Communication

(We invite all men in the University to submit communications on subjects of timely interest, but assume no responsibility for sentiments expressed under this head.)

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The praise of the late Professor Muensterberg and Royce, as well as of some other distinguished former members of the Harvard Department of Philosophy, which appeared recently in the CRIMSON in the form of a clipping from the Springfield Republican, was very considerably marred, at least to students of philosophy, by the unnecessary and unjust disparagement of Mr. Bertrand Russell which went along with it.

The clipping says confidentally that Mr. Russel would probably not be asked to take a chair "held by such men as Professor Palmer and Professor Royce." The implication that Mr. Russell's ability and achievements as a philosopher are slight and not comparable to those of the men whom Harvard has, in the last few years, lost, is too wholly absurd to be taken seriously by anyone who has kept at all abreast of modern philosophic thought. Mr. Russell has established himself so firmly in philosophy that it is not untrue to say that in England today there is a "Russian school." Professor Royce remarked on one occasion, at least, that Mr. Russell's work, "The Principia Mathematica," is undoubtedly the most important work in philosophy of the past ten or fifteen years.

Doubtless Mr. Russell's attitude toward the war and toward nationalism motivated some of the remarks--remarks such as this: "The chair demands a philosophical scholar who is an ethical thinker of distinction, and Mr. Russell with his provocative individualism, is hardly that." Why, indeed, must all distinguished ethical thought be anti-individualistic? Is only the man who swallows tradition, keeps in the straight and narrow path of past systems of morals, and who, above all, agrees with you--is only he a distinguished ethical thinker? Clearly, it is not Mr. Russell's distinction as a philosopher against which the writer directs this remark, but Mr. Russel's philosophy. If Mr. Russell is wrong in his attitude toward the war and in his ethical views, he is certainly not hasty or unphilosophic.

Any honest and clear-headed student of philosophy would be forced to say of Mr. Russell, no matter how much he disliked his philosophy, that no single man is better fitted to "make philosophy a living interest in this America of ours which so greatly needs it." A bowing acquaintance with philosophy "in this America of ours" at the present day would have made it clear to the writer that exactly that is what Mr. Russell's work as much as the work of anybody is actually doing. A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY.