Bertrand Russell was unique among the philosophers of this century in combining the study of the specialized problems of philosophy, not only with an interest in both the natural and the social sciences, but with an engagement in primary as well as higher education, and an active participation in politics. It was, indeed, mainly through his political activity and as a moral and social propagandist that he achieved the world-wide fame which he enjoyed at the end of his life, but it is to his philosophical work, and especially that which he accomplished in his youth and early middle age, that he will owe his place in history. Here, too, his range was exceptionally wide. He himself, no doubt with good reason, attached the greatest value to the work which he did on mathematical logic; but we shall see that he also made an important contribution to the philosophy of logic, in a wider sense, to the theory of knowledge, and to ontology, the question of what there really is. In all these aspects, his work has had a very great influence upon his contemporaries, from the beginning of this century up to the present day. Indeed, with the possible exception of his pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein, there is no philosopher of our time who has made such a large difference, not only to the treatment of particular philosophical problems, but to the way in which the whole subject is pursued.

Russell was born on May 18th, 1872, almost exactly a year before the death of his lay god-father, John Stuart Mill. His father, Viscount Amberley, was the eldest son of the first Earl Russell, the famous Liberal statesman who, as Lord John Russell, introduced the first Reform Bill in 1832, and was twice Prime Minister, from 1846 to 1852 and from 1865 to 1866. His mother, who also belonged to the Whig aristocracy, was the daughter of a less prominent Liberal politician, the second Lord Stanley of Alderley. Bertrand Arthur William Russell was their second son and third child. Their lives and characters are sympathetically depicted in the two volumes of The Amberley Papers which Russell edited in collaboration with Patricia Russell, his third wife, and published in 1937.

Russell's mother and sister died of diphtheria in 1874, and his father, who never recovered from this loss, survived them by less than two years. He had appointed two freethinkers as guardians of his sons but his parents contrived to have this provision nullified, with the result that Bertrand Russell and his brother Frank, who was nearly seven years his senior, went to live with their grandparents at Pembroke Lodge, a grace-and-favour house in Richmond Park ws of autobiography which Russell published in the years 1966-9 he speaks of his arrival at Pembroke Lodge at the age of three as his earliest vivid recollection. His grandfather, who was then eighty-three years of age, lived only three years longer but his grandmother, who was twenty-three years younger than her husband and lived until 1898, was the dominant influence on him throughout his childhood and adolescence. A daughter of the second Earl of Minto, she came from a family of staunch Presbyterians and held very strong moral and religious convictions. In politics she was more radical than her husband and her influence over him was resented by his colleagues, who spoke of her as 'Deadly Nightshade'. Bertrand Russell himself came to reject many of her principles, though not her radicalism, but he inherited her moral fervour: and the text which she inscribed on the flyleaf of the Bible which she gave him, 'Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil', was one to which he courageously adhered at all times in his life.

As he recalls it in his autobiography, Russell's childhood was solitary but not unhappy. Unlike his brother he was not sent away to school, but was educated by governesses and tutors. In adolescence, he began to suffer from loneliness and he was made unhappy by his sense of an intellectual estrangement from his grandmother which was sharpened by his rejection of her religious beliefs. His own interest in science had been aroused by one of his uncles at an early age, but the moment of his greatest intellectual awakening was his discovery of the geometry of Euclid to which he was introduced by his brother at the age of eleven. He mastered the theorems very quickly but objected to having to take the axioms on trust. He consented to do so only when his brother assured him that they could make no progress otherwise. It was, however, a concession to which he was never really reconciled, as his philosophy was later to show.

After spending eighteen months at an Army crammer's, where he was shocked by the coarse philistinism of most of his companions, Russell succeeded in obtaining a minor scholarship in mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge. He went up to Cambridge in October 1890, at the age of eighteen, and from then on, as he put it, 'everything went well with me'.[1] He had been examined for the scholarship by A. N. Whitehead, with whom he was afterwards to collaborate on Principia Mathematica, and Whitehead had told people to look out for him. He quickly made a circle of friends which included the philosopher J. E. McTaggart, then already a lecturer at Cambridge, and was later to include the philosopher G. E. Moore, and like them, he was elected a member of the exclusive society of 'The Apostles'. He began by reading mathematics and was placed seventh Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos of 1893, but his interest was already turning towards philosophy, and he stayed for a fourth year in order to read for the second part of the Moral Science Tripos. Having obtained a First with distinction, he set about working for a Fellowship.

By that time he was engaged to be married. He had met Alys Pearsall Smith in 1889, when he was barely seventeen, and had fallen instantly in love with her; though it was not until four years later that she began to take him seriously. She was five years older than he and came from a family of American Quakers: the writer, Logan Pearsall Smith, was her brother. Russell's family disapproved of the engagement, partly on social grounds, and tried to discourage him by telling him that the insanity in his family made it unsafe for him to have children: his Uncle William was mad and his maiden Aunt Agatha, at the time of her own engagement, had suffered from insane delusions, so that the engagement had to be broken. When this did not deter him, they separated him from Alys by arranging for him to become an honorary attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. By his own account, his work there chiefly consisted in trying to persuade the French Government that lobsters were not fish. Tiring quickly of such diplomacy, and having a legacy from his father which made him financially independent, he returned to England after a few months, still determined upon marriage. The marriage took place in December 1894 and at the beginning turned out very happily.

In the following year Russell obtained his Fellowship at Trinity with a dissertation on the Foundations of Geometry. By the terms of the Fellowship, which he held until 1901, he was not required to teach or even to reside in Cambridge and he went with his wife to Berlin to study politics and economics. Many years later he wrote of a spring morning when, walking in the Tiergarten, he formed the plan of writing two series of books: one 'on the philosophy of the sciences, growing gradually more concrete as I passed from mathematics to biology' and the other 'on social and political questions, growing gradually more abstract'.[2] Being still under the influence of the Hegelianism which he had learned from McTaggart, he hoped that this would culminate in a Hegelian synthesis, 'an encylopedic work dealing equally with theory and practice'.[3] The earliest fruits of this project were the publication in 1896 of a work on German Social Democracy, the first of the seventy-one books and pamphlets that Russell was eventually to publish, and the appearance a year later of An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, on the basis of his fellowship thesis. This was followed in 1900 by A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, a book arising out of a course of lectures which, substituting for McTaggart, he had given at Cambridge in 1899. It mainly consisted in an attempt to derive Leibniz's metaphysics from his logic and in particular from his mistaken assumption that all propositions are of the subject-predicate form. By this time Russell had forsaken Hegel, chiefly through the persuasion of his friend G. E. Moore, but in his book on Leibniz, and still more in the earlier essay on the Foundations of Geometry, he shows himself to have been strongly influenced by Kant, a philosopher for whom he later came to have little respect.

Russell's work on the philosophy of mathematics took a new and decisive turn in July 1900 when he went to an International Congress of Philosophy in Paris and there met the Italian logician, Giuseppe Peano. Peano had developed his own system of mathematical logic and Russell found in his notation 'an instrument of logical analysis such as I had been seeking for years'.[4] In fact, Peano's notation is rather cumbersome and Russell himself was greatly to improve upon it, but it opened his eyes to the technical possibility of carrying out a reduction of mathematics to logic. Russell spent two months in mastering and extending Peano's methods and then turned with such ardour to the task of analysing the fundamental notions of mathematics that he completed the first draft of his five-hundred-page book on The Principles of Mathematics by the end of the year. He took over a year longer to revise it and the book was not published until 1903. It remains a landmark in the history of the subject. We shall see that it contains a vein of Platonic Realism which Russell was later to reject, but, as he said in the introduction to the second edition, which appeared in 1937, its 'fundamental thesis ... that mathematics and logic are identical, is one which I have never seen any reason to modify'.[5]

To sustain this thesis, Russell needed to refashion logic, and for this he enlisted the co-operation of his old tutor Whitehead. Together they set about constructing the new system of logic which is embodied in their Principia Mathematica, of which the first volume appeared in 1910, the second in 1912 and the third in 1913. At first everything went smoothly, but at a quite early stage, even before the publication of Russell's The Principles of Mathematics, they encountered difficulties which they were unable to resolve until Russell in 1906 discovered his Theory of Types.[6] What chiefly remained after that was the mechanical labour of writing out the theorems. Since Whitehead was fully occupied with teaching, this devolved almost entirely upon Russell, who relates that from 1907 to 1910 he worked at it for about eight months in each year from ten to twelve hours a day.[7] When the book was completed, the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press estimated that its publication would involve them in a loss of £600 of which they were not willing to bear more than half. The Royal Society, of which Russell and Whitehead were both Fellows, Russell having been elected in 1908, agreed to contribute £200 but the authors had to find the remaining £100. Thus their financial reward for this masterpiece, which had cost them ten years' work, was minus £50 apiece.

During this period the Russells and the Whiteheads frequently shared a house. Mrs Whitehead was an invalid, suffering from heart trouble, and Russell describes an occasion, in the year 1901, when finding her isolated in her pain he had a sudden revelation of 'the loneliness of the human soul'. He reflected that 'nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless; it follows that war is wrong, that a public school education is abominable, that the use of force is to be deprecated, and that in human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that'.[8] Russell was never a theist or, as we shall see, a friend to organized religion, but he was a man of religious temper. In his youth, his attitude to mathematics was almost mystical,[9] he was always sensitive to nature and to romantic poetry, and his desire that human existence should have a meaning was reflected in the emotional stresses of his private life and in the passion which he brought to politics. At the same time, this mystical strain was balanced by a strong sense of irony, and by a sceptical and analytical intelligence; and it makes little showing in his philosophy.

During the years that he was working on Principia Mathematica, Russell did not allow his interest in politics to lapse. He was a friend of the leading Fabians, including Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and especially Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and under the Webbs's influence he had become an imperialist and a supporter of the Boer War. After the revelation which he underwent in 1901, he changed sides on this question and then became a pacifist. In the early years of the century he campaigned for Free Trade, and when this policy triumphed with the liberal victory in the General Election of 1906, he took up the cause of women's suffrage. In the face of much ridicule and some violence, he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament, at a by-election in Wimbledon in 1907, as a candidate for the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. After completing Principia Mathematica he thought more seriously of a political career and sought to have himself adopted as the Liberal candidate for Bedford. But the members of the local Liberal Association, who had at first received him enthusiastically, declined to select him when he confessed to being an agnostic and admitted that this fact would probably become known to the electors.

Russell believed, I do not know with how much justification, that his agnosticism also at this time cost him a Fellowship at Trinity.[10] By then, he welcomed paid employment, as he had diminished his capital in settling Whitehead's debts. Mrs Whitehead knew of this but Whitehead himself did not. In fact Trinity did come to his support by making him, not indeed a Fellow, but a Lecturer. The appointment was made in 1910 for an initial period of five years. It carried the same salary as if it had been a Fellowship but did not give him any voice in the government of the College or afford him the same security of tenure. This fact was to become important a few years later.

The first decade of the century was a period not only of intellectual strain for Russell but also of emotional unhappiness. Early in 1902, when he was living with the Whiteheads at Grantchester, he went out bicycling one afternoon, and suddenly realized that he no longer loved Alys. He could not and indeed did not try to conceal this from her and since she continued to demonstrate a love for him to which he could not respond, while neither of them sought consolation with anybody else, their life together became difficult to bear. This went on for nine years until Russell fell in love with Lady Ottoline Morrell, the famous hostess of Garsington, and the wife of a Liberal politician for whom Russell had been canvassing. When he confessed this to Alys, she threatened to divorce him and cite Lady Ottoline. But Lady Ottoline did not wish to leave her husband, or to incur a scandal, and Russell prevented Alys from taking action by threatening to commit suicide. He then went away and did not see Alys again until 1950 when they met as friends. It is clear from her letters that she loved him all her life.

Though Russell had been concentrating on mathematical logic since he began work on The Principles of Mathematics, he had not entirely neglected other aspects of philosophy. His Philosophical Essays, which came out in 1910, contained a paper on ethics and some effective criticism of both pragmatist and idealist theories of truth, and his article 'On Denoting', which indeed arose out of his logical studies, and was published in Mindin 1905, laid the foundations of his famous Theory of Descriptions.[11] After completing Principia Mathematica he branched out further. The article in which he first made his important distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by descriptions[12] was published in 1911; his presidential address to the Aristotelian Society in the same year was concerned with the relation of particulars and universals[13] and in 1912 he published in The Home University Library a little book on The Problems of Philosophy, which is probably still the best introduction to the subject that exists in English. In the following year he published among other things an important article 'On the Notion of Cause' and in the spring of 1914 he delivered the Lowell Lectures in Boston and published them under the title of Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy. The position taken in this book, as we shall see, is that of a radical empiricism. It places Russell in the line of succession to Locke, Berkeley, Hume and John Stuart Mill.

While he was lecturing at Boston, Russell was made a temporary Professor at Harvard and there had T. S. Eliot as one of his graduate students. He is the hero of Eliot's poem 'Mr Apollinax', represented at a party where 'his laughter tinkled among the teacups' and 'his dry and passionate talk devoured the afternoon'. He subsequently became a close friend of Eliot's and of Eliot's first wife, but never succeeded in converting him to his philosophy.

By this time Russell's affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell was on the wane and on this visit to the United States he again fell in love, with a girl who followed him to England, on the understanding that she would live with him and that they would get married if Alys would give him a divorce. This plan was frustrated because Russell's love for her did not withstand the emotional shock to him of the outbreak of the First World War. Russell was not devoid of patriotism; indeed, he said in his autobiography that 'love of England is very nearly the strongest emotion that I possess':[14] neither was he an absolute pacifist; in the Second World War he thought that the evils of Nazism warranted armed resistance. It was just that in 1914, and increasingly as the war progressed, he could see no principle at stake, or any probability of a better outcome, which would justify the suffering and loss of life. He was appalled by the enthusiasm with which our entry into the war was generally greeted and by the support which it found among many of his friends, including such men as Whitehead and Gilbert Murray. Being unable to achieve the detachment of his brother's friend, the philosopher Santayana, who reasoned that the young men who were being killed in the war would anyhow die sooner or later, and would be good for nothing while they lived, he devoted himself to writing against the war, making speeches at pacifist meetings and taking an active part in such movements as the Union of Democratic Control and the No Conscription Fellowship. He did not believe that these activities could have much effect but thought it his duty to do whatever he could.

This duty extended to the attempt to work out a political theory which would supply the framework of a better order of society. The two books which resulted were Principles of Social Reconstruction, which was published in 1916, and Roads to Freedom, which came out two years later. In composing the lectures on which the first of these books was based, Russell had the advice of D. H. Lawrence. He had got to know Lawrence through Lady Ottoline, of whom Lawrence drew a malicious portrait as Hermione Roddice in his novel, Women in Love. Lawrence's attitude to Russell was a mixture of friendship and hostility, with the hostility becoming predominant. He wrote asking Russell to make him his heir but in the same letter attacked him for being a savant, bidding him to 'become a creature instead of a mechanical instrument',[15] and he suggested that Russell's pacifism was a mask for his 'lust to jab and strike'. For a short while Russell believed this and was driven to thoughts of suicide, but then he threw off Lawrence's spell and saw his Fascist politics and his cult of unreason for the evils that they were.

A better and braver friend was Clifford Allen, afterwards Lord Allen of Hurtwood, the chairman of the No Conscription Fellowship, who was repeatedly court-martialled and kept in prison for refusing to obey military orders. It was at one of these trials, in 1916, that Russell met Lady Constance Malleson, wife of the actor Miles Malleson, and herself a well-known actress under the name of Colette O'Niel. They soon became lovers, and Russell found in her beauty and youth and courage, and in her love for him, a refuge from 'the world of hate'.[16] by which he was surrounded.

His enmity to this world was reciprocated by it. In April 1916 the No Conscription Fellowship had issued a leaflet in protest against a sentence of two years' hard labour which had been passed upon a conscientious objector. When some men were also sentenced to hard labour for distributing the leaflet, Russell wrote a letter to The Times, saying that he was the author of the leaflet and that if anyone was to be prosecuted for it, he was primarily responsible. As a result, he was brought to trial before the Lord Mayor of London on a charge of making 'statements likely to prejudice the recruiting and discipline of His Majesty's forces'. In fact the paragraph in the leaflet on which the prosecution chiefly relied, where the reader was asked whether he would join the persecutors or stand for those who were defending conscience, was not written by Russell but he took responsibility for it. He was found guilty and sentenced to a fine of £100 with £10 costs or the alternative of sixty-one days' imprisonment. Russell refused to pay the fine but when the authorities distrained on his effects, his friends raised the motley and offered it for the first of his books to be put up for auction.

The most serious consequence to Russell of this affair was that he was dismissed from his position at Trinity. In February 1915, the Council of the College had declared its willingness to appoint him to a Fellowship as soon as his Lectureship expired, but when he applied for two terms' leave of absence in order to continue his political work the Council decided to renew his Lectureship for a further five years instead. When its members heard of his conviction, they voted unanimously to remove him from the Lectureship. As the executive body of the College, they had the power to do this, but the attitude of the eleven men concerned, who were mostly elderly and politically out of sympathy with Russell, was at variance with that of the majority of the Fellows, including those who were serving in the war. Twenty-two of them immediately signed a letter of protest and in 1919, a year after the end of the war, a memorial demanding Russell's reinstatement, which was signed by twenty-eight Fellows and supported by five others, was agreed to by the Council. Russell accepted the appointment, but applied for leave of absence for the year 1920-1, and in 1921, when he was due to resume his lectures, he resigned because he feared that the circumstances of his second marriage might bring scandal on the College and embarrass his friends.[17]

In the meantime Russell continued his conflict with authority. When Trinity dismissed him he was offered a Professorship at Harvard, but the British Government refused him a passport. Two years later they took stronger action. In May 1918 he wrote an article for a weekly paper, in which, in the course of depicting the bad consequences which would result from refusing the German overtures for peace, he wrote that 'the American Garrison which will by that time be occupying England and France, whether or not they will prove efficient against the Germans, will no doubt be capable of intimidating strikers, an occupation to which the American Army is accustomed when at home'.[18] For this alleged libel on an ally, he was sent to prison for six months. Thanks to the intervention of Mr Balfour, he served the sentence under conditions which allowed him the free use of books and writing materials, and he took advantage of this opportunity to write his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, in which he gives a lucid and simple account of the main ideas of Principia Mathematica, and to begin work on The Analysis of Mind.

The decision to return to philosophy had been taken by Russell even before he wrote the article which landed him in prison. Early in 1918 he had given in London a course of eight lectures entitled The Philosophy of Logical Atomism. They were published then in The Monist, but did not appear in book form until 1956, when they were included in a collection of Russell's essays entitled Logic and Knowledge. As Russell admitted in the preface to the lectures which he wrote for The Monist, they owed a great deal to conversations which he had had with Ludwig Wittgenstein before the war. Wittgenstein had come to Cambridge in 1912 to learn the philosophy of mathematics from Russell and had very soon impressed Russell with his genius. When the war broke out, Wittgenstein became an officer in the Austrian Army and was captured by the Italians some time after the Armistice. In his acknowledgment in The Monist Russell said that he did not know whether Wittgenstein was alive or dead, but in February 1919 Wittgenstein wrote to him from his Italian prison-camp to say that he had a manuscript which he would like Russell to read and that when he ceased to be a prisoner of war he would like them to meet and discuss it. This was the manuscript of Wittgenstein's famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. One obstacle to their meeting was that Wittgenstein, believing it wrong for a philosopher to have money, had given away his considerable fortune, and was too proud to let Russell pay his fare. This difficulty was resolved by Russell's buying some furniture which Wittgenstein had left in Cambridge and they met in The Hague at Christmas 1919. The result was that Russell arranged for the publication of the Tractatusand wrote an introduction to the English edition. After that they diverged philosophically. Wittgenstein coupled Russell with H. G. Wells as men who had run out of problems, and Russell, though he retained great affection for Wittgenstein, could see little merit in his later work.

In this visit to The Hague, Russell was accompanied by Dora Black whom he had first met in 1916 when she was a student at Girton. Meeting her again in 1919, he was torn between her and Colette, but the fact that she wanted to have children made her more attractive to him. They were, however, at odds politically because of their different attitudes to Soviet Russia, which they visited independently in 1920. Dora Black was favourably impressed by what she was shown there but Russell, as he wrote to Lady Ottoline, though thinking it 'the right government for Russia at this moment', saw the regime more percipiently as 'a close tyrannical bureaucracy, with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsars', ruling 'a nation of artists which it aimed to make as industrial and as Yankee as possible'.[19] He recorded his opinions in a book called The Theory and Practice of Bolshevism, which was published in the same year, and never relaxed his opposition tax the Soviet's denial of liberty.

After returning from Russia, Russell almost immediately left for China, where he had been invited to lecture for a year. He took Dora with him intending to marry her as soon as the divorce proceedings which he had persuaded Alys to bring against him were completed. Russell was as enchanted with China as he had been disenchanted with Russia and was especially captivated by Peking, which seemed to me also, when I visited it in 1954, to be the most beautiful city in the world. Towards the end of his stay in China he became seriously ill with bronchitis and very nearly died. Some Japanese journalists, who had been refused an interview, reported that he had died, which gave him the pleasure of reading his own obituary notices. One of them, in a missionary journals consisted of the one sentence: 'Missionaries may be pardoned for breathing a sigh of relief at the news of Mr Bertrand Russell's death.'

Having disappointed the missionaries, Russell returned to England in September 1921, and married Dora Black. Their first child was born soon afterwards and named John Conrad, in part after the novelist Joseph Conrad, for whom Russell had a great admiration and affection, which Conrad reciprocated. A daughter, Kate, was born two years later. Since landlords refused to have him as a tenant, on moral and political grounds, Russell bought a house in Chelsea, where he stood unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate for Parliament in 1922 and again in 1923. For the sake of the children he also bought a house in Cornwall where he spent about half his time. Having given away nearly all his remaining capital, mainly to the University of Cambridge and to one of its women's colleges, he needed to make money and in the course of the decade he undertook four lecture tours to the United States. This was also a period of great literary activity on his part. The Analysis of Mind, in which he carries his empiricism to its farthest point, was published in 1921. In 1925 he was invited to give the Tarner Lectures at Trinity and they were published in 1927 under the title of The Analysis of Matter: they show him moving towards a position of physical realism. A rather more popular book which he called An Outline of Philosophy appeared in the same year. In the meantime he had published a book on China, a book on The Prospects of Industrial Civilization, on which his wife collaborated, two small books entitled The A.B.C. of Atoms and The A.B.C. of Relativity, a small book on The Future of Science and another called What I Believe, and in 1926 a book On Education: Especially in Early Childhood, which was financially successful. In 1928, he brought out a collection called Sceptical Essays, of which the first sentence characteristically runs: 'I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question Is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.' It was in this spirit that in the previous year he had written Why I am not a Christian. Sceptical Essays was followed in 1929 by Marriage and Morals, and in 1930 by The Conquest of Happiness. These books, which were thought shocking at the time and were, indeed, to do their author harm because of their advocacy of a certain measure of sexual freedom, have themselves contributed to the change of climate which makes them now seem dated. They do not have the depth of Russell's more academic work, but they are admirably written and the moral outlook which they represent is rational and humane. I read them when they were first published and can testify from my youthful experience to their enlightening effect.

Believing strongly in the importance of the first steps in education, and not being able to find a school for their children which measured up to their theories, the Russells decided to start one of their own. For this purpose, Russell rented his brother's house on the South Downs and recruited about twenty children to accompany his own. The school was conducted on progressive though not anarchic lines. In his Autobiography,[2] he admitted that it was not entirely successful, partly because it attracted too many problem children, and partly because he was not able to strike the right balance between freedom and authority. The school remained in existence until after the beginning of the Second World War, but Russell's own part in running it came to an end in 1932, when he left Dora. Their two children were made wards in Chancery.

By then he had become the third Earl Russell, his brother having died in 1931. He inherited less than no money with the title, since his brother had gone bankrupt, and Russell, besides having to pay alimony to Dora, had also acquired the obligation to pay £400 a year in alimony to the second of his brother's three wives. He had been receiving £1,000 a year for writing articles for the Hearst newspapers, but this came to an end when he declined an invitation to stay with Hearst at his castle in California. Being more than ever dependent on writing books for his living, he published The Scientific Outlook in 1932, Freedom and Organization 1814-1914 in 1934, In Praise of Idleness in 1935 and Which Way to Peace? in 1936, besides a short book on Religion and Science in 1935 and a lecture on Determinism and Physics in 1936. In Which Way to Peace? he still maintained a pacifist position, but became increasingly dissatisfied with it as the Second World War approached.

The best of these books, in my view, is Freedom and Organization 1814-1914, in which Russell most effectively displays his gift for writing political history. In doing the research for this book he was assisted by Patricia, more commonly known as Peter Spence, a young woman who had at one time taught at his school. In 1936 he married her and their son, Conrad, was born in the following year.

Having published a book on Power in 1938, Russell again turned to philosophy. He gave a course of lectures at the London School of Economics and another at Oxford, where he held discussions with the younger philosophers of whom I was one. He seemed to me then and later to have the great quality, which Moore and Einstein also had, of being able to talk to younger and less gifted people as though he could learn something from them.

In the autumn of 1938, Russell went with his family to America to take up an appointment as Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. This was followed by a similar appointment at the University of California and in 1940 he was invited by the Board of Higher Education of New York City to become a Professor at their City College. But no sooner had he accepted this offer, and resigned from his post in California, than an outcry was raised against his appointment. It was started by an Episcopalian Bishop and continued mainly by the Catholic hierarchy. The grounds of their objection to Russell were his agnosticism and his alleged advocacy and practice of sexual immorality. When the Board of Higher Education stood firm, a Mrs Kay of Brooklyn was induced to bring an action against the city to have Russell's appointment voided because of the harm which his teaching might do to her daughter. The fact that he had been invited to teach logic at a Liberal Arts College to which at that time women were not admissible was not considered relevant. Her lawyer, a Mr Goldstein, drew heavily upon his imagination describing Russell's works in his brief as 'lecherous libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral-fibre'.[21] On the strength of Russell's sensible remark, in his book On Education, that 'a child should, from the first, be allowed to see his parents and brothers and sisters without their clothes whenever it so happens naturally"[22] he accused him of conducting a nudist colony, and he added, without any evidence at all, that Russell went in for salacious poetry and approved of homosexuality. Russell was not able to answer these charges in court since he was not allowed to become a party to the suit. The case was tried before a Roman Catholic judge called McGeehan, who found for the plaintiff mainly on the ground that Russell's teaching would encourage his pupils to commit criminal offences. The Board of Higher Education was prevented from appealing on a legal technicality, and an appeal would anyhow have been of little use, as in the next city budget Mayor La Guardia prudently removed the appropriation for Russell's lectureship.

As a result of this affair, Russell was almost completely deprived of the means of earning a living in the United States. Although many academic persons had spoken up in his defence, they could not persuade their universities to employ him. The lecture tour which he had planned had to be cancelled, and no newspaper or magazine would print his articles. Happily the University of Harvard, which had already invited him to give the William James lectures, had the courage and decency to maintain their invitation. The lectures were published in the same year under the title of An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. Though it leaves some loose ends, this book contains many interesting ideas and I rank it high among Russell's philosophical works.

Having completed his semester at Harvard, Russell was rescued from his predicament by Dr Barnes, a Philadelphia millionaire who owned a magnificent collection of modern pictures, which he seldom allowed anyone to see, and maintained a private Foundation, mainly for the instruction of art historians. He invited Russell to lecture at the Foundation and gave him a five-year contract which he broke after less than two years on the ground that the lectures, which were a preview of the greater part of Russell's History of Western Philosophy, were insufficiently prepared. On this occasion, Russell was more fortunate in his judge; he brought an action for wrongful dismissal against Barnes and was awarded damages. In the meantime he had been invited by Trinity to return as a Fellow. It was some time before the British Embassy could be persuaded to arrange for his and his family's passage home, in spite of his argument that he wished to perform his duties in the House of Lords, but an invitation from Professor Paul Weiss at Bryn Mawr College broke the embargo on his lecturing and he obtained a substantial advance on the History of Western Philosophy, which turned out to be the most financially successful of all his books; so much so as to relieve him thenceforward of financial anxiety. At Bryn Mawr Russell completed the intellectual autobiography which he wrote for The Philosophy of Bertrand RusselI in the series of' The Library of Living Philosophers. This book, which was published in 1944, contains an interesting article on Russell's logic by Gödel and a moving appreciation of his work by Einstein, but the level of the contributions to it is more than usually uneven and Russell's reply to his critics is rather perfunctory.

Russell entered into his Fellowship at Trinity in October 1944 and gave lectures in Cambridge in that and the two ensuing academic years. His Fellowship was prolonged until 1949 and then changed to a Fellowship under another category which gave him tenure for life without any duties. The History of Western Philosophy was published in 1945 and was followed in 1948 by Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, the last of Russell's major philosophical works. Russell was chagrined by the comparative lack of attention which professional philosophers paid to his book, ― and attributed it to the contemporary vogue for a narrow form of linguistic philosophy of which he disapproved. For the most part, the ideas which the book contains had already been set out in An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, but it is of interest in that it contains Russell's first full-scale attempt to tackle the problem of induction.

After Trinity had welcomed him back, the British authorities also decided that Russell had become respectable, and indeed that his hostility to Communism could be turned to their advantage. In 1948 he was sent to lecture in Berlin, where to his great amusement he was temporarily made a member of the armed forces, and in November of the same year he went on a similar mission to Norway. On this occasion he was saved from death by his strong addiction to smoking, admittedly a pipe and not cigarettes, since the aeroplane which was taking him from Oslo to Trondheim crashed in Trondheim harbour and all the passengers in its non-smoking compartment were killed. Russell had to swim a short distance before he was picked up by a boat but was none the worse for the adventure, even though the water was icy cold. Though he looked very frail, he had a very strong constitution and except for an attack of pneumonia in 1953, which nearly killed him, and another severe illness ten years later, he enjoyed remarkably good health till the end of his life. In his later years he was afflicted with deafness and he also had difficulty in swallowing, which meant that he had to live upon soft foods but he continued to enjoy smoking and drinking, especially whisky and champagne. I last saw him on his ninety-fifth birthday and found him physically active and intelligently alert. The rumour which was put about by his political adversaries that he became senile is quite without foundation.

Continuing in official favour, Russell was awarded the Order of Merit, eliciting from King George VI the comment that he was 'a queer-looking man', and in the same year, 1949, was made an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy and invited by the BBC to give the first series of Reith Lectures, which he published under the title of Authority and the Individual. In 1950 he toured Australia and the United States, and then went to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. The speech which he made on this occasion is included in his book Human Society in Ethics and Politics, which came out in 1954. Among the other books which he published in the 1950s were the charming Portraits from Memory, consisting mainly of character sketches of some of the famous people that he had known, and My Philosophical Development, a combination of intellectual autobiography, replies to his critics, and statements of his current views. He also brought out two volumes of short stories, entitled Satan in the Suburbs and Nightmares of Eminent Persons. They are mainly fables, very much in the manner of Voltaire.

Russell's marriage to Patricia Spence broke up in 1949, and in 1952 he married Edith Finch, an American lady whom he had known for many years, This marriage was very happy and brought Russell a peace of mind which he had not previously known. At first they shared a house in Richmond with Russell's eldest son and his family, but in 1955 they rented a house at Penrhyndeudraeth in North Wales, where, with occasional excursions, mainly on political business, Russell lived for the remainder of his life.

From that time onwards, Russell was increasingly absorbed in politics. He was chiefly moved to action by his belief in the probability of a third world war, in which he feared that the use of atomic weapons would bring about the destruction of the greater part of the human race. There had been a period in the late 1940s when he had argued that the United States should coerce Russia by threatening to use the atom bomb, but by the middle fifties he had come to the conclusion that the only hope for peace lay in the renunciation of atomic weapons, as a prelude to general disarmament, and he thought it the British Government's duty to set the example. He held this opinion so strongly that he hardly admitted the possibility of honest disagreement, and he too readily accused his political adversaries of simple wickedness. His views are set out in his book Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, which was published in 1959 and its sequel Has Man a Future?, which was published in 1961. His own long-term political solution was the establishment of a world government, for which he campaigned actively in the 1950s. In 1955 he induced a number of leading scientists, including Einstein and Joliot-Curie, to sign a manifesto in favour of cooperation for peace and inaugurated a series of annual conferences to this end. In 1958 he became President of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, resigning two years later to head the Committee of 100 in its campaign of civil disobedience. In February 1961 he presided at the mass sit-down which it organized in Whitehall, and after another mass meeting in August, he and his wife were arrested and charged with incitement to civil disobedience. They were sentenced to two months' imprisonment but on the production of medical evidence that this would be dangerous to their health, the sentence was commuted to a week's detention in the prison hospital.

Thereafter Russell's activities broadened out. He corresponded with heads of states and intervened both in the Cuban crisis of 1962 and in the Sino-Indian border dispute. He took up the cause of the Jews in Russia, the Arabs in Israel and political prisoners in East Germany and Greece. Rejecting the official account of President Kennedy's assassination, he became President of the British Who Killed Kennedy? Committee. In 1964 he established the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and, to raise funds for it, later sold his archives to McMasters University in Ontario. By now he had come to think that the actions of the United States Government represented the greatest danger to world peace and the last book which he published, apart from his autobiography, was entitled War Crimes in Vietnam. This came out in 1967, shortly after he had set up an International War Crimes Tribunal, of which Jean-Paul Sartre was the most prominent member, which arraigned President Johnson. The proceedings of this tribunal were ill-received at the time but the evidence which has since come to light has very largely vindicated them.

In his book on Human Society in Ethics and Politics Russell said that in the ethical sphere he agreed with Hume's dictum that 'Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions'. At times he may have followed this principle too literally, but whatever view one takes of his political position, one's admiration must be commanded by the moral fervour, the persistent concern for humanity, the amazing intellectual and physical energy which drove him on. He died on February 2nd, 1970, in his ninety-eighth year.

[1]The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 1, p. 56.

[2] 'My Mental Development', The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, ed. P. A. Schillp (1944), p. 11.

[3] Ibid.

[4] The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 1, p. 144.

[5] The Principles of Mathematics, p. v.

[6] See below, pp. 47-51.

[7] The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 1, p. 152.

[8] Ibid., p. 146.

[9] See, for example, his essay on 'The Study of Mathematics' written in 1902 and reprinted in Philosophical Essays (1910) and Mysticism and Logic (1917).

[10] See Sceptical Essays, p. 150.

[11] See below, pp. 52-62.

[12] Set below, pp. 36-40.

[13] See below, pp. 105-11.

[14] The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Vol. II, p. 7.

[15] Quoted in Russell's Portraits From Memory, p. 109.

[16] The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Vol. II, p. 26.

[17] The foregoing account is based on G. H. Hardy's Bertrand Russell and Trinity. Professor Hardy was himself one of Russell's most active supporters in Trinity.

[18] The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Vol. II, p. 80.

[19] Ibid., Vol. II, p. 122.

[20] Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 54-5.

[21] Ibid., Vol. II, p. 219. For a full account of the affair, see also the appendix by Paul Edwards to the 1950 edition of Russell's Why I am not a Christian.

[22] On Education: Especially in Early Childhood, p. 170