BOOKS.

MYSTICISM AND LOGIC.•

ONE of the most marked features of Mr. Bertrand Russell's work, from the literary point of view, is his extraordinary intellectual self-control. He seems always armed against the temptation to risk a darkening of his main theme by the introduction of the irrelevant or 'the disproportionate, however intrinsically delightful or valuable they may be. He has something of the surgeon's pitiful pitilessness. Rather than overload an argument he will go to the most heroic lengths of elimination. This is the sort of footnote we constantly come across in his books :-

" It was A Theory of Time and Space, by Mr. A. A. Robb, which first suggested to me the views advocated here ; though I have for present purposes omitted what is most novel and interesting in his theory."

Can austerity be pushed further ? The stories of Agamemnon and Abraham pale before such an example of paternal fortitude !

-Sustained by his example, we propose in these brief notes upon an exceedingly suggestive and brilliant book to confine

• Mysticism and Logic. By Bertrand Russell, 31,a., F.R.S. London: Longmans and Go- Ile. td- vet.;

ourselves to a consideration of only two of the entirely popular " among the ten essays which the volume contains. This self-denying ordinance will preclude any adequate mention of the essays which deal with mathematics. We must, however, allow ourselves one comment—a kind of last oblation to the Goddess of Discursiveness. Mr. Russell is unjust to very many teachers of mathematics when he asserts that they do not point out to " aspiring youth " the fact that " mathematics rightly viewed possess not only truth but supreme beauty. . . . The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, can be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry." The present writer remembers vividly the overwhelming sense of delight with which he first apprehended certain of the propositions of Euclid, and how his tutor was particularly fond of enlarging to him upon the meaning of Pythagoras's sacrifice of a yoke of oxen to the Muses on his discovery of the forty-seventh proposition.

" Mysticism and Logic," the essay that gives its title to the book, has for its main points the restatement in " popular language " (otherwise admirably nervous and vigorous English) of what are perhaps Mr. Bertrand Russell's three most fundamental tenets— the three propositions which he most constantly insists upon in his metaphysical works. The first is that if the study of meta- physics is ever to advance, the metaphysician must follow in the footsteps of other investigators and must specialize. Ho must, if he is ever to achieve anything, cease to be tho Mr. Bye-Ends of the intellectual world ; for ever rushing in pursuit of the butterfly of psychology or wandering off after an ethical fixed star. Ho must not allow himself to be deflected from his subject, " the attempt to conceive the world as a whole by means of thought." The second is that it is as necessary for the philosophic investigator to be disinterested as for the scientific experimenter. The end and goal of metaphysics is not primarily to construct an evolutionary system, nor to steel us against the blows of misfortune, nor to justify the ways of God to man, nor even to discriminate between good and evil. If its votaries are to see the fruit of their labours, they must be animated solely by an austere and disinterested desire for I he Truth. It is not for them directly to seek the Good. Whether they approach from the logical and scientific side, or from the intuitive and mystical, they must come " cleansed of desire " :- " In philosophy, hitherto, ethical neutrality has been seldom sought and hardly ever achieved. Men have remembered their wishes. . . . It is a commonplace that happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly ; and it would seem that the same is true of the good,. In thought, at any rate, those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires. . . . Ethical considerations can only legiti- mately appear when the truth has been ascertained : they can and should appear as determining our feeling toward the truth, and our manner of ordering our lives in view of the truth, but not as them- selves dictating what the truth is to be. . . . He that loveth his life shall lose it.' . . . The submission which religion inculcates in action is essentially the same in spirit as that which science teaches in thought ; and the ethical neutrality by which its victories have been achieved is the outcome of that submission."

The third tenet concerns means. If we are agreed that " the Truth shall make you free," by what road shall we set forth on the search whose end is to answer Pilate's question ? The whole body of metaphysical thought has been brought forth " by the union and mallet of two very different human impulses, the one urging men towards mysticism, the other urging them towards science. . . . In Hume, for example, the scientific impulse reigns quite unchecked, while in Blake a strong hostility to science co-exists with profound mystic insight." Are these impulses truly antagonistic ? And if so, which are we to choose ? After giving examples of the two atti- tudes and analysing their characteristics, Mr. Russell leads us to his conclusion. Neither pure logic nor pure mysticism can satisfactorily stand alone. If we dig down, we find that all the vast edifices which logic has erected rest in the last resort upon the foundation of some a priori conception.* (For example, we have arbitrarily to assume our own existence before we begin to argue at all.) Therefore it may be contested that logic cannot wholly ignore intuition and a priori concepts :— " Of the reality or unreality of the mystic's world I know nothing. I have no wish to deny it, nor even to declare that the insight which reveals it is not a genuine insight. What I do wish to maintain . . . is that insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth, in spite of the fact that much of the most important truth is first suggested by its means."

Mysticism is often in danger of pitching her note too high, and of achieving a total severance from humanity. She comes to take no stock of mundane things, to pronounce this or that " common and unclean." " It is failure in this respect that has made so much of idealistic, philosophy thin, lifeless, and insubstantial. It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit ; divorced from it, they remain barren." Yet " there is -an element of wisdom to be learned from the mystical way of thinking

does not seem attainable in any other manner." It is, then, in a union of the two spirits that we can best hope to reach the high

• Bee Mr. Smell's Problems of Iltikool eminences of the world of thought. Reason we must regard as " a harmonizing, controlling force rather than a creative one "—the light by whose help we can co-ordinate and direct the forces of mystical experience, " the inspirers of whatever is best in man."

The second essay of which we propose to give an account, " A Free Man's Worship," is as remarkable for the splendour of its rhetoric as for the almost intolerable poignancy of the Stoic attitude which it portrays. A summary by no means does justice to the merits of a most noble and moving piece of prose. Mr. Russell first shows the reader giddily whirling nebulae, hot seas, vast forests, inhabited by huge obscene monsters breed- ing, devouring, fighting, and dying. And in this tossing, blind, purposeless, meaningless world man is evolved, alone of all creatures, sentient—a powerless creature " conscious of the oppression of his impotence before Nature," and knowing that anything that he may achieve in his brief life must inevitably be buried " beneath the debris of a universe in ruins." Such and no other is the revolution of the wheel of life. " Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on a firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation be safely built." Mr. Russell traces man's pathetic attempts to build a warmer nest, to believe in a God of Love, all-powerful and all-good- "the mystic unity of what is and what should be. But the world of fact is after all not all good." There is something slavish in submitting our judgment to it. Shall then our God exist but be evil, or shall He be recognized as the creation of our own con- science When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the Gods, seems necessary to the assertion of freedom. . . . But indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil world. . . . Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires : the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the submission of our desires, but not of our thoughts. From the submission of our desires springs the virtue of resignation : from the freedom of our thoughts springs the whole world of art and philosophy."

But the vision of beauty is possible only to thoughts not fettered and loaded with eager wishes. Freedom is born of the renunciation even of real goods if they are unobtainable. When misfortune comes, it is not only the port of courage but " the very gate of wisdom " to bear the ruin of our hopes without repining or vain regrets. Yet " Not by renunciation alone can we build a temple for the worship of our own ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the temple appear in the-realm of imagination, in music, in architecture, in the un- troubled kingdom of reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of change, remote from the failures and disenchantments of the world of fact.. . Except in those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a cavern of darkness to be traversed before that temple can be entered. . . . There Self must die : there the eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from the empire of Fate."

Then the pilgrim may hope to refashion the universe in the crucible of imagination, to find a new joy and a new tenderness, and to see even in the unconscious universe a beauty which his own thought first made :- " Brief and powerless is Man's life : on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way : for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass though the gates of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day : disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built : undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life : proudly defiant of the irresist- ible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power."

Mr. Russell has written a noble and deeply moving work. If the present writer has erred, it is not in praising too highly, but in not being generous enough in his eulogy. And yet, feeling as he does about Mr. Russell's views on the war, he cnn say in all sincerity that he would rather be the humblest English soldier fighting for the good cause than have written this most memorable book.