The Tiger and the Machine

Abstract

This article contains a detailed discussion of the friendship and the intellectual collaboration between D. H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell during the spring and summer of 1915. The questions it seeks to answer are why Russell initially was inclined to treat Lawrence's philosophical thought with respect, even to the extent of becoming an evangelist on its behalf; why he subsequently rejected Lawrence's outlook and distanced himself from Lawrence's political program; and what similarities and dissimilarities exist in Russell's thought and Lawrence's as represented by Russell's Principles of Social Reconstruction and Lawrence's essays "Study of Thomas Hardy" and "The Crown." Both writers, it is suggested, were centrally concerned with the possibility of transcending the "prison" of the self, but the ideas each developed as to how this should be done were radically divergent, so much so that each could, in the end, regard the other as the very personification of the kind of egoism they sought to transcend.