BR TO OTTOLINE MORRELL, 28 SEPT. 1911
BRACERS 17281. ALS. Morrell papers #199, Texas
Proofread by K. Blackwell et al.

Ipsden.1, 2
Thursday evening Sp. 28. 1911.

My Darling

My last evening here has been extraordinarily beautiful — I walked up to a beech wood and watched the sunset from its edge — it was intoxicatingly wonderful. I am sorry to be leaving this place — it is very satisfying, and I feel it is the end of a chapter. But if I have a place of my own in London, with no servant except in the morning, it will be very nice — we shall have a great sense of liberty, and I can have books there and means of making tea, and even peppermints in some secret recess!

I feel an absolute need of writing to you tonight, so I will begin a kind of mental biography — I dare say I have told you most of the things already, but perhaps you won’t mind.

The first important event in my mental life was beginning Euclid with my brother when I was 11. I remember a disappointment in finding that one had to begin by admitting unproved axioms — beforehand I had hoped everything would be proved. But I soon got over that, and found it an incredible delight — the sudden opening of a new world. And I remember after doing the 5th proposition (the Pons Asinorum) my brother told me it was supposed to be difficult, and I was pleased because I had found no difficulty. But chiefly it was the thing itself that delighted me — to have things proved seemed too wonderful. Algebra I had much more difficulty with — I began it with a Swiss tutor who taught very badly. He made me learn by heart “the square of the sum of two numbers is equal to the sum of their squares increased by twice their product”. I hadn’t the vaguest idea what it meant, and never could remember it; at last he would lose patience and throw the book at my head, but that never made my mind work any better. However, before long I got a better teacher and got on better. I used to work things out for myself, and read the book ahead of where I was supposed to be — I did a lot of work in secret in my bedroom, both at night and in the morning. Mathematics gave me more delight in those days than ever since. I began to despise everything else — I thought of mathematics as the key to science, and science as the liberator of the intellect from superstition. I always loathed Latin and Greek, and felt that people who lived before mathematics was known couldn’t be worth studying. All poetry struck me as nonsense, and philosophy too except so far as one could deduce it from mathematics. Then, when I was about 15, my outlook changed enormously. I had thought all talk of beauty mere sentimental twaddle — I had not disbelieved religion, but had not been interested in it. But now I began to notice beauty in nature, to read poetry, and to care about religion. All this was added on to my love of mathematics, which remained. The result of being interested in religion was that I began to have doubts. First I disbelieved free will, because I thought the motions of the body must be determined by the laws of dynamics, not by the will. So I came to the conclusion that man is a machine — that was when I was about 15. But it didn’t follow that man is not immortal or that there is no God. I couldn’t get much to read — I read In Memoriam, then Wordsworth, then Shelley — Shelley was a wonderful discovery. I remember the moment now. I was alone in my aunt Maude Stanley’s room at Dover Street, and by accident I took out the Golden Treasury selections from Shelley and began reading “Alastor”a — it, utterly carried me away, and I couldn’t understand how grown-up people, who admired Shakspeare and Milton, could fail to care about Shelley. I got a passionate personal love of him — more than for anyone I knew. I read Milton too a good deal, and Carlyle; but nobody who tackled things in the way they all did seemed to me likely to get at the truth about religion. It was all sentiment and feeling — exactly the sentiment and feeling I wanted to agree with, but so detached from any serious attempt to prove the truth of what they affirmed that it only increased my doubts.

I read a few books of a different sort — Buckle, and Spencer’s Principles of Sociology, and I think Darwin. These seemed to me much more on the right track than the poets and prophets, and they influenced me a good deal. At that time — when I was 15 and 16 — I used to write down my thoughts on religious questions in a copy book (which I still have). I wrote them in Greek letters, and headed them “Greek exercises”,3 because it would never have done for my people to know what I thought. (My grandmother never knew to her death.) To make quite sure, I even invented a system of phonetic spelling of my own. I slowly came to disbelieve in immortality, but I still believed in God, because I thought there must be a first cause. At last, when I was 18, I read Mill’s autobiography, and I remember this sentence about his father: “He taught me that the question ‘who made me?’ cannot be answered, for it immediately suggests the further question ‘who made God?’”. In a flash I saw that the first-cause argument was fallacious, and I ceased to believe in God. It was a pain at first, but very soon I felt the relief of being done with the years of pre-occupation and doubt and fear — the worst certainty was better than that. This was in the summer before I went to Cambridge. Mill was my Pope at that time — I read his Political Economy and his Logic, and made careful notes of his Logic. I was almost more troubled, in those days, by doubts as to all human knowledge than by religious doubts. I wanted to think something was knowable, but Mill seemed to me far too optimistic about the possibility of knowledge. He based everything on induction, and left induction itself — or at least the induction that proved causation — a mysterious dogma. Already I was specially interested in the philosophy of mathematics, because I thought mathematics must be knowledge if anything was.

I began thinking about Ethics when I was about 14. It struck me as self-evident that happiness was the good, and for some time I supposed everybody else thought so too. Then I came across some accidental allusion to “Bentham’s Greatest-Happiness Principle”, and learnt to me surprise that there were people who thought otherwise, and that people who thought as I did were called Utilitarians. So, being young and foolish, I announced in all seriousness that I was a utilitarian. My people pretended to be amused, but were really shocked. They tried the sort of chaff which has an edge, and I was vexed. When I argued with them, I found they were perfectly stupid, and incapable of answering any question except by an appeal to authority. They continued to chaff and to refuse to argue seriously, and I saw they were not onlyb stupid butc also wanting in candour. Their chaff hurt my feelings, and I never let them know my real opinion about anything again. (In those days my sense of humour was as defective as that of the bus-driver in the story.)

I used to spend a lot of time examining my own character and motives, partly merely for the sake of knowledge, partly for moral reasons. I remember coming to the conclusion, with great pain, that I had never in my life done anything unselfish. I practised the art of thinking dispassionately about matters on which I felt strongly — now it is an ingrained habit, but in those days it was a difficult discipline. I was determined to discover truth, if possible, and in any case to discard error: this determination dominated my life. All the time I worked at mathematics about seven hours a day.

I was very full of ambition, wholly of an intellectual kind. I wanted to make great discoveries in mathematics, and to combat superstition. I dreamed of a day when human actions should be as calculable as the motions of the heavenly bodies, and old ghosts such as conscience and sin and divine inspiration should be laid to rest. (Nevertheless conscience and a sense of sin were very active in me.) And all the time a moonlight night or a sunset or a lyric would give me uneasy mystical emotions which I couldn’t fit in, and which drove me half mad. The world seemed to me a frightful place — I was brought into close contact with lust and cruelty and brutishness. It seemed to me obvious that only the utterly frivolous could be even tolerably cheerful. So I was torn between a burning desire to achieve great things, and a sense that life was utterly horrible. I used to wander out alone and watch the sunset light fading from the west, and solace myself with thoughts of suicide. But my purpose was stronger than my unhappiness and pulled me through.

As soon as I went to Cambridge, everything was changed. I got to know most of my present friends within a fortnight, and for the first time found people interested in what interested me, and answering what I said in a way that showed they had similar thoughts. Owing to bad teaching and the examination system, I grew less and less interested in mathematics, but philosophy took its place. McTaggart, who was then young and enthusiastic, about 5 years older than I was, astonished me by announcing that he believed in immortality, which I had supposed no intelligent people did. Moreover he said he could prove it by his philosophy. In talks with him, and afterwards in the Society, I got glimpses of strange possibilities; but no one could understand his proofs without mastering Hegelianism, which remained unintelligible. So I determined to learn philosophy as soon as I had done with mathematics — my first three years I had to stick to mathematics, but my last year I gave to philosophy. Throughout the greater part of the year I remained quite unconvinced of Hegelianism. Stout, who chiefly taught me, persuaded me that it all turned on the ontological argument. This argument, in the crude form invented by Archbishop Anselm (whom one knew of in childhood as resisting William Rufus) is: “God is the subject of all perfections; existence is a perfection; therefore God exists”; or “God, is the most perfect Being; what exists is more perfect than what does not exist; therefore God exists”. The argument has been subtilized since, and now it proves the Absolute, not God. One day, a week before my last Tripos, I ran out of tobacco while I was working, so I went out to get some. As I was coming back with a tin, I suddenly seemed to see truth in the ontological argument. I threw the tin into the air and exclaimed out loud “Great God in boots, the ontological argument is sound”. (I can’t imagine the reason for such an oath.) So I became a Hegelian, and remained one for about 3 years or 4, till Moore led me to abandon Hegel. Since then I have had only developments, no revolutions.

It was largely the hope of getting a religion out of philosophy that led me to take it up. Even when I accepted Hegel, however, I found flaws in most of the comfortable consequences. I remember suggesting to McTaggart as a summary of his philosophy (when I believed it) “God’s in his heaven, all’s wrong with the world” — and that really is Hegelianism. When I adopted Moore’s views, the last hope of getting any creed out of philosophy vanished. This was of course a great disappointment, and helped to turn me back to mathematics. Since then I have only hoped that philosophy could show that we do know something; and to find out whether this is so has been my main business.

Now I must stop this long screed. I wonder if you will have patience to read it.4

• 1

  [document] Document 000199. Proofread against a colour scan of the original.

• 2

  [envelope] A circled “199”.

• 3

  “Greek exercises” Published in whole as 1 in Papers 1; preceded by selections in My Philosophical Development and the Autobiography, Vol. 1.

• 4

  patience to read it A note at the top of the last page is “Typed”.

Textual Notes

• a

  “Alastor” quote marks editorially supplied

• b

  not only inserted

• c

  but written over &