Sceptical Essays — Chapter-by-Chapter Outline

Author: Bertrand Russell

First published: 1928

Edition covered: Routledge Classics, 2nd edition (Routledge, London and New York, 2004; 240 pp., ISBN 9780415325080), whose table of contents — 17 essays in the order below — is identical to the first edition, Sceptical Essays (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1928; 251 pp.) and to the American first edition (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1928). The essay list and order were verified against three independent sources: the publisher's table of contents on the Routledge book page, the full text of a 1928 Norton printing scanned on the Internet Archive (its printed contents page lists all 17 essays), and the HathiTrust catalog record of the 1928 Allen & Unwin edition. The British spelling "Sceptical" in the title is retained in every edition, including the Routledge Classics reprint; the British editions spell the seventh essay "Behaviourism and Values" (the Routledge contents list prints "Behavourism and Values", a typographical error), while American editions print "Behaviorism and Values". Individual essays in this outline use American spelling for that title, with the British variant noted.

Central thesis

The book proposes a doctrine Russell admits will appear "wildly paradoxical and subversive": that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. Far from being a counsel of paralysis, this doctrine is offered as the discipline that makes rational action, tolerance, and happiness possible. The collection applies the doctrine case by case: to dreams and myths (personal, national, and cosmic), to science itself, to philosophy, to morality, to education, to freedom, and to politics.

Russell is careful to define the scope of the scepticism he recommends. He is "a British Whig, with a British love of compromise and moderation" — he rejects the heroic Pyrrhonism of the story about Pyrrho walking past his teacher stuck in a ditch, and he accepts common-sense beliefs in practice and any well-established result of science as "sufficiently probable to afford a basis for rational action". His scepticism reduces to three rules: (1) when experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) when experts are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; (3) when experts hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man should suspend judgment.

Because the opinions for which people are willing to fight and persecute all fall into the classes this scepticism condemns, a little rational doubt would transform social life. The book's recurring claim is that irrational certainty is the engine of cruelty: "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." The cure is what Russell variously calls the scientific temper, the will to doubt (his deliberate inversion of William James's "will to believe"), and truthfulness as opposed to truth.

Can men govern their lives by beliefs proportioned to the evidence, and would the spread of rational scepticism — the habit of believing a proposition only when there is ground for believing it — actually improve human life?

Chapter 1 — Introduction: On the Value of Scepticism

Central question

Why is it undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true — and what would happen if that doctrine were widely accepted?

Main argument

The doctrine and its limits. Russell states his thesis with deliberate irony: the doctrine would "completely transform our social life and our political system; since both are at present faultless, this must weigh against it", and it would 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". He then distinguishes his middle position from the "heroic scepticism" of Pyrrho, founder of Pyrrhonism, whose story Russell tells as a warning: seeing his philosophy teacher with his head stuck in a ditch, Pyrrho walked on, holding that there was no sufficient ground for thinking he would do any good by pulling the old man out. Russell's own test case is the predicted eclipse of the moon: he thinks it worth while to look and see whether it is taking place. The three rules about expert opinion follow.

Passion as a symptom of irrationality. "The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists." Russell illustrates with England's post-1920 unemployment: one party blamed the wickedness of trade unions, another the confusion on the Continent, while the third-party view attributing most of the trouble to the Bank of England's policy of raising the value of the pound contained most of the experts — but no one else, because it did not minister to anyone's passions. To produce converts one would have had to prove the Bank of England wicked, hostile to trade unionism, or "immoral". A second illustration is the dispute over whether socialism is contrary to human nature: the only scientific discussion Russell knows is W. H. R. Rivers's posthumous Psychology and Politics, which concludes that the only way of finding out whether socialism is contrary to European human nature is to try it.

"Sin is geographical." Surveying marriage customs — the Indian horror of widows' remarriage, Catholic divorce, easy American divorce with condemnation of extra-conjugal relations, Mohammedan polygamy, and the Tibetan custom of several husbands for one woman — Russell notes that no one attempts to show that his own country's customs contribute more to happiness. Westermarck's History of Human Marriage shows that almost every kind of custom has existed, and "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". From this it is a small step to the conclusion that "the notion of 'sin' is illusory, and that the cruelty habitually practiced in punishing it is unnecessary" — an unwelcome conclusion because "the infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell."

Nationalism and collective insanity. A scientific historian 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". The psychology of the lunatic who believes he is King of England is exactly the psychology of the nation that asserts its own greatness: the difference is only that the nation's delusion wins adherents. "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."

Belief and action. Psychologists agree that intellectual factors play a much smaller part in action than the plain man supposes. Most of an ordinary day — getting up, breakfast, catching the train, reading the newspaper — runs on habit; arithmetic rules are "habits of his body, like those of a tennis player". But "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 religious and political actions are associated with beliefs. On the question of how far beliefs rest on evidence, Russell introduces two complementary processes: rationalizing (Freudian — inventing rational grounds for an irrational decision) and irrationalizing (a converse process, chiefly in English-speaking countries — the unconscious makes a sound selfish computation while the conscious mind invents high-sounding public-spirited phrases). The concept of shrewdness (unconscious reason) explains why "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" — the early Quaker shopkeepers who refused to bargain grew rich. Since education cannot teach shrewdness or virtue, the practical task is to teach rationality, meaning "a scientific habit of mind in forecasting the effects of our actions".

The limits of rationality. Rationality should not invade everything. Leibniz, who told a correspondent he withdrew his marriage offer because the lady asked for time to consider, was rational but unadmirable. Russell's governing example is Euripides' The Trojan Women at the Old Vic in 1919: the audience wept at the killing of Astyanax yet had voted for governments prolonging the blockade of Germany and imposing the blockade of Russia, which killed "immense numbers of children" — the same cruelty on a scale Euripides never imagined. The problem is to keep "the lover and the poet, without the lunatic": the instinctive apparatus has two parts, one tending to further our own life and that of our descendants (joy of life, love, art) and one tending to thwart rivals (competition, patriotism, war). "Conventional morality does everything to suppress the first and encourage the second. True morality would do the exact opposite." Our dealings with those we love can be left to instinct; "it is our dealings with those whom we hate that ought to be brought under the dominion of reason."

Key ideas

• The central doctrine: it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
• The three rules of expert opinion: unanimity cannot guarantee certainty; disagreement rules out certainty for the non-expert; when experts suspend judgment, the ordinary man should too.
• Passionate belief is the sign of ungrounded belief, not of conviction — "the passion is the measure of the holder's lack of rational conviction".
• Comparative study of customs (Westermarck) dissolves the absoluteness of local moral codes: "sin is geographical".
• The collective delusions of nations follow the laws of individual insanity, with the difference that nothing short of war can compel a nation to submit to reason.
• Belief governs only a small part of action, but it governs the most important part — religious and political action.
• Rationalizing (Freud) and irrationalizing (Russell's coinage for Anglo-Saxon practice) both separate stated reasons from real causes.
• Rationality has limits: the lover and the poet must survive; only our dealings with those we hate should be brought under the dominion of reason.

Key takeaway

Scepticism is not the enemy of action or emotion but the discipline that strips away the myths — about ourselves, our nations, and our sins — behind which cruelty operates, and it would "absolutely revolutionize human life" if taken seriously.

Chapter 2 — Dreams and Facts

Central question

How far are our beliefs really derived from rational grounds, and what correctives exist for the myth-making faculty of the human mind?

Main argument

Desire as the source of belief. "Man is essentially a dreamer, wakened sometimes for a moment by some peculiarly obtrusive element in the outer world, but lapsing again quickly into the happy somnolence of imagination." Freud showed that night dreams are pictured wish-fulfilment and said the same of day-dreams — "and he might have included the day-dreams which we call beliefs". Russell offers three ways of demonstrating the non-rational origin of convictions: psycho-analysis (starting from the insane and hysterical), the sceptical philosopher (showing how feeble the rational evidence is even for cherished beliefs), and common observation of men — the way he chooses.

The comforting beliefs of savages and citizens. Savages are not groping in conscious ignorance: they have innumerable beliefs that control their actions — that eating the flesh of an animal or warrior transfers its virtues, that pronouncing the chief's name is fatal sacrilege (so that a king named John would compel the words "jonquil" and "dungeon" to become "George-quil" and "dun-george"), that incantations or small fires bring rain, that the slain man's ghost pursues the slayer and can be misled by disguise. The belief in the avenging ghost "has obviously originated from those who feared murder, the second from those who had committed it" — the belief system is a projection of both parties' wishes. Russell cites Frazer's Folk-Lore in the Old Testament ("The Mark of Cain").

Irrational beliefs are not confined to savages: most of the human race holds religious opinions "different from our own, and therefore groundless", and in the autumn of 1914 the immense majority of the German nation felt certain of victory — "In this case fact has intruded and dispelled the dream."

The hierarchy of comforting beliefs and politeness. Every man "is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day": beliefs about himself (his virtues, his rosy prospects, his energy despite delicate health), about his family (the father's unbending rectitude, the sons carrying all before them), about his class (the best socially, the most intelligent, or the most deserving morally), about his nation (Mr. Podsnap: "Foreign nations, I am sorry to say, do as they do do"), and finally theories exalting mankind in general — men have souls though animals have not; Man is the "rational animal"; cruelty is "brutal" although it is distinctively human; God made Man in His own image. Politeness is the practice of respecting that part of a man's beliefs which concerns his own merits or those of his group; its maximum strain comes with foreigners, as Russell's anecdote of the untraveled American who flew into a passion at the suggestion that the British Constitution might have a few good points illustrates.

Two correctives. Beliefs are corrected in two ways: contact with fact (mistaking a poisonous fungus for a mushroom) and conflict with the opposite beliefs of other men (pork-eaters versus beef-eaters, which "has usually resulted in bloodshed; but gradually there is beginning to be a rationalist opinion that perhaps neither is really sinful"). The failure of politeness is "admirable from the point of view of dispelling myths". Human conceit, the last layer, survives all social correction — against it, "a partial corrective is found in Science; but the corrective can never be more than partial, for without some credulity Science itself would crumble and collapse."

The cosmic dream. Against the individual and group dreams, Russell sets the actual position of man: on "this dot" of a planet, "tiny lumps of impure carbon and water... crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded", dividing their time between labor to postpone their own dissolution and "frantic struggles to hasten it for others of their kind"; natural convulsions kill thousands or millions, and when men achieve similar destruction themselves "they rejoice, and give thanks to God". The consoling philosophies that deny this — the idealists, who after Copernicus deposed man from the centre invented a metaphysic according to which "every place is like home", and whose "reasons... are carefully camouflaged so as to conceal even from their authors the connection with human wishes" — are wish-projections. Russell's parable: a society whose sole business was to act the part of the First Sailor in Hamlet ("God bless you, sir") would invent critical systems making those four words the kernel of the drama — and man's place in the universe is far smaller than the First Sailor's place in the play.

Against harmless myths. The contention that comforting systems, even if untrue, are harmless is false: "they are in fact not harmless, and the comfort they bring is dearly bought by the preventable misery which they lead men to tolerate." Representing Nature as a friend diverts energy from the conquest of Nature to the conquest of each other. And the search for happiness based on untrue beliefs is neither noble nor glorious: "There is a stark joy in the unflinching perception of our true place in the world" and "liberation from the tyranny of Fear". The essay ends with its most quoted sentence: "No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness."

Key ideas

• The great mass of our beliefs is "the bodying forth of desire", corrected at isolated points by the rude shock of fact.
• Freud's account of dreams generalises: beliefs are day-dreams, and wish-fulfilment shapes conviction.
• There is a hierarchy of comforting beliefs — self, family, class, nation, humanity — protected by politeness.
• Savages' magic and modern metaphysics are products of the same myth-making faculty; "it is their mistakes that give the key to their personality".
• The two correctives are contact with fact and conflict with other men's beliefs; science is a partial corrective, and requires credulity itself.
• Anthropocentric metaphysics (idealism) was invented to repair the damage Copernicus did to human conceit.
• Even comforting falsehoods are harmful: they make men tolerate preventable misery.
• Seeing one's own littleness is the condition of liberation from fear.

Key takeaway

Man is a dreamer whose beliefs body forth his desires; the unflinching perception of our true place in the world is both a starker and a more liberating happiness than any built on myth.

Chapter 3 — Is Science Superstitious?

Central question

Can the scientific outlook survive once it is separated from the non-rational faiths and superstitions that originally nourished it — and is the rational justification of science adequate?

Main argument

The scientific outlook and its crisis. Modern life rests on science in two ways: on scientific inventions for daily bread, and on habits of mind connected with a scientific outlook. The scientific outlook is twofold: the creator (inspired by passions, holding an "undemonstrated faith" without which he would achieve little) and the appreciator (who sees things in proportion). As civilization becomes more traditional, appreciators conquer creators and the civilization becomes "Byzantine and retrospective" — something "seems to be beginning to happen in science". The high priests weary of the worship: "The pious young Luther reverenced a free-thinking Pope"; so today "those remote from centers of culture have a reverence for science which its augurs no longer feel", while "the 'scientific' materialism of the Bolsheviks, like early German Protestantism, is an attempt to preserve the old piety" — a fiery belief "in the verbal inspiration of Newton".

Two books on the foundations. Russell examines the case against the scientific credo through E. A. Burtt's The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (1924) and A. N. Whitehead's Science and the Modern World (1926). Whitehead's thesis: "There can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an order of things" — a belief pre-scientific in origin. Greek tragedy contributed the idea of Fate ("Fate in Greek Tragedy becomes the order of Nature in modern thought"), Roman law the conception of government by rules, Christianity a law-giving God — all ingredients of the idea of Natural Law. Burtt shows that Kepler's inspiration was in part a "Zoroastrian sun-worship", and that the Renaissance's revolt against Christianity "was associated with superstition quite as much as with science". Science, Russell concludes with Burtt, "has never shaken off its origin in the historical revolt of the later Renaissance. It has remained predominantly an anti-rationalistic movement, based upon a naive faith", borrowing its reasoning from mathematics, a relic of Greek rationalism — "blandly indifferent to its refutation by Hume".

Can the faith be justified? Science can no longer ignore philosophy: relativity (space-time), the quantum theory (discontinuous motion), and behaviorism have forced the question. Whitehead offers a Bergson-like philosophy to make science rational in a way it has not been since Hume — but Russell finds it fails: if Whitehead's concepts can be tested scientifically, they do not require his philosophy; and where his philosophy touches fact (as in the doctrine that the past survives in memory), it is "a mere figure of speech". The great scandal remains: "The great scandals in the philosophy of science ever since the time of Hume have been causality and induction. We all believe in both, but Hume made it appear that our belief is a blind faith for which no rational ground can be assigned." Whitehead believes he answers Hume; so did Kant; "I find myself unable to accept either answer. And yet, in common with every one else, I cannot help believing that there must be an answer."

The pleasant and the unpleasant aspects. Science is agreeable through the power it gives us over the environment and disagreeable because it assumes a determinism which "involves, theoretically, the power of predicting human actions". People wish to keep the pleasant aspect without the unpleasant; attempts to do so have broken down. If belief in causality and induction is irrational, we do not know science to be true; if we admit scientific method, causality and induction apply to human volitions as much as to anything else. "The outcome seems to be that, though the rational justification of science is theoretically inadequate, there is no method of securing what is pleasant in science without what is unpleasant" — and to refuse to face the logic "will dry up the impulse to scientific discovery at its source, which is the desire to understand the world".

Key ideas

• Science rests on a pre-scientific faith in an order of nature; its psychological origins are superstitious (Kepler's sun-worship, Renaissance paganism).
• The scientific outlook has creator and appreciator sides; the appreciators are in danger of making science Byzantine and retrospective.
• Bolshevist "scientific materialism" is a religion, a belief in the verbal inspiration of Newton.
• The problem of induction and causality, left by Hume, is still unsolved; neither Kant nor Whitehead has answered it.
• Science and philosophy can no longer maintain armed neutrality; they must be friends or foes.
• The pleasant (power) and unpleasant (determinism) aspects of science are inseparable; there is no honest way of keeping one without the other.
• The desire to understand the world, not utility, is the source of scientific discovery.

Key takeaway

Science was born of superstition and still runs on a naive faith that cannot be rationally justified, yet its pleasant and unpleasant aspects are inseparable — the honest position is to admit the inadequacy of the justification while refusing to give up the desire to understand.

Chapter 4 — Can Men Be Rational?

Central question

What is rationality, in opinion and in conduct, and can human beings actually achieve it in the face of pragmatism and psycho-analysis?

Main argument

Two definitions. Rationality has a theoretical and a practical side. Rationality in opinion is "merely the habit of taking account of all relevant evidence in arriving at a belief"; where certainty is unattainable, the rational man gives most weight to the most probable opinion while retaining others as hypotheses. Rationality in practice is "the habit of remembering all our relevant desires, and not only the one which happens at the moment to be strongest" — the man who acts in a passion "cuts off his nose to spite his face". Both are matters of degree; "complete rationality is no doubt an unattainable ideal, but so long as we continue to classify some men as lunatics it is clear that we think some men more rational than others."

Pragmatism refuted. The Plebs Text-Books Committee's Outline of Psychology says the intellect is "an instrument of partiality", yet the same authors hold that the Marxian faith is "grounded on the scientific analysis of objective reality" — an inconsistency, since the second claim requires objective knowledge. The pragmatists hold that opinions are weapons and "true" means survival-value; Russell responds with the story of the sixth-century Japanese court, which ordered a courtier to adopt Buddhism experimentally and see if he prospered, and asks why pragmatists, by their own criterion, are not converted to Judaism. A pragmatist on a jury weighs evidence like anyone else; the "frame-up" is what practical pragmatism looks like, and its concealment "shows that even policemen believe in objective truth in the case of a criminal trial". The general law: "irrationalism, i.e., disbelief in objective fact, arises almost always from the desire to assert something for which there is no evidence, or to deny something for which there is very good evidence. But the belief in objective fact always persists as regards particular practical questions."

Psycho-analysis as a therapy of rationality. Those who conclude from psycho-analysis that rationality is impossible misunderstand it: its method "is primarily one of therapeutics", presupposing "an ideal of sanity" to which the patient is brought back "by making him conscious of all the relevant facts, including those which he most wishes to forget". It cured war-neuroses in the war; Rivers's Instinct and the Unconscious analyses shell-shock. "A closely similar method can cure the irrationalities of those who are not recognized lunatics... Presidents, Cabinet Ministers, and Eminent Persons, however, seldom fulfill this condition, and therefore remain uncured."

Bias and interest. Differences on practical questions come from two sources: differences of desire and differences of estimate of means. The second is really theoretical — battleships versus airplanes is a dispute about facts and probabilities, to which theoretical rationality applies. The complication is that "a man who desires to act in a certain way will persuade himself that by so acting he will achieve some end which he considers good": gamblers believe in winning systems, politicians believe in their party's purity, tobacco-lovers say it soothes the nerves, drinkers that it stimulates wit, and "even a learned scientific article about the effects of alcohol on the nervous system will generally betray by internal evidence whether the author is or is not a teetotaler". "Nine times out of ten a man's politics can be predicted from the way in which he makes his living." Psycho-analysis is useful here precisely because "it enables men to become aware of a bias which has hitherto been unconscious" — "a technique for seeing ourselves as others see us".

Enlightened self-interest. The residuum of conflicting desires (two Stock Exchange competitors) cannot be removed by intellectual methods, but rationality can still prevent most of the harm: "if all men acted from enlightened self-interest the world would be a paradise in comparison with what it is". Enlightened self-interest is not the highest morality, but it is better than unenlightened self-interest, and "in an ordered community it is very rarely to a man's interest to do anything which is very harmful to others". The concluding claim is the book's programme: "I believe that all solid progress in the world consists of an increase in rationality, both practical and theoretical... It is to intelligence, increasingly widespread, that we must look for the solution of the ills from which our world is suffering."

Key ideas

• Rationality in opinion: taking account of all relevant evidence; rationality in practice: remembering all our relevant desires, not only the strongest at the moment.
• Irrationalism is not a deep truth about the human mind but a device for asserting what there is no evidence for.
• Pragmatism, applied consistently, would select the most profitable person to hang; even its practitioners rely on objective fact in practice.
• Psycho-analysis presupposes an ideal of sanity; it is the therapy of irrationality, not its justification.
• Desire distorts judgments of fact (gamblers' systems, teetotalers' science, politics from one's livelihood).
• Enlightened self-interest, if common, would immeasurably improve the world.
• "A man is rational in proportion as his intelligence informs and controls his desires."
• All solid progress consists in an increase of rationality, theoretical and practical.

Key takeaway

Rationality is the habit of proportioning belief to evidence and action to all our desires, and although it is an unattainable ideal, every increase in it is progress — the alternative is to let the fight replace the argument.

Chapter 5 — Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

Central question

What has happened to philosophy in the twentieth century — and what becomes of its grand claims when the new logic and the new physics take hold?

Main argument

The decline and the three schools. Since the Middle Ages philosophy has declined in social and political importance: William of Ockham was hired by the Kaiser to write pamphlets against the Pope; the disciples of Locke in eighteenth-century France and the Benthamites in nineteenth-century England created the bourgeois liberal outlook; but the correlation of philosophy and politics has faded — Hume was a Tory in politics and an extreme Radical in philosophy — surviving only in Russia (Bolsheviks are materialists, Whites idealists) and Tibet, where the second official of the State is "the 'metaphysician in chief'". Academic philosophy divides into three groups: the adherents of classical German philosophy (Kant, Hegel), the pragmatists and Bergson, and the "realists" who attach themselves to the sciences.

German idealism and its overthrow. Bradley's Appearance and Reality (1893), which Russell began studying in 1893, is the exemplary Hegelian text: the world as it seems is self-contradictory and therefore illusory; reality is a single Absolute, "timelessly engaged in something more analogous to feeling than to thinking or willing". The doctrine ought to destroy morality — "if it were true it would not matter how we behave". The attack came from two sides: the logicians, who contended that relations, plurality, space, and time are not self-contradictory, and William James and Bergson, who disliked the regimentation. James's 1884 Mind article, reprinted in Essays in Radical Empiricism, is quoted at length — the "through-and-through" universe is like a seaside boarding-house with no private bedroom. Russell analyses James's three strands: training in physiology and medicine (scientific, slightly materialistic — dominating his Psychology), a mystical and religious bias (the Will to Believe, psychical research), and a democratic sentiment à la Walt Whitman.

Pragmatism. The basis of pragmatism is a certain kind of scepticism: religious doctrines can neither be proved nor disproved, and neither can causality, the reign of law, memory, and induction; since we must act, James argued, the test of belief is success in promoting life, and "truth" means what works. Russell concedes the point for grand hypotheses, then applies the ordinary test: "Suppose you see a flash of lightning, you may expect to hear thunder... When you hear the thunder, your belief is verified or refuted, not by any advantage or disadvantage it has brought you, but by a 'fact'". Pragmatism's merits: it realizes truth is "merely human truth, fallible and changeable", and it sees that beliefs are a "blur of truth and falsehood" rather than sharply true or false. Its sinister side: "A belief may be made to pay through the operation of the criminal law" — seventeenth-century Catholicism paid in Catholic countries — and "energetic people can manufacture 'truth' by getting hold of the Government". The theory is "derived from the practice of the advertiser"; exaggerating its scope leads to "an orgy of propaganda, which is ultimately brought to an abrupt end by hard facts in the shape of war, pestilence, and famine".

Bergson. Russell treats Bergson as pragmatism's ally only by temperament: both prefer action to reason, "Othello to Hamlet". The intellectual criticisms: L'Évolution Créatrice (1907) "contains, from beginning to end, no argument, and therefore no bad argument"; intuition is dressed up with zoology (the solitary wasp Ammophila, whose unerring sting the Peckhams disproved); the doctrine of interpenetration is "traditional mysticism expressed in slightly novel language" — "apart from phraseology, Bergson has added nothing to Plotinus", and the new phraseology shows "the ability... of the company-promoter rather than the philosopher". His real innovation was to combine mysticism with belief in the reality of time and progress, appealing to the pre-1914 "Heartbreak House" people — "boredom and scepticism, leading to love of excitement and longing for an irrational faith". Russell applies logic: if there is genuine novelty and everything real persists (duration), then total states of the world form a series with all the properties Bergson banished — "If the new elements... are not external to the old elements, there is no genuine novelty, creative evolution has created nothing, and we are back in the system of Plotinus." "At bottom, Bergson's appeal is to mystical faith, not to reason."

Realism, analysis, pluralism. The third school — analysis as a method, pluralism as a metaphysic — began around 1900: Frege (1879 onward), Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen (1900), Meinong's Ueber Annahmen (1902), G. E. Moore's The Nature of Judgment (1899) and Principia Ethica (1903), Russell's own Philosophy of Leibniz (1900) and Principles of Mathematics (1903), Couturat in France, the New Realists in America, Mach's analysis of sensations. Its characteristics: no special philosophical method, no peculiar brand of knowledge; philosophy "essentially one with science"; no attempt to deduce the nature of the world from the nature of knowledge; logic atomistic rather than organic (Leibniz's wife dying in India is the test case — the intrinsic change in the man comes only when he hears of it); mathematics cleansed by Lobatchevski (non-Euclidean geometry), Weierstrass (no infinitesimals), Cantor (the infinite), and Frege (arithmetic from logic); "Philosophers met the situation by not reading the authors concerned." Russell recounts the theory of descriptions (1905): the round square is not mentioned when we say "the round square does not exist" — "absurdities are the experiments of the logician".

The new physics. Relativity's two philosophical consequences: (1) there is no single all-embracing time — events in different places have no definite time-order; Russell illustrates with the light-signal sent from the earth to the sun and reflected back: events on earth during the sixteen minutes are neither earlier nor later than the signal's arrival at the sun, and observers in different states of motion will judge differently, all "equally right or equally wrong"; (2) the subjective element in observation can be eliminated by the tensor calculus. Matter is "a series of events obeying certain laws"; "the persistent ego seems as fictitious as the permanent atom. Both are only strings of events having certain interesting relations to each other." Physics and psychology have approached each other; the old dualism of mind and matter has broken down; modern physics knows nothing of "force" — everything is deducible "from a law of universal laziness" (the principle of least action), "The universe of modern science is much more like that of Lao-Tze than that of those who prate of 'great laws' and 'natural forces'." The new philosophy "does not attempt to flatter human conceit as most philosophies do... If it is dry and technical, it lays the blame on the universe, which has chosen to work in a mathematical way rather than as poets or mystics might have desired."

Key ideas

• Philosophy's social importance has declined since Ockham wrote pamphlets against the Pope; only Russia and Tibet still connect philosophy with politics.
• Hegelianism draws the world out of logic; its morality is inconsistent with its metaphysics.
• James and Bergson attacked Hegelianism as disagreeable rather than false — the "human appeal" outran the academic.
• Pragmatism holds that truth is what works; Russell concedes it for grand hypotheses but refutes it with the thunder example and the manufactured "truth" of persecution.
• Bergson's élan vital and duration are Plotinus plus novel phraseology; applied logic shows they collapse into the series he rejected.
• The new realism: no special philosophic method; knowledge is a natural fact; logic is atomistic; mathematics and mathematical logic rebuild the foundations.
• Relativity abolishes cosmic time, makes matter a series of events, and breaks down the dualism of mind and matter — "subjectivity" is no longer a mark of mind.
• The new philosophy aims only at clarifying science and offers no consolation: it does not flatter human conceit.

Key takeaway

Twentieth-century philosophy is the story of the defeat of the schools that deduced the world from logic or intuition, and the rise of a philosophy of analysis and pluralism that accepts the universe "as a mathematical way of working" — with nothing to offer the believer except intellectual delight.

Chapter 6 — Machines and the Emotions

Central question

Will machines destroy emotions, or will emotions destroy machines — and what does machinery actually do to human happiness?

Main argument

The two attitudes to machines. "Will machines destroy emotions, or will emotions destroy machines?" — the question suggested by Samuel Butler in Erewhon, growing more actual as the empire of machinery enlarges. Every normal boy loves machines; the Japanese long only to imitate the West; an educated Asiatic "feels as a boy would feel who was told to play with dolls instead of toy automobiles. And like a boy, he would prefer a real automobile to a toy one, not realizing that it may run over him." In the West the sentimental opposition — Peacock's "steam intellect society", Rousseau's disciples, the Lake Poets, William Morris's News from Nowhere ("a country where it is always June") — was reactionary. Butler was the first to see the non-sentimental case. "Machines are worshiped because they are beautiful, and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous, and loathed because they impose slavery" — a machine is a Djinn in the Arabian Nights, "beautiful and beneficent to its master, but hideous and terrible to his enemies".

The happiness-proportional-to-income assumption. The master of the machine defends it by pointing out that its operatives can purchase vastly more goods than their great-grandfathers could, "if we are to accept an assumption which is made by almost every one" — that happiness is proportional to income. Russell challenges it psychologically: "Men have physical needs, and they have emotions. While physical needs are unsatisfied, they take first place; but when they are satisfied, emotions unconnected with them become important." Why do we desire increased incomes? "In fact, we desire these mainly in order to impress our neighbors" — the larger house in the more genteel quarter, the son at the good school, the fashionable district, the millionaire's gallery of old masters from which "the only pleasure he derives... is the thought that others know how much they have cost". Other societies show the craving for wealth is not inherent: in aristocratic epochs men were admired for birth, in Paris for artistic excellence, in German universities for learning, in India for sanctity, in China for wisdom. "If, by law, we all had exactly the same income, we should have to seek some other way of being superior to our neighbors." Since the craving is competitive, "a general increase of wealth gives no competitive advantage, and therefore brings no competitive happiness".

Spontaneity and variety. The value of increasing wealth, apart from preventing destitution (which does not depend on machinery — France has little destitution and less machinery, industrial England a century ago much destitution and much machinery), is not very great. Meanwhile "machines deprive us of two things which are certainly important ingredients of human happiness, namely, spontaneity and variety. Machines have their own pace, and their own insistent demands." "The great trouble with the machine, from the point of view of the emotions, is its regularity. And, of course, conversely, the great objection to the emotions, from the point of view of the machine, is their irregularity." The praise of being reliable, punctual, exact — "qualities of a machine" — is the new morality, against which Bergson's philosophy was a protest.

War as the revolt of starved instincts. "The impulse to war has always existed... but it did not, in the past, have the same intensity or virulence as it has in our day." In the eighteenth century England and France fought for hegemony "but they liked and respected each other the whole time"; in 1665 a man bringing atrocity stories about the Dutch was punished and the Dutch denial published — "In the late war we should have knighted him." The greater ferocity of modern war is attributable to machines in three ways: larger armies; a cheap press that flourishes by appealing to baser passions; and the starving of "the anarchic, spontaneous side of human nature, which works underground, producing an obscure discontent, to which the thought of war appeals as affording possible relief". The war's popular demand had an instinctive basis: "the modern increase in warlike instinct is attributable to the dissatisfaction (mostly unconscious) caused by the regularity, monotony, and tameness of modern life". In Russia the explanation by machination was adequate, "that is one reason why Russia fought half-heartedly".

The remedy: breaks in the monotony. Abolishing machinery is reactionary and impracticable. "The only way of avoiding the evils at present associated with machinery is to provide breaks in the monotony, with every encouragement to high adventure during the intervals" — Alpine climbing (one of the ablest peace workers Russell knew spent his summers on the most dangerous peaks), a month a year working an aeroplane or hunting for sapphires in the Sahara. "Machines have altered our way of life, but not our instincts. Consequently there is maladjustment." Moral self-control and prohibition are inadequate because instincts "are capable of as many disguises as the Devil in medieval legend"; "the only adequate method is to discover what are the needs of our instinctive nature, and then to search for the least harmful way of satisfying them". Science has mastered the physical world but not our own nature; "when science learns to understand human nature, it will be able to bring a happiness into our lives which machines and the physical sciences have failed to create".

Key ideas

• Machines are both worshiped and hated; the two attitudes are not right and wrong but aspects of the same object.
• The defence of machinery assumes happiness is proportional to income; the assumption is false for all who have more than the bare necessaries.
• Wealth is desired mainly to impress neighbors; the craving is competitive, so general wealth increases bring no competitive happiness.
• Machines destroy spontaneity and variety — the two great emotional ingredients of happiness.
• Modern war's ferocity is a machine-product, partly through starving the anarchic side of human nature into underground discontent.
• The remedy is not abolition but breaks in monotony and opportunity for adventure.
• Instincts must be understood and satisfied in the least harmful way; disguise defeats prohibition.
• "Machines have altered our way of life, but not our instincts. Consequently there is maladjustment."

Key takeaway

Machines have changed our way of life but not our instincts, and the maladjustment shows itself in war and discontent — the cure is to learn the needs of instinctive nature and satisfy them in the least harmful way.

Chapter 7 — Behaviorism and Values

Central question

What is the logical bearing of behaviorism upon values, and what will be its effect on ordinary men and women if widely accepted?

Main argument

The popular creed. Russell finds in an American periodical the statement that there is only one behaviorist in the world, Dr. Watson; "I should have said there are as many as there are modern-minded men." The popular version: there is no mind, only the body; "Feeling" consists of visceral occurrences connected with the glands, "Knowing" of movements of the larynx, "Willing" of movements of striped muscles. Hence the joke: the intellectual who married the famous dancer — "she had cultivated the muscles of legs and arms, he the muscles of the larynx, so that both were acrobats". Since the only thing we can do is move our bodies, we ought to move them as much as possible — but relativity raises the question of what motion: the acrobat, the man who runs up a descending escalator, or the man in an aeroplane? "On the whole I back the aéronauts."

Behaviorism justifies existing ideals. "Behaviorism merely supplies a theoretical justification for what is already believed": the acrobat is the ideal of physical culture in the British governing class, the escalator man of the muscular Christians and the Y.M.C.A., the aéronaut an aristocratic ideal, and above all the financier — "the ruler at rest in the center, while all else revolves round him" — suggests Aristotle's unmoved mover. Against this, the older Greek and medieval ideal in which "feeling and knowing are considered as important as doing": the Cherubim love God and the Seraphim contemplate Him. "One reason why theology has lost its hold is that it has failed to provide progressive machinery in heaven, though Milton provided it in hell."

The non sequitur of ethical systems. "It may be laid down that every ethical system is based upon a certain non sequitur. The philosopher first invents a false theory as to the nature of things, and then deduces that wicked actions are those which show that his theory is false." The Christian: everything obeys the will of God, so wickedness is disobedience — possible only if God's will is not always obeyed. The Hegelian: the universe is a perfect organism, so wickedness diminishes harmony — "difficult to see how such behavior is possible". Bergson threatens ridicule: his book on Laughter argues that what makes us laugh is seeing a person behave mechanically — "you are ridiculous when you do something that shows Bergson's philosophy to be false, and only then". Therefore: "a metaphysic can never have ethical consequences except in virtue of its falsehood: if it were true, the acts which it defines as sin would be impossible." Applied to behaviorism: "if, and in so far as, it has ethical consequences, it must be false, while conversely, if it is true, it can have no bearing on conduct". A true doctrine may have practical consequences (the coin in the automatic machine) but not ethical ones.

Watson's ethic of income. Popular behaviorism nevertheless infers: since the only thing we can do is cause matter to move, "we ought to move as much matter as possible". Russell quotes Watson's criterion of personality — the length of time the individual stayed in positions and his yearly increases in earnings ("the chances are he is a hack writer") — and applies it: "to Buddha, Christ, and Mahomet, to Milton and Blake, it involves an interesting readjustment in our estimates of the values of personalities". Two ethical maxims are implicit: excellence must be easily measurable, and must consist in conformity to law. "I cannot believe that virtue is proportional to income, nor yet that it is wicked to have difficulty in conforming to the herd."

The esthetics of the child-study school. In education, Watson's own views are "excellent", but the behaviorist outlook in The Child: His Nature and His Needs (edited by M. V. O'Shea) shows the esthetic lack. Its spelling programme — only the words actually used in daily life need be mastered — rests on a sound psychological refutation of memory-training, but: "there is no point whatever in being able to spell anything. Shakespeare and Milton could not spell; Marie Corelli and Alfred Austen could." Spelling is kept for snobbery, herd domination, and the "devotee of natural law" who feels pain at individual liberty. Written language should be subordinate to spoken; children should be taught to read aloud (the pater-familias reading the Bible aloud served admirably); half the population of America spends as much time in education as Shakespeare spent "but its vocabulary is hardly a tenth of his". "The modern view is that a man has enough command of language if he can make himself understood; the older view was that... he should be able to give esthetic pleasure."

The conclusion: teach logic so that people will not reason. Russell accepts the scientific part of behaviorism "for practical purposes", rejects the inferred ethic and esthetic. "The problem is, in a broad sense, political: given that the bulk of mankind are certain to commit fallacies, is it better that they should deduce false conclusions from true premises or true conclusions from false premises?" The only true solution is that "ordinary men and women should be taught logic, so as to be able to refrain from drawing conclusions which only seem to follow". The English-speaking nations have been freer from French-style "logic" (accepting everything a person "totally destitute of logical subtlety would erroneously suppose to follow") than others, "but there are signs that... they will require more philosophy and logic than they have had in the past". "Logic was, formerly, the art of drawing inferences; it has now become the art of abstaining from inferences... I conclude, therefore, that logic ought to be taught in schools with a view to teaching people not to reason. For, if they reason, they will almost certainly reason wrongly."

Key ideas

• Popular behaviorism reduces feeling, knowing, and willing to bodily processes, and so justifies the existing ideals of the acrobat, the muscular Christian, and the financier as unmoved mover.
• Every ethical system rests on a non sequitur: its ethic is possible only if its metaphysic is false.
• Therefore behaviorism, if true, can have no ethical consequences; an ethic of "move as much matter as possible" is a fallacy.
• Watson's criterion of excellence is yearly income; applied to Buddha, Christ, Milton, and Blake it is absurd.
• The behaviorist school's educational programme sacrifices esthetic values (pronunciation, vocabulary, reading aloud) to measurable utility.
• Scientific behaviorism is accepted; the ethical and esthetic inferences from it are rejected.
• The remedy for wrong inference is logic taught "with a view to teaching people not to reason".
• Virtue is not proportional to income, and it is not wicked to have difficulty in conforming to the herd.

Key takeaway

Behaviorism is a true science with no ethical bearing: its value judgments — that excellence is income and conformity — are a non sequitur, and the cure for such inferences is the art of abstaining from inference.

Chapter 8 — Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness

Central question

What does China — a civilization based on enjoyment rather than power — reveal about the value of the Western pursuit of progress?

Main argument

Travel as a time machine. Wells's Time Machine has a real-world analogue: "A European who goes to New York and Chicago sees the future... when he goes to Asia he sees the past" — India the Middle Ages, China the eighteenth century. George Washington would feel increasingly at home in America, England, France — "but he would not feel really at home until he reached China", where men still believe in "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as Americans of the War of Independence conceived them.

The Confucian system. Chinese civilization rests on Confucius, who flourished five hundred years before Christ, believed the remote past was better than the degenerate present, and aimed "at creating a stable society, maintaining a certain level of excellence, but not always striving after new successes" — "in this he was more successful than any other man who ever lived". Confucianism is not a religion (no supernatural, no mysticism); its ethics "are not too exalted for ordinary men to practice", resembling the eighteenth-century ideal of a gentleman. Russell quotes from Lionel Giles's Sayings of Confucius: the true gentleman is never contentious, "even when competing he remains a true gentleman"; uprightness in the Duke of She's country is a father hiding his son's guilt; asked about returning good for evil, Confucius answers "rather should you return justice for injustice, and good for good". Taoism, whose founder Lao-Tze taught "To the good I would be good; to the not-good I would also be good" and "Requite injury with kindness" — sometimes "amazingly like parts of the Sermon on the Mount" — lost to Confucius because its doctrine of inaction seemed visionary to practical administrators.

Two kinds of morality. "We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practice, and another which we practice but seldom preach." Christianity, Asiatic in origin, taught non-resistance; European princes found it necessary "to maintain that some texts were not to be taken literally"; under competitive industrialism "the slightest approach to non-resistance is despised". The Chinese admit in theory that there are occasions when fighting is proper, and practice holds that they are rare; "whereas we hold in theory that there are no occasions when it is proper to fight and in practice that such occasions are very frequent".

Enjoyment versus power. "If I were to try to sum up in a phrase the main difference between the Chinese and ourselves, I should say that they, in the main, aim at enjoyment, while we, in the main, aim at power." The Chinese work hard for a living but not for its own sake: "When they have enough to live on, they live on it, instead of trying to augment it by hard work." Russell confesses that "since I came to know China, I have regarded laziness as one of the best qualities of which men in the mass are capable". Western efficiency is double-edged: skill in manufacture partly for luxuries and partly "for the purpose of killing each other wholesale"; administration partly for education and sanitation and partly for war; the police partly for crime prevention and partly for imprisoning "anybody who has any new constructive political ideas". Chinese inefficiency — of industry, state, police — produced freedom: "in China, as compared to any white man's country, there was freedom for all, and a degree of diffused happiness which was amazing in view of the poverty of all but a tiny minority".

Two differences of outlook. First, the Chinese "do not admire activity unless it serves some useful purpose". Second, "they do not regard morality as consisting in checking our own impulses and interfering with those of others". The doctrine of original sin — still preached by missionaries — is the chief obstacle to Christian missions in China (Giles's Gifford Lectures), since the Chinese are told their parents and grandparents are in hell-fire; Confucius taught that men are born good and become wicked through evil example. "Among ourselves, the people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others... This attitude comes from our notion of Sin. It leads not only to interference with freedom, but also to hypocrisy." Chinese moral precepts are positive (respect parents, be kind to children, be generous to poor relations, courteous to all) and, being achievable, actually fulfilled. Without the notion of Sin, "men are much more willing to submit their differences to argument and reason": disputes are adjusted by the mediation of a third party; compromise is the accepted principle; "saving face... is a most valuable national institution".

The one defect. "There is one serious defect, and only one, in the Chinese system, and that is, that it does not enable China to resist more pugnacious nations. If the whole world were like China, the whole world could be happy; but so long as others are warlike and energetic, the Chinese... will be compelled to copy our vices to some degree if they are to preserve their national independence. But let us not flatter ourselves that this imitation will be an improvement."

Key ideas

• New York and Chicago show the future; Asia shows the past; China still lives the ideals of 1776.
• Confucius aimed at a stable society, not progress, and succeeded beyond any other teacher.
• China prefers the ethics of Confucius to the ethics of Lao-Tze; Taoism survives chiefly as magic.
• The West preaches one morality and practices another; China practices what it preaches.
• The Chinese aim at enjoyment, the West at power; laziness is one of the best qualities men in the mass can have.
• Western efficiency is largely devoted to war; Chinese inefficiency produced freedom.
• The Chinese are not burdened by original sin: morality is positive, achievable, and non-interfering; "saving face" makes life less ruthless.
• The single defect of the Chinese system is that it cannot resist pugnacious nations.

Key takeaway

The difference between East and West is the difference between aiming at enjoyment and aiming at power; China's defect is not moral but military, and the imitation of Western vices it is forced to learn will not be an improvement.

Chapter 9 — The Harm That Good Men Do

Central question

Do the people conventionally called "good" actually do good — and what kind of morality would?

Main argument

Bentham and the definition of a good man. A hundred years ago Jeremy Bentham was "universally recognized to be a very wicked man"; the Rev. Sydney Smith reported that Bentham thought people ought to make soup of their dead grandmothers. "The really serious charge against him was no less than this: that he defined a 'good' man as a man who does good" — subversive of all true morality, unlike Kant's rule that a kind action is virtuous only if inspired by the moral law. Bentham fulfilled his own definition: the forty middle years of the nineteenth century — the Reform Act, the abolition of slavery in Jamaica, the restriction of the death penalty, the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846, compulsory education in 1870 — owed much to his influence, and "nine-tenths of the people living in England in the latter part of last century were happier than they would have been if he had never lived".

Portraits of "good" and "bad" men. The ideally good man "does not drink or smoke, avoids bad language... attends church regularly, and holds the correct opinions on all subjects", has "a wholesome horror of wrongdoing" and "a still greater horror of wrong thinking", encourages patriotism and military training, and is a trustee of a university preventing "an ill-judged respect for learning from allowing the employment of professors with subversive ideas". The "bad" man smokes and drinks, says bad words when his toe is trodden on, takes a scientific attitude to wrongdoing ("sermons and prison will no more cure vice than mend a broken tire"), and maintains "that what is called 'wrong thinking' is simply thinking". The empirical observation: "It may be doubted whether a 'good' man, in the above sense, does, on the average, any more good than a 'bad' man." The evidence is literary: Wordsworth wrote good poetry when "bad" and bad poetry after he became "good"; Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan when wicked and theology when good; Dante was deported for subversive propaganda; Shakespeare would not have been landed in New York by American immigration officers; Milton wrote most of his poetry before and after Cromwell's reign; Donne's poems all precede his virtuous deanery; Swinburne wrote Songs Before Sunrise in his wicked youth and Boer-war attacks in his virtuous old age. "The standards of virtue now prevalent are incompatible with the production of good poetry." Galileo, Darwin, Spinoza, Descartes were bad men. In humbler matters, those who object to preventable mortality are necessarily wicked: Russell's own London district, with its abnormal infant death-rate, is controlled by the rich, who cut down expenditure on infant welfare. "We may simplify our account of what constitutes a good man: a good man is one whose opinions and activities are pleasing to the holders of power."

The uses of good men. A typically virtuous man was George III, who refused Catholic emancipation on the ground of his coronation oath — "the question, for him, was not whether it would do good, but whether it was 'right' in the abstract" — and whose interference "was always dictated by the most lofty motives", and was largely responsible for American independence. The ex-Kaiser was "a deeply religious man, sincerely convinced... that God was on his side, and... wholly free from personal vices. Yet it would be hard to name any man of our time who has done more to cause human misery." Good men serve as a smoke-screen behind which others act (Whittaker Wright "surrounded himself with blameless peers, whose virtue made them incapable of understanding his arithmetic"); they make the scandal-mongering possible by which undesirables are kept out of politics; they suppress the knowledge of venereal-disease prevention so that sin keeps its "natural" punishment; they get themselves murdered to provide pretexts (the missionaries whose murder gave Germany Shantung; the Archduke at Sarajevo, "and how grateful we ought to be to him!").

The roots of "goodness". The standards of public opinion "are not those which are calculated to make the world a happier place... The chief is tradition, and the next most powerful is the unjust power of dominant classes." Primitive morality grew out of taboo — prohibitions that were purely superstitious (eating out of the chief's dish) and survived when their reasons were forgotten. Even the prohibition of murder is superstitious in origin: the murdered man's blood or ghost demanded vengeance, and purification by ritual washing could remove blood-guiltiness — "When we speak of repentance as 'washing out' guilt we are using a metaphor derived from the fact that long ago actual washing was used to remove blood-stains" (Frazer). "A rational ethic will view the matter differently: it will be concerned with prevention and cure, as in the case of illness, rather than with guilt, punishment, and expiation." Our ethic is a mixture: murder is ancient and viewed through a mist of horror; forgery is modern and viewed rationally. "We still think in social practice... that virtue consists in not doing rather than in doing." The Gospels' positive precept "Love thy neighbor as thyself" is obeyed by no one without persecution — Jaurès, "the best citizen of France", was murdered and his murderer acquitted "on the ground that he had performed a public service".

What a rational ethic would be. Criticism of traditional morality need not make all morality crumble, if based on something positive and constructive: "The greatest happiness of the greatest number" gives the moralist a more arduous life, championing the oppressed and proclaiming concealed facts. Official morality has been "oppressive and negative"; the great mystics and religious teachers protested in vain. "More is to be hoped... from the progress of reason and science." What is needed: "a morality based upon love of life, upon pleasure in growth and positive achievement, not upon repression and prohibition. A man should be regarded as 'good' if he is happy, expansive, generous, and glad when others are happy; if so, a few peccadillos should be regarded as of little importance." And the man who acquires a fortune by cruelty should be regarded as "immoral" even if he goes to church regularly and gives a portion of his gains to public objects. "The power of reason is thought small in these days, but I remain an unrepentant rationalist. Reason may be a small force, but it is constant, and works always in one direction, while the forces of unreason destroy one another in futile strife."

Key ideas

• Bentham's "wickedness" was defining a good man as one who does good — and he fulfilled the definition.
• The conventional "good" man is defined by abstinence, orthodoxy, and pleasing the holders of power.
• Poetry and science have usually been produced by "bad" men: virtue as currently understood is incompatible with good poetry.
• George III and the ex-Kaiser were good men who did enormous harm; honesty and loftiness of motive do not prevent mischief.
• Good men serve as smoke-screens, as scandal-instruments, and as pretexts for war.
• "Goodness" descends from taboo; even the prohibition of murder rests on superstition, as ritual purification shows.
• A rational ethic is concerned with prevention and cure, not guilt and expiation; virtue is positive, not negative.
• "I remain an unrepentant rationalist" — reason is a small but constant force.

Key takeaway

The man society calls "good" is one whose opinions and activities please the holders of power, and such men — from George III to the ex-Kaiser — have done more harm than the "bad" men who wrote the poetry, did the science, and loved their neighbors.

Chapter 10 — The Recrudescence of Puritanism

Central question

Why has Puritanism — the doctrine that certain acts are inherently sinful and must be suppressed by law — returned to power, and what harm does it do?

Main argument

The reaction after the war. During the war the holders of power bribed populations into cooperation with unusual concessions — a living wage, "Hindoos were told that they were men and brothers", votes for women, innocent pleasures for the young. The war won, the victors set to work to deprive their tools of the advantages: the coal strikes of 1921 and 1926 worsted the wage-earners, married women were ousted from posts. These were "political" issues with organized bodies of voters; but "no organized body represents the point of view of those who believe that a man or woman ought to be free in regard to enjoyments which do not damage other people, so that the Puritans have met with no serious opposition".

The definition of a Puritan. "We may define a Puritan as a man who holds that certain kinds of acts, even if they have no visible bad effects upon others than the agent, are inherently sinful, and, being sinful, ought to be prevented by whatever means is most effectual — the criminal law if possible, and, if not that, then public opinion backed by economic pressure." Originally such prohibitions were reconciled with utilitarianism by the belief that certain crimes roused the anger of the gods (Sodom and Gomorrah); nowadays the laws can only be justified by the theory of vindictive punishment — certain sins are so heinous that it is our duty to inflict pain on the delinquent. Under Benthamism this lost its hold; "with the general decay of Liberalism, it has regained lost ground".

The American lineage. "It is from America that the new movement derives most of its force; it is one consequence of the fact that America was the sole victor in the war." Puritanism held brief power in seventeenth-century England, colonized New England and the Middle West; "the American Civil War was a continuation of the English Civil War"; unlike the English Civil War, it led to a permanent victory of the Puritan Party, "so that the greatest Power in the world is controlled by men who inherit the outlook of Cromwell's Ironsides". Russell credits Puritanism's services — democracy against royal tyranny, emancipation of the slaves — but "they belong to the past"; the problem of the present is "the combination of order with liberty for minorities", requiring "tolerance and breadth of sympathy rather than moral fervor". On Prohibition he says he will say nothing: opponents "cannot well make their opposition a matter of principle, since most of them would favor the prohibition of cocaine, which raises exactly the same questions of principle".

The fanatic's error. "The practical objection to Puritanism, as to every form of fanaticism, is that it singles out certain evils as so much worse than others that they must be suppressed at all costs. The fanatic fails to recognize that the suppression of a real evil, if carried out too drastically, produces other evils which are even greater." The law against obscene publications: Post Office officials destroyed pictures by an eminent Dutch artist sent through the post, with no appeal from their decision. Obscenity law as applied to birth control: "in the practice of the Courts, it means 'anything that shocks the magistrate'"; information given in an expensive book with long words is legal, in a cheap pamphlet in plain language illegal — "consequently it is at present illegal in England to give information on birth control to wage-earners, though it is legal to give it to educated people". "Destitution, chronic illness among women, the birth of diseased children, overpopulation and war are regarded by our Puritan lawgivers as smaller evils than the hypothetical pleasure of a few foolish boys." The League of Nations' International Conference on Obscene Publications (reported in The Times, September 17, 1923) recommended tightening the law; "the British delegate was apparently the most zealous in this good work."

The white-slave traffic. The real evil — ignorant young women enticed into semi-slavery — "is essentially a Labor question, to be dealt with on the lines of the Factory Acts"; but it has been the excuse for gross interference with liberty: the man who married a prostitute and did not at once turn her out when she returned to her old profession "was flogged and thrown into prison"; in America "a New Yorker may take his mistress to Brooklyn but not to Jersey City". A Canadian delegate proposed that no woman, however old, should travel on a steamer unless accompanied by husband or parent; "it is, of course, obvious that such measures turn all women into 'white slaves'... The only logical goal of these reformers is the purdah."

The pleasures that remain are worse. Pleasures divide into those with a basis in the senses and those mainly of the mind; the traditional moralist praises the latter, condemning art in toto if stern (Plato and the Fathers) or tolerating it only with a "spiritual purpose" if latitudinarian (Tolstoy). "My point is that the pleasures which remain possible after the Puritan has done his utmost are more harmful than those that he condemns. Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power." Love of power "does far more harm than love of drink or any of the other vices against which Puritans protest"; it camouflages itself as love of doing good — "It merely means that we punish our victims for being wicked, instead of for being our enemies. In either case, tyranny and war result. Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world."

The conclusion: live and let live. As industrialism grows and the earth becomes more crowded, "life cannot remain tolerable unless we learn to let each other alone in all matters that are not of immediate and obvious concern to the community. We must learn to respect each other's privacy, and not to impose our moral standards upon each other." The Puritan mistakes his standard for the moral standard, not realizing other ages, countries, and groups have standards with equal right. "Unfortunately, the love of power which is the natural outcome of Puritan self-denial makes the Puritan more executive than other people"; the hope is that "a broader education and a wider knowledge of mankind may gradually weaken the ardor of our too virtuous masters".

Key ideas

• The war's temporary concessions (living wage, votes for women, the young's pleasures) were withdrawn when peace came; only the Puritan restrictions had no organized opposition.
• A Puritan is one who holds certain acts inherently sinful and to be prevented by law or economic pressure, regardless of their effects.
• Puritanism's modern force is American, the product of the Civil War's permanent victory of Cromwell's party.
• The fanatic's error is that suppressing a real evil too drastically produces greater evils.
• "Obscenity" in practice means "anything that shocks the magistrate"; birth-control information is illegal for wage-earners but legal for the educated.
• The white-slave-traffic laws punish the innocent with flogging and aim logically at the purdah.
• The pleasures left after Puritan suppression — above all, the love of power — are more harmful than those condemned.
• "Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world."

Key takeaway

Puritanism defines certain acts as inherently sinful, suppresses them by law and economic pressure regardless of consequences, and in doing so makes the love of power — which does far more harm than the vices it forbids — the dominant motive of social life.

Chapter 11 — The Need for Political Scepticism

Central question

Why is party government in a democracy structurally incapable of useful policies, and what machinery could let expert opinion make itself heard?

Main argument

The swing of the pendulum. The English-speaking world believes that the ills it suffers would be cured if a certain party were in power: "A man votes for one party and remains miserable; he concludes that it was the other party that was to bring the millennium." Russell's contention: "A party which is to obtain power must, in a democracy, make an appeal to which the majority of the nation responds... an appeal which is widely successful, with the existing democracy, can hardly fail to be harmful. Therefore no important political party is likely to have a useful program, and if useful measures are to be passed, it must be by means of some other machinery than party government." (The essay is the Presidential Address to the Students' Union of the London School of Economics, October 10, 1923.)

The politician and the expert. "The skill of the politician consists in guessing what people can be brought to think advantageous to themselves; the skill of the expert consists in inculcating what really is advantageous, provided people can be brought to think so." There is no point in moral exhortations to politicians: in a democracy they must adopt the opinions that seem right to the average man, and their intuitive skill at forecasting opinion "does not imply any skill whatever in forming their own opinions". A measure useful to the party politician must fulfill two conditions: "they must seem to favor a section of the nation; (2) the arguments for them must be of the utmost simplicity." There is "a Gresham's law in politics as in currency" — the man who aims at nobler ends is driven out. Politicians live by "noise and fury, signifying nothing"; the late war showed that democracy is an admirable training for appealing to neutrals — "It is true it lost the peace; but that is another question."

The defects of the expert. The civil servant or specialist has correlative defects: (1) "His knowledge being specialized, he probably overestimates the importance of his department" — the dentist, oculist, heart, lung, and nerve specialists who would each preserve you and leave no time to live; (2) he either overestimates the possibility of persuading people to be reasonable or prefers "hole-and-corner methods"; (3) "he is no judge of popular passions... He usually understands a committee very well, but he seldom understands a mob" — the man who throws doubt on German atrocities, the Chinese civil servant Wang An Shih, who converted the Emperor to Socialism in the eleventh century and was hurled from power for offending the literati ("the Northcliffe Press of that time"); (4) he "undervalues the importance of consent" — laws ahead of public opinion are evaded; (5) he allows nothing "for sheer laziness and indifference" (daylight saving had to wait for the war); (6) "if they had executive power, their impulses towards tyranny would develop". So we cannot escape present evils by handing power to civil servants — yet "it seems imperative, in our increasingly complex society, that experts should acquire more influence than they have at present".

Instincts and industrialism. "There is at present a violent conflict between instinctive passions and industrial needs. Our environment... has been suddenly changed by industrialism. Our instincts have presumably not changed, and almost nothing has been done to adapt our habits of thought to the altered circumstances." The beavers that build dams out of books in a library illustrate: "We are almost equally ill-adapted to our new surroundings. Our education still teaches us to admire the qualities that were biologically useful in the Homeric age." "It is a natural propensity to attribute misfortune to some one's malignity": when prices rise it is the profiteer, when wages fall the capitalist — "Why the capitalist is ineffective when wages rise, and the profiteer when prices fall, the man in the street does not inquire." "We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want some one to hate when we suffer... The supreme example of this kind of political thought was the Treaty of Versailles."

Marx and Salter. The contrast of the two books advocating international socialism — Marx's Capital and Sir Arthur Salter's Allied Shipping Control — represents "the politician's and the civil servant's methods, respectively, of advocating economic change". Marx proves wage-earners have suffered terrible privations, "but does not prove, and does not attempt to prove, that they will suffer less under Communism"; he repudiates ethical considerations yet "did in fact represent the bourgeois as wicked, and set to work to stimulate a fiery hatred of him"; "Capital is in essence, like the Bryce Report, a collection of atrocity stories designed to stimulate martial ardor against the enemy... It is through the stimulation of hatred that Marx has proved such a tremendous political force." Salter's book, by contrast, describes the wartime system of international control — the Allied Maritime Transport Council, the joint buying of food and raw materials, "in all essentials, a complete international Socialism" — introduced "without antagonizing the capitalists", "not... 'Such-and-such classes of men are wicked and must be punished'... but: The peace-time system was inefficient". Its committees organized conflicts "not between nations, but between commodities" — "the moral is that any successful internationalism must organize separate functions internationally".

The dilemma and the remedy. "The difficulty of revolutionary Socialism is that it rouses too much opposition; the difficulty of the civil servant's Socialism is that it wins too little support. Opposition to a political measure is roused by the fear that oneself will be damaged; support is won by the hope (usually subconscious) that one's enemies will be damaged. Therefore a policy that injures no one wins no support, and a policy that wins much support also rouses fierce opposition." From this dilemma "there is no issue by means of ordinary action": the best hope is that "we should, as many of us as possible, become political sceptics, rigidly abstaining from belief in the various attractive party programs". "We must be sceptical even of our scepticism." But widespread political scepticism is psychologically possible: "it means concentrating our enmity upon politicians, instead of nations or social classes" — fulfilling William James's desideratum of a "moral equivalent for war". "Widespread political scepticism is possible; psychologically, it means concentrating our enmity upon politicians, instead of nations or social classes." The story of the Chinese merchants — forced honest by brilliant corruption in the courts — shows "that dishonest politicians may do less harm than honest ones". Honesty has three senses (Lloyd George: not money; Lord Grey: not power; Lord Morley: not falsehood) — "Stupidity and unconscious bias often work more damage than venality" — and "any man who is both able and public-spirited must be a hypocrite if he is to succeed in politics". The constructive remedy: civil servants should frame Bills in their own names and argue for them publicly; international conferences of experts should cut across party lines — "Knowledge exists, and good will exists; but both remain impotent until they possess the proper organs for making themselves heard."

Key ideas

• No important political party can have a useful program, because a successful appeal in a democracy must favor a section and be simple enough for platform speeches.
• Politicians guess what people can be brought to think advantageous; experts know what is advantageous if people could be brought to think so.
• There is a Gresham's law in politics: honest expert opinion is driven out by sectional appeal.
• Experts have six defects, including departmental bias, no understanding of mobs, and incipient tyranny.
• Men attribute misfortune to malignity; the Treaty of Versailles is the supreme example of political thought as scapegoat-hunting.
• Marx's Capital works by stimulating hatred; Salter's Allied Shipping Control works by argument from the general advantage.
• A policy that injures no one wins no support; a policy that wins support rouses fierce opposition.
• Political scepticism — enmity concentrated on politicians rather than nations — is a moral equivalent for war, and "we must be sceptical even of our scepticism".

Key takeaway

Party government cannot pass useful measures because its success depends on sectional, simple, and hateful appeals; the remedy is expert opinion organized internationally and made audible, plus political scepticism as a "moral equivalent for war".

Chapter 12 — Free Thought and Official Propaganda

Central question

What are the modern obstacles to freedom of thought — beyond legal penalties — and how can they be met?

Main argument

The two senses of free thought. (The essay is the Moncure Conway Lecture for 1922.) In its narrower sense "free thought" means thought free from the dogmas of traditional religion; Russell is "a dissenter from all known religions" and hopes every kind of religious belief will die out — "I regard it as belonging to the infancy of human reason". But the wider sense matters more: thought free from outward control. Freedom means "free from" something: "thought is 'free' when it is exposed to free competition among beliefs, i.e., when all beliefs are able to state their case, and no legal or pecuniary advantages or disadvantages attach to beliefs."

Legal penalties. No great country lacks them: the English blasphemy laws make it illegal to express disbelief in Christianity (though not enforced against the well-to-do; in New Zealand a publisher was convicted for Sassoon's poems); America requires immigrants to disbelieve in anarchism, polygamy, and Communism; Japan forbids disbelief in the divinity of the Mikado. "A voyage round the world is a perilous adventure" — though "this of course only applies to steerage passengers; saloon passengers are allowed to believe whatever they please". The persecution of opinions that strike the majority as "monstrous and immoral" is "exactly the same view as that which made possible the tortures of the Inquisition. There was a time when Protestantism seemed as wicked as Bolshevism seems now."

Economic penalties and distortion of evidence. "Legal penalties are, however, in the modern world, the least of the obstacles to freedom of thought. The two great obstacles are economic penalties and distortion of evidence" — thought is not free if professing an opinion makes it impossible to earn a living, nor if all the arguments on one side are presented as attractively as possible. Russell's three personal incidents: his father's will appointing free-thinking guardians was set aside by the Courts (a parent may ordain that any "imaginable superstition" be instilled after his death, but not that his children be kept free from superstition); his 1910 candidacy for Parliament ended when he admitted he was an agnostic and would not go to church; Trinity College offered him a lectureship but not a Fellowship, because the clerical party did not want an anti-clerical vote — with the result that they could dismiss him in 1916 without making him starve. "People who are not well-to-do dare not be frank about their religious beliefs." In Russia the advantages are reversed; "the result is that in Russia one set of fanatics feels absolute certainty about one set of doubtful propositions, while in the rest of the world another set of fanatics feels equal certainty about a diametrically opposite set of equally doubtful propositions."

The will to doubt. "William James used to preach the 'will to believe.' For my part, I should wish to preach the 'will to doubt.'" "None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error." The methods of increasing the degree of truth: hearing all sides, ascertaining all the relevant facts, controlling bias by discussion with people of the opposite bias, and readiness to discard any hypothesis that has proved inadequate — "These methods are practiced in science". In science "men's attitude is tentative and full of doubt"; in religion and politics "everybody considers it de rigueur to have a dogmatic opinion, to be backed up by inflicting starvation, prison, and war". "If only men could be brought into a tentatively agnostic frame of mind about these matters, nine-tenths of the evils of the modern world would be cured." Einstein is the brilliant example of the scientific temper: "a German-Swiss-Jew pacifist", verified by the English eclipse expedition of 1919, overturning the framework of traditional physics — "yet physicists everywhere have shown complete readiness to accept his theory as soon as it appeared that the evidence was in its favor"; none, least of all Einstein, claims the last word. Had he advanced something equally new in religion or politics, the world would have found Prussianism or a Zionist plot in it, and "ultimately the truth or falsehood of his doctrine would be decided on the battlefield". "What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite."

Education. Irrational certainty is nourished by three agencies: education, propaganda, and economic pressure. (1) Education: "Each nation aims only at self-glorification in the school text-books of history" — English and German books both know they are not telling the truth about Waterloo; American books were violently anti-British, then pro-British. "Apparently it has not occurred to any one that a 'good American,' like a 'good German,' or a 'good Japanese,' must be, pro tanto, a bad human being." "Without an elaborate system of deceit in the elementary schools it would be impossible to preserve the camouflage of democracy." The New York laws: no license for a school teaching the overthrow of organized government by force (which would have made it illegal to teach the overthrow of the Kaiser's Government), and teachers' certificates only for those who have "shown satisfactorily" loyalty — "according to the law of the State of New York, Christ and George Washington were too degraded morally to be fit for the education of the young". "Thus the law decrees that the teachers shall all be either hypocrites or fools." "The State is a collection of officials... The only alteration they are likely to desire in the status quo is an increase of bureaucracy and of the power of bureaucrats." Japan gives "information without intelligence" plus worship of the Mikado (Chamberlain's The Invention of a New Religion). "We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought... Education should have two objects: first, to give definite knowledge...; secondly, to create those mental habits which will enable people to acquire knowledge and form sound judgments for themselves. The first of these we may call information, the second intelligence." The utility of intelligence is admitted only theoretically: "it is not desired that ordinary people should think for themselves".

Propaganda. "The art of propaganda, as practiced by modern politicians and governments, is derived from the art of advertisement." "If I were to stand up once in a public place and state that I am the most modest man alive, I should be laughed at; but if I could raise enough money to make the same statement on all the buses and on hoardings along all the principal railway lines, people would presently become convinced that I had an abnormal shrinking from publicity." The two evils of propaganda: it appeals to irrational causes of belief, and "it gives an unfair advantage to those who can obtain most publicity, whether through wealth or through power" — even a law confining parties to valid arguments would leave the million-pound party beating the hundred-thousand-pound party. "Equality of opportunity among opinions is essential if there is to be real freedom of thought."

Economic pressure. The supreme example is Soviet Russia, which could starve Kropotkin; but the Dreyfus affair cost French teachers their posts, and "in America at the present day I doubt if a university professor, however eminent, could get employment if he were to criticize the Standard Oil Company". Trusts and monopolies concentrate employment, and "from the standpoint of liberty, it makes no difference to a man whether his only possible employer is the State or a Trust". The two principles that would solve almost all social problems: "The first is that education should have for one of its aims to teach people only to believe propositions when there is some reason to think that they are true. The second is that jobs should be given solely for fitness to do the work." Refusing employment for opinions "amounts to a very vigorous form of persecution" — "The old liberties can be legally retained without being of the slightest use." "Some element of doubt is essential to the practice, though not to the theory, of toleration." Teaching should include the art of reading newspapers — biased accounts on both sides and an impartial record, "the cynical scepticism which would result... would make the children in later life immune from those appeals to idealism by which decent people are induced to further the schemes of scoundrels". The plea throughout "has been for the spread of the scientific temper, which is an altogether different thing from the knowledge of scientific results... The results of science, in the form of mechanism, poison gas, and the Yellow Press, bid fair to lead to the total downfall of our civilization."

Key ideas

• Free thought has a narrow sense (freedom from religious dogma) and a wider sense (free competition among beliefs) — the wider is the more important.
• Legal penalties persist everywhere, but the two great modern obstacles are economic penalties and distortion of evidence.
• "I should wish to preach the 'will to doubt'"; "None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error."
• Einstein's reception shows the scientific temper; the same novelty in religion or politics would be settled on the battlefield.
• Education teaches self-glorifying history and makes teachers "either hypocrites or fools"; "education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought".
• Propaganda is the art of advertisement applied to government; its deeper evil is the unfair advantage it gives to wealth and power.
• "It makes no difference to a man whether his only possible employer is the State or a Trust."
• Two principles would solve almost all social problems: teach people to believe only on evidence, and give jobs solely for fitness.

Key takeaway

Legal penalties are the least of the obstacles to freedom of thought; the decisive ones are economic pressure and the distortion of evidence through education and propaganda, and only the scientific temper — the will to doubt — can cure them.

Chapter 13 — Freedom in Society

Central question

To what extent is freedom possible and desirable among human beings who live in communities — and where should the community's interference stop?

Main argument

Definitions. "Freedom" in its most abstract sense means "the absence of external obstacles to the realization of desires" — so freedom may be increased "either by maximizing power or by minimizing wants". The Russian Red Army Commissar told Russell the English do not need a physical strait-jacket "because they have a mental one: their souls are always in strait-jackets". Russell rejects the Hegelian "true" freedom (the right to obey the police) as inappropriate where half the nation believes the Government very wicked. He introduces psychological dynamics: "It has been far too common to accept human nature as a datum in politics... The truth is, of course, that external conditions modify human nature." Industrialism generates new wants (motor-cars; soon private aeroplanes) and unconscious wants — "Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States."

Society and the minimum of freedom. The fundamental needs are "food, drink, health, clothing, housing, sex, and parenthood... which constitutes the bare minimum of freedom". A "society" is a group cooperating for common purposes; economics and war are the main motives for social cohesion. Society diminishes physical obstacles but creates social obstacles. Civilized men, oddly, are less social in their instincts than savages — more dependent on rational apprehension of advantages than on herd instinct — so the problem of individual liberty arises "with more and more urgency as they become more civilized". Freedom is not to be increased by mere diminution of government: "one man's desires are apt to be incompatible with another man's, so that anarchy means freedom for the strong and slavery for the weak". The problem is "how to secure its advantages with the smallest possible interference with freedom... striking a balance between physical and social freedom".

Capitalism and the sacred principles of liberty. The answer turns on whether we are to have the food or someone else. In a siege, or England in 1917, any degree of governmental pressure is endured because it is obviously to everyone's advantage; "but when one person is to have the governmental pressure and another person is to have the food, the question looks quite different. In this form we arrive at the issue between Capitalism and Socialism." Laissez-faire Liberalism's sacred principles are embodied in one maxim: "The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate." "Liberalism considered it proper for an employer to say to an employee: 'You shall die of hunger,' but improper for the employee to retort, 'You shall die first, of a bullet.'... apart from legal pedantries, it is ridiculous to make a distinction between these two threats."

The overriding claim of necessaries. The claim to the bare minimum "should override any other claim... I should regard it as a priori justifiable to deprive one person of comforts in order to supply another with necessaries." Health is the test case: in every London borough the well-to-do band together to cut public-health, maternity, and infant-welfare spending — "that is to say, they are all prepared to condemn thousands of people to death in order that they themselves may continue to enjoy good dinners and motor-cars. As they control almost all the Press, they prevent the facts from being known to their victims." This cannot be defended on grounds of freedom. The right to sex and parenthood is as real as the right to food, though Christian asceticism makes people less willing to recognize it.

What the community may not touch. "While admitting the abstract right of the community to interfere with its members in order to secure the biological necessaries to all, I cannot admit its right to interfere in matters where what one man possesses is not obtained at the expense of another. I am thinking of such things as opinion and knowledge and art." Majority dislike of an opinion gives no right to interfere; the lady's book about family life in Texas, "which I consider sociologically very valuable", is illegal to send through the post. "Society is, in certain respects, like these [psycho-analytic] patients, but instead of allowing itself to be cured it imprisons the doctors who bring unwelcome facts to its notice." Personal morals — "if a man chooses to have two wives or a woman two husbands, it is his affair and theirs" — are no one else's business.

The psychology of interference. Given a social and a physical obstacle causing the same direct loss of liberty, "the social obstacle is more harmful, because it causes resentment" (the boy forbidden to climb the tree versus the boy who cannot). Governments attribute misfortunes to natural causes; oppositions to human causes — "When the price of bread goes up, governments say it is due to bad harvests, and oppositions say it is due to profiteers." Industrialism has bred belief in the omnipotence of man — "we no longer regard poverty as sent by God" — which increases resentment and makes modern communities harder to govern; hence "the governing classes tend to be exceptionally religious". Two further reasons make social interference undesirable: "people do not desire the welfare of others, and... they do not know in what it consists" — "hardly any man or class can be trusted as the trustee of another's interests". Officials, remote from those they control, are specially dangerous: teachers understand children, but officials "to whom children may be merely nasty little brats" control them; "power lies with those who control finance, not with those who know the matter upon which the money is to be spent... the holders of power are, in general, ignorant and malevolent, and the less they exercise their power the better".

Where compulsion is justified. The case for compulsion is strongest where "the person compelled gives a moral assent to the compulsion" — we would all rather pay rates than have no roads; we acquiesce in prohibiting cocaine. The best case is children, who "must be under authority, and are themselves aware that they must be" — and whose authorities are sometimes fond of them. Compulsion is at its worst when "the victim firmly believes the act commanded to be wicked or harmful" — the Mahometan compelled to eat pork; anti-vaccinationists.

The fundamental distinction. "The most important distinction, in this matter of freedom, is between those goods which one man holds at the expense of another, and those in which one man's gain is not another's loss" — food versus mathematics. Necessaries are suitable for governmental action; justice should govern, and in a modern democracy "justice means equality" — or more precisely "the arrangement producing least envy". "In matters of opinion, free competition is the only way of arriving at truth. The old Liberal watchwords were applied in the wrong sphere, that of economics; it is in the mental sphere that they really apply. We want free competition in ideas, not in business." As free competition in business dies out, the victors use economic power to enforce right living and right thinking — "The liberty of the individual should be respected where his actions do not directly, obviously, and indubitably do harm to other people. Otherwise our persecuting instincts will produce a stereotyped society, as in sixteenth-century Spain." "The freedom we should seek is not the right to oppress others, but the right to live as we choose and think as we choose where our doing so does not prevent others from doing likewise."

Psychological dynamics again. "A society composed of human beings and tigers could not have much freedom: either the tigers or the human beings must be enslaved. There cannot therefore be any freedom in parts of the world where white men govern colored populations." To secure maximum freedom, character must be formed by education in the first six years of life — Miss McMillan at Deptford is training children "who become capable of creating a free community. If her methods were applied to all children... one generation would suffice to solve our social problems." "Given men and women who do not desire the things which can only be secured through the misfortunes of others, the obstacles to social freedom will be at an end."

Key ideas

• Freedom is the absence of external obstacles to the realization of desires; it can grow by minimizing wants as well as maximizing power.
• Psychological dynamics: external conditions modify human nature; desires must not be treated as a fixed datum.
• Food, drink, health, clothing, housing, sex, and parenthood are the bare minimum of freedom; the claim to necessaries overrides the claim to comforts.
• Anarchy means freedom for the strong and slavery for the weak; the question is how much governmental pressure buys how much food.
• Laissez-faire liberty is the maxim that "the fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate".
• Opinion, knowledge, and art are not held at anyone's expense; majority dislike gives no right to interfere.
• Social obstacles to freedom are worse than physical ones because they cause resentment.
• "We want free competition in ideas, not in business" — and one generation of right early education would solve our social problems.

Key takeaway

Freedom is the absence of obstacles to desire, secured partly by society and partly against it: the community may redistribute necessaries and educate character, but opinion, knowledge, art, and personal morals are not held at anyone's expense and must be left alone.

Chapter 14 — Freedom Versus Authority in Education

Central question

How much authority is necessary in education, how should it be exercised, and why is freedom of opinion the one freedom that needs no limitation?

Main argument

The limits of freedom in education. "Freedom, in education as in other things, must be a matter of degree." Russell opens with the lady who maintained no child should ever be forbidden anything, because a child ought to develop its nature from within — "How if its nature leads it to swallow pins?" — and notes that every child, left to itself, will sooner or later swallow pins, drink poison, fall out of an upper window, or plague elderly gentlemen "who may not all have Elisha's powers of repartee". "An element of discipline and authority must exist; the question is as to the amount of it, and the way in which it is to be exercised." The standpoints to be examined: the State, the Church, the schoolmaster, the parents, and the child itself.

The State. State interest in education is very recent. The Renaissance brought the Collège de France against the ecclesiastical Sorbonne; the Reformation a desire to keep universities from "Popery"; only the modern movement of universal compulsory education made the State dominant. The motives: literacy as desirable in itself, commercial advantage, less juvenile crime, regimentation of slum populations, anti-clericalism, and nationalism (especially after the Franco-Prussian War). Once established, the State found education capable of many uses: it makes the young more docile, improves manners, diminishes crime, facilitates common action — "Without it, democracy cannot exist except as an empty form. But democracy, as conceived by politicians, is a form of government, that is to say, it is a method of making people do what their leaders wish under the impression that they are doing what they themselves wish." State education teaches respect for existing institutions, suspicion of foreign nations, uniformity: "Uniformity is desired because it is convenient to the administrator, regardless of the fact that it can only be secured by mental atrophy. So great are the resulting evils that it can be seriously questioned whether universal education has hitherto done good or harm on the balance."

The Church and the schoolmaster. The Church differs from the State only in one respect: "the Church would prefer that the laity should not be educated at all", and both wish to instill beliefs "likely to be dispelled by free inquiry"; the Church perfects "the technique of giving instruction without stimulating mental activity — a technique in which, long ago, the Jesuits led the way". The schoolmaster is "sacked" if he is found to be educating; he stands for discipline ("It is easier to punish a boy for showing boredom than it is to be interesting"); he is tempted to mould pupils in his own image — Lytton Strachey's Dr. Arnold walking beside the Lake of Como and meditating on "moral evil", which "for him, was whatever he wished to change in his boys". Still, "the teacher is far the best of the forces concerned in education". The schoolmaster's desire for the credit of his school selects a few superior boys and neglects the rest: Sanderson of Oundle (from H. G. Wells's Life of Sanderson of Oundle) insisted that all boys sing in chapel, not a chosen choir.

The parents. The wage-earner wants children in school early (to diminish bother) and out early (to profit by their earnings): the proposal to raise the school age to six caused an irresistible outcry of worried mothers; the proposal to lower the leaving age to thirteen was not unpopular. The professional man wants "not an education which is good in itself, but an education which is better than other people's" — if every qualified person could get a medical education, doctors would earn less. "The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them"; parents have sacrificed their children's happiness in marriage from the dawn of civilization till almost our own time, "choosing almost always the richest bride or bridegroom available". "Neither happiness nor virtue, but worldly success, is what the average father desires for his children."

The child's point of view. Each authority wants the child to minister to an end outside its own well-being — the State to national aggrandizement, the Church to the priesthood's power, the schoolmaster to the school's glory, the parent to the family's credit; "the child itself, as an end in itself... does not come into these various external purposes". Yet children must be under some authority; the aim should be "as little authority as possible", utilizing natural desires. "The desire to acquire knowledge is natural to most young people" — the traditional pedagogue's belief in a native horror of instruction is self-excusing. Tchekov's tale of the man who taught a kitten to catch mice by beating it — "This is the man... who taught me Latin" — shows the folly of forcing before the instinct awakens; cats wait until the instinct has awakened. Children learn to talk by their own efforts in the first two or three years, with only "opportunity and praise". Sanderson of Oundle made mathematics interesting through machinery; effort is natural when there is "a problem of which the solution is desired" and "a feeling of hopefulness" — the opposite of David Copperfield's Murdstone arithmetic ("If I go into a cheesemonger's shop, and buy five thousand double-Gloucester cheeses..."). "The power of understanding hypothetical truth is one of the latest developments of logical faculty" — the governess's horse-and-pony sum, and the boy's question "Had he been down?" — "James (the groom) says it makes a great difference."

Three freedoms. Freedom in education has three aspects: freedom to learn or not to learn (only partially conceded in childhood — the illiterate minimum must be secured, "but children must have the opportunity thrust upon them"), freedom as to what to learn (specialization from fourteen, since "the ideal of an 'all-around' education is out of date; it has been destroyed by the progress of knowledge"), and freedom of opinion — "the most important of the various kinds of freedom, and the only one which requires no limitations whatever".

Freedom of opinion. "The fundamental argument for freedom of opinion is the doubtfulness of all our beliefs." If we certainly knew the truth it could be taught without invoking authority: "It is not necessary to make a law that no one shall be allowed to teach arithmetic if he holds heretical opinions on the multiplication table." When the State intervenes to teach a doctrine, "it does so because there is no conclusive evidence in favor of that doctrine. The result is that the teaching is not truthful, even if it should happen to be true." New York made it illegal to teach that Communism is good; Soviet Russia that it is bad — "Either New York or Soviet Russia was teaching truth and proscribing falsehood, but neither was teaching truthfully, because each was representing a doubtful proposition as certain." Hence the distinction between truth and truthfulness: "Truth is for the gods"; "truthfulness... is the habit of forming our opinions on the evidence, and holding them with that degree of conviction which the evidence warrants... In science, an observer states his results along with the 'probable error'; but who ever heard of a theologian or a politician stating the probable error in his dogmas?" "If the fundamentalists thought they had a good case against evolution, they would not make the teaching of it illegal."

The effects of orthodoxy. Orthodoxy excludes from teaching "men who combine honesty with intellectual vigor": in politics, the American economics teacher who will not teach what adds to the wealth of the very rich must go elsewhere (Mr. Laski, "formerly of Harvard, now one of the most valuable teachers in the London School of Economics"); in religion, "the immense majority of intellectually eminent men disbelieve the Christian religion, but they conceal the fact in public"; in morals, "Practically all men are unchaste at some time of their lives... it is only to the hypocrites that teaching posts are open." Intellectually, what stimulates the pupil is "a problem of obvious practical importance, as to which he finds that divergent opinions are held" — economics from individualists and socialists, history taught "by Frenchmen in England, and by Englishmen in France"; "a young man should learn to think that all questions are open". Morally, orthodoxy encourages intolerance: Edmund Gosse's Father and Son and the horrified question "Father, is she a Pedo-Baptist?"; children in Catholic schools believe Protestants wicked, children everywhere believe atheists wicked; "for the sake of orthodoxy the children are rendered uncharitable, intolerant, cruel, and bellicose". And the social damage: "Wars and persecutions are rife everywhere, and everywhere they are rendered possible by the teaching in the schools" — Wellington said Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton; "he might have said with more truth that the war against revolutionary France was instigated in the classrooms of Eton". The conclusion: "Regimentation is the source of the evil... No man is fit to educate unless he feels each pupil an end in himself... Reverence for human personality is the beginning of wisdom, in every social question, but above all in education."

Key ideas

• Freedom in education must be a matter of degree; some authority is unavoidable, but each authority serves an end outside the child.
• State education is a method of making people "do what their leaders wish under the impression that they are doing what they themselves wish"; uniformity is secured by mental atrophy.
• The Church gives instruction without mental activity; the schoolmaster is sacked if he educates; the parent wants a credit, not a happiness.
• The child learns naturally (talking, kittens, Oundle's machinery) when there is an instinctive stimulus, a desired problem, and hope of solution.
• Freedom of opinion is the most important freedom and needs no limitation: "The fundamental argument for freedom of opinion is the doubtfulness of all our beliefs."
• Truth is for the gods; education should teach truthfulness — opinion proportioned to evidence, with a "probable error" attached.
• Orthodoxy excludes honest vigorous teachers and renders children uncharitable, intolerant, cruel, and bellicose.
• "Reverence for human personality is the beginning of wisdom, in every social question, but above all in education."

Key takeaway

Every authority in education — State, Church, schoolmaster, parent — uses the child for ends of its own, and since all our beliefs are doubtful, the one freedom that needs no limitation is freedom of opinion, taught by truthfulness rather than orthodoxy.

Chapter 15 — Psychology and Politics

Central question

What effects — good and bad, possible and probable — will psychology come to have upon politics?

Main argument

Political opinions are not based on reason. "Even so technical a matter as the resumption of the gold standard was determined mainly by sentiment, and according to the psycho-analysts, the sentiment in question is one which cannot be mentioned in polite society." The sentiments of an adult are "a kernel of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of education", and education works partly through influencing imagination — everyone wants to see himself as a fine fellow, so what counts as a "fine fellow" shapes effort and delusion. "I doubt whether anyone who had learned modern psychology in youth could be quite like the late Lord Curzon or the present Bishop of London."

Three kinds of effects of a science. A science may (1) furnish inventions used by the holders of power, (2) influence the imagination and so alter analogies and expectations, (3) change the manner of life. Physical science shows all three (aeroplanes; the mechanistic outlook; urban industrial life). Psychology's future effects are prophecy — most reliable as to the second kind.

Analogies that rule politics. In the Middle Ages the Pope-Emperor controversy was decided by the analogy of the Sun and the Moon: "it became recognized that the Pope was the Sun and the Emperor was the Moon, so the Pope won" — "It would be a mistake to argue that the Pope won because he had better armies." Today "some people think society is a machine and some think it is a tree. The former are Fascisti, imperialists, industrialists, Bolsheviks; the latter constitutionalists, agrarians, or pacifists. The argument is just as absurd as that of the Guelfs and Ghibellines, since society is in fact neither a machine nor a tree." With the Renaissance came the influence of classical literature (Professor Gilbert Murray's first reaction is "What would Euripides have said about it?"); Montesquieu and Rousseau shaped the American Constitution — "The American Constitution is what Montesquieu imagined the British Constitution to be." With the industrial revolution came the era of physics. "A machine... works according to known scientific laws... for a definite purpose lying outside itself... Its relation to man is exactly that which the world had to God in the Calvinist theology; perhaps that is why industrialism was invented by Protestants." If society is a machine it has an external purpose: "we are no longer content to say that it exists for the glory of God, but it is easy to find synonyms for God, such as: the Bank of England, the British Empire, the Standard Oil Company, the Communist Party, etc. Our wars are conflicts between these synonyms — it is the medieval sun-and-moon business over again."

Psychology as the science that alters man directly. Physics operated on the environment; "given a science equally definite, and capable of altering man directly, physics would be put in the shade. This is what psychology may become." The two important approaches are the physiologists' and the psycho-analysts'. Education is the test case: "one finds that the scientific tendency is to attribute far more power to education than was formerly done, only it must begin very early. Psycho-analysts would begin at birth; biologists would begin even sooner" — "You can educate a fish to have one eye in the middle" (Jennings, Prometheus). "The essence of education is that it is a change (other than death) effected in an organism to satisfy the desires of the operator." The two principal methods of early education are chemicals and suggestion; "we know much more about the education of salamanders than about that of human beings, chiefly because we do not imagine that salamanders have souls". The mind-matter dualism is a mistake: sometimes the physical antecedent is easier to discover (iodine for idiocy), sometimes the psychological (a phobia) — "There is no inconsistency in treating one case by administering iodine, and another by curing a phobia."

The fundamental impulses. The orthodox economists, and Marx after them, took acquisitiveness as the only motive; "It is now held by capitalists and communists, and by all respectable persons, such as The Times and the magistrates, both of whom express utter amazement when young women sacrifice their earnings to marry men on the dole." The psycho-analysts counter that the fundamental impulse is sex; "I do not think either view quite true, but I certainly think the latter the less harmful." "If a wrong theory prevails, successful men will be unhappy, but will not know why. This fills them with rage, which leads them to desire the slaughter of younger men, whom they envy unconsciously. Most modern politics, while nominally based on economics, is really due to rage caused by lack of instinctive satisfaction." Sex is chiefly important when thwarted — "In the war, elderly spinsters developed a ferocity partly attributable to their indignation with young men for having neglected them" (the battleships at Saltash Bridge: "Isn't it sad to see them all lying idle!") — but hunger and thirst count for more politically, and parenthood is immensely important (Rivers even suggested it is the source of private property). Beyond the life-preserving impulses are the impulses of Glory: love of power, vanity, rivalry. "If politics is ever to allow of a tolerable life, these glory-impulses must be tamed."

Training instincts rather than thwarting them. "Our fundamental impulses are neither good nor bad: they are ethically neutral. Education should aim at making them take forms that are good. The old method, still beloved by Christians, was to thwart instinct; the new method is to train it." Love of power can be satisfied by "oppression, politics, business, art, science... The purpose of our public schools is to teach the technique of oppression and no other; consequently they produce men who take up the white man's burden. But if these men could do science, many of them might prefer it." Skill makes virtue attractive: "Of two activities which a man has mastered, he will generally prefer the more difficult: no chess-player will play draughts." Fear illustrates: Rivers's four reactions to danger — Fear and Flight; Rage and Fight; Manipulative activity; Paralysis — of which the third is best but requires skill; "The second is the one praised by militarists, schoolmasters, bishops, etc., under the name of 'courage'. Every governing class aims at producing it in its own members, and producing fear and flight in the subject population."

The danger of psychological weapons. "It is greatly to be feared that psychology will place new weapons in the hands of the holders of power. They will be able to train timidity and docility, and make the mass of men more and more like domestic animals" — and the holders of power include all officials, "even those of trade unions and Labor Parties". The hereditary principle at least ensured governing classes with a good proportion of the lazy and incompetent, which gave the rest a chance; "but if the governing class is to be recruited from the most energetic in each generation... the outlook for ordinary mortals is very black... Perhaps democracy is a passing phase; if so, psychology will serve to rivet the chains on the serfs. This makes it important to secure democracy before the technique of oppression has been perfected." Psychology's effects on the imagination: wider acceptance of determinism (prayers for rain are obsolete, "but they are not so uncomfortable about prayers for a good heart" — the difference would cease if the causes of a good heart were as well known), and emancipation from materialism, "which... would be wholly good, since it would remove the erroneous notions now prevalent as to what constitutes happiness". "The great practical importance of psychology will come in giving ordinary men and women a more just conception of what constitutes human happiness. If people were genuinely happy, they would not be filled with envy, rage, and destructiveness. Apart from the necessaries of life, freedom for sex and parenthood is what is most needed." "The world is full of knowledge of all sorts that might bring such happiness as has never existed since man first emerged, but old maladjustments, greed, envy, and religious cruelty, stand in the way. I do not know what the outcome will be, but I think it will be either better or worse than anything the human race has yet known."

Key ideas

• Political opinions are not based on reason; sentiment — a kernel of instinct in a husk of education — decides even the gold standard.
• Analogies rule politics: the Sun and Moon, the machine versus the tree; wars are conflicts between synonyms for God.
• Psychology may become the science that alters man directly, as physics altered his environment.
• Education is "a change (other than death) effected in an organism to satisfy the desires of the operator".
• Neither acquisitiveness nor sex is the whole of human motive; hunger, parenthood, and the glory-impulses (love of power, vanity, rivalry) matter politically.
• Instincts are ethically neutral; education should train them, not thwart them — public schools teach the technique of oppression.
• Psychology will give the holders of power irresistible weapons of education and propaganda; democracy must be secured "before the technique of oppression has been perfected".
• A more just conception of happiness would end the envy, rage, and destructiveness of modern politics.

Key takeaway

Psychology may give the holders of power weapons to rivet the chains on the serfs, or it may give ordinary men and women a juster conception of happiness — the outcome will be "either better or worse than anything the human race has yet known".

Chapter 16 — The Danger of Creed Wars

Central question

Is the world entering a new age of synthetic intolerance — wars between rival creeds like those of the Middle Ages — and can they be averted?

Main argument

The historical oscillation. "Various periodic oscillations run through the history of mankind... the oscillation from synthesis and intolerance to analysis and tolerance, and back again." Uncivilized tribes are synthetic and intolerant; the pre-Hellenic civilizations retained this (Egypt's priesthood repelled Akhnaton's solvent scepticism); the first age of analytic tolerance was Greece, produced by commerce — "Commerce was... a matter of individual enterprise, in which prejudices were a hindrance to profits" — but the commercial spirit could not produce the cohesion needed for military success, so the Greeks succumbed to Macedonia and Rome. Rome was "synthetic, and intolerant in a quite modern way, i.e., not theologically, but imperialistically and financially"; its synthesis dissolved into Christian and Mahometan syntheses; the Renaissance produced a brief splendor, then the wars of religion; Holland and England emerged first into tolerance; "England, like ancient Greece, has had a solvent effect upon neighbors", producing the scepticism required for democracy and parliamentary government. "The world of the nineteenth century... is due to the philosophy embodied in the revolution of 1688 and expressed by John Locke" — dominating America in 1776 and France in 1789.

The inconsistency of Liberalism. Locke's ideas were "commercial, not industrial": "the philosophy appropriate to industrialism is quite different from that of seafaring merchant adventurers. Industrialism is synthetic; it builds up large economic units, makes society more organic, and demands a suppression of individualistic impulses. Moreover, the economic organization of industrialism has hitherto been oligarchic, and has neutralized political democracy in the very moment of its apparent victory. For these reasons it seems likely that we are entering upon a new age of synthetic intolerance, involving, as such ages always do, wars between rival philosophies or creeds."

Two Great Powers. "There are in the world to-day only two Great Powers: one is the United States, the other is the U.S.S.R." — a division reminiscent of medieval Christendom and Islam, "the same kind of difference of creed, the same implacable hostility", with wars within each group ending in genuine peace treaties but between the groups "only truces produced by mutual exhaustion... I suppose the conflict is maintained because each group hates the other and regards it as wicked. This is a characteristic of creed wars." The prophecy is made to be falsified: "part of the object of the prophet is to induce people to make the efforts necessary to falsify his predictions".

The causes of intolerance. "The fundamental reason for expecting a greater degree of effective intolerance in the near future than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the cheapness of large-scale standard production" — leading to trusts and monopolies and to "control of the sources of opinion... concentrated in a few hands, with the result that minority opinions lose the chance of effective expression". In the U.S.S.R. the concentration is deliberate: "Communism is becoming more and more a creed, concerned with a future heaven, and less and less a way of life for this mundane existence"; "The less Communism there is in the actual economic régime, the more there will be in the generally accepted creed." In China the nationalists, under Russian influence, are turning against all old religions; "it is quite probable that it may adopt the philosophy of the Bolsheviks", and Britain's excessive belief in the power of tradition blinds it to Young China. "It is therefore by no means improbable that, twenty years hence, the Bolshevik ideology will be in power throughout China."

The American creed. In the Western world the modern creed appears most purely in America. "The Russian ideal is Communism. The American ideal is free competition" — trusts are to the American ideal what the NEP was to the Russian. "From Log Cabin to White House represents the ideal to be put before the young in politics"; the individualist philosophy makes the failing individual "feel ashamed of his incapacity rather than angry with the social system". "In a stable social system there must be some method of making the less fortunate acquiesce in their lot, and this is usually some kind of creed": America offers technical progress and material comfort, Russia the conception of industry conducted for the benefit of all and membership in a cooperative community. "We come here to the kernel of the difference between the creeds of America and Russia": the one, molded by Protestant tradition and pioneering, believes in the individual fighting his way from poverty to affluence (even at the cost of lifelong servility of opinion); the other, impressed by the Byzantine Church, the Tartars, and the Tsardom with "the nothingness of the individual", can sacrifice him to the community more wholeheartedly than any Christian — the fable of Menenius Agrippa's body. The cult of Lenin is "an inconsistency, an eruption of the natural man through the crust of theory... He may in time become as theoretically abstract as the Logos."

Why the creeds will persist. Communism is more suited to industrialism than capitalism in some respects — organizations grow, individual ownership of land is illogical (mining royalties, the Boer farmer on whose farm gold is found, Egypt and Panama and the canals, the "wealthy highwaymen" who levy toll on the world's minerals) — yet "I do not think that the socialistic outlook is likely to become common in America at any time during the next hundred years", because so long as "the American working-man is richer than the working-man in a socialist country", capitalistic propaganda can rebut socialism. The machinery of uniformity: "Syndicated newspapers, higher education subsidized by millionaires, elementary education controlled by the Churches... a well-organized book-trade... radio, but, above all, the cinema". Propaganda prevails "so long as the régime which it recommends appears to the common man to bear the marks of success. Defeat in war, which is a mark of failure that everybody can understand, may upset any régime, but the prospect of America being defeated in war is remote." Each side knows the other's cruelties but not its own: Sacco and Vanzetti ("The real crime of Sacco and Vanzetti was that they were anarchists"), Mooney, the Swiss law under which "it is not only legal to murder a communist, but the man who has done so is exonerated for his next crime", the Japanese policeman who strangled two anarchists and their nephew and was imprisoned only lightly. Organized religion will grow more powerful in capitalist countries as education is controlled in the interests of the rich — "the Churches ruled officially that it would be anti-Christian to confiscate" royal property in Germany; "Such opinions deserve to be rewarded. They no doubt will be."

The verdict. "The whole evil could, of course, be avoided by the spread of the scientific spirit, that is to say, by the habit of forming opinions on evidence rather than on prejudice; but although scientific technique is necessary to industrialism, the scientific spirit belongs rather to commerce... We may therefore expect to see it surviving only in small countries, such as Holland, Denmark, and Scandinavia." After "a century or so of conflict, both sides will grow weary, as they did after the Thirty Years War. When that time comes, the latitudinarians will again have their chance." Russell's own position is Erasmus's: "No doubt I agree with the Bolsheviks on many more points than with the American magnates, but I cannot believe that their philosophy is ultimately true or capable of producing a happy world." Both philosophies organize by economics — "the trust and the trade union are economic" — whereas "the groupings that are consonant with human instinct are biological. The family and the nation are biological." "The fundamental delusion of our time... is the excessive emphasis upon the economic aspects of life", and "the strife between Capitalism and Communism as philosophies" will not cease "until it is recognized that both are inadequate through their failure to recognize biological needs". The method of diminishing the ferocity of the struggle: "the old Liberal watchwords" — freedom of opinion and opportunity for its spread — though the mechanism for spreading opinion lies with the State or great capitalist concerns, "and it can hardly be expected that either... will devote money and energy to the propagation of opinions which it considers dangerous and subversive". The suffragette method (simple, passionate issues) is the only one available to unpopular causes; "the effect of the official or unofficial censorship is therefore to make opposition to it passionate rather than rational". "Perhaps in time men may come to feel that intelligence is an asset to a community, but I cannot say that I see much sign of any movement in this direction."

Key ideas

• History oscillates between synthesis-with-intolerance and analysis-with-tolerance; commerce breeds tolerance, industrialism breeds synthesis.
• Locke's commercial Liberalism is inconsistent with industrialism, which is oligarchic and synthetic — hence a new age of creed wars is probable.
• The two Great Powers, America and Russia, are rival creeds dividing the world like medieval Christendom and Islam; creed wars end in truces, not treaties.
• Cheap large-scale production concentrates the sources of opinion; minority opinions lose effective expression.
• Communism is becoming a creed of a future heaven; "the less Communism there is in the actual economic régime, the more there will be in the generally accepted creed".
• America's creed is individualist (Log Cabin to White House), Russia's collectivist; each makes the less fortunate acquiesce.
• Propaganda machinery (press, radio, cinema, subsidized schools) prevails while the régime bears the marks of success.
• "The fundamental delusion of our time... is the excessive emphasis upon the economic aspects of life"; both creeds ignore biological needs.

Key takeaway

Industrialism is producing a new age of synthetic intolerance in which America and Russia face each other as rival creeds; the conflict rests on the fundamental delusion that life is economics, and only the scientific spirit — surviving in small commercial countries — could dissolve it.

Chapter 17 — Some Prospects: Cheerful and Otherwise

Central question

If our civilization survives, what will the world look like in the next hundred to two hundred years — and what will it cost?

Main argument

The scientific and the Utopian method. "There are two ways of writing about the future, the scientific and the Utopian. The scientific way tries to discover what is probable; the Utopian way sets out what the writer would like." In astronomy no one prophesies eclipses because it would be pleasant; in social affairs the professed law-givers are usually guessing. Russell ignores new discoveries (travel to Mars, chemical food) and "assume[s] that our civilization will continue, although this is by no means certain".

The central authority. The most important change in modern times is "the tendency towards closer social organization", and connected with it "the greater unity of the world" — Augustus and the Han Emperor could each imagine himself master of the civilized world; the Dalai Llama, courted by Russians and British, took refuge in Peking "where all his suite arrived duly armed with kodaks from America". From these two premises it follows that "if our civilization is to develop, there will have to be a central authority to control the whole world" — "at latest some time during the twenty-first century — there must be either a cataclysm or a central authority controlling the whole world". It may be a combination of financiers persuaded that peace is to their interest, a single dominant State (America), or a group; before it is reached there may be a long period of division between America (controlling Western Europe and the Dominions) and Russia (controlling Asia). "First and foremost, it must be able to decide questions of peace and war" — by financial supremacy alone if necessary, as with Germany since Versailles. Three matters fall to it: (1) the allocation of territory (the absurd solemnity of treason — Croydon versus Colombia-Venezuela); (2) movements of population — Asiatic immigration is prohibited, stimulating "Asiatic militarism"; "Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favor of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life"; (3) the rationing of raw materials — "perhaps the most important of all... I am an international socialist, but I expect to see internationalism realized sooner than Socialism."

Economic changes. "Whenever an increase in the size of organizations has been desirable in the interests of those concerned, it has had to be brought about (with negligible exceptions) by means of force on the part of the stronger": Greece before Macedonia, sixteenth-century Italy, present-day Europe. The central authority will be created by force or the threat of force, "not by a voluntary organization such as the League of Nations"; its power will be economic, resting on raw materials and financial credit — "a group of financiers backed, informally, by one or more great States". Monopoly will be at the basis of the economic structure (the world's oil; the Big Five in Chicago, themselves controlled by J. P. Morgan & Co.); "given monopoly at one stage of a process there will be a tendency to extend the monopoly to earlier and later stages". Secure peace and adequate control of production should increase material comfort; the dominant group will concede progressive increases to its own wage-earners, as in the United States and formerly England. The development will then tend "in the direction of democracy, i.e., of Socialism — for Socialism is merely economic democracy in a community which has reached the stage of monopoly in many industries": England's parallel — unified by the King (Henry VII after the Wars of the Roses), then democracy after unity was secure. "We are now, in the economic sphere, just about at the transition from the Wars of the Roses to Henry VII." A world-wide Socialism involving economic justice to all nations and classes may become possible "not long after the establishment of a central authority". The alternative possibility: caste distinctions on the South African or Southern States pattern, with "democracy for white men with a semi-servile condition for the colored population", perhaps ending with "the white race... gradually [becoming] a numerically small aristocracy, and... finally exterminated by a negro insurrection".

The family. "Humanitarian sentiment towards children" is weakening the family: the State will care for neglected children; "gradually the expense of caring for neglected children out of public funds will become so great that there will be a very strong inducement... to give their children over to the State"; with parental responsibility removed, marriage would cease among those classes; the State would pay mothers to produce the desired number of citizens. "All this is not so very remote; it might easily happen in England before the end of the twentieth century." If it happens while capitalism and international anarchy still rule, the results will be terrible: two castes — the proletarians, "educated by the State... imbued, like the Janissaries in old Turkey, with a passionate militaristic loyalty", and the well-to-do preserving the family; "an era of internecine wars, comparable only to the invasions of Huns and Mongols in the Middle Ages". If a world authority comes first, State-raised children "will, if the pressure of militaristic necessities is removed, almost certainly be better developed both physically and mentally than the average child is now". If the world remains capitalistic, the lower caste will need submissiveness, and "the rich [may] encourage breeding among black rather than white or yellow proletarians". "I see no reason to suppose that this will change in the near future. And I think, for such reasons as I have been giving, that if our civilization continues much longer to pursue the interests of the rich, it is doomed. It is because I do not desire the collapse of civilization that I am a socialist." Biologically the family is an institution for protecting helpless children; with ants and bees there is no family; "if infant life comes to be safe apart from the protection of parents, family life will gradually disappear" — diminishing differences between people, making sex-love less romantic, rendering love-poetry absurd. "I cannot but think that there will be a real loss in the emotional texture of life; but every increase of safety involves some such loss. Steamers are less romantic than sailing-ships; tax-collectors than highwaymen. Perhaps, in the end, safety will become wearisome, and men will become destructive from sheer boredom."

Culture and the danger of boredom. Culture will tend toward science and away from art and literature: "a 'gentleman' should know some Latin, but need not know how a steam-engine is made"; before long "no one will be considered educated unless he knows something of science". Art becomes a matter of coteries; the emotional needs formerly satisfied aesthetically find trivial outlets (dancing, dance-music, except the Russian ballet). Education will become "dynamic" — "will teach people to do rather than to think or feel"; "There will probably be an official caste of thinkers and another of feelers" (the former a development of the Royal Society whose results are Government property, the latter a federation of the Royal Academy and the Episcopate), with the decisions of the Official Feelers probably "Government secrets". The daily Press will be killed by broadcasting; reading replaced by the gramophone, writing by the dictophone. Four hours' work a day would suffice; the hours of leisure will go to dancing, football, the movies; children will be no anxiety; old age postponed by rejuvenation — "It will be a hedonist's paradise, in which almost every one will find life so tedious as to be scarcely endurable." R. L. Stevenson's Suicide Club might flourish; secret societies devoted to artistic murder. But the dilemma is escapable: "what passes as 'human nature' is at most one-tenth nature, the other nine-tenths being nurture", and early education could preserve seriousness without danger. "Two things are necessary for this purpose: the development of constructive impulses in the young, and opportunities for their existence in adult life." "The emotions of esthetic creation or scientific discovery may be as intense and absorbing as the most passionate love." The final warning: "The harm that this will do will be the diminution of opportunities for individual effort. Vast organizations produce a sense of impotence in the individual, leading to a decay of effort... Into every tidy scheme for arranging the pattern of human life it is necessary to inject a certain dose of anarchism, enough to prevent immobility leading to decay, but not enough to bring about disruption."

Key ideas

• The scientific way of writing about the future tries to discover what is probable; the Utopian way sets out what the writer would like.
• Closer social organization and the greater unity of the world make a central world authority inevitable — by the twenty-first century, "either a cataclysm or a central authority controlling the whole world".
• The central authority will be economic (financiers backed by great States), will control peace and war, territory, population movements, and raw materials.
• Monopoly is the basis of the future economy; "I expect to see internationalism realized sooner than Socialism", then economic democracy.
• The family will fade as the State cares for children; if capitalism and international anarchy survive, the result is two castes and internecine war; if a world authority comes first, the results may be good.
• "If our civilization continues much longer to pursue the interests of the rich, it is doomed. It is because I do not desire the collapse of civilization that I am a socialist."
• Culture will become scientific and "dynamic", with Official Thinkers and Official Feelers; a hedonist's paradise will be tedious.
• Human nature is one-tenth nature and nine-tenths nurture; constructive impulses and opportunities can save seriousness.
• "Into every tidy scheme for arranging the pattern of human life it is necessary to inject a certain dose of anarchism."

Key takeaway

If civilization survives it will be organized under a central world authority, economically monopolistic and eventually democratic, with the family dissolving and culture turning scientific — and the greatest danger is not destruction but the boredom and decay of individual effort that vast organization produces, against which a dose of anarchism must be injected.

The book's overall argument

1. Chapter 1 (Introduction: On the Value of Scepticism) — states the doctrine that it is undesirable to believe a proposition with no ground for believing it, defines its limits, and argues that passionate belief is the measure of ungrounded conviction, so that scepticism is the precondition of both rational action and humane emotion.
2. Chapter 2 (Dreams and Facts) — establishes that the mass of belief is wish-fulfilment arranged in a hierarchy of comforting myths (self, family, class, nation, humanity), correctable only partially by fact and conflict, and that even comforting falsehoods make men tolerate preventable misery.
3. Chapter 3 (Is Science Superstitious?) — shows that science itself rests on a pre-scientific faith whose rational justification (causality, induction) is still unsolved, and that its pleasant and unpleasant aspects are inseparable.
4. Chapter 4 (Can Men Be Rational?) — defines rationality in opinion and conduct, refutes pragmatism's denial of objective fact, and argues that psycho-analysis itself presupposes an ideal of sanity, so that increased rationality is the only solid progress.
5. Chapter 5 (Philosophy in the Twentieth Century) — surveys the defeat of German idealism and the critiques of pragmatism and Bergson, and describes the philosophy of analysis and pluralism forced by the new logic and the new physics, which offers knowledge without consolation.
6. Chapter 6 (Machines and the Emotions) — argues that machinery's defence assumes happiness is proportional to income, that the real desire behind wealth is competitive vanity, and that machines starve spontaneity and variety, driving instincts into war; the remedy is to understand and satisfy instinct in the least harmful way.
7. Chapter 7 (Behaviorism and Values) — shows that behaviorism as a science can have no ethical consequences, that every ethical system rests on a non sequitur, and that the behaviorist ethic of income and conformity must be rejected while its science is accepted.
8. Chapter 8 (Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness) — contrasts China's Confucian civilization, which aims at enjoyment, with the Western pursuit of power, and argues that China's only defect is military, not moral.
9. Chapter 9 (The Harm That Good Men Do) — inverts the ordinary moral vocabulary: a "good" man is one whose opinions please the holders of power, such men (George III, the ex-Kaiser) have done enormous harm, and the "bad" men — poets, scientists, reformers — have done the good; a rational ethic would rest on prevention and cure, not guilt and expiation.
10. Chapter 10 (The Recrudescence of Puritanism) — explains the return of the doctrine that certain acts are inherently sinful, traces it to the permanent victory of Cromwell's party in America, and argues that suppressing real evils too drastically produces greater ones, leaving the love of power as the dominant pleasure.
11. Chapter 11 (The Need for Political Scepticism) — argues that party government in a democracy can only pass sectional, simple, and hateful policies, that experts are indispensable but fallible, and that political scepticism — enmity concentrated on politicians — is the moral equivalent for war.
12. Chapter 12 (Free Thought and Official Propaganda) — diagnoses the two great modern obstacles to freedom of thought — economic penalties and distortion of evidence through education and propaganda — and prescribes the will to doubt and two principles: believe only on evidence, and give jobs for fitness.
13. Chapter 13 (Freedom in Society) — defines freedom as absence of obstacles to desire, distinguishes the goods held at others' expense (necessaries, subject to justice) from those not so held (opinion, knowledge, art, personal morals), and argues for free competition in ideas, not in business.
14. Chapter 14 (Freedom Versus Authority in Education) — examines the State, the Church, the schoolmaster, the parent, and the child, concludes that no authority serves the child as an end in itself, and argues that the doubtfulness of all beliefs makes freedom of opinion the one freedom needing no limitation, taught as truthfulness rather than orthodoxy.
15. Chapter 15 (Psychology and Politics) — shows that political opinions rest on sentiment and analogy, that psychology may give holders of power irresistible weapons, and that the great hope is a juster popular conception of happiness through training instincts rather than thwarting them.
16. Chapter 16 (The Danger of Creed Wars) — predicts a new age of synthetic intolerance in which America and Russia face each other as rival creeds, resting on the fundamental delusion that life is economics, and sees the scientific spirit surviving only in small commercial countries.
17. Chapter 17 (Some Prospects: Cheerful and Otherwise) — forecasts a central world authority by the twenty-first century, monopolistic then democratic, the dissolution of the family, the scientific and "dynamic" direction of culture, and warns that the dose of anarchism against immobility is the delicate problem civilization is least likely to solve.

Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: The book is against all belief and recommends doubting everything. Russell explicitly rejects "heroic scepticism": he tells the story of Pyrrho walking past his teacher stuck in a ditch to disown it, accepts common-sense beliefs "in practice if not in theory", and accepts well-established science as "sufficiently probable to afford a basis for rational action". The doctrine is that belief should be proportioned to evidence — "These propositions may seem mild, yet, if accepted, they would absolutely revolutionize human life."

Misunderstanding: "Sceptical" is a misspelling of "skeptical". The British spelling "Sceptical" is the book's original title spelling, used by the first publisher (George Allen & Unwin) and retained in every edition including Routledge Classics. American editions such as the 1928 Norton printing keep the title's British spelling while spelling "behaviorism" American-style inside the text.

Misunderstanding: The essays argue for cold, emotionless rationality as a way of life. The Introduction argues the opposite: "There are very definite limits... within which rationality should be confined." Russell wants to keep "the lover and the poet, without the lunatic"; the ideal is conventional morality's exact opposite — leave love to instinct, bring hatred under the dominion of reason.

Misunderstanding: "Is Science Superstitious?" is an attack on science. The essay examines the naive faith behind the scientific credo and reports that causality and induction have no rational justification since Hume — but its conclusion is that science is the best knowledge we have, that refusing to face the logic would dry up the impulse to understand, and that the cure for superstition is more of the scientific temper, not less science.

Misunderstanding: Russell is recommending party politics or revolution as the cure. "The Need for Political Scepticism" argues the exact reverse: no important party can have a useful program, "we must be sceptical even of our scepticism", and the sane attitude is to abstain from belief in party programs while expert opinion is organized to make itself heard.

Misunderstanding: "The Harm That Good Men Do" means morally upright people are secretly harmful and vice is good. Russell's "good" man is a technical term of the essay: "a good man is one whose opinions and activities are pleasing to the holders of power". The essay's point is that the conventional standard of goodness is superstition plus the interest of dominant classes, and that the genuinely useful people (Bentham, poets, scientists, reformers) fail it.

Misunderstanding: The essay on behaviorism condemns behaviorism. Russell calls Watson's books "enormously important", admires his educational views, and accepts the scientific part of behaviorism for practical purposes — he rejects only the popular inference that since we can only move matter, we ought to move as much of it as possible.

Misunderstanding: The book's political essays are dated and describe only the 1920s. "The Danger of Creed Wars" is a structural analysis of the oscillation between tolerance and intolerance, applied to the America-Russia division of its own day but general in form; "Some Prospects" explicitly declines to prophesy from Utopian wishes and reasons from tendencies alone. The essays' arguments about propaganda, economic pressure on opinion, and the concentration of control over belief are offered as permanent mechanisms of mass society.

Misunderstanding: Scepticism leads to social paralysis. The Introduction argues that ungrounded beliefs are held with passion precisely because they lack rational grounds, and that the opinions people fight over — politics and religion — are exactly those the three sceptical rules condemn; a rational sceptic is freer to act, because his actions rest on probable evidence rather than on myths that must be defended by war and persecution.

Central paradox / key insight

The collection's most counterintuitive theme is that scepticism is the path to conviction — doubt, not faith, is what makes rational action, tolerance, and happiness possible. The passion with which an opinion is held is a measure of its lack of rational grounding; the "will to doubt" is the exact opposite of William James's "will to believe"; and the man who proportioned belief to evidence would be the most decisive and least cruel actor in the world. Russell inverts the moral verdict on myth: the comforting systems that hide our littleness are not harmless consolations but the machinery of cruelty, while the "unflinching perception of our true place in the world" is liberation from the tyranny of fear.

"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."

Important concepts

Scepticism (Pyrrhonism) — The doctrine that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true, delimited against Pyrrho's heroic suspension of judgment. Russell's version: (1) expert unanimity does not make the opposite opinion impossible; (2) expert disagreement rules out certainty for the non-expert; (3) when experts see no sufficient grounds, the ordinary man should suspend judgment.

The scientific temper — The habit of forming opinions on evidence rather than prejudice, tentatively and with doubt; contrasted throughout the book with the mere knowledge of scientific results, which can serve mechanism, poison gas, and the Yellow Press as easily as discovery.

The will to doubt — Russell's inversion of William James's "will to believe": the wish to find out, the readiness to discard inadequate hypotheses, and the practice of holding beliefs with the degree of conviction the evidence warrants.

Truth versus truthfulness — "Truth is for the gods"; truthfulness is the human habit of forming opinions on the evidence and stating the probable error, as scientists do, rather than asserting doubtful propositions as certain, as politicians and theologians do.

The myth-making faculty — The mind's tendency to body forth wishes as beliefs, producing the hierarchy of comforting convictions (self, family, class, nation, humanity) that politeness protects and that only contact with fact and conflict with other men's beliefs partially corrects.

Rationalizing and irrationalizing — The Freudian process of inventing rational grounds for an irrational decision, and Russell's converse term for the Anglo-Saxon practice of letting the unconscious compute self-interest soundly while the conscious mind invents high-sounding public-spirited phrases.

"Sin is geographical" — The conclusion of the Introduction's survey of marriage customs: since every kind of custom has existed and none can be shown better or worse, the notion of sin is illusory and the cruelty practiced in punishing it unnecessary.

Shrewdness — Unconscious reason; the main quality for success in business, always selfish, but sufficient to keep men from the worst crimes; the reason why those who deliberately, on moral grounds, do what they believe contrary to their interest (the Quaker shopkeepers) end by doing what is in fact most to their interest.

The non sequitur of ethical systems — The principle that every ethical system is based on a false metaphysic: wickedness is defined as the behavior that shows the philosopher's theory false, which would be impossible if the theory were true — hence behaviorism, if true, can have no ethical consequences.

Puritanism — The doctrine that certain kinds of acts, even with no visible bad effects on others, are inherently sinful and ought to be prevented by the criminal law if possible, otherwise by public opinion backed by economic pressure.

Political scepticism — The rigid abstention from belief in party programs; concentrating enmity on politicians rather than nations or classes, which Russell suggests as fulfilling William James's desideratum of a "moral equivalent for war".

The bare minimum of freedom — Food, drink, health, clothing, housing, sex, and parenthood; the claim to these necessaries overrides any other claim, so that depriving a man of necessaries to secure superfluities is a greater interference with freedom than the reverse.

Psychological dynamics — The principle that external conditions modify human nature and desires, so that freedom must be considered as a relation between variable desires and variable environments, not with human nature as a fixed datum.

Creed wars — Wars between rival philosophies or creeds (medieval Christendom versus Islam; America versus Russia) fought because each side regards the other as wicked; they end in truces produced by mutual exhaustion, not in peace treaties.

Truthfulness in education — The habit of forming opinions on the evidence and holding them with the degree of conviction the evidence warrants; the object of education as opposed to the imparting of information without intelligence.

Glory impulses — Love of power, vanity, and rivalry; the impulses that play the greatest part in politics and must be tamed — trained into beneficent outlets by skill, not thwarted into hypocrisy by preaching.

The dose of anarchism — Russell's prescription for the future: "Into every tidy scheme for arranging the pattern of human life it is necessary to inject a certain dose of anarchism, enough to prevent immobility leading to decay, but not enough to bring about disruption."

References and Web Links

Primary sources — full text and editions

• Internet Archive — 1928 Norton printing, full text scan (the source for this outline's essay-by-essay content; its printed contents page lists all 17 essays): https://archive.org/details/scepticalessays0000bert_k7a1
• Internet Archive — 1966 Unwin Books edition (catalog record and scan; same 17-essay contents): https://archive.org/details/scepticalessays00russ
• HathiTrust — catalog record of the first edition, Sceptical Essays, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928 (251 pp.), confirming edition facts: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001384152
• HathiTrust — full view of the 1928 edition (University of Michigan copy; listed in HathiTrust's own search results for this title): https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015017287114
• Open Library — work page for Sceptical Essays (all editions under one record): https://openlibrary.org/works/OL25724095W
• Open Library — Routledge Classics 2004 edition record (ISBN 9780415325080): https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7491629M

Publisher — table of contents

• Routledge — Sceptical Essays (Routledge Classics, 2nd edition, 2004) product page with the official 17-item table of contents used to verify the essay list and order: https://www.routledge.com/Sceptical-Essays/Russell/p/book/9780415325080
• Wayback Machine capture of the same Routledge page (December 4, 2023), used for verification because the live page may change: https://web.archive.org/web/20231204033451/https://www.routledge.com/Sceptical-Essays/Russell/p/book/9780415325080

Biographical and background

• Wikipedia — Bertrand Russell (life and bibliography; its bibliography lists Sceptical Essays, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
• The Bertrand Russell Society (bibliographical and biographical resources on Russell's work): https://www.bertrandrussellsociety.org/

Works cited inside the essays (named by Russell in the text; not linked above because no verified online copies were checked): W. H. R. Rivers, Psychology and Politics and Instinct and the Unconscious; E. Westermarck, History of Human Marriage; J. G. Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament; E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (1924); A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1926); J. B. Watson, Behaviorism; M. V. O'Shea (ed.), The Child: His Nature and His Needs; Lionel Giles, Sayings of Confucius; Sir Arthur Salter, Allied Shipping Control; E. M. H. Lloyd, Stabilization (1923); Samuel Butler, Erewhon; H. G. Wells, The Life of Sanderson of Oundle.

Note on study guides — No standalone study guides to Sceptical Essays were verified during the research for this outline; readers seeking secondary commentary should prefer the essays' own cited sources (Whitehead, Burtt, Watson, Rivers) and the general Russell literature, treating any commercial summary site as a supplement, not a substitute, for the primary text.