Abstract

Apostles of the Rational Mind

This article provides brief information on two books. "Portraits From Memory and Other Essays," by Bertrand Russell and "A Piece of My Mind. Reflections at Sixty," by Edmund Wilson. For whether, because his own inner growth has steadily continued, or because the social period itself has shifted so sharply, the outlines of Russell's career, as he defines them in his eighties, are impressive. The book, by Russell, provides several historical and social movements. In Wilson's book, there is almost a deliberate reversion, which Wilson himself senses, to an eighteenth century classicism in his values as in his prose, just as he has returned to the role of country squire in his ancestral home at Talcottville, New York, and as his discussion of "modern education" centers upon the Greek and Latin poets.