Introduction

‘Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.’ These, the opening words of the autobiography of the philosopher, mathematician and pacifist Bertrand Russell, with their strange mixture of desperate poignancy, lucid self-knowledge and rationally analysed compassion, give a startlingly direct synthesis of his own living philosophy. The unexpected admixture can perhaps be attributed to his privileged yet vulnerable and sad childhood: his mother and sister died shortly after his birth and his father, Lord Amberley, less than two years later. Bertrand and his brother, Frank (who would be the second husband of KM’s cousin Elizabeth, whom she later ruthlessly portrayed in the figure of Wemyss in her novel Vera, published 1921), were taken in hand by one of their guardians. Their grandparents, however, were horrified by what they considered to be a godless settlement and fought successfully for custody of the children. The grandfather, Earl Russell, then died when Russell was six, and he was brought up from then on by his grandmother, a devout, principled woman from whom he inherited his passionate love of literature.

Russell, then died when Russell was six, and he was brought up from then on by his grandmother, a devout, principled woman from whom he inherited his passionate love of literature. Russell went up to Cambridge to study Mathematics at Trinity College, where he was soon elected to the Apostles, a society that quickly became his family, offering him the sort of intellectual and emotional intimacy and affection that he had been longing for. He later switched to Philosophy, where he worked with G. E. Moore; together they would later be acknowledged as the greatest contributors to and influences on British philosophy of the first half of the twentieth century. He married his first wife, Alys, the sister of Logan Pearsall Smith in 1894, and began advancing in his career, notably establishing key links with French and Central European philosophers while working on his own philosophical method that owed its rational, logical roots to mathematics as much as classical philosophy. This would eventually lead to his huge work, often referred to as a ramified theory of facts, Principia Mathematica (1910), the title echoing Moore’s 1903 Principia Ethica.