Mysticism and Logic

Bertrand Russell

Mysticism and Logic

And Other Essays

The following essays have been written and published at various times, and my thanks are due to the previous publishers for the permission to reprint them.

The essay on "Mysticism and Logic" appeared in the Hibbert Journal for July, 1914. "The Place of Science in a Liberal Education" appeared in two numbers of The New Statesman, May 24 and 31, 1913. "The Free Man's Worship" and "The Study of Mathematics" were included in a former collection (now out of print), Philosophical Essays, also published by Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co. Both were written in 1902; the first appeared originally in the Independent Review for 1903, the second in the New Quarterly, November, 1907. In theoretical Ethics, the position advocated in "The Free Man's Worship" is not quite identical with that which I hold now: I feel less convinced than I did then of the objectivity of good and evil. But the general attitude towards life which is suggested in that essay still seems to me, in the main, the one which must be adopted in times of stress and difficulty by those who have no dogmatic religious beliefs, if inward defeat is to be avoided.

CONTENTS

Chapter

I. Mysticism and Logic

II. The Place of Science in a Liberal Education

III. A Free Man's Worship

IV. The Study of Mathematics

V. Mathematics and the Metaphysicians

VI. On Scientific Method in Philosophy

VII. The Ultimate Constituents of Matter

VIII. The Relation of Sense-data to Physics

IX. On the Notion of Cause

X. Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description