1944

Russell, Bertrand. My mental development. (1944). In : The philosophy of Bertrand Russell. Ed. by Paul Arthur Schilpp. (Evanstone : Northwestern University, 1944). (The library of living philosophers ; 5). In : Russell, Bertrand. Basic writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903-1959. (New York, N.Y. : Simon and Schuster, 1961).
China did one thing for me that the East is apt to do for Europeans who study it with sensitive sympathy : it taught me to think in long stretches of time, and not to be reduced to despair by the badness of the present. Throughout the increasing gloom of the past twenty years, this habit has helped to make the world less unendurable than it would otherwise have been.
There was much that I found admirable in the Chinese tradition, but it was obvious that none of this could survive the onslaughts by Western and Japanese rapacity. I fully expect to see China transformed into a modern industrial state as fierce and militaristic as the powers that it was compelled to resist. I expected that in due course there would be in the world only three first class powers – America, Russia and China – and that the new China would possess none of the merits of the old. These expectations (in 1920) are now being fulfilled.