Page:Philosophical Review Volume 20.djvu/436



This volume consists of seven essays, all of which, with the exception of the last, "are reprints, with some alterations, of articles which have appeared in various periodicals." The first and longest essay, "The Elements of Ethics," is a succinct presentation of the ethical theory familiar to readers of Mr. G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica, reviewed in Vol. XIII of this. Essay II, "The Free Man's Worship," is an eloquent assertion of Stoicism. "Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power" (p. 70).

Among the lofty thoughts that ennoble man's little day, Mr. Russell regards mathematical conceptions as of prime value, and Essay III deals with "The Study of Mathematics." "For the health of the moral life, for ennobling the tone of an age or a nation, the austerer virtues have a strange power, exceeding the power of those not informed and purified by thought. Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics" (p. 86). But mathematics, "rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the