A Conversation with Bertrand Russell (1952)

Romney Wheeler interviews British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic Bertrand Russell (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) at Russell's home in Surrey, England.

Russel speaks about his work and thought, his life, including revelations about his grandfather, who was John Russell, 1st Earl Russell. He had been British Prime Minister 1846–1852, and 1865–1866 during the early Victorian era. Russell had a 90-minute meeting with Napoleon in December 1814 during the former emperor's exile at Elba. Bertrand was raised by his grandparents Bertrand was 4 years old when his parents died, his mother of diphtheria and his father of bronchitis in 1876. In his will, Bertrand's father John Russell, Viscount Amberley named Douglas Spalding and T. J. Cobden-Sanderson as Frank and Bertrand's guardians, not wishing his children to be raised as Christians, but Lord and Lady Russell successfully contested the stipulation and assumed full guardianship. The deeply pious Lady Russell, notwithstanding her undoubted disapproval of its content, made sure that her son's book "An Analysis of Religious Belief" was published a month after his death. Both Amberley's sons eventually succeeded to the earldom.

John Stuart Mill was Russell's secular godfather. But Mill died when Bertrand was 2 years old. His grandfather died in 1878, and was remembered by Russell as a kindly old man in a wheelchair. His grandmother, the Countess Russell (née Lady Frances Elliot), was the dominant family figure for the rest of Russell's childhood and youth.

Russell's adolescence was very lonely, and he often contemplated suicide. He remarked in his autobiography that his keenest interests were in "nature and books and (later) mathematics saved me from complete despondency;" only his wish to know more mathematics kept him from suicide. He was educated at home by a series of tutors. When Russell was eleven years old, his brother Frank introduced him to the work of Euclid, which he described in his autobiography as "one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love."

During these formative years he also discovered the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Russell wrote: "I spent all my spare time reading him, and learning him by heart, knowing no one to whom I could speak of what I thought or felt, I used to reflect how wonderful it would have been to know Shelley, and to wonder whether I should meet any live human being with whom I should feel so much sympathy." Russell claimed that beginning at age 15, he spent considerable time thinking about the validity of Christian religious dogma, which he found very unconvincing. At this age, he came to the conclusion that there is no free will and, two years later, that there is no life after death. Finally, at the age of 18, after reading Mill's Autobiography, he abandoned the "First Cause" argument and became an atheist.