His admirable and lucid English style may be attributed to the fact that he did not undergo a classical education at a public school; his religious views and his moral character may be due to the wise exercise of the paternal jurisdiction of the court of chan cery; but his wit, his love of truth, and his capacity for hard work seem to be innate. (C. P. SA.) Philosophy.—What is fundamental in Russell's philosophy is his logic; his views on metaphysics and ethics, on the nature and relations of matter and mind have changed profoundly in the course of his life, but these changes have all proceeded from suc cessively deeper applications of his logical method. He, therefore, prefers to classify his philosophy not as a species of Idealism or Realism but as "Logical Atomism," since what distinguishes the whole of his work is his use of logical analysis as a method and his belief that by that method we can arrive at ultimate "atomic facts" logically independent both of one another and of being known.
His first great achievement was to free logical analysis from the domination of ordinary grammar, and to realize that the grammatical form of a sentence often fails to reflect the logical form of its meaning. In his Principles of Mathematics (1903) he insisted that relations could not be reduced to qualities of their terms, and that relational facts were not of the subject predicate form, but he still thought that any descriptive phrase which could be made the subject of a sentence must stand for a term which had being, even if like "the round square" it were self-contradictory. But in his article "On Denoting" (Mind, 1905), and in subsequent writings, he put forward his "Theory of Descriptions" which is perhaps the most important as well as the least controvertible of his discoveries. According to this theory "the present king of France" is not a name for a non existent entity but an "incomplete symbol" which only has mean ing in connection with a context. The meaning of such a state ment as that "the present king of France is bald" is firstly that there is someone who is at present both king of France and bald, and secondly that there are not at present two kings of France; and when such statements are analysed in this way the need to believe in entities such as "the present king of France" (which are said by some philosophers to have "being" but not "existence") is altogether removed. Similarly when it is said that "unicorns are not real," this does not have the same kind of meaning as the grammatically similar statement that "lions are not ver satile." For this last statement means that certain animals, namely lions, lack a certain characteristic, namely versatility; but "uni corns are not real" does not mean that certain animals, namely unicorns, lack the characteristic of reality. For there are no such animals and no such characteristic ;—what is meant is simply that there are no animals which have one horn but otherwise resemble horses. The destructive effect of this logical analysis on many philosophical theories of existence and reality is evidently of the first importance.
Russell has applied similar methods to propositions, classes and numbers and argues that each of these categories consists of what he calls "logical constructions," and not of genuine entities. In saying, e.g., that classes are logical constructions, he does not mean that they are entities constructed by the human mind, but that when we express facts by sentences which have for subject such a phrase as "the class of men," the true analysis of the fact does not correspond to the grammatical analysis of the sentence.
When, for instance, we say "the class of men includes the class of criminals," the fact we assert is really about the characteristics of being a man and being a criminal and not about any such entities as classes at all. This notion of a logical construction was much employed by Russell in his work in mathematical logic, and he has also used it extensively in the philosophy of matter and mind, and has even adopted as a fundamental principle that constructions (in his special sense of the word) are to be sub stituted for inferred entities wherever possible.
By applying this method he has been led to a view of the world on which the ultimate constituents of mind and matter are of the same type, the difference between minds and bodies lying in their structure and not in the elements of which they are com posed. A man's mind is composed of sensations and images, which are identified by Russell with physical events in his brain, the difference between physics and psychology lying not in the events they study but in the kind of laws about those events which they seek to establish, physics being concerned with struc ture and psychology with quality. This theory has been worked out in connection with modern physics in The Analysis of Matter (1927).
In the theory of knowledge Russell's earlier rationalism has been considerably modified in a pragmatist or behaviourist direc tion, and in the Analysis of Mind (1921) he rejects consciousness as a fundamental characteristic of mind and adopts a form of "neutral monism" about perception, which he combines with representationism as regards memory and judgment. An exposi tion of his philosophical attitude is to be found in An Outline of Philosophy (1927).
(Cf. article on MATHEMATICS, FOUNDATIONS OF.) (F. P. R.)