However, it would be much worse not to reach the ideal at all, or to
confuse it for want of courage and sincerity in uttering our true
mind; and it is in uttering our true mind that Mr. Russell can help
us, even if our true mind should not always coincide with his.
In the following pages I do not attempt to cover all Mr. Russell's
doctrine (the deeper mathematical purls of it being beyond my
comprehension), and the reader will find some speculations of my own
interspersed in what I report of his. I merely traverse after him
three subjects that seem of imaginative interest, to indicate the
inspiration and the imprudence, as I think them, of this young
philosophy.
II. THE STUDY OF ESSENCE
"The solution of the difficulties which formerly surrounded the
mathematical infinite is probably," says Mr. Russell, "the greatest
achievement of which our own age has to boast.... It was assumed as
self-evident, until Cantor and Dedekind established the opposite,
that if, from any collection of things, some were taken away, the
number of things left must always be less than the original number of
things. This assumption, as a matter of fact, holds only of finite
collections; and the rejection of it, where the infinite is concerned,
has been shown to remove all the difficulties that hitherto baffled
human reason in this matter.
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