There was a footpath leading across fields to New Southgate, and I used to go there alone to watch the sunset and contemplate suicide. I did not, how… - Bertrand Russell

[Unlike the] utilitarian... I judge pleasure and pain to be of small importance compared to knowledge, the appreciation and contemplation of beauty, and a certain intrinsic excellence of mind which, apart from its practical effects, appears to me to deserve the name of virtue. [For] many years it seemed to me perfectly self-evident that pleasure is the only good and pain the only evil. Now, however, the opposite seems to me self-evident. What first turned me away from utilitarianism was the persuasion that I myself ought to pursue philosophy, although I had (and have still) no doubt that by doing economics and the theory of politics I could add more to human happiness. It appeared to me that the dignity of which human existence is capable is not attainable by devotion to the mechanism of life, and that unless the contemplation of eternal things is preserved, mankind will become no better than well-fed pigs. But I do not believe that such contemplation on the whole tends to happiness. It gives moments of delight, but these are outweighed by years of effort and depression.

So far I have been considering the raw materials of industry, but the matter is far more grave as regards soil, which is the raw material of food. Ever since agriculture began it has been carried on wastefully in most parts of the world. Where methods are completely primitive, the cultivator merely moves on after he has exhausted the soil of one piece of land. This requires, of course, a great deal of available territory, and even then, only offers a permanent solution if the damage done to the soil by cultivation is temporary and not permanent. It is no wonder that men worshiped fertility divinities or that they developed a belief in the magical efficacy of human sacrifice. But in former times, while the population of the globe was still sparse, the problem had not the tragic importance that it has in our own day. It has been treated very fully in two books: Fairfield Osborne's [sic] Our Plundered Planet and William Vogt's Road to Survival. I could wish to see both these books carefully studied by all who allow themselves a facile optimism, and especially by those who believe that free enterprise and the profit motive will solve all problems. They will learn from these authors many tragic facts about formerly fertile hillsides now turned into barren rock, about irrigated plains now desert, and flourishing civilizations now buried beneath the sands. They will learn that this process, which devastated Western Asia and North Africa centuries ago, is in full swing at the present day in many parts of the Western hemisphere, including the United States. They will learn that the intense demand for food, which results from increase of population and development of industry, is becoming year by year more difficult to satisfy. We all know that the price of food goes up, but most of us attribute this to the wickedness of the Government. If we live under a progressive Government, it makes us reactionary; if we live under a reactionary Government, it turns us into Socialists. Both these reactions are superficial and frivolous. All Governments, whatever their political complexion, are at present willy-nilly in the grip of natural forces which can only be dealt with by a degree of intelligence of which mankind hitherto has shown little evidence.

My abandonment of former beliefs was, however, never complete. Some things remained with me, and still remain: I still think that truth depends upon a relation to fact, and that facts in general are nonhuman; I still think that man is cosmically unimportant, and that a Being, if there were one, who could view the universe impartially, without the bias of here and now, would hardly mention man, except perhaps in a footnote near the end of the volume; but I no longer have the wish to thrust out human elements from regions where they belong; I have no longer the feeling that intellect is superior to sense, and that only Plato's world of ideas gives access to the 'real' world. I used to think of sense, and of thought which is built on sense, as a prison from which we can be freed by thought which is emancipated from sense. I now have no such feelings. I think of sense, and of thoughts built on sense, as windows, not as prison bars. I think that we can, however imperfectly, mirror the world, like Leibniz's monads; and I think it is the duty of the philosopher to make himself as undistorting a mirror as he can. But it is also his duty to recognize such distortions as are inevitable from our very nature. Of these, the most fundamental is that we view the world from the point of view of the here and now, not with that large impartiality which theists attribute to the Deity. To achieve such impartiality is impossible for us, but we can travel a certain distance towards it. To show the road to this end is the supreme duty of the philosopher.