چکیده :
يتناول المؤلف سيرته الذاتية بشي من التوضيح غير المخل ويسرد ما حصل له في حياته يقول المؤلف...خيمت الوحدة على مراهقة برتراند الذي كثيراً ما فكر بالانتحار وذكر في سيرته الذاتية أن أكبر اهتماماته كانت الدين والرياضيات وأن رغبته في تعلم المزيد من الرياضيات ردعته عن الانتحار تلقى تعليمه في المنزل على يد عدد من المدرسين الخصوصين عرَفه شقيقه فرانك بأعمال أقليدس والتي حولت حياة راسل.
وخلال هذه السنين اكتشف راسل أعمال بيرسي بيش شيلي.
three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
these passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
i have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that i would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy.
i have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness – that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss.
i have sought it, finally, because in the union of love i have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.
this is what i sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what – at last – i have found.
with equal passion i have sought knowledge.
i have wished to understand the hearts of men.
i have wished to know why the stars shine.
and i have tried to apprehend the pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux.
a little of this, but not much, i have achieved.
love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens.
but always pity brought me back to earth.
echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart.
children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be.
i long to alleviate the evil, but i cannot, and i too suffer.
this has been my life.
i have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
prologue: "what i have lived for" (written on 25 july 1956)
at the age of eleven, i began euclid, with my brother as my tutor.
this was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love.
i had not imagined that there was anything so delicious in the world.
after i had learned the fifth proposition, my brother told me that it was generally considered difficult, but i had found no difficulty whatever.
this was the first time it had dawned upon me that i might have some intelligence.
from that moment until whitehead and i finished principia mathematica, when i was thirty-eight, mathematics was my chief interest, and my chief source of happiness.
like all happiness, however, it was not unalloyed.
i had been told that euclid proved things, and was much disappointed that he started with axioms.
at first i refused to accept them unless my brother could offer me some reason for doing so, but he said: 'if you don't accept them we cannot go on', and as i wished to go on, i reluctantly admitted them pro tem.
the doubt as to the premisses of mathematics which i felt at that moment remained with me, and determined the course of my subsequent work.
ch.
1: childhood, pp.
30–31
at the age of eighteen ...
i read mill's autobiography, where i found a sentence to the effect that his father taught him that the question "who made me?" cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question "who made god?".
this led me to abandon the "first cause" argument, and to become an atheist.
throughout the long period of religious doubt, i had been rendered very unhappy by the gradual loss of belief, but when the process was completed, i found to my surprise that i was quite glad to be done with the whole subject.
ch.
2: adolescence, p.
36
i remember the precise moment, one day in 1894, as i was walking along trinity lane, when i saw in a flash (or thought i saw) that the ontological argument is valid.
i had gone out to buy a tin of tobacco; on my way back, i suddenly threw it up in the air, and exclaimed as i caught it: "great scott, the ontological argument is sound!"
ch.
3: cambridge, p.
60
i once devised a test question which i put to many people to discover whether they were pessimists.
the question was: "if you had the power to destroy the world, would you do so?"
ch.
3: cambridge, p.
62
keynes's intellect was the sharpest and clearest that i have ever known.
when i argued with him, i felt that i took my life in my hands, and i seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool.
i was sometimes inclined to feel that so much cleverness must be incompatible with depth, but i do not think that this feeling was justified.
ch.
3: cambridge, p.
69
against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at cambridge gradually wore off.
in this respect my travels were very useful to me.
ch.
5: first marriage, p.
135
suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and i found myself in quite another region.
within five minutes i went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless; it follows that war is wrong, that a public school education is abominable, that the use of force is to be deprecated, and that in human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that.
ch.
6: 'principia mathematica', p.
149
at the end of those five minutes, i had become a completely different person.
for a time, a sort of mystic illumination possessed me.
i felt that i knew the inmost thoughts of everybody that i met in the street, and though this was, no doubt, a delusion, i did in actual fact find myself in far closer touch than previously with all my friends, and many of my acquaintances.
having been an imperialist, i became during those five minutes [...] a pacifist.
having for years cared only for exactness and analysis, i found myself filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty, and with an intense interest in children and with a desire almost as profound as that of the buddha to find some philosophy which should make human life endurable.
a strange excitement possessed me, containing intense pain but also some element of wisdom.
the mystic insight which i then imagined myself to possess has largely faded, and the habit of analysis has reasserted itself.
but in something of what i thought i saw in that moment has remained always with me, causing my attitude during the first war, my interest in children, my indifference to minor misfortunes and a certain emotional tone in all my human relations.
ch.
6: 'principia mathematica', p.
149
i went out bicycling one afternoon, and suddenly, as i was riding along a country road, i realised that i no longer loved alys.
i had had no idea until this moment that my love for her was even lessening.
the problem presented by this discovery was very grave.
we had lived ever since our marriage in the closest possible intimacy.
we always shared a bed, and neither of us ever had a separate dressing-room.
we talked over together everything that ever happened to either of us.
she was five years older than i was, and i had been accustomed to regarding her as far more practical and far more full of worldly wisdom than myself, so that in many matters of daily life i left the initiative to her.
i knew that she was still devoted to me.
i had no wish to be unkind, but i believed in those days (what experience has taught me to think possibly open to doubt) that in intimate relations one should speak the truth.
i did not see in any case how i could for any length of time successfully pretend to love her when i did not.
i had no longer any instinctive impulse towards sex relations with her, and this alone would have been an insuperable barrier to concealment of my feelings.
at this crisis my father's priggery came out in me, and i began to justify myself with moral criticisms of alys.
i did not at once tell her that i no longer loved her, but of course she perceived that something was amiss.
she retired to a rest-cure for some months, and when she emerged from it i told her that i no longer wished to share a room, and in the end i confessed that my love was dead.
i justified this attitude to her, as well as to myself, by criticisms of her character.
ch.
6: 'principia mathematica', pp.
150–151