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A LOVER OF LIGHT AMONG LUMINARIES: Dilip Kumar Roy Actually, Russell was all admiration for science. He held science to be a very great achievement of men. He reckoned that science had wonderful potentialities. If scientists were given sufficient freedom, Russell, believed, they could even improve the present breed of humanity. To cite a crude example of the immense power of science in changing the entire face of mankind, he told Roy that scientists would allow the mass of men to have sex naturally. But he said:
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"Women would not be allowed to do without' contraceptives except when they and the selected fathers were pronounced to be fit eugenically. The unfit must take proper measures for birth-control when they have intercourse."37
But, it would not be Russell, if he failed to show the other side of any subject in a balanced manner. Dilip Roy quotes a few passages from. Russell's books like The Scientific Society, Power, Authority and Individual in which he has weighed very efficiently both advantages and disadvantages of science. He
wrote:
"No civilization worthy of the name-can be merely scientific.. Scientific technique is concerned with the mechanism of life: It can prevent evils, but cannot create positive goods. It can diminish illness, but cannot tell a man what he shall do with health; it can cure poverty, but cannot tell a man how he shall spend wealth; it can prevent war, but cannot tell a man what form of adventure or heroism he is to put in its place. Science considered as the pursuit of knowledge is something different from scientific technique, and deserves a high place among the ends of life, but among these it is only one of several."38
A scientific society, Russell claimed, which did not promote the creation and enjoyment of beauty, the joy of life and human affection, could not be considered excellent, because, apart from the consideration of a community or society at large, individual things in human life could be understood equally valuable. He knew that like science, all religious leaders, great artists and intellectual discoverers too have felt both, a kind of moral compulsion to fulfil their creative impulses and a sense of moral exaltation when they have succeeded. Hence, it can be said that Russell, as such, was not against any religion but was against orthodox dogmatism that might creep in any of the religious or mystical ecstatic experiences.
Dilip Roy and Bertrand Russell also talked about the relative intelligence of men at different epoches in course of evolution. He did not agree with the popular view that evolution must mean progress towards a more and more evolved species. For him, it meant the change the species underwent in adapting itself to
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