   While there is significant evidence that Russell did believe in the existence of simple entities in the early phases of his logical atomist period, it is possible that, uncharacteristically, he held this belief without argumentation.  In admitting that it is possible that analysis could go on ad infinitum, Russell claimed that “I do not think it is true, but it is a thing that one might argue, certainly” (PLA, 202). In his 1924 piece “Logical Atomism”, Russell admitted that “by greater logical skill, the need for assuming them [i.e. simples] could be avoided”.  This attitude may explain in part why it is that at the outset of his 1918 lectures on logical atomism, he claimed that “[t]he things I am going to say in these lectures are mainly my own personal opinions and I do not claim that they are more than that” (PLA, 178). It may have been that Russell was interested not so much in establishing definitively that there are any absolutely simple entities, but rather in combating the widespread arguments of others that the notion of a simple, independent entity is incoherent, and only the whole of the universe is fundamentally real. According to Russell, such attitudes are customarily traced to a wrong view about relations; in arguing for the doctrine of “external relations”, Russell was attempting simply to render a world of simple entities coherent again. Others had argued that possessing an inner complexity in the form of “nature” was needed to explain the essential properties of things or the necessary connections between them; as we shall see in Section 4.3 below, Russell believed that such apparent essential properties or necessary relations could typically be explained away.