Don’t forget, Russell’s a deep formal logician. As such, he’s used to holding contradictory or paradoxical premises–things that “make no sense” in a more common sense view–in his head and working with them to arrive at correct, if equally “meaningless” in some sense, answers. Hell, to most people formal logic alone is probably enough to make someone seem insane, and explanations of it could drive certain people mad. Heh.

Actually, I suspect he’d end up being one of those powerful Mythos sorcerers, although he would see it more as symbol manipulation or something.

Looking at some of the titles in Russell’s bibliography, it’s easy to imagine the more sinister versions of these books that would have resulted in that world. Some of the essays above would obviously be different in content, but also imagine how these titles would have turned out:

• The Conquest of Happiness
• Power: A New Social Analysis
• Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits
• Satan in the Suburbs
• Nightmares of Eminent Persons
• Has Man a Future?

I also imagine essays like “Why I Do Not Worship Fabulous Monsters of Abhorrent Grotesqueness and Malignity, Half Ichthyic and Half Batrachian in Suggestion”