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The private world of instinctive interests
is a small one, set in the midst of a great and powerful world which must,
sooner or later, lay our private world in ruins. Unless we can so enlarge
our interests as to include the whole outer world, we remain like a garrison
in a beleaguered fortress, knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that
ultimate surrender is inevitable. In such a life there is no peace, but a con-
stant strife between the insistence of desire and the powerlessness of will.
In one way or another, if our life is to be great and free, we must escape this
prison and this strife.
One way of escape is by philosophic contemplation. Philosophic con-
templation does not, in its widest survey, divide the universe into two
hostile camps—friends and foes, helpful and hostile, good and bad—it
views the whole impartially. Philosophic contemplation, when it is un-
alloyed, does not aim at proving that the rest of the universe is akin to man.
All acquisition of knowledge is an enlargement of the Self, but this
enlargement is best attained when it is not directly sought. It is obtained
when the desire for knowledge is alone operative, by a study which does
not wish in advance that its objects should have this or that character, but
adapts the Self to the characters which it finds in its objects. This enlarge-
ment of Self is not obtained when, taking the Self as it is, we try to show that
the world is so similar to this Self that knowledge of it is possible without
any admission of what seems alien. The desire to prove this is a form of
self-assertion and, like all self-assertion, it is an obstacle to the growth of
Self which it desires, and of which the Self knows that it is capable. Self-
assertion, in philosophic speculation as elsewhere, views the world as a
means to its own ends; thus it makes the world of less account than Self,
and the Self sets bounds to the greatness of its goods. In contemplation,
on the contrary, we start from the not-Self, and through its greatness the
boundaries of Self are enlarged; through the infinity of the universe the
mind which contemplates it achieves some share in infinity.
For this reason greatness of soul is not fostered by those philosophies
which assimilate the universe to Man. Knowledge is a form of union of
Self and not-Self; like all union, it is impaired by dominion, and therefore
by any attempt to force the universe into conformity with what we find in
ourselves.
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- Russell: The Value of Philosophy Page 92
 
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