The Earl Goes Home

One of the most distinguished rebels of his generation finally had a job last week that suited him. It was high time. Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 71, by primogeniture third Earl Russell and Viscount Amberley, in his own right a world-famed mathematician and philosopher, accepted a Cambridge fellowship. It was offered him by his famed alma mater, Trinity College, which in 1916 dismissed him for a pacifism he no longer holds to.

Bertrand Russell, who looks like a twinkling Mad Hatter and talks like a twinkling Alice, has found the U.S. a through-the-looking-glass wonderland. Some reasons:

> A successful lecturer at the University of California, he resigned when invited to lecture on higher mathematics and logic at Manhattan's City College in 1940. Presently he saw his invitation nullified: Episcopal Bishop William Thomas Manning charged that Russell, unorthodox on sex questions (Marriage and Morals), was morally unfit to teach; Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia pulled Russell's professorial chair out from under him by unbudgeting his salary.

> Hired by Albert (Argyrol) Barnes to lecture at his art foundation in Merion, Pa., Russell was ousted when terrible-tempered Mr. Barnes tired of him (TIME, Feb. 1, 1943).

> Awarded $20,000 breach-of-contract damages from Barnes, Russell has been unable to collect because Barnes retained the right of appeal.

As a result, Russell has done little for several years but write and lecture at Manhattan's little laborite Rand School. (At present he is lecturing there, once a week, on "Philosophies in Practice.") Concluding that he could say nothing absolute about the nature of truth, but that he might be interesting on the subject of what men have thought it to be, he has just finished a history of philosophy for Simon & Schuster. A believer in scientific method as the most promising approach to truth, he is now writing a book (he thinks it is about his 30th) to prove his never-ending case. He is living in Princeton, N.J., in the cozy, old-fashioned Peacock Inn, with his good-looking young Countess (his third wife) and their six-year-old son, Conrad. He has given a few lectures at Princeton.

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