapes of mystery that inhabit that unknown night ... I want
to bring back into the world of men some little bit of new wisdom. There is a little wisdom in
the world; Heraclitus, Spinoza, and a saying here and there. I want to add to it, even if only
ever so little.
In the subsequent inter-war decades Russell added to the sum of ideas and books more than a little
with numerous popular books which were undertaken as journalistic tasks to support himself. Like
Thomas Paine, he had the gift of expressing himself with great force and clarity directly to the

common reader. One of his most controversial books was The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism,
written after a visit to Russia in 1920. He had welcomed the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, but the
reality quickly disillusioned him and he found himself 'infinitely unhappy in this atmosphere -- stifled
by its utilitarianism, its indifference to love and beauty and the life of impulse'. Like Diderot, he was
given the opportunity to talk to a Russian leader, but Lenin did not have the time to listen to his
ideas that Catherine the Great had found to give ear to the French philosophe. Russell was
impressed with Lenin's strength, which 'comes, I imagine, from his honesty, courage, & unwavering
faith -- religious faith in Marxian orthodoxy, which takes the place of the Xtian martyr's hope of
paradise, except that it is less egotistical. He has as little love of liberty as the men who suffered
under Diocletian & retaliated (on heretical Xtians) when they acquired power.'
A year later he visited China, where he was invited to give a course of lectures at the university in
Peking. He thought China was 'what Europe would have become if the 18th century had gone on till
now without industrialism or the French revolution' and was delighted to observe that 'people seem
to be rational hedonists, knowing very well how to obtain happiness'. He became so ill with
pneumonia that a report of his death was published in a Japanese paper and he had the rare
pleasure of reading in his own obituary in a missionary paper that 'missionaries may be pardoned for
heaving a sigh of relief at the news of Mr Bertrand Russell's death'. He wrote in his Autobiography: 'I
was told that the Chinese said that they would bury me by the Western Lake and build a shrine to
my memory. I have some slight regret that this did not happen, as I might have become a god,
which would have been very chic for an atheist.'
He shared with his second wife, Dora Black, an interest in progressive education -- an interest that
was given practical impetus as they brought up their own children. They started a school at Beacon
Hill in Sussex with the intention, in Dora's words, of 'providing a really modem education which,
instead of training young children to maintain every prejudice of traditional society, or teaching them
new dogmas, should try to help them to think and work for themselves, and so fit them for meeting
the problems of the changing world they will have to face when they grow up'. Dora and Bertrand,
like Owen and Carlile, saw education as a tool for enlightenment and social change. The school was
notorious. An apocryphal story told how the local vicar was greeted at the door by a young child with
no clothes on; to his exclamation, 'Oh, my God!', the child replied, 'There is no God'. In fact, the
local rector was quite friendly with the children.
To support the school Russell continued to write prolifically and to accept opportunities of lucrative
American tours. Among his popular books were Marriage and Morals (1929) and The Conquest of
Happiness (1930). It was not a conquest which he found easy and the then controversial view that
divorce ought to be made easier was reached from personal experience. He separated from Dora
and the school in 1935 and married Patricia Spence in the following year. His hand-to-mouth freelance existence gave him insufficient opportunity for philosophical study and he was pleased to
return to this when he gave a course of lectures on Language and Fact at Oxford in 1938. Despite
his doubts about breaking away from England at a time when war loomed, he accepted a post as
visiting professor of philosophy at Chicago in 1938-9. He moved from there to California University,
where friction with the President led him to resign on the expectation of a position at the College of
the City of New York in 1940. The refusal to confirm the appointment, because of the pressure of
religious groups led by Bishop Manning, became a cause clbre. Both his book Marriage and
Morals and his personal life led to the oldest of charges against the unbeliever -- immorality. Despite
opposition the New York Board of Education appointed him; but the appointment was challenged in
the State Supreme Court by a student's parents on the grounds that he was an alien who had not
passed a competitive exam for the post and who advocated sexual immorality. Russell was amused,
not to say flattered. by the brief of the lawyer opposing him, with its accusation that he was
'lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded,
untruthful, and bereft of moral fibre'. He concluded that his only predecessors were Apuleius and
Othello. The case was tried by a Roman Catholic, Justice McGeehan, whose biased judgement
contained the memorable indictment that the appointment would establish 'a chair of indecency'.
Russell lost the case and the American academics belatedly rallied to defend freedom of speech. On
the title page of a later book, Russell included amongst a list of his distinctions -- 'Judicially
pronounced unworthy to be Professor at the College of the City of New York (1940)'.
Russell, supporting his children in American higher education, went through considerable hardship
during the Second World War. His earning capacity as a lecturer was at first much reduced by the
notoriety arising from the New York College case. He was saved by an invitation to deliver the

William James lectures at Yale, and then by the patronage of a wealthy American, Dr Abbott Barnes,
who contracted him to lecture for five years on the history of philosophy. The William James Lectures
developed into his last important philosophical work, An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth. The
lectures for the Barnes foundation, although not completed because of quarrels with Dr Barnes, led
him to write his History of Western Philosophy, which eventually became such a world-wide bestseller that he enjoyed financial security for the remainder of his life.
Russell had not opposed the Second World War. In 1940 he sent his views to Kingsley Martin for
publication in the New Statesman: 'I am still a pacifist in the sense that I think peace the most
important thing in the world. But I do not think there can be any peace in the world while Hitler
prospers, so I am compelled to feel that his defeat, if at all possible, is a necessary prelude to
anything good; I should have felt as I do if I had lived in the time of Genghis Khan.' He agonized
over whether to return to England and accepted an invitation to return to Trinity College, Cambridge
in 1944 with relief.
During the post-war era, Russell, in his seventies, experienced a brief halcyon period as a figure of
fame, almost returning to the Establishment. He was awarded the OM and the Nobel Prize for
literature, invited to lecture all round the world and given the chance to become a pundit or. the
expanding media of radio and television. His undiminished vigour while on a lecture tour in Norway
enabled him to swim to safety when his plane came down in Trondheim Fjord. The remainder of his
life was dominated by his detestation of war and his crusade against nuclear weapons. The zeal of
his conviction and the various tactics which he was prepared to adopt soon removed him from his
pedestal and put him back in the controversial zones of opposition where he had spent most of his
life. He said in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize for literature.
The atom bomb and the bacterial bomb, wielded by the wicked communist or the wicked
capitalist as the case may be, make Washington and the Kremlin tremble, and drive men
further and further along the road to the abyss. If matters are to improve, the first and
essential step is to find a way of diminishing fear. The world at present is obsessed by the
conflict of rival ideologies, and one of the apparent causes of conflict is the desire for the
victory of our own ideology and the defeat of the other.
He found peace himself in his last marriage to Edith Finch and in his rural home in Wales. In his
nineties, there were numerous rumours that, with the approach of death. he had returned to
religion. He thanked the American Humanist Association 'for bringing to my attention these
continuing rumours of my imminent conversion to Christianity' and commented: 'Evidently there is a
lie factory at work on behalf of the after-life. How often must I continue to deny that I have become
religious. There is no basis whatsoever for these rumours. My views on religion remain those which I
acquired at the age of sixteen. I consider all forms of religion not only false but harmful. My
published works record my views.' He claimed, perhaps mischievously, that he had contemplated
compiling an illustrated joke-book about the Bible, but had dropped the idea since it would cause
offence.
Russell had no need to compile such a book to consolidate his reputation as an anti-religious atheist.
He had become the best-known media rationalist, expounding on the radio discussion programme
The Brains Trust, broadcasting a talk on 'What I believe' end participating in an extended radio
debate with the distinguished Jesuit Father Copleston on 'The Existence of God'.
One of the most clear-cut expressions of his beliefs had been given in a lecture entitled 'Why I Am
Not a Christian' delivered for the National Secular Society in Battersea Town Hall in 1927. After
consideration of the first cause argument, the natural law argument, the argument from design, the
moral arguments for deity and the argument for remedying injustice, he concluded that no
argument in favour of the existence of the deity could convince him. In his debate with Copleston,
he considered the arguments with more philosophical subtlety and accepted the appellation
'agnostic' on the ground that he could not prove the non-existence of God. (An argument frequently
used by believers to force unbelievers to soften their terms by accepting their opponents' definition;
'Atheist' means without a concept of God that is logically convincing, not with proof that God does
not exist.) Elsewhere he was frequently happy to refer to himself as an atheist. For all the
complexity of the debate, he adjudged that 'What really moves people to believe in God is not any

intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early
infancy to do it, and that is the main reason.'
In an essay on 'What I believe', published in 1925, Russell had made his doubts about immortality
clear: 'All the evidence goes to show what we regard as our mental life is bound up with brain
structure and organized bodily energy. Therefore it is rational to suppose that mental life ceases
when bodily life ceases. The argument is only one of probability, but it is as strong as those upon
which most scientific conclusions are based.'
The same essay betrayed an over-confident faith in science: 'Physical science is thus approaching
the stage where it will be complete, and therefore uninteresting ...' -- the kind of overstatement
which has produced something of a reaction against science in recent years. But it was central to
Russell, as to all the figures in this book, that 'It is not by prayer and humility that you cause things
to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws' (Autobiography).
Russell could be acerbic in his attitude to Christianity, never more so than in 'Why I am not a
Christian'. He thought Christ made some good points such as ']udge not lest ye be judged' and 'If
thou wilt be perfect, go and sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor', but he thought that most
Christians did not take much notice of them. He observed that 'historically it is quite doubtful
whether Christ ever existed at all', but thought that Christ as presented in the Gospels had many
defects, including his teaching about a Second Coming and Hell, and his exhortation to 'take no
thought for the morrow'. The history of Christianity he depicted as a lamentable story and
commented that 'you find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period
and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse
has been the state of affairs'. Somewhat sweepingly (and perhaps for the benefit of his audience of
secularists) he remarked: 'You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in
humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step towards the diminution of war,
every step towards better treatment of the coloured races, every moral progress that there has been
in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized Churches of the world. I say quite
deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the
principal enemy of moral progress in the world.' Elsewhere he wrote: 'My own view of religion is that
of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human
race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early
days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in
time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do
not know of any others' ('Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?').
Personal frailty came to Russell in his last few years. But he was well cared for by his wife and
enjoyed family life, observing the countryside, reading and writing letters. He knew that his body
was giving way and observed: 'I do so hate to leave the world.' On 2 February 1970, aged ninetyseven, he died. A simple gathering commemorated' his departure at Colwyn Bay crematorium.
In contrast to the deists and sceptics of the early eighteenth century, Russell was able to publish and
publicize his views on religion without fear of imprisonment and without too much vilification of his
personality. He was passionately concerned with the future of a world in which it was impossible to
be as optimistic about human nature or the beneficence of the natural world as the
Enlightenmentphilosophes had been. Looking back on his life at the end of his Autobiography he
commented on the ferocity of twentieth-century wars and twentieth-century ideologies:
'Communists, Fascists, and Nazis have successfully challenged all that I thought good, and in
defeating them much of what their opponents have sought to preserve is being lost. Freedom has
come to be thought weakness, and tolerance has been compelled to wear the garb of treachery. Old
ideals are judged irrelevant, and no doctrine free from harshness commands respect.' Most of those
individuals represented in these pages would be forced to agree with his admission that 'I may have
thought the road to a world of free and happy human beings shorter than it is proving to be...'
Nevertheless, many of those Against the Faith, including myself, still share his 'pursuit of a vision,
both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle:
to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination
the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy
die because there is nothing to nourish them.'

Why I am Not a Christian

Bertrand Russell
[March 6, 1927]
[HTML by Cliff Walker, April 27, 1998]
An Examination of the God-Idea and Christianity
[The lecture that is here presented was delivered at the Battersea Town Hall under the auspices of
the South London Branch of the National Secular Society, England. It should be added that the
editor is willing to share full responsibility with the Hon. Bertrand Russell in that he is in accord with
the political and other opinions expressed.] [The previous statement was included in the original,
and is not made by Positive Atheism.]
As your chairman has told you, the subject about which I am going to speak to you tonight is "Why I
Am Not a Christian." Perhaps it would be as well, first of all, to try to make out what one means by
the word "Christian." It is used in these days in a very loose sense by a great many people. Some
people mean no more by it than a person who attempts to live a good life. In that sense I suppose
there would be Christians in all sects and creeds; but I do not think that that is the proper sense of
the word, if only because it would imply that all the people who are not Christians -- all the
Buddhists, Confucians, Mohammedans, and so on -- are not trying to live a good life. I do not mean
by a Christian any person who tries to live decently according to his lights. I think that you must
have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian. The word
does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times of St. Augustine and St.
Thomas Aquinas. In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what he meant.
You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single
syllable of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions.

What is a Christian?
Nowadays it is not quite that. We have to be a little more vague in our meaning of Christianity. I
think, however, that there are two different items which are quite essential to anyone calling himself
a Christian. The first is one of a dogmatic nature -- namely, that you must believe in God and
immortality. If you do not believe in those two things, I do not think that you can properly call
yourself a Christian. Then, further than that, as the name implies, you must have some kind of belief
about Christ. The Mohammedans, for instance, also believe in God and immortality, and yet they
would not call themselves Christians. I think you must have at the very lowest the belief that Christ
was, if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men. If you are not going to believe that much
about Christ, I do not think that you have any right to call yourself a Christian. Of course, there is
another sense which you find inWhitaker's Almanack and in geography books, where the population
of the world is said to be divided into Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, fetish worshipers, and
so on; but in that sense we are all Christians. The geography books counts us all in, but that is a
purely geographical sense, which I suppose we can ignore. Therefore I take it that when I tell you
why I am not a Christian I have to tell you two different things: first, why I do not believe in God
and in immortality; and, secondly, why I do not think that Christ was the best and wisest of men,
although I grant him a very high degree of moral goodness.
But for the successful efforts of unbelievers in the past, I could not take so elastic a definition of
Christianity as that. As I said before, in the olden days it had a much more full-blooded sense. For
instance, it included the belief in hell. Belief in eternal hell fire was an essential item of Christian
belief until pretty recent times. In this country, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item
because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and
the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this country our religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and
therefore the Privy Council was able to override their Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a
Christian. Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe in hell.

The Existence Of God

To come to this question of the existence of God, it is a large and serious question, and if I were to
attempt to deal with it in any adequate manner I should have to keep you here until Kingdom Come,
so that you will have to excuse me if I deal with it in a somewhat summary fashion. You know, of
course, that the Catholic Church has laid it down as a dogma that the existence of God can be
proved by the unaided reason. This is a somewhat curious dogma, but it is one of their dogmas.
They had to introduce it because at one time the Freethinkers adopted the habit of saying that there
were such and such arguments which mere reason might urge against the existence of God, but of
course they knew as a matter of faith that God did exist. The arguments and the reasons were set
out at great length, and the Catholic Church felt that they must stop it. Therefore they laid it down
that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason, and they had to set up what they
considered were arguments to prove it. There are, of course, a number of them, but I shall take only
a few.

The First Cause Argument

Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. It is maintained
that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further
and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God. That
argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause
is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause,
and it has not anything like the vitality that it used to have; but apart from that, you can see that
the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that
when I was a young man, and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long
time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John
Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question,
Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made
God?" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First
Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything
without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that
argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an
elephant, and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?"
the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. There
is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand,
is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the
world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty
of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about
the First Cause.

The Natural-Law Argument

Then there is a very common argument from Natural Law. That was a favorite argument all through
the eighteenth century, especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his cosmogony.
People observed the planets going around the sun according to the law of gravitation, and they
thought that God had given a behest to these planets to move in that particular fashion, and that
was why they did so. That was, of course, a convenient and simple explanation that saved them the
trouble of looking any further for any explanation of the law of gravitation. Nowadays we explain the
law of gravitation in a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced. I do not propose
to give you a lecture on the law of gravitation, as interpreted by Einstein, because that again would
take some time; at any rate, you no longer have the sort of Natural Law that you had in the
Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a
uniform fashion. We now find that a great many things we thought were Natural Laws are really
human conventions. You know that even in the remotest depth of stellar space there are still three
feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature.
And a great many things that have been regarded as laws of nature are of that kind. On the other
hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find that they
are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are
statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law
that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not
regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double

10

sixes came every time we should think that there was design. The laws of nature are of that sort as
regards to a great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws
of chance; and that makes the whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly
was. Quite apart from that, which represents the momentary state of science that may change
tomorrow, the whole idea that natural laws imply a law-giver is due to a confusion between natural
and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which way
you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of
how things do in fact behave, and, being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot
argue that there must be somebody who told them to do that, because even supposing that there
were you are then faced with the question, Why did God issue just those natural laws and no others?
If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find
that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted. If
you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues he had a reason for
giving those laws rather than others -- the reason, of course, being to create the best universe,
although you would never think it to look at it -- if there was a reason for the laws which God gave,
then God himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing
God as an intermediary. You really have a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God
does not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate law-giver. In short, this whole argument
from natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have. I am traveling on in
time in my review of these arguments. The arguments that are used for the existence of God change
their character as time goes on. They were at first hard intellectual arguments embodying certain
quite definite fallacies. As we come to modern times they become less respectable intellectually and
more and more affected by a kind of moralizing vagueness.

The Argument From Design

The next step in the process brings us to the argument from design. You all know the argument
from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if
the world was ever so little different we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from
design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white
tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application. It is an
easy argument to parody. You all know Voltaire's remark, that obviously the nose was designed to
be such as to fit spectacles. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark
as it might have seemed in the eighteenth century, because since the time of Darwin we understand
much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment
was made to be suitable to them, but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of
adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it.
When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people
can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best
that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot
believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years
in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan, the Fascisti,
and Mr. Winston Churchill? Really I am not much impressed with the people who say: "Look at me: I
am such a splendid product that there must have been design in the universe." I am not very much
impressed by the splendor of those people. Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you
have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is
merely a flash in the pan; it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay
you get the sort of conditions and temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and
there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of
thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.
I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they
believed that they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody
really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they
are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about
something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously
rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen in this world millions and
millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die
out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that

11

people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation -- it is not such as to render life
miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.

The Moral Arguments For Deity

Now we reach one stage further in what I shall call the intellectual descent that the Theists have
made in their argumentations, and we come to what are called the moral arguments for the
existence of God. You all know, of course, that there used to be in the old days three intellectual
arguments for the existence of God, all of which were disposed of by Immanuel Kant in the Critique
of Pure Reason; but no sooner had he disposed of those arguments than he invented a new one, a
moral argument, and that quite convinced him. He was like many people: in intellectual matters he
was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed implicitly in the maxims that he had imbibed at his
mother's knee. That illustrates what the psycho-analysts so much emphasize -- the immensely
stronger hold upon us that our very early associations have than those of later times.
Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms
was extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say
that there would be no right and wrong unless God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with
whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another
question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between
right and wrong, then you are then in this situation: is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not? If
it is due to God's fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is
no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do,
that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent
of God's fiat, because God's fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that he made
them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that
right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God. You
could, of course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders to the God who
made this world, or could take up the line that some of the agnostics ["Gnostics" -- CW] took up -- a
line which I often thought was a very plausible one -- that as a matter of fact this world that we
know was made by the Devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be
said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.

The Argument For The Remedying Of Injustice

Then there is another very curious form of moral argument, which is this: they say that the
existence of God is required in order to bring justice into the world. In the part of the universe that
we know there is a great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one
hardly knows which of those is the more annoying; but if you are going to have justice in the
universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress the balance of life here on earth,
and so they say that there must be a God, and that there must be Heaven and Hell in order that in
the long run there may be justice. That is a very curious argument. If you looked at the matter from
a scientific point of view, you would say, "After all, I only know this world. I do not know about the
rest of the universe, but so far as one can argue at all on probabilities one would say that probably
this world is a fair sample, and if there is injustice here then the odds are that there is injustice
elsewhere also." Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top
layer of oranges bad, you would not argue: "The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress
the balance." You would say: "Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment;" and that is really what
a scientific person would argue about the universe. He would say: "Here we find in this world a great
deal of injustice, and so far as that goes that is a reason for supposing that justice does not rule in
the world; and therefore so far as it goes it affords a moral argument against deity and not in favor
of one." Of course I know that the sort of intellectual arguments that I have been talking to you
about is not really what moves people. What really moves people to believe in God is not any
intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early
infancy to do it, and that is the main reason.
Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is
a big brother who will look after you. That plays a very profound part in influencing people's desire

12

for a belief in God.

The Character Of Christ

I now want to say a few words upon a topic which I often think is not quite sufficiently dealt with by
Rationalists, and that is the question whether Christ was the best and the wisest of men. It is
generally taken for granted that we should all agree that that was so. I do not myself. I think that
there are a good many points upon which I agree with Christ a great deal more than the professing
Christians do. I do not know that I could go with Him all the way, but I could go with Him much
further than most professing Christians can. You will remember that He said: "Resist not evil, but
whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." That is not a new precept
or a new principle. It was used by Lao-Tse and Buddha some 500 or 600 years before Christ, but it is
not a principle which as a matter of fact Christians accept. I have no doubt that the present Prime
Minister, for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite
him on one cheek. I think you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative
sense.
Then there is another point which I consider excellent. You will remember that Christ said, "Judge
not lest ye be judged." That principle I do not think you would find was popular in the law courts of
Christian countries. I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest
Christians, and they none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what
they did. Then Christ says, "Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee
turn thou not away." This is a very good principle. Your chairman has reminded you that we are not
here to talk politics, but I cannot help observing that the last general election was fought on the
question of how desirable it was to turn away from him that would borrow of thee, so that one must
assume that the liberals and conservatives of this country are composed of people who do not agree
with the teaching of Christ, because they certainly did very emphatically turn away on that occasion.
Then there is one other maxim of Christ which I think has a great deal in it, but I do not find that it
is very popular among some of our Christian friends. He says, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell
that which thou hast, and give to the poor." That is a very excellent maxim, but, as I say, it is not
much practiced. All these, I think, are good maxims, although they are a little difficult to live up to. I
do not profess to live up to them myself; but then, after all, I am not by way of doing so, and it is
not quite the same thing as for a Christian.

Defects In Christ's Teaching

Having granted the excellence of these maxims, I come to certain points in which I do not believe
that one can grant either the superlative wisdom or the superlative goodness of Christ as depicted in
the Gospels; and here I may say that one is not concerned with the historical question. Historically,
it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about
Him, so that I am not concerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one. I am
concerned with Christ as He appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and
there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, he certainly
thought his second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who
were living at that time. There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance: "Ye
shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come." Then He says: "There are
some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into His kingdom"; and
there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that He believed His second coming would happen
during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of his earlier followers, and it was the
basis of a good deal of His moral teaching. When He said, "Take no thought for the morrow," and
things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought the second coming was going to be very
soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count. I have, as a matter of fact, known some
Christians who did believe the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his
congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they
were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden. The early Christians
really did believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens,
because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent. In this respect

13

clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and he certainly was not superlatively
wise.

The Moral Problem

Then you come to moral questions. There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral
character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person that is really
profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the
Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against
those people who would not listen to His preaching -- an attitude which is not uncommon with
preachers, but which does somewhat detract from superlative excellence. You do not, for instance,
find that attitude in Socrates. You find him quite bland and urbane toward the people who would not
listen to him; and it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to take that line than to take the line
of indignation. You probably all remember the sorts of things that Socrates was saying when he was
dying, and the sort of things that he generally did say to people who did not agree with him.
You will find that in the Gospels Christ said: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye
escape the damnation of hell." That was said to people who did not like His preaching. It is not really
to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about hell. There is, of
course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost: "Whosoever speaketh against the
Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this world nor in the world to come." That text has
caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that
they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them
either in this world or in the world to come. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree
of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of this sort into the world.
Then Christ says, "The Son of Man shall send forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His
kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of
fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth"; and He goes on about the wailing and gnashing
of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a
certain pleasure in contemplating wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often.
Then you all, of course, remember about the sheep and the goats; how at the second coming He is
going to divide the sheep from the goats, and He is going to say to the goats: "Depart from me, ye
cursed, into everlasting fire." He continues: "And these shall go away into everlasting fire." Then He
says again, "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off; it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than
having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched, where the worm dieth
not and the fire is not quenched." He repeats that again and again also. I must say that I think all
this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put
cruelty into the world, and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the
Gospels, if you could take Him as his chroniclers represent Him, would certainly have to be
considered partly responsible for that.
There are other things of less importance. There is the instance of the Gadarene swine, where it
certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down the hill
into the sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils
simply go away; but He chose to send them into the pigs. Then there is the curious story of the figtree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig-tree. "He was
hungry; and seeing a fig-tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything
thereon; and when he came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And
Jesus answered and said unto it: 'No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever'.... and Peter.... saith
unto Him: 'Master, behold the fig-tree which thou cursedst is withered away.'" This is a very curious
story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I
cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite
as high as some other people known to History. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him
in those respects.

The Emotional Factor

14

As I said before, I do not think that the real reason that people accept religion has anything to do
with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very
wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not
noticed it. You know, of course, the parody of that argument in Samuel Butler's book, Erewhon
Revisited. You will remember that in Erewhon there is a certain Higgs who arrives in a remote
country, and after spending some time there he escapes from that country in a balloon. Twenty
years later he comes back to that country and finds a new religion in which he is worshipped under
the name of the "Sun Child"; and it is said that he ascended into heaven. He finds that the feast of
the Ascension is about to be celebrated, and he hears Professors Hanky and Panky say to each other
that they never set eyes on the man Higgs, and they hope they never will; but they are the High
Priests of the religion of the Sun Child. He is very indignant, and he comes up to them, and he says:
"I am going to expose all this humbug and tell the people of Erewhon that it was only I, the man
Higgs, and I went up in a balloon." He was told, "You must not do that, because all the morals of
this country are bound round this myth, and if they once know that you did not ascend into heaven
they will all become wicked"; and so he is persuaded of that and he goes quietly away.
That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems
to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find
this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound
has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of
affairs. In the so-called Ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its
completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate
women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in
the name of religion.
You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress of humane feeling, every
improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better
treatment of the colored races, or ever mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has
been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite
deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the
principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

How The Churches Have Retarded Progress

You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so, I do not think that I am. Take
one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the churches compel one
to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an
inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man, in that case the Catholic Church says, "This is an
indissoluble sacrament. You must stay together for life," and no steps of any sort must be taken by
that woman to prevent herself from giving birth to syphilitic children. This is what the Catholic
church says. I say that that is fiendish cruelty, and nobody whose natural sympathies have not been
warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could
maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.
That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which at the present moment the church,
by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved
and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of
progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen
to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human
happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human
happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to
do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy."

Fear, The Foundation Of Religion

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and
partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in
all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing -- fear of the mysterious, fear of

15

defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and
religion have gone hand-in-hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world
we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by the help of science,
which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and
against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in
which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts
can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky,
but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of
the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.

What We Must Do
We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world -- its good facts, its bad
facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world
by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The
whole conception of a God is a conception derived from the ancient oriental despotisms. It is a
conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and
saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy
of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We
ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still
be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge,
kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the
free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a
free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is
dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.

Why I Am A Rationalist
The Rational Habit Of Mind Is A Rare One
I am, in this age when there are a great many appeals to unreason, an unrepentant Rationalist. I
have been a Rationalist ever since I can remember, and I do not propose to cease to be so whatever
appeals to unreason may be made. We have listened to a speech, by which I think we were all much
moved, about the pioneers in the past who have done what they could to promote the cause of
freedom of thought. I suppose it is for me to speak about the great need of continuing this work in
our own day, and about how much there is that remains for all who sympathize with its objects to
accomplish. We are not yet, and I suppose men and women never will be, completely rational.
Perhaps, if we were, we should not have all the pleasures that we have at present; but I think
complete rationality is so distant a prospect that we need not be much alarmed by it, and the
nearest approach that we are likely to get is sure to be all to the good. I certainly find that there is a
very great deal of irrationality still about in the world.
While Professor Graham Wallas was speaking about the bequests that have been made to the
Rationalist Press Association I was thinking: What is its creed, what is its dogma, and what is going
to be the, so to speak, doctrine that these benefactions are going to be devoted to propagating? You
have, of course, to be a little careful, when you find yourself landed with endowments and
benefactions, lest you should become another endowed church. (Laughter.) As far as I can see, the
view to which we are committed, one which I have stated on a former occasion, is that we ought not
to believe, and we ought not to try to cause others to believe, any proposition for which there is no
evidence whatever. That seems a modest proposition, and if you can stick to that you will be fairly
sure that you are not going to become a sort of ossified endowed church. We ought not to commit
ourselves to dogmatic negations any more than to dogmatic affirmations; we ought merely to say
that there are a great many propositions about which men and women feel pretty certain, but,

16

concerning which they have no right to feel certain, and it is our business as Rationalists to try to
make them see that those things are not certain. I am told that that is a very wicked position to
maintain. I have here a book recently published which I commend to your attention. You may or
may not know that some little time ago, under the auspices of the National Secular Society, I
delivered a lecture on "Why I am Not a Christian." Now, It appears that I did not know why it is that
I am not a Christian; and here is a book which will tell you why I am not -- by Mr. H. G. Wood, who
is a somewhat eminent member of the Society of Friends, a body for which I have the greatest
respect. His book is called Why Mr. Bertrand Russell is Not a Christian. It seems that the reasons are
not those which I thought they were. He says in one sentence: "The main reason why he is not a
Christian is that he simply does not know what religion is." One might say that Mr. Wood is not an
Agnostic because he does not know what Agnosticism is. After all, I had all the benefits of a
Christian education, and he did not have the benefits of an Agnostic education; so that possibly the
argument might be considered two-edged. Nevertheless, I commend the book to your attention, and
you will then know why it is that I am not a Christian.
There is a very large amount of Rationalist work required in the world. I think the battle is quite as
fierce as ever it was. Take, for example America. America is a very important country. What America
thinks today the rest of the world will be forced to think tomorrow, and therefore what America
thinks is important. There are some hopeful features about America. I was recently on a boat going
to America, and a minister of religion on the boat invited me to speak to his congregation about my
views on religion. I said: "Yours must be a very broad-minded congregation"; and this minister of
religion, somewhat to my surprise, replied: "Oh, of course, I do not believe in God." I met other
ministers of religion in America who took the same line. That, I must say, somewhat surprised me;
but they are, I am afraid, rather a small minority, and the great bulk of Americans are still extremely
theological. Moreover, we have to face the very serious position due to the growth of the Roman
Catholic Church in America, because, as far as I can see, the Roman Catholic Church is likely to
dominate America in another fifty or a hundred years by the sheer increase of numbers, and not by
rational propaganda. That is a very grave matter, and a matter which I think will affect the whole of
the civilized world very much. Of course, you know that already in Boston, which was once the home
of advanced Protestantism, the Roman Catholics rule the whole place; and there is a censorship
upon literature more severe than in any other part of America. I expect you know that in America
men are still sent to prison for Atheism, not only in Fundamentalist States, but even in States of the
East, and altogether there is in that part of the world an enormous need of propaganda on these
matters. It is very important to all of us, because the Americans tend more and more to rule the
world, and we shall find ourselves in a very difficult position unless we can more or less liberalize
them -- a mission, I may say, in which I have done what I can, and my wife has also.
We have to realize that the attitude of Rationalism, which I defined as that of not believing a
proposition or causing others to believe it unless there is at least some reason for supposing it to be
true, is by no means widespread. Take the matter of education, concerning which Professor Graham
Wallas spoke. In most countries of the world a great many extremely dubious propositions are
taught to the young with great emphasis, and the young grow up accepting those extremely dubious
propositions. If by any chance you attempt, as my wife and I are attempting at this moment, to
bring up a small number of young people free from superstition, you find yourself in a very difficult
situation. You find, of course, that the public money which goes to education will not be given to any
education that involves no element of superstition; you find that support is extremely difficult to
obtain; you find that altogether it is thought that, whatever grown men and women may be allowed
to think, the young, at any rate, ought to believe a whole lot of absurdities, and that it is quite
impossible for the young to attain the necessary minimum of virtues unless you produce an
extremely large number of very bad arguments in favour of that virtue-arguments which, of course,
they will see through as soon as they get a little older; but it is thought that what they do then when
they see through them does not so much matter. I cannot quite take that view. I think that any
virtue that you may believe in should be one that you can support from the very first without
appealing to anything that you do not yourself believe. Education will have to be quite enormously
transformed if that view is accepted. I believe that it is at present illegal in every country of the
world except Russia to teach children in the kind of way which skilled medical practitioners would
consider the best for their mental health. That is one point upon which irrational convictions as
generally held interfere, and there are a number of ways in which it is at present impossible to
educate rationally without coming up against the authorities. The authorities are organized upon a
basis of certain irrational dogmas, and those dogmas are not all of them theological. Some are
theological, and some are of other sorts; but the rational habit of mind is a very rare one.

17

I think that we ought to do all that we can to bring before the world the importance of the attitude
that we are not going to believe a thing unless there is some reason to think that it is true. I know
that that is thought to be very shocking. It is supposed that there are a lot of things that you ought
to believe because good people believe them, and not because there is any reason for them. I do
not take that view. I think anything that is worth believing must have some positive ground in its
favour.
There are always new grounds being alleged in favour of irrationality; perpetually new things come
up. Take, for example, the kind of use that has been made by some people of psycho-analysis. If
you read the works of the founder of psycho-analysis, you find an entirely rationalist attitude; but if
you listen to some of the minor disciples you will imagine that this doctrine has swept away the idea
that opinions can be based upon reason at all. That, of course, is not the truth of it. You will always
find a number of clever people engaged in perversions of anything that comes up -- engaged in
saying that the latest results of science prove that the people who always opposed science are after
all in the right. That is where there is always humbug. Anybody who tells you that the latest results
of science prove something, he himself not being a scientist, you may be pretty sure is talking
nonsense.

What is the Soul?

by Bertrand Russell
from The Will to Doubt
One of the most painful circumstances of recent advances in science is that each one of them makes
us know less than we thought we did. When I was young we all knew, or thought we knew, that a
man consists of a soul and a body; that the body is in time and space, but the soul is in time only.
Whether the soul survives death was a matter as to which opinions might differ, but that there is a
soul was thought to be indubitable. As for the body, the plain man of course considered its existence
self-evident, and so did the man of science, but the philosopher was apt to analyze it away after one
fashion or another, reducing it usually to ideas in the mind of the man who had the body and
anybody else who happened to notice him. The philosopher, however, was not taken seriously, and
science remained comfortably materialistic, even in the hands of quite orthodox scientists.
Nowadays these fine old simplicities are lost: physicists assure us that there is no such thing as
matter, and psychologists assure us that there is no such thing as mind. This is an unprecedented
occurrence. Who ever heard of a cobbler saying that there was no such thing as boots, or a tailor
maintaining that all men are really naked? Yet that would have been no odder than what physicists
and certain psychologists have been doing. To begin with the latter, some of them attempt to
reduce everything that seems to be mental activity to an activity of the body. There are, however,
various difficulties in the way of reducing mental activity to physical activity. I do not think we can
yet say with any assurance whether these difficulties are or are not insuperable. What we can say,
on the basis of physics itself, is that what we have hitherto called our body is really an elaborate
scientific construction not corresponding to any physical reality. The modem would-be materialist
thus finds himself in a curious position, for, while he may with a certain degree of success reduce the
activities of the mind to those of the body, he cannot explain away the fact that the body itself is
merely a convenient concept invented by the mind. We find ourselves thus going round and round in
a circle: mind is an emanation of body, and body is an invention of mind. Evidently this cannot be
quite right, and we have to look for something that is neither mind nor body, out of which both can
spring.
Let us begin with the body. The plain man thinks that material objects must certainly exist, since
they are evident to the senses. Whatever else may be doubted, it is certain that anything you can
bump into must be real; this is the plain man's metaphysic. This is all very well, but the physicist

18

comes along and shows that you never bump into anything: even when you run your head against a
stone wall, you do not really touch it. When you think you touch a thing, there are certain electrons
and protons, forming part of your body, which are attracted and repelled by certain electrons and
protons in the thing you think you are touching, but there is no actual contact. The electrons and
protons in your body, becoming agitated by nearness to the other electrons and protons, are
disturbed, and transmit a disturbance along your nerves to the brain; the effect in the brain is what
is necessary to your sensation of contact, and by suitable experiments this sensation can be made
quite deceptive. The electrons and protons themselves, however, are only a crude first
approximation, a way of collecting into a bundle either trains of waves or the statistical probabilities
of serious different kinds of events. Thus matter has become altogether too ghostly to be used as an
adequate stick with which to beat the mind. Matter in motion, which used to seem so
unquestionable, turns out to be a concept quite inadequate for the needs of physics.
Nevertheless modern science gives no indication whatever of the existence of the soul or mind as an
entity; indeed the reasons for disbelieving in it are of very much the same kind as the reasons for
disbelieving in matter. Mind and matter were something like the lion and the unicorn fighting for the
crown; the end of the battle is not the victory of one or the other, but the discovery that both are
only heraldic inventions. The world consists of events, not of things that endure for a long time and
have changing properties. Events can be collected into groups by their causal relations. If the causal
relations are of one sort the resulting group of events may be called a physical object, and if the
causal relations are of another sort, the resulting group may be called a mind. Any event that occurs
inside a man's head will belong to groups of both kinds; considered as belonging to a group of one
kind, it is a constituent of his brain, and considered as belonging to a group of the other kind, it is a
constituent of his mind.
Thus both mind and matter are merely convenient ways of organizing events. There can be no
reason for supposing that either a piece of mind or a piece of matter is immortal. The sun is
supposed to be losing matter at the rate of millions of tons a minute. The most essential
characteristic of mind is memory, and there is no reason whatever to suppose that the memory
associated with a given person survive, that person's death. Indeed there is every reason to think
the opposite, for memory is clearly connected with a certain kind of brain structure, and since this
structure decays at death, there is every reason to suppose that memory also must cease. Although
metaphysical materialism cannot be considered true, yet emotionally the world is pretty much the
same as it would be if the materialists were in the right. I think the opponents of materialism have
always been actuated by two main desires: the first to prove that the mind is immortal, and the
second to prove that the ultimate power in the universe is mental rather than physical. In both these
respects, I think the materialists were in the right. Our desires, it is true, have considerable power
on the earth's surface; the greater part of the land on this planet has a quite different aspect from
that which it would have if men had not utilized it to extract food and wealth. But our power is very
strictly limited. We cannot at present do anything whatever to the sun or moon or even to the
interior of the earth, and there is not the faintest reason to suppose that what happens in regions to
which our power does not extend has any mental causes. That is to say, to put the matter in a
nutshell, there is no reason to think that except on the earth's surface anything happens because
somebody wishes it to happen. And since our power on the earth's surface is entirely dependent
upon the supply of energy which the earth derives from the sun, we are necessarily dependent upon
the sun, and could hardly realize any of our wishes if the sun grew cold. It is of course rash to
dogmatize as to what science may achieve in the future. We may learn to prolong human existence
longer than now seems possible, but if there is any truth in modem physics, more particularly in the
second law of thermo-dynamics, we cannot hope that the human race will continue for ever. Some
people may find this conclusion gloomy, but if we are honest with ourselves, we shall have to admit
that what is going to happen many millions of years hence has no very great emotional interest for
us here and now. And science, while it diminishes our cosmic pretensions, enormously increases our
terrestrial comfort. That is why, in spite of the horror of the theologians, science has on the whole
been tolerated.

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The Theologian's Nightmare

by Bertrand Russell
from Fact and Fiction, 1961
The eminent theologian Dr. Thaddeus dreamt that he died and pursued his course toward heaven.
His studies had prepared him and he had no difficulty in finding the way. He knocked at the door of
heaven, and was met with a closer scrutiny than he expected. "I ask admission," he said, "because I
was a good man and devoted my life to the glory of God." "Man?" said the janitor, "What is that?
And how could such a funny creature as you do anything to promote the glory of God?" Dr.
Thaddeus was astonished. "You surely cannot be ignorant of man. You must be aware that man is
the supreme work of the Creator." "As to that," said the janitor, "I am sorry to hurt your feelings, but
what you're saying is news to me. I doubt if anybody up here has ever heard of this thing you call
'man.' However, since you seem distressed, you shall have a chance of consulting our librarian."
The librarian, a globular being with a thousand eyes and one mouth, bent some of his eyes upon Dr.
Thaddeus. "What is this?" he asked the janitor. "This," replied the janitor, "says that it is a member
of a species called 'man,' which lives in a place called 'Earth.' It has some odd notion that the
Creator takes a special interest in this place and this species. I thought perhaps you could enlighten
it." "Well," said the librarian kindly to the theologian, "perhaps you can tall me where this place is
that you call 'Earth.'" "Oh," said the theologian, "it's part of the Solar System." "And what is the
Solar System?" asked the librarian. "Oh," said the theologian, somewhat disconcerted, "my province
was Sacred Knowledge, but the question that you are asking belongs to profane knowledge.
However, I have learnt enough from my astronomical friends to be able to tell you that the Solar
System is part of the Milky Way." "And what is the Milky Way?" asked the librarian. "Oh, the Milky
Way is one of the Galaxies, of which, I am told, there are some hundred million." "Well, well," said
the librarian, "you could hardly expect me to remember one out of so many. But I do remember to
have heard the word galaxy' before. In fact, I believe that one of our sub-librarians specializes in
galaxies. Let us send for him and see whether he can help."
After no very long time, the galactic sub-librarian made his appearance. In shape, he was a
dodecahedron. It was clear that at one time his surface had been bright, but the dust of the shelves
had rendered him dim and opaque. The librarian explained to him that Dr. Thaddeus, in endeavoring
to account for his origin, had mentioned galaxies, and it was hoped that information could be
obtained from the galactic section of the library. "Well," said the sub-librarian, "I suppose it might
become possible in time, but as there are a hundred million galaxies, and each has a volume to
itself, it takes some time to find any particular volume. Which is it that this odd molecule desires?"
"It is the one called 'The Milky Way,'" Dr. Thaddeus falteringly replied. "All right," said the sublibrarian, "I will find it if I can."
Some three weeks later, he returned, explaining that the extraordinarily efficient card index in the
galactic section of the library had enabled him to locate the galaxy as number QX 321,762. "We
have employed," he said, "all the five thousand clerks in the galactic section on this search. Perhaps
you would like to see the clerk who is specially concerned with the galaxy in question?" The clerk
was sent for and turned out to be an octahedron with an eye in each face and a mouth in one of
them. He was surprised and dazed to find himself in such a glittering region, away from the shadowy
limbo of his shelves. Pulling himself together, he asked, rather shyly, "What is it you wish to know
about my galaxy?" Dr. Thaddeus spoke up: "What I want is to know about the Solar System, a
collection of heavenly bodies revolving about one of the stars in your galaxy. The star about which
they revolve is called 'the Sun.'" "Humph," said the librarian of the Milky Way, "it was hard enough
to hit upon the right galaxy, but to hit upon the right star in the galaxy is far more difficult. I know
that there are about three hundred billion stars in the galaxy, but I have no knowledge, myself, that
would distinguish one of them from another. I believe, however, that at one time a list of the whole
three hundred billion was demanded by the Administration and that it is still stored in the basement.
If you think it worth while, I will engage special labor from the Other Place to search for this
particular star."
It was agreed that, since the question had arisen and since Dr. Thaddeus was evidently suffering
some distress, this might be the wisest course.

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Several years later, a very weary and dispirited tetrahedron presented himself before the galactic
sub-librarian. "I have," he said, "at last discovered the particular star concerning which inquiries
have been made, but I am quite at a loss to imagine why it has aroused any special interest. It
closely resembles a great many other stars in the same galaxy. It is of average size and
temperature, and is surrounded by very much smaller bodies called 'planets.' After minute
investigation, I discovered that some, at least, of these planets have parasites, and I think that this
thing which has been making inquiries must be one of them."
At this point, Dr. Thaddeus burst out in a passionate and indignant lament: "Why, oh why, did the
Creator conceal from us poor inhabitants of Earth that it was not we who prompted Him to create
the Heavens? Throughout my long life, I have served Him diligently, believing that He would notice
my service and reward me with Eternal Bliss. And now, it seems that He was not even aware that I
existed. You tell me that I am an infinitesimal animalcule on a tiny body revolving round an
insignificant member of a collection of three hundred billion stars, which is only one of many millions
of such collections. I cannot bear it, and can no longer adore my Creator." "Very well," said the
janitor, "then you can go to the Other Place."
Here the theologian awoke. "The power of Satan over our sleeping imagination is terrifying," he
muttered.

On the Value of Scepticism

by Bertrand Russell
from The Will To Doubt
I wish to propose a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The
doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground
whatever for supposing it true. I must, of course, admit that if such an opinion became common it
would completely transform our social life and our political system; since both are at present
faultless, this must weigh against it. I am also aware (what is more serious) that it would tend to
diminish the incomes of clairvoyants, bookmakers, bishops, and others who live on the irrational
hopes of those who have done nothing to deserve good fortune here or hereafter. In spite of these
grave arguments, I maintain that a case can be made out of my paradox, and I shall try to set it
forth.
First of all, I wish to guard myself against being thought to take up an extreme position. I am a
British Whig, with a British love of compromise and moderation. A story is told of Pyrrho, the
founder of Pyrrhonism (which was the old name for scepticism). He maintained that we never know
enough to be sure that one course of action is wiser than another. In his youth, when he was taking
his constitutional one afternoon, he saw his teacher in philosophy (from whom he had imbibed his
principles) with his head stuck in a ditch, unable to get out. After contemplating him for some time,
he walked on, maintaining that there was no
sufficient ground for thinking he would do any good by pulling the man out. Others, less sceptical,
effected a rescue, and blamed Pyrrho for his heartlessness. But his teacher, true to his principles,
praised him for his consistency. Now I do not advocate such heroic scepticism as that. I am prepared
to admit the ordinary beliefs of common sense, in practice if not in theory. I am prepared to admit
any well-established result of science, not as certainly true, but as sufficiently probable to afford a
basis for rational action. If it is announced that there is to be an eclipse of the moon on such-andsuch a date, I think it worth while to look and see whether it is taking place. Pyrrho would have
thought otherwise. On this ground, I feel justified in claiming that I advocate a middle position.
There are matters about which those who have investigated them are agreed; the dates of eclipses
may serve as an illustration. There are other matters about which experts are not agreed. Even
when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. Einstein's view as to the magnitude of the

21

deflection of light by gravitation would have been rejected by all experts not many years ago, yet it
proved to be right. Nevertheless the opinion of experts, when it is unanimous, must be accepted by
non-experts as more likely to be right than the opposite opinion. The scepticism that I advocate
amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to
be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a nonexpert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the
ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.
These propositions may seem mild, yet, if accepted, they would absolutely revolutionize human life.
The opinions for which people are willing to fight and persecute all belong to one of the three classes
which this scepticism condemns. When there are rational grounds for an opinion, people are content
to set them forth and wait for them to operate. In such cases, people do not hold their opinions with
passion; they hold them calmly, and set forth their reasons quietly. The opinions that are held with
passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the
holder's lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held
passionately. Except in China, a man is thought a poor creature unless he has strong opinions on
such matters; people hate sceptics far more than they hate the passionate advocates of opinions
hostile to their own. It is thought that the claims of practical life demand opinions on such questions,
and that, if we became more rational, social existence would be impossible. I believe the opposite of
this, and will try to make it clear why I have this belief.
Take the question of unemployment in the years after 1920. One party held that it was due to the
wickedness of trade unions, another that it was due to the confusion on the Continent. A third party,
while admitting that these causes played a part, attributed most of the trouble to the policy of the
Bank of England in trying to increase the value of the pound sterling. This third party, I am given to
understand, contained most of the experts, but no one else. Politicians do not find any attractions in
a view which does not lend itself to party declamation, and ordinary mortals prefer views which
attribute misfortune to the machinations of their enemies. Consequently people fight for and against
quite irrelevant measures, while the few who have a rational opinion are not listened to because
they do not minister to any one's passions. To produce converts, it would have been necessary to
persuade people that the Bank of England is wicked. To convert Labour, it would have been
necessary to show that directors of the Bank of England are hostile to trade unionism; to convert the
Bishop of London, it would have been necessary to show that they are "immoral." It would be
thought to follow that their views currency are mistaken.
Let us take another illustration. It is often said that socialism is contrary to human nature, and this
assertion is denied by socialists with the same heat with which it is made by their opponents. The
late Dr. Rivers, whose death cannot be sufficiently deplored, discussed this question in a lecture at
University College, published in his posthumous book on Psychology and Politics. This is the only
discussion of this topic known to me that can lay claim to be scientific. It sets forth certain
anthropological data which show that socialism is not contrary to human nature in Melanesia; it then
points out that we do not know whether human nature is the same in Melanesia as in Europe; and it
concludes that the only way of finding out whether socialism is contrary to European human nature
is to try it. It is interesting that on the basis of this conclusion he was willing to become a Labour
candidate. But he would certainly not have added to the heat and passion in which political
controversies are usually enveloped.
I will now venture on a topic which people find even more difficulty in treating dispassionately,
namely marriage customs. The bulk of the population of every country is persuaded that all
marriage customs other than its own are immoral, and that those who combat this view do so only
in order to justify their awn loose lives. In India, the remarriage of widows is traditionally regarded
as a thing too horrible to contemplate. In Catholic countries divorce is thought very wicked, but
some failure of conjugal fidelity is tolerated, at least in men. In America divorce is easy, but extraconjugal relations are condemned with the utmost severity. Mohammedans believe in polygamy,
which we think degrading. All these differing opinions are held with extreme vehemence, and very
cruel persecutions are inflicted upon those who contravene them. Yet no one in any of the various
countries makes the slightest attempt to show that the custom of his own country contributes more
to human happiness than the custom of others.

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When we open any scientific treatise on the subject, such as (for example) Westermarck's History of
Human Marriage, we find an atmosphere extraordinarily different from that of popular prejudice. We
find that every kind of custom has existed, many of them such as we should have supposed
repugnant to human nature. We think we can understand polygamy, as a custom forced upon
women by male oppressors. But what are we to say of the Tibetan custom, according to which one
woman has several husbands? Yet travellers in Tibet assure us that family life there is at least as
harmonious as in Europe. A little of such reading must soon reduce any candid person to complete
scepticism, since there seem to be no data enabling us to say that one marriage custom is better or
worse than another. Almost all involve cruelty and intolerance towards offenders against the local
code, but otherwise they have nothing in common. It seems that sin is geographical. From this
conclusion, it is only a small step to the further conclusion that the notion of "sin" is illusory, and
that the cruelty habitually practiced in punishing it is unnecessary. It is just this conclusion which is
so unwelcome to many minds, since the infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to
moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
Nationalism is of course an extreme example of fervent belief concerning doubtful matters. I think it
may be safely said that any scientific historian, writing now a history of the Great War, is bound to
make statements which, if made during the war, would have exposed him to imprisonment in every
one of the belligerent countries on both sides. Again, with the exception of China, there is no
country where people tolerate the truth about themselves; at ordinary times the truth is only
thought ill-mannered, but in war-time it is thought criminal. Opposing systems of violent belief are
built up, the falsehood of which is evident from the fact that they are believed only by those who
share the same national bias. But the application of reason to these systems of belief is thought as
wicked as the application of reason to religious dogmas was formerly thought. When people are
challenged as to why scepticism in such matters should be wicked, the only answer is that myths
help to win wars, so that a rational nation would be killed rather than kill. The view that there is
something shameful in saving one's skin by wholesale slander of foreigners is one which, so far as I
know, has hitherto found no supporters among professional moralists outside the ranks of Quakers.
If it is suggested that a rational nation would find ways of keeping out of wars altogether, the answer
is usually more abuse.
What would be the effect of a spread of rational scepticism? Human events spring from passions,
which generate systems of attendant myths. Psychoanalysts have studied the individual
manifestations of this process in lunatics, certified and uncertified. A man who has suffered some
humiliation invents a theory that he is King of England, and develops all kinds of ingenious
explanations of the fact that he is not treated with that respect which his exalted position demands.
In this case, his delusion is one with which his neighbours do not sympathize, so they lock him up.
But if, instead of asserting only his own greatness, he asserts the greatness of his nation or his class
or his creed, he wins hosts of adherents, and becomes a political or religious leader, even if, to the
impartial outsider, his views seem just as absurd as those found in asylums. In this way a collective
insanity grows up, which follows laws very similar to those of individual insanity. Every one knows
that it is dangerous to depute with a lunatic who thinks he is King of England; but as he is isolated,
he can be overpowered. When a whole nation shares a delusion, its anger is of the same kind as
that of an individual lunatic if its pretensions are disputed, but nothing short of war can compel it to
submit to reason.
The part played by intellectual factors in human behaviour is a matter as to which there is much
disagreement among psychologists. There are two quite distinct questions: (1) how far are beliefs
operative as causes of actions? (2) how far are beliefs derived from logically adequate evidence, or
capable of being so derived? On both questions, psychologists are agreed in giving a much smaller
place to the intellectual factors than the plain man would give, but within this general agreement
there is room for considerable differences of degree. Let us take the two questions in succession.
(1) How far are beliefs operative as causes of action? Let us not discuss the question theoretically,
but let us take an ordinary day of an ordinary man's life. He begins by getting up in the morning,
probably from force of habit, without the intervention of any belief. He eats his breakfast, catches
his train, reads his newspaper, and goes to his office, all from force of habit. There was a time in the
past when he formed these habits, and in the choice of the office, at least, belief played a part. He
probably believed, at the time, that the job offered him there was as good as he was likely to get. In
most men, belief plays a part in the original choice of a career, and therefore, derivatively, in all that
is entailed by this choice.

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At the office, if he is an underling, he may continue to act merely from habit, without active volition,
and without the explicit intervention of belief. It might be thought that, if he adds up the columns of
figures, he believes the arithmetical rules which he employs. But that would be an error; these rules
are mere habits of his body, like those of a tennis player. They were acquired in youth, not from an
intellectual belief that they corresponded to the truth, but to please the schoolmaster, just as a dog
learns to sit on its hind legs and beg for food. I do not say that all education is of this sort, but
certainly most learning of the three R's is.
If, however, our friend is a partner or director, he may be called upon during his day to make difficult
decisions of policy. In these decisions it is probable that belief will play a part. He believes that some
things will go up and others will go down, that so-and-so is a sound man, and such-and-such on the
verge of bankruptcy. On these beliefs he acts. It is just because he is called upon to act on beliefs
rather than mere habits that he is considered such a much greater man than a mere clerk, and is
able to get so much more money -- provided his beliefs are true.
In his home-life there will be much the same proportion of occasions when belief is a cause of
action. At ordinary times, his behaviour to his wife and children will be governed by habit, or by
instinct modified by habit. On great occasions -- when he proposes marriage, when he decides what
school to send his son to, or when he finds reason to suspect his wife of unfaithfulness -- he cannot
be guided wholly by habit. In proposing marriage, he may be guided more by instinct, or he may be
influenced by the belief that the lady is rich. If he is guided by instinct, he no doubt believes that the
lady possesses every virtue, and this may seem to him to be a cause of his action, but in fact it is
merely another effect of the instinct which alone suffices to account for his action. In choosing a
school for his son, he probably proceeds in much the same way as in making difficult business
decisions; here belief usually plays an important part. If evidence comes into his possession showing
that his wife has been unfaithful, his behaviour is likely to be purely instinctive, but the instinct is set
in operation by a belief, which is the first cause of everything that follows.
Thus, although beliefs are not directly responsible for more than a small part of our actions, the
actions for which they are responsible are among the most important, and largely determine the
general structure of our lives. In particular, our religious and political actions are associated with
beliefs.
(2) I come now to our second question, which is itself twofold: (a) how far are beliefs in fact based
upon evidence? (b) how far is it possible or desirable that they should be?
(a) The extent to which beliefs are based upon evidence is very much less than believers suppose.
Take the kind of action which is most nearly rational: the investment of money by a rich City man.
You will often find that his view (say) on the question whether the French franc will go up or down
depends upon his political sympathies, and yet is so strongly held that he is prepared to risk money
on it. In bankruptcies it often appears that some sentimental factor was the original cause of ruin.
Political opinions are hardly ever based upon evidence, except in the case of civil servants, who are
forbidden to give utterance to them. There are of course exceptions. In the tariff reform controversy
which began several years ago, most manufacturers supported the side that would increase their
own incomes, showing that their opinions were really based on evidence, however little their
utterances would have led one to suppose so. We have here a complication. Freudians have
accustomed us to "rationalizing," i.e. the process of inventing what seem to ourselves rational
grounds for a decision or opinion that is in fact quite irrational. But there is, especially in Englishspeaking countries, a converse process which may be called "irrationalizing." A shrewd man will sum
up, more or less subconsciously, the pros and cons of a question from a selfish point of view.
(Unselfish considerations seldom weigh subconsciously except where one's children are concerned.)
Having come to a sound egoistic decision by the help of the unconscious, a man proceeds to invent,
or adopt from others, a set of high-sounding phrases showing how he is pursuing the public good at
immense personal sacrifice. Anybody who believes that these phrases give his real reasons must
suppose him quite incapable of judging evidence, since the supposed public good is not going to
result from his action. In this case a man appears less rational than he is; what is still more curious,
the irrational part of him is conscious and the rational part unconscious. It is this trait in our
characters that has made the English and Americans so successful.

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Shrewdness, when it is genuine, belong, more to the unconscious than to the conscious part of our
nature. It is, I suppose, the main quality required for success in business. From a moral point of
view, it is a humble quality, since it is always selfish; yet it suffices to keep men from the worst
crimes. If the Germans had had it, they would not have adopted the unlimited submarine campaign.
If the French had had it, they would not have behaved as they did in the Ruhr. If Napoleon had had
it, he would not have gone to war again after the Treaty of Amiens. It may be laid down as a general
rule to which there are few exceptions that, when people are mistaken as to what is to their own
interest, the course that they believe to be wise is more harmful to others than the course that
really is wise. Therefore anything that makes people better judges of their own interest does good.
There are innumerable examples of men making fortunes because, on moral grounds, they did
something which they believed to be contrary to their own interests. For instance, among early
Quakers there were a number of shopkeepers who adopted the practice of asking no more for their
goods than they were willing to accept, instead of bargaining with each customer, as everybody else
did. They adopted this practice because they held it to be a lie to ask more than they would take.
But the convenience to customers was so great that everybody came to their shops, and they grew
rich. (I forget where I read this, but if my memory serves me it was in some reliable source.) The
same policy might have been adopted from shrewdness, but in fact no one was sufficiently shrewd.
Our unconscious is more malevolent than it pays us to be; therefore the people who do most
completely what is in fact to their interest are those who deliberately, on moral grounds, do what
they believe to be against their interest. Next to them come the people who try to think out
rationally and consciously what is to their own interest, eliminating as far as possible the influence of
passion. Third come the people who have instinctive shrewdness. Last of all come the people whose
malevolence overbalances their shrewdness, making them pursue the ruin of others in ways that
lead to their own ruin. This last class embraces 90 per cent. of the population of Europe.
I may seem to have digressed somewhat from my topic, but it was necessary to disentangle
unconscious reason, which is called shrewdness, from the conscious variety. The ordinary methods
of education have practically no effect upon the unconscious, so that shrewdness cannot be taught
by our present technique. Morality, also, except where it consists of mere habit, seems incapable of
being taught by present methods; at any rate I have never noticed any beneficent effect upon those
who are exposed to frequent exhortations. Therefore on our present lines any deliberate
improvement must be brought about by intellectual means. We do not know how to teach people to
be shrewd or virtuous, but we do know, within limits, how to teach them to be rational: it is only
necessary to reverse the practice of education authorities in every particular. We may hereafter learn
to create virtue by manipulating the ductless glands and stimulating or restraining their secretions.
But for the present it is easier to create rationality than virtue -- meaning by "rationality" a scientific
habit of mind in forecasting the effects of our actions.
(b) This brings me to the question: How far could or should men's actions be rational? Let us take
"should" first. There are very definite limits, to my mind, within which rationality should be confined;
some of the most important departments of life are ruined by the invasion of reason. Leibniz in his
old age told a correspondent that he had only once asked a lady to marry him, and that was when
he was fifty. "Fortunately," he added, "the lady asked time to consider. This gave me also time to
consider, and I withdrew the offer." Doubtless his conduct was very rational, but I cannot say that I
admire it
Shakespeare puts "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet" together, as being "of imagination all
compact." The problem is to keep the lover and the poet, without the lunatic. I will give an
illustration. In 1919 I saw The Trojan Women acted at the Old Vic. There is an unbearably pathetic
scene where Astyanax is put to death by the Greeks for fear he should grow up into a second Hector.
There was hardly a dry eye in the theatre, and the audience found the cruelty of the Greeks in the
play hardly credible. Yet those very people who wept were, at that very moment, practicing that
very cruelty on a scale which the imagination of Euripides could have never contemplated. They had
lately voted (most of them) for a Government which prolonged the blockade of Germany after the
armistice, and imposed the blockade of Russia. It was known that these blockades caused the death
of immense numbers of children, but it was felt desirable to diminish the population of enemy
countries: the children, like Astyanax, might grow up to emulate their fathers. Euripides the poet
awakened the lover in the imagination of the audience; but lover and poet were forgotten at the
door of the theatre, and the lunatic (in the shape of the homicidal maniac) controlled the political
actions of these men and women who thought themselves kind and virtuous.

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Is it possible to preserve the lover and the poet without preserving the lunatic? In each of us, all
three exist in varying degrees. Are they so bound up together that when the one is brought under
control the others perish? I do not believe it. I believe there is in each of us a certain energy which
must find vent in art, in passionate love, or in passionate hate, according to circumstances.
Respectability, regularity, and routine -- the whole cast-iron discipline of a modern industrial society
-- have atrophied the artistic impulse, and imprisoned love so that it can no longer be generous and
free and creative, but must be either stuffy or furtive. Control has been applied to the very things
which should be free, while envy, cruelty, and hate sprawl at large with the blessing of nearly the
whole bench of Bishops. Our instinctive apparatus consists of two parts -- the one tending to further
our own life and that of our descendants, the other tending to thwart the lives of supposed rivals.
The first includes the joy of life, and love, and art, which is psychologically an offshoot of love. The
second includes competition, patriotism, and war. Conventional morality does everything to suppress
the first and encourage the second. True morality would do the exact opposite. Our dealings with
those whom we love may be safely left to instinct; it is our dealings with those whom we hate that
ought to be brought under the dominion of reason. In the modern world, those whom we effectively
hate are distant groups, especially foreign nations. We conceive them abstractly, and deceive
ourselves into the belief that acts which are really embodiments of hatred are done from love of
justice or some such lofty motive. Only a large measure of scepticism can tear away the veils which
hide this truth from us. Having achieved that, we could begin to build a new morality, not based on
envy and restriction, but on the wish for a full life and the realization that other human beings are a
help and not a hindrance when once the madness of envy has been cured. This is not a Utopian
hope; it was partially realized in Elizabethan England. It could be realized tomorrow if men would
learn to pursue their own happiness rather than the misery of others. This is no impossibly austere
morality, yet its adoption would turn our earth into a paradise.

Is There a God?
by Bertrand Russell
(commissioned by, but never published in, Illustrated Magazine, in 1952)
The question whether there is a God is one which is decided on very different grounds by different
communities and different individuals. The immense majority of mankind accept the prevailing
opinion of their own community. In the earliest times of which we have definite history everybody
believed in many gods. It was the Jews who first believed in only one. The first commandment,
when it was new, was very difficult to obey because the Jews had believed that Baal and Ashtaroth
and Dagon and Moloch and the rest were real gods but were wicked because they helped the
enemies of the Jews. The step from a belief that these gods were wicked to the belief that they did
not exist was a difficult one. There was a time, namely that of Antiochus IV, when a vigorous
attempt was made to Hellenize the Jews. Antiochus decreed that they should eat pork, abandon
circumcision, and take baths. Most of the Jews in Jerusalem submitted, but in country places
resistance was more stubborn and under the leadership of the Maccabees the Jews at last
established their right to their peculiar tenets and customs. Monotheism, which at the beginning of
the Antiochan persecution had been the creed of only part of one very small nation, was adopted by
Christianity and later by Islam, and so became dominant throughout the whole of the world west of
India. From India eastward, it had no success: Hinduism had many gods; Buddhism in its primitive
form had none; and Confucianism had none from the eleventh century onward. But, if the truth of a
religion is to be judged by its worldly success, the argument in favor of monotheism is a very strong
one, since it possessed the largest armies, the largest navies, and the greatest accumulation of
wealth. In our own day this argument is growing less decisive. It is true that the un-Christian
menace of Japan was defeated. But the Christian is now faced with the menace of atheistic
Muscovite hordes, and it is not so certain as one could wish that atomic bombs will provide a
conclusive argument on the side of theism.
But let us abandon this political and geographical way of considering religions, which has been
increasingly rejected by thinking people ever since the time of the ancient Greeks. Ever since that
time there have been men who were not content to accept passively the religious opinions of their

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neighbors, but endeavoured to consider what reason and philosophy might have to say about the
matter. In the commercial cities of Ionia, where philosophy was invented, there were free-thinkers in
the sixth century B.C. Compared to modern free-thinkers they had an easy task, because the
Olympian gods, however charming to poetic fancy, were hardly such as could be defended by the
metaphysical use of the unaided reason. They were met popularly by Orphism (to which Christianity
owes much) and, philosophically, by Plato, from whom the Greeks derived a philosophical
monotheism very different from the political and nationalistic monotheism of the Jews. When the
Greek world became converted to Christianity it combined the new creed with Platonic metaphysics
and so gave birth to theology. Catholic theologians, from the time of Saint Augustine to the present
day, have believed that the existence of one God could be proved by the unaided reason. Their
arguments were put into final form by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. When
modern philosophy began in the seventeenth century, Descartes and Leibniz took over the old
arguments somewhat polished up, and, owing largely to their efforts, piety remained intellectually
respectable. But Locke, although himself a completely convinced Christian, undermined the
theoretical basis of the old arguments, and many of his followers, especially in France, became
Atheists. I will not attempt to set forth in all their subtlety the philosophical arguments for the
existence of God. There is, I think, only one of them which still has weight with philosophers, that is
the argument of the First Cause. This argument maintains that, since everything that happens has a
cause, there must be a First Cause from which the whole series starts. The argument suffers,
however, from the same defect as that of the elephant and the tortoise. It is said (I do not know
with what truth) that a certain Hindu thinker believed the earth to rest upon an elephant. When
asked what the elephant rested upon, he replied that it rested upon a tortoise. When asked what the
tortoise rested upon, he said, "I am tired of this. Suppose we change the subject." This illustrates
the unsatisfactory character of the First-Cause argument. Nevertheless, you will find it in some ultramodern treatises on physics, which contend that physical processes, traced backward in time, show
that there must have been a sudden beginning and infer that this was due to divine Creation. They
carefully abstain from attempts to show that this hypothesis makes matters more intelligible.
The scholastic arguments for the existence of a Supreme Being are now rejected by most Protestant
theologians in favor of new arguments which to my mind are by no means an improvement. The
scholastic arguments were genuine efforts of thought and, if their reasoning had been sound, they
would have demonstrated the truth of their conclusion. The new arguments, which Modernists
prefer, are vague, and the Modernists reject with contempt every effort to make them precise. There
is an appeal to the heart as opposed to the intellect. It is not maintained that those who reject the
new arguments are illogical, but that they are destitute of deep feeling or of moral sense. Let us
nevertheless examine the modern arguments and see whether there is anything that they really
prove.
One of the favourite arguments is from evolution. The world was once lifeless, and when life began it
was a poor sort of life consisting of green slime and other uninteresting things. Gradually by the
course of evolution, it developed into animals and plants and at last into MAN. Man, so the
theologians assure us, is so splendid a Being that he may well be regarded as the culmination to
which the long ages of nebula and slime were a prelude. I think the theologians must have been
fortunate in their human contacts. They do not seem to me to have given due weight to Hitler or the
Beast of Belsen. If Omnipotence, with all time at its disposal, thought it worth while to lead up to
these men through the many millions of years of evolution, I can only say that the moral and
aesthetic taste involved is peculiar. However, the theologians no doubt hope that the future course of
evolution will produce more men like themselves and fewer men like Hitler. Let us hope so. But, in
cherishing this hope, we are abandoning the ground of experience and taking refuge in an optimism
which history so far does not support.
There are other objections to this evolutionary optimism. There is every reason to believe that life
on our planet will not continue forever so that any optimism based upon the course of terrestrial
history must be temporary and limited in its purview. There may, of course, be life elsewhere but, if
there is, we know nothing about it and have no reason to suppose that it bears more resemblance to
the virtuous theologians than to Hitler. The earth is a very tiny corner of the universe. It is a little
fragment of the solar system. The solar system is a little fragment of the Milky Way. And the Milky
Way is a little fragment of the many millions of galaxies revealed by modern telescopes. In this little
insignificant corner of the cosmos there is a brief interlude between two long lifeless epochs. In this
brief interlude, there is a much briefer one containing man. If really man is the purpose of the
universe the preface seems a little long. One is reminded of some prosy old gentleman who tells an

27

interminable anecdote all quite uninteresting until the rather small point in which it ends. I do not
think theologians show a suitable piety in making such a comparison possible.
It has been one of the defects of theologians at all times to over-esti-mate the importance of our
planet. No doubt this was natural enough in the days before Copernicus when it was thought that
the heavens revolve about the earth. But since Copernicus and still more since the modern
exploration of distant regions, this pre-occupation with the earth has become rather parochial. If the
universe had a Creator, it is hardly reasonable to suppose that He was specially interested in our
little corner. And, if He was not, His values must have been different from ours, since in the
immense majority of regions life is impossible.
There is a moralistic argument for belief in God, which was popularized by William James. According
to this argument, we ought to believe in God because, if we do not, we shall not behave well. The
first and greatest objection to this argument is that, at its best, it cannot prove that there is a God
but only that politicians and educators ought to try to make people think there is one. Whether this
ought to be done or not is not a theological question but a political one. The arguments are of the
same sort as those which urge that children should be taught respect for the flag. A man with any
genuine religious feeling will not be content with the view that the belief in God is useful, because he
will wish to know whether, in fact, there is a God. It is absurd to contend that the two questions are
the same. In the nursery, belief in Father Christmas is useful, but grown-up people do not think that
this proves Father Christmas to be real.
Since we are not concerned with politics we might consider this sufficient refutation of the moralistic
argument, but it is perhaps worthwhile to pursue this a little further. It is, in the first place, very
doubtful whether belief in God has all the beneficial moral effects that are attributed to it. Many of
the best men known to history have been unbelievers. John Stuart Mill may serve as an instance.
And many of the worst men known to history have been believers. Of this there are innumerable
instances. Perhaps Henry VIII may serve as typical.
However that may be, it is always disastrous when governments set to work to uphold opinions for
their utility rather than for their truth. As soon as this is done it becomes necessary to have a
censorship to suppress adverse arguments, and it is thought wise to discourage thinking among the
young for fear of encouraging "dangerous thoughts." When such mal-practices are employed against
religion as they are in Soviet Russia, the theologians can see that they are bad, but they are still bad
when employed in defence of what the theologians think good. Freedom of thought and the habit of
giving weight to evidence are matters of far greater moral import than the belief in this or that
theological dogma. On all these grounds it cannot be maintained that theological beliefs should be
upheld for their usefulness without regard to their truth.
There is a simpler and more naive form of the same argument, which appeals to many individuals.
People will tell us that without the consolations of religion they would be intolerably unhappy. So far
as this is true, it is a coward's argument. Nobody but a coward would consciously choose to live in a
fool's paradise. When a man suspects his wife of infidelity, he is not thought the better of for
shutting his eyes to the evidence. And I cannot see why ignoring evidence should be contemptible in
one case and admirable in the other. Apart from this argument the importance of religion in
contributing to individual happiness is very much exaggerated. Whether you are happy or unhappy
depends upon a number of factors. Most people need good health and enough to eat. They need the
good opinion of their social milieu and the affection of their intimates. They need not only physical
health but mental health. Given all these things, most people will be happy whatever their theology.
Without them, most people will be unhappy, whatever their theology. In thinking over the people I
have known, I do not find that on the average those who had religious beliefs were happier than
those who had not.
When I come to my own beliefs, I find myself quite unable to discern any purpose in the universe,
and still more unable to wish to discern one. Those who imagine that the course of cosmic evolution
is slowly leading up to some consummation pleasing to the Creator, are logically committed (though
they usually fail to realize this) to the view that the Creator is not omnipotent or, if He were
omnipotent, He could decree the end without troubling about means. I do not myself perceive any
consummation toward which the universe is tending. According to the physicists, energy will be
gradually more evenly distributed and as it becomes more evenly distributed it will become more

28

useless. Gradually everything that we find interesting or pleasant, such as life and light, will
disappear -- so, at least, they assure us. The cosmos is like a theatre in which just once a play is
performed, but, after the curtain falls, the theatre is left cold and empty until it sinks in ruins. I do
not mean to assert with any positiveness that this is the case. That would be to assume more
knowledge than we possess. I say only that it is what is probable on present evidence. I will not
assert dogmatically that there is no cosmic purpose, but I will say that there is no shred of evidence
in favor of there being one.
I will say further that, if there be a purpose and if this purpose is that of an Omnipotent Creator,
then that Creator, so far from being loving and kind, as we are told, must be of a degree of
wickedness scarcely conceivable. A man who commits a murder is considered to be a bad man. An
Omnipotent Deity, if there be one, murders everybody. A man who willingly afflicted another with
cancer would be considered a fiend. But the Creator, if He exists, afflicts many thousands every year
with this dreadful disease. A man who, having the knowledge and power required to make his
children good, chose instead to make them bad, would be viewed with execration. But God, if He
exists, makes this choice in the case of very many of His children. The whole conception of an
omnipotent God whom it is impious to criticize, could only have arisen under oriental despotisms
where sovereigns, in spite of capricious cruelties, continued to enjoy the adulation of their slaves. It
is the psychology appropriate to this outmoded political system which belatedly survives in orthodox
theology.
There is, it is true, a Modernist form of theism, according to which God is not omnipotent, but is
doing His best, in spite of great difficulties. This view, although it is new among Christians, is not
new in the history of thought. It is, in fact, to be found in Plato. I do not think this view can be
proved to be false. I think all that can be said is that there is no positive reason in its favour.
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas
rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that
between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit,
nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too
small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since
my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to
doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a
teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into
the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of
eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of
the Inquisitor in an earlier time. It is customary to suppose that, if a belief is widespread, there must
be something reasonable about it. I do not think this view can be held by anyone who has studied
history. Practically all the beliefs of savages are absurd. In early civilizations there may be as much
as one percent for which there is something to be said. In our own day.... But at this point I must be
careful. We all know that there are absurd beliefs in Soviet Russia. If we are Protestants, we know
that there are absurd beliefs among Catholics. If we are Catholics, we know that there are absurd
beliefs among Protestants. If we are Conservatives, we are amazed by the superstitions to be found
in the Labour Party. If we are Socialists, we are aghast at the credulity of Conservatives. I do not
know, dear reader, what your beliefs may be, but whatever they may be, you must concede that
nine-tenths of the beliefs of nine-tenths of mankind are totally irrational. The beliefs in question are,
of course, those which you do not hold. I cannot, therefore, think it presumptuous to doubt
something which has long been held to be true, especially when this opinion has only prevailed in
certain geographical regions, as is the case with all theological opinions.
My conclusion is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and,
further, that there is no reason to wish that they were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to
natural forces, is free to work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity.

Has Religion Made

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Useful Contributions to Civilization?

by Bertrand Russell
My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of
untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to
civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle
eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am
prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.
The word religion is used nowadays in a very loose sense. Some people, under the influence of
extreme Protestantism, employ the word to denote any serious personal convictions as to morals or
the nature of the universe. This use of the word is quite unhistorical. Religion is primarily a social
phenomenon. Churches may owe their origin to teachers with strong individual convictions, but
these teachers have seldom had much influence upon the churches that they have founded, whereas
churches have had enormous influence upon the communities in which they flourished. To take the
case that is of most interest to members of Western civilization: the teaching of Christ, as it appears
in the Gospels, has had extraordinarily little to do with the ethics of Christians. The most important
thing about Christianity, from a social and historical point of view, is not Christ but the church, and if
we are to judge of Christianity as a social force we must not go to the Gospels for our material.
Christ taught that you should give your goods to the poor, that you should not fight, that you should
not go to church, and that you should not punish adultery. Neither Catholics nor Protestants have
shown any strong desire to follow His teaching in any of these respects. Some of the Franciscans, it
is true, attempted to teach the doctrine of apostolic poverty, but the Pope condemned them, and
their doctrine was declared heretical. Or, again, consider such a text as "Judge not, that ye be not
judged," and ask yourself what influence such a text has had upon the Inquisition and the Ku Klux
Klan.
What is true of Christianity is equally true of Buddhism. The Buddha was amiable and enlightened;
on his deathbed he laughed at his disciples for supposing that he was immortal. But the Buddhist
priesthood -- as it exists, for example, in Tibet -- has been obscurantist, tyrannous, and cruel in the
highest degree.
There is nothing accidental about this difference between a church and its founder. As soon as
absolute truth is supposed to be contained in the sayings of a certain man, there is a body of
experts to interpret his sayings, and these experts infallibly acquire power, since they hold the key
to truth. Like any other privileged caste, they use their power for their own advantage. They are,
however, in one respect worse than any other privileged caste, since it is their business to expound
an unchanging truth, revealed once for all in utter perfection, so that they become necessarily
opponents of all intellectual and moral progress. The church opposed Galileo and Darwin; in our own
day it opposes Freud. In the days of its greatest power it went further in its opposition to the
intellectual life. Pope Gregory the Great wrote to a certain bishop a letter beginning: "A report has
reached us which we cannot mention without a blush, that thou expoundest grammar to certain
friends." The bishop was compelled by pontifical authority to desist from this wicked labor, and
Latinity did not recover until the Renaissance. It is not only intellectually but also morally that
religion is pernicious. I mean by this that it teaches ethical codes which are not conducive to human
happiness. When, a few years ago, a plebiscite was taken in Germany as to whether the deposed
royal houses should still be allowed to enjoy their private property, the churches in Germany
officially stated that it would be contrary to the teaching of Christianity to deprive them of it. The
churches, as everyone knows, opposed the abolition of slavery as long as they dared, and with a few
well-advertised exceptions they oppose at the present day every movement toward economic
justice. The Pope has officially condemned Socialism.

Christianity and Sex

The worst feature of the Christian religion, however, is its attitude toward sex -- an attitude so
morbid and so unnatural that it can be understood only when taken in relation to the sickness of the
civilized world at the time the Roman Empire was decaying. We sometimes hear talk to the effect
that Christianity improved the status of women. This is one of the grossest perversions of history
that it is possible to make. Women cannot enjoy a tolerable position in society where it is considered

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of the utmost importance that they should not infringe a very rigid moral code. Monks have always
regarded Woman primarily as the temptress; they have thought of her mainly as the inspirer of
impure lusts. The teaching of the church has been, and still is, that virginity is best, but that for
those who find this impossible marriage is permissible. "It is better to marry than to burn," as St.
Paul puts it. By making marriage indissoluble, and by stamping out all knowledge of the ars amandi,
the church did what it could to secure that the only form of sex which it permitted should involve
very little pleasure and a great deal of pain. The opposition to birth control has, in fact, the same
motive: if a woman has a child a year until she dies worn out, it is not to be supposed that she will
derive much pleasure from her married life; therefore birth control must be discouraged.
The conception of Sin which is bound up with Christian ethics is one that does an extraordinary
amount of harm, since it affords people an outlet for their sadism which they believe to be
legitimate, and even noble. Take, for example, the question of the prevention of syphilis. It is known
that, by precautions taken in advance, the danger of contracting this disease can be made
negligible. Christians, however, object to the dissemination of knowledge of this fact, since they hold
it good that sinners should be punished. They hold this so good that they are even willing that
punishment should extend to the wives and children of sinners. There are in the world at the present
moment many thousands of children suffering from congenital syphilis who would never have been
born but for the desire of Christians to see sinners punished. I cannot understand how doctrines
leading us to this fiendish cruelty can be considered to have any good effects upon morals.
It is not only in regard to sexual behaviour but also in regard to knowledge on sex subjects that the
attitude of Christians is dangerous to human welfare. Every person who has taken the trouble to
study the question in an unbiased spirit knows that the artificial ignorance on sex subjects which
orthodox Christians attempt to enforce upon the young is extremely dangerous to mental and
physical health, and causes in those who pick up their knowledge by the way of "improper" talk, as
most children do, an attitude that sex is in itself indecent and ridiculous. I do not think there can be
any defense for the view that knowledge is ever undesirable. I should not put barriers in the way of
the acquisition of knowledge by anybody at any age. But in the particular case of sex knowledge
there are much weightier arguments in its favor than in the case of most other knowledge. A person
is much less likely to act wisely when he is ignorant than when he is instructed, and it is ridiculous to
give young people a sense of sin because they have a natural curiosity about an important matter.
Every boy is interested in trains. Suppose we told him that an interest in trains is wicked; suppose
we kept his eyes bandaged whenever he was in a train or on a railway station; suppose we never
allowed the word "train" to be mentioned in his presence and preserved an impenetrable mystery as
to the means by which he is transported from one place to another. The result would not be that he
would cease to be interested in trains; on the contrary, he would become more interested than ever
but would have a morbid sense of sin, because this interest had been represented to him as
improper. Every boy of active intelligence could by this means be rendered in a greater or less
degree neurasthenic. This is precisely what is done in the matter of sex; but, as sex is more
interesting than trains, the results are worse. Almost every adult in a Christian community is more
or less diseased nervously as a result of the taboo on sex knowledge when he or she was young.
And the sense of sin which is thus artificially implanted is one of the causes of cruelty, timidity, and
stupidity in later life. There is no rational ground of any sort or kind in keeping a child ignorant of
anything that he may wish to know, whether on sex or on any other matter. And we shall never get
a sane population until this fact is recognized in early education, which is impossible so long as the
churches are able to control educational politics.
Leaving these comparatively detailed objections on one side, it is clear that the fundamental
doctrines of Christianity demand a great deal of ethical perversion before they can be accepted. The
world, we are told, was created by a God who is both good and omnipotent. Before He created the
world He foresaw all the pain and misery that it would contain; He is therefore responsible for all of
it. It is useless to argue that the pain in the world is due to sin. In the first place, this is not true; it
is not sin that causes rivers to overflow their banks or volcanoes to erupt. But even if it were true, it
would make no difference. If I were going to beget a child knowing that the child was going to be a
homicidal maniac, I should be responsible for his crimes. If God knew in advance the sins of which
man would be guilty, He was clearly responsible for all the consequences of those sins when He
decided to create man. The usual Christian argument is that the suffering in the world is a
purification for sin and is therefore a good thing. This argument is, of course, only a rationalization
of sadism; but in any case it is a very poor argument. I would invite any Christian to accompany me

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to the children's ward of a hospital, to watch the suffering that is there being endured, and then to
persist in the assertion that those children are so morally abandoned as to deserve what they are
suffering. In order to bring himself to say this, a man must destroy in himself all feelings of mercy
and compassion. He must, in short, make himself as cruel as the God in whom he believes. No man
who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his ethical values unimpaired,
since he is always having to find excuses for pain and misery.

The Objections to Religion

The objections to religion are of two sorts -- intellectual and moral. The intellectual objection is that
there is no reason to suppose any religion true; the moral objection is that religious precepts date
from a time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities
which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow.
To take the intellectual objection first: there is a certain tendency in our practical age to consider
that it does not much matter whether religious teaching is true or not, since the important question
is whether it is useful. One question cannot, however, well be decided without the other. If we
believe the Christian religion, our notions of what is good will be different from what they will be if
we do not believe it. Therefore, to Christians, the effects of Christianity may seem good, while to
unbelievers they may seem bad. Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a
proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which
produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our
prejudices.
A certain kind of scientific candor is a very important quality, and it is one which can hardly exist in a
man who imagines that there are things which it is his duty to believe. We cannot, therefore, really
decide whether religion does good without investigating the question whether religion is true. To
Christians, Mohammedans, and Jews the most fundamental question involved in the truth of religion
is the existence of God. In the days when religion was still triumphant the word "God" had a
perfectly definite meaning; but as a result of the onslaughts of the Rationalists the word has become
paler and paler, until it is difficult to see what people mean when they assert that they believe in
God. Let us take, for purposes of argument, Matthew Arnold's definition: "A power not ourselves
that makes for righteousness." Perhaps we might make this even more vague and ask ourselves
whether we have any evidence of purpose in this universe apart from the purposes of living beings
on the surface of this planet.
The usual argument of religious people on this subject is roughly as follows: "I and my friends are
persons of amazing intelligence and virtue. It is hardly conceivable that so much intelligence and
virtue could have come about by chance. There must, therefore, be someone at least as intelligent
and virtuous as we are who set the cosmic machinery in motion with a view to producing Us." I am
sorry to say that I do not find this argument so impressive as it is found by those who use it. The
universe is large; yet, if we are to believe Eddington, there are probably nowhere else in the
universe beings as intelligent as men. If you consider the total amount of matter in the world and
compare it with the amount forming the bodies of intelligent beings, you will see that the latter
bears an almost infinitesimal proportion to the former. Consequently, even if it is enormously
improbable that the laws of chance will produce an organism capable of intelligence out of a casual
selection of atoms, it is nevertheless probable that there will be in the universe that very small
number of such organisms that we do in fact find.
Then again, considered as the climax to such a vast process, we do not really seem to me
sufficiently marvelous. Of course, I am aware that many divines are far more marvelous than I am,
and that I cannot wholly appreciate merits so far transcending my own. Nevertheless, even after
making allowances under this head, I cannot but think that Omnipotence operating through all
eternity might have produced something better. And then we have to reflect that even this result is
only a flash in the pan. The earth will not always remain habitable; the human race will die out, and
if the cosmic process is to justify itself hereafter it will have to do so elsewhere than on the surface
of our planet.. And even if this should occur, it must stop sooner or later. The second law of
thermodynamics makes it scarcely possible to doubt that the universe is running down, and that
ultimately nothing of the slightest interest will be possible anywhere. Of course, it is open to us to

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say that when that time comes God will wind up the machinery again; but if we do not say this, we
can base our assertion only upon faith, not upon one shred of scientific evidence. So far as scientific
evidence goes, the universe has crawled by slow stages to a somewhat pitiful result on this earth
and is going to crawl by still more pitiful stages to a condition of universal death. If this is to be
taken as evidence of a purpose, I can only say that the purpose is one that does not appeal to me. I
see no reason, therefore, to believe in any sort of God, however vague and however attenuated. I
leave on one side the old metaphysical arguments, since religious apologists themselves have
thrown them over.

The Soul and Immortality

The Christian emphasis on the individual soul has had a profound influence upon the ethics of
Christian communities. It is a doctrine fundamentally akin to that of the Stoics, arising as theirs did
in communities that could no longer cherish political hopes. The natural impulse of the vigorous
person of decent character is to attempt to do good, but if he is deprived of all political power and of
all opportunity to influence events, he will be deflected from his natural course and will decide that
the important thing is to be good. This is what happened to the early Christians; it led to a
conception of personal holiness as something quite independent of beneficient action, since holiness
had to be something that could be achieved by people who were impotent in action. Social virtue
came therefore to be excluded from Christian ethics. To this day conventional Christians think an
adulterer more wicked than a politician who takes bribes, although the latter probably does a
thousand times as much harm. The medieval conception of virtue, as one sees in their pictures, was
of something wishy-washy, feeble, and sentimental. The most virtuous man was the man who
retired from the world; the only men of action who were regarded as saints were those who wasted
the lives and substance of their subjects in fighting the Turks, like St. Louis. The church would never
regard a man as a saint because he reformed the finances, or the criminal law, or the judiciary. Such
mere contributions to human welfare would be regarded as of no importance. I do not believe there
is a single saint in the whole calendar whose saintship is due to work of public utility. With this
separation between the social and the moral person there went an increasing separation between
soul and body, which has survived in Christian metaphysics and in the systems derived from
Descartes. One may say, broadly speaking, that the body represents the social and public part of a
man, whereas the soul represents the private part. In emphasizing the soul, Christian ethics has
made itself completely individualistic. I think it is clear that the net result of all the centuries of
Christianity has been to make men more egotistic, more shut up in themselves, than nature made
them; for the impulses that naturally take a man outside the walls of his ego are those of sex,
parenthood, and patriotism or herd instinct. Sex the church did everything it could to decry and
degrade; family affection was decried by Christ himself and the bulk of his followers; and patriotism
could find no place among the subject populations of the Roman Empire. The polemic against the
family in the Gospels is a matter that has not received the attention it deserves. The church treats
the Mother of Christ with reverence, but He Himself showed little of this attitude. "Woman, what
have I to do with thee?" (John ii, 4) is His way of speaking to her. He says also that He has come to
set a man at variance against his father, the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law
against her mother-in-law, and that he that loveth father and mother more than Him is not worthy
of Him (Matt. x, 35-37). All this means the breakup of the biological family tie for the sake of creed
-- an attitude which had a great deal to do with the intolerance that came into the world with the
spread of Christianity.
This individualism culminated in the doctrine of the immortality of the individual soul, which was to
enjoy hereafter endless bliss or endless woe according to circumstances. The circumstances upon
which this momentous difference depended were somewhat curious. For example, if you died
immediately after a priest had sprinkled water upon you while pronouncing certain words, you
inherited eternal bliss; whereas, if after a long and virtuous life you happened to be struck by
lightning at a moment when you were using bad language because you had broken a bootlace, you
would inherit eternal torment. I do not say that the modern Protestant Christian believes this, nor
even perhaps the modern Catholic Christian who has not been adequately instructed in theology;
but I do say that this is the orthodox doctrine and was firmly believed until recent times. The
Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptize Indian infants and then immediately dash their brains
out: by this means they secured that these infants went to Heaven. No orthodox Christian can find
any logical reason for condemning their action, although all nowadays do so. In countless ways the

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doctrine of personal immortality in its Christian form has had disastrous effects upon morals, and
the metaphysical separation of soul and body has had disastrous effects upon philosophy.

Sources of Intolerance
The intolerance that spread over the world with the advent of Christianity is one of the most curious
features, due, I think, to the Jewish belief in righteousness and in the exclusive reality of the Jewish
God. Why the Jews should have had these peculiarities I do not know. They seem to have developed
during the captivity as a reaction against the attempt to absorb the Jews into alien populations.
However that may be, the Jews, and more especially the prophets, invented emphasis upon personal
righteousness and the idea that it is wicked to tolerate any religion except one. These two ideas
have had an extraordinarily disastrous effect upon Occidental history. The church made much of the
persecution of Christians by the Roman State before the time of Constantine. This persecution,
however, was slight and intermittent and wholly political. At all times, from the age of Constantine to
the end of the seventeenth century, Christians were far more fiercely persecuted by other Christians
than they ever were by the Roman emperors. Before the rise of Christianity this persecuting attitude
was unknown to the ancient world except among the Jews. If you read, for example, Herodotus, you
find a bland and tolerant account of the habits of the foreign nations he visited. Sometimes, it is
true, a peculiarly barbarous custom may shock him, but in general he is hospitable to foreign gods
and foreign customs. He is not anxious to prove that people who call Zeus by some other name will
suffer eternal punishment and ought to be put to death in order that their punishment may begin as
soon as possible. This attitude has been reserved for Christians. It is true that the modern Christian
is less robust, but that is not thanks to Christianity; it is thanks to the generations of freethinkers,
who from the Renaissance to the present day, have made Christians ashamed of many of their
traditional beliefs. It is amusing to hear the modern Christian telling you how mild and rationalistic
Christianity really is and ignoring the fact that all its mildness and rationalism is due to the teaching
of men who in their own day were persecuted by all orthodox Christians. Nobody nowadays believes
that the world was created in 4004 b.c.; but not so very long ago skepticism on this point was
thought an abominable crime. My great-great-grandfather, after observing the depth of the lava on
the slopes of Etna, came to the conclusion that the world must be older than the orthodox supposed
and published this opinion in a book. For this offense he was cut by the county and ostracized from
society. Had he been a man in humbler circumstances, his punishment would doubtless have been
more severe. It is no credit to the orthodox that they do not now believe all the absurdities that
were believed 150 years ago. The gradual emasculation of the Christian doctrine has been effected
in spite of the most vigorous resistance, and solely as the result of the onslaughts of freethinkers.

The Doctrine of Free Will

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

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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

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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.

The Idea of Righteousness

The third psychological impulse which is embodied in religion is that which has led to the conception
of righteousness. I am aware that many freethinkers treat this conception with great respect and
hold that it should be preserved in spite of the decay of dogmatic religion. I cannot agree with them
on this point. The psychological analysis of the idea of righteousness seems to me to show that it is
rooted in undesirable passions and ought not to be strengthened by the imprimatur of reason.
Righteousness and unrighteousness must be taken together; it is impossible to stress the one
without stressing the other also. Now, what is "unrighteousness" in practise? It is in practise
behaviour of a kind disliked by the herd. By calling it unrighteousness, and by arranging an
elaborate system of ethics around this conception, the herd justifies itself in wreaking punishment
upon the objects of its own dislike, while at the same time, since the herd is righteous by definition,
it enhances its own self-esteem at the very moment when it lets loose its impulse to cruelty. This is
the psychology of lynching, and of the other ways in which criminals are punished. The essence of
the conception of righteousness, therefore, is to afford an outlet for sadism by cloaking cruelty as
justice.
But, it will be said, the account you have been giving of righteousness is wholly inapplicable to the
Hebrew prophets, who, after all, on your own showing, invented the idea. There is truth in this:
righteousness in the mouths of the Hebrew prophets meant what was approved by them and
Yahweh. One finds the same attitude expressed in the Acts of the Apostles, where the Apostles
began a pronouncement with the words "For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us" (Acts xv,
28). This kind of individual certainty as to God's tastes and opinions cannot, however, be made the
basis of any institution. That has always been the difficulty with which Protestantism has had to
contend: a new prophet could maintain that his revelation was more authentic than those of his
predecessors, and there was nothing in the general outlook of Protestantism to show that this claim
was invalid. Consequently Protestantism split into innumerable sects, which weakened one another;
and there is reason to suppose that a hundred years hence Catholicism will be the only effective
representation of the Christian faith. In the Catholic Church inspiration such as the prophets enjoyed
has its place; but it is recognized that phenomena which look rather like genuine divine inspiration
may be inspired by the Devil, and it is the business of the church to discriminate, just as it is the

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business of the art connoisseur to know a genuine Leonardo from a forgery. In this way revelation
becomes institutionalized at the same time. Righteousness is what the church approves, and
unrighteousness is what it disapproves. Thus the effective part of the conception of righteousness is
a justification of herd antipathy.
It would seem, therefore, that the three human impulses embodied in religion are fear, conceit, and
hatred. The purpose of religion, one may say, is to give an air of respectability to these passions,
provided they run in certain channels. It is because these passions make, on the whole, for human
misery that religion is a force for evil, since it permits men to indulge these passions without
restraint, where but for its sanction they might, at least to a certain degree, control them.
I can imagine at this point an objection, not likely to be urged perhaps by most orthodox believers
but nevertheless worthy to be examined. Hatred and fear, it may be said, are essential human
characteristics; mankind always has felt them and always will. The best that you can do with them, I
may be told, is to direct them into certain channels in which they are less harmful than they would
be in certain other channels. A Christian theologian might say that their treatment by the church in
analogous to its treatment of the sex impulse, which it deplores. It attempts to render
concupiscence innocuous by confining it within the bounds of matrimony. So, it may be said, if
mankind must inevitably feel hatred, it is better to direct this hatred against those who are really
harmful, and this is precisely what the church does by its conception of righteousness.
To this contention there are two replies -- one comparatively superficial; the other going to the root
of the matter. The superficial reply is that the church's conception of righteousness is not the best
possible; the fundamental reply is that hatred and fear can, with our present psychological
knowledge and our present industrial technique, be eliminated altogether from human life.
To take the first point first. The church's conception of righteousness is socially undesirable in
various ways -- first and foremost in its depriciation of intelligence and science. This defect is
inherited from the Gospels. Christ tells us to become as little children, but little children cannot
understand the differential calculus, or the principles of currency, or the modern methods of
combating disease. To acquire such knowledge is no part of our duty, according to the church. The
church no longer contends that knowledge is in itself sinful, though it did so in its palmy days; but
the acquisition of knowledge, even though not sinful, is dangerous, since it may lead to a pride of
intellect, and hence to a questioning of the Christian dogma. Take, for example, two men, one of
whom has stamped out yellow fever throughout some large region in the tropics but has in the
course of his labors had occasional relations with women to whom he was not married; while the
other has been lazy and shiftless, begetting a child a year until his wife died of exhaustion and
taking so little care of his children that half of them died from preventable causes, but never
indulging in illicit sexual intercourse. Every good Christian must maintain that the second of these
men is more virtuous than the first. Such an attitude is, of course, superstitious and totally contrary
to reason. Yet something of this absurdity is inevitable so long as avoidance of sin is thought more
important than positive merit, and so long as the importance of knowledge as a help to a useful life
is not recognized.
The second and more fundamental objection to the utilization of fear and hatred practised by the
church is that these emotions can now be almost wholly eliminated from human nature by
educational, economic, and political reforms. The educational reforms must be the basis, since men
who feel hatred and fear will also admire these emotions and wish to perpetuate them, although this
admiration and wish will probably be unconscious, as it is in the ordinary Christian. An education
designed to eliminate fear is by no means difficult to create. It is only necessary to treat a child with
kindness, to put him in an environment where initiative is possible without disastrous results, and to
save him from contact with adults who have irrational terrors, whether of the dark, of mice, or of
social revolution. A child must also not be subject to severe punishment, or to threats, or to grave
and excessive reproof. To save a child from hatred is a somewhat more elaborate business.
Situations arousing jealousy must be very carefully avoided by means of scrupulous and exact
justice as between different children. A child must feel himself the object of warm affection on the
part of some at least of the adults with whom he has to do, and he must not be thwarted in his
natural activities and curiosities except when danger to life or health is concerned. In particular,
there must be no taboo on sex knowledge, or on conversation about matters which conventional

37

people consider improper. If these simple precepts are observed from the start, the child will be
fearless and friendly.
On entering adult life, however, a young person so educated will find himself or herself plunged into
a world full of injustice, full of cruelty, full of preventable misery. The injustice, the cruelty, and the
misery that exist in the modern world are an inheritance from the past, and their ultimate source is
economic, since life-and-death competition for the means of subsistence was in former days
inevitable. It is not inevitable in our age. With our present industrial technique we can, if we choose,
provide a tolerable subsistence for everybody. We could also secure that the world's population
should be stationary if we were not prevented by the political influence of churches which prefer war,
pestilence, and famine to contraception. The knowledge exists by which universal happiness can be
secured; the chief obstacle to its utilization for that purpose is the teaching of religion. Religion
prevents our children from having a rational education; religion prevents us from removing the
fundamental causes of war; religion prevents us from teaching the ethic of scientific co-operation in
place of the old fierce doctrines of sin and punishment. It is possible that mankind is on the
threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the
door, and this dragon is religion.

Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic?
A Plea For Tolerance In The Face Of New Dogmas
by Bertrand Russell (1947)
I speak as one who was intended by my father to be brought up as a Rationalist. He was quite as
much of a Rationalist as I am, but he died when I was three years old, and the Court of Chancery
decided that I was to have the benefits of a Christian education.
I think perhaps the Court of Chancery might have regretted that since. It does not seem to have
done as much good as they hoped. Perhaps you may say that it would be rather a pity if Christian
education were to cease, because you would then get no more Rationalists.
They arise chiefly out of reaction to a system of education which considers it quite right that a father
should decree that his son should be brought up as a Muggletonian, we will say, or brought up on
any other kind of nonsense, but he must on no account be brought up to think rationally. When I
was young that was considered to be illegal.
Sin And The Bishops
Since I became a Rationalist I have found that there is still considerable scope in the world for the
practical importance of a rationalist outlook, not only in matters of geology, but in all sorts of
practical matters, such as divorce and birth control, and a question which has come up quite
recently, artificial insemination, where bishops tell us that something is gravely sinful, but it is only
gravely sinful because there is some text in the Bible about it. It is not gravely sinful because it does
anybody harm, and that is not the argument. As long as you can say, and as long as you can
persuade Parliament to go on saying, that a thing must not be done solely because there is some
text in the Bible about it, so long obviously there is great need of Rationalism in practice.
As you may know, I got into great trouble in the United States solely because, on some practical
issues, I considered that the ethical advice given in the Bible was not conclusive, and that on some
points one should act differently from what the Bible says. On this ground it was decreed by a Law
Court that I was not a fit person to teach in any university in the United States, so that I have some
practical ground for preferring Rationalism to other outlooks.

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Don't Be Too Certain!

The question of how to define Rationalism is not altogether an easy one. I do not think that you
could define it by rejection of this or that Christian dogma. It would be perfectly possible to be a
complete and absolute Rationalist in the true sense of the term and yet accept this or that dogma.
The question is how to arrive at your opinions and not what your opinions are. The thing in which we
believe is the supremacy of reason. If reason should lead you to orthodox conclusions, well and
good; you are still a Rationalist. To my mind the essential thing is that one should base one's
arguments upon the kind of grounds that are accepted in science, and one should not regard
anything that one accepts as quite certain, but only as probable in a greater or a less degree. Not to
be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.
Proof of God
Here there comes a practical question which has often troubled me. Whenever I go into a foreign
country or a prison or any similar place they always ask me what is my religion.
I never know whether I should say "Agnostic" or whether I should say "Atheist". It is a very difficult
question and I daresay that some of you have been troubled by it. As a philosopher, if I were
speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an
Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there
is not a God.
On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I
ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I
ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
None of us would seriously consider the possibility that all the gods of homer really exist, and yet if
you were to set to work to give a logical demonstration that Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, and the rest of
them did not exist you would find it an awful job. You could not get such proof.
Therefore, in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say
that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those
gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same
line.
Skepticism
There is exactly the same degree of possibility and likelihood of the existence of the Christian God as
there is of the existence of the Homeric God. I cannot prove that either the Christian God or the
Homeric gods do not exist, but I do not think that their existence is an alternative that is sufficiently
probable to be worth serious consideration. Therefore, I suppose that that on these documents that
they submit to me on these occasions I ought to say "Atheist", although it has been a very difficult
problem, and sometimes I have said one and sometimes the other without any clear principle by
which to go.
When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much
more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight
than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and
one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter
skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless.
Persecution
On must remember that some things are very much more probable than others and may be so
probable that it is not worth while to remember in practice that they are not wholly certain, except
when it comes to questions of persecution.

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If it comes to burning somebody at the stake for not believing it, then it is worth while to remember
that after all he may be right, and it is not worth while to persecute him.
In general, if a man says, for instance, that the earth is flat, I am quite willing that he should
propagate his opinion as hard as he likes. He may, of course, be right but I do not think he is. In
practice you will, I think, do better to assume that the earth is round, although, of course, you may
be mistaken. Therefore, I do not think we should go in for complete skepticism, but for a doctrine of
degrees of probability.
I think that, on the whole, that is the kind of doctrine that the world needs. The world has become
very full of new dogmas. he old dogmas have perhaps decayed, but new dogmas have arisen and,
on the whole, I think that a dogma is harmful in proportion to its novelty. New dogmas are much
worse that old ones.

A Free Man's Worship

by Bertrand Russell
A brief introduction: "A Free Man's Worship" (first published as "The Free Man's Worship" in Dec.
1903) is perhaps Bertrand Russell's best known and most reprinted essay. Its mood and language
have often been explained, even by Russell himself, as reflecting a particular time in his life; "it
depend(s)," he wrote in 1929, "upon a metaphysic which is more platonic than that which I now
believe in." Yet the essay sounds many characteristic Russellian themes and preoccupations and
deserves consideration -- and further serious study -- as an historical landmark of early-twentiethcentury European thought. For a scholarly edition with some documentation, see Volume 12 of The
Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, entitled Contemplation and Action, 1902-14 (London, 1985;
now published by Routledge).
To Dr. Faustus in his study Mephistopheles told the history of the Creation, saying:
"The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow wearisome; for, after all, did he not
deserve their praise? Had he not given them endless joy? Would it not be more amusing to obtain
undeserved praise, to be worshipped by beings whom he tortured? He smiled inwardly, and resolved
that the great drama should be performed.
"For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At length it began to take
shape, the central mass threw off planets, the planets cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains
heaved and tossed, from black masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid crust. And
now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the ocean, and developed rapidly in the fructifying
warmth into vast forest trees, huge ferns springing from the damp mould, sea monsters breeding,
fighting, devouring, and passing away. And from the monsters, as the play unfolded itself, Man was
born, with the power of thought, the knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship.
And Man saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world, that all is struggling to snatch, at any
cost, a few brief moments of life before Death's inexorable decree. And Man said: 'There is a hidden
purpose, could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for we must reverence something, and in
the visible world there is nothing worthy of reverence.' And Man stood aside from the struggle,
resolving that God intended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts. And when he followed
the instincts which God had transmitted to him from his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin,
and asked God to forgive him. But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until he invented
a divine Plan by which God's wrath was to have been appeased. And seeing the present was bad, he
made it yet worse, that thereby the future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the strength
that enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible. And God smiled; and when he saw that
Man had become perfect in renunciation and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which
crashed into Man's sun; and all returned again to nebula.
"'Yes,' he murmured, 'it was a good play; I will have it performed again.'"

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Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science
presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home.
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his
origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental
collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an
individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration,
all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar
system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the
debris of a universe in ruins -- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain,
that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths,
only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.
How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his
aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions
of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still
to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all
the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man
is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To
him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his
superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.
The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of his impotence before the powers of Nature; but
having in himself nothing that he respects more than Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before
his gods, without inquiring whether they are worthy of his worship. Pathetic and very terrible is the
long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of
placating the jealous gods: surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is most precious has
been freely given, their lust for blood must be appeased, and more will not be required. The religion
of Moloch -- as such creeds may be generically called -- is in essence the cringing submission of the
slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master deserves no adulation.
Since the independence of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely worshipped, and
receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain.
But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world begins to be felt; and worship, if
it is not to cease, must be given to gods of another kind than those created by the savage. Some,
though they feel the demands of the ideal, will still consciously reject them, still urging that naked
Power is worthy of worship. Such is the attitude inculcated in God's answer to Job out of the
whirlwind: the divine power and knowledge are paraded, but of the divine goodness there is no hint.
Such also is the attitude of those who, in our own day, base their morality upon the struggle for
survival, maintaining that the survivors are necessarily the fittest. But others, not content with an
answer so repugnant to the moral sense, will adopt the position which we have become accustomed
to regard as specially religious, maintaining that, in some hidden manner, the world of fact is really
harmonious with the world of ideals. Thus Man creates God, all-powerful and all-good, the mystic
unity of what is and what should be.
But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our judgment to it, there is an
element of slavishness from which our thoughts must be purged. For in all things it is well to exalt
the dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of non-human Power. When
we have realised that Power is largely bad, that man, with his knowledge of good and evil, is but a
helpless atom in a world which has no such knowledge, the choice is again presented to us: Shall we
worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our God exist and be evil, or shall he be
recognised as the creation of our own conscience?
The answer to this question is very momentous, and affects profoundly our whole morality. The
worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us, is
the result of failure to maintain our own ideals against a hostile universe: it is itself a prostrate
submission to evil, a sacrifice of our best to Moloch. If strength indeed is to be respected, let us
respect rather the strength of those who refuse that false "recognition of facts" which fails to
recognise that facts are often bad. Let us admit that, in the world we know, there are many things
that would be better otherwise, and that the ideals to which we do and must adhere are not realised
in the realm of matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal of perfection

41

which life does not permit us to attain, though none of these things meet with the approval of the
unconscious universe. If Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In this lies
Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good,
to respect only the heaven which inspires the insight of our best moments. In action, in desire, we
must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free,
free from our fellow-men, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free
even, while we live, from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of faith which enables
us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let us descend, in action, into the world of fact,
with that vision always before us.
When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred
of the gods, seems necessary to the assertion of freedom. To defy with Promethean constancy a
hostile universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively hated, to refuse no pain that the
malice of Power can invent, appears to be the duty of all who will not bow before the inevitable. But
indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil world; and in
the fierceness of desire from which rebellion springs there is a kind of self-assertion which it is
necessary for the wise to overcome. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our
desires; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the submission of our desires, but
not of our thoughts. From the submission of our desires springs the virtue of resignation; from the
freedom of our thoughts springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the vision of beauty by
which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant world. But the vision of beauty is possible only to
unfettered contemplation, to thoughts not weighted by the load of eager wishes; and thus Freedom
comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods
that are subject to the mutations of Time.
Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of evil, yet Christianity, in
preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding that of the Promethean philosophy of rebellion. It must
be admitted that, of the things we desire, some, though they prove impossible, are yet real goods;
others, however, as ardently longed for, do not form part of a fully purified ideal. The belief that
what must be renounced is bad, though sometimes false, is far less often false than untamed
passion supposes; and the creed of religion, by providing a reason for proving that it is never false,
has been the means of purifying our hopes by the discovery of many austere truths.
But there is in resignation a further good element: even real goods, when they are unattainable,
ought not to be fretfully desired. To every man comes, sooner or later, the great renunciation. For
the young, there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a passionate
will, and yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice
of duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however
beautiful may be the things we crave, Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage,
when misfortune comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts
from vain regrets. This degree of submission to Power is not only just and right: it is the very gate of
wisdom.
But passive renunciation is not the whole of wisdom; for not by renunciation alone can we build a
temple for the worship of our own ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the temple appear in the
realm of imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of reason, and in the
golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow,
remote from the fear of change, remote from the failures and disenchantments of the world of fact.
In the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will shape itself in our hearts, giving at
once a touchstone to judge the world about us, and an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs
whatever is not incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple.
Except for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a cavern of darkness to be traversed
before that temple can be entered. The gate of the cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the
gravestones of abandoned hopes. There Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of untamed
desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from the empire of Fate. But out of the cavern
the Gate of Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a
new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to gladden the pilgrim's heart.

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When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both to resign ourselves to the
outward rules of Fate and to recognise that the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it
becomes possible at last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to transmute it
in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all
the multiform facts of the world -- in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the
events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death -- the insight of creative idealism
can find the reflection of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its
subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of Nature. The more evil the material with which it deals,
the more thwarting to untrained desire, the greater is its achievement in inducing the reluctant rock
to yield up its hidden treasures, the prouder its victory in compelling the opposing forces to swell the
pageant of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the proudest, the most triumphant; for it builds its
shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest
mountain; from its impregnable watchtowers, his camps and arsenals, his columns and forts, are all
revealed; within its walls the free life continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair,
and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles
of beauty. Happy those sacred ramparts, thrice happy the dwellers on that all-seeing eminence.
Honour to those brave warriors who, through countless ages of warfare, have preserved for us the
priceless heritage of liberty, and have kept undefiled by sacrilegious invaders the home of the
unsubdued.
But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more or less obvious shapes, is
present always and everywhere in life. In the spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable
pain, and in the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a
feeling of the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some
strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In these moments
of insight, we lose all eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling and striving for petty ends, all
care for the little trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of day by day;
we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark
ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill blast
breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated upon
the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the
whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with
the powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation
into the overmastering beauty of human existence. From that awful encounter of the soul with the
outer world, enunciation, wisdom, and charity are born; and with their birth a new life begins. To
take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be -- Death
and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of Man before the blind hurry of
the universe from vanity to vanity -- to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.
This is the reason why the Past has such magical power. The beauty of its motionless and silent
pictures is like the enchanted purity of late autumn, when the leaves, though one breath would
make them fall, still glow against the sky in golden glory. The Past does not change or strive; like
Duncan, after life's fitful fever it sleeps well; what was eager and grasping, what was petty and
transitory, has faded away, the things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the
night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is unendurable; but to a soul which has conquered Fate
it is the key of religion.
The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison with the forces of Nature. The
slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he
finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great as they are,
to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendour, is greater still. And such thought makes
us free men; we no longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjection, but we absorb it, and
make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of
temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things -- this is emancipation, and this is the free
man's worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued
by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of Time.
United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds
that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man
is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain,
towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they

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march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very
brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours
to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the
pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair.
Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need -of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us
remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy as
ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the
immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of
ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready
with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.
Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.
Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for
Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of
darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little
day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands
have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny
that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his
knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his
own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.

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