"In reply to your letter of April 22, I think it is meaningless to inquire as to the cause of the world. 'Cause' is, in any case, a concept which belongs to a quite outmoded view. In so far as it is applicable at all, we can speak of one occurrence causing another, but this way of speaking is only applicable to bits of the world. To look for a cause of the whole is like trying to define the spatial position of the universe."

Also enclosed receipt and envelope; poem is titled "The H Bomb Test".

Re: anti-nuclear campaign in California.

"The essence of my position on the question of the existence of God is that I feel that the proposition that God exists is a meaningless and untestable proposition. Those persons who maintain the existence of God do not provide us with any criteria to determine whether or not what they say is correct, and this should be the basis for all scientific propositions. Furthermore, they invoke the authority of their God to impose their dogmatic and harmful laws upon others."

Enclosed letter to editor of the Sunday Times, 19 Nov. 1961.

BR's letter is addressed to "Ingmar Folkas".

"I have no cold proof of the non-existence of the Olympian Gods or the Gods of Valhalla or Satan, Beelzebub, Moloch, etc. To prove non-existence is almost always impossible. What I maintian [sic] in all these cases, as in that of the Christian God, is that there is no positive evidence of their existence. Suppose I were to say that I believe there is a China tea-pot circling round the sun half-way between the Earth and Mars. You would think my belief absurd even if I said that it afforded me much spiritual comfort, but you would be quite unable to prove that there is no such teapot."

Tss. are titled "The Labour Party and I: a Plea" and "Unilateralism Again".

Poem is titled "Annihilation has a Plain Face".

Other signatories: Jean Fanchette and Fritz Pickard.

On verso of Forti's letter "... although I can read Italian, I cannot write it grammatically."

On verso of Foster's letter.

"In your letter, you express the view that I believe physical reality to consist of forces between billiard ball atoms. I think I held this view when I was very young, but it is at least sixty years since I abandoned it."

On verso of Foster's letter.

On verso of Foster's letter.

Copy sent to BR with brief autograph note on bottom.

Ts. is titled "Spin Formalism Aligned to the Exclusion of Mirror Invariance."

Dated 12 April 1959 (if date correct couldn't have been enclosed).

On verso of page 1 of Foster's letter.

"I am afraid I do not believe that prayer is anything more than superstition. I do not think that God is an idea that has any other basis than fear."

Draft reply in Edith Russell's hand in top left corner.

Re: Beacon Hill School.

"I do not know of any literature about the school that I ran for a while and I do not think there is anything interesting to be said about it. The running of a school, as I quickly discovered, requires practical and administrative talents which I do not possess."

[Re Beacon Hill School.]

Re statement in "What Is Freedom?", in Fact and Fiction, that difference in salary between USSR generals and privates was greater than that in U.K. or U.S.

"I am sorry that I no longer have the document from which I extracted this fact and many others of a like nature, but I do think that I ought to have made a proviso excluding the very few super-rich."

One clip, from La Stampa, has a photo of BR standing with Michael Scott; the other is an article on BR by Gigi Ghirotti, "Un Coraggioso Libro del Pacifista Russell Si Domanda: 'Puo l'Uomo Sopravvivere?'", in La Stampa, 23 Nov. 1961 (actually a book review of Has Man a Future?).

Clip is of Frank's ad in New York Times re foreign aid.