Youth[ edit ] My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.
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Cambridge is one of the few places where one can talk unlimited nonsense and generalities without anyone pulling one up or confronting one with them when one says just the opposite the next day. Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness. Greek Exercises ; at the age of fifteen, Russell used to write down his reflections in this book, for fear that his people should find out what he was thinking.
I should like to believe my people's religion, which was just what I could wish, but alas, it is impossible. I have Moral Law Vs Private Life Essay no religion, for my God, being a spirit shown merely by reason to exist, his properties utterly unknown, is no help to my life.
I have not the parson's comfortable doctrine that every good action has its reward, and every sin is forgiven. My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.
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Greek Exerciseswritten two days after his sixteenth birthday. Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith ; published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume 1: The Private Years —edited by Nicholas Griffin Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don't know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery. Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith Smith was a Quaker, thus the archaic use of "Thee" in this and other letters to her. Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were Moral Law Vs Private Life Essay as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child — this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a Fielding Essays genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways.
It should be noted that in his talk of "the race", he is referring to "the human race". Smith married Russell in December ; they divorced in It is essential not to discuss whether the first proposition is really true, and Prigate to mention what the anything is, of which it is supposed to be true. Both these points would belong to applied mathematics.
We start, in pure mathematics, from certain rules of inference, by which we can infer that if one proposition is true, then so is some other proposition.]
I think, that you commit an error. Let's discuss. Write to me in PM, we will talk.
This situation is familiar to me. It is possible to discuss.
To be more modest it is necessary