Bertrand’s paternal grandfather, John Russell was the first Earl Russell (A British nobleman ranking above a Viscount and below a Marquess). He had been the British Prime Minister in the 1840s and 60s and was the second son of the 6^th Duke (a member of the nobility, historically of highest rank below the Monarch) of Bedford. The Russells were counted as one of the leading Whig (Liberal) families in Britain. They witnessed almost every great political event, from the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536-40, to the Glorious Revolution in 1688–89, to the Great Reform Act in 1832.

Kate Kinsley, Bertrand’s mother was also from an aristocratic family. She was the sister of the Countess (a title in European countries for a noble of varying status, but historically deemed to convey an approximate rank intermediate between the highest and lowest titles of nobility) of Carlisle, Rosalind Howard.

Born on the 18^th of May, 1872 at the height of Britain’s social and economic ascendency at Ravenscroft, Trellech, Wales, to Viscount Amberley and Katharine Louisa (Kate’s name after her marriage), Bertrand was the youngest of the three siblings, with Frank his brother, nearly eight years elder to him and his sister Rachel, four years elder to him.

Bertrand’s parents were pretty radical according to those times. Three reasons account to this statement. Firstly, both advocated birth control at a time when it was considered a taboo. Secondly, Amberley chose to be an atheist, a belief that was rare during those times. Thirdly, and not the least, Amberley did not raise his voice in spite of learning about his wife’s affair with their children’s tutor, the Biologist - Douglas Spalding.

However, Bertrand at the age of three was in for a lonely childhood as in a span of two years he lost his mother to diphtheria in June 1874 and soon after, he lost his sister Rachel. This was followed by the death of his father who at his wife and daughter’s death remarked, “two greatest treasures in this world are gone almost at one blow.” Amberley died in 1876 on account of bronchitis, after a long bout of depression due to an unwillingness to live.

Thereafter, since there was no one to take care of him and his brother Frank, both were put in the hands of their staunch grandparents at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park near London. Bertrand remarks, “My first vivid recollection is my arrival at Pembroke Lodge in February 1876. To be accurate, I do not remember the actual arrival at the house, though I remember the big glass roof of the London terminus, presumably Paddington, at which I arrived on my way and which I thought inconceivably beautiful. What I remember of my first day at Pembroke Lodge is tea in the servant's hall. It was a large, bare room with a long massive table with chairs and a high stool.”

However, within a period of two years their grandfather expired and thereafter, their grandmother played a crucial role in the lives of both the siblings.

Meanwhile, Bertrand was left in a lurch with loneliness and anxiety and starved emotionally. The ambience at Pembroke Lodge was one with strict Victorian views, regular prayers and formality. But as Pembroke Lodge offered a scintillating view of River Thames and the Surrey Hills, it proved to be an adventurous zone for him.

Amberley, Bertrand’s father, had provisioned in his will that the children be raised as atheists. While an atheist is someone who completely rules out the existence of the supreme, an agnostic is one who believes that it is impossible to know whether there is a God. Belonging to a strict Scottish family, Lady Russell petitioned the British court regarding the will and proposed that the children be raised as agnostics. Not only this, in spite of being religiously conservative, Lady Russell accepted Darwinism and also propagated Irish home rule. Irish home rule was a setting in which Irish leaders demanded a form of self rule within the British Parliament.

While Frank reacted to such a mundane and melancholic environment by being a rebel, the reticent Bertrand chose to hide his feelings behind a calm exterior. In unpublished memoirs he writes, “From adolescence onwards, I was driven by a desperate misery of loneliness for which I knew that love would be the only cure.”

Bertrand remarked that his grandmother, “ate only the plainest food, breakfasted at eight, and until she reached the age of 80 never sat in a comfortable chair until after tea.”

As Bertrand grew, the Spartan regime at Pembroke prepared him for the rigours of the outer world. A daily routine of a cold bath and half an hour of piano practice before the family prayers at eight followed.

Bertrand was thrown from the easy-going life of Ravenscroft into the more mellow and disciplined environment at Pembroke. The emotional vacuum was soon to make him a tough man, both physically and intellectually.

Frank had been sent to school at Winchester and had attracted enough trouble. Hence, Lady Russell (Bertrand’s grandmother) was crystal clear about not sending Bertrand to a public school

and therefore, wanted him to be home schooled.  This meant that Bertrand would lack the sturdiness and competitiveness that a public school might have provided.

As George Santayana, a fellow American philosopher and a family friend of the Russells put it:

 “Bertie at least must be preserved pure, religious and affectionate; he must be fitted to take his   grandfather’s place as Prime Minister and continue the sacred work of reform.”

Bertrand was hence put into the hands of local tutors.

Love came to Bertrand at an early age of 17. Lord Amberley’s brother, Uncle Rollo lived on the slopes of Hind head, forty miles east of London. The Pearsall Smiths, a family of rich Philadelphia Quakers lived nearby. Uncle Rollo was out for an afternoon stroll when he decided to introduce his nephew to Alys, the youngest daughter of the Pearsall Smiths and the prospective Mrs. Bertrand Russell.

Bertrand considered Alys to be sophisticated and puritanical. He was enchanted by the fact that she had connections with various educationalists and religious activists. Meanwhile, Lady Russell did not take kindly to his grandson’s liaison with Alys. The news was received with utmost horror, since she was five years elder to him and was the daughter of a rich American manufacturer. Whereas, though not conventionally good-looking, Bertrand had a charm of his own that saw women falling for him. 5’9, slightly built, hazel eyed, he usually viewed things in a sceptical manner. His vigour and confidence were definite turn-ons with women.

Capitalizing on her health, Lady Russell chose to put off the hullabaloo that would be caused by Bertrand’s proposal to Alys, which is why she asked him to not see his beloved for three months by sending him to Paris. The British Ambassador in Paris was persuaded to appoint Bertrand as his ad-hoc attaché in the city. Lady Russell felt that Bertrand’s attraction to Alys would be subdued after seeing the high life of Paris.

Keeping his promise to not see Alys for three months, Bertrand spent his time in Paris. Even when he returned to Cambridge for the apostles, he simply chose to send Alys a letter. Later, Bertrand travelled back to Paris with Alys’s sister, Mary Costelloe, who was to marry the famous American art historian, Bernard Berenson.

However, in December 1894, Bertrand came back from Paris and married Alys, thereby cutting himself off from an environment that he was not so affectionate about. Later, when Pembroke Lodge was taken over by the civil service, Bertrand wrote, “Almost every night before falling asleep I see the garden in which I passed my childhood, which has since been destroyed; I mind its destruction quite as much as the deaths of people I have loved.”

Bertrand lectured on the foundations of Geometry at John Hopkins University in Baltimore. Soon, they returned to England and settled in Millhanger, their new home on the outskirts of Fernhurst. Here, Bertrand started working on the new structure of Mathematics which in turn would facilitate the simplest laws of logic. Such a system would enable a single mixture of logic and Mathematics.

It was precisely during this period that Bertrand started contemplating his idealist beliefs. The idealists believed that everything rested in the mind of the beholder, whereas Bertrand wanted to prove that Mathematics was objective and independent of the mathematicians. Meanwhile, his intellectual stigma was mixing up with emotional imbalance. In 1901, when he and Alys returned to Cambridge, they initially stayed with the Whiteheads. Bertrand could not see Mrs. Whitehead in pain (after a heart attack), and it was then that he realized this sudden ‘conversion’ towards her.

It was when Bertrand was lecturing at Trinity that he felt he was out of love with Alys. One fine day, when he went for a bicycle ride in the afternoon at Mill House, Grantchester, the Whitehead’s new home, he admitted “I had no idea until this moment that my love for her was even lessening.” The problem presented by this discovery was very grave and he was now unable to hide the fact that he had fallen out of love with Alys; he could not see her the same way as when they were in love. Both endured a life of mutual agony and pain for nine years, after which they parted ways. However, the instance drove Bertrand to further focus his concentration on Mathematics.

This gave way to the book ‘The Principle of Mathematics’ in 1903 wherein he argued his thesis that Mathematics and logic are identical.  Later came ‘Principia Mathematicia’ , a book on the foundations of Mathematics which was published with Whitehead in three volumes between 1910 and 1913. “I created with all an artist’s passion for the perfect, a new treatment of Symbolic Logic,” Bertrand said of The Principles of Mathematics, and “to my joy Whitehead finds that it has all the beauty and perfection that I hoped.”

While Bertrand was working further on The Principles of Mathematics which could have proved that all Mathematics followed from logical principles of his first volume, Whitehead too was simultaneously working on his own book ‘Universal Algebra’, an effort to discover common principles of algebras in logic and Mathematics.

Later, Whitehead remarked, “We discovered that our projected volumes were practically on identical topics, ‘so we coalesced to produce a joint work. We hoped that a short period of one year or so would complete the job. Then our horizon extended and in the course of eight or nine years, Principia Mathematica was produced.”

Principia Mathematicia is considered to be a monumental work in the history of logic. Meanwhile, Bertrand’s ‘paradox’ was avoided in Principia Mathematicia, which he discovered while working on The Principles of Mathematics.

According to naive set theory, any definable collection is a set. Let R be the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. If R qualifies as a member of itself, it would contradict its own definition as a set containing all sets that are not members of themselves. On the other hand, if such a set is not a member of itself, it would qualify as a member of itself by the same definition.

The barber‘s story is a popular example of Bertrand’s paradox:

Suppose there is a town with just one barber, who is male. In this town, every man keeps himself clean-shaven, and he does so by doing exactly one of two things:

1.   Shaving himself, or

2.   Going to the barber.

Another way to state this is:

The barber is a man in town who shaves those and only those men in town who do not shave themselves.

All this seems perfectly logical, until we pose the paradoxical question:

Who shaves the barber?

This question results in a paradox because, according to the statement above, he can either be shaven by:

1.    Himself, or

2.    The barber (which happens to be himself).

However, none of these possibilities is valid. This is because:

·         If the barber does shave himself, then the barber (himself) must not shave himself.

·         If the barber does not shave himself, then he (the barber) must shave himself.

This contradiction is Russell’s paradox.

Even though Mathematics consumed much of his time, Bertrand had an interest in politics. He was a founder-member of Sidney Webb’s (a British socialist, economist, reformer and a co-founder of the London School of Economics) ‘Co-efficients’ (A number or symbol multiplied with a variable or an unknown quantity in an algebraic term). Bertrand spoke on ‘Free Trade’ and also served on the committee of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Finally, it was in 1907 that he stood for a seat in the Parliament. In the same year, the Wimbledon seat in south-west London got vacant on account of the resignation of the then conservative MP. The Liberals did not contest a seat but just before a day of the elections, they decided to choose Bertrand Russell for their candidature.

Bertrand advocated women’s suffrage and he later admitted that the subject was treated with ‘mere hilarity’; hence, he faced quite a lot of flak for it. The election was one of utter chaos, with rats being let loose during his first public meeting against his opponent;Chaplin mustered up 10,263 votes whereas Bertrand received only 3299.

The hullabaloo introduced him to the more public, chaotic life. Moreover, the Principia too had come to an end and Bertrand was on the lookout for what to do next. He even mentioned that within the next two years of such an unsatisfactory life, the only thing that kept him from committing suicide was his love for Mathematics.

In 1909, Bertrand met Philip Morrel, the MP for South Oxfordshire, and his wife Lady Ottoline. Bertrand wrote of her, “Ottoline was very tall, with a long thin face, something like a horse, and very beautiful hair of an unusual colour, more or less like that of marmalade, but rather darker.” Even Ottoline wrote in her diary: “I don’t think I have ever met anyone more attractive, but very alarming, so quick and clear sited, and supremely intellectual-cutting false and real asunder. Somebody called him ‘The Day of Judgment’.”

As a matter of fact, there was something brewing between them. His affair with Lady Ottoline affected his public and private life. Due to her, Bertrand was brought in contact with the artistic and literary groups of his times and even the political circles.

The liaison also led him to writing letters, some love letters and others on various topics like his life at Cambridge and his accounts of meetings with great men like Joseph Conrad (a Polish author), D.H.Lawrence (an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter), T.S. Eliot (a poet, playwright, literary and social critic) and the one who was to become the most important person to him, Ludwig Wittgenstein (an Austrian-British philosopher).

A few weeks later, Lady Ottoline was to become his mistress. Despite Bertrand’s appeals, she never thought it conducive to break her marriage or move away from the social position she enjoyed. Ottoline’s influence awakened him in an aesthetic sense too. Bertrand later admitted, “In my heart the whole business about Art is external to me-I believe it with my intellect, but in feeling I am a good British Philistine.” Now he could write about enjoying Bach’s music, appreciating the landscape in Italy and applauding the stature of Victory in Brescia. Under her influence he even embarked on a novella, ‘The Perplexities of John Forstice’.

Meanwhile, it was in 1911 that he met Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian engineering graduate, who worked as a research student in Aeronautics in Manchester University. While being stuck here on designing a jet reaction propeller, Ludwig had turned to Philosophy and Mathematics. Ludwig arrived at Trinity in the same year to study under Bertrand. From the very beginning, Bertrand was fascinated by Ludwig and remarked of him, “perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense and dominating.”

He was viewed by Bertrand as a successor to his findings on Mathematics. Even after Ludwig’s phobias and spasms of despair, Bertrand continued encouraging him, thereby leading him to write ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’, which was to be published eleven years later.

However, Bertrand devoted himself to an important task. Principia Mathematicia was not just famous in England, but also in the USA, with supporters of New Realism (early 20th-century movement in Metaphysics and Epistemology that opposed the idealism dominant in British and U.S. Universities) widely reading it. On account of that, Bertrand was invited to give lectures at Cambridge and to give a course at Harvard.

Eventually, he agreed to do the same in March 1914.

Meanwhile, the First World War was taking shape and before the end of 1914, Bertrand had joined the Union of Democratic Control, an organisation that was to survive the First and Second World War. The war overthrew Bertrand’s rationality-oriented world. He indulged in pacific activities during the First World War, which saw him being overthrown by Trinity College in 1916. He was convicted under the ‘Defence of the Realm Act’.

Moreover, in order to investigate the effects of the Russian Revolution, Bertrand was sent to Russia by the British government as a member of an official delegation. In the same year, Bertrand met Dora Black, a British author and socialist campaigner who was visiting Russia independently, as she was keen to know about the revolution. The two got into a relationship three years later, when Bertrand asked her to join him on his summer holidays. During the First World War, Dora supported Bertrand in his campaign against military conscription. However, Bertrand was imprisoned at Brixton prison for six months for lecturing in public, against United States’ invitation to enter the war on Britain’s side.

“Prisoner 2917” as Bertrand was called, made the best of his prison days. “I had no engagements, no difficult decisions to make, no fear of callers, no interruptions to my work”, he later wrote. While in prison, he also wrote, the ‘Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy’, a book that gave a comparatively simpler account of The Principles of Mathematics and Principia Mathematicia. Bertrand was later released in September 1918.

Bertrand also wrote a book titled ‘The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism’ in 1920, based on his Russian sojourn. He also started lecturing in Beijing on philosophy, which lasted for a year. It was here that he became seriously ill with pneumonia, so much so that the press went berserk with reports of his death. While visiting Japan on their return journey, Dora remarked to the journalists, “Mr Bertrand Russell, having died according to the Japanese press, is unable to give interviews to Japanese journalists.”

By the end of April, Bertrand was on his way to recovery. Some weeks later, he learnt about Dora’s pregnancy, which is why he came back to England in 1921. Alys had been granted a decree, which usually took six months to be made absolute. However, Alys speeded up the application process for divorce, knowing Dora was already pregnant and being unmarried in such a case would mean defamation of the potential Fourth Earl. Bertrand married Dora on 27^th September, 1921, and also told Ottoline that he wanted to lead “a common life” with Dora. Dora and Bertrand had two children and they named them John Russell and Katharine Jane Russell.

Bertrand wrote books on philosophy, ethics and the common man. Bertrand held an interest in education as he was of the opinion that if the young were subject to a proper education, many of the world’s problems would find a solution. He realized that practical and theoretical learning were poles apart and that school was more of a burden. He established the experimental Beacon Hill School in 1927 but left it in 1932, after the breakdown of his marriage with Dora because of her having two kids with an American journalist, Griffin Barry. However, Dora continued with the Beacon Hill School for eleven more years.

Meanwhile, after having ended his second marriage, Bertrand was soon to find love again. On 18^th January, 1936, he married his third wife, Patricia Spence or Peter, an Oxford undergraduate. She had been his children’s governess since the 1930s. They had one son, Conrad Sebastian Robert Russell, who was to become a prominent historian in years to come.

In 1936, Bertrand published, ‘Which Way to Peace?’ a book in which he made it clear that the horror of bombings would be much greater than those of surrendering to the Germans. But once the war began, his stance began to change. Having been initially against the Nazis, Bertrand later changed his thoughts, thereby advocating that World War was more important than focusing on defeating Hitler.

Bertrand became a professor at the City College in New York in 1940. However, an anti-cry against him saw his appointment being adjourned. The reason being, he was thought to be ‘morally unfit’ to teach. The movement was started by the mother of a student, who did not get admission in abstract, mathematical logic.

Bertrand later became a part of the Barnes foundation and lectured on philosophy. Returning back to Britain in 1944, he rejoined as a lecturer of Trinity College.