42C 



NA TURE 



\_August 31, 1882 



WILLIAM STANLEY JEVONS 

 WILLIAM STANLEY JEVONS, whose tragical 

 death was recorded in our issue of the 17th inst., 

 (p. 377), was born at Liverpool in 1835. As in the case 

 of most men of intellectual work, the facts of his life are 

 few and simple. He was educated partly in Liverpool, 

 partly at University College, London, where he particu- 

 larly distinguished himself in the classes of mathematics 

 and natural science. For University College Jevons ever 

 retained feelings of the warmest loyalty. He was proud 

 of his connection with it and with the London University, 

 and doubtless these feelings weighed with him when in 

 1876 he resigned his chair at the Owens College and 

 accepted that of Political Economy at University College. 

 Before completing his career as a student, Jevons accepted 

 an appointment in the Sydney Mint and spent five years 

 (1854-59) m practical work abroad. At the close of that 

 time his disinterested determination to devote his life and 

 energies to intellectual work of the highest kind prompted 

 him to return to England and to resume his interrupted 

 studies. He graduated at London in 1862 with the 

 highest distinction in logic and political economy, and a 

 year later began his active career as a teacher in the 

 capacity of general teacher at the Owens College, a post 

 he occupied for three years. Even at this early period cf 

 bis life, however, he had already produced not only an 

 earnest of his great powers but the germs of all the best 

 work he afterwards accomplished. A pamphlet on the 

 Fall in the Value of Gold, and an important work on the 

 probability and consequences of the exhaustion of coal 

 sufficiently attested his mastery over concrete problems of 

 economics. But of even greater significance was the 

 short paper presented in 1862 to the British Association 

 on quantitative reasoning in economical theory and the 

 little noticed volume on Pure Logic (1864). The one 

 contains the fundamental notions of the author's later 

 work in theoretical political economy, the other the first 

 principles and outlines of the development of his well- 

 known symbolical logic. In 1 866 Jevons was appointed 

 to the combined chair of Philosophy and Political 

 Economy at the Owens College, and for ten years he 

 discharged with the greatest ability and success the 

 onerous duties of the office. During this time his practical 

 activity was incessant and his intellectual labour con- 

 tinuous. In political economy his occasional contribu- 

 tions in the shape of papers in the Statistical Society s 

 Journal, addresses or reviews, his important treatise, the 

 Theory of Political Economy (1871), and his excellent 

 manual on logic, his tract Money ; or, The Substitution of 

 Similars, his Elementary Lessons on Logic, and his great 

 work, the Principles of Science (1874), raised his reputa- 

 tion to the highest point, and it may be confidently said 

 that no man ever obtained or deserved so thoroughly to 

 obtain more widespread recognition as a master in these 

 departments of knowledge. In 1876 the feeling that his 

 time might with greater advantage to himself and the 

 public be devoted to continuing his original researches, 

 prompted his resignation of the laborious chair at Owens 

 College. In that year he migrated to London and to 

 University College, and for five years he continued to hold 

 the chair of Political Economy in that institution. The 

 same desire for more time induced him in 18S1 to resign 

 the comparatively light duties of his London chair, and 

 he was doubtless enjoying the feeling of perfect freedom 

 to devote himself to his beloved work when the abhorred 

 shears cut short the thin spun thread of his life. A great 

 force for good and a noble type of the man of science has 

 been lost to us in Jevons. 



The feature which perhaps impresses onemost in review- 

 ing the products of so busy a life, apart altogether from 

 the fine and most lovable character of the man, is the 

 combination of multifarious interests with uncommon 

 tenacity in working out certain definite lines of thought. 



It is a feature peculiar to what is called genius and its 

 presence, even when in less than a pre-eminent degree 

 stamps the mind, exhibiting it as one of the highest 

 order. Jevons's scientific training was excellent, his 

 knowledge of the details of scientific work in many 

 diverse branches truly universal, his interest in scientific 

 questions and his love of scientific research of the 

 keenest. A full record of the many contributions made 

 by him to the great dictionary for the library of Chemistry 

 and Philosophical Society in Manchester, to the Philoso- 

 phical Magazine, and to our columns, it is hardly possible 

 yet to produce, but it may be said that the character of 

 his work, whether it be upon gold assaying, upon the 

 forms of clouds, upon the motion of minute particles in 

 liquids (a phenomenon named by him pedests and 

 examined with long continued and loving care), or upon 

 the connection of sun-spot periods with economic changes, 

 is such as to prove him amply endowed with the finest 

 qualities of the investigator of nature. Indeed there can 

 be little doubt that had Jevons devoted himself to 

 physical inquiry he had all the ability to secure a reputa- 

 tion possibly not inferior to that gained by him in other 

 departments. He was an exact thinker, in the best sense 

 of that term, and brought to bear upon great and 

 economical problems a power of methodical, patient re- 

 flection comparable with that displayed by any of his 

 contemporaries in the field of physical research. 



In logic and political economy his numerous and varied 

 writings have secured him a very distinct place in the 

 first rank of writers. In both subjects he united, to a 

 quite unusual extent, wide and comprehensive knowledge 

 of details, with rare originality in handling scientific 

 principles. His treatment of questions of detail, apart 

 from his original contributions to the theory of either 

 subject, would alone have secured for him a high reputa- 

 tion. Thus the Principles of Science contains a most 

 exhaustive and penetrating analysis of the methods of 

 scientific work, illustrated from all branches of scientific 

 research with a fulness and precision that leave little to 

 be desired, while his various works and papers on 

 economic and social problems, in the treatment of which 

 he exhibited a most happy talent of effective exposition, 

 constitute a contribution of very high value to the litera- 

 ture of political economy. 



The permanence of his fame as a writer of the first 

 order in his special subjects, however, must naturally 

 depend upon the character and value of his original re- 

 searches in the first principles of logic and political 

 economy. As was above said these researches occupied 

 Jevons throughout the whole of his active career as a 

 writer, and his successive works are but the amplification 

 and development of thoughts which had presented them- 

 selves to his mind at a very early period of his life. In 

 political economy this thought was the reference of the 

 laws of complex phenomena, such as prices, interest, and 

 so on, to the simpler laws of pleasurable and painful feel- 

 ing, the subjection of their simpler laws to quantitative 

 treatment and the consequent application of exact, even 

 of mathematical, methods to economics. He was too far- 

 seeing and too judicious to overlook the enormous gulf 

 that separates abstract economics from the domain of 

 practice, and he was under no delusion as to the practi- 

 cability of applying exact methods to phenomena so im- 

 mensely complex as those of society, but within the 

 (li.ui mi of abstract theory he perceived the need for some 

 more vigorous method than that usually employed, and 

 his contribution is of rare value. Here indeed, as in 

 logic, Jevons had to suffer a fate common to thinkers of 

 un. oubted originality, that of discovering that their new 

 principles and new methods are not absolutely new. But 

 in either science, it may be safely said that if Jevons's con- 

 tributions cannot claim novelty, they can always claim 

 originality in the honest sense. They were thoroughly 

 his own and were developed by him with ingenuity and 



