Bertrand Russell was born in Monmouthshire, England. His parents, Lord and Lady Amberley, both died while Russell was still a child, leaving him in charge of his grandfather, Lord John Russell. At eighteen Russell entered Cambridge University to study mathematics and philosophy. Under the tutelage of Frances Herbert Bradley (1846-1942) he became a Hegelian idealist. Bradley, one of twenty-two children fathered by an Evangelical preacher, developed a new brand of absolute idealism from opposition both to the past British empiricists (Locke, Berkeley and Hume) and the then-current empiricism of J.S. Mill. Like most post-Kantian idealist metaphysicians, Bradley conceived the totality of what really exists in terms of "the Absolute," an essentially whole world-mind similar to Hegel's and Schelling's conceptions except Bradley's more atheistic system does not involve any type of God.

bio by Daniel Kolak in Lovers of Wisdom
(Wadsworth, 1997)