Page 28 - DENG104_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_I

Unit 2: A Free Man’s Worship by Bertrand Russell

strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging Notes
scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need of the sorrows, the difficulties,
perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are
fellow sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so,
when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality
of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was
the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with
encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.”
Let our little day in the immense scheme of things be free of unnecessary pain, and be filled
with gratitude. Let us worship, during our few precious moments, at our self built shrine
dedicated to aesthetic beauty. If we cherish these few good things during our journey, then
we will be less buffeted by the uncaring universe that unknowingly created us. This is the
only worship worthy of free men.
”Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless
and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its
relentless way; for Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass
through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty
thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to
worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to
preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of
the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to
sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned
despite the trampling march of unconscious power.”

Did u know? Here are the Russell bullet-points.
• Russell says, without God, “Science” is the only tool we have to understand
the world.
• Science gives us three bleak certainties:
(1) Your life has no purpose-it’s but an accidental put-together of atoms.
(2) There’s no existence after death.
(3) All the achievements of humanity are destined to be destroyed by
the inexorable onslaught of nature’s power.
• Realize the certainty of these three things. They form a “foundation of
unyielding despair.” Build your life on them.

2.8 Critical Analysis

Bertrand Russell’s A Free Man’s Worship is his attempt of emancipating the modern people
from the bloody tradition worship of power. As a modern humanist philosopher, Russell first
takes the allusion of Marlow’s Dr Faustus to describe the probable creation story of the human
world. Russell does not take allusion from any other sources but only Marlow because in his
drama the description given by Mephistopheles is the must probable creation story, related to
science. So he takes his allusion and believes that the creation story is the most logical. Any
way Russell believes that human beings came in to existence and the first savage ancestors
were totally powerless on the hand of nature.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 23