Bertrand Russell's Crisis of Faith

Abstract

Philosophers, Russell once wrote, view the world in one of two ways: either as a jelly or as a pile of shot. Russell himself, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, abandoned the jelly in favour of the shot. This was the most radical of all the intellectual changes Russell went through in his career. Since it led directly to the writing of his greatest philosophical works, and, in general, to much of what is distinctive and best in Russell's matUre philosophy, the change has usually been presented as an intellectual liberation: an escape from nineteenth-century philosophical muddle to twentieth-century analytical rigour; from the Victorian parlour to the Bauhaus. There was, indeed, much of this in it; but also there was a more distressing aspect. The Victorian parlour offered a comfortable cosiness not available in the bleak, hard light of the Bauhaus interior. The change, I think, also had its impact on Russell's personal life, on his moral thinking, and, in particular, on the way he regarded human relationships. I shall do what I can in this paper to bring out these interconnections. But, first, I want to describe the Victorian parlour in a little more detail, [or, while the Bauhaus is sufficiently well known for my present purposes, the parlour was not so dark and cobwebby as it has sometimes appeared in retrospect. The British neo-Hegelian movement, in which Russell did his first philosophical work, embraced a fairly wide range of positions with only a few clear theses in common. Of these, I want to draw attention to two: the idealist thesis, that (ultimately) spirit alone is real; and the unity thesis, that (ultimately) either all relations are internal 'or else there are no relations at all. The disjunction in the unity thesis admits the distinction between the