ABSTRACT
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
What I Believe
Bertrand Russell was born into aristocracy in Ravenscroft, Wales during the Victorian age in England on 18 May 1872. His family was famous, a cadet branch of the Dukes of Bedford. His father, Viscount Amberly, was an avowed atheist whose political career in Parliament was destroyed by views then still shocking to public sentiment, such as support of women’s suffrage and birth control. His mother’s intellectual freedom from the subjugations of the age was a product of her friendship with John Stuart Mill, who was appointed as little Bertie’s honorific godfather. Tragically, his mother and sister died of diphtheria when he was two and his father died some eighteen months later. Amberly’s will left instructions for his sons to be raised by agnostics, one of whom was scientist D. A. Spalding, who was originally employed as a tutor to Bertie’s older brother Frank. But the grandparents won the ensuing court battle. Frank found life in the house of his grandfather John Russell unhappy and his rebellions eventuated in his being sent away to boarding school. His grandfather died shortly thereafter, and Bertie was left at the mercy of his puritanical Scottish Presbyterian grandmother, practicing the virtues of Victorian middle-class morality.
