The Prologue to Bertrand
Russell's Autobiography:
What Desires Are Politically
Important?
Nobel Lecture 11.12.1950
I have chosen this subject for my lecture
tonight because I think that most current discussions of politics and political
theory take insufficient account of psychology. Economic facts, population statistics,
constitutional organization, and so on, are set forth minutely. There is no
difficulty in finding out how many South Koreans and how many North Koreans
there were when the Korean War began. If you will look into the right books
you will be able to ascertain what was their average income per head, and what
were the sizes of their respective armies. But if you want to know what sort
of person a Korean is, and whether there is any appreciable difference between
a North Korean and a South Korean; if you wish to know what they respectively
want out of life, what are their discontents, what their hopes and what their
fears; in a word, what it is that, as they say, «makes them tick»,
you will look through the reference books in vain. And so you cannot tell whether
the South Koreans are enthusiastic about UNO, or would prefer union with their
cousins in the North. Nor can you guess whether they are willing to forgo land
reform for the privilege of voting for some politician they have never heard
of. It is neglect of such questions by the eminent men who sit in remote capitals,
that so frequently causes disappointment. If politics is to become scientific,
and if the event is not to be constantly surprising, it is imperative that our
political thinking should penetrate more deeply into the springs of human action.
What is the influence of hunger upon slogans? How does their effectiveness fluctuate
with the number of calories in your diet? If one man offers you democracy and
another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation will you prefer
the grain to the vote? Such questions are far too little considered. However,
let us, for the present, forget the Koreans, and consider the human race.
All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory
advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist
desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious,
not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold
on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do,
you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather
the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.
There are some desires which, though very powerful, have not, as a rule, any
great political importance. Most men at some period of their lives desire to
marry, but as a rule they can satisfy this desire without having to take any
political action. There are, of course, exceptions; the rape of the Sabine women
is a case in point. And the development of northern Australia is seriously impeded
by the fact that the vigorous young men who ought to do the work dislike being
wholly deprived of female society. But such cases are unusual, and in general
the interest that men and women take in each other has little influence upon
politics.
The desires that are politically important may be divided into a primary and
a secondary group. In the primary group come the necessities of life: food and
shelter and clothing. When these things become very scarce, there is no limit
to the efforts that men will make, or to the violence that they will display,
in the hope of securing them. It is said by students of the earliest history
that, on four separate occasions, drought in Arabia caused the population of
that country to overflow into surrounding regions, with immense effects, political,
cultural, and religious. The last of these four occasions was the rise of Islam.
The gradual spread of Germanic tribes from southern Russia to England, and thence
to San Francisco, had similar motives. Undoubtedly the desire for food has been,
and still is, one of the main causes of great political events.
But man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is
that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be
fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa
constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake
until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this.
When the Arabs, who had been used to living sparingly on a few dates, acquired
the riches of the Eastern Roman Empire, and dwelt in palaces of almost unbelievable
luxury, they did not, on that account, become inactive. Hunger could no longer
be a motive, for Greek slaves supplied them with exquisite viands at the slightest
nod. But other desires kept them active: four in particular, which we can label
acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power.
Acquisitiveness - the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title
to goods - is a motive which, I suppose, has its origin in a combination of
fear with the desire for necessaries. I once befriended two little girls from
Estonia, who had narrowly escaped death from starvation in a famine. They lived
in my family, and of course had plenty to eat. But they spent all their leisure
visiting neighbouring farms and stealing potatoes, which they hoarded. Rockefeller,
who in his infancy had experienced great poverty, spent his adult life in a
similar manner. Similarly the Arab chieftains on their silken Byzantine divans
could not forget the desert, and hoarded riches far beyond any possible physical
need. But whatever may be the psychoanalysis of acquisitiveness, no one can
deny that it is one of the great motives - especially among the more powerful,
for, as I said before, it is one of the infinite motives. However much you may
acquire, you will always wish to acquire more; satiety is a dream which will
always elude you.
But acquisitiveness, although it is the mainspring of the capitalist system,
is by no means the most powerful of the motives that survive the conquest of
hunger. Rivalry is a much stronger motive. Over and over again in Mohammedan
history, dynasties have come to grief because the sons of a sultan by different
mothers could not agree, and in the resulting civil war universal ruin resulted.
The same sort of thing happens in modern Europe. When the British Government
very unwisely allowed the Kaiser to be present at a naval review at Spithead,
the thought which arose in his mind was not the one which we had intended. What
he thought was, «I must have a Navy as good as Grandmamma's». And
from this thought have sprung all our subsequent troubles. The world would be
a happier place than it is if acquisitiveness were always stronger than rivalry.
But in fact, a great many men will cheerfully face impoverishment if they can
thereby secure complete ruin for their rivals. Hence the present level of taxation.
Vanity is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children
knows how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying «Look
at me». «Look at me» is one of the most fundamental desires
of the human heart. It can take innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit
of posthumous fame. There was a Renaissance Italian princeling who was asked
by the priest on his deathbed if he had anything to repent of. «Yes»,
he said, «there is one thing. On one occasion I had a visit from the Emperor
and the Pope simultaneously. I took them to the top of my tower to see the view,
and I neglected the opportunity to throw them both down, which would have given
me immortal fame». History does not relate whether the priest gave him
absolution. One of the troubles about vanity is that it grows with what it feeds
on. The more you are talked about, the more you will wish to be talked about.
The condemned murderer who is allowed to see the account of his trial in the
press is indignant if he finds a newspaper which has reported it inadequately.
And the more he finds about himself in other newspapers, the more indignant
he will be with the one whose reports are meagre. Politicians and literary men
are in the same case. And the more famous they become, the more difficult the
press-cutting agency finds it to satisfy them. It is scarcely possible to exaggerate
the influence of vanity throughout the range of human life, from the child of
three to the potentate at whose frown the world trembles. Mankind have even
committed the impiety of attributing similar desires to the Deity, whom they
imagine avid for continual praise.
But great as is the influence of the motives we have been considering, there
is one which outweighs them all. I mean the love of power. Love of power is
closely akin to vanity, but it is not by any means the same thing. What vanity
needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it is easy to have glory without power.
The people who enjoy the greatest glory in the United States are film stars,
but they can be put in their place by the Committee for Un-American Activities,
which enjoys no glory whatever. In England, the King has more glory than the
Prime Minister, but the Prime Minister has more power than the King. Many people
prefer glory to power, but on the whole these people have less effect upon the
course of events than those who prefer power to glory. When Blücher, in
1814, saw Napoleon's palaces, he said, «Wasn't he a fool to have all this
and to go running after Moscow.» Napoleon, who certainly was not destitute
of vanity, preferred power when he had to choose. To Blücher, this choice
seemed foolish. Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence
could satisfy it completely. And as it is especially the vice of energetic men,
the causal efficacy of love of power is out of all proportion to its frequency.
It is, indeed, by far the strongest motive in the lives of important men.
Love of power is greatly increased by the experience of power, and this applies
to petty power as well as to that of potentates. In the happy days before 1914,
when well-to-do ladies could acquire a host of servants, their pleasure in exercising
power over the domestics steadily increased with age. Similarly, in any autocratic
regime, the holders of power become increasingly tyrannical with experience
of the delights that power can afford. Since power over human beings is shown
in making them do what they would rather not do, the man who is actuated by
love of power is more apt to inflict pain than to permit pleasure. If you ask
your boss for leave of absence from the office on some legitimate occasion,
his love of power will derive more satisfaction from a refusal than from a consent.
If you require a building permit, the petty official concerned will obviously
get more pleasure from saying «No» than from saying «Yes».
It is this sort of thing which makes the love of power such a dangerous motive.
But it has other sides which are more desirable. The pursuit of knowledge is,
I think, mainly actuated by love of power. And so are all advances in scientific
technique. In politics, also, a reformer may have just as strong a love of power
as a despot. It would be a complete mistake to decry love of power altogether
as a motive. Whether you will be led by this motive to actions which are useful,
or to actions which are pernicious, depends upon the social system, and upon
your capacities. If your capacities are theoretical or technical, you will contribute
to knowledge or technique, and, as a rule, your activity will be useful. If
you are a politician you may be actuated by love of power, but as a rule this
motive will join itself on to the desire to see some state of affairs realized
which, for some reason, you prefer to the status quo. A great general may, like
Alcibiades, be quite indifferent as to which side he fights on, but most generals
have preferred to fight for their own country, and have, therefore, had other
motives besides love of power. The politician may change sides so frequently
as to find himself always in the majority, but most politicians have a preference
for one party to the other, and subordinate their love of power to this preference.
Love of power as nearly pure as possible is to be seen in various different
types of men. One type is the soldier of fortune, of whom Napoleon is the supreme
example. Napoleon had, I think, no ideological preference for France over Corsica,
but if he had become Emperor of Corsica he would not have been so great a man
as he became by pretending to be a Frenchman. Such men, however, are not quite
pure examples, since they also derive immense satisfaction from vanity. The
purest type is that of the eminence grise - the power behind the throne
that never appears in public, and merely hugs itself with the secret thought:
«How little these puppets know who is pulling the strings.» Baron
Holstein, who controlled the foreign policy of the German Empire from 1890 to
1906, illustrates this type to perfection. He lived in a slum; he never appeared
in society; he avoided meeting the Emperor, except on one single occasion when
the Emperor's importunity could not be resisted; he refused all invitations
to Court functions, on the ground that he possessed no court dress. He had acquired
secrets which enabled him to blackmail the Chancellor and many of the Kaiser's
intimates. He used the power of blackmail, not to acquire wealth, or fame, or
any other obvious advantage, but merely to compel the adoption of the foreign
policy he preferred. In the East, similar characters were not very uncommon
among eunuchs.
I come now to other motives which, though in a sense less fundamental than those
we have been considering, are still of considerable importance. The first of
these is love of excitement. Human beings show their superiority to the brutes
by their capacity for boredom, though I have sometimes thought, in examining
the apes at the zoo, that they, perhaps, have the rudiments of this tiresome
emotion. However that may be, experience shows that escape from boredom is one
of the really powerful desires of almost all human beings. When white men first
effect contact with some unspoilt race of savages, they offer them all kinds
of benefits, from the light of the gospel to pumpkin pie. These, however, much
as we may regret it, most savages receive with indifference. What they really
value among the gifts that we bring to them is intoxicating liquor which enables
them, for the first time in their lives, to have the illusion for a few brief
moments that it is better to be alive than dead. Red Indians, while they were
still unaffected by white men, would smoke their pipes, not calmly as we do,
but orgiastically, inhaling so deeply that they sank into a faint. And when
excitement by means of nicotine failed, a patriotic orator would stir them up
to attack a neighbouring tribe, which would give them all the enjoyment that
we (according to our temperament) derive from a horse race or a General Election.
The pleasure of gambling consists almost entirely in excitement. Monsieur Huc
describes Chinese traders at the Great Wall in winter, gambling until they have
lost all their cash, then proceeding to lose all their merchandise, and at last
gambling away their clothes and going out naked to die of cold. With civilized
men, as with primitive Red Indian tribes, it is, I think, chiefly love of excitement
which makes the populace applaud when war breaks out; the emotion is exactly
the same as at a football match, although the results are sometimes somewhat
more serious.
It is not altogether easy to decide what is the root cause of the love of excitement.
I incline to think that our mental make-up is adapted to the stage when men
lived by hunting. When a man spent a long day with very primitive weapons in
stalking a deer with the hope of dinner, and when, at the end of the day, he
dragged the carcass triumphantly to his cave, he sank down in contented weariness,
while his wife dressed and cooked the meat. He was sleepy, and his bones ached,
and the smell of cooking filled every nook and cranny of his consciousness.
At last, after eating, he sank into deep sleep. In such a life there was neither
time nor energy for boredom. But when he took to agriculture, and made his wife
do all the heavy work in the fields, he had time to reflect upon the vanity
of human life, to invent mythologies and systems of philosophy, and to dream
of the life hereafter in which he would perpetually hunt the wild boar of Valhalla.
Our mental make-up is suited to a life of very severe physical labor. I used,
when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover twenty-five miles
a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from boredom,
since the delight of sitting amply sufficed. But modern life cannot be conducted
on these physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary,
and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles. When crowds assemble
in Trafalgar Square to cheer to the echo an announcement that the government
has decided to have them killed, they would not do so if they had all walked
twenty-five miles that day. This cure for bellicosity is, however, impracticable,
and if the human race is to survive - a thing which is, perhaps, undesirable
- other means must be found for securing an innocent outlet for the unused physical
energy that produces love of excitement. This is a matter which has been too
little considered, both by moralists and by social reformers. The social reformers
are of the opinion that they have more serious things to consider. The moralists,
on the other hand, are immensely impressed with the seriousness of all the permitted
outlets of the love of excitement; the seriousness, however, in their minds,
is that of Sin. Dance halls, cinemas, this age of jazz, are all, if we may believe
our ears, gateways to Hell, and we should be better employed sitting at home
contemplating our sins. I find myself unable to be in entire agreement with
the grave men who utter these warnings. The devil has many forms, some designed
to deceive the young, some designed to deceive the old and serious. If it is
the devil that tempts the young to enjoy themselves, is it not, perhaps, the
same personage that persuades the old to condemn their enjoyment? And is not
condemnation perhaps merely a form of excitement appropriate to old age? And
is it not, perhaps, a drug which - like opium - has to be taken in continually
stronger doses to produce the desired effect? Is it not to be feared that, beginning
with the wickedness of the cinema, we should be led step by step to condemn
the opposite political party, dagoes, wops, Asiatics, and, in short, everybody
except the fellow members of our club? And it is from just such condemnations,
when widespread, that wars proceed. I have never heard of a war that proceeded
from dance halls.
What is serious about excitement is that so many of its forms are destructive.
It is destructive in those who cannot resist excess in alcohol or gambling.
It is destructive when it takes the form of mob violence. And above all it is
destructive when it leads to war. It is so deep a need that it will find harmful
outlets of this kind unless innocent outlets are at hand. There are such innocent
outlets at present in sport, and in politics so long as it is kept within constitutional
bounds. But these are not sufficient, especially as the kind of politics that
is most exciting is also the kind that does most harm. Civilized life has grown
altogether too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide harmless outlets
for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting. In Australia,
where people are few and rabbits are many, I watched a whole populace satisfying
the primitive impulse in the primitive manner by the skillful slaughter of many
thousands of rabbits. But in London or New York some other means must be found
to gratify primitive impulse. I think every big town should contain artificial
waterfalls that people could descend in very fragile canoes, and they should
contain bathing pools full of mechanical sharks. Any person found advocating
a preventive war should be condemned to two hours a day with these ingenious
monsters. More seriously, pains should be taken to provide constructive outlets
for the love of excitement. Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment
of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing
such moments than is sometimes thought.
Interwoven with many other political motives are two closely related passions
to which human beings are regrettably prone: I mean fear and hate. It is normal
to hate what we fear, and it happens frequently, though not always, that we
fear what we hate. I think it may be taken as the rule among primitive men,
that they both fear and hate whatever is unfamiliar. They have their own herd,
originally a very small one. And within one herd, all are friends, unless there
is some special ground of enmity. Other herds are potential or actual enemies;
a single member of one of them who strays by accident will be killed. An alien
herd as a whole will be avoided or fought according to circumstances. It is
this primitive mechanism which still controls our instinctive reaction to foreign
nations. The completely untravelled person will view all foreigners as the savage
regards a member of another herd. But the man who has travelled, or who has
studied international politics, will have discovered that, if his herd is to
prosper, it must, to some degree, become amalgamated with other herds. If you
are English and someone says to you, «The French are your brothers»,
your first instinctive feeling will be, «Nonsense. They shrug their shoulders,
and talk French. And I am even told that they eat frogs.» If he explains
to you that we may have to fight the Russians, that, if so, it will be desirable
to defend the line of the Rhine, and that, if the line of the Rhine is to be
defended, the help of the French is essential, you will begin to see what he
means when he says that the French are your brothers. But if some fellow-traveller
were to go on to say that the Russians also are your brothers, he would be unable
to persuade you, unless he could show that we are in danger from the Martians.
We love those who hate our enemies, and if we had no enemies there would be
very few people whom we should love.
All this, however, is only true so long as we are concerned solely with attitudes
towards other human beings. You might regard the soil as your enemy because
it yields reluctantly a niggardly subsistence. You might regard Mother Nature
in general as your enemy, and envisage human life as a struggle to get the better
of Mother Nature. If men viewed life in this way, cooperation of the whole human
race would become easy. And men could easily be brought to view life in this
way if schools, newspapers, and politicians devoted themselves to this end.
But schools are out to teach patriotism; newspapers are out to stir up excitement;
and politicians are out to get re-elected. None of the three, therefore, can
do anything towards saving the human race from reciprocal suicide.
There are two ways of coping with fear: one is to diminish the external danger,
and the other is to cultivate Stoic endurance. The latter can be reinforced,
except where immediate action is necessary, by turning our thoughts away from
the cause of fear. The conquest of fear is of very great importance. Fear is
in itself degrading; it easily becomes an obsession; it produces hate of that
which is feared, and it leads headlong to excesses of cruelty. Nothing has so
beneficent an effect on human beings as security. If an international system
could be established which would remove the fear of war, the improvement in
everyday mentality of everyday people would be enormous and very rapid. Fear,
at present, overshadows the world. The atom bomb and the bacterial bomb, wielded
by the wicked communist or the wicked capitalist as the case may be, make Washington
and the Kremlin tremble, and drive men further along the road toward the abyss.
If matters are to improve, the first and essential step is to find a way of
diminishing fear. The world at present is obsessed by the conflict of rival
ideologies, and one of the apparent causes of conflict is the desire for the
victory of our own ideology and the defeat of the other. I do not think that
the fundamental motive here has much to do with ideologies. I think the ideologies
are merely a way of grouping people, and that the passions involved are merely
those which always arise between rival groups. There are, of course, various
reasons for hating communists. First and foremost, we believe that they wish
to take away our property. But so do burglars, and although we disapprove of
burglars our attitude towards them is very different indeed from our attitude
towards communists - chiefly because they do not inspire the same degree of
fear. Secondly, we hate the communists because they are irreligious. But the
Chinese have been irreligious since the eleventh century, and we only began
to hate them when they turned out Chiang Kai-shek. Thirdly, we hate the communists
because they do not believe in democracy, but we consider this no reason for
hating Franco. Fourthly, we hate them because they do not allow liberty; this
we feel so strongly that we have decided to imitate them. It is obvious that
none of these is the real ground for our hatred. We hate them because we fear
them and they threaten us. If the Russians still adhered to the Greek Orthodox
religion, if they had instituted parliamentary government, and if they had a
completely free press which daily vituperated us, then - provided they still
had armed forces as powerful as they have now - we should still hate them if
they gave us ground for thinking them hostile. There is, of course, the odium
theologicum, and it can be a cause of enmity. But I think that this is an
offshoot of herd feeling: the man who has a different theology feels strange,
and whatever is strange must be dangerous. Ideologies, in fact, are one of the
methods by which herds are created, and the psychology is much the same however
the herd may have been generated.
You may have been feeling that I have allowed only for bad motives, or, at best,
such as are ethically neutral. I am afraid they are, as a rule, more powerful
than more altruistic motives, but I do not deny that altruistic motives exist,
and may, on occasion, be effective. The agitation against slavery in England
in the early nineteenth century was indubitably altruistic, and was thoroughly
effective. Its altruism was proved by the fact that in 1833 British taxpayers
paid many millions in compensation to Jamaican landowners for the liberation
of their slaves, and also by the fact that at the Congress of Vienna the British
Government was prepared to make important concessions with a view to inducing
other nations to abandon the slave trade. This is an instance from the past,
but present-day America has afforded instances equally remarkable. I will not,
however, go into these, as I do not wish to become embarked in current controversies.
I do not think it can be questioned that sympathy is a genuine motive, and that
some people at some times are made somewhat uncomfortable by the sufferings
of some other people. It is sympathy that has produced the many humanitarian
advances of the last hundred years. We are shocked when we hear stories ofthe
ill-treatment of lunatics, and there are now quite a number of asylums in which
they are not ill-treated. Prisoners in Western countries are not supposed to
be tortured, and when they are, there is an outcry if the facts are discovered.
We do not approve of treating orphans as they are treated in Oliver Twist.
Protestant countries disapprove of cruelty to animals. In all these ways sympathy
has been politically effective. If the fear of war were removed, its effectiveness
would become much greater. Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is
that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.
The time has come to sum up our discussion. Politics is concerned with herds
rather than with individuals, and the passions which are important in politics
are, therefore, those in which the various members of a given herd can feel
alike. The broad instinctive mechanism upon which political edifices have to
be built is one of cooperation within the herd and hostility towards other herds.
The co-operation within the herd is never perfect. There are members who do
not conform, who are, in the etymological sense, «egregious», that
is to say, outside the flock. These members are those who have fallen below,
or risen above, the ordinary level. They are: idiots, criminals, prophets, and
discoverers. A wise herd will learn to tolerate the eccentricity of those who
rise above the average, and to treat with a minimum of ferocity those who fall
below it.
As regards relations to other herds, modern technique has produced a conflict
between self-interest and instinct. In old days, when two tribes went to war,
one of them exterminated the other, and annexed its territory. From the point
of view of the victor, the whole operation was thoroughly satisfactory. The
killing was not at all expensive, and the excitement was agreeable. It is not
to be wondered at that, in such circumstances, war persisted. Unfortunately,
we still have the emotions appropriate to such primitive warfare, while the
actual operations of war have changed completely. Killing an enemy in a modern
war is a very expensive operation. If you consider how many Germans were killed
in the late war, and how much the victors are paying in income tax, you can,
by a sum in long division, discover the cost of a dead German, and you will
find it considerable. In the East, it is true, the enemies of the Germans have
secured the ancient advantages of turning out the defeated population and occupying
their lands. The Western victors, however, have secured no such advantages.
It is obvious that modern war is not good business from a financial point of
view. Although we won both the world wars, we should now be much richer if they
had not occured. If men were actuated by self-interest, which they are not -
except in the case of a few saints - the whole human race would cooperate. There
would be no more wars, no more armies, no more navies, no more atom bombs. There
would not be armies of propagandists employed in poisoning the minds of Nation
A against Nation B, and reciprocally of Nation B against Nation A. There would
not be armies of officials at frontiers to prevent the entry of foreign books
and foreign ideas, however excellent in themselves. There would not be customs
barriers to ensure the existence of many small enterprises where one big enterprise
would be more economic. All this would happen very quickly if men desired their
own happiness as ardently as they desired the misery of their neighbours. But,
you will tell me, what is the use of these utopian dreams ? Moralists will see
to it that we do not become wholly selfish, and until we do the millenium will
be impossible.
I do not wish to seem to end upon a note of cynicism. I do not deny that there
are better things than selfishness, and that some people achieve these things.
I maintain, however, on the one hand, that there are few occasions upon which
large bodies of men, such as politics is concerned with, can rise above selfishness,
while, on the other hand, there are a very great many circumstances in which
populations will fall below selfishness, if selfishness is interpreted as enlightened
self-interest.
And among those occasions on which people fall below self-interest are most
of the occasions on which they are convinced that they are acting from idealistic
motives. Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love
of power. When you see large masses of men swayed by what appear to be noble
motives, it is as well to look below the surface and ask yourself what it is
that makes these motives effective. It is partly because it is so easy to be
taken in by a facade of nobility that a psychological inquiry, such as I have
been attempting, is worth making. I would say, in conclusion, that if what I
have said is right, the main thing needed to make the world happy is intelligence.
And this, after all, is an optimistic conclusion, because intelligence is a
thing that can be fostered by known methods of education.
On
Denoting (1905)
Vagueness (1923)
Icarus
or The Future of Science (1924)
What is an Agnostic
Knowledge and
Wisdom
Why I am
not a Christian (06.03.1927)
In
Praise of Idleness (1932)
Of Co-Operation
(18.05.1932)
On Sales Resistance
(22.06.1932)
On Modern
Uncertainty (20.07.1932)
What is the Soul?
(28.09.1932)
On youthful
Cynism (1930)
Philosophical
Consequences of Relativity (1626)
On Astrologers
How
to become a Man of Genius
Education
and Disciple
What
Desires are politically important? (Speech at the Nobel Award, 11.12.1950)
Prolog to his Autobiography: What
I have lived for