Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays Quotes by Bertrand Russell: Context & Meanings

“The good which it concerns us to remember is the good which it lies in our power to create—the good in our own lives and in our attitude towards the world.”

Russell shifts attention from uncontrollable cosmic outcomes toward forms of goodness that can still be created through one’s conduct and stance toward life.

Source note: Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, within Russell’s philosophical discussion of human value and the world. The line is preserved as ethical argument rather than converted into a promise that circumstances are controllable.

“Disinterested curiosity, which is the source of almost all intellectual effort, finds with astonished delight that science can unveil secrets which might well have seemed for ever undiscoverable.”

Curiosity can sustain difficult intellectual work because discovery itself becomes rewarding even when inquiry is not driven by immediate practical gain.

Source note: Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, essay “The Place of Science in a Liberal Education.” Project Gutenberg #25447. The surrounding passage describes the positive value of a scientific spirit.

“The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests of the desire to know—it involves suppression of hopes and fears, loves and hates, and the whole subjective emotional life, until we become subdued to the material, able to see it frankly, without preconceptions, without bias, without any wish except to see it as it is, and without any belief that what it is must be determined by some relation, positive or negative, to what we should like it to be, or to what we can easily imagine it to be.”

Inquiry becomes more reliable when the wish to know is allowed to challenge hopes, fears and preferences that would otherwise predetermine the answer.

Source note: Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, “The Place of Science in a Liberal Education.” Russell continues by describing an attempt to see material frankly, without preconception or wishful bias.