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Bertrand Russell : Prologue,or Epilogue
from: Russell's Human Society in Ethics and Politics, 1954

* ホイット・バーネット(著),村松仙太郎・山川學而(共訳)「疑問を抱く哲学者、Ｂ．ラッセル」『現代に生きる信条』(荒地出版社,1958年12月刊)pp.9-12.
* この英文（Prologue, or Epilogue）の邦訳は、『現代に生きる信条』のpp.12-21 にお収録されている。


Bertrand Russell Quotes 366
MAN, as time counts in geology and in the history of evolution, is a very recent arrival in his planet. For countless millions of years only very simple animals existed. During other countless millions, new types gradually evolved--fishes, reptiles, birds and, at last, mammals. Man, the species to which we happen to belong, has existed for, at most, a million years, and has possessed his present brain capacity for only about half that time. But recent as is the emergence of man in the history of the universe, and even in the history of life, the emergence of his titanic powers, at once terrifying and splendid, is very much more recent. It is only about six thousand years since man discovered his capacity for distinctively human activities. These began, we may say, with the invention of writing and the organization of government. Since the beginning of recorded history progress has not been steady, but has been a matter of fits and starts. After the Age of the Pyramids, the first really noteworthy advance was in the time of the Greeks, and after them there was no further advance of comparable importance until about five hundred years ago. During the last five hundred years changes have occurred with continually increasing frequency, and have at last become so swift that an old man can scarcely hope to understand the world in which he finds himself. It seems hardly possible that a state of affairs differing so profoundly from everything that has existed since first there were living organisms, can continue without bringing some kind of dizziness, some calamitous vertigo, that will end the maddening acceleration in which heart and brain become increasingly exhausted . Such fears are not irrational: the state of the world encourages them, and the contrast between the hustling present and the leisurely past brings them to the imagination of the contemplative historian.
But when, forgetting our present perplexities, we view the world as astronomers view it, we find ourselves thinking of the future as extending through many more ages than even those contemplated in geology. There appears to be no reason in physical nature to prevent our planet from remaining habitable for another million million years, and if man can survive, in spite of the dangers produced by his own frenzies, there is no reason why he should not continue the career of triumph upon which he has so recently embarked. Man's destiny for many millions of years to come is, so far as our present knowledge shows, in his own hands. It rests with him to decide whether he will plunge into disaster or climb to undreamt-of heights. Shakespeare speaks of

The prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come

Are we to think that the dream is not prophetic? Is it no more than a deceiving vision ending in death? Or may we think that the drama is only just begun, that we have heard the first syllables of the prologue, and as yet no more ?
Man, as the Orphics said, is a child of earth and of the starry heaven ; or, in more recent language, a combination of god and beast. There are those who shut their eyes to the beast, and there are those who shut their eyes to the god. It is all too easy to make a picture of man as unmixed beast. Swift did it in his Yahoos, and did it in a manner so convincing that to many of us the impress is ineffaceable. But Swift's Yahoos, repulsive as they are, lack the worst qualities of modern man, since they lack his intelligence. To describe man as a mixture of god and beast is hardly fair to the beasts. He must rather be conceived as a mixture of god and devil. No beast and no Yahoo could commit the crimes committed by Hitler and Stalin. There seems no limit to the horrors that can be inflicted by a combination of scientific intelligence with the malevolence of Satan. When we contemplate the tortures of millions deliberately inflicted by Hitler and Stalin, and when we reflect that the species which they disgraced is our own, it is easy to feel that the Yahoos, for all their degradation, are far less dreadful than some of the human beings who actually wield power in great modern States. Human imagination long ago pictured Hell, but it is only through recent skill that men have been able to give reality to what they had imagined. The human mind is strangely poised between the bright vault of Heaven and the dark pit of Hell. It can find satisfaction in the contemplation of either, and it canuot be said that either is more natural to it than the other.
Sometimes, in moments of horror, I have been tempted to doubt whether there is any reason to wish that such a creature as man should continue to exist. It is easy to see man as dark and cruel, as an embodiment of diabolic power, and as a blot upon the fair face of the universe. But this is not the whole truth, and is not the last word of wisdom.
Man, as the Orphics said, is also the child of the starry heaven. Man, though his body is insignificant and powerless in comparison with the great bodies of the astronomer's world, is yet able to mirror that world, is able ta travel in imagination and scientific knowledge through enormous abysses of space and time. What he knows already of the world in which he lives, would be unbelievable to his ancestors of a thousand years ago ; and in view of the speed with which he is acquiring knowledge there is every reason to think that, if he continues on his present course, what he will know a thousand years from now will be equally beyond what we can imagine. But it is not only, or even principally, in knowledge that man at his best deserves admiration. Men have created beauty; they have had strange visions that seemed like the first glimpse of a land of wonder ; they have been capable of love, of sympathy for the whole human race, of vast hopes for mankind as a whole. These achievements, it is true, have been those of exceptional men, and have very frequently met with hostility from the herd. But there is no reason why, in the ages to come, the sort of man who is now exceptional should not become usual, and if that were to happen, the exceptional man in that new world would rise as far above Shakespeare as Shakespeare now rises above the common man. So much evil use has been made of knowledge that our imagination does not readily rise to the thought of the good uses that are possible in the raising of the level of excellence in the population at large to that which is now only achieved by men of genius. When I allow myself to hope that the world will emerge from its present troubles, and that it will some day learn to give the direction of its affairs, not to cruel mountebanks, but to men possessed of wisdom and courage. I see before me a shining vision: a world where none are hungry, where few are ill, where work is pleasant and not excessive, where kindly feeling is common, and where minds released from fear create delight for eye and ear and heart. Do not say this is impossible. It is not impossible. I do not say it can be done tomorrow, but I do say that it could be done within a thousand years, if men would bend their minds to the achievement of the kind of happiness that should be distinctive of man. I say the kind of happiness distinctive of man, because the happiness of pigs, which the enemies of Epicurus accused t him of seeking, is not possible for men. If you try to make yourself content with the happiness of the pig, your suppressed ) potentialities will make you miserable. True happiness for human beings is possible only to those who develop their godlike potentialities to the utmost. For such men, in the world of the present day, happiness must be mixed with much pain, since they cannot escape sympathetic suffering in the spectacle of the sufferings of others. But in a society where this source of pain no longer existed, there could be a human happiness more complete, more infused with imagination and knowledge and sympathy, than anything that is possible to those condemned to live in our present gloomy epoch.
Is all this hope to count for nothing? Are we to continue entrusting our affairs to men without sympathy, without know-ledge, without imagination, and having nothing to recommend them except methodical hatred and skill in vituperation? ( I do not mean this as an indictment of all statesmen; but it applies to those who guide the destinies of Russia and to some who have influence in other countries.) When Othello is about to kill Desdemona, he says, "But yet the pity of it Iago Oh Iago, the pity of it." I doubt whether Malenkov and his opposite number, as they prepare the extermination of mankind, have enough pity in their character to be capable of this exclamation, or even to realize the nature of what they are preparing. I suppose that never for a moment have they thought of man as a single species with possibilities that may be realized or thwarted. Never have their minds risen beyond the daily considerations of momentary expediency in a narrow contest for brief po\ver. And yet there must, in every country, be many who can rise to a wider point of view. It is to men with such capabilities, in whatever country, that the friends of man must appeal. The future of man is at stake, and if enough men 1 become aware of this his future is assured. Those who are to lead the world out of its troubles will need courage, hope and love. Whether they will prevail, I do not know ; but, beyond all reason, I am unconquerably persuaded that they will.