Key ideas: Published in 1931. "In the great tradition of Greek philosophy, this is a volume of the living credos of 22 outstanding modern thinkers. Here we have a meeting of Titans, who bare their souls and question their deepest faiths and passions in a way which must remind us once again that philosophy in its most elemental sense is but a love of wisdom, a seeking for totality of perspective."
This subject brings me to that vilest offspring of the herd mind--the odious militia. The man who enjoys marching in line and file to the strains of music falls below my contempt; he received his great brain by mistake--the spinal cord would have been amply sufficient. This heroism at command, this senseless violence, this accursed bombast of patriotism--how intensely I despise them! War is low and despicable, and I had rather be smitten to shreds than participate in such doings.
Such a stain on humanity should be erased without delay. I think well enough of human nature to believe that it would have been wiped out long ago had not the common sense of nations been systematically corrupted through school and press for business and political reasons.
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. This insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms-this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.
[I]t was at that very early age that one of the decisive experiences of my life occurred. My brother, who was seven years older than I was, undertook to teach me Euclid, and I was overjoyed, for I had been told that Euclid proved things, and I hoped at last to acquire some solid knowledge. I shall never forget my disappointment when I found that Euclid started with axioms. When my brother read the first axiom to me, I said that I saw no reason to admit it; to which he replied that such being the situation we could not go on.
Since I was anxious to go on, I admitted it provisionally, but my belief that somewhere in the world solid knowledge was obtainable had received a rude shock...
Again, popular feeling during the war, especially in the first months, afforded me a keen though very painful scientific interest. I observed that at first most of those who stayed at home enjoyed the war, which showed me how much hatred and how little human affection exist in human nature educated on our present lines. I saw also how the ordinary virtues, such as thrift, industry, and public spirit, were used to swell the magnitude of the disaster by producing a greater energy in the work of mutual extermination...
All my thinking on political, sociological, and ethical questions during the last fifteen years has sprung from the impulse which came to me during the first days of the war. I soon became convinced that the study of diplomatic origins, though useful, did not go to the bottom of the matter, since popular passions enthusiastically supported governments in all the steps leading up to the war.
I have found myself also unable to accept the view that the origins of wars are always economic, for it was obvious that most of the people who were enthusiastically in favor of the war were going to lose money by it, and the fact that they themselves did not think so showed that their economic thinking was biased, and that the passion causing the bias was the real source of their warlike feeling. The supposed economic causes of war, except in the case of certain capitalistic enterprises, are in the nature of a rationalization: people wish to fight, and they therefore persuade themselves that it is to their interest to do so.
The important question, then, is the psychological one--"Why do people wish to fight?" And this leads on from war to a host of other questions concerning impulses to cruelty and oppression in general. These questions in their turn involve a study of the origins of malevolent passions, and thence of psychoanalysis and the theory of education...
The keynote of my social philosophy, from a scientific point of view, is the emphasis upon psychology and the practice of judging social institutions by their effects upon human character.
During the war all the recognized virtues of sober citizens were turned to a use which I considered bad, Men abstained from alcohol in order to make shells; they worked long hours in order to destroy the kind of society that makes work worth doing. Venereal disease was thought more regrettable than usual because it interfered with the killing of enemies.
All this made me acutely aware of the fact that rules of conduct, whatever they may be, are not sufficient to produce good results unless the ends sought are good. Sobriety, thrift, industry, and continence, in so far as they existed during the war, merely increased the orgy of destruction. The money spent on drink, on the other hand, saved men's lives, since it was taken away from the making of high explosives.
Yet if I am a democrat, I confess it is mainly because I cannot find anything else to be. The actual achievement of democracy is that it gives a tolerably good time to the underdog. Or, at least, it honestly tries; and it is, I think, for this reason that most of us accept it as our political creed.
My objection to it is that, as I think, it forms a barrier to further upward progress. True progress--to better things--must be based on thought and knowledge. As I see it, democracy encourages the nimble charlatan at the expense of the thinker, and prefers the plausible wizard with quack remedies to the true statesman.
Democracy is ever eager for rapid progress, and the only progress which can be rapid is progress downhill. For this reason I suspect that all democracies carry within them the seeds of their own destruction, and I cannot believe that democracy is to be our final form of government. And indeed, there is little enough of it left in Europe to-day.
We are still at the very beginning of civilisation. Ordered government has a past of some thousands of years behind it, but a future of millions of years before it--at least, we hope so. The historians of the remote future will, I imagine, see democracy merely as one of the early experiments tried in that age of repeated upheavals--our own--in which mankind was still groping its way to a rational mode of life. It may be that democracy--like teething--is a state through which we have to pass on our way to higher things. Anyhow, it is a restless, feverish state, and I hope it will soon give place to something better.
I wonder what. Possibly, in future ages, the power to vote and govern will not be regarded as a right, but as a distinction, to be acquired by service or merit. This may suggest that I have but little respect for the sacred principle of equality. Perhaps so. If I had to choose a one-word motto I do not think it would be "Equality." I might choose "Excelsior"--let us get on to higher things. And a traveller will not get far towards higher things if he is ever afraid of putting one foot in front of the other.
For similar reasons, I feel very little sympathy with socialism. If I think of democracy as a juvenile ailment, I think of socialism as a definite disease....
The common view of science is that it is a sort of machine for increasing the race's store of dependable facts. It is that only in part; in even larger part it is a machine for upsetting undependable facts. When Copernicus proved that the earth revolved around the sun, he did not simply prove that the earth revolved around the sun; he also proved that the socalled revelation of God, as contained in the Old Testament, was rubbish.
The first fact was relatively trivial: it made no difference to the average man then, as it makes no difference to him to- day. But the second fact was of stupendous importance, for it disposed at one stroke of a mass of bogus facts that had been choking the intelligence and retarding the progress of humanity for a millennium and a half.
So with every other great discovery in the physical world: it had immediate repercussions in the world of ideas, and often they were far more important than its immediate effect...
There is only one man who has a right to be attended to, and that is the man who is trying, patiently, fairly, earnestly, diligently, to find out the truth [...] But I am not willing to listen to the man who argues that what might be or ought to be true is somehow superior to what is true.
One Copernicus, it seems to me, is worth all the Popes who ever lived, and all the bishops and archbishops, and all save a baker's dozen of the holy saints....
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind--that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overborne by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty; and that the democratic form is at least as bad as any of the other forms.
I believe that an artist, fashioning his imaginary worlds out of his own agony and ecstasy, is a benefactor to all of us, but that the worst error we can commit is to mistake his imaginary worlds for the real one.
I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence for witches, and deserves no more respect.
I believe in complete freedom of thought and speech, alike for the humblest man and the mightiest, and in the utmost freedom of conduct that is consistent with living in organized society.
I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.
I believe in the reality of progress.
I--
But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than to be ignorant.
But I am convinced that intelligence, though the only hope, is a support both limited and questionable. Some of the noblest and most enlightened minds of the nineteenth century believed ardently, some believe to-day, that the method of physical science applied to human concerns may make human life a brief tenancy of this worldly paradise. Certainly squalor and disease have been greatly eliminated, life has been and may be further lengthened by science, even stupidity may be reduced. Conflicts may be removed between individuals and classes and nations through methods analogous to those of the physical laboratory
But I have an obdurate conviction that human nature is surd, unpredictable, and ultimately unintelligible, that it will not be bound or expressed by formulas or saved by them. It seems to me that human nature and human life will always provide irreducible difficulties and unhappinesses that no House of Solomon, no world-wide scientific foundation can ever cure. Unrequited--and unrequitable --love, loneliness, frustration, and disappointment may be reduced by sociologists and in their extremer consequences eliminated by psychiatrists. But I am certain there would be wistful and regretful citizens in even the most splendidly organized scientific Utopia.
We must, however, distinguish between democracy as a form of government, in which [1] all the citizens legislate without representation; [2] democracy as a form of State, which means that the electors, under universal suffrage, have the last word; and [3] democracy as a form of society, which means equal consideration for all.
The first is possible only in a small city State, like ancient Athens or a Swiss canton. The second is what we have got. The third is a Christian principle, and as a Christian I believe in it.
Number two I do not much believe in, and I fancy very few people believe in it any longer.
Mr. Shaw has said that the great political problem is to find a good anthropometric method, and that we have not found it. The silliest of all methods is to break heads; the next silliest is to count them.
Practically, universal suffrage means that the worldly goods of the minority are put up to auction at each election, and there is no limit to the absurdity of the promises made by candidates except the fear that they may be called upon to redeem them. It is a ridiculous arrangement; but I frankly admit that I do not know what we could put in its place.
As for the notion of abolishing private gain, I will only make one obvious remark. If you destroy the chief motives which induce people to work hard, namely, the desire to improve their own position, and still more to give their children a good start in the world, a few people will work as well as they do now (I hope I should, but I doubt it), the majority will work badly, and a considerable number will refuse to work at all unless someone stands over them with a whip. The output of commodities would beyond question be enormously reduced; and the country would be very poor. At last in desperation we should adopt the whip, or some equivalent.
As Herbert Spencer said, "Socialism would mean slavery, and the slavery would not be mild."