SOURCE: “Russell and Whitehead: A Comparison,” in Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers, State University of New York Press, 1983, pp. 255-68.

Russell is the most gifted Englishman alive.
Russell doesn't understand the importance of the past, or of tradition,
and—he won't qualify.
Bertie says that I am muddle headed, but I say that he is simple minded.
Seek simplicity and mistrust it.

Alfred North Whitehead

As a teacher I regard Whitehead as perfect.
Asymmetrical relations are the most relational of relations.

Bertrand Russell

A UNIQUE COLLABORATION

The ten-year long collaboration of Russell (1872-1970) and Whitehead (1861-1947) was an unprecedented affair. Never before had two thinkers of their stature struggled together so arduously to produce a work so influential upon philosophical inquiry as Principia Mathematica. Yet, and this illustrates the tragicomedy of philosophy, probably no two thinkers whose training and knowledge were so similar have ever differed more in their mature philosophies than these two. It also says much about philosophical difficulties that the profession in general appears to have only a confused and inadequate grasp of the nature and significance of the Russell-Whitehead divergence.

First I shall say something about my own experiences of the two. I was never in the usual sense a pupil of either; but I have been a much younger colleague of each, of Whitehead at Harvard for three years, of Russell in Chicago for some months. I helped Whitehead grade student papers one year, and altogether I talked with him perhaps a score of times while I was at Harvard, and several times later. I also had a few revealing talks with Russell. For the most part I learned the views of both of them by reading their works.

There is one issue that, better than any other, focuses the divergence between the two philosophers: their differing conceptions of the place of relations in reality. The “logic of relations” is among the greatest additions that modern logic has effected. Russell, building on the work of Peirce, is one of the architects of this addition. I propose to show that, paradoxically, Russell quite failed to grasp the primary philosophical import of this great achievement, but that Whitehead (as well as Peirce) did largely grasp it. This is one of the ways in which it is reasonable to say that Whitehead was the greater philosopher. That he was not the more popular one says something, too, about the philosophical task but is not in my opinion particularly surprising.

The contrast between the two men appears vividly in the different ways in which they responded to other philosophers to whom both reacted. I shall consider especially Hume, Bergson, Leibniz, Bradley, and James. In my, of course not impartial, view Russell responded to these five as follows: in the case of Hume by accepting his central error, logical atomism, in the case of Bradley by overreacting to a contrary and equally arbitrary extreme; in the other three cases by a combination of these unfortunate responses. No doubt this is an oversimple and partly unjust summary; but I shall try to show that it has considerable basis in fact. In all five cases Whitehead responded by appropriating substantial elements of the other's thought—with careful qualifications and corrections. Confronted by an extreme position (and the philosophers listed do represent such positions) Whitehead neither adopted his predecessor's extremism nor did he overreact to the contrary extreme. Here also I may oversimplify and exaggerate—as Russell often did.

Another difference exhibited by the collaborators is that between a rebellious or iconoclastic temperament and one more evenly balanced between respect for our ancestors and the sense for the need of change. In some ways Whitehead is the more innovative and prophetic figure, yet at the same time he is more deeply appreciative of the past. Russell's iconoclasm is pleasantly expressed (in one of his essays) by the passage in which he takes off from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle as follows: “I think the universe is all spots and jumps, with little of the order and regularity that clergymen and governesses love.” (Quoted from memory.)

RUSSELL, HUME, AND BERGSON

Consciously duplicating Hume, Russell applied the maxim of (symmetrical) separability of distinguishables to successive states or events (Hume's “impressions”). But there is a slight difference from Hume in one respect. Hume combined the mutual logical independence of events with their mutual causal inferribility in principle. Thus he strangely maximized logical independence and causal dependence. Russell early in his career inclined to determinism, but as stated above, abandoned it because of quantum physics.

For Russell relations of earlier to later, read either way, are logically external. As a logician he might have reflected upon the way dependence and independence occur in formal logic. The truth of “this is a fox” depends on the truth of “this is a mammal.” The converse dependence does not obtain. Is this relevant to the question of temporal relations? Consider: There were mammals before there were foxes; there could not have been foxes before there were mammals. Evolution is a dramatically asymmetrical affair.

Philosophers rather generally seem, in discussing time, to instantiate Whitehead's caustic words: “Spending their lives answering questions they have never asked.” What is the past? It cannot be nothing, sheer nonbeing. What then? The philosophers who see this question with appreciation of its profundity are not numerous. The natural, intuitive claim about memory is that it is a present experience that requires previous experiences as its data or relata, though the previous experiences did not require it and had no relation to it. This claim if allowed is precisely a counter example to the Hume-Russell theory of temporal succession. I shall presently consider what Russell could say in rebuttal.

The other basic aspect of experience besides memory is perception. The natural intuitive claim is that perceiving something requires the thing or event perceived, but not vice versa. We can see trees because there are trees; but trees, or at least plants, existed long before there were seeing animals. Here again we have one-way separability. In temporal terms there are two ways of conceiving this asymmetry. (a) We can say, and most philosophers have said, that the perceived and the perceiving (in some cases at least) exist or occur simultaneously or at any rate contemporaneously; and (b) we can say that perceiving temporally follows events perceived. If all transmission of influence takes time and if the perceived influences the perceiving (the only way to account for the truth of the latter), perceived events must be already past when they are perceived. Astronomers take for granted that in seeing the starry heavens we are seeing events that occurred long ago. Whitehead is perhaps the only philosopher who has definitely generalized the principle to cover perceptions of events (e.g., flashes of pain) inside the body.

A conclusion from the foregoing is that whether as remembering or as perceiving, experience is in a relation of one-way dependence upon the past. Experiences are effects that intuit and logically require their own past causal conditions. Experiencing itself is the central counter example to Hume's axiom. If we have impressions of experiencing, we have impressions of necessary causal connections; necessary, however, retrospectively only. (The partial predictability of the future is a corollary.)¹ If we have no impressions of experiencing, whence the idea?

If events as cases of experiencing remember or perceive earlier events, events are not “simple” in the sense the doctrine requires. On the contrary each new event is complicated by relations to its predecessors though these were not complicated by relations to it. This is the Bergsonian thesis of the cumulative-creative nature of becoming. The past is like the inside or a rolling, ever-growing snowball, except (for becoming cannot be adequately represented spatially) that the inside of the ball is even less (not at all) altered by the new outside layers than must be the case in the example taken literally. The more exact analogy is with X remembering or perceiving Y, which neither remembered nor perceived nor was in any way related to X. And this is an instance, not a mere analogy.

It is time to consider how far Russell might defend his position. He did criticize Bergson's formulation. Rightly, he objected to the latter's term “interpenetration” as the way mental states are related. Here a symmetrical term was, most unfortunately, used to express an asymmetrical view of becoming. (Capek takes the meaning to be that simultaneous mental states of one person are mutually dependent or inseparable but not successive states. This is what Bergson ought to have said but not, I fear, what he did say.)

One may grant Russell some basis for his rejection of Bergson. And of course Russell has some more directly relevant arguments for his atomistic view. He resorted to the familiar reasoning: Past events are not happening now, hence they cannot be constitutive of present events. Looked at carefully this reveals itself as question-begging. The inner layers of the snowball are not the outer layers, but they are there and are not turned into nonentities by the fact that they no longer have the status of the outermost layer, which consists of what is happening now. To be real now is identical with happening now only if the Russell theory is correct. And if Russell's view is right, what is history about? Something simply unreal?

Russell could and I think does have in mind certain facts or apparent facts about memory and perception. These are chiefly of two kinds: “mistakes” of memory and perception, and gaps in memory and perception. Very little of the past seems to be remembered or perceived. And there are the “illusions” of perception as well as of memory. George the Fourth “remembered” being at the Waterloo battle but was not there. Here again I find the argument unimpressive. It is on the level of casual unperceptive philosophizing that needs no genius to attain but may require genius, or respect for genius, to transcend. George the Fourth said he remembered certain experiences, but saying is not demonstrating, and, even granting sincerity, introspective reporting is not infallible. How careful psychologists have found themselves forced to be in estimating the value of reports on one's own experiencing!

There is, in a sense, vastly more, and in another sense also less, in experience than people say there is. Verbal reports on subtle aspects of experience are theories, with of cours some grains of truth, but that is all that we can assume without careful inquiry.

Once at the University of Chicago I had an experience that nicely illustrates what may have happened in the British king's case. I was in doubt, “Have I, or have I not, gone to the faculty (mail) exchange today?” Then suddenly I recalled what had happened. I was on my way to the exchange when I met a friend who told me something (perhaps that the mail had not yet come) that caused me to change my plan. So I had not gone. But the reason it had almost seemed to me that I had gone was that, as I now recalled quite clearly, I had, when close to the exchange, done an unusual thing of vividly imagining myself inside the building and in front of my mailbox. So what I had later remembered, and really remembered, was this actual past experience of vivid imagining. Such imagining is rather like actual perceiving, hence my confusion. In principle one can with this clue unravel many a mystery of mistaken memory. I see no disproof whatever of the following principle: The data of memory are invariably past experiences, though they may be misclassified, temporarily mislocated, and otherwise misinterpreted.

Mistakes of perception are in principle, as various authors have observed, open to a parallel explanation. After infancy we do not have mere memory, or mere perception, as uninterpreted intuitions or sensations; always the data are taken as meaning this or that. The interpretation is not part of the events perceived or remembered; it occurs now, whereas the data are past events. There is no reason why this assignment of meaning should be infallible, every reason why it should be reliable only to the extent that biological adaptation of the species and learning of the individual imply; and this is a long way from infallibility for philosophical purposes.

As for the gaps of memory and perception, another principle here comes into play. It is one thing to say, for example, “I have experienced motion, therefore something has altered its spatial location,” and another thing to say, “I have not experienced motion, therefore nothing has altered its position.” Negative judgments have their own dangers. “No elephants in the room” may be safe where “no microbes in the room” is almost certainly wrong. Much philosophizing, including some of Russell's, ignores this principle. That we totally forget most of our past experience is a theory; that most of our past is, at any given moment, not distinctly and consciously recalled is observably true.

Russell's gifts were astonishingly various and remarkable; but ability to make a major addition to the repertoire of world views was not among them. He remained in philosophical essentials a latter-day Hume, as Passmore, our best historian of recent philosophy, has pointed out. A really great philosopher resists any such reduction to a predecessor. What competent historian would attempt such a reduction with Leibniz, Peirce, or Whitehead?

RUSSELL AND BRADLEY AS OPPOSITE EXTREMISTS

The philosophy of F. H. Bradley seems about as different as possible from that of Hume. This contrast can obtain because both positions were extreme cases of the monism-pluralism issue. Hume deduced his radical pluralism from a fatally ambiguous maxim; Bradley had complicated and numerous arguments for his monism. However, these arguments, like the more cavalier one of Hume, simply ignored the question of symmetry. Relations were either internal or external to both their terms. Russell, who failed to correct Hume's oversight, showed a similar insensitivity to philosophical issues in reacting to Bradley, or to Hegel, Bradley's predecessor in this way of thinking. What Russell saw in Bradley or Hegel was an attempt to justify a position he found, after a brief period of almost yielding to it, quite impossible to accept. This impossibility was partly elucidated by Bradley himself when he pointed out that all discursive thought assumes a plurality of terms related to other terms.

Since a logician must take discursive thought seriously, the logician Russell could hardly adopt a philosophy that leads to the conclusion that the concept of terms in relation does not make consistent sense. Taking Bradley far too much at his word, Russell opts for the pluralistic horn of the invalid dilemma: Either relations are symmetrically internal to their terms, and then all distinction among terms is mere distortion (or mere appearance), or relations are symmetrically external, and then we seem to have three entities in each case of aRb: R, a, and b. The three entities need relation to one another; so there is a regress.

Russell meets the objection to the pluralistic option by holding that aRb must be taken as it stands, without further analysis. He cuts rather than unties the knot. Moreover, he seems to have known what he was doing. Otherwise, how could one explain his emphatic declaration to this writer: “A philosopher can be a thoroughgoing monist or a thoroughgoing pluralist, and I don't see any rational ground for deciding between these positions.” Obviously Russell was treating contraries as though they were contradictories. Suppose a logician were to say: Either propositions are all mutually independent or they are all mutually interdependent, that is, equivalent. What formal logician would see this as a valid dilemma? Yet this models the procedure of Hume, Russell, and Bradley in choosing their philosophical positions. They choose between two symmetrical extremes, ignoring the asymmetrical middle position.

In falling into this trap Russell was … one of many of his time, a fact that recalls Santayana's remark about a certain “conventionality” of Russell's mind. Such conventionality may go with expertness and considerable inventiveness in formal logic, but how far is it compatible with philosophic greatness? Russell, as some of us see him, combined stature in logic with, by comparison, mediocrity in philosophy. A great essayist, by standards of readability, clarity, scope of interests and knowledge, he was also, by some criteria, a great humanitarian, repeatedly on the side of the underdog or of popularly neglected values (as in wartime). But how much of permanent value is to be found in his philosophizing?

Of course many would rate Russell rather differently.² Carnap once, in an interview, was asked, “Whom do you consider the greatest philosopher of all time?” Reply: “It is difficult to say; perhaps Bertrand Russell.” Again Sir Karl Popper, unsurpassed among the living in my view, wrote of Russell as “a great rationalist,” whereas he called Whitehead, who referred to his own philosophy as a form of “rationalism,” an “irrationalist.” Here is how I incline to see the difference between the two philosophers.

Russell, although “the most gifted Englishman”, a person with great courage and some other noble qualities, was always an extremist, and to that extent not truly rational. He began his philosophizing with an inclination toward monism, but soon reacted to the opposite extreme of radical pluralism. In other words, he went from the theory that relations are exclusively internal to the theory that (with trivial exceptions) they are exclusively external. Whitehead, who was never an extremist, and always his own man, began as a critical student of Kant (also of early Christian theology); then gradually, over a long lifetime, revised his reactions to Kant (and traditional theology) in view of intellectual discoveries made since Kant and in view of a reflective survey of the entire history of ideas. He came to see relations as internal to some terms, external to others. (Unluckily, he is not consistently and explicitly clear about this.) I doubt if Hegel played a major part in any of this. But Kant probably did play such a part. Whitehead once said that Kant's Critiques should have been written in reverse order. This is because, with Bradley, Whitehead held that experiencing is primarily and primitively enjoying-suffering and only in special cases knowing; so that the theory of feeling, and hence aesthetics, not epistemology, is primary. In this aspect Bradley seems un-Hegelian, and Whitehead goes farther away in the same direction from Hegel's panlogism.

LEIBNIZ

Russell's monograph on Leibniz, a work that doubtless influenced Whitehead, is a case of a highly competent logician evaluating the man who, more than anyone before Peirce, combined logical and mathematical creativity with metaphysical originality and deep knowledge of the history of ideas. Russell saw sharply the frailty of the barriers Leibniz tried to erect between his own views and the completely necessitarian view of Spinoza. He saw also that Leibniz had failed to grasp the importance of relations and that his attempt to reduce relations among monads to nonrelative, merely internal properties of monads was bound to fail. But here, as usual, Russell failed to find the remedy for his predecessor's troubles. Instead of attributing asymmetrically relative, yet internal, properties to the final units of reality, which he takes to be momentary states or single events (or, in a late phase of his philosophical development, unitary qualia, united by relations of compresence), Russell simply adds relations as entities additional to the units, thus adopting one horn of Bradley's spurious dilemma.

Two other great logicians who considered Leibniz with care were Peirce and Whitehead. Neither of them retained the denial of internal but relative properties, which become, in simplest form, cases of Peirce's Secondness (the dependence of a thing on some other thing) or of Whitehead's prehension (having something as intuited datum). Thus both philosophers escaped from the trap into which many have fallen. Secondness was not unambiguously asymmetrical; but it was certainly not universally symmetrical (as the numerical analogy implies it should not be), and prehension is definitely one-way. Only past actualities are prehended; A and B cannot literally prehend each other, where single actualities (states of individuals) are values for the variables A and B. Peirce and Whitehead saw that the great merit of modern logic is to see that absolute or nonrelative predicates, such as “happy” or “aware,” are not enough to describe any concrete actuality. Always one must have relative predicates, those that necessarily involve one or more other actualities. Thus S² is happily aware of S¹. This predicate is not a mere addition to the concrete subject S² but part of its internal makeup. Yet it leaves intact oneway separability and hence distinguishability. For S¹ need not and, if it is a single actuality (rather than an enduring, changing individual), cannot be aware of S². If there is a clearer case of progress in metaphysics, I do not know what it can be. Where have those who see no progesss in metaphysics discussed examples such as this?

WILLIAM JAMES

Russell admired James and admittedly learned from him. It is likely that James (as well as Hume) helped Russell to see that “substance” (or individual) is further analyzable, and that the final terms of analysis are not individuals that remain “the same” while changing more or less widely in qualities but rather are momentary actualities that successively become. Change is the successive becoming of contrasting actualities. So far Whitehead and Russell agree. For Whitehead the successor relation is intrinsic property of actualities with respect to their predecessors; for Russell it is extrinsic property. But both held that substance is anaylzable into a special kind of succession. It is a nice question how far this common doctrine of Russell and Whitehead was arrived at independently. I have not researched the evidence here. But James's saying, “The thoughts themselves are the thinkers,” or “Becoming is in drops or buds,” and the like, may have influenced both men. Both Russell and Whitehead were certainly influenced by relativity physics, which seems to demand a nonsubstance view, and which Russell, as there is competent authority for saying, understood very well. Of course Hume was an influence in the same direction.

There was another strand in James that Russell judged favorably also, but which I take to be James at his most confused. The essays in “radical empiricism” are rich in ambiguities. Whitehead read them and made his own judgment upon them. So did Russell. But how differently the two resolved James's ambiguities! Russell accepts James's partial relapse into something not far from Hume's theory of “impressions,” that is, mental states devoid of subject-object duality and, as it were, impressions of something upon nothing, or of nothing upon something. In James there are qualifications that make his view at least closer to reality than Hume's. But Russell removes the qualifications and engages in a real relapse into Humeanism. Each mental state is logically self-contained, and it is only a postulate that it indicates a real past or a possible or probable future. Russell lists the postulates we in effect rely upon in making predictions, but which have no apparent basis in the pluralistic ontology.

Whitehead's theory of experience is far from Russell's. Instead of collapsing the subject-object duality, as Russell does, Whitehead sharply explicates the duality as the very key to temporal succession and causality. The past is previous events, experiences, as in present experiences. This explains causal dependence. In Problems of Philosophy James seems to approach this position. But he lacked the indispensable insight that perception and memory are akin in temporal structure, both having only past events as data. In stressing this kinship of memory and perception, Whitehead was original if there is originality in philosophy. He found a new solution for the causal problems. To make the solution general, rather than applicable merely to human experiences, Whitehead had to generalize the concept of experience to the uttermost extent, something Leibniz had already done (though with needless and now antiquated artificialities that Whitehead, like Peirce, discarded). But for this generalization Whitehead offers other reasons besides its use in explaining causality.

James, like Russell and Whitehead, took the Zeno paradoxes seriously. Russell's solution (at least in one writing) was the merely mathematical one that however we divide motion or change spatially we can divide time similarly, so that there can be no difficulty in correlating each position of Achilles, relative to the tortoise, to a suitable point in time. But Whitehead, like James, thought this was to miss the point. If becoming is simply continuous, then no definite terms of temporal relations can be found. What succeeds what? After a certain time, what happens next? Is it the event occupying the next half second? If becoming is continuous, this cannot be, because first something must happen in the next quarter second, and before that in the next eighth, and so on. The trouble with the resulting infinite set is not just its infinity but the lack of a beginning. Becoming does not need a last instance, but it needs a next instance if succession is to have any definite meaning. Thus Whitehead arrives at his “epochal” theory of becoming.

Von Wright has perhaps put the matter even better. A changing thing is both p and not-p, taking different moments of time into account. But when is the subject simply p rather than not-p, or not-p rather than p? When is there definiteness? Can it be in an instant? But in an instant (as in a point of space) there can be no actual becoming. Instants, like points, are idealizations, limiting concepts. (Cf. Whitehead's theory of “extensive abstractions.”)

I incline to argue simply that continuity is, as Peirce said, the order of possibilities, and this implies (though Peirce oddly failed sometimes to see this) that if actuality and possibility are not simply coincident, the order of actualities cannot be continuity. Quantum physics, simply as such, should have been anticipated, as I have argued elsewhere. Instead the physicists had to lead philosophy to take the step it ought to have taken on its own. All definiteness depends on discontinuity. For example, even taking the evolutionary past into account, species are separated from one another and parents from offspring by finite jumps. Nature always “makes leaps,” and this is a metaphysical law. Whitehead had the advantage over metaphysicians of earlier times in that when he was in his prime physics no longer supported philosophers in the extreme that Peirce unwisely defended as “synechism,” that is, continuity-ism.

CONCLUSION

Whitehead's “simple minded” and Santayana's “conventional” point to the limitations of Russell's famous clarity. It is easier to be clear if you see only what others have already seen and found words for, also easier if you can be content with one-sided extreme views than if you are struggling to escape from traditional opposites in order to “see life steadily and see it whole” (Matthew Arnold). The following is an example that illustrates how Whitehead saw Russell at times. Russell lectured at Harvard once on values, suggesting that the key to values is the conditioned reflex. Whitehead's comment was as follows. “There is a lost dialogue of Plato on the Good, and I have often wondered what was in that dialogue. Now I know. When one of Pavlov's dogs' mouth waters, that is the good.” Here is another Russellian oversimplification. In some essay Whitehead's collaborator claims that science requires pluralism. If pluralism is defined as the simple negation of absolute monism, then of course science requires pluralism. But (as Peirce and Whitehead saw well) there is no ground for supposing that science requires, or is really compatible with, the Hume-Russell extreme of pluralism. Recently a physicist (F. Capra) has argued that science goes a long way toward justifying the mystical monisms of ancient China or India.

Russell did try to escape from one crude opposition; that of materialism vs. idealism. But all that he accomplished was to denature the idea of subjectivity by treating each mental state as a self-sufficient or absolute entity capable only of purely external relations and to declare an almost complete agnosticism as to the qualitative natures of physical things (what makes them more than mere relational patterns expressible in mathematical formulae). The sole exception was physical events in brains, concerning which he had what seems an early version of the identity theory. There must, Russell conceded, be qualities everywhere, but the only knowable ones are in human nervous systems. Thus a hard dualism of knowable and unknowable qualities takes the place of a dualism of known mind and known matter, or a materialistic denial of mind.

No one indebted, as my generation has been, to Russell's writings can end on a merely negative note. He had rare knowledge of the sciences (his ABC of Relativity has been termed the best introduction, except for the book by Einstein and Infeld) as well as superb ability to expound what he knew. His illustrations are often matchless. True enough, Russell showed no originality in science. Thus he merely expounded Einstein in physics, whereas Whitehead had his own mathematically simpler and so far not empirically refuted version.³ I recall Whitehead's remarking that on scientific questions Russell simply accepted science as it then stood. It remains a fact that he was immensely helpful as an expositor of exact knowledge.

Finally Russell was right about the importance of formal logic for philosophy. In this contention he was in agreement with Peirce and Whitehead and in opposition to Bergson and James. Whitehead did not in his metaphysical works exemplify his own declaration (in one of his last utterances) that metaphysical issues need to be analyzed using the tools of formal logic. I suspect this failure to practice what he preached may have been partly because he realized that the requisite portions of formal logic were not yet adequate—for instance, modal logic, or the logic of contingent as compared to necessary propositions, and the logic of “truth” in its relations to time and the difference between actual past and potential future events. It remains significant, I believe, that three leading modern logicians who have thought much about general philosophical problems have insisted upon the central role of symbolic logic in clarifying those problems. If most of us who take “process philosophy” seriously have not yet shown much inclination to be guided by the advice of three of the most philosophical recent logicians, this may be interpreted as one of a number of reasons for thinking that the last word on metaphysics has not been said and that the two authors of the twentieth-century Principia must both be transcended.

Notes

1. I have tried to explicate the way in which necessary retrospective causal connections imply partial predictability of the future in “Creativity and the Deductive Logic of Causality,” The Review of Metaphysics 27, no. 1 (September 1973): 62-74. For Whitehead's view of the immanence of the past in the present, see his treatment of causal efficacy in Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Macmillan, 1927; London: Cambridge University Press, 1928). Russell's contrasting atomistic view pervades many of his writings. In An Outline of Philosophy (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1960), p. 293, he states it sharply: “pluralism in the sense that admits the existence of a great multiplicity of events, each minimal event being a logically self-subsistent entity.” The agnostic view of the qualities of physical things also appears in this work (pp. 152, 153, 295). In it also, however, Russell takes a step toward the universal psychicalism of Peirce and Whitehead when he writes (p. 299): “It may be that each cell in the body has its own mental life, and that only selections from these mental lives go to make up the life which we regard as ours. … These, however, are only speculative possibilities.”

   The idea of logically self-sufficient items making up the world recalls Ockham's saying, “Everything is absolute.” English pluralism is six centuries old! R. B. Perry, an American follower of this tradition, once wrote, “Thus the absolute reappears in the humble guise of fact.” The process view is neither that everything is absolute (independent) nor that everything is relative. Either extreme would flout the principle of contrast.

   Although Russell's intention is clear, there is a subtle ambiguity in “logically self-subsistent entity.” If the entity is an event remembering and/or perceiving (mostly indistinctly) all its conditions in the past and in this manner including them in its logical being, then indeed it is self-subsistent. What it does not include it does not require for its reality. This only brings out the truth that between extreme pluralism à la Hume and Russell and the extreme monism there is a middle way. But it is one that Russell never seriously considered. In this he is like a multitude of others.

2. For impressive testimony to Russell's importance for his time see Bertrand Russell: Philosopher of the Century, ed. R. Schoenman (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967).

   On Russell as an activist and elderly eccentric, see the somewhat unsympathetic but vivid account by an outstanding reporter and Anglo-American figure of our time, Alistair Cooke, in his Six Men (New York: Knopf, 1977).

3. Such a refutation has now, it is said, been achieved (1982).