The World as I Found It Read Online Free PDF Page B

Well, if nothing else, said Wittgenstein, I, unlike Russell, am a practicing philosopher. No wonder Russell finds philosophy so easy now. The man has done no real philosophical thinking in thirty years.
    In a bruised way, Russell and Wittgenstein relished these snipings, which, paradoxically, made their former closeness all the more apparent. The last time they saw each other, as it turned out, was at a meeting of the Cambridge Moral Science Club in 1946, five years before Wittgenstein’s death and four years before Russell’s Nobel.
    It was appropriate that G. E. Moore should have been presiding over the meeting. For years, Moore had acted as a sort of buffer between Wittgenstein and Russell.
    Wittgenstein had assumed Moore’s chair at Cambridge when Moore had retired, and the two were still on quite friendly terms. Wittgenstein found the judicious Moore a good sounding board for his ideas, and he met with the old don every Tuesday to discuss philosophy, music, literature or anything else that struck their interest. The two men also met once a month at the Moral Science Club, where Wittgenstein would appear like a guilty conscience to brain a visiting Reputation or silence some mouthy young twit.
    Moore ran a civil meeting, thoughtfully introducing speakers and rapping his gavel whenever a discussion got out of hand. A boyish, courtly, paunchy man of seventy-three, with fine white hair and rosy little chaps for cheeks, Moore was the most unvain of men, especially great men. In this respect alone, he could not have been more unlike the contentious Russell. Since their undergraduate days at Cambridge they had known each other, and for almost as long they had been rivals. Typically, this rivalry was more Russell’s doing than Moore’s, but it was largely quiescent now, not from any change of heart or, Lord knows, from the supposed softening of age, but as a purely practical matter. After all, the two men almost never saw each other. They moved in completely different orbits, and though they did not want to admit it, they both knew their best work was behind them. As elder statesmen secure in their reputations — indeed, as men whose names were even commonly linked because of their early alliance in demolishing the idealism of Bradley, the reigning ism when they were both coming up at Cambridge in the late 1890s — they knew there was nothing to be gained from squabbling. To Russell, Moore did not present the threat he had forty years before, when the young author of Principia Ethica stood as the moral guide and example to a generation of young England’s finest young minds, including Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf. And faster than either of them cared to imagine, they were becoming history now — captive spirits.
    Between them, then, was the tacit understanding that each would speak appreciatively, if briefly, about the other should his name come up. An innocent anecdote or thoughtful parenthesis, a thoughtful smile — that would do it. Moore admirably disguised his dismay when he learned that Russell would be attending that night’s meeting. The speaker, a visiting professor from the University of Chicago, might as well have stayed home. It was Wittgenstein and Russell they came to see, and the normal audience of two or three dozen swelled to a standing-room crowd of more than a hundred.
    Russell was the first to arrive, accompanied by a little throng of students and several dons. Russell observed the etiquette: straightaway, he went up to Moore and warmly shook his hand. The master courtier asked about Dorothy, Moore’s wife. He asked about Moore’s two sons, just demobilized, then turned, in passing, to ask of Moore’s health and work. Well … said Moore, reaching for a comparable question (wondering, that is, which wife or mistress Russell was on). Tell me, resumed the politic Moore, altogether sidestepping the sensitive question of woman. How are