The only thing that will redeem mankind is co-operation, and the first step towards co-operation lies in the hearts of individuals. - Bertrand Russell

The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.

Modern industry depends upon raw materials which are found at, or near, the earth's surface. These raw materials are the product of past geological ages; for the most part they are not being reproduced by any natural process. The elements were built up long ago by a process which we are just beginning to understand, and which when understood may enable clever men to put an end to the human race. The process by which the elements were built up required enormous heat, the sort of heat that exists in the interior of the sun. In a great natural laboratory, nature, starting with hydrogen, arrived by various stages at a number of elements. The number used to be ninety-two but is now indefinite. The elements, at temperatures much lower than that at which they were formed, entered into chemical combinations. At a certain stage the earth was at a temperature peculiarly suitable to the formation of complex chemical combinations, and at last combinations were formed which had the properties that are characteristic of living matter. Living matter has a curious property which I have called "chemical imperialism." In virtue of this property, when it is put into a suitable environment, it transforms a mass of dead matter into a mass of living matter. It is this property which has made organic evolution possible.

Every man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility.

What I Have Lived For

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness — that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what — at last — I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.