By the early 1930s Lovecraft had resolved many of the philosophical issues that had concerned him in prior years; in particular, he had come to terms with the Einstein theory and managed to incorporate it into what was still a dominantly materialistic system. In so doing, he evolved a system of thought not unlike that of his later philosophical mentors, Bertrand Russell and George Santayana.

It appears that Lovecraft first read both these thinkers between 1927 and 1929. He clearly found Russell's reliance on science and his secular ethics to his liking, although Russell was not exactly an atheist. In 1927 Russell encapsulated his philosophical outlook in terms Lovecraft would have welcomed:

What Lovecraft had come to realize about the Einstein theory— in particular, its bearing on the three principles of materialism emphasized by Hugh Elliot (the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology, and the denial of substances not envisaged by physics and chemistry)—is that Newtonian laws of physics still work entirely adequately in the immediate universe around us: ‘The given area isn't big enough to let relativity get in its major effects— hence we can rely on the never-failing laws of earth to give absolutely reliable results in the nearer heavens.’. This allows Lovecraft to preserve at least the first of Elliot's principles. As for the second: