The Logos Scripture · The Book of Russell

On the Time I Took It Back

The Book of Russell 3 · Written by himself, from his lectures, essays, prison writing and autobiography

Bertrand Russell, born at Trellech in Wales in 1872, died in Wales in 1970 at ninety-seven. Both his parents were dead before he was four, and his grandmother raised him. With Whitehead he wrote the three volumes of Principia Mathematica, meaning to set arithmetic on logic. In 1901 he found a contradiction in his own scheme and wrote to Frege about it; Frege, whose life’s work was then at the printer, added a paragraph at the end saying the foundation of his book had been shaken. In 1916 he was fined for defending a conscientious objector and Cambridge dismissed him; in 1918 an article put him in prison for six months, where he finished a book on the philosophy of mathematics. In 1940 the City College of New York appointed him and a court revoked the appointment on the ground of his views on morals. He took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. In 1955 he and Einstein signed the manifesto urging the nations to give up such weapons (cf. The Book of Einstein). In 1961, at eighty-nine, he went to prison for a week for inciting civil disobedience. This volume rests on what he wrote himself, not on another man’s record of him. He did not believe and did not hide it: the lecture he gave in 1927 is called Why I Am Not a Christian. What this volume brings is something the scripture did not have: a man taking back in public what he had said, and showing the working of the retraction (chapter three). There are men here who changed (cf. The Book of Franklin), but none who ran the same reason twice and got two different answers.

3.1When the war came in 1914 I opposed it.
3.2It cost me my place at Cambridge, it cost me a fine, and in the end it cost me six months in prison.
3.3In prison I finished a book on the philosophy of mathematics. The warder asked my trade; I said philosopher, and he did not know how to write it down.
3.4What I said then was that no war is worth fighting.
3.5Some twenty years later another came, and I did not say it.
3.6I said that sentence, and I now take half of it back.
3.7And I must give the reason for taking it back. Without the reason, taking it back is only turning coat.
3.8My reason before was that a war destroys more than it saves.
3.9That is a claim that can be worked out. And what can be worked out must be worked out again against the case in front of you.
3.10In 1914 what the two sides were quarrelling over was not worth that many lives.
3.11In 1939 it was otherwise. If that side won, every single thing I valued would be scraped off the earth.
3.12The same reason, worked twice, gave two answers. That is not softening. The sums were different.
3.13Men tell me I should not have changed. I ask them: by which year’s sums would you have me live which year?
3.14A man who alters nothing he has said in a whole lifetime is not usually standing firm. He has usually stopped doing the arithmetic.
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