Bertrand Russell 作品集简介3.docx

The Study of Mathematics (1902)edit Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty.To those who inquire as to the purpose of mathematics, the usual answer will be that it facilitates the making of machines, the travelling from place to place, and the victory over foreign nations, whether in war or commerce. The reasoning faculty itself is generally conceived, by those who urge its cultivation, as merely a means for the avoidance of pitfalls and a help in the discovery of rules for the guidance of practical life.Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement.Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.The rules of logic are to mathematics what those of structure are to architecture.Mathematics takes us still further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the world, but every possible world, must conform.A Free Mans Worship (1903)edit Brief and powerless is Mans life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.That Man is the product of causes that 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 individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors 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 Mans 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 souls habitation henceforth be safely built.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.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 fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death.Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.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.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.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.Brief and powerless is Mans life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.1910seditThe number of syllables in the English names of finite integers tends to increase as the integers grow larger, and must gradually increase indefinitely, since only a finite number of names can be made with a given finite number of syllables. Hence the names of some integers must consist of at least nineteen syllables, and among these there must be a least. Hence the least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables must denote a definite integer; in fact, it denotes 111, 777. But the least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables is itself a name consisting of eighteen syllables; hence the least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables can be named in eighteen syllables, which is a contradiction. This contradiction was suggested to us by Mr. G. G. Berry of the Bodleian Library.Principia Mathematica, written with Alfred North Whitehead, (1910), vol. I, Introduction, ch. II: The Theory of Logical Types. This is a statement of theBerry paradox.I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe because, likeSpinozas God, it wont love us in return.Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, March, 1912, The above proposition is occasionally useful.as quoted in Gaithers Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2012), p. 1318.Life seems to me essentially passion, conflict, rage. It is only intellect that keeps me sane; perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling.Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell in 1912, as quoted in Clark The life of Bertrand Russell (1976), p. 174.The above proposition is occasionally useful.Comment after the proof that 1+1=2, completed in Principia Mathematica, Volume II, 1st edition (1912), page 86.When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.Theory of Knowledge (1913).People are said to believe in God, or to disbelieve in Adam and Eve. But in such cases what is believed or disbelieved is that there is an entity answering a certain description. This, which can be believed or disbelieved is quite different from the actual entity (if any) which does answer the description. Thus the matter of belief is, in all cases, different in kind from the matter of sensation or presentation, and error is in no way analogous to hallucination. A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.On the Nature of Acquaintance: Neutral Monism (1914).In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word “experience” have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word. It is to be feared, however, that if the word is avoided the confusions of thought with which it has been associated may persist.On the Nature of Acquaintance: Neutral Monism (1914).Of all evils of war the greatest is the purely spiritual evil: the hatred, the injustice, the repudiation of truth, the artificial conflict.Justice in War-Time (1916), p. 27.No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.Justice in War-Time (1916), p. 70.Righteousness cannot be born until self-righteousness is dead.Justice in War-Time (1916), p. 192.It seems clear to me that marriage ought to be constituted by children, and relations not involving children ought to be ignored by the law and treated as indifferent by public opinion. It is only through children that relations cease to be a purely private matter.Letter to Ottoline Morrell, January 30, 1916.I dont care for the applause one gets by saying what others are thinking; I want actually to change peoples thoughts. Power over peoples minds is the main personal desire of my life; and this sort of power is not acquired by saying popular things.Letter to Lucy Martin Donnelly, February 10, 1916.I dont like the spirit of socialism I think freedom is the basis of everything.Letter to Constance Malleson (Colette), September 29, 1916.One must look into hell before one has any right to speak of heaven.Letter to Colette ONiel, October 23, 1916; published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914-1970, p. 87.I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of all the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race I am ashamed to belong to such a species.Letter to Colette, December 28, 1916. It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.How much good it would do if one could exterminate the human race.A characteristic saying of Russell, reported in a letter of 8 October 1917 to Lady Ottoline Morrell, by Huxley (p. 395); Bibliography of Bertrand Russell (Routledge, 2013).It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.Principles of Social Reconstruction (1917).The principal source of the harm done by the State is the fact that power is its chief end.Principles of Social Reconstruction (1917).That I, a funny little gesticulating animal on two legs, should stand beneath the stars and declaim in a passion about myrights it seems so laughable, so out of all proportion. Much better, like Archimedes, to be killed because of absorption in eternal things.There is a possibility in human minds of something mysterious as the night-wind, deep as the sea, calm as the stars, and strong as Death, a mystic contemplation, the intellectual love of God. Those who have known it cannot believe in wars any longer, or in any kind of hot struggle. If I could give to others what has come to me in this way, I could make them too feel the futility of fighting. But I do not know how to communicate it: when I speak, they stare, applaud, or smile, but do not understand.Letter to Miss Rinder, July 30, 1918.What a queer work the Bible is.Some texts are very funny. Deut. XXIV, 5: When a man hath taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war, neither shall he be charged with any business: but he shall be free at home one year, and shall cheer up his wife which he hath taken. I should never have guessed cheer up was a Biblical expression. Here is anoth