THE COMPLEAT AGNOSTIC
The mood of agnosticism, expressed in the music of Schoenberg and Webern (even though the latter, at least, was profoundly religious), in the art of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, in Bunuel’s ‘Los Olvidados’, and in ever so many other manifestations of the modern world, is philosophically best expressed in Bertrand Russell’s ‘Free Man’s Worship’.
This work, Russell’s ‘Free Man’s Worship’ is mainly a manifesto. (The general idea in it he inherited from T. H. Huxley and H. G. Wells.) Russell himself said he did not like, later in life, its pseudo-Miltonian prose; but he never withdrew its content, and his biographer Alan Wood testified that he felt strongly, later in life, that the view and mood expressed there is correct.
It is a true sleeper: there are few references to it in the philosophic literature, none of any import. And perhaps there is, indeed, no need to refer to it. Yet, any survey, even a superficial one, will show that it is immensly popular - students of philosophy read it and fall under its spell, people unfamiliar with it will assent to anyone who quotes to them crucial passages from it. It truly expresses both the view and the mood of most Western intellectuals who profess agnosticism and even of some of those who profess some religious denomination or other.
Free Man’s Worship - and Free Man is both a species and an individual, so that the reader gets a whiff of a sense of eternity from the mere style of the work - is the erect pose with which he walks over a narrow bridge, not knowing where that bridge ends, if anywhere, not having any assurance that it leads anywhere: the bridge is only seen for a brief distance and then disappears in the fog, or, still better, in the void. The meaninglessness and cruelty we see around is inescapable, yet Free Man does not succumb. He goes on regardless, hardly even hoping for the best, but acting as if he does.
II.