Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:uippraisals from the 'Past THE CLEAREST INTELLECT OF OUR AGEl H UGH MACLENNAN 19°7-199° R cently I have been rereading Bertrand Russell, and in so doing I suddenly realized that lowe to this man a good deal of such happiness as I enjoy. Over the years I had forgotten how great my debt was, but when I reread one of his books which I first read as a student, I understood the extent to which he had liberated me from the psychological sadism of Calvin and Knox, to whom I had been unduly exposed when young. It is probably impossible for anyone entirely to escape once these two have got their hands around his throat, but Russell enabled me to escape a litde. 1 [This essay was recently discovered during the cataloguing for BRACERS of an obscure class of correspondence. Mr. Joseph w. Devine had sent Russell a clipping of the essay's appearance in' the Philadelphia Sunday But/etin, of 15 July 1962. I had long thought, from reading Elspeth Cameron's Hugh MacLennan: a Writers Life (1981), that he showed signs not only of having been influenced by Russell but of being the sOrt of person who is attracted to Russell's way of thinking. A promising tide in the same scholar's bibliography ofMacLennan turned out to be a fuller version of the clipping. "The Clearest Intellect of Our Age" is reprinted from The Montreal Star, 14 July 1962, "Entertainments" sec., p. 5. Russell did influence MacLennan. Neither the Russell Archives nor the inventory of the Maclennan papers at the Universiry of Calgary reveals personal contact berween the rwo. I wish I had asked MacLennan about contacts and influence seventeen years ago, when I sent him an early issue of Russell He commented: ''1 found your journal fascinating and never before had read that beautiful thing Russell wrote in his early days with Whitehead:" He is referring to the essay on the status of women in No.6, now in Papers 12.-Ed.] russell: the Journal ofthe Benrand Russell Archives McMaster Unive..ity Libraty Press noS. 11 (summer 1991): 83-5 ISSN 00,6-01631 84 HUGH MACLENNAN I suppose he really is the greatest man alive, in the sense that his teaching grows and his teaching is good, but it is pointless to argue the point between him and Churchill. It is wonderful, however, that many think he is our greatest man and that he has become an international hero to millions of the thoughtful youth. He must be the first pure logician who ever was that. Until he took his stand against nuclear war, he never appealed to the passions. He lacked the aggressions which youth admires. He never said: "Come live with me and I will be your master"; or, "Follow me and I will purge you of your sins." He had no use for self-sacrifice as such. He simply said, in effect: "Happiness is good. If you desire it, you must be reasonable." As he was intelligent enough to know that anyone who teaches that happiness is good, and teaches how to achieve it, is sute to be considered subversive to a Christian-commercial society, he bore no personal resentment when society persecuted him. The young know, of course, that Russell is now assumed by the experts to be the most important philosopher since Hume, but that is not why they love him. They love him for the sublime civilization of his courage, for his refusal to let an intensely kind nature blunt his respect for truth. They love him because he loves life even in the twentieth century; and they love him most of all because he is engage. And of course they also love the wit which refuses to be made tongue-tied by those who insist that whenever one speaks of sex or religion one must be solemn. Russell's wit is worth the study of any writer. It is based on mathematics, and Russell would agree, I think, with the remark Camillien Houde once made to me when I asked the famous mayor of Montreal how he was always able to make people laugh. Houde replied...