Bertrand Russell's epiphany at the beginning of the First World War

 

Bertrand Russell's reflections on the First World War :

[ In 1901, Russell and his wife, Alys, spent an academic term living with the Whiteheads. One day he and Alys came home to find Evelyn in severe physical pain. In his Autobiography, Russell describes a profound experience: “She seemed cut off from everyone and everything by walls of agony, and the sense of the solitude of each human soul suddenly overwhelmed me. … Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless; it follows that war is wrong, … that the use of force is to be deprecated, and that in human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that.” ][